Vergil’s Coffee

A power song idea is from the iPod Nano+Nike mash up whereby you select a song that you play during your workout or run when you need a little musical “pick me up.”

I don’t have an iPod Nano+Nike thing, but I do have a Shuffle and I’m looking for some suggestions on what song to use for this weekend’s Sunburst Marathon in South Bend, IN (”from the College Hall of Fame to the 50-yard line at Notre Dame”).

Last weekend’s marathon was easy because Lori and I ran in the Cleveland Rock n Roll Marathon and I can’t tell you how many times I listened to the Presidents of the US sing “Cleveland Rocks” (good song to get from iTunes Store ).

Here’s some suggestions so far from Twitter friends:

Any other suggestions?

And this is not a rant against not getting the Lilly Endowment for not granting my proposal “Writing a blank canvas: Arctic Canada and Northern Indiana” (There is little distracting about the landscapes of Nunavut, Canada and Northern Indiana. But in writing about place, I plan on crafting an non-fiction essay about the vast beauty of each in a longer article for publication).

Is that not a cool proposal? Well, apparently it didn’t make the cut, but I’m still living without having the summer Lilly grant experience. And I just a call from a teacher in my building who also applied for the Lilly Teacher Creativity grant and well laughed about not getting the “good” letter of acceptance. Sigh.

So, for fun, I thought I might recount the last six years of grant proposals:

2008: Writing a blank canvas: Write an article about Nunavat and Indiana landscapes

2007: Building an Inuksuk garden (visit Nunavat and then recreate the experience in my backyard).

2006: Running in Nunavat: See inuksuk and run a marathon in Nunavut.

2005: Jack London: Visit Glen Ellen, CA and write short stories.

2004: Get a private pilot’s license.

2003: Study and complete in the National Chess Championships in PA.

I’ve been hanging around the idea of going to Nunavut for the past 3 years and I have a feeling that once people see the promotions for the 2010 Winter Olympics, everyone will want to know more about Inuksuk. But, perhaps, I need to let that idea go for next year.

And, to the winners of the 2008 Lilly Teacher Creativity Grant: congratulations and enjoy the experience. I hear that it is a wonderful boost to your teaching.

Times of being a kid are great.

We’re back from the 9th annual family gathering of the Bickels (Lois’ parents and Lois’ brother, his wife [Jinger] and their son), the Certalics (Jinger’s parents) and us on Thanksgiving weekend in Schaumburg, IL (home of the Woodfield Mall<= really big).

And, for the last 9 years, we had all read the same book and had a book talk (this year: A Thousand Splendid Sunsets [Hosseini of The Kite Runner]). At the suggestion by Lois, we each created a list of “Things we loved” that didn’t include the usual things like family or country or belief-like items. I scribbled mine on the back of notes from a little talk that I gave the editors of the Student Publications class and found more room on the hotel’s small notepad paper. It was interesting to hear each person’s list and was in general a pretty cool to do.

Try it sometime…or now–as a response to this post–it’s fun. It’s not so much in making this list, but sharing it with someone else who has made the list too.

So, here’s mine:

The Things I love:

• Venti Bold lots of room for cream with four packets of Sugar in the Raw from Starbucks at 7:07 a.m. before school.
• New England Clam Chowder with sour dough bread at The Tides restaurant in Bodega Bay, California.
• The Mac OS X OS with its Unix core underneath and the bling bling of the UI on our eMac.
• That each Bickel has a bottle of nasal spray on their night stand.
• Celtic Women, Riverdance, and “Danny Boy.”
• Most BBC comedies.
• Netflixing with Lois.
• Colin’s red hair and Evan’s hitting the floor.
• Making Ken and Doris coffee.
• The first bass note in a song.
• The pictures of Lois and me at the Japanese Tea Gardens (Golden Gate Park) in 1989 and 2001.
• The beginning, middle and end of a marathon.
• My 2007 Grand Rapids Marathon shirt.
• NPR (”Wait, wait…Don’t Tell me,” “This American Life,” and “Speaking of Faith”).
• Troubleshooting a website’s code and the moment when it works as it ought to.
• Writing in a black marble composition book.
• The Golden Gate Bridge on a bright foggy day.
• My running shoes.
• My Timberland shoes.
• A 1988 Ford Festiva.
• Building inuksuk on the Lake Michigan shore in Milwaukee, WI.
• The flatness of the Midwest.
• When Lois calls me a jackass.

Here’s a report from last weekend’s Lakefront Marathon (Milwaukee, WI), the smaller marathon from the weekend with less press. I decided to use my older camera phone to record the sights and sounds of the race. For the sights, I used my Flickr account and for the sounds, I used my existing Twitter account with Dave Winer’s mashup, Twittergrams (the upshot is that you can record a 30-second message and people who are following your Twitter account have a link that they can follow and hear your audio message). [Note: time stamps are EDT and we were in CDT, so subtract an hour for reality].

Saturday, 6 October 2007

(BayView Farmers Market: Baby Jessica)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/29esqz 08:34 AM October 06, 2007 from TwitterGram

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/3dcrtd 01:32 PM October 06, 2007 from TwitterGram

Some pix from this morning in Milwaukee (Bayview): http://tinyurl.com/2s22n8; time for lunch and packet pickup. 01:43 PM October 06, 2007 from web

(Milwaukee: MSOE field house)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2v4kw8 03:17 PM October 06, 2007 from TwitterGram

Sunday, 7 October 2007 (Before the race)

Today, Lois and I are running in the Lakefront Marathon (WI); we’re headed to the bus pickup and I’ll be twittering (t-gram) from the race. 07:00 AM October 07, 2007 from web

Have a great day folk…it’s gonna be a warm one…drink lots of fluids. 07:01 AM October 07, 2007 from web

Being transported to Grafton, WI

On bus with chatty people runners. 07:48 AM October 07, 2007 from txt

15 minutes before race time

Mile 0: Start of race (Grafton High School, Grafton, WI)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/26d4go 09:02 AM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 3 (High point…maybe)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/34coe8 09:33 AM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 4 (Losing Lois and Accordions)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2wg3wc 09:46 AM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 10 (Ambulance)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2uwys4 10:58 AM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 15 (Fox Pointe and finishing)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/yrcfdt 12:06 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 17 (Crowd support)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2xk2nz 12:21 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 18 (White Fish Bay, now all downhill)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/ywpgg7 12:41 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 19 (What not to eat)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2oeos5 12:52 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 20 (Flickr pix)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2ghh2b 01:07 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 23 (What not to eat, part 2; Meeting the Lake)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/28tzrd 01:48 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 24 (Jack)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/ysf6zt 02:04 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Mile 26.2 (Finish line)

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/3xutt6 02:23 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

Post-race commentary

Phoned-in TG from Lakefront Marathon weekend http://tinyurl.com/2k4twa 02:40 PM October 07, 2007 from TwitterGram

My initial goal for this running season was a 3:30 time; I figured I should give it a whirl and try harder at improving my time…just to try it. Then, around the time of the Elkhart Co. 4-H fair 5K, I decided that my pace was fast enough to try to qualify for Boston: 3:20. I changed training schedules, trained more often and more miles and Lake City was a strong race.

I missed the qualifying time, but ran a 3:25 (12th overall out of 57 registered runners, 9th Male finisher) and was happy with how prepared I felt. I was on track for the first 13.1 mile loop (we ran the course twice) with a time of 1:38, but my second time, I dropped 9 mins. behind. My previous PR was 3:47 and it’s fun to reflect back to my first marathon in 2002 with a finishing time of 4:27 (here’s the result page; I’m in 569th place).

I wrote about my progress up through the 2005 season in a previous post , and if I remember right, last season I was trying for a two marathon year, but ending up doing 3:

• 2006 Sunburst: 3:47* (PR; Previous PR was 3:56, Sunburst 2004)
• 2006 Lake City: 3:53 (leg cramped up at Mile 17)
• 2006 Columbus (I ran with Lois as her running buddy).

This season so far hasn’t been entirely groovy:

• 2007 April Louisville: 4:02 <=crashed hard at Mile 14
• 2007 June Sunburst: 4:01 <= relaxed and “enjoyed” the course
• 2007 Sept. Lake City: 3:25 <= a bit nippy, but legs felt great throughout the course.

The Hanson training schedule has been more demanding, but I would agree with the many others when I say that you don’t have to run over 16 miles in your training schedule to be prepared (at least in the beginner/intermediate level). Lois and I are running Lakefront the first weekend in October and my sister, Stephany, just got her tickets to fly out for her nephew’s birthday and run in Grand Rapids. (I might try another qualifying run there if the training holds up).

I wasn’t exactly planning on five marathons this year, but I’m 40 now, and why not. I still want one of those Segways, but until then, running marathons still amuses me.

This morning’s tempo run (7:40 pace) of 5-miles was nice (+66f; 92% humidity; listened to Bruce Hornsby, the “Everybody Dance” track from Paul M. and Train).

As I look back on the last 3 months of blogging (or at least on this site) I can see a mish-mash of stuff and things that I find amusing for that day. Sometimes the thought of hashing out a cohesive 3 or so paragraphs slips my mind and I find that my tumblr account has been much more active than this Wordpress account. (I’m not going into all of the psychology of that right now, as many other folk have put a lot of type into the internet tubes on writing blogs vs. mini-blogging and the like). What I’m wondering from people is how do they manage two Twittering people on one computer.

We have an ol’ eMac 700 that’s not going to be replaced just yet (because it still does the stuff I need it to do) and because both Lois and I Twitter (and have different “friends,”) I went with two Twitter clients so that both of us can view our social life at any time (the computer is in a central place). Because I follow more people, I have the Twitteriffic program which is slick and so usable; for Lois, I set up tweetr (an AIR app that is maturing well and I just like the idea of using AIR as it seems to be on the edge of some really cool content).

I realize that we could sign out and sign in on Twitterrific, but that just takes too much time and frankly would be a little annoying. (Plus, both apps have their distinct sounds when a new tweet is received: And like Pavlov’s dog we run to the computer <g>).

This way seems workable for us, and though a bit resource heavy on the little ol’ eMac 700, we can continue our social lives in 140 characters or less.

(Hey, my whole html toolbar shows up in Safari…cool)<= Spoke too soon…shows up, not fully functional
Anyway, the new teacher portfolio scoring took less than half the time we had planned for, so I got to come home Tuesday. (BTW, this is a worthwhile process: the portfolio, the mentoring, and the scoring…I will post about this later, but for some reason, some people think it’s “just another hoop we have to jump through”…I’d like to go on record and argue that assessment…later).
This morning was my first tempo run (a run at marathon pace) and I was planning on a conservative time of 8:00 miles and my first mile today was 7:35 and then I figured I might as well see how the rest of the run went. For the 5 mile run, my average mile was 7:40 and I felt comfortable and could breathe easily…which makes me wonder about my plans of qualifying for Boston next year: why not this year?
So the journey begins and I will continue to trace my progress here. I’ve been keeping track of some of my training over at Buckeye, but I can’t seem to figure out how to have my training log show up in my sidebar (that’s another project, I suppose).  

When I stepped out for the 3-miler this morning, I was wondering if it was foggy enough for a school delay. But, my mind quickly ran to poetry and the various faces of poetry that I was going to lead my classes through today. These poems, though, tend to be fairly accessible to people and a tad less formatting and lots more whimsical.

Another thing that I remembered is that I’m still running in the Sunburst (Hall of Fame to Notre Dame) the first Saturday in June. My calf feels fine–a bit tight at the beginning of the run–so I should be able to reach the finish line. From there it’s summer re-training and Lake City Marathon in mid-September and then I run with Lois at the Lakefront Marathon (WI) at the beginning of October. I’m still tossing the idea around about Grand Rapids, but possibly that will fall by the wayside like last year.

I’ve finished making my phone calls to teacher on my list, informing them of the delay. I end with Carl Sandburg and that most anthologized, “Fog”:

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches 5
and then moves on.

Running onto the inner track of Church Hill Downs (Kentucky Derby fame) the thought hit me: whereas Notre Dame fans like the idea of running onto the field at the Sunburst races, Kentuckians like the idea of running on the track of Church Hill Downs.

But that didn’t help me much: Mile 14 I crashed. I would complain about the hills, so I will…I wasn’t prepared for them. The course was beautiful, but in no way should I have been trying for a PR. Wonderful people and wonderfully organized.

So, here are my numbers (and they had a really cool thing where people could follow your progress through the course. I signed up for the results to be sent to my email address, so I’m posting the last one that summarizes my race (and you’ll see a drop off from about the half-way point: 20ishK…I was on pace for a 3:40 finish until then):

Chris Judson has finished the Derby Festival Marathon in 4:02:56 at an average pace of 9:16.1.

According to preliminary results, he is number 343 overall and number 43 in his age group. These results are subject to change when results are finalized.

Splits:

10K: 0:51:27
15K: 1:17:43
25K: 2:13:06
30K: 2:43:09
Finish (42.2K) - Gun Time: 4:04:52
Finish (42.2K) - Net Time: 4:02:56

Thanks Louisville, KY for a wonderful experience and good seafood at Joe’s Crab Shack on the River!