Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I’ve had two online forum transition experiences in a week now. It’s interesting to observe how quickly an existing user base can be fragmented or even lost altogether.

The Yahoo Finance message boards uproar continues. Now that I’ve tried it more than once during the past few days, I’m still finding it difficult to scan quickly. More importantly to Yahoo, there are signs of mass migration to other message boards by very active participants looking for a new home. Much of the flock may still settle back at Yahoo, but it looks like there’s been a lot of people checking out the alternatives during the past few days.

This past weekend I ran the Big Sur Marathon, my 3rd time on the course. I’ve been posting on a separate running blog for a while, here’s a roundup of Big Sur posts:

• Signed up for Big Sur 2006
• Game plan for this year’s Big Sur Marathon
• Where we’re starting from this year (2006)
• How Long is a marathon, exactly?
• Some Photos from the 2006 Big Sur Marathon

I’ve signed up for the Big Sur Marathon again. I’m also splitting off the running posts so regular readers here won’t have to wade through my training posts and other running minutiae.

This is also giving me a chance to try out Wordpress 2.0 over there before updating the main site.

My new running blog is at hojohnlee.com/running.

Today’s Wall Street Journal mentions that some hotels are offering to place exercise equipment in your room. For $20, the Westin will provide a treadmill or stationary bike, and several others will provide yoga mats and DVDs.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has first hand experience with this. On the one hand, it might save a few minutes finding / getting in and out of the gym, as well as fixing the problem of gym hours not lining up with when you’re actually at the hotel during business travel. I routinely find that the published hours don’t reflect reality, although I can usually get someone to open the gym if it’s a real hotel (i.e. well equipped but overpriced).

I’ll use this week’s no-GYM theme to go with something completely different:

I’ve travelled between the US and India something like 20 times in the past few years. From the Bay Area, it’s roughly equidistant to go via Europe or via Asia. I often have other stops to make elsewhere in Asia, but one reason I like to go westbound is because of the facilities at the Singapore Changi Airport. (Another reason is that I find the Frankfurt airport vaguely creepy, but that’s another story.)

I typically fly on United from San Francisco, connecting in either Tokyo or Hong Kong, and arriving in Singapore at midnight. There’s a connecting flight to Bangalore at around 7:30am, which leaves just enough time for a few hours sleep, a workout in the gym, breakfast and e-mail at the business lounge, and picking up any last minute items at one of the many stores.

Map My Run is a new Google Maps-based application for plotting and measuring your runs. I just tried plotting one of my usual loops around the Stanford campus and it’s pretty close to what I get with my GPS running watch.

You can plot routes by clicking points on the map, or upload a GPS tracklog (didn’t try this, though). These sorts of applications are great for estimating your mileage when you don’t actually have a GPS or some way to measure the course. Unfortunately, Google’s map coverage is still somewhat limited outside the US, so it works great for plotting runs around London’s Hyde Park but not so good for loops around the Vidhana Soudha or Cubbon Park in Bangalore, although if you know your way around you can use the satellite view to make a rough guesstimate.

This evening my 9-year-old and I ran the Palo Alto Moonlight Run. The event is run every fall, in the evening, when the moon is full (or nearly full) so there’s light to see on the course which runs around the Baylands.

I really wanted Emily to have a fun time at her first race event. We did the early 5K family walk/run, which isn’t officially timed, and they encourage family participation, including dogs, kids in strollers, etc, so it’s a pretty casual, festive affair, with a DJ, frisbees, and booths with fun kid-friendly samples items like Hobees coffeecake, Luna bars from Whole Foods, and blinking lights from Runners High. I’d been thinking that Emily might like to give it a try, since she’s never actually run in a race or event, but has actually gone futher than that a number of times. She’s also been doing soccer this fall, (which I’m coaching,) so every week she gets a lot of sustained light-to-moderate running, which she generally seems to enjoy.

Over the past few weeks I’ve started ramping back up from nearly zero mileage to around 20 miles per week. My normal week until this spring has been around 50+ miles per week, or roughly 7 miles / 1 hour per day.

I had an OK easy 6+ mile run this morning. This is the longest distance I’ve gone in weeks now, after a self-imposed cutback on running over the summer to ward off some impending injuries. The good news is that all the moving parts are feeling a lot better than they were at the beginning of the summer, I haven’t picked up any weight, and the heart rate monitor shows that the cross training and shorter runs have kept me from turning into a total slug. The bad news is that I’m having a hard time getting the mental groove back together. I think taking a break has thrown off my running routine more than I anticipated.

Here’s some sample data, and an example of how to read the heart rate data from the binary dump file eeprom.bin, continuing from part 1 of my notes on the Timex Bodylink.

This is what we don’t want to see when using the Timex Trainer software to download from the data recorder.

In my case, this happened in the middle of a long (4+ hour HRM and GPS) data download. I suspect, but can’t confirm, that this was related to leaving the “speed smoothing” function on and tripping over an unhandled exception related to a missing point or something along those lines. I didn’t seem to have problems after disabling the smoothing option.

When retrying the download, the Timex software would complain:

I have used various heart rate monitors and GPS-based distance measuring systems as part of my running in the past. A couple of years ago, I wore a Timex Bodylink HRM and GPS system, with the data recorder, during the Big Sur Marathon. Since I’m a bit of a data junkie, I wanted to compare the race data with my previously recorded training data.

Unfortunately, the Timex Trainer software choked while downloading the 4+ hours of data. It did let me download the raw data from the recorder, though. I was hoping that someone at Timex might be able to either parse the data or provide a specification so I could process the bits myself. Other than signing up as an OEM developer, there wasn’t much in the way of software support, and no useful response from Timex with regard to either recovering the data from the binary dump (eeprom.txt) or getting a specification.

Family travel is so much different than business travel on my own. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. Among other things, more luggage and logistics. My daughter’s passport renewal ran a bit late so we drove to the San Francisco passport office to pick it up in person, then left for the airport a few hours later.

The flight to London on United was totally full, but on time, and I was pleased to see that our luggage made it as well. It’s a bit sad that my expectations of air travel have gradually been reduced to the level where I’m now a little surprised to arrive uneventfully with luggage in hand.

The Gmaps Pedometer is a great hack combining two of my current interests, running and map hacking.

I just tried entering a couple of routes that I run on regularly to compare the results from the Gmaps Pedometer with my logs from my Timex Bodylink GPS, and they’re pretty close. This seems like a relatively painless way to get approximate course distance without having to actually measure the course, assuming you remember where you ran.

update 2005-07-07 20:46 - looks like they may have exceeded the Google API 50k request limit, it’s complaining about the “Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site”.

 
Awesome. I love reading about people like Kozo Haraguchi. Most people would feel pretty good just making it to 95. I hope I’m able to run at all when/if I live as long as this guy, who just set a record in the 95-99 year old male running bracket. Plugging his 22.04 second 100m time into McMillan’s equivalent pace calculator, he would be doing something like 92-second 400m or 7:28 miles or a 4:12 marathon, which is around what I did in my first marathon a couple of years ago.

From Sports Illustrated:

“It was the first time for me to run in the rain and as I was thinking to myself, ‘I mustn’t fall, I mustn’t fall,’ I made it across the goal,” Haraguchi told reporters.

Japanese media reports Monday said that Haraguchi had beaten the world record of 24.01 seconds for the 95 to 99 age group set by Hawaii-resident Erwin Jaskulski in May 1999.

The Big Sur Marathon has a well-deserved reputation for being difficult, scenic, and well run. This is my second time at Big Sur, having run it last year (2004) as well. It’s my 3rd marathon overall, after starting as a novice runner in 2002. I’m continuing to build an aerobic base and improving my running mechanics, so each time out on the course is another experiment and learning experience.

During the past year I’ve maintained a base mileage of 45-55 miles per week, with no major injuries. I’ve regularly logged 13-16 mile runs during the past year, but have only gone up to 18 miles on this training cycle, vs the previous year where I put in four 20 mile runs and weekly hill intervals. From my training log paces and HR data I can see that I’m in better base condition than the previous year, but going in I’m uncertain about how things will hold up after 3 hours on the road.

Yogi Berra once said that “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical”, which also applies well to marathons. It’s taper time, and we’re clearly working on the mental part of the game.

With seasonal allergies in full swing, I wake up feeling tired and groggy every morning, so it’s easy to be anxious about whether I’m in shape to run Big Sur, especially without the reassurance of completing a decent workout every day. This week I’ve been mostly doing short, easy 3-5 mile runs, vs the daily 9-13 mile runs I was getting in a few weeks ago, since part of the reason for tapering is to let the body recharge a bit. Unfortunately, while that’s good for the body, it’s tricky for the mental aspect of preparation. In my case, I know it can take up to an hour of easy running before I get comfortable, so between allergies and short runs, most of my workouts this week have left me feeling slightly uneasy. Today’s workout was a full hour, and felt awkward for the first 30 minutes but the last 3-4 miles clicked off cleanly at MP-to-LT paces, which makes me feel better for now.

Just over a week left before the Big Sur Marathon, found this blog linked from the web site. Reading about these guys over at the the Monterey Herald makes me feel a little better about how this training cycle has been going.

The Longest Mile is an online diary following the triumphs and travails of Ken Ottmar and Jon Segal, two overweight, out-of-shape, newspaper desk jockeys training for the brutal Big Sur Marathon. Come and taste the pain.

Just looking at these guys makes my feet and knees ache. Hope they do ok next weekend, or at least avoid major injuries…

Time for a followup. I received my “Last Minute Instructions” from the Big Sur Marathon today. It’s on April 24th, a little more than two weeks away, so it’s time to take inventory and start planning. One of the things I like about marathon training is that 26.2 miles is far enough to require a bit of humility and honesty about oneself. In a 5K or 10K there are many naturally athletic individuals who could muddle through the event without training properly.

In a marathon, any number of things can randomly go wrong during training and the actual race, but there’s also almost no way for someone to simply show up and finish the event without putting in the time on the road. You can’t fake your way through a marathon.

I just got e-mail confirming my registration for this year’s Big Sur Marathon on April 24th. Had been putting off signing up for a few weeks now, debating whether to run it again or to try something different in the spring, or to hold off until the fall.

The course is beautiful, and we always enjoy spending time in the Monterey/Carmel area. On the other hand, it’s a famously hilly course, so I have no expectations of going particularly fast. I have been making slow, but steady, improvements to my endurance and pace, and am gradually getting within theoretical range of a Boston Marathon-qualifying time. “Theoretical” meaning that the various equivalent race-pace calculators such as McMillan Running indicate that I might be able to hit a 3:20 marathon time, based on my current 10K time, provided that I complete adequate preparation and training.