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First run in Three Years

Running. That’s a lot art to me. Ever since discovery the joys of cycling (serious cycling, not the simple pedal pushing I was doing years before), I haven’t looked back at running. The reasons I gravitated to cycling were:

• easy to get started
• had a friend with which to partner
• data from rides was plentiful and easy to gather
• improvement came quickly

The reasons I drifted away from running:

• difficult to maintain a level of fitness which made running easy
• improvement came slowly
• knee pain (not much, but enough to be yet another excuse to not go out)
• little data collection involved (pretty much time and distance–I didn’t have a heart rate monitor yet)
• no social involvement

So today was my first run in years. I was apprehensive about it. Would it be painful? Would me knees hurt just as before? Would I be out of breath quickly? Turns out, it wasn’t that bad. No pain, even in the knees. Cardiovascular system felt fine (though I forgot to put on my HR monitor, doh!). The only negative part was how different it felt from cycling.

Ah, cycling. My true training love. How I can just float along for hours and grind away miles upon miles. My greatest ride, as I’ve bored you with before, was my 24 hour event this past July. It was brilliant. Exulting. My greatest physical achievement. I want to do it again and again.

So why on earth would I want to reopen the door to the Running Room? Variety. New goals. I ran in high school and college, and while I gravitated towards longer distances, I never really pushed myself to run LONGER distance. Twelve miles is the furthest I’ve ever run. Twelve. Seems so utterly puny next to the 351 I rode in 24 hours. Yes, they are two entirely different animals. But still. Twelve? And this was at the, arguably, height of my physical fitness in high school track.

Bob Dunkleburg and I turned to Coach at the start of Sunday morning’s over-distance day and said “we feel good, what have you got for us?” He smiled and said, well, you can do the Rock Island run. A local 8.3 mile event in town. “Nah, we’ve done eight plenty of times… More!” He mentioned another slightly longer run of 9 or 10 miles. We still balked. Then Coach said jokingly, “Alright, you could run out to the Fowler school and back. That’d be 12 miles.” And so it was. Twelve miles in 1 hour and 24 minutes. Coach had to borrow a bike from some kid to check on us. We ran well and consistently. I do remember having to switch sides of the road a few times because of mild pronation problems in my ankle (due to the significant crowning of the road we were on). But other than that it was brilliant. Bob and I had accomplished something great.

Fast forward about 10 or 12 years. Now I’ve long since lost any fitness of yesteryear. I’ve put on enough extra pounds to feel it and start to long for the mid-run and post-run feelings I so fondly remembered. A rudimentary running regimen starts and miraculously I make it back to… wait for it… here it comes… 11 MILES! Pretty close to that 12 in high school. Pretty amazing, I’m thinking. But somehow even that achievement wasn’t enough to keep me going and my running jones died like leaves in the fall.

I alluded to new goals earlier. I’m still formulating them and perhaps won’t even have them solidified for another month or two. I want to make sure the knees aren’t going to be an issue first. So no disclosure yet. I’m sure for at least a few readers out there familiar with the path cycling has taken me it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to figure out what I might be thinking running-wise. But I’ll leave it to conjecture at the moment. I’m sure I’ll still do about 5,000 miles in the coming year, heck, if I do the John Ceceri series, that along will be over 2,100 miles. Just in in SEVEN events! This year, I’m coming in at just a smidge under 5,000 (hopefully 4,900… we’ll see what kind of miles I get in on Sunday).

Oh yeah, the stats… I did 2.15 miles in 22:04 at a pace of 10:14. That’s a woefully low pace… too long a time, but respectable distance. How’d it feel? Well, earlier I said I could float along for hours on my bike and compared to running, float IS the operative word. Running felt heavy. Not heavy like theories by Locke and Rousseau. Heavy as in “does my body really weigh this much?” Each step meant I had to lift and propel forward my entire weight. BY MYSELF! Good grief. No assistance? Cycling spoiled me. And for that reason, I’ll never give up cycling.

The ol’ Print Shop

What seems like eons ago, I think about three eons to be exact, I worked in a quick print shop. I was the graphics person. While I was there many other designers (I use the term loosely) came and went. But there I stayed, like the one unbroken cue on a pool hall rack.

It was a great little job that introduced me to a lot. It taught me, among other things, about good and bad design and how to work under a deadline. Well, the job really didn’t teach me much about design, I kind of absorbed it as I went along and read all I could from outside sources. It was easy to spot the designs I didn’t like (which was most of them). And it got easier and easier to pinpoint the reasons for why I thought a particular design was good.

Since I was interested in graphic design to begin with, it was easy to learn and I quickly picked up the basics from sources like Adobe Magazine (now defunct), and several design books. Adobe Pagemaker and Photoshop were the two big tools and I used every feature they had (which wasn’t many, looking back) to try and make my job easier.

Probably the greatest thing I took away from that job was a Brian-shaped best friend. Thank you Tom & Sue for hiring him and dumping him in my department!

Here is a Quicktime virtual photo of my old office–hideous that the space was.

Use the mouse to click and drag around the photo. Press [shift] and [ctrl] to zoom.

Things to look for:

• Two crappy PCs
• A crappy GCC black and white laser printer
• A slow scanner that was on its 2nd or 3rd blub
• Buzz Lightyear (to infinity, and beyond!)
• An ancient Sony Discman on top of the stereo (I can’t even find it on WalkmanCentral.com!)
• Jenny’s puppy picture as my desktop wallpaper
• My Jurassic Park foam art (more on that and others in another post)
• The Gerber label machine (below the JP art) (a fun device that added diversion to my day)
• Movie posters (my feeble attempt to minimize the deplorable look of the room–I can’t even make out what they are with the glare)
• The smell of mundane work output with speed

Higgins & Zeldman

I was looking through some folders of photos on the computer the other day and stumbled upon this photo of me with the esteemed Web-meister Jeffery Zeldman. Unfortunately the dolt I gave the camera to was incapable of taking a simple picture and thus ruined my brush with fame. Ok maybe Zeldman isn’t Hollywood famous, but he’s Internet famous. Alright, maybe not Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, famous. Rather in certain circles, Mr. Zeldman is regarded very very highly.

I went to a talk he gave on web standards back on May 2, 2003 in downtown Albany. (Whew, seems so long ago already!) Web standards are a set of standards designed to provide a way to build and present web sites such that they are the most accessible and useful. It is an admirable goal, one that many people take to heart.

Let me describe it like this… Say SONY made a TV that was really tall and narrow. Say SONY had about 75% of the market, that is, three out of every four TVs is tall and narrow. All the rest of the TVs out there looked the way we normally see them (4:3 ratio… slightly wider than tall). Now if networks designed their programs to fit the majority of TVs, then there is a whole segment of the population with TVs where the program WON’T look good.

This, thankfully, doesn’t happen in the world of TV. However, it runs rampant on the internet. Browsers are the TVs and Internet Explorer is the tall and narrow SONY.

Mr. Zeldman, along with like-minded folk, advocate designing sites that adhere to an established set of standards. These standards are independent of any particular browser. It’s the browser developer’s responsibility to make sure their browser adheres to the greatest number of standards.

Here is a slideshow from that foggy, springtime trip.

Map of the photos.