The Swift Fish

Yesterday, I ran my twelfth marathon in the same place as my first ( in 1996) with the Marine Corps Marathon. While I didn’t have a particularly good race, it was good to get back to the marathon distance after a three year break from marathoning. I had hoped to run somewhere between 3:30-3:40 but ended up over 3:50. I started out right on target at a little over 8 minute per mile pace through the first 10K, but for some inexplicable reason, without intending to speed up at all, I was suddenly cruising along at around 7:30 pace. I knew I wasn’t currently trained to run at that pace for an entire marathon, and my lack of concentration early really cost me later on. I was just about out of energy by 18 miles with almost a third of the way to go, so I shuffled along the rest of the way with occasional walking breaks.

As for the weather, it was probably one of the best if not the best weather I have run in for a marathon. It started out in the 40°F’s and was probably still in the 50°Fs when I finished. There was at most a light breeze. The only negative was squinting into the sun. I also rather enjoyed the course. I think it was a bit hillier than the last time I ran this race, but I actually like some vertical variety to keep things interesting. I particularly liked the part around the Potomac with the mist over the river.

Now I get to take it easy for a few weeks to recover. I haven’t thought about what to train for next, but I will start to look for a next race soon.

I frequently run on the Rock Creek trail in Maryland for training. This morning was no exception on yet another warm and humid summer AM. This morning I passed another pedestrian going in the opposite direction when he said,

“There’s a deer right there!”

Sure enough, a few steps later, there was indeed a deer to be seen. In fact, there was more than one along with at least one fawn. Now, anyone who has traveled even a few times along the Rock Creek trail or probably almost any other outdoor area would probably wonder why I am bothering to write about this, because the fact is that it is not at all unusual to see deer along the trail. Actually, it would be far more unlikely to not see at least one deer on any given day. I suppose I partly find it strange that anyone would bother mentioning something so commonly seen in the area. I could understand maybe mentioning a beaver, fox, or even a blue heron as those are more rarely seen (perhaps just a couple of the first two and around 10 herons per year). I also wondered for maybe an instant if it was a warning in case the deer got spooked and charged right at me. Anyone who ran the Riley’s Rumble half marathon a couple of years ago would know that deer can be quite dangerous to runners in a collision, but I somehow doubt that is what was meant by the comment. I can’t help but wonder if the guy just doesn’t get outside much! If nothing else, it kept me entertained a while with wondering why he mentioned it. That’s always useful, especially when my running is dragging as it was this morning.

I spent a few days in Florida around Memorial Day. It was really great to get away and just relax for a few days! A selection of activities is as follows…

• Tampa Bay Rays Vs. Baltimore Orioles: The Rays completed a sweep with a walk-off RBI double
• Kayaking the Weedon Island canoe trail
• Geocaching on Honeymoon Island

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Most of my runs tend to be fairly repetitive. I don’t notice much of a difference between them from one day to the next, but every now and then there are special days like today that stick out. I think it is related to a number of factors with weather, energy, and state of mind all being in the optimal zone to combine for a great run.
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I don’t follow NCAA basketball at all during the regular season other than reading the occasional sports headline, so when it comes time to fill in the brackets for tournament challenge contest entries in March, my picks come down to fairly random guesses with an occasional upset thrown in. My picks tend to be biased by schools I have actually heard of or upsets that I would like to see happen when I don’t particularly like a team. In order to remove that level of bias from my picks this year, all of my entries are chosen randomly by a script I wrote with the weighting based on historical records of seed versus seed in the NCAA tournament. There is also some weighting based on the actual difference in seed value as certain match-ups don’t occur very frequently because they arise from upsets.
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Back when I was still going to school, I took Organic Chemistry, and in one of the labs we had to do a project. I don’t remember the details of my project anymore (I probably still have the lab notebook somewhere), but it had to do with studying citronella essential oils. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an actual citronella plant, but I did manage to get a Citrosa geranium which produces one of the fragrant essential oils that is so distinctive in citronella oil. I held onto one of the Citrosa plants I used after the project ended, and for the most part, it has been very easy to grow. It is really quite weed-like; it doesn’t bloom much but has plenty of rather pleasant foliage. I just cut it back once in a while, water it every now and then, and it grows just fine.

This summer, however, it started to fade out. Continue Reading »

After a December of spending my weekends either internet shopping for the holidays or visiting relatives, things are back to my usual pattern for the first weekend in the New Year. Usual for me (at least in the last six months or so) is working with my computers on various projects and getting in a run at some point in the day. The projects are not far enough along to bother mentioning in detail just yet, but at least I am making some progress on them for a change. The running is gradually improving after finally getting closer to 100% recovered from a cold I picked up from my travels last month.
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I hadn’t gone geocaching lately, but this past weekend was a perfect opportunity for adding a state or two to my map of states that I have found geocaches in: I drove up to Connecticut for a cousin’s wedding from Maryland. I already had Connecticut, but I was hoping to add New York and Pennsylvania. Alas, I didn’t have enough time for a Pennsylvania cache, but kiirekass and I successfully added a NY cache as well as a couple of extra CT finds. While I was updating my geocaching profile, I thought I would add a geocaching badge to my sidebar. It ended up being a bit more work than I anticipated, as I had to adjust some CSS to get it to fit without getting cutoff at the right side of the sidebar. Hopefully I didn’t mess up any other edges and borders in the process. I am no expert with CSS. One of these days I need to do something about that zero hidden stat!

It has been a while since I’ve posted, so here’s a brief update.

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I had not bothered to check the validity of my WordPress site’s XHTML before today, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that there were some errors present. I took some time to track down and fix the minor issues. Hopefully, I caught them all.

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