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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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comments
Comments now work. Woot.
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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.
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friedcheese.org is back!
Yes, I’m back after over a year break. My impetus this time is to create a running blog, telling the tale of my training for the Spokane Marathon. I still have a few more features to add, but the bare essentials are once again in place. Actual running-related entries should commence in one week.
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494
my new home. my alex ross flash poster has adorned the space above my bed in every room i’ve slept in since freshman year at nu, so of course it got the place of honor yet again! to the left of where i’m standing when taking this shot is my tiny little kitchenette. aside from the bathroom behind me, that’s pretty much all there is to it.
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