It's funny how circular the web can be.  This morning I was looking for people to add to my dailymile.com friends list.  I saw a user’s icon that I recognized and clicked to view his profile.  My click was prompted by lingering curiosity from last week.  I had followed this person on Twitter.  The individual is both a runner and someone in the tech field; it seemed like a relevant fit.  A few minutes later I received a direct message thanking me for the follow and referencing our common interest in running.  Interesting, I’d never been thanked for following before.  My first thought was, “Hmm, nice touch.”  My second thought was, “Has some sort of Twitter etiquette, no doubt labeled ‘Twetiquette’, evolved that encourages these social graces?”  I didn’t have time to reply at the time, but made a mental note to do so later.  That night I saw a tweet in the person’s feed, a blip.fm song reference about which I made an @reply comment.  Then I typed out a direct message and sent it off only to be told that I can’t send a direct message to someone who is not following me.  Strange.  I checked my small list of followers and, yep, I’d been quit.  Had the delay in my response to the afternoon’s direct message offended?  Now I felt like a lout, especially after making a presumably unwelcome @reply.  Better to just un-follow and move on.

Return to this morning where I’m reading through this person’s blog from the dailymile profile click through.  The second post catches my eye because it mentions Twitter and Qwitter.  Qwitter I learn is a service that will let you know when people stop following you.  And not only that but also the tweet you made immediately preceding when they stopped following.  That way you can parse your 140 or less characters to get a glimpse into the quitter's psyche.  Honestly, people, it’s just Twitter.  Is this kind of thing really necessary?  Before you say “Well of course not, Will” read on because at the end of his post there I was.  He was apologizing for having offended me to the point that I would quit him, complete with “Brokeback Mountain” reference.  Huh?

Well, as it turns out I hadn’t been quit.  I had mentally checked the box that said this person had followed me when I received the direct message when in fact he had not.  (I backtracked through my email trash and found no ‘This person is following you on Twitter’ message.)  I had not offended him by not responding, and he had not un-followed me.  I suppose I never would have made this mistake if I’d been using Qwitter because I would not have received a ‘This person is no longer following you on Twitter’ email.  Foolproof clarity for free.

My wife makes fun of me for using Twitter.  I can't say that I blame her, especially after wasting half an hour writing this post.  For me Twitter wanes while dailymile.com waxes.  I’m looking for camaraderie not an audience – not that having an audience is bad.  You’re reading this now.  Will I Qwit Twitter?  No, I’m going to stick with it for now.  I have some friends that are traveling overseas and they decided to use Twitter as a low bandwidth intensive way of sharing their experience.  After that, who knows?  It’s not every day that you get have this kind of convoluted misunderstanding with a person you’ve never met.

I took the afternoon off on Tuesday to got to Frankfort.  My wife had made the trip to the state capitol last week to get the necessary seals for our adoption paperwork.  China requires certifications for the required documents as opposed to apostilles.  We initially received apostilles, but found out only after sending the paperwork via FedEx overnight to D.C. at great expense that we should have gotten certifications.  This is our fourth time through the China paper chase and each time there are new documents or variations in the process.  So back came the documents and it was now my turn to head to Frankfort. 

Until Tuesday I had not been to Frankfort and have only been to Louisville a few times, but I knew there were other parks and trails in the Frankfort/Louisville area.  If I was going to take the day off from work to make the trip I figured that was a good excuse to also find a trail run in the area.  A quick search turned up Capitol View Park conveniently located along my route.  The trial map on the site was too small to be of much use, but I found a larger version on another site. 

After getting the certifications on the paperwork I took them to a nearby FedEx office and sent them on their way.  Then it was time to run.  I found the park on the East West Connector and parked at the kiosk.  From there I followed the notes on the trail map that direct you to proceed through the parking lots to “The First Section”.  I actually overshot that trailhead and ended up heading down the double track and hoping onto the section of trail that runs along the upper perimeter of the map.  I went to the right and found myself on the abandoned railroad bed that took me back to the kiosk.  Realizing what I had done, I simply turned around and retraced my steps, moving counterclockwise as suggested.  After a full circuit of the park I grabbed a quick drink and bite at the car and ran clockwise this time, skipping the long loop that runs behind the library building.  I picked up the trailhead of “The First Section” this time around.  All told I covered about 12 miles of great trail under a blue sky.

If you go note that the trails are marked better in some areas than others.  Also, there a few details like side trails and intersections not included on the map so you may have to feel your way along, exploring, to make sure you’re on the main course if want to get the full mileage out of the park.  That’s part of the fun though.

As I’ve mentioned before my wife and I bought a treadmill early last December.  So far I love it.  Without it I would never have been able to keep any sort of training regimen with the shortening daylight hours and lowering temperatures through the winter.  We made our purchase at the local Dick’s Sporting Goods.  I know one of the managers there from church, and he let me use his friend’s and family discount when the sale rolled around.  That saved us about 20% and allowed us to get a much better machine than I thought we could (read: spend more than I thought my wife would let me.  Thanks, Honey).  Of course in purchasing said treadmill we used that card that a lot of these big chain stores have.  Best Buy has one too.  You know, where if you purchase $5000 dollars of stuff in a year they’ll send you a certificate for $5.  I’m exaggerating but not by much.  I did the math on the Best Buy one once and it works out to a 2% rebate.  I’m not sure what the percentage is on the Dick’s version, but it’s pretty close.  Still, a treadmill added up to a lot of points and sure enough in late January we got a certificate worth $40.  That’s when the trouble started.

Truth be told $40 is $40, even if you have to spend it by the end of February to prevent if from not being $40 anymore.  So what do you do with $40?  Shoes of course.  A runner always needs shoes.  Brooks Trance?  Sure, but Dick’s charges more for them than everyone else.  Asics DS Trainer 14?  Nope, but they’ve got the 13.  In the store?  No, online.  Hmm.  Asics Hyper Speed?  I need racing flats.  No.  Brooks racing flats?  No.  Any racing flats?  Not really.  Shorts!  A runner always needs shorts.  I’m the old school type that likes the ones where the front panel overlaps the back panel.  Nike makes them.  Dicks caries Nike, right?  Well they do and they don’t.  You see where I’m going with this. 

I can’t expect Dick’s to be John’s Run Walk Shop, or Omega Sports, or Phidippides or any of the other places that end up being running’s equivalent of Cheers.  And to be honest, I don’t want them to.  Big box stores are about getting a good price on a treadmill and some orange cones to mark an Ultimate field.  When I need the next larger sized ball and cleats for the start of kids’ soccer season, I go to the big box.  But when I want to feel the difference in fit between an Asics Hyper Speed and a Brooks T6 Racer I’ll head to John’s.  And while I’m there I’ll probably linger and talk about running with people who love to run.

Long live the specialty running shop.

I like Craig’s List.  It facilitates a face-to-face, cash exchange that is inherently scam-free for free.  This is as opposed to EBay which has become a wasteland.  I’ve got a Craig’s List listing now for an Archos 605 that I’m trying to sell.  I previously sold a PSP and a Garmin Forerunner 50 (which is a great, no-frills heart rate monitor by the way).  Not too long after I  posted my PSP last year I got an email from someone who was going to pay more than the asking price and just needed my PayPal ID.  All I had to do was box it up an ship it off.  Of course it was a scam.  I got another one yesterday regarding the Archos from anitamorgan82@gmail.com. 

The text was in light gray and looked like an auto-generated signature line.  Still, I wrote back and said that I did.  Within seconds I got a reply.  Actually, I got two replies.  The first was from the original address with the same content as the first email.  The second was from Anita’s other email - anitamorgan85@yahoo.com.

Hey, $350 plus $180 when I’m only asking $225 is not bad.  Spelling and grammar aside, Anita must be a real sweetheart.  At this point I’m curious just how this scam works.  I do a little searching and find this poor guy’s experience.  Being a computer guy, I’m also wondering if Anita, sweetheart though she may be, is a human or an auto-responder.  I write back before going to bed.

This morning I learned that Anita is a human because I found two responses from the previous night.

That one arrived just eight minutes after I sent my $1093.37 fee list (including the anti-dolphin coating charge).  Anita is willing.  And not just willing, but eager (probably due to the long delivery time) as evidence by her second email which arrived less than an hour later.

By this morning my curiosity had run its course.  I had my fun, and as Anita might say, it was a “hamless deal”.  The sad thing is that there are people out there who are in for plenty of ham.  They’re well intentioned or naive or inexperienced or lured into getting more than their asking price.  Whatever they are, ultimately, Anita is going to take their money and waste their time.  So watch out, folks, because I’m here to tell you that Anita is a non-sweetheart human eager to do you ham harm.  And she’s probably not the only one.

When I started running again last fall I picked up The Competitive Runner's Handbook by by Bob and Shelly-Lynn Florence Glover.  During my high school and college days I had the luxury of a coach to guide my training.  From that experience I have a reasonable understanding about how to train for distances from 5K to 10K.  My new goal race distance is the half-marathon and marathon for 2009.  While there are obvious similarities in training for a 5K and a marathon you can’t just take a 5K plan and multiply by nine.  The Competitive Runner's Handbook helped me begin to get a feel for the training regimen changes necessary to race at the marathon distance.  It even has suggested training schedules for runners of various ability levels.  Still, I wasn’t finding the information I was looking for.  There are a thousand and one half-marathon or marathon training schedules out there.  But where do they come from?  How are they created?  It wasn’t long before I realized that what I was really looking for was not a mini-encyclopedia of running but a book that would teach me how to be a coach so that I could coach myself. 

When I went looking for that kind of book I found Brad Hudson’s Run Faster from the 5K to the Marathon: How to Be Your Own Best Coach.  In this book Hudson and his co-author Matt Fitzgerald lay out Hudson’s adaptive coaching philosophy.  In a nutshell Hudson approaches coaching each athlete as an individual with different strengths and weaknesses and seeks to tailor a plan that best suits their race goals.  The book is narrowly focused.  You won’t find chapters on nutrition, stretching, or race strategy.  While there are training schedules laid out in the back of the book, they are intended to be guidelines around which to build your own schedule.  So far I’m in week 7 of the half-marathon level 3 schedule.  I started at week one on January 4.  My plan is to stick as close to his 16 week schedule as possible leading up to the Country Music Half-Marathon.  From there I’ll should have plenty of information both from training and the race to assess where to go next in my training.  And that is what Hudson’s approach is all about – train, assess, refine, repeat.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the treadmill this winter.  While I’m looking forward to getting back outside (possibly next week judging by the long term forecast), I’ve been very grateful for my new treadmill.  I’ve also been grateful for my laptop that I use to watch movies and TV (Netflix, Hulu, DVD) while logging miles.  I’ve never listened to music while running outside.  I have considered it a few times, but have avoided bringing along a music player in part because I didn’t want it to take away from my essential experience of running.  Some people feel just the opposite, and that’s fine by me - whatever works to get you out the door.  When it comes to the treadmill, however, I never thought twice about music or video.  Here are a few of the movies or shows that I’ve watched so far:

• Transformers – High energy action with decent amount of foot chases.
• Eagle Eye – Another action flick featuring Shia LaBeouf with foot and car chases.
• Traitor – A movie about a terrorist plot staring Don Cheadle.
• Spirit of the Marathon – A documentary about marathons in general and the 2005 Chicago Marathon specifically.  It’s a must see for runners. 
• Breaking Away – I hadn’t seen this on in a while.  A goofy old feel good movie about a guy trying to make it as a pro cyclist. 
• Legend of the Seeker – This is a new fantasy genre show I found on Hulu. 
• Eureka – Another TV show from Hulu.

The TV shows have been good for shorter runs.  Sometimes I delay starting them for a mile or two if I’m doing a longer run.  Likewise the movies can be split across a long and a short run.  I’ve also thought about getting some audio books from the library if the movies run dry – no pun intended.

What do you watch or listen to when you’re running?

My wife and I bought a treadmill before Christmas of last year.  It has been great to be able to run regardless of the weather or daylight this winter.  A couple of days ago the weather was warm so I headed outside for the first time in a while.  I was running on a known course – the arboretum at UK - and realize that I seemed to be running at a faster pace based on perceived effort compared to my perceived treadmill effort.  If anything, it should be the other way around.  My guess was that the treadmill was reporting a slower speed than it was actually moving at.  But how do you calibrate a treadmill?  The manual gave a procedure for calibration that allowed the roller diameter to be adjusted prior to running through an automatic calibration procedure.  So here’s how I did it.

I have a bicycle, a wind trainer (rear wheel clamp style), and a bike computer (speedometer).  The following could be done without a wind trainer, but it makes the whole thing a lot easier.  My particular computer (Cateye Astrale 8) uses a rear wheel speed sensor.  I made sure the bike computer was properly configured with the wheel circumference.  I then clamped the rear wheel in the wind trainer as per normal use and positioned the bike such that the front wheel was on the treadmill belt as if I were going to ride the bike on the treadmill.  Next I moved the trainer forward on the floor behind the treadmill until the rear wheel made contact with the belt.  I checked that there were no obstructions then turned on the treadmill at its slowest speed.  As the belt moved it turned the wheels showing the speed of the belt.  I tested the treadmill at six, eight, and ten miles per hour and found it to be moving about 0.2 mph fast.  That is, when the treadmill said eight mph the bike computer said 8.2 mph. 

From here on it was just a slow process of trail and error.  I went through the set up procedure for calibrating the treadmill, each time increasing the setting for the size of the rollers by a couple of points.  I finally arrived at a setting of 2.89 as opposed to the setting of 2.81 listed in the manual.  Once the speeds agreed I let the whole setup run for a few miles to see if the distances would match up as well.  A small difference in speed between the treadmill and bike computer – both of which only read to a tenth of a mile per hour – would easily show up over a distance of a few miles.  Overall I found the two to match up well with the treadmill running perhaps .05 mph faster, which is fine for me. 

Gels (GU, Hammer Gel, Clif Shot) are handy on long training runs.  I like to have calories on hand for distances over 10 miles on the road or over about 75-80 minutes on trails.  I've used GUs and Clif Shots and like them both.  They are light, compact, and convenient.  The downside is that gels, and energy bars for that matter, are expensive.  I like cheap.  I also like tinkering. 

The nutrition info on the label boils down to maltodextrin and amino acids.  Maltodextrin is a carbohydrate; that's the fuel.  And the amino acids?  Leucine, valine, isoleucine, and histadine are listed in the GU nutrition info.  Clif Shot lists none, although it does list electrolytes (salts like magnesium and potassium).  Given that these are competing products the difference in content caused me to question the importance of the amino acids.  Further digging turned up a great series of three podcasts by six-time Ironman champion Dave Scott where he talks about replacing calories during training and racing.  In addition to his advice the site provides associated charts (taken from from the book, The Performance Zone: Your Nutrition Action Plan for Greater Endurance & Sports Performance by Dr. John Ivy, Ph. D, and Dr. Robert Portman, Ph D.) that pretty much lay out exactly what should be in a sports drink.  Fair warning - the podcast site is sponsored by Accelerade.  Nevertheless, the details are there and agree with the other sources I found both on the web and in research journals.  So apparently carbohydrates and proteins in a 4:1 ratio along with some salts and a little vitamin C is what should be in a sports drink.  And what is a gel if not a  super-concentrated sports drink?

An exhausting, if not exhaustive, search of local and online sources led me to BulkNutrition.com as a source for both maltodextrin and whey protein.  Whey protein is complete (contains all 20 amino acids) and has the highest biological value of any known protein source.  I ordered the maltodextrin and whey protein made by Now Foods.  The whey protein mixture itself contains some carbohydrates as it is intended for use as a drink mix.  Based on my calculations to account for the carbohydrates in the whey protein mix, 90g of maltodextrin and 40g of whey protein mix would combine to yield five 100 calorie servings with the overall 4:1 ratio of carbohydrate to protein.

If you’ve never seen an energy gel imagine pancake syrup, only thicker.  How do you get from 130g of powder to 5oz. of thick gel?  This is one detail I still haven’t figured out.  I mixed my 90g of maltodextrin and 40g of whey powder with 5oz. of bottled water.  I tried using less water, but when I did the mixture was too thick to stir.  Heating the mixture seems like an obvious answer, but I was and still am afraid of degrading the amino acids.  In my former life as a biologist I autoclaved bacterial media all the time, but I’m not sure what the crucial temperature would be.  If you have any suggestions or experience please leave a comment.  In the meantime, I coaxed the thick, mildly sweet mixture into newly purchased, empty 2 oz. shampoo travel tubes from Walmart. 

Voila, energy batter.

I’ve gone through a couple of batches of this stuff so far.  It’s not optimal, but it works.  I estimated the price per 100 calories to be under 30 cents as opposed to just over a dollar for a GU or Clif Shot.  That kind of savings adds up when you start using a half dozen or more of these a week.  My next experiment will be to see if I can make a maltodextrin only style gel ala Clif Shot by boiling the solution.

Below is a growing list of possible races for 2009:

• Louisville’s Lovin’ the Hills 50K (31 miles) & 15 mile Trail Runs
  Louisville, KY - February 14, 8:00 AM
• Country Music Marathon & 1/2 Marathon REGISTERED
  Nashville, TN - April 25, 7:00 AM
• Blue Planet Run 24: Black Mountain
  Asheville, NC - Early May
• Another Dam 50K Run
  Englewood, OH - June 6, 8:00 AM
• Indian-Celina Challenge Half and Full Marathon
  Hoosier National Forest, IN - June 13, 6:30 am
• Bluegrass 10K
  Lexington, KY - July 4, 7:30 AM (Registration opens June 1)
• Germantown 50K Trail Run
  Germantown, OH - August
• A Midsummer Night's Run 5K
  Lexington, KY - August 15, 8:30 PM
• Salem Lake 30K/10K Trail Runs
  Winston-Salem, NC - September 26, 8:00 AM
• Big South Fork Trail Race (17.5 miles)
  Oneida, TN - September/October
• Stone Steps 50K Trail Race
  Mt. Airy Forest, Cincinnati, OH - October 25, 8:00 AM
• Mountain Masters 16-Mile Trail Run
  Harlan, KY - End of November

I've made my first race commitment of 2009.  I signed up to run the Country Music Half Marathon.  I've got a friend that recently moved to Nashville.  He and another old friend and I are all going to run together.  It feels good to have a set training goal for the new year.  I may slide a 5K or 10K in late February or early March to gage my progress.  I had considered trying to run all four races in the Southwest Ohio 50K Trail Series, but the first series race is on the same day as the half.  The half is a more reasonable return to racing given that I haven't competed in about ten years.  All four of those 50K's would probably be too big a bite for 2009.  I have to remember to view 2009 as a (re)building year.  I've accumulated just under 400 miles since late August so I have a decent base on which to begin more intensive training.