July « 2008 « www.arareko.net

Reinventing training formulas

So I only have 2 effective weeks to “train” for Mexico City marathon. I’ve been so busy lately with work and Mokka’s care that I haven’t had a formal training schedule, neither for climbing nor running.

Today I started a little “training experiment”: will run every other day, starting from 10K and gradually increasing mileage until I have a 20 kilometer run, then will decrease it a little bit and have 3 days of rest before the race.

I don’t know if it’s going to actually work, but it seems like I don’t have any other option given the circumstances, we’ll see…

Home again

After 2 weeks of a fully featured travel, I’m finally back at home. I’m really tired and looking forward to some relaxing days here, despite not taking any vacations.

I’m happy to be close again to my family, friends and Mokka

Yosemite weekend

The weekend was awesome indeed! On Friday afternoon, Daniel and I made the 4-hour drive from Santa Clara to Yosemite National Park. We arrived to Foresta around 10 p.m. where we met Juliana and Bryan at their place.

It’s been 11 years since the last time we (Juliana and me) saw each other, it was in Yosemite as well and we were a young pair of dirtbag climbers looking for any opportunity to have fun. We had a long “catch up” conversation along with a couple of beers, remembering the good old days…

The temps have been very high in The Valley and there have been a lot of fires as well, so on Saturday morning we opted to drive all the way to Tuolumne Meadows. We hiked to the base of Cathedral Peak, just to witness the crowds (~8 parties) hanging and messing around the first pitches of the wall.

It was almost noon so we decided to hike down a little bit to have a swim at Budd Lake then come back later in the afternoon, when the sunlight wouldn’t hit the rock directly and the crowds would be almost reaching the peak’s summit. So we did, and after 3 hours of fun climbing via the Southeast Buttress route and some variations (7 pitches up to 5.7), we made it to the summit. I took the lead in front of Daniel while Juliana free soloed the entire route. What a beautiful climb, a true Yosemite classic!

We scrambled down the summit around 6 p.m then hiked all the way back to the car, we were tired but really happy of the awesome day we just had. Juliana was meeting Bryan at the YOSAR campground, they were planing to do some more climbing at Toulumne on Sunday morning. Daniel and I on the other hand, wanted to visit The Valley the following day so we said goodbye to Juliana and headed towards Mono Lake to camp out of the Park boundaries for the night.

This morning we had a nice breakfast back at the Toulumne lodge before driving to The Valley floor. Around noon we arrived there, the temperature was really high, leaving no other choice than to climb some boulder problems under Camp 4′s sequoias. We ate pizza at the Curry Village and also fooled around the Visitor Center. At 5 o’clock we called it “a weekend” and got out of there, arriving back to Santa Clara early in the night.

Now onto pack my stuff before flying back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. I’m so close from home now…

The rest of the pictures can be seen here.

Mission accomplished?

Finished another day of meetings and celebration. This time it was at the Y! Sunnyvale campus with my friends from the Sports engineering team. It would seem like we’re coming to an end with the Canadian Sports project, but no, we’re just entering into a more mature state of it. We’ll see how it goes…

Now onto another topic, Daniel and I will spend the weekend at Yosemite. There we’ll meet my old good friend Juliana and will be climbing and hiking as much as possible. Really looking forward to have some great time there

A day in Santa Monica

It’s been a very busy day here in Santa Monica (I flew down from Toronto yesterday afternoon).

Very early in the morning, Michelle, Julie and I went for a run along the beach trail. We ran together for the first 4 km before they had to turn around to get back to the hotel, then I followed my way all along Venice beach until reaching the pier and coming back. Total roundtrip distance was 12 km and the sunrise beautiful.

The rest of the day was for lots of meetings at the Y! Santa Monica office, where we meet a lot of nice people and gave them a status of our Canadian Sports project.

At night, we (Julie, Michelle, Trevor and I) went for a very good dinner to some mafia-style restaurant where we celebrated our successful day

BOSC 2008

Today BOSC 2008 came to its end. After missing the conference for some years now, I was finally able to attend this year.

It was really great to finally meet “in person” some of the people with whom I’ve been working all of this time at BioPerl and other OBF-affiliated projects.

The conference was really good, with interesting talks about each of the projects as well as new developments being made in the Open Source Bioinformatics community. And, of course, we had lots of fun hanging around Toronto in our spare time!

Hope to see you all again next year in Stockholm!

Confused GPS

The missing luggage finally arrived. Now with my running gear available, I went out for a run after work today.

Last time I was in Toronto the temps were below 0°C and there still were snow patches in some places around the city. One of my favorite places for running, the Moore Park’s ravine, was completely covered with snow and most of its trail was icy, making it even better for an adventurous fun run.

This time however, the Summer has made its presence as well as the rain, and the ravine looks really gorgeous, every tree colored in green and lots of flowers painted above the grass like tiny colorful dots. I really enjoyed running once again through it.

So what does all of this has to do with the post’s title? Well, that apparently I didn’t wait enough for my GPS watch to calibrate before starting the run so it really went mad trying to accurately measure my position while I was running…

The result: a funny track that measured a distance of almost 20 kilometers (when I only ran 10.7), done in a “very fast” time of 1 hour and 5 minutes (I could easily qualify for any world record competition!), which also featured some running above Lake Ontario (yeah, now I can run over the water!) as well as some teletransportation magic (I dissapeared at one point just to reappear at a very distant one).

Oh, the amazing things one can do when technology goes crazy…

Traveling light

So I arrived to Toronto a couple of hours ago just to be informed that the airline didn’t put my luggage into the airplane, so it didn’t arrive with me. Great…

After writing the proper report and complaining at the baggage claim desk, everything I could get from the airline is that they located my things and are going to ship them in tomorrow’s flight, delivering them to where I’m staying, until Wednesday morning.

Excellent! No toothbrush, hairbrush, deodorant or clean underwear to change in a couple of days. Which makes me think about next travel buying cheap clothes on the road and disposing them after a couple of days of use so I don’t have to worry about carrying luggage at all. Very tempting idea…

Ok, seriously, what really concerns me aren’t the missing clothes, but the few climbing gear that I packed so I could use it at the very end of this trip. Perhaps I should also get a disposable set of Stoppers and Camalots while on the road? I don’t think so…

Free as a bird

This photo speaks by itself…

All I can say is that this has been one of the most intense experiences of my life. Very short, but extremely intense.

So intense that I complained with Ramiro (the professional behind me) when he opened the parachute and interrupted the 30-second free fall to the ground and made the travel a light glide across the sky. Yeah, the effects of a sudden heavy dose of oxygen directly into the brain… haha

The rest of the pictures are here.

Massive headache

A very strong headache hit me today while at the office. So strong that I wasn’t able to look at the computer screen, thus being unable to work effectively. No medicine did the trick so I opted to shut things down and run away towards home to get some rest.

Once at home, I was welcomed by Mokka who made me smile for a couple of minutes so I could forget about the pain in my head. After a 3 hour nap, I woke up to find myself pretty much recovered and ready to go to my parents place for dinner.