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Random Distance Run 2008
(02 May 2008 at 22:50) |
Today was the sixth annual Random Distance Run. Like usual I made the t-shirts: Here you can see the design for the front and back. I decided to try something different on the front (this is 1968 Olympics Theme) and I am running kind of dry on CS puns for the back—but fortunately there were twice as many real sponsors this year so I only needed two. (I had to recreate several of the logos by hand in vector format, though, urgh.)
I also ran in the race, which was 1¾ miles this year. I came in 4th place. I am pretty happy with that. | |
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Pretty Wrong Race
(23 Sep 2006 at 12:48) |
| Hi! I'm finally back from a series of time-consumed weeks that I will tell you about in separate posts in order. Two fridays ago I ran in the CMU SCS "Pretty Good Race", and I tried hard to do well. Play an easy game of "Where's tom7?!" Unfortunately since there was nobody nearby to follow and I was in the zone, I accidentally took a wrong turn and only did 90% of the course, so my effort was for naught. Embarrassing, right? Had I kept up my pace for the entire distance, I would have finished in about 20m30s. So my goal remains to do an official 5K in under 20... | |
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Ingenious Scientists Complete 34.6-mile ''Death March''
(28 Jun 2006 at 00:02) |
951×591 version Well, we did it: a 34.6 mile hike, from sun rise to sunset on a single day, across the entirety of the "brutal" Rachel Carson Trail. (results here—it took us about 14 hours, but it's not a race!) I put the word brutal in quotes because that is how the Rachel Carson Trail challenge web-site describes it, I guess to make it seem like more of a double-dog dare. You can see the route zoomed out above (or google earth it yourself) across the north side of the Allegheny river, with an embedded elevation profile. Here's a representative image:
So you can see it goes up and down, and in this particular case the people are all clumped up because of a series of very trecherous muddy descents and ascents that really amounted to short rock climbs with mud instead of rocks.
I wasn't having a rough time at all until about the 26th mile, when my feet and ankles were hurting really bad, just from the repeated stepping. (26 miles is something like 60,000 steps for each foot!) An ace bandage got me through it, but by the end my feet had never hurt so bad in my life. Fortunately I have recovered quickly (tomorrow I'm aiming to start running again) and even used that crippled time to put in a bunch of good work on the programming contest, which is coming up in three weeks! (!)
Somewhere out there someone has pictures of our group at every checkpoint, so you can do a 5-frame time laps photo to see us become more and more weary and enmuddened. Here's a picture of Cortney and I at the very end, though I think we were deliberately trying to look beleaguered the sentiment is not far off:
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Back!
(06 Jun 2006 at 17:21) |
 I know yinz are like "Where is Tom? Did he die?" The answer is, no, my friends, I am sitting right at my computer and I did not kick the bucket or purchase any farms! True, though, that I have not posted an update in some time. So, what's been going on?
Well, up above is a picture of me finishing the Cleveland Half-Marathon, which I posted about in the previous entry. This was my first visit to Cleveland and my first time running that kind of distance, and all-in-all I declare it a success! Cleveland is a nice city (despite warnings I've heard to the contrary), though it is a bit too driving-oriented for my tastes. Also, during our visit there was a bloom of what I think were mayflies. They were everywhere, like when we were walking around we'd inhale them and they crawled all over the Automatic ATM Machine and the walls and my car and themselves and that was pretty sick. We got dinner at the Great Lakes brewpub, which I love because I love brewpubs. It isn't my favorite brewery, but they had a lovely pale ale special to the pub, and a delicious veggie burger. OK, right, so we had to get up at 5:00am for the run itself and it was pretty cold and raining for almost the whole race. It wasn't really that bad though, and that's mainly because the course is quite flat and I'll trade hills for rain any day! Cortney and Alvin biked around town to cheer for us at various points of the race, which was really nice and motivating. I finished in 1h46m (pace of 8:09) and ran the whole time except for a bathroom break at the 10K mark. I feel like I should have done better, but I had only run a total of sixteen minutes in the two weeks prior, so I wasn't really trained for it. Now I want to run a real marathon sometime in the next year. If I don't do it, yinz all should chastize me for being a lame slacker!
Song of the month for May is Jonathan Coulton's Mandelbrot Set, which I learned about from Joshuah via Moira. It's totally cheesy and has a very TMBG-like educational subject matter, but I love it for its Van Halen porta synth and lyrics that incorporate phrases like "disdain for pure mathematics and unique geometrical insights." I lollerskated for real.
What's been keeping me away from the internet and everything for the last week is a workshop deadline for which I submitted two papers; one an updated version of my old draft about Grid/ML, and one a new paper about Separate Compilation for Standard ML. The latter was an extremely painful process that took up day and night for the whole weekend. I am glad to be done with that. As far as I know, I'll only be working on the programming contest for the next month or so.
To be continued in a few minutes! | |
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Random Results
(01 May 2006 at 11:47) |
Another fun and busy weekend. On Friday I ran in the Random Distance Run (see also my shirt design). The roll of the dice was <6, 5>, which is just one lap short of the maximum of three miles. But three miles is no problem for me these days. I did pretty well, finishing in 8th place at a pace of 6:20 per mile.
After that we biked downtown to watch the Pirates play baseball. It was a great experience; the weather was totally lovely, our team played well and it was the first time I've ever been to a professional sporting event and seen my team win! | |
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