Where’s the peanut butter?!

Pilot, hunter, fisher, Ray,
originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

I took a train yesterday to Denali and got to the hostel by early evening. I slept like a rock in one of their tents and this morning rolled out of bed and out for breakfast when Leslie, a fellow hosteler, said “we’re going on a flightseeing tour of Denali - would you like to come?” I thought about it for a second and realized the cost was being split three ways and said “Sure!” “Great - the driver will be here in 20 minutes.” I scrambled to get my wits and get what I’d need ready and we hit the road. We had an incredibly lucky day of visibility. The summit of Denali, also called Mount McKinley, is obscured by clouds for 80% of summer - today we could clearly see it from the road on the way to the airplane. We flew in a tiny Cessna with Ray Atkins for a little over an hour before coming back. I’ve finally got a few pictures of the trip up and will be putting them in my Flickr Alaska collection.

I just got back from the Gold Discovery Run our near Fox in Fairbanks. It was awesome and the whole run has been a totally great experience. I got my coach’s approval to do the 16.5 mile run, even though the long run planned for this weekend should have dropped me back to 13. But Fairbanks is an incredibly sprawling town and I don’t have a car so I wasn’t sure how it would all work out but everything is just clicking.

First, I’m staying at Billie’s Backpackers hostel (which I recommend) which is pretty close to the University of Alaska - Fairbanks but not near downtown and feels (to this city boy) like it’s in the boonies a bit. I’d seen the registration for the race is at a place called “Toy Quest” and, amazingly, that’s probably the closest business to my hostel! Yay! So (and I blogged about this earlier - sorry for the old news), Friday I went over to register for the race. I met a nice guy named Bob who is part of Running Club North, the local club who organize the run and was managing registration. He very nicely put in a call to Steve, who I gather had been president of the club for years, and who was super helpful and willing to take me to the run on Sunday if I could go to the site Saturday for a bit and help set up. Perfect! And even more good news - unlike every other race I’ve run in where you get a cotton T-shirt for registration (well, there was one race where we got tank tops), they had nice SPF 45 running hats! This is terrific since I’d forgotten to pack a hat on the trip and think one of these would be handy sometimes. These hats alone probably cost close to the $25 race registration fee.

So Saturday morning I was planning on heading downtown to catch the parade and some other events that are part of Golden Days and gave Steve a call. It turned out they were putting on a run that morning - the Golden Mile - and I could meet him or some other club members and get everything set up for me getting to the race Sunday. While I was there I met a nice woman doing the Golden Mile named Lena who said if I was in a pinch she could probably get me to the race. This would later turn out to be great because Steve would need to get to the race early Sunday morning for setup and other things. So I had a pretty good looking plan B lined up that was becoming my plan A.

At the race, I met Keith, who (I gather) is the current Running Club North president. Keith was super nice and we drove in his pickup past the Alaska pipeline and out to Silver Gulch Brewery, where the race would finish, and started moving some things around to get ready for the post race BBQ. Steve showed up at Silver Gulch, too, and we lugged around some tables and “candlesticks” (the traffic sticks used to direct cars or channel runners), then he took me back downtown where I bummed around a little trying to figure out subsequent travel plans and booking.

So that night I got back in touch with Lena about a ride. She and Mike would be able to come pick me up in the morning at 7:30 - which would be *way* better than the option I was looking at of getting out there with Steve at or by 6, so that was perfect. They don’t live too far from my hostel and Lena said when she originally came to Alaska 5 years ago or so she’d stayed here, too.

OK, so on to the race. Today we got to Silver Gulch and boarded a bus at about 8:15 to get to the starting line. The race started at 9 and was really amazing. I have to say this again. It was amazing. I’ve never done trail running before (at all - so why not start with a run that matches the longest run of my life?) and though it doesn’t look exactly like it from the profile, the course itself was fairly hilly. But what the profile and course map don’t show is the incredible scenery on a clear day of the surrounding Alaskan mountain ranges. It’s just breathtaking. It would have been even moreso if I hadn’t been incredibly paranoid about getting stuck in the middle of a rural mountain trail with a sprained ankle and unable to continue my training, unable to run in Alaska, and possibly missing my marathon. But I caught enough peeks of the environment to say that the beauty is just staggering and it almost makes me understand how people suffer the long, frigid, dark winter months to live in a place like this.

I didn’t know exactly how hard to take it and didn’t want to injure myself and so on, so I ran a somewhat moderate pace I finished at a time with almost exactly 8 minute miles and walked through most of the drink stations. But here’s where the story gets - um - interesting…

If you have especially delicate sensibilities, you might want to skip past this…

I’m really still figuring out the whole race nutrition and eating thing. One new thing I did on this race was eat a goo (some mango flavored Clif brand). It seemed OK and probably helped me. But about 11 miles in I really needed to pee. I hate having to do this in the middle of a run because it’s uncomfortable, feels like it screws up your pacing and so forth. So, having to go to the bathroom on the run is probably an encouraging sign for your level of hydration (which is something I’m keenly aware of, having almost died 6 weeks ago probably due in part to poor nutrition) but it still sucks on the run.

But that’s not the worst part. Somewhere after 15 miles - less than 1.5 miles from the finish - something I’d been struggling with ever since the last hydration station at mile 14 became unavoidable. Borat might say “it was time make shit.” And there was nothing I could do to stop it. I ran off the road, trying to get to the bushes in time to take care of what needed to be done. I mostly made it. I really won’t go into too many details, but I was very happy to finish the race - VERY happy this happened at the end, and I spent a while trying to clean up in the toilets at the brewery and wound up borrowing their mop to clean up the bathroom. So…I really need to figure out more about what I should eat before a race. Today I had a banana, cup of OJ, and a little coffee. I think I should probably avoid the coffee (since I identify with Dr. Dorian wisdom about the physiological response it triggers). Lena and Mike suggested that they eat a bagel with natural peanut butter and it’s always been a good combination - which certainly sounds worth a try.

At the end, they hosted a very nice cookout in the parking lot of the Silver Gulch Brewery and the brewery donated a bunch of beer. I tried both beers they’d donated - one was “Vienna” something and I can’t remember what the other was. Both were very good, but one was more IPA/hoppier than I usually like, but it was definitely good for the beer it was. At the awards Steve very nicely called out people who were doing the run from out of state. He asked me “how it went” and I was a little troubled figuring out what to say about “The Events Described Above In The Questionable Part” but said I had a good time, which was certainly true.

All in all - a great, incredibly memorable, and educational race. And I should mention that all of the guys I met from Running Club North - Bob, Steve, and definitely Keith, are all awesome people and I would definitely encourage anyone visiting Fairbanks and who has even a casual interest in running to see what the club has to offer, or to just come out to one of their events and say “hello” and maybe “can I do some heavy lifting for you?” You’ll be glad you did.

Lots of good events in Alaska the past day or two.

Yesterday I went for a short run in the morning around the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. The campus is on a small hill not far from the hostel where I’m staying and has a very nice outdoor Shakespeare theater that reminds me of the space in Regent’s Park, London where Tanya and I saw the Merchant of Venice a few years ago. Otherwise the campus seems pretty unremarkable. On the way back, I had the awesome realization that the shop where the race registration for the run I wanted to do tomorrow is probably the closest business to my hostel. Yay! I went back when the store opened and met Bob from Running Club North who was very helpful and assured me they could get me to the race as he handed me bib #83. Then he put me in touch with Steve, who had been the club president for a couple years and we negotiated a “you scratch my back…” (I come carry around some tables the day before the race) “…and I’ll scratch yours” (he’ll drive me to the race). Otherwise yesterday there was a cookout at the hostel and it was release day for the final Harry Potter book and the small independent book shop up the street - Gulliver’s Books - was holding a midnight sale and huge outdoor party for it. I couldn’t really resist the will of the people so I hopped on the bandwagon at 6:00 and got spot in line #125. I wandered around for more of the afternoon and evening before coming back to a very nice cookout at the hostel and eventually going out that night to get the book. This is one of my favorite conversations I had this day:

• Me (to two kids in line for Harry Potter who were obviously dressed like Harry Potter and Ginny, affecting my best fake-interested-Trick-or-Treater-parent voice): Now, who are you two supposed to be??
• Them: (silence)
• Me: Hey - could I get your picture? Are you two together?
• Them (after looking at each other awkwardly and answering the second question: No, we don’t know each other
• Me: Oh, well could I get your pictures anyway??
• And then they let me. It’ll be in flickr when I get another internet connection, but it was great.

Trivia: according to someone else in line - the kids at the front of the line at that shop who had been in line for 11 days held the longest vigil in the world for the book’s release. I had to think “don’t you want to do something else with your summer in Fairbanks???”

This morning I lined up for a bus into town so I could get to the travel center and start thinking about my next destination (something I didn’t wind up accomplishing) and also to see the Golden Days parade. Everything is going back to running for me right now and this did, too. It turned out there was a 1 mile race for Golden Days and I met a woman who was running that and is running the race tomorrow and agreed she would drive me to the run tomorrow (this is preferable since if I go with the club president, he needs to get there at 6AM). So hooray! After the parade I met Keith, who is the current Running Club North president who drove me to the Silver Gulch Brewery where the finish/bbq/beer sampling will be after the race.

Trivia: Silver Gulch microbrew is one of the furthest north breweries in the US (I have a hard time believing there are no microbrews in the arctic circle to give it top honors, but that’s what I read). Then I went back to town, had lunch at a diner where I expected Schneider and the rest of the cast of One Day at a Time to saddle up next to me. I took the waitress’s question “did I tell you it was my 21st birthday last night?” to be my cue to get the check and head back to the hostel.

It was 93 degrees today according to the thermometer on the Key Bank downtown. I feel exhausted from the sun and just want to rest now.

Tonight I’m in Fairbanks staying at a local hostel. So far everything is great. It turns out the buses don’t run after 6 or so (duh - what did I expect from a town of 30,000?) so I caught a taxi to the hostel. Once I arrived I met a nice traveller named Jenny who immediately loaned me her bike to get some groceries from the store! That’s terrific trust. Dinner from Taco Bell (desperate times call for desperate measures) and then later a few of us went out looking for beers. We found a small liquor store owned by Safeway that sells some of the local Alaska beer, took them back to a church lot and drank them under the midnight sun. It’s really disorienting.

On the walk back to the hostel we saw a car strangely screech to a stop in the road ahead, get out, and then tear off down the road past us. Upon further inspection it looked like they probably hit an animal, threw it in the bed of their pickup and took off. A meal? Something to stuff and mount? Who knows. While we were investigating, a second car came by and threw a pack of firecrackers at us. Nice. Then a *third* car came by and a bunch of probably drunken nuts leaned out the window yelling at us for no reason. I think the sun makes Alaskans a little loopy.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to figure out how to register for this 16 mile run on Sunday I learned about and got my coach’s approval to do - I’m super excited!

I don’t know, but I’m going to Alaska tomorrow! Expect (even) less frequent blog updates since I’ll be travelling, but I do hope to keep uploading pictures to my flickr account and will probably be sending twitter updates so that’s the best way to catch what’s up in the life of the unemployed.

My itinerary is pretty loose except for flying in to Fairbanks and eventually coming back to Seattle. The only other thing I’m pretty sure will be in the cards is a bunch of running to stay on track for the Portland marathon training program I’m on.

If you’re like me, when you read this weather alert:

   THE HEAT WAVE WILL CONTINUE TODAY WITH WARMER CONDITIONS EXPECTED
   COMPARED TO YESTERDAY. AFTERNOON HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL REACH
   INTO THE MID 90S TO NEAR 100 DEGREES. THIS IS 20 TO 25 DEGREES
   ABOVE NORMAL. THE COMBINATION OF HIGHER TEMPERATURES AND HIGHER
   RELATIVE HUMIDITY WILL CREATE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE AND DANGEROUS
   CONDITIONS ACROSS THE AREA.

You think “time to go heat up some coffee and think about the afternoon run.”

Maybe this example is exaggerated but one thing that frequently drove me nuts while working at Microsoft was poor bug management. A high quality bug should have a number of characteristics:

• terse - the bug should contain the necessary information for the reported issue, any further investigation or clarification of the issue, progress of the investigation into resolving the bug, and little else
• completeness - a bug should be a complete picture of the reported issue. It should reproduce and have the required information to reproduce the problem
• steps, expected behavior, and actual behavior - always should be included even if the expected/actual behavior are “no crash/crash” or some buggy actual behavior and the bug reporter doesn’t know what the expected behavior should be.

That’s not a comprehensive list but it’s a decent start for productive software creation.

Compare that with this Mozilla bug that was reported last November dealing with a cross-site scripting bug leaving part of the Firefox password manager vulnerable. This led me to not use Firefox’s password manager for the past 9 months. I’d like to use it again but not if every myspace user (or user of other, similar sites) could snarf my own account password. Today I thought “Hey, I wonder if that’s fixed yet and I can start using this feature again?” so I checked the bug.

Holy christ. Almost 400 comments with the vast, vast majority having nothing to do with the actual content of the issue reported. And it looks like it’s resolved fixed but in Firefox 3 alpha 5. I’m sure this is a corner case since most bugs in open source probably go unnoticed by most of the blowhards who’ve chimed in on this one, but what an impossible context to actually get anything done in.

Today I feel I crossed a small milestone in my marathon training - 13.2 miles. My target distance was just 13 miles but my GPS signal wasn’t so hot and I set a target location (home) which got me 13.2. This is the halfway point for an actual marathon and while I think the second 13 miles will certainly be the harder part, I felt really good about the run and mostly very good about my recovery (except I waited waaaay too long to get coffee today). I ran with many of the same terrific people I met last week in ChuckIt - Dan, Elizabeth, and Joe. Last week there were more of us and we took the course much easier. Today I got 2-3 more miles in and my average pace was under 8:30 vs. 10+ minute miles last week. That probably spells “too fast for training” but it’s really, really enjoyable and the company makes me want to run that way. Dan turned 49 last Monday and is going through some significant life events which made him exude infectious optimism and I’m *positive* that helped set our pace. I think a terrific time was had by everyone, though. Tomorrow I made what might be the mistake of volunteering to marshal for the SeaFair Marathon, which turns out to mean “get to Kirkland by 6:15AM” (maybe that’s why they had trouble getting volunteers?), but overall joining ChuckIt must be the best decision I’ve made for personal fitness in years - probably in my life - and I’d encourage anyone in Seattle who has even a passing interest in running to consider joining.

Tuesday night at about 11:55 the Firecracker 5K took off from Mercer Arena in Seattle Center. It was a fun race that starts on July 3 and finishes on July 4 (but is late!) and overall I was very pleased with the race.

I put together a mini-persistence of vision (POV) kit from ladyada and programmed it to say “USA!” with a small firecracker logo that I would tie to my shoe for the run. This seemed like a great idea, but it fell apart literally and figuratively. Figuratively, I thought I should tie it to my left shoe since the course involved a bunch of right turns and I thought people would be more likely to see it on my left foot. But I failed to consider that from a watcher’s perspective, my left foot moves right to left, meaning the image created by the POV kit would be mirrored. Oh well, at least the firecracker would still work, right? Not so. I really should have anticipated this but probably 200′ into the race I felt like the straps on the battery pack were loosening and by 500-1000′ into the race the battery pack was totally loose. This was awful because I was trying to set a competitive pace in the race and was near the front so tons of runners were behind me as I stumbled and tried to rip the battery pack off so I could run. I did manage to rip it off (and have been able to solder it all back together and it still works) but I had an awkward half mile or so while I tried putting the battery pack and batteries in my pocket, then decided to carry them, and finally got comfortable.

And my technical woes didn’t end there! At about the 2 mile mark I wanted to check my pace and in trying to turn the light on my watch on I managed to pop one of the pins out of the strap. Ugh!

In spite of this I finished in just over 21 minutes at 6:50 miles, which accomplished my goal of sub-7 minute miles. My previous best recorded 5k pace was over a minute slower. So yay!

Tanya and I scootered down, which was eventful, and met John on the field and also ran into Gunter and Mike before the race. I think everybody had a great time and Gunter took 5th in the clydesdale division - way to go, Super G! Tanya’s time was on par with the Furry 5K, which was good considering that while this wasn’t an impossible course it was quite a bit more challenging.

The National played at Neumo’s on Saturday and were completely stunning. The first song in their set was Start a War from their last album, Boxer. I wasn’t very familiar with their music before the concert but during the show I told my friend, John, that The National are like a Joy Division whose music is broadly more enjoyable: layered, melancholy, and desperate but much less anxious (American Music Club or Morphine might be closer comparisons). From the first song I was riveted and when they closed with Abel (or was it About Today?) I knew I would be completely hooked and I’ve had trouble listening to anything but them since the show. Here’s that first track - go buy their music.

Start A War - The National

We expected something, something better than before. We expected something more.
Do you really think you can just put it in a safe behind a painting, lock it up and leave?
Do you really think you can just put it in a safe behind a painting, lock it up and leave?
Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.

Whatever went away I’ll get it over now. I’ll get money, I’ll get funny again.
Whatever went away I’ll get it over now. I’ll get money, I’ll get funny again.
Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.

We expected something, something better than before. We expected something more.
We were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now.
We were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now.
Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.

Whatever went away I’ll get it over again. I’ll get money, I’ll get funny again.
Whatever went away I’ll get it over again. I’ll get money, I’ll get funny again.
Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.
Walk away now and you’re gonna start a war.