Learning to make a video

About a month ago I got to do a 24 hour mountain bike race with some buds. It was the 24 Hours of Halloween. We did it last year and had a good time so figured we might as well do it again. It's a good time. There was a pro road rider (Rashaan Bahati - coming in for an exchange at about 2:45) there turning some fast laps. I managed to turn one lap faster than him. I'll take that with me to my grave. (The fact that he did more laps and they were on average much faster is...well...just a small detail.)

Looking forward to a 12 hour race in Temecula in January. Might try to do a better video. It seems sometimes the picture was clear, but other times it wasn't. Might need to fool with some settings. I'm open to tips and tricks if they are out there.

Ragnar Relay Tennessee 2010

My first Ragnar Relay is in the books. A few weekends ago my team, Southern Discomfort, and we finished the 195.5 mile course in 30:29:21. I think we signed up for a 10:00 plus pace. Well we blew that out of the water coming in with a average team pace of 9:21 min/mile. Nice work team!

In the first van, and running in this order were Me, Angela, Ashley, Tristan, Zach, and Heidi. In the second van was Daryl, Amy, Matt, Barry, Erin, and Amber.

I can say that was pretty prepared for the running part of it. What was really tough was running on little to no sleep. Right before my last and final leg I was able to squeeze in about an hour or two of sleep because they let us into the gym of an elementary school. It was a hard floor, but at least I could stretch out. And I was so stressed that I'd oversleep and miss my exchange with Amber that I had a hard time sleeping. It was also very cold that weekend. I was running my last leg at about 4 am and it was 26 degrees outside. As long as I have good gloves I'm usually ok. My face went numb, but that was fine, I could still breathe.

It must not have been that bad though, I've already signed up for another one in January down in Florida. This should be a little easier than Tennessee because there are no hills and it will be in the 50s. My legs are a lot longer, but smooth terrain will make then very doable.

Down hill both ways

I did my third half-marathon (maybe 4th, not too sure) a couple of weekends ago. It was the Silver Comet Half that happens every Halloween weekend. I did it back in 2004, three years after the race was born. Back then I posted a 2:04 time. This year I did it 1 hour and 44 min. I attribute this to the flatness of the course. I'm doing the Tennessee Ragnar this weekend with fellow PRS contributor Zach, so I've been training. I usually run at work because I work 30 miles from my house and it is just easier to run during lunch for me. Well in Norcross, Ga (most of Ga that is) there are a lot of hills. So that is what I've become familiar with. While I was running the Half on the Silver Comet I honestly felt like I was going down hill the whole time. It was great. There is no way I could have pulled off a sub-8 min pace on a hillier course. Think I'll try to do this one every year.

Check back later for details on my first Ragnar.

Also thinking about doing Florida Keys Ragnar....