San Diego

The family traveled to San Diego last weekend. It’s spring break for the boys. This year they have one week off. Last year it was two. Something about making the break longer for those students who wanted to travel back home to Mexico. Either that or the teachers wanted two weeks.

Usually we hang out here in Santa Barbara for the break. This year Carrie planned ahead and organized a San Diego jaunt and we had a great time.

Left Saturday morning around 10:00 made a stop in San Juan Capistrano. This year is Evan’s turn to do a California missions report, and this is definitely my favorite of the ones we’ve visited. I used to live in So Cal back in jr. high and had visited this mission many years ago, but the only thing I remembered was the fact that an errant fly got stuck halfway down my throat and I was gagging most of the time.

There was no bug swallowing on Saturday and I’ll definately remember the impressive ruins of the old sanctuary.

After a quick stop at Starbucks we continued to San Diego and had time for a trip to the pool and a movie (”Race to Witch Mountain”) before bedtime.

We took the hotel shuttle to Sea World on Sunday morning and stayed all day. It was a cool, overcast day and that may have contributed to keeping the crowd small. We had plenty of time to do and see everything and have to give it a big thumbs up. Will post pictures and some more observations about the family favorites, but we all enjoyed the shows (dolphins, Shamu, etc.) and came home with a couple stuffed penguins. The shark experience was amazing. Being underneath and among slowly swimming sea creatures was very impressive. Had to go back and do that one a second time.

Monday we hung around the hotel room until almost noon, had a nice brunch and headed to downtown San Diego with only a vague plan.

We wandered over to the Padres stadium (Petco Park). I’d heard about the “Park at the Park” and read online that it was open on non-game days and that turned out to be just what we were looking for. It sits directly beyond center field at Petco and has a grassy knoll area and bleacher seats as well as a small baseball diamond and provides a fantastic view of the park itself. The picture is a view during an actual game. There were only a handful of businessmen eating lunch when we were there. A couple of security guards wandered over and gave the boys some whiffle balls to fool around with and suggested we walk over to the Omni hotel. There is a little-known collection of baseball memorabilia on the 4th, 5th and 6th floors of the hotel which is partially owned by the Padres former owner. We saw the bat that Pete Rose used when he broke Ty Cobb’s hit record, a number of old uniforms, two of Tony Gwynn’s gold gloves and other interesting relics of baseball’s past.

All-in-all, a great trip.

In the last couple of days my boys have inspired me. Two of them (number three may be coming through shortly) have begun their own web pages. Blair’s is here and Evan’s is here. Keep in mind the fact that there are currently NO guns or chimpanzees in my house, and I do not intend to own or store any guns or chimpanzees in the future. If that last sentence did not make sense, you haven’t see the pages yet.

The fun part of working with them on these obviously VERY basic pages is that they have no preconception of what a web page or blog should be. All they want to do is put up some fun stuff. That’s it. For them it’s all about what THEY like. And in the end, isn’t that what ends up happening anyway. In the spirit of throwing crap up to see what sticks, I’m setting off in a bit of a new direction . . . simple direct and bold. What do I want to browse through in the decades to come? The mundane everyday stuff that I tend to forget. What happened on the plane on our trip to Hawaii? What was that funny joke that Drake told when we were in Colorado? There is too much that I forget. Too much of the small stuff goes the way of the Dodo and is lost forever.

What better way to start things off than a graph of Shaver Lake water elevations over the last 6 years? Bingo - lost most of the viewing audience already.

And I don’t care.

At least I’m trying not to care.

My family, and a bunch of other families, go to Shaver Lake, CA every summer. We’ve been doing this for more years than I can count and I have NEVER documented any of these trips online. Ever.

That’s also going to change.

One of the issues we’ve been dealing with here in the Terminator State is drought. And of course the carbon emissions we created while burning our coal furnace full blast during the recent Earth Hour was a direct contributor to the lower than normal rain over the last couple of years.

In 2007, the lake was at its lowest in our experience and at the time we expressed some doubts about coming back. The dramatic increase in beach areas had transmogrified the Shaver Lake we had grown to love into a haven for mutant tatooed beer-chugging bikini-wearing loud-music-playing neanderthals.

If you count yourself a member of this particular group, please understand; I hold nothing against you or your lifestyle. I simply aim to point out the scientific observation that the number of overweight liquid-grain suckers increases in direct proportion to the increase in beach area created by the lowering lake levels and I prefer not to spend my summer vacation hanging out with them.

So, in looking forward to this year’s trip I checked on water levels and it looks like they’re headed back up. Hopefully the trend with continue through the summer.

Had a great President’s Day yesterday with the boys at the Reagan Library. The boys thought the Air Force One exhibit was the best, and it was kind of cool to be able to walk through the plane that carried every president since Nixon. It was not, however, the plane where LBJ took the oath of office after Kennedy’s assasination.

My favorite was probably the portion of the Berlin wall that sits behind the library. It’s displayed so that you approach it looking at the grafitti covered western side. I walked around to see the nearly unmarked eastern side and the thought that I had moved behind what was once the iron curtain gave me a few moments pause. Of course this side was clean. Loitering on this side could get you shot.

I like that it’s now President’s Day. You can now celebrate whatever president(s) you wish. Next year I think we’re going to go with William Henry Harrison who died on his 32 day in office. He’s best know for his 2-hour innauguration speech. It put everyone there to sleep, and might have contributed to his death. Job well done, I say.

One other little presidential tidbit: Do you know what the “S” in Harry S. Truman stands for? That’s his middle name, just “S”. He joked that people should not put a period, because it’s not short for anything.

Maybe you already knew that, but did you know that Ulysses S. Grant’s middle name is “Ulysses?” His “S.” doesn’t even stand for “S.” It was a mistake on his West Point appointment and he decided to keep it. His first name is Hiram.

Oh, ran 11 miles on Sat. at a 9:02 pace. Felt good.

I began the following post last week.

As I mentioned in my last post, I ran 30+ miles last week (two weeks ago!). Getting to 30mpw has been a goal since I started running consistently again last October and it feels good to finally reach it. I probably could have reached it sooner, but with the December holidays and travel I’m good with where things are.

Now it’s time to start mixing in some variety and speed. I picked up the FIRST training book over Christmas and I plan on integrating some of their workouts into my routine. The main reason I picked up the book is because of the variety of the track and tempo workouts they’ve developed. They also provide excellent charts to help determine interval and tempo paces. I did not grow up running, so the book is an excellent resource for this type of information.

So, today (last Wednesday) was the first of my FIRST inspired track workouts. 5 X 1K with 400m rest interval. My legs felt full of wet oatmeal even before my first 200m, but I managed to slog out 4 out of the 5 at or near the 5:00 goal. Skipped the last one and jogged back to work for a total of 5.5 miles.

And then I pretty much stopped running. I got 5 miles in on Saturday and then Sunday I walked out my front door to the sidewalk, jogged to the end of the block and stopped. I was dizzy and felt horrible. I turned around and went home and laid down for a 1 hour nap.

I think I might have been sick.

So, it was a crappy week running-wise and writing-wise.

I’m glad it’s Monday. I’ll run today, and will be rejuvenated by the end of the week.

Believe it.

Merry Christmas! Here in blogland that might be an appropriate exclamation, seeing as how my last post was dated December 21st and my entire site has been down since around that time. This post represents, in a very real sense to me, the end of an era. My internet presence has been hosted on various servers completely under my control since my oldest son was an infant. He’s now a teenager and I am now paying a hosting provider because my last server gave up the ghost during a windstorm-induced power outage while I was on vacation in Oregon. After a month of hesitation I bit the bullet and I am no longer the master of my own domain. Those of you who post to Blogger or Wordpress or other sites and have never had the pleasure of loading, configuring and maintaining your own LAMP server might not appreciate the trials and tribulations of us old school folk, but believe me when I say that I did not relinquish my kingdom without much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The above is a long-winded way of saying that my month-long absense from the Intertubes was in no way due to my laziness or lack of desire to post. On the contrary, this little adventure in ‘literature’ was gaining some much-needed momentum when the plug was pulled and that momentum corresponded to my conservative, but steady, increase in running enthusiasm and mileage.

So, despite the whole end-of-an-era thing, and due to a bit of perserverence and technical acumen, I’m back online.

What about the whole running thing, you might be asking? The fact of the matter is that I ran 32 miles this past week. If you have been one of the lucky few reading this site over the past few months you’ll know that I have had a goal of running a 30 mile week for quite some time. I also ran 100 miles for the month of January, which means that my goal of running at least 100 miles/month for this year continues to be attainable.

I’m a happy camper. I’m running and writing and looking forward to a stellar year.

To those of you that have been reading and wondering what the hell happened - thank you! I’m back stronger than ever and looking forward to great things to come.

We’re on the road heading north to Oregon, but wanted to make a quick note that I ran 10 miles yesterday. That’s my first 10 mile run in nearly a year. Feeling good about that and about the season. Merry Christmas and happy first day of Hannukah and winter.

When it comes to running I’m a keeper of logs and a maker of schedules, and as such I am once again faced with a list of recurring frustrations. The fundamental problem is that I want to keep track of a number of different types of running data. First, I need a calendar to map out training goals for weeks and sometimes months at a time. This information can be as simple as a single number representine the number of miles I plan to run, or more complicated such as “1.5 mile warmup, 10 X 800 @ X:XX, 1.5 mile cooldown.” And, this information is not static. Things change. Workouts need to be adjusted based on scheduling conflicts, or because the workouts are simply too easy and need to be made more demanding. (Yeah, that happens a lot!).

So, that’s one type of information, the schedule. The second is the logging of the actual workout that was accomplished. Again, this could be in the form of a number, or a commingling of numbers and words and symbols and ancient runes.

With me so far? Now it starts to get even more complicated because I actually want to do something with this data. I want to know how many miles I plan to run next week. I want to know how many miles I ran last week. What’s my current average pace for long runs? You can see that simply making out a schedule on a sheet of paper is going to do what I need. I need some of these numbers summed and averaged and plotted. Ah, a spreadsheet might come in handy here, yes. Good answer, and it solves many of the problems, but it’s not a complete solution because it doesn’t handled the non-quantifiable information that I also want to track. I also want to track things like where I ran. Who did I run with? How did I feel? This non-quantitative information doesn’t fit well into the nicely ordered universe of the spreadsheet.

For the last few years I’ve relied on an excellent spreadsheet put together buy a guy named David Hays. It captures and slices and dices pretty much everything, including your weight and what you rolling 7 and 30 day mileage averages are. It’s great, and I have recommended it to others, and recommend it to you if you’re looking for a nearly perfect way to track your data. The only thing it doesn’t do as well as I’d like is scheduling. I want to be able to look at a calendar and see what I have planned for myself. I want to be able to map out and fiddle with various plans as I prepare for a race, or to reach a particular goal. and the spreadsheet just isn’t made for that kind of thing. It also doesn’t allow for much room to describe a particular run.

So, here it is, the end of one year and the beginning of another. It’s once again time to open up a fresh spreadsheet and punch in the numbers for year number five of similar Excel-based logs.

It’s also the time to begin, or continue, planning for the future. So, I print out a paper calendar, and begin planning and adding and subtracting my path forward. That creates a seperate and distinct chunk of data that I’ve got to keep track of.

And then there’s this blog. Here is where I typically post the long form, qualitative data. The stuff that doesn’t fit on the spreadsheet.

By now you may understand the downside of my methods. I’ve got three distinct and physically seperate tools. Sometimes my hard-copy schedule is sitting on my desk at work when I want to look it over on my living-room couch. Sometimes I’m at work and I want to check the last time I ran more than ten miles and my spreadsheet file is on the USB pen drive that I left in the pocket of my pants in my bedroom closet. Sometimes it’s just a pain in the butt to type out information into an online blog, an offline spreadsheet and correlate that with data on a 8.5 X 11 sheet of white paper. It’s messy and inelegant and it’s what I’ve been dealing with for going on close to four years. I’ve even blogged about it before.

And you want to know a secret? I even have a solution, but I don’t want that information getting out, because if it did I’d either have to implement the solution or stop complaining about the problem.

There is a way to stick all kinds of data into a single, central repository and access and massage it any number of ways. It’s called a database and I even have experience creating and managing them. In fact creating exactly what I’d like online would represent an opportunity to do something fun and learn some new stuff. The problem, as it usually is, is time.

So, I’ll probably end up doing what I’ve been doing. Maybe tweaking some little things here and there, but by this time next year I’ll probably be writing another post like this one complaining that I don’t have something that I know I can make myself.

It doesn’t rain much around here. In fact, we are supposedly in the midst of an official drought. The only way I knew that was through an announcement on the radio a few months ago. The weather this winter has been a bit on the wet side. I’m not complaining. Things are greening up and I don’t have to water my lawn.

I’d heard that it was supposed to rain this weekend, but the forecast on Friday said a 50% chance. A fellow workmate said, “Oh, that means it will definately rain.” That didn’t make sense until about 10:00 Sunday night when the drops started to fall. That put me in a bit of a bind. You see, I hadn’t, at that point, put in any miles for the weekend. With Christmas stuff and a million other things that add up to lazy I had not dumped my butt out of bed on Sunday morning as I’d planned and by 10:00pm Sunday I had accomplished much in the way of Christmas, but nothing in the way of fitness. I popped on the shoes and shorts and then the rain started.

Remember the scene in Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman are digging up the grave? Marty Feldmans says, “it could be worse, it could be raining.” And of course it begins to rain. That’s how I felt last night. I was not in the mood to go out in the dark and the rain, but after struggling to find my gloves (they were obviously not excited about going out either) and checking around the outside of the house and putting away stuff that shouldn’t get wet, I was off. And 7 miles later, and soaked to the bone, I was done.

I finished the week respectfully, but not ideally, and felt good about getting out he door depsite the hour and the weather.

And now it’s a brand new week. I’ve cut down on mileage a bit for the next few weeks in anticipation of the holidays and travel, but I’m in a good position to hit the 30 mile/week goal in January. I’m right on my conservative, but steadily increasing path.

As I mentioned in the last post, the California International Marathon was last weekend. I forgot to mention that it was also the weekend of the New Las Vegas Marathon which was my first marathon in 2005.

Obviously the best way to celebrate these anniversaries would have been to run, and I planned on doing just that. I was optimistically hoping to knock out 10 miles. I looked back into my logs and realized that I hadn’t done a 10 mile run since Dec 31, 2007. That was the day my dad died.

I came to this realization on Friday and that started a weekend of general funkiness and I never once seriously considered lacing up the running shoes. So, I celebrated my first and last (so far) marathons by not running at all. I snapped out of the funk on Tuesday and ran 6 miles and then another 5 today. If I do 3 tomorrow I’ll go into the weekend with 14 and back on track. Don’t know if I can bang out 10 on Sunday, but I’d like to. 8 is probably more realistic.

This month, with Christmas and a trip back to New Mexico to bury my dad’s ashes, I have some interesting choices. Some of the best, most memorable runs I’ve had have been while running in unfamiliar locations while traveling, but I have a difficult time getting out when the family goes up to Oregon for Christmas. You’d think that the prospect of running around Eugene, OR would get anybody out of bed and into their shorts, but I seem to get extremely lazy when we’re up there. Maybe it’s because it’s further north and the sun is lower on the horizon and doesn’t stay up as long. Maybe it’s the rain. Maybe it’s just that it’s Christmas and I’m on vacation. Not sure, but I’m determined to get some nice runs in during that week.

Then comes the quick trip to Las Cruces. I’ll be driving and I’ve been thinking about setting a new record (for me, obviously) of the most number of states run during a 24 hour period. If I go out for a quick jog before I leave California, run a mile or two in Arizona as I’m passing through and then top it off with another quick jaunt once I reach NM, then I’ll have three states in one day. That’s three times the number of states I’ve ever run in one day before! It would also be the first time I’ve ever gone on a run during a road trip. Nope, take that back. I stopped and ran in the Garden of the Gods when I was driving from Colorado Springs to Loveland a couple of years ago. I’ll count that, and I remember it being a chilly, beautiful run a couple of days before I ran the Denver Marathon. Good times at high(er) altitude.

A guy I work with is running The 26th annual California International Marathon in Sacramento this Sunday. I won’t be running it, but I did run it in 2006 and have enjoyed reminiscing about that event while my friend has been training for it. The race I ran in 2006 was my slowest marathon time, but it was my most memorable race because I ran it with my 66 year old father-in-law. His goal time was 4:45 and we finished in 4:43 and change. It was a nearly perfect day made even better by a surprise appearence (to him, not me) from my mother-in-law and my wife around the halfway point. It was a day I’ll never forget, and it was the last marathon I’ve run.