Month: August 2006

Whale Sharks!

Boy are those things big! We drove to the island of Holbox on Monday with a couple of friends. We played at the beach and basically bummed around on Monday evening. After the six hour drive, it was kinda nice to just bum. The mosquitoes about carried us off. And they said it is not even mosquito season right now.

Boats on the beachThe hotel where we stayed was right near the beach. Not on the beach, but I don’t think walking a block was asking too much to get there. The water was very warm right near the shore, but as we got further out, it cooled off. You could walk out a long way before there was any significant drop off in depth. With the water calm as it was that evening, it was a great place to just swim. I enjoyed swimming until it felt like my arms were going to fall off. The visibility was pretty poor so we had trouble finding one of our snorkel and goggle sets when it was lost in 3.5 feet of water.

Tuesday morning we met with our tour boat. We took a 2 hour trip to where the whale sharks should have been. They don’t stay in the same spot from day to day, so you just have to get close to where they were seen yesterday and then putt around till you find them. There were 14 boats at one point looking for the whale sharks. We found some, but they did not stay at the surface. So we all spread out and started looking. Finally we caught up with a couple that stayed at James and David ready to jump in.the surface and let us swim with them. They were huge. We did not have the biggest ones to swim with. The one I got to be with was about 15-18 feet long. Some from our group were with one that was about 20-22 feet long.

We had some underwater disposable cameras. I will get those pics up soon. I hope they turned out nice. We did not have very good visibility to get good pictures. Also, you could not get far enough away from them to take a good picture and understand their size. I dove down to get a picture from underneath the shark, but when I got low enough to take a picture, I could not see the whale shark. It was just too murky.

Great trip. If you get the chance, then it is worth the time to do it. I don’t know what the going rate for the trip is as our friends that we went with do promotions for different tours and hotels. They got their trip free by going with this company and we paid about $65 (USD) each. The company we went with, Monkey’s Tours, were very professional. I imagine they are the most expensive tour company there.

Good 7 miler

Knowing that I was going to be running for close to an hour and a half, I decided to not try anything new. No new shorts, new shoes, new shirts. I did, however, opt for my new socks and hat. I figured a hat could not bother me and my socks I have worn on enough short runs to know they would be fine. But…I could not find my fanny pack. Which meant that I could not carry my Sport Beans that I am trying out and my water. Water could be bought along the way, but that meant that I then had to carry money.

The only running clothes I have with pockets are a new pair shorts. I did not want to wear them, but I ended up doing so. They have never caused problems, but the longest I have run in them was 5.5 miles. Just about a 1 hour run.

Great run. I felt great. The Sport Beans apparently did a wonderful job. I was not starving when I got home even though all I had to eat before I left was a granola bar. About 5 miles into the run I was disappointed that it was almost over.

With the exception of one of my toes feeling a bit rubbed, the run felt good.

My old shoes have always been too short. I did not buy them with running in mind. I recently lost two toenails because my toes were hitting the front of the shoe. The damage was done in May, but the nails just fell off within the last couple of weeks. With no nail to protect my toe, I have a huge blood blister on the tip of it now. Ouch!

I did not realize that I had rubbed my nipple raw until I jumped in the pool last night. I had taken a dip in the pool yesterday morning and a shower, but both were very cold water. The pool was much warmer in the evening, so I noticed the tender spot on my chest.

And the shorts… Well, I really should have stuck to my original plan. Though these shorts are nice and had never given me any problems in the 2 weeks I have run in them, they did yesterday. I have chaffed inner thighs. I will have to walk around tenderly for a day or so. I am trading my undergarments for compression shorts for the day. Since they are black, I will have to remember to not wear white pants to church today.

Stick to your plan. Don’t try new stuff. And remember, the old stuff can hurt you too.

The run was 7.28 miles in 1:20:42 seconds. A pace of 11:05. That is a great pace for me to be running long runs at this stage of my half marathon training. On race day, if I can push myself, I think I can be at my goal pace of 10 minutes. If not, it will at least be better than my last half.

Book Review: Coast to Coast

This is the story of the 2004 RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) cross country relay team running across the country. Fitting. They ran a continuous relay from San Diego to Annapolis, MD in just over 12 days.

They dipped the relay baton in the Pacific and then celebrated with the baton in the Chesapeake Bay of the Atlantic less than 2 weeks later. Of course much more went on between those two events. The story includes more than just who ran when. Ryan Pancoast did a great job in capturing the feelings that occured during the relay. Way too many people packed into too little space for too long leads to many intense moments.

I was most interested in two things in this book. First, knowing it was a group of college students running the event, there had to be a lot of stupidity going on. I was amazed to think that they could actually do it. So in reading the book, my curiosity for how they would make it to the end was satisfied. Imagine all the stupid things you would do if you were with a group like this and that is what you have in the book. Fun to read for that factor alone.

Secondly I wanted to see a book published by Lulu Press. I have read and heard quite a bit about the quality of the final product, it was good to see it on my own. The book is well bound. The cover seems a bit flimsy, but the pages are good quality. You would not expect this book to fall apart after several readings. Good job Lulu. I am much more interested in reading other books printed by them now.

Kudos to RIT for making this an official school event. I am sure it was a tough decision by the decision makers. Or, if it was not, it should have been. After they read the book, they should have seen it as a very important decision. They have already committed to allowing another group of students to run the event in 25 more years. There will probably be much more planning involved by the school the next time around.

In the final pages of the book Pancoast (or Sanford as he is called in the book) says: “In those last few moments, we loved each other like family and hated each other like family.” If you want to know how that could come about in just 2 weeks, you must read the book. Imagine a group of 20 brothers and sisters and you have an idea of what 2 weeks of running will do to a group of college kids.

But, due to the raunchy language used in the book, I will not personally recommend it to any of my friends, nor allow my children to read it.

Nose dive on a 5 miler

Had my 5 mile run all mapped out on Google Earth last night. Ready to run this morning. It was to be a “tempo run” which means that I should run at race pace. I decided to run my tempo runs at the pace I would like to run my 1/2 marathon. That should be 10 minutes per mile. Which will give me a time of 2:10:00 (plus a little bit) for the half. If I run a bit faster for a few miles, I might even get closer to 2 hours. My last one was 2:29:00.

My run took me on a dirt road between miles 2 and 3. I had run on this road several times before and was congratulating myself on the difficulty of that road and the fact that I have never face planted there. It is quite a technical run. Lots of big rocks stick out along with having to dodge the mud puddles. About half way through my congratulatory speech to myself a rock grabbed my right foot. I started going down fast. Fortunately the rock let go of my foot in time to shove it under me and keep me from hitting the ground with my face.

I did, however, violently rip my ear phones out of my head. I wear the kind that loop around the back of the ear like a hearing aide. Hurt just a little, but far less than scraping my nose off of a rock with a spatula.

Good run. I have almost 20 miles on my new shoes. I am not really even thinking about them anymore. They are noticeably more comfortable, but only if I think about it.

Gnats and Telephone Poles

I ran through several clouds of gnats last week while running in south Texas. They certainly don’t go down very easily. They tend to get stuck in the back of the throat. Ick!

One day last week I got to do something enjoyable, besides get my protein fill of gnats. I noticed while running that there were telephone poles in regular succession. I was able to do some speed work by sprinting from one pole to the next and taking the next pole at a relaxed pace. They certainly were not 200 yards apart and therefore did not fit with my current interval plan, but it was something I could do without being at the track.

Today while running along a beach in Ciudad del Carmen, México I could have done the same thing with trash cans. It was amazing to see the number of trash cans they have right along a particular area where they obviously host quite a number of events. There was a section where the trash cans could not have been more than 20 yards apart for close to a half mile long.