I am training for a 50k race in October (the John Holmes Trail Run ). It will be my first Ultramarathon. I decided to go up in distance rather than taking another shot at the marathon. Perhaps I had some lingering doubts after my first and only marathon experience. In any case, after working hard all summer and with a lot of speedwork under my belt, I felt that it was time to ease back on pace for a while. Besides, Ultra training should give me a nice endurance base should I decide to train for another marathon.

Sunday I capped off my second 70 mile week with a 26 mile trail run at San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. I ran on the hiking trails, the horse trails, and the mountain bike trails. There is a surprising (for Florida) amount of elevation and terrain on some of the more remote trails.

Dailymile gives me a nice weekly brag sheet:



I think my training is going well. I hit a low spot last week after slogging through a few 4 am workday runs. The weekend trail runs have kept me going, though. I am amazed by how much more quickly I can bounce back from a 20-mile training run than a few months ago. I have finished 5 runs of at least 21 miles since July, with many runs over 10 miles during that time.

Now I plan to scale back for a week in order to recover. Then I am going to try to get in one more long day (5 hours and close to 30 miles?) before the 50k race.

My goal? Finish the race and hopefully still be running during the last few miles.

Excuse the site layout, etc. I am in the progress of upgrading to Geeklog 2.0 and will be playing with themes and functionality.

The Melon Run 3 mile race is held in Gainesville, FL on the 4th of July. I am a bit delinquent posting a race report. There isn't much to say, it was HOT and HUMID as usual. I handled the heat much better than last year, mostly by mental preparation and by doing some heat training in the weeks leading up to the race.

This year I ran 17:41 and won 1st in my age group.

The Melon Run always draws a big crowd of the local talented runners.


Photo by Race Pace Photos.


Photo by Race Pace Photos.

I am still road racing in my Inov-8 Bare-X Lite 150 shoes.

Awards included an actual watermelon!



Race results available here: http://www.floridatrackclub.org/race-...-run-2013/

I've been musing about getting a faster computer ever since Steam for Linux was released. As mentioned previously, TF2 (Team Fortress 2) was playable on my old computer... but I had to run at a reduced resolution. At about the same time, I was doing some intensive graphics editing in GIMP and Inkscape and for the first time in a while (ever?) I had a productivity (rather than gaming) need for a faster processor. I also edit video from time to time which always wants more compute power.

I last blogged about my desktop computer in 2010. Some of that has not changed (mouse, keyboard, computer case, ...), but I finished upgrading motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, and graphics card and WOW this machine is BLAZING FAST! The SATA3 SSD helps my system boot to the login screen in under 10 seconds! I'm pleased that I got so much use out of those old components but now I will hand them down to another Linux user.

The nVidia GTX650 Ti BOOST graphics card that I bought from NewEgg was new enough that the standard drivers available for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS did not support it. After some struggle, the driver package nvidia-319 from "Edgers" PPA did the trick and I have amazing graphics for gaming. Here are some screenshots of Linux gaming, all running natively...

Portal:



Dungeon Defenders:



Serious Sam 3 BFE:




These screenshots of the nVidia control panel (nvidia-settings) show some details of the graphics card and drivers:

It's time again for the Alachua County Friends of the Library Spring book sale.

I have not been reading nearly as much lately, mostly due to my running habit, but I do still like to go to the book sale just to browse. I only bought a few books this year as I still have a few on my shelf from last year.

This time I noticed that they had dozens and dozens of old Science Fiction magazines. At first I skipped over them, but then I saw the publication dates included the 1970s.

I thought "Hey, I should try to find one from the year I was born." I ended up going through all of them, finding two magazines from the month and year I was born. There were a bunch of magazines I hadn't even heard of, so I tried to get at least one of each. Here's a picture of my treasures:



edit: The photo includes magazines dated from the 1950s - 1980s.

There's still time left to find a bargain. Tomorrow (Wednesday) is 10 cent day!

Saturday was perfect for racing at the Lloyd Clarke Sports Trail of Payne 10k, held at Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. It was a brisk morning, with temps in the 40s at race start and a nice fog rising off Lake Wauburg.



Before the race, I felt good and ready to run.



On your marks, GO!