Archive for January, 2010

A gal who makes an entire video wearing a shithead wig and discussing the wiley ways of The Bear has no business running out of dessert on a Wednesday evening and eating a mammoth bowl of frosted shredded wheat as a poor substitute.  Especially if that gal goes on a tempo run the next morning without doing her, er…business, beforehand.

Backtracking, Tuesday was quite a good run – hill reps day -  so 10mi w/5 x.25mi repeats.  When I did these 3 weeks ago, I was pretty satisfied with the workout though if you remember, once home and looking at my logs, realized I’d lost quite a chunk of fitness since last Fall’s buildup.  So this Tuesday was great because it was 10sec faster per rep, had an additional rep than the last time and a lower heart rate, to boot. Plus, they were all into the wind.  A needed confidence booster.

Wednesday was an 8mi recovery, then yesterday, a not-so-hot tempo.  It was 13mi. w/4tempo and I struggled to keep the tempo miles at anything approaching a good pace, they veered from 7:20s to 7:25, which really super sucks but honestly, I was ok with it!

Having Tuesday’s good workout was like, “Ok, this was just an off day, there’s still good things going on beyond this one run.”   I rarely do morning runs in the winter anyway, so maybe I wasn’t all there, but also…the bear! My last tempo mile was crazy fighting that gnarly wooly creature off.  Thankfully, the tempo portion ended just in front of the restrooms.   I guess you need to be careful of what you talk about, or else it might come round to bite you in the ass.  Literally.

Today is a day off, but well spent.  I made a narration demo!  I love Mike and Deb, the studio owners.  They’re a blast to hang with and she makes a mean chicken casserole.  Here are the fruits of our labor.  (warning: it’s not at all thrilling but since I’m such a media whore these days, may as well post it).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Other than that, I’ve become enamored with Facebook this week. Last night I made a Fan Page for Gifted Runner and it’s already got 50 fans.  Half are my friends while the other half are people I don’t even know and they’re actually going to the website, so this is a very cool development. Didn’t realize just how useful it could be, so if you have a site, I highly recommend making a Page for it. And once you get 25 Fans, you can go to www.facebook.com/username to get a pretty URL for it, so I’ve got www.facebook.com/giftedrunner. Niiice.

There’s very little on the page right now but one thing I posted is a promise of new designs by February 9th. How’s that for a publicly self-imposed kick in the ass? Anyway, if you’d like to become a Fan of Gifted Runner, please do. And while I’m in beggar mode, if you want to add me to your friend pile, I’m game: www.facebook.com/flo.karp (you can get a nice URL for your personal page, too).

And with that, I’m going to enjoy the rest of this frigid day off by doing absolutely nothing and not eating shredded wheat because I have 10 w/8MP tomorrow. Just wish it wasn’t going to be 14 degrees. Winter bites.

Time for a video with some actual value.  This one is a demonstration and comparison of hydration belts and handhelds. I thought it might be worthwhile for those folks that haven’t yet dealt with the different methods for carrying water/sports drinks, especially the newbies, but even for the experienced souls who might not have considered all the options.

As always, the production values suck (I need to buy a proper light) and I did it in one take because it was too long to want to do again, lol, so please excuse any Alzheimers moments.

For the moment, I’m linking it directly to YouTube because I need to start getting some YouTube love in their rankings, so if you guys and gals want to help out, please rate the video or even comment there – that’d be super cool.   Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this one!

Handhelds and Hydration Belts – A demonstration and Comparison

Before you read this, if you haven’t seen the survey in the previous post, please do me a huge favor and take it, it’s just 3 questions.  Thanks, kids!  Now on to today’s post…

Having finally entered the world of social media (albeit kicking and screaming) I gotta say, it’s pretty darn fun.  Twitter took me a while to understand why I was even on there and I can finally say that now “I get it.”  It’s for:

1. Giving a quickie of how you feel, just for the hell of it.
2. Announcing blog or website updates.  I’m following Coolrunning and Active.com among others and they’re basically touting posts or articles every 1/2 hour or so.  It’s cool though, click what sounds interesting, ignore the rest.  I won’t lie, This is actually the main reason I’m on there, to get people to this blog and The Gifted Runner.  No shame in that as long as you post other stuff, too, you don’t want to be a totally selfish tweeter (though tons of folks and companies are).
3. Sharing interesting web finds. People post quotes, articles or funny pictures.
4. Sharing your daily run report.  Some people, like my pal Progman, link to their running logs, which is pretty cool.

What’s appealing to me is that tweets can only be 140 characters at most.  Such a limiting framework makes it easy to jump in and you don’t have to think of what to write or how best to say it like you do when writing full paragraphs.  Also, you don’t have to be involved with real conversations.  Occasionally there’ll be a message directed towards you or you’ll reply specifically to someone’s tweet, but for the most part, it’s a one-way deal.  Very easy with no emotional investment…just my speed.

If you want to try it, here are a couple tips:

To get followers

I have 47 followers right now, which is very modest, but considering I’ve only been on it 10 days, not bad.  Followers are the people who follow your tweets.  It’s one thing to spout whatever’s on your mind, but the fun comes in knowing you’re being read.  You can follow people anytime but to have people follow you requires some action.

One way to do it is to go to a guru with your interest, like a famous runner or coach, click the followers link in their profile and start following the first couple pages of people that come up.  Some will follow you back immediately.  I only did it once on my first day so it’s pretty effective.

Another great way to find people with your interest is to do a search on “running” or “marathon”, then follow whoever looks interesting (I admit to following a few guys just because they’re cute).

Saved Searches

Speaking of searches, another way to get more followers is by including a search tag in your tweet which means way more people will see it than just your followers.  For example, yesterday I wrote  Just got back from my long #run. 18.34mi @ 8:47 pace, half road, half trails. Tomorrow’s recovery run will be heaven. #running #marathon

You can click those links to see that they take you to searches on those particular words. So all you have to do it is put the # before whatever word to make it a search link.  If you’re writing about some great thing you made for dinner and want other cooks to see it, write “yum, just made a fabulous stew from cows eyeballs #recipes”  Like that.

Make A Cool Profile Background

I just did this yesterday. If you’ve got a graphics program, you can make something and upload it, otherwise, there are lots of free online Twitter backgrounds you can get and some that even let you create your own online.  Here’s a google search if you’re interested.  Having your own background can help advertise your site or blog and/or make people more likely to want to follow you.

So that’s a little taste of my experience so far.  The cool thing is I don’t spend hardly any time on it but am getting about 5 new followers each day, seems that posting about my run using the #running tag gets people interested.

Back to the blog…

Tobey asked how to get those avatars by your name when you comment here or on other blogs.  I posted the link in my reply comment but it’s worth reposting here so everyone can get one.  It’s called a gravatar and you go to http://en.gravatar.com/ to get your very own.  It’s simple, free and fun because no matter whose blog you’re posting on, you can adorn your fabulous comments with the identifying picture of your choice.

And that’s it for my Monday blab.  Have some great runs, all!

Welcome to the new look of GIM.  I was bored of the old design and figured a nicer, larger blog was in order.  I’ve finally got it set up for nested replies so I don’t have to make one big ole reply to you guys and bold your names, now I (or anyone) can reply to individual posts.

And, because I’ve gone plug-in crazy (WordPress really does rock with all the things you can do with it), I’ve added a checkbox below the comment box so if anyone replies to your comment, you can choose to get an email alerting you to that.  Works really nicely.  If anyone reading here has a WordPress blog and you see something you’d like on yours, just ask me and I’ll tell you what plug-in I use to achieve it.

Now, on to running… Been a nice week on that score.  On Thursday, one mile into my run, I found a crisp $20 bill on the ground.  Felt like I was stealing by taking it but it was me or the next guy, so ME!  :-)  The run itself was pretty good, 3mi tempo (they won’t be as short from here on in) inside a 13 miler, the HR was lower than the previous times so that’s a beautiful thing.

Today I had 9 w/7MP and was fully expecting to be slower than the standard 7:30s I’d consistently done for Philly.  I already have the green light to go slower since breaking 3:20 will take 7:37s, but I was feeling really good, the weather was 42 so all I had on was my UA mock, tights, headband and light gloves.  Something about that outfit makes me feel speedy and sexy (maybe because it’s just one fitted layer between me and winter) so when all was said and done, I averaged 7:29s for the MP miles, 7:43 avg for the total run.

And now for the survey.  I was wondering what level you consider yourself at as a runner and if you’re a forum reader.  So if you wouldn’t mind filling it out, I’d be majorly grateful.  Also, please feel free to expand on it in the comments, too. I’d be interested in what type of info in general you guys seek out (i.e. running magazines (online or paper), books, blogs galore or if you like to just…run!)

I bought this shithead wig (that’s what it was called in the catalog) about 25 years ago for Halloween but never wore it.  It’s one of my pride and joys and now that I have a captive audience, what better way to show it off than with an quasi-educational video about poop and pee?  Enjoy.

I did my first proper speed session in a while (5 x .5mi w/ 2min rec) and did alright!  Nothing to write home about because I am at home already – that’s where the computer lives – but enough to put a smile on my face.

The intervals went 3:20, 3:18, 3:20, 3:19, 3:21 (avg pace 6:39mi).  They’re about 5 seconds off where I was in September, but hey…last January I did these at 7:04 pace, so no complaints.

One thing I’m looking forward to after this marathon business is over: shorter speed and tempo workouts – and I don’t mean the quality portion.  Because I want to keep the mileage at a certain level and endurance is part of the marathon game, I’m compelled to have that extra padding around the interval session to get at least 9 miles, so today I did 3.5 warmup and 2.75 cooldown for 9.54 miles total.  Ditto the tempos, they’re sitting within 13 and 14 milers.  It’ll be so nice to just do 1.5 for warmup and cooldown.

In non-running stuff, I finished a major site overhaul on Fish Pie and added some new designs, so today I have to work on getting a newsletter out for that.  Here’s one of the new ones:

Also, looks like the narration/medical voiceover demo might not be as simple as I’d hoped. I thought I’d just compile bits of past jobs, same as a commercial demo, but since it’s largely pharmaceutical stuff (with all the legal crap surrounding it) I might not be able to do that.  I’m waiting to hear from the studio to see if I have to rerecord something new or will have to spend some time sifting for generic bits.  Yawn.

And that’s it for now.  Have beautiful runs, my lovelies.