Archive for August 21st, 2008

Usually I don’t post if it’s a rest day, but with a few little annoyances and pleasures, thought I’d post anyway.

On the annoying end, the fan went out in my computer’s power supply.  24 tiny screws later, I figured out what I needed and ordered another one.  Could have just ordered a new power supply, but I’m cheap and repairing stuff has its joys.  Meanwhile, I’m just hoping the power supply doesn’t overheat till it comes.  On top of that, one of my hard drives is making occasional high-pitched chirping sounds, which usually means hard drive death is imminent, so I have to deal with getting a new one.  Yawn.

On happy computer news, not sure what everyone’s using as far as browsers, but I’m a huge Firefox proponent.  I finally switched to version 3, which I highly recommened everyone do, it’s speedier than ever and has a lot of lovely features.  If you download it, go to this page for the speed tweaks that’ll have that baby absolutely flying.

If despite this, you still have a seemingly sluggish Firefox (I was about to tear my hair out when I first installed it and was going to revert to ver.2), disable your add-ons.  Once I did that, it was zoomy as all get-out.  I think imacros was the culprit (great add-on, btw).

Tomorrow I have a 12-miler.  I was going to visit Smile Hill, but since Sunday will be a 22-miler that I plan to take to the trail (harder run), I think I’ll just use my usual route with some Lemon Hill loops thrown in.  That’s  a short, steepish hill area closer to home and was a pain in the Philly Marathoners’ asses last year, as it was a new addition to the race.  It’s commonly used around here for hill repeats, but I want to stay fresh for Sunday, so just a few easy loops should do.

Looking ahead with PDR in the near future, I’ve been going over the schedule pretty intensely wondering how best to deal with that Half as it sits in the plan.  It lands on a 20-miler week, which isn’t so bad, I’ll make that up surrounding it, but I figure it’s best to switch weeks 3 and 4 completely since week 4 accounted for a tune-up race, thus the VO2max is only 600s falling on a Tuesday, as opposed to 1200s on a Wednesday.

The only pain about this is, he schedules the tune-up on Saturday and 17 on Sunday.  Since my Half is on Sunday, and I’m racing it full-out, I might just consider the Half a catch-all for both runs and gulp! skip what would have been the 8K tuneup (at least mileage-wise, since the Half totally counts as a tuneup).

Steamtown is the ultimate goal, but PDR has goal qualities for me, too, so it’ll be a balancing act. Not to mention I really want to do my last 20 the weekend after PDR where a 16 is scheduled, but I’ll have to see how I feel after the race to know if that’s a good idea or not.

Ah, the unknown.  Either a fun way to pass the time imagining multi-scenarios, or a great reason to lay blame if things don’t turn out right.  Gotta love it!