On Christmas Day I ran from Old Man's Cave to Cedar Falls to Ash Cave along the Buckeye Trail in the Hocking Hills. It was a cold day (32 degrees), with lots of icicles hanging from the rock formations. The trail section between Old Man's Cave and Cedar Falls is technical with rocks, roots, and stone stairways to navigate. I was glad to have my Altra Superior trail running shoes. The section between Cedar Falls and Ash Cave is not technical but has some serious hills leading up to the fire tower. The fire tower is open for climbing, and after reaching the top there is a very nice 360 degree view of the surrounding Hocking Hills region.

I didn't carry a GPS so I'm not exactly sure how far I ran, but the round trip is somewhere between 10 and 12 miles. The Buckeye Trail is well-marked here, just "Follow the Blue Blazes...".

Pictures from the Old Man's Cave section:





Pictures from the Cedar Falls section:

I'm a little behind on posting my last few race reports. I ran the Tom Walker Memorial Half Marathon on December 1, 2012, just a few weeks before attempting my first marathon.

This race was a Florida Track Club event and this year the FTC provided pace groups. The two ladies leading the 1:30 pace group (Meredith DeFranco and Stephanie McGrail) are some of my training buddies, so my plan was to stick with the pace group for the first half of the race and then push it in to see how far under 1:30 I could get.

Here is the 1:30 pace group early in the race:


Photo by Florida Track Club

I followed my race plan and came through with a nice personal best!

Coming through the finish line:

Thanks to an ancient http://PHP.net comment (http://www.php.net/manual/en/features....php#26201) and a Joomla! forum post (http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php...3#p1318363), I was able to figure out how to run a Joomla php script from the command line and
specify query parameters *without* having to modify any of the PHP code to parse the arguments / options. Most of the examples on the net suggest modifying the PHP script to parse the argv options. I also did not have luck using environment variables to specify QUERY_STRING.

For example, take a Joomla! article with a URL something like this:

mysite/index.php?option=com_content&id=10

Many people running Joomla have SEO-friendly URLs enabled, but the above is the simple (simplest?) query string to get to a particular article using the article id.

Now we can test a particular article at this site from the command line.

Change directory to the appropriate document root and run php as a command-line program:

$ php index.php '&option=com_content&id=10'

The magic sauce is that the first character of the query argument list is just another ampersand rather than the traditional question mark.

Why would I want to do this at all? As one of the Linux system administrators responsible for helping our University customers with their hosted web sites, I sometimes have to debug unusual issues. Having system administrators modify production customer code is not standard practice and unfortunately some of our web hosting customers are not saavy enough to debug unusual issues themselves. One of the tools in our sysadmin toolbox is strace. If I can get the script to repeat the behavior in the command line while strace is running I can often determine the cause of the issue. Running the script in the cli is frequently much easier than trying to catch the issue with strace on a live production site, in shared web infrastructure, etc. We can see file accesses failing, network requests to external servers that don't allow the php page to render until after the remote content is fetched, slow performance from a mysql database... all via the output of strace.

I recently ran the Gainesville Fisher House Veterans Day 5k race. I was pleased to participate in this event that was well-organized and for a good cause.

Martin McCrory's Race Pace Photos took pictures of the event and as always they did an awesome job. I have purchased a number of digital images from him through SmugMug in the past and he has always been responsive and open to feedback. Here is a link to the Race Pace Photos gallery for this event:
http://www.racepacephotos.com/Events/...r-House-5k

The Florida Track Club also has a photo site at SmugMug with pictures of the event:
http://florida-track-club.smugmug.com...r-House-5K

It was a beautiful morning for a race, with blue skies and a huge American flag.


Photo copyright Race Pace Photos

I have a tendency to go out too fast so my race plan focused mainly on keeping the first mile under control. I executed the plan well, hitting my first mile split at 5:55. The second mile was 5:55.55 (all fives!). Even though the first two miles were spot-on, my third mile just didn't come together (third mile split was 6:14).

This is a photo of me approaching the last turn before the finish, probably less than 100 meters to go:


Photo copyright Race Pace Photos

Here I am making the last turn towards the finish line:

I was recently accused of being an Altramaniac by one of the sales folks at a local running store. When I look at my collection of Altra Zero Drop shoes, it is kind of hard to argue. I do own at least one pair of every model of Altra Zero Drop footwear currently available (I'm trying to get this blog post out the door before the Altra Superior lightweight trail shoe hits the shelves). Just call me "the man with many left shoes"...


Pictured (from left to right): Lone Peak, Provision, Samson, Adam, Instinct 1.5, Instinct black, Instinct original

In case you hadn't heard, Altra is a young shoe company that makes Zero Drop footwear. Zero Drop means there is no difference between the height of the shoe sole at the heel and the height of the shoe sole under the forefoot. This is also known as having a low (or no) ramp angle since the footbed lies flat rather than sloping downward towards the front of the shoe.

The true Altramaniacs make silly videos and show their love of Zero Drop footwear by dressing up in costume.

While I am not (yet) an extreme Altra nut like these two guys:



I am definitely a fan of Altra Zero Drop footwear.

I was going through some old photos tonight and found this picture of a poor dead mermaid that we saw washed up on the rocks in Puerto Rico. The photo was taken near the Castillo San Felipe del Morro in Old San Juan.



Here is a cropped / zoomed version of the picture: