williamhathaway.com

I was originally planning on running the Hands-on-House 5k or 1/2 marathon this weekend.  The plan fell through since I wasn’t paying enough attention and didn’t realize it was on Saturday (I thought it was a Sunday race).  After realizing my mistake on Saturday afternoon, I decided I needed a new plan and  saw that the Harrisburg Area Road Runners Club was having a run on the Stoney Creek rails-to-trail path on Sunday morning (10 or 4 mile options) , so I decided to hit that.

I ended up getting to the starting area about 2 minutes before the race began, did a really really quick warmup, and we were off.  The first two miles of the road/trail were a bit rougher than I was expecting, with lots of small potholes, although the rest of the trail was pretty nice.   Just after the 2nd mile mark, Tadd Morris pulled along side and we ended up running together for almost the entire remaining 8 miles (although he was off to do another 10 miles once this run finished).  Having some company definitely made the effort feel easier.  The trail has a slight incline so the 2nd half of the run definitely had a faster pace. I think this was my best longish run to date.

The race directors (Bruce Irvin and his wife Rachel) did a nice job with putting blazes along the trail to mark the miles and set out a water stop at the 2/8 mile mark. Water and yummy cookies were available at the finish area.

Distance: 10.18 according to GPS

Time: 1:15:08

Average Pace: 7:22/mile

Average Heart Rate: 169

Motionbased Link

If you have a machine running zones, it is inefficient to setup sar in each of the zones. Just set it up in the global zone (I like 5 minute intervals) and then add /var/adm/sa as an lofs mount from the global zone to each of the local zones.

root@global # zonecfg -z webzone

add fs
set dir=/var/adm/sa
set special=/var/adm/sa
set type=lofs
add options ro
end
exit

root@global # zoneadm -z webzone reboot

If you are using a tight host-based firewall and want the host to participate in multicast traffic, you may need to allow IGMP traffic as well as the actual multicast UDP packets.

In IPF terms, adding a rule set like

# IGMP is a separate protocol and there is no igmp keyword for my version of ipf

# so had to look up the decimal number in /etc/protocols

pass in quick proto 2 from any to any
pass out quick proto 2 from any to any

should do the trick.

If you are using weblogic app server in clusters you will need to do this.

Tip of the hat to Joe Wilcoxson.

Here are a couple of products/services/authors that I’ve used/read lately that I really like:

• Virtualization – VMWare Fusion for OSX
• Portable automotive GPS – Garmin C340 (simple interface, comes pre-loaded with maps for entire US and uses text-to-speech to pronounce street names before turns). You can get it at Amazon for about $260.
• Fitness GPS – Garmin Forerunner/Edge 305 (combines watch/heartrate/GPS). You can get it under $200 if you shop around with rebates.
• Austin Bookstore -Book People( as big as the big-box bookstores but with a great vibe, a ton of staff recommendations and lots authors that come and speak)
• Austin Ice-cream – Amy’s (if you go to the 6th street location the scoopers perform crazy acrobatic/tossing moves as they mix your add-ins and put it into a dish)
• Author – Richard Wiseman (wrote Quirkology and The Luck Factor among others)
• Harrisburg Burritos – Neato Burrito (no frills ambiance but tasty food)

After running in Austin TX this past week I was looking forward to the cooler temperatures back in PA. This morning it was in the 60s when I went to the Conewago trail head. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go since I had ran the last 7 days in a row (52 miles, a new record for me) so I thought I’d take it relatively easy and see how I felt. I started going pretty slow for the first 1/2 a mile to warm up and then got into a decent groove. At the 3rd mile I realized I should probably back off the pace a tad since I still hadn’t decided how far out to go. As I approached the 8th mile marker I realized I didn’t have a lot of fuel on me (I had 20oz of Powerade and 20oz of water with me when I began), and started thinking how much it would suck if I ran out of glucose and bonked. At the 9th mile marker I did a u-turn and started heading back.  I could definitely feel the leg fatigue increasing after the 13th or 14th mile.  I was pretty releaved when I hit the “1 mile to go” marker and I was able to pick up the pace a bit, but I’m not sure how much longer I could have kept going without significantly increased effort.  I packed two gels into my fuel belt so next time bonking should be less of a concern.

Run stats

Distance: 18 miles

Time: 2 hours 31 mins

Average Speed: 8:24/mile

Average HR: 148 beats/min

Motionbased link

My wife and I just got back from spending a week in Austin, TX on vacation. We are checking out a handful of locations for a potential move in the next year or two. We had a really good time and liked the city a lot although the heat takes some getting used to. I felt like I was starting to acclimatize a bit on the 5th or 6th day there.

Things I liked about Austin:

• No significant winter (at least according to PA standards)
• Sane cost of living (not much more than where we are now)
• Large tech industry presence – should be easy to find a decent job
• University of Texas campus – huge campus (48k undergrads!) with lots of formal and informal classes and cultural offerings
• General vibe – lots of local flavor (the unofficial motto is “keep Austin weird”)
• Very active fitness and various social communities

I’m on vacation in Austin and I just came back from a run around Town Lake.  It has a nice trail around it (about 80% packed dirt, some sections are concrete, and a little bit of the trail was on the side of the road or sidewalks) that has a lot of shade.  The trail was mostly level, but there were a few small hills.  There are many water fountains on the south side ,and RunTex, the local running superstore had two stations with a ton of Accelerade available to everyone for free.  The trail was pretty packed with runners, walkers, and a few bicyclists when I went there at 8:15 this morning.

I had a pretty good 6 miles this morning, but unfortunately the race was a half-marathon not a 10k. I felt well prepared, my August mileage was solid (about 165), and I had done some 12-14 mile runs in the last month with an average pace of about 7:40, so I was hoping I could push harder and average around 7:15 for the race (goal time 1:35). I had a so-so taper for the last two weeks, although accidentally did a long run on Wed, but at a very slow pace. My friends Jon and Mark had showed up and I saw them right before the start, which was a nice boost. I’ll post some of their pictures on my flickr account when I get them.

I started off a bit faster than my goal pace (first two miles in 14:10), but I saw a person who I had been pretty competitive with in 5k races just ahead of me, so I tried staying close to him. From glancing at my heart monitor, I was averaging about where I wanted to be (roughly 177 BPM), but the effort felt harder. Around mile 4 I could definitely feel a lot more fatigue than I was expected and started backing off a bit. By mile 5 I was feeling pretty tired and took the gel I was carrying when I got to a water station (I was planning on taking it around mile 10, so this was not a good omen). I felt a bit better for a few minutes, but by mile 6 I was still back in a funk. Around mile 7 I felt horrible and started taking rather frequent walk breaks and my mood was switching from “what will be time be” to a “I just hope I can finish the damn race”. The rest of the race felt sort of like a sluggish death march.

I was thrilled when I finally got to the finish line. My final time is approx 1:46:30, which was about 2:30 slower than my first 1/2 marathon, but given how I felt for the second half I was happy my time wasn’t much worse. I caught up with my friends for a few minutes and then scored some Panera Cinnamon Crunch bagels (my favorite kind) and drinks from the food area. I also ran into Nathan Powell who had ran at Conewago in the morning and came out to catch some of the race. You can definitely tell he is getting into better shape.

Things I learned from the race:

1. If in doubt about the heat, bring liquid with you. I stopped for water at every aid station, and even after pigging out when the race ended, I was still 2.5 lbs lighter when I got home than when I left. I probably had lost about 5lbs of water weight during the race. I should have worn my fuel belt.
2. Start slow and increase the pace later if you can. Next time my goal pace is 7:15, I’ll try running the first few at 7:30s and see how I feel that day. The race temperature was a bit hotter than my best training runs, I should have taken that into account.
3. Especially for longer races, don’t try to latch onto someone in the beginning if that will invalidate #2
4. Perform tempo runs. I’ve only ran a few miles faster than 7:15 while training. If I want to race 1/2 marathons at a pace I should put in some 3-5 mile segments at that speed regularly.

While the race ended up not being very enjoyable overall, I’m happy that I finished, am not injured, and got to learn a bit more about running and my own psychology. I’ll try to run another 1/2 marathon sometime before the end of the year.

Motionbased.com users: If you use the “record data every second” setting on your GPS, and perform a long activity (over about an hour and 25 mins), when you try to upload the data your activity will hit the following error:

http://wiki.motionbased.com/mb/Upload_Status_Codes#Too_Much_Detail

I hit this when I tried to upload the race. I emailed customer service, hopefully they can manually process this one for me

Race statistics:

I’m running in the Harrisburg Half-Marathon tomorrow morning.  I have bib number 298, so if anyone is watching or running the race, say “hi”.  I’ll post a race report tomorrow afternoon.

Amazon has a (relatively) new service called subscriptions.  For many of the food and household goods they sell, you can configure a standing order to ship a set amount to you every month (or every few months) automatically.  This comes with free shipping and a 15% discount.  I am a big fan of the Chocolate Chip Clif Bars
and tend to buy them in batches throughout the month when I’m running low and I see them at decent prices.  Using the Amazon subscription service, the price ends up being just under $20 for each box of 24 or roughly 80 cents a piece.   This is cheaper than I’ve ever seen them on sale anywhere and has the convenience that they will just show up on my doorstep automatically without any additional effort on my part.  Plus I get my 3% kickback with the Amazon card.