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Archive for August, 2008

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

The Human Race

Just returned from Nike’s Human Race with Octavio today. The 10K course was really nice this year, having -in my opinion- a good balance of slight ups and downs in the hills, not being really strenuous.

Despite that, it would seem like every year I get into a Nike’s race, my finish time just grows a little more. In this occasion, I finished in a -not so bad at all- time of 53:26, which compared to previous years doesn’t look so good.

I know I haven’t been in my best shape lately, but I think the growth of participants every year can also affect your ability to improve your time. It would be good to run the same course without the crowds to know if this is true at all…

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Science & Wordle

Remember the beautiful word cloud I posted a couple of months ago? Well, Neil posted about a nice experiment he did with Wordle using feeds from different science journals as source. Do the resulting word clouds reflect the truth about the journals content? Read on to find it out…

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Post-race hunger

After Sunday’s struggle, I find myself enjoying the “dire” consequences of running a marathon: a fierce hunger.

It’s been some time that I didn’t experience such reaction, and it’s due to the fact that my body and metabolism were used to very long training runs, so there was no “urge” from my body to refuel the system, there was some kind of balance.

Anyhow, I’m eating like a pig and enjoying every minute of it. I know this will last for a week at most without any consequences in my weight, so I must take advantage. Lets go for dinner!

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Snail mode

No other pair of words can describe my performance today at Mexico City Marathon. All I can say is that 2 weeks of “training” are not enough to finish a race this long with a decent time. Mine was 4 hours 45 minutes and it hurt every minute starting from km 30 till the finish line.

I met my running friends Chalita (before the start) and Toño (along the course), and was told by them that Luis was also running the race. Of course all of them were making better times than me… At least the course this year was more “enjoyable” than last year’s:

Shame on me, shame on me…

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

Fresh trail

So it’s been only 10 days since I started my training experiment. This morning I went out for my longest (20 km) run along Villa Alpina’s trail.

Ideally, under a “regular” training regime, I would have gone for a longer (30 km) run at Nevado de Toluca, but my current endurance situation would have been really inappropriate for that.

On the other hand, it wasn’t so bat at all. The Villa Alpina route is a really demanding trail run by itself, so I took it easy and managed to complete it out and back in a moderate time of 3 hours and 9 minutes.

The trail was totally wet and muddy, but beautiful as always in this time of the year. I really enjoyed the run, it made me feel confident that I’ll finish next week’s race

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Still slow but better

Well, I’m improving a little bit on the training. It has been somewhat painful, but I’m getting better at it.

Increasing the mileage so quick isn’t working so bad at all, however, I’d prefer to be able to have more decent rest instead of the constant struggle. The fruits of being a couch potato…

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Dirtbag days

Remembering my post from the other day, I came across this picture in one of my albums:

This shot was taken in the Summer of ’97 while hiking up to Nevada Falls, after a full morning of Camp 4 bouldering and other usual dirtbag activities (such as trading handcrafts for climbing gear or food). As you can see, we really were a pair of happy silly kids…