Cold Wet Nose

Running in Brussels

dstovall — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:58:54 +0000

After the Middleware 2008 conference in Leuven, I took the train up to Brussels for a day of tourism. Being the holidays and all, I wasn’t able to spend much time there (less than 24 hours). However, my new custom of touring foreign cities on the run makes the most of these kinds of opportunities. By looking at the uploaded routes on mapmyrun.com and gpsies.com, I was able to get a fairly good picture of what areas are good for running. I combined these in Google Earth and then took a look at how many Panoramio photographs were positioned near by. With this information, I get a picture of Bussles that looks something like this:

Clearly there’s some sort of park in the south that people like to run around. And there also seems to be something in the upper left corner that people feel needs to be photographed frequently (old town). Unfortunately, this information is not quite enough… I’m also stuck with public transport. And since buses never seems to be tourist friendly (except airport buses), I am further restricted to subways and trams. Brussels does have both, but they don’t head out to the east very far. I was able to find most of the subway stops in Google Maps (though not in Google Earth for some reason) and picked a couple that looked good. These stops are marked in green below. Using these bits of data, I synthesized a new route plan borrowing from both realms:

All in all, this route worked pretty well. The first bits were through crowded bits of town, but I expected this and didn’t get too frustrated. I just kept my eyes up on the architecture and the interesting people, and did my best to keep moving. Once I got out of the down-town area it really lighted up and I was able to run 10 minute miles without spooking anyone. The only other notable thing about this route as the unexpected staircases… For future reference, this is what big sets of stairs look like from overhead:

The 10 minutes of pouring rain half-way through was a little disconcerting, but it let up pretty quick and just drizzled the way it had been all morning. The clouds made the run a little dark and washed out all the colors, but it also seemed to keep the air clean and the noise down. The ducks in all the ponds didn’t seem to mind the rain, so why should I, right?

As always, here’s a picture of the planed route (Orange) and the actual (Blue):

Dog Toys

dstovall — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:13:34 +0000

With all these running posts, I’ve fallen behind in my quota for posts about dogs…

Gracie and I were home alone a couple weeks ago, and didn’t really have much to do. For me, this means that I sit at my desk sorting through bills and trying to clean up what I can around the house. For Gracie, this means sitting in the sun in the back yard.

In a particular hour of this particular day I happened to notice that Gracie had come into the house several times and then shortly returned to the back yard. Normally I would assume that she was just trying to decide between cold hard floors and warm soft grass… but she seemed to be a little more deliberate than usual. I decided I needed to investigate the strange behavior.

As usual, Gracie welcomed me to the back yard with a smile and an exposed belly (ripe for petting):

However, if you look in the background, you’ll notice that Gracie has decided that most all of her inside toys really belonged outside… about 10 feet away… in a big pile…

I guess she figured that her toys needed to come outside and enjoy the sun and have a little tea party. And being the good mom that she is, she decided to let them enjoy their party by themselves, but close enough to provide any assistance if needed.

Running in Leuven

dstovall — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:35 +0000

After today’s demo at the Middleware 2008 conference, I went for a little run in and out of the city. I based my route on “Hanne’s Route“, a 5.5 mile loop starting near the edge of the old city and heading south west our of town. My adaptation had to start and stop at my hotel, and I shortened the original loop a little to compensate. The new plan was about 6 miles, a fairly reasonable distance for a work-night run.

As with all best laid plans, something had to go wrong. And indeed I had some problems. First I found that my route lead right into a locked iron gate. This turned out to be a minor problem as I was able to find a nearby path that ran parallel to the original plan. Second, the sun went down about 30 minutes before I thought it would… leaving me to navigate in a foreign country entirely my GPS. Once I turned over my fate entirely to technology (aka my watch), everything was fine. Not only did I get to where I was going, but I was able to enjoy the scenery and look around a lot more then I would if I was trying to find landmarks to follow a map.

As though to prove the point, once I got back to the city, I started thinking that I knew my way better then Garmin did, and I paid the price. An extra mile or so of running in a big circle was fun and pretty, but also a bit embarrassing. You can see the extra mileage in the picture below (see how the green line makes a much bigger loop then the yellow line…). This resulted in a slightly longer (7.75 miles) run.

All in all, the run was wonderful. The university area was particularly nice and the ducks and geese make me laugh. Once I passed the university area, crossed the big ring road, and passed by a big sports complex (under the cloud), I entered a large marshy area. This part of the run included a solid hard-pack trail, a gorgeous sunset, and a mist rising from the ground against an almost completely silent backdrop… a very romantic scene.

Clearly I need a photographer to follow me around more often…

Picture of run including the plan and actual routes.

In the route picture above, red is the inspiration route, yellow is my original plan, and green is where I actually ran. All routes start and finish in the upper right corner and follow the loop counter-clockwise. You can clearly see in the upper right corner the extra distance covered by the green line as compared with the yellow line… ugh.

Rock and Roll San Antonio

dstovall — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:51:38 +0000

Today we finished our first half marathon. That’s just cool to say. Not only did we finish, but we finished within 30 seconds of our goal time. It’s not very often that my performance is within 0.33% of my projection. I’d say that’s a successful run by (almost) any measure.

As advertised, the course was indeed very flat. Coming from our training in central Austin, the few minor hills that we did encounter were behind us before we even realized they were there. We also found that the course was really well supported compared to the 10K’s that we’ve done before. The water stations were busy, but long enough that we could just get our cups at the far end of the stations.

It was a lot cooler (some say colder) then we had planned for… but since we started about an hour late, the sun had come up and it was a lot warmer then it would have been if we started on time. The light weight gloves that were provided by the sponsors came in handy and we were both glad to have them.

Lessons Learned

All those good things being said, we did learn a few lessons the hard way:

Don’t stay in a hotel that is too close to the course. Our hotel was (literally) adjacent to the course. This meant we got to see it at about mile 7 which was fun, but more importantly it meant that we had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to navigate a foreign city with a bunch of closed roads. Next time we’ll either stay in one of the recommended hotels and count on race-specific shuttles, or we’ll stay well away from the course and thus be able to follow the driving instructions provided by the race organizers.
Leave a ton of extra time if you are driving yourself to the race. If at all possible, I think I would have someone else drop me off a mile or two from the start rather than park and ride buses with tens of thousands of other people. While an hour seemed like enough time to get parked and bussed to the course, it turned out to take twice that.
When aiming for a time goal, use the race clocks (if you can do subtraction on the run). I was using my Garmin 405 to pace us for the first 9 miles. I kept us right on 9:09/mile which would get us in to the finish right on time (2 hours). It turns out that Garmin was crediting me for the actual distance I ran rather than the official distance along the course… the former being about 2-3% more. This means that by mile 9, we were about two minutes behind our target according to the race clocks (the only ones that matter).

What’s Next

We had thought about stepping up and doing a marathon if all went well at this race, but we’ve since decided that 13.1 miles is a good distance for us right now. We might do 26.2 later in 2009, but for the spring we’ll stick to 13.1 and 6.2. First up we have to decide between the 3M Half Marathon and the Austin Marathon/Half Marathon. I think there’s a good chance we’ll do the Austin race since it will be easier to talk our friends into doing it with us.

After that, we’ll start in on the spring-time 10K’s like Cap10K, Texas Roundup, and others.

Hope to see ya’ll out there!

Nike Human Race in Austin

dstovall — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:39:30 +0000

Official Race Course Map

As expected, the Nike+ Human Race in Austin was hot… Some 93 degrees hot. And despite my doomsday prediction and the one “runner on medical cart” sighting, the race barely registered on the local news. So while the heat certainly made the race a bit slower then it could have been, there were no major medical stories here… yippie.

This was Gwen and my third race together, and the first that we’ve run side-by-side the whole way. It was kinda nice to have a running partner most of the time… The part where she dragged me up the last 100 yards at a sprint wasn’t so pleasant at the time, but I’ll forgive her for that. It’s also nice running with someone who has the same amount of training as you do. Since we run together all the time, we both felt that we did our best and knew that the other felt exactly the same way. While 60 minutes and 30 seconds isn’t any kind of record, it was a good solid effort for us and a good solid race experience.

Drew's Results from the Race

Another nice result from the race was a clearly negative split on the course. I like to run negative splits when I train to make sure I really do “leave it all out there” (and to give myself an excuse to go slow at first). Nike’s results page has a neat feature that shows each racer’s speed along the course. It also shows that Gwen and I placed at about 95,000^th out of all the runners (don’t ask, I have no idea).

Elevation data for race course

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m sure that some part of the negative split was a result of the fairly steep rise in the first two-thirds, and the nice steady decline in the last third. The course designer was lucky that there was that decline at the end, because right about 7km, I was gettin’ ready to turn around and go back home…

Now before you start thinking that I’m all rainbows and butterflies, this race also reminded me how much I dis-like mobs of people, especially when running with them. It’s not very surprising that people are too busy with their own race to show a lot of courtesy to those around them, but this was a lot worse than my previous races. The worst example was the lady who came to a complete stop in the middle of the road (and right in front of me) so she could diddle with her iPod. Presumably she didn’t like the playlist she had put together and wanted to choose just the right song to run too…

I could get all upset about all the people who were walking in the middle of the road, or about the people who just start walking instead of running without checking behind them, but those are never-ending frustrations. There were a lot of incidents like this and, to some extent, it’s our own fault for starting too far back in the pack. So next time we’ll make a point of getting to the front of the pack at the starting line.

Nike Human Race

dstovall — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:16:45 +0000

We’re running in the Nike+ Human Race this weekend. At this point I’m sorta having mixed feelings about the event… but since I’m generally an optimist, I’ll start with the good stuff, then the bad, then the weird…

The Good

The event is basically a collection of 25 different 10K road races taking place in different locations all over the world. Nike is also promoting the idea that anyone can join in by using the Nike+ foot pod gizmo to run a timed 10K by themselves. While it sounds a little cheesy at first, I’m all for supporting new ideas and new concepts… and in this internet/digital/connected world, we might just see some really interesting derivatives from a loosely-coupled global event like this.

The Bad

Maybe the other race cities don’t have this problem, but the temperature at race time in Austin is going to be in the 90-95 neighborhood… This combined with my perception of a intense marketing campaign has me worried that the big story from the event will “racers suffer in heat” instead of “racers unite the world”. I know I won’t be aiming for a fast time if the temps are as high as I expect, and I really hope that other goals get reigned in as well. The last thing we need is another fiasco like the 2007 Chicago Marathon.

The Weird

This just seems weird… To run the race, you have to wear the t-shirt. If the shirt is cool looking and it’s good technically, then maybe this isn’t such a big deal… so I’m reserving judgment on this one for now.

If the shirt is dumb looking, I guess it’s comforting that we will all be dumb looking together… But if it’s just a cotton t-shirt, then we have a bigger problem. Remember that it’s going to be hot… hauling around a soaked cotton shirt for 45-60 minutes will be miserable.

Any which way, it’s painfully obvious that Nike plans on using the impressive photos of the huge swaths of uniform nameless humanity to market their stuff. When you see the photos, just remember that by looking all alike we are representing the homogeneous The Human Race, just not the distinctly heterogeneous human race.

RnR San Antonio, here we come!

dstovall — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:02:18 +0000

With 18 weeks to go, we’re officially starting our training program for the San Antonio Rock and Roll Half Marathon. Gwen and I flirted with a number of ‘official’ and ‘coached’ training programs, but none of them really seemed like good value for the money. (Of course, being graduate students, money has a lot more value than it used to…) So we’re left to come up with our own training plan. This is probably best anyhow since we can tailor it to our lives and our current routines. And while I hope it doesn’t happen, we can change it up if we get injured or something.

Coming up with a training schedule is a lot more difficult then I originally thought… so just like in software, I came up with a list of psedo-requirements or “user-stories” that the schedule has to meet:

Run 4 days a week, strength 2 days, and cross train 1
Long run on the day we like to long run (Saturday)
Intervals / Repeats, but not too often and variety of distances since running in circles sucks.
Tempo run every week, peaking at 7 miles (plus warm-up/cool-down)
3-4 miles on all the other days
2 week taper at end
Easy / rest weeks about every 4 weeks, but can float around a bit.
10K race as a time trial in late August (Nike Human Race)

Taking these tenants and the publicly available schedules from several different programs, we’ve tried to synthesize our own program. So far it’s looking good, but we’ll have to see how it holds up to the rigors of user-testing…

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My birthday gift to myself

dstovall — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:35:28 +0000

Today’s my birthday… yippee! Not only that, but today also marks a week since I met my (original) weight-loss goal. It’s been some 45 weeks, 500+ miles, and 55+ pounds. So this year, “basic fitness” is my gift to myself.

I wish I could say losing all that weight was tough or easy, or something like that… but actually it just sorta happened. It started when I finally realized that I was just inside the “obese” category (according to BMI). I knew I needed to get out of that group, through the “overweight” category, and into the “normal” range.

And so, like any good project, I started by gathering a bit of information. It seems that there’s this theory going around that “diet and exercise” is a great way to lose weight… so I thought I’d give it a shot.

For the “diet” part, I found a good book that laid out how nutrition works, how the body processes foods, and then made some recommendations. Honestly, I think the key to success on this facet was the selection of one book. I’m sure there are both better and worse books out there, but by picking one source I didn’t have to reconcile multiple theories by myself…

For the “exercise” part, I pretty much have to blame my wife for getting me started on that. She dragged me out to start running a couple times a week. At first it was much more walking then running, but it really didn’t take long (1 month or so) before I was running more then I was walking. It certainly wasn’t easy for either one of use those first couple months, but it’s become a habit now… just part of the routine, like taking out the trash.

As far as sticking to the “diet and exercise” program… well… that’s was excel is for. It didn’t take long to start showing a trend in weight loss and that gave me hope most every day. Some days I went up in weight, mostly I went down, but either way I had to record it. And now, I’ve got a pretty cool looking chart to show for it. And more importantly, I’m a member of the “normal range” once again.

Yippie!

(I’m not about to start pushing my program on anyone else, and my results are just that… mine. If you want to know what book I used, or more info on how I run, just ask. I need a good excuse to share a pint with someone anyhow.)

Running in Oslo, Part 2

dstovall — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:46:34 +0000

Another great run in the hills north of Oslo. The trails that I took for this route were all well maintained gravel roads. Most of these roads can be seen from above on Google Earth if that’s any indication. Though I typically assume that roads are less picturesque then single track trails, these roads were gorgeous. The scenery is striking in every way, and the few people that I did encounter didn’t break the solitude that the back-country provided. The first and last half-mile of the run was on city streets, but this was completely acceptable to me since I was able to use the metro to get there and back. Yeah public transport!

I was finally able to use the “follow this route” feature of my GPS (which turned out to be a god-send). The area has several gravel roads that cris-cross all over the region, so having my gizmo tell me that I did or did not need to turn let me relax a bit more and enjoy the run. In retrospect, there are a couple areas that I would have put in more way-points, but in general it worked very well.

As with the previous post, I found some photos on Google Earth to give you an idea of the scenery since I didn’t have my own camera. Enjoy.

(The blue trace is this run. The green trace in the background is from my first run in Oslo)
View in Google Earth
Interactive map on MapMyRun.com

Running in Oslo, Part 1

dstovall — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:55:27 +0000

I just got back from running near Sognsvaten just north of Oslo. I chose this area because I could take the metro all the way to the edge of the “green area”. While I was clearly not the only one to realize that this area would be a great place to enjoy a sunny Friday evening, the trails were not too crowded and I was able to really get away from things.

Most of the run I stayed on the dirt roads, but occasionally veered off course to one of the single-track trails in the area. These trails were really quite technical due to rocks and roots, and since I only have street running shoes I had to pick my way on these trails. None the less, I was always rewarded with some crazy beautiful scenery. The eastern part of the run follows a very picturesque stream with lots of water falls and rapids. At the very northern edge of the run there is a large lake whose surface was still as glass. The western part of the trail actually has street lights (though they’re not needed in the summer).

Via google earth, I found some photos of the area that I’ve included below to give you a flavor of the scenery.

View in Google Maps
Interactive map on MapMyRun.com