On that trail

This weekend gave some indications that my training is definitely on track. On Saturday I ran a 5k in 18:18, which is faster than I've run since high school! Sure the course was downhil, A LOT, but it was great to know the legs still had the ability to go fast. Incidentally, in my little world, sub-6:00 miles for any race qualifies as fast, sub-7:00 min miles qualifies as pretty fast, and up to 8:30 is moving pretty good. Oh, for the other side anything between 5 and 6 min/mile is smoking fast, with anything sub-5:00 qualifying as DAMN! That's not DAMN fast, that's just DAMN!! These qualifications change given distance but I think they hold true for anything from 1 mile up to a 10k, I'd probably add 30s for a half-marathon and I think I'd probably add only 1-minute for females at all distances. For the marathon I'd go with Boston's qualifying standard indicating fast. I'm only newly being introduced to ultras and aren't quite sure what fast would be because courses vary so much. Based on my limited experience, it sounds like 20-hr/100-miles would mean fast. Aside from the St. George marathon, the real test for me will be in late September when we do a local 5k cross-country course and I'll have been spending a couple weeks tapering. We also just found a half-marathon that is almost exactly the same conditions as St. George. It'll be nice to know where I stand on breaking 3 hrs. If this last weekends results were any indication and Yasso 800s hold true I should be golden.

Over the last couple weeks I've been working on coding up Darcy's law in Java. It seemed like a pretty great place to start since it's simple and provides a way for me to learn lots of little things about software development. Once I get some of these basics down I thought I'd code up as many elements of the hydrologic cycle I can think of. This gives me the double bonus of teaching me Java and refreshing myself on all the hydrology I've forgot over the years. As part of this I'll code up some GIS, statistics and maybe even some chemistry with the idea that at some point (teams of experienced programmers do this kind of thing over years) I'll have a real model I can use. I also plan to spend a lot of time on documentation so that anybody wanting to use the code could readily have a textbook style summary of what they're doing. My within code documentation should resemble that used by Jo Wood in his book "Java Programming for Spatial Sciences". It's a bit outdated, but it provides a great introduction into planning and organization.

Lastly I think I may restructure the blogs so that I have one for sport, one for science, and one for miscellaneous day-to-day thoughts. Something to think about.