-
baby needs a new pair of shoes
So I took a little day trip to Spokane today. The primary purpose was to replace my aging Nikes, and Runners Soul is the only running specialty store I’m aware of in the area. So I waltzed out of there with a shiny new pair of Brooks Adrenaline GTS 7’s. Rather than turning my tail and heading back to the Palouse, I decided to give running in Spokane a go, since that’s my ultimate goal and all. So I checked out the Spokane River Centennial Trail. After aimlessly running around about a million other bike trails in Spokane’s Riverfront Park for 15 min, I finally found the Centennial Trail and continued onward, for a total of a 50 min run. It took me through Gonzaga’s campus, and I got to see some great views of the river. Usually you think of rivers going through cities as being pretty calm, but Spokane River has rapids and waterfalls and whatnot. It’s pretty cool. No idea how far the run was, but I’d wager between 5 and 6 miles. The new shoes felt great.
-
warshington
Today was another 3-miler. Same old Washington-and-back route on the Chipman trail. It was pretty windy and in the low 50s, so I was shivering while I was stretching and starting out. But on the return trip, the wind was at my back and it suddenly became crazy hot.
-
up town
Today I went for a five-miler. Not having done specifically that quantity as a Moscow resident (I’ve done plenty of 4- and 6-milers, but never 5 for some reason), I had to figure out a new route. Granted, I could always just do an out-and-back on a 2.5 mile stretch of one of the bike paths, but I like to actually run on roads and see the town every once in a while. Not to mention that the bike paths are very flat, and I like to get a few hills in. The Spokane race is supposed to have a whole slew of them. A good source for routes is the Palouse Road Runners website. I chose the “Up Town” 4.7 mile route (connecting to it from my apartment brought it up to 5). It was a nice run, mostly through the residential parts of town. I messed up a little bit, cutting down to 1st street too early instead of staying on D, but mile-wise it was six of one, half-dozen of the other. I might’ve missed a good hill or something, shrug. My shoes are starting to bother me a bit. I’m planning on driving up to Spokane this weekend to gear up.
-
and so it actually begins
Well, today was the first day of honest-to-goodness running in my training program. Tuesdays and Thursdays will be my easy days, so it was only 3 miles. It was pretty chilly this morning (40s), but it was very clear and the sun sure made it feel like summertime by the end of my run. As far as route, I did my ol’ standard 3-mile run. As luck would have it, I live exactly a mile and a half from the Washington state border, so it makes for a perfect “Washington and back” route on the Bill Chipman Trail. There’s a neat little sign at the border with “Vandals” (for UI) on one side and “Cougars” (for WSU) on the other. Also on Tuesdays, I do some strength training. Grad school must’ve atrophied my upper body muscles or something, because it takes all I’ve got to do a dozen pushups. I remember back in my marching band days, I’d crank them out like crazy. Oh well.
-
and so it begins
Today marked the start of my 18-week marathon training program. It began, rather anticlimactically, without any running at all. Rather, Monday will be my cross-training days, and so I headed to the university aquatic center for some lap swimming. Besides my practice swim last Monday, I haven’t done any serious swimming since I was taking lessons over a decade ago. However, I felt pretty good. I did 20 laps total, 5 freestyle, 5 breaststroke, 5 backstroke, and 5 more freestyle. Let’s hope my arms don’t feel like jelly all this week like they did last…
-
skin and bear it
Retro skins have been implemented. It won’t make the site exactly look how it did back in the day, but it’ll be pretty darn close. The 2006 skin probably looks the most different from its original - each entry was in its own little box, which isn’t possible with the way the current site is set up. However, you can still see it in its original glory here. The new skin is my favorite, though.
-
behind the scenes stuff a go
I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff, letting me add, edit, and delete entries directly from the site rather than hacking my MySQL server. I suppose the next step will be adding old school skins.
-
i would walk...er, run... 500 miles
My little mileage tracker is now in business off to the side. I won’t start recording them until next Monday. (Actually Tuesday, Monday is my cross-training day, but whatever.) That’s when my Hal Higdon 18-week training program begins.
-
comments
Comments now work. Woot.
-
a little intro and a to do list
Alrighty. I’ve had some presence on the internet since I made my first Geocities page probably around 10 years ago. This was even before we had a computer - I used to make my dad take me to his office on weekends. At first it was no more than some links here and there to comic book sites and whatnot. Eventually I started posting some of the calculator games I’d programmed and building an encyclopedia of my favorite super-hero, the Flash (which has now been absorbed into one of my favorite internet time-wasters, the DC Database). And then, after I went to college, I took the plunge and started a weblog like everyone and their brother.
At first it was just hosted on my university account. For a while I’d been considering purchasing the friedcheese.org domain name, and when I saw register.com having a $1 sale, I snatched it up. I then started messing around with running Apache and MySQL off my computer, and hosted the site from there. Eventually, I splurged for an actual webhost, and the site’s been there ever since.
As far as running, I’ve been doing it for a long time. I was on my middle school and high school cross country and track teams (although my involvement in music kept me from doing them the last couple years), and have run off and on ever since. I’ve done a fair number of 5Ks, but no longer distances in an organized race.
In my 10th grade English class, Mrs. Meyer (I think that was her name…) made everyone write down a list of 100(?) things we wanted to accomplish in our lifetimes. A good portion of them were things I just kind of threw down on the page to get the assignment finished, but there were a few I honestly and truly wanted to see through. I wish I still had the list, but sadly I don’t. I still remember the important ones. Some I already missed my chance on, like becoming an Eagle Scout. Some I’ve already accomplished, like growing a beard and learning to play guitar and piano. But there were two that really stuck with me. One was to earn a Ph.D. I’m en route to that now, having just finished my first year of grad school. The other was to run a marathon.
So, maybe about a year and a half ago, I figured, hey, I’m in my mid 20s, the prime of my life. Let’s do that marathon thing. I bought Hal Higdon’s book, started training, and signed up for the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati. However, at the time, I was working as a manager for a garden center at a local retail store. Lots of evenings, weekends, long hours, and loading 40 lb bags of manure into the backs of people’s trucks. Going home after that and doing a 12 mile long run just wasn’t working out. I put my dream on hold.
So here we are now. With grad school, it’s a lot easier to fit a training program into my schedule. Especially this summer, since I’m only teaching one course and not taking any. So I’m getting geared up for the Spokane Marathon on October 14. Although I’ve been running for most of the spring, my 18-week training program official begins next Monday, so that’s when I’ll start to catalog miles and whatnot.
As for the site, there’s quite a few things I’d like to implement. One will certainly be a little counter of how many miles I’ve run with a breakdown for the week and so forth. Another is a comments feature so folks can tell me how badly I’m boring them or whatever. I’d also like to either have a gallery of this site’s former designs, and maybe even implement them as skins. And there’s a bunch of behind the scenes stuff I’d like to do, to make it easier for me to edit entries, etc. Everything in this site was coded in PHP and MySQL by yours truly. No Blogger or Blogspot or Livejournal or what have you. It’s my sick, twisted idea of fun I guess.
And that’s part of our world tonight.
subscribe via RSS