Tag: photo

Buffalo Trace

Back in 2002-2003 I used to run on the Buffalo Trace trail at Lake of the Woods Park in Mahomet every Thursday evening with the Buffalo. We used to live on the northwest corner of Champaign, and it was quicker and easier to get to Lake of the Woods for the Thursday night runs than it was to get to Meadowbrook Park in Urbana for the Tuesday night runs.

The running club eventually started a race on this course, apparently in 2003. I didn’t run it that year and I have no recollection why. I must have been out of town. The following year I had just torn cartilage in my knee. The next two years were the same story. The year after that we were in Nicaragua. The year after that I opted for a bike race instead that day. Last year I ran the Rockford Marathon instead that day. To make a long story short (too late), this morning I finally got the chance to run the nearest trail race to my home in its eighth year.

I won’t bore you too much with the details, because it turned out like pretty much every other race I’ve run in recent years (with a few exceptions). I started too fast. I gradually slowed down. I felt dead by the end. My last mile was over one minute slower than my first mile. Decent race, but not great. I ended up about 45 seconds slower than my fastest time on that trail. I finished 5th overall (out of 188) and 1st in my age group.

Buffalo

Cham-Pain County TT

This morning was the Cham-Pain County 40km Time Trial bike race organized by Wild Card Cycling. It would have been really great to participate, but I’m still not 100% recovered from the marathon and I’d probably just injure myself if I tried. I may be up to racing again by next weekend… we’ll see.

Anyway, I showed up to see if I could help out and to take some photos. I ended up taking around 500. Whoops. I normally don’t like to dump every photo I take somewhere online (I prefer to just post the best ones) but this was simply too many to sort through in any reasonable amount of time. I also figured the racers would like to see all the photos I took of them rather than my favorite one.

Here’s a few of my Wild Card teammates.

Humidity

I find running a marathon to be a lot like eating at Pizza Hut. Every so often I crave it. Midway through I realize what a terrible decision I made. I finish out of shear stubbornness. Afterwards I vow to never do it again.

The marathon is a harsh mistress. Of the six previous marathons I have completed I would say two were good, two were mediocre, two were awful, and all were painful. I hoped this year’s Illinois Marathon would be good. But we don’t always get what we want.

Last year I ran the Illinois Marathon and it didn’t exactly go according to plan. Six weeks later (and with a completely different outlook) I ran much better at the Rockford Marathon where I set my marathon PR of 3h09m. I then promptly spent most of the summer recovering from a knee injury. In August I reset and started over from scratch. I trained and raced well throughout the fall and winter, and by spring I was looking to run another marathon PR. My marathon training went very well. I was prepared.

Marathon Expo

The race day forecast called for rain (which didn’t particularly bother me) and relatively high temperatures (which did bother me). I awoke on race morning to wet roads, muggy air, overcast skies, and a temperature of 64˚F… which at 5:30 AM was already too hot for running a marathon.

When the race began at 7:30 AM the humidity was 93%. After one mile of easy running I was drenched with sweat. I looked at my watch at the one mile mark, expecting to see a heart rate in the low 140’s. It read 162. The good news was that my perceived exertion was pretty low. The bad news was that either my heart rate monitor wasn’t working or the extreme humidity was having the effect on me I knew in the back of my mind it would. I chose to believe my heart rate monitor was broken and I cruised on.

Aside from the massive sweating, the early miles were really very easy. I ran much of the way with the 3:10 pace group. I ate and drank reguarly. At no point was I running hard… I could comfortably breath through my nose the entire time (though I didn’t). The clouds disappeared, the sun came out, the temperature soared into the mid-to-upper-70’s. Now, not only was it ridiculously humid, the sun was beating me into submission. Around the halfway point I started to feel terrible. Really terrible.

Rob at mile 11 of Illinois Marathon

I wasn’t dehydrated, I had been drinking frequently. I wasn’t lacking energy, I had been eating regularly. I wasn’t lacking fitness, my training went superbly and both my long and short runs had been right where they needed to be. I wasn’t tired, I stayed fairly disciplined in my 2-3 week taper prior to the race. I wasn’t running too fast, I was absolutely certain I could maintain the current 7:10-7:15 minute per mile pace for much longer than I had. I just felt terrible. The combination of the heat and humidity was simply more than I could handle.

I desperately wanted to quit. I’m still not exactly sure why I didn’t. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I guess I just don’t like seeing a DNF next to my name in the results. Of maybe 150 or so races I’ve done in my life I can only think of one I didn’t finish, and that was a triathlon where I got two flat tires on the bike.

I slowed down to around 8 minutes per mile, knowing the slower pace would be the only way I could finish. Then at mile 17 I just started walking. I needed to collect myself. About a quarter of a mile later I began running again, just a little over 8 minute per mile pace. I stopped at each aid station (one every mile or two) and walked through it while I drank vast quantities of water and gatorade. Then after I gulped down the liquids I ran on to the next aid station.

After the 20 mile mark, where most runners (including me) typically fade away, I actually started to come back to life. I had already hit rock bottom and I had nowhere else to go but up. I still walked through the aid stations, but I was able to run slightly faster between them. Finally, after reaching the top of the hill on Armory street, less than two miles from the finish, on streets I have covered dozens of times before, I picked it up. I ran the final miles around 7:30 pace. It was the first time in the race when I actually felt like I was running hard. It hurt.

I finished in 3h28m, even slower than last year when I thought I had a bad race. But whatever, I finished marathon #7. Looking at the results today I noticed the average finishing times seemed to be around 15-20 minutes slower than last year. Talking to and hearing from many other runners, I don’t think anyone had a good race. The conditions were just too poor.

Illinois Marathon 2009 v. 2010

Blue: 2009 finishing times, Red: 2010 finishing times

So now I’m sore all over, sunburned like crazy (I chose not to wear sunscreen due to the supposed likelihood of rain which somehow never materialized), and a bit disappointed. If this were last year I would vow to run another marathon to redeem myself. But this isn’t last year. And I’m not going to run another marathon to redeem myself. And I’m never going to eat at Pizza Hut again. Until I do.

Feel the burn

Many thanks to my parents for watching Will while both Melissa and I ran the marathon.

April 2010 Stats

Photo of the Day

Running

Marathon Expo

Long runs early in the month, taper for the marathon late in the month.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 109.05 Mile 10 10.905 Mile
February 76.18 Mile 8 9.5225 Mile
March 84.86 Mile 10 8.486 Mile
April 83.15 Mile 9 9.23889 Mile
Total 353.24 Mile 37 9.54703 Mile

Cycling

The boys

Will went on his first few bike rides in April. My one race (Hillsboro) sucked, but my training has gone much better. I’ve been feeling stronger and stronger each week.

April 2010

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 112.05 Mile 8 14.0063 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 206.93 Mile 5 41.386 Mile
Total 318.98 Mile 13 24.5369 Mile

January-April 2010 by bike

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 172.8 Mile 21 8.22857 Mile
El Fuego 40.9 Mile 11 3.71818 Mile
Pocket Rocket 31.27 Mile 2 15.635 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 889.76 Mile 29 30.6814 Mile
Total 1134.73 Mile 63 18.0116 Mile

January-April 2010 by month

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 166.25 Mile 20 8.3125 Mile
February 140.67 Mile 12 11.7225 Mile
March 508.83 Mile 18 28.2683 Mile
April 318.98 Mile 13 24.5369 Mile
Total 1134.73 Mile 63 18.0116 Mile

Walking

Rio Grande

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 28.66 Mile 9 3.18444 Mile
February 51.45 Mile 16 3.21563 Mile
March 34.7 Mile 10 3.47 Mile
April 44.35 Mile 11 4.03182 Mile
Total 159.16 Mile 46 3.46 Mile

ABQ

William already shared his insights on our trip to Albuquerque last weekend. I’ll add a few other random tidbits.

Albuquerque botanical gardens

I photographed the entire weekend with my (reasonably) new 30mm prime lens. Since it has a fixed focal length, zooming with this lens is extremely manual (i.e. the photographer must physically move). I was a bit concerned this might be too much of a burden, so I actually packed a zoom lens but I ended up not using it. Also, since it has a large maximum aperture of f/1.4 I was able to shoot a lot of indoor photos without a flash (which I didn’t even bother to bring).

Lying

The Albuquerque airport shares runways with an air force base. Fighter jets are super loud when they’re flying… and they’re even louder when they take off. It was kind of amusing to watch them take turns with the commercial jets. They were very loud even all the way across town.

Running at 6000 ft of elevation was definitely noticeable in the first few miles, though it didn’t seem to bother me much after that.

Albuquerque sunrise

New Mexico apparently has a lot of dinosaur fossils.

Snack

Albuquerque has Bicycle Boulevards with lane markings clearly indicating cyclists are entitled to the full width of the lane. Of course, this is true on nearly all public roadways… but most motorists don’t understand this.

Bicycle Boulevard

Bicycle Boulevard

Mexican food is quite popular.

The hand that feeds you

The Rio Grande has way more water in it in Albuquerque than it does downstream in El Paso/Juarez. I guess it’s all channeled away for irrigation.

Rio Grande

It’s really hard (impossible?) to get the white balance right when photographing an aquarium indoors with low light. Either we ended up too red or the water ended up to green.

Albuquerque aquarium

Dehydration, part one

Saturday was my first bike race of the year. Hillsboro-Roubaix was my first bike race last year as well, and thanks to a knee injury following my two spring marathons it also happened to be my only bike race last year. Last year’s cat 4 race was 44 miles with a field size of 100 riders. This year’s cat 4 race was 58 miles with a field size of 125. I’ll start by saying this is too many people and too long a distance for a cat 4 road race.

Our Wild Card Cycling team had a really strong group of six riders in the cat 4 race. I’m a pretty decent rider (I finished 19th in this race last year) and our other five guys are way better than me. We liked our chances. We headed out onto the course for what I thought was going to be a short warmup ride. We ended up going 10 miles, which is much farther than I should have gone given that I was already nervous about the race distance.

Hillsboro

We all started the race in good position–perhaps too good. After the first uphill Luke rode off the front of the group without really trying (the speed was low). I suddenly found myself at the front of the 125 rider group not knowing whether to catch up to Luke (who certainly wasn’t planning to be alone at this point in the race) or slow down and let his gap grow. I slowed down. Nobody came around me. Luke’s lead continued to grow. I slowed down more. Nobody came around me. Finally, after several minutes, a small group surged past on my left super fast. I caught onto the tail end of this group which caught up with Luke just before a turn into a tailwind. We looked around and this group of around 15 riders contained all six Wild Cards. Game on. We pushed the speed even higher and opened up a sizable lead. This was only a couple miles into the race and it was just too early for that kind of move. After a couple miles of chasing the rest of the main field eventually caught up and we were one group.

This is where my race would begin to go wrong. It happened so gradually that I didn’t really notice. I moved from 15th to 20th to 30th to 50th to 80th. The pack was so big and the road was so narrow I couldn’t maintain my position and before I knew it I was at the back of the field. This is not where I wanted to be. In addition to the inherent danger of being directly behind scores of cyclists moving at high speed in tight formation, the back of the pack does a lot of yo-yoing. There’s an accordion effect. There were times when I felt like we were coming to a complete stop, then there were times when I was going flat out to hang on to the group. I knew I need to be eating frequently for such a long race, but there was no time to do it. At one free moment I tried to snarf down a Clif Bar. I got half of it in my mouth before I had to accelerate hard. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow it. The half bar remained in my mouth for several miles before I could finally choke it down.

Making matters worse was my looming dehydration. My bike holds two water bottles. This is enough to get me through 30 miles. The race was twice that distance, this was one of the hottest days of the year so far, and I sweat more than any human being on the planet. I knew I had to conserve what I had, but it was costing me.

The race made its way through the countryside without much excitement. I knew my race would be over if I wasn’t closer to the front by the end of the first lap. The big hill and brick roads in town would definitely split the field. Seizing my only opportunity I found an opening on a straight flat road with a tailwind and flew past about 30-40 riders in one go. Entering town around 40th place or so really only prolonged my agony.

Sure enough the group split going up the big hill in town, and, like every other time I’ve ridden up this hill, I got stuck behind people going very slowly and basically had to stop on multiple occasions. By the time I turned the corner to go back down the hill the leaders were almost at the next corner, almost out of sight. This was bad. I flew down the hill onto the brick road, struggling to keep my bike upright. The group was completely shattered. There was a big group ahead, a big group behind, and I was in no-man’s-land with a couple dozen other stragglers. We remained separate heading back out of town, nobody was able to get organized. The leaders rode away and we could do nothing about it.

Hillsboro 2010

At this point my fate was sealed. I could neither get a good result nor offer any support to my stronger teammates. I don’t like seeing DNF next to my name in race results so I was determined to finish the race. It was a real struggle though. I baked in the sun the whole second lap. I was out of water, thirsty, tired, miserable. In retrospect, I would have been better off stopping. Eventually I came upon my teammate Alexei, who was changing a flat tire. I stopped to talk to him and we rode together for a few miles until cramps in my legs (a sure symptom of dehydration) slowed me down even further. I had more cramps on the first hill coming back into town. I actually had to stop and stretch for a minute because I was unable to rotate my pedals all the way around without cramping up. I made if halfway up the last hill when I pulled off to the side of the road long enough to watch the cat 1-2 riders blow past me up the hill on their final lap. Once at the top I basically coasted on to the finish line.

The other guys on the team had done alright, but not as well as they had hoped. We had a couple of guys with pretty good chance of winning who ended up 6th and 11th. They raced well, but it just wasn’t our day.

I crossed the line completely alone in 70th place (which is actually far higher than I thought). I immediately chugged as much water and gatorade as I could find. I felt absolutely terrible–muscles twitching, head aching, disoriented, hungry, and a bit nauseous all at once. The race didn’t go at all how I planned. But that was just my Saturday…

Robot 1-X

Six weeks ago Apple announced the iPad, a portable touch screen computer. It runs the same operating system and application software as the tremendously successful iPhone and iPod Touch devices, but it has a larger screen and faster processor. A lot of geeks panned it as just a big iPod Touch. Sure, an iPad is just a big iPod Touch in the same way a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.

The geeks didn’t get it. I got it, but that’s because I had actually used one. This device doesn’t do everything a geek would want to do with a computer, but it does everything a non-geek would want to do on a computer. And it does so in an easily understandable way, without software installation/configuration headaches, viruses, malware, etc. In other words, it’s not targeted at the geeks, it’s targeted at everyone except the geeks.

I love my new toy

Work has been ridiculously busy the last six weeks. I’ve been laboring, around the clock at times, to enhance my company’s iPhone app (WolframAlpha) to work as well as possible on an iPad. About halfway through that time we hired another employee to help with this project (and future projects). It was a little slow at first, as I had to spend some valuable time actually training the new guy. By the end he was working productively and actually made significant contributions to the project. We ended up with an app that works pretty well.

WolframAlpha on iPad

When the app was initially launched last October it was priced at a premium, $50. I only found out about this price literally minutes before the app went on sale. I was a bit upset. I figured nobody would buy it and all my hard work would have been wasted. I was wrong. It sold remarkably well (close to 10,000 copies), which completely blew away my meager expectations. It was a lot, and the company made money on the app, but the app wasn’t serving the exact purpose they wanted.

A few days ago the company announced a radical shift in the direction of the project. Instead of making money on the app directly they wanted to get more people using the service. Presumably they’re making money somewhere else. I don’t know about these things, I just write the code. Anyway, as of a few days ago the new price of the app is $2. It runs on both iPhones and iPads. Within hours of the announcement (humorously made on April 1st), the WolframAlpha iPhone app became the top selling application in the entire iTunes app store. A few hours later it became the top grossing app (total money earned) in the iTunes app store. It stayed at the top of the charts for a couple days. As of right now it’s still near the top, at #12. In other words, the response has been incredible.

On top of the tremendous success of the WolframAlpha app, I was somewhat involved in another side project. My boss, Theodore Gray, collects chemical element samples, photographs them, and writes books about them. Theo saw the potential of the iPad as the killer electronic book platform and put a huge effort into making a really amazing eBook: The Elements. The text and photos are largely the same as the printed edition of the book, but the images are not static, they are interactive, animated, and rotatable with the touch of a finger. It’s hard to describe, you really just have to see it.

Anyway, in addition to giving advice and answering technical questions, I worked to create an embedded version of the WolframAlpha app that pops up from within The Elements app.

It would be nice if that was the end of the story, but there is still much work to do, features to add, problems to fix. Hopefully the hours will be a little more sensible for the foreseeable future.

Robot 1-X is a character from Futurama. It is the new model of robot that immediately made all other robots obsolete.

March 2010 Stats

Photo of the Day

March 2009 Photo of the Day

I’m still going with this, tough at times this month it was a real struggle (and I think the quality of photos reflects that). I was super-busy with work, and busy on top of that with marathon training, oh, and cycling season is here (first race next weekend).

Running

Finishing

March was a good month. My training quality has continued to improve, without much change to the quantity. I’m doing my runs a little bit faster without really feeling the extra effort. I ran a 5k race at 5:59 pace and I did a 20 mile training run at 7:30 pace. Aside from my weekly long runs and the race, I’ve done virtually all of my running wearing Vibram Fivefinger (barefoot-like) shoes and they’re feeling really good.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 109.05 Mile 10 10.905 Mile
February 76.18 Mile 8 9.5225 Mile
March 84.86 Mile 10 8.486 Mile
Total 270.09 Mile 28 9.64607 Mile

Cycling

I'm seeing red

While my running steadily improved in March, my cycling made a huge leap. Notably, I rode over 100 miles two times in March 2010, after only riding that distance two times previously in my entire life.

March 2010 by bike

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 42.75 Mile 8 5.34375 Mile
Pocket Rocket 3.6 Mile 1 3.6 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 462.48 Mile 9 51.3867 Mile
Total 508.83 Mile 18 28.2683 Mile

January – March 2010 by bike

Bike Distance # Rides Avg per Ride
Bianchi 60.75 Mile 13 4.67308 Mile
El Fuego 40.9 Mile 11 3.71818 Mile
Pocket Rocket 31.27 Mile 2 15.635 Mile
Thundercougarfalconbird 682.83 Mile 24 28.4513 Mile
Total 815.75 Mile 50 16.315 Mile

January – March 2010 totals

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 166.25 Mile 20 8.3125 Mile
February 140.67 Mile 12 11.7225 Mile
March 508.83 Mile 18 28.2683 Mile
Total 815.75 Mile 50 16.315 Mile

Walking

This little piggy

Despite the better weather I’ve continued walking on a regular basis. I don’t know, I just feel like it helps me in my long distance running.

Month Distance # Workouts Avg per Workout
January 28.66 Mile 9 3.18444 Mile
February 51.45 Mile 16 3.21563 Mile
March 34.7 Mile 10 3.47 Mile
Total 114.81 Mile 35 3.28029 Mile

Parts

My road bike, the Thundercougarfalconbird, is now five years old and has covered tens of thousands of miles. Up until yesterday it still had the original drivetrain, and probably even the original chain (which is pretty ridiculous). My cranks were falling apart. My chainrings were bent from an incident a few years ago when half of the chainring bolts fell out while I was riding (hard) up a steep hill. I tried to pound the rings flat with a hammer. It didn’t work well enough to fix the problem, but it did work well enough to prevent me from replacing them immediately. Then time passed.

On top of that, between Melissa and me, we have seven bikes with 9-speed Shimano components, which are getting harder and harder to find. The world moved to 10-speed years ago and left me behind.

Anyway, to make a long story short (too late), I replaced my old drivetrain last night with a 10-speed SRAM group. It took about five hours (way longer than I planned) to disassemble the bike, clean it, reassemble everything, then make the necessary adjustments. Tonight I finally got a chance to hop on the TCFB and test it out. It feels like a new bike. I think it will take a few rides to get used to the different ergonomics of the shifters. It’s a little strange to have the shifter cables routed along the handlebars rather than sticking out (like all the other older Shimano bikes). This kind of makes the bike feel like it’s missing something. I assume that feeling will go away with time.

Well, without further ado, here’s the obligatory bike porn.

I'm seeing red

Red crank