Nine weeks ago last Sunday I started training for the Austin Marathon in earnest. I’ve made it this far without any major injuries and with only a few minor ones (sore knees, small muscle pulls). I’m at the halfway point time wise, but still have the majority of my planned training miles to go.
I’ve learned a few things so far:
- Even though they’ve already charged $100 to run the marathon they’ll still charge a $7.50 processing fee (which they don’t tell you about until the last page of the registration process).
- Don’t run if you’ve eaten Chuy’s Tex-Mex that day or the day before.
- Don’t run after eating if when you finished you think “wow I’m full” or “I wish I was wearing sweat pants”.
- Rabbits will scare the dickens out of you in the dark (and you them).
- Synthetic running socks are worth $8 a pair for fighting blisters (they cost $9 a pair, but what are you going to do?).
The stats so far:
- I’ve run 192.48 miles (out of a planned 177)
- My average time per mile is 9:18 (week 9)
- My longest run was 15.8 miles which I wrote about here.
- My average weight for week 9 was 152.3 lbs (down 4.3 lbs from the start)
- My average body fat for week 9 was 15.2% (down 1.9 percentage points from the start)
I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, but my goal is to stretch every single day. My stretching has become almost nonexistent. I’ve only stretched 3 times in the last two weeks and I think it is starting to take a toll. I’m more sore and have had a few small muscle pulls. If I can’t keep on top of it I’m afraid that my gait and stride will be affected and it is all downhill from there. Plus, running tight and sore just isn’t as much fun (and it isn’t that much fun to start with).
Just a quick post to let everyone know that Jillian has started rolling over from her tummy to her back. She rolls both to the left and to the right. Amber keeps missing it, but I swear its real. She did it about 5 times tonight. Soon she’ll be crawling and then walking and then driving and then flying the space shuttle. Well not the shuttle really. They are retiring that in 2010. She’ll have to fly the next generation Constellation rocket system.
UPDATE (2007/12/20): Amber has now witnessed the rolly polly that is our daughter. See I’m not crazy.
Tags: Jillian, Rolling over
Hard drives crash. Sad, but true. A recent study by Carnegie Melon of over 100,000 drives showed annual failure rates of 4-13%. So chances are good that your financial records, your Christmas pictures, and your naughty limerick collection will all go poof at some point. You need a plan before it happens. I am a bit paranoid about data loss, perhaps because of all the unrecoverable data I see at work. So I use two methods to keep my data safe.
The first and probably most important method is simply making a copy of my data. This could mean burning to CD or DVD, copying to another computer, copying to a USB memory stick. For this type of simple copy backup system I recommend SyncBack. They offer free downloads of previous versions (the paid version handles versioning of files as well). It handles keeping directories synchronized, creating backup sets and ftp. The most important thing is to place the data on a different physical drive. If you make a copy from one folder or partition to another and the drive has a physical failure the data will still be lost. Or you could do what I do and use an automated off-site backup system.
A few weeks ago I decided that we needed our own pizzelle iron. Pizzelles are an Italian cookie flavored with anise. They are a Christmas tradition in our family and it hardly feels like Christmas without. We needed a specific type of iron. It had to be a Vitatonio No.3 hand iron. No electric irons for us. They just don’t count. And it had to be Vitantonio because the irons have a specific pattern that had to be matched. Also, the No.3 makes three diamond shaped cookies rather than the one circular one that most irons make. So where do you go to find a fifty-plus year old cooking gadget from a company that no longer exists? Ebay of course.
