The snow is not quite as dramatic as the forecasts, but there is indeed snow out there. I was just out on the snowshoes for the first time this year, out around by the local river. The snow is not so deep that snowshoes are essential, but walking is indeed easier with them, and a step in a deeper soft spot is a lot less dramatic. It's pretty out there in the winter. The river isn't frozen over yet, so the sky is reflected in the rippling water.

The official report is plenty of snow at Lapham Peak, the park with the lighted ski loop, so I'll probably be headed there after work tomorrow. The snow should still be there, tomorrow's high temperature is forecast to be -15°C. That sort of thing is always fun. I've put the insulated tubing on the Camelbak.

My employer is trying to encourage us to be healthy. They have a web site we can use to track our health and fitness. It is hilarious.

First thing is, it's very American and I can't figure out a way to change the units to the standard ones, and I'm not about to convert everything to miles or pounds to use a web site I had no interest in using in the first place.

It has a calender to enter your "aerobic miles." But there is no field for what you were doing. Apparently they figured you'd just add your running and cycling (and speed skating, skiing, etc.) together into "miles." What's the difference anyway? And there is no field for time or speed, which is pretty much the entire point of using software to track your exercise. And no fields for the heart rate data. It's just so comically useless, I can't imagine what the designers were thinking.

It's like some giant stereotype in action. Some manager on his fourth heart attack got a bunch of painfully stereotypical never-exercise computer programmers and locked them in a dark basement room with a few cases of Jolt cola and told them to write a fitness tracker.

I'm going to stick with my spreadsheets.

I'm sure many of you will appreciate this:

( Frazz )

Well, I'm very curious how tired and achy I'll feel tomorrow. For now I actually feel fine.

I've been itching to try a fast 5km run, so that's what I did this morning. It really didn't feel like it was going well, my heart rate stayed fairly low, I was breathing very hard, and it didn't seem as fast as I'd hoped. In the end, though, my time (25:39) was just seconds longer than my personal best. On the one hand, I was aiming for a new personal best, on the other, essentially equaling my best time on a morning when things were just not going right isn't so bad. Also, I was pretty much totally wiped out when I set that best, today, not so much.

After a few hours and some food, I figured I'd go to the Pettit Center. I'm going to be running a half marathon there at the end of January, so I really ought to do some running on the track that encircles the ice. 11 laps is 4.95km, and 27:30 at a easy-feeling pace is not bad at all for me. I'll have to try some different clothing to find something just right for the temperature in there. The rubber running surface is nice even if it is worn-looking, and just as skaters get to watch the runners, runners get to watch the skaters, so while it's endless loops around the oval there is at least something to see.

Then after a short break I went out on the 400 meter oval ice for a half hour. Now I remember why I like that so much. A long-track speed skating oval is, after all, meant for speed. It's huge, there is lots of space to go fast. Nothing like coming around one of the turns and seeing 100 meters of mostly clear ice ahead. I can never resist applying all available power. I mostly spent the time getting used to skating again after the summer away from it. A few hundred meters backwards (love having the space for easy backward skating), some slow skating, some bursts of speed, 500 meters at maximum effort, and general fun.

The last two mornings have been clear, sunny (in the sun-just-rising sense), and around -2°C. There's a sliver of moon high in the sky, the sun peeking above the trees shines on everything, and the grass is frosted white with frost, making a weird pastel green-white color. It makes for a very pretty bike ride into work. The ride home is in the dark, of course, and though the air is warmer with no sun and the cold sky, it doesn't feel any warmer.

( two photos )

OK, in the vein of some things I've been saying:

( Frazz )

I have just read what is an excellent paper overall (so I won't name it or the authors, since I'm making fun of a tiny part of it here), and noticed in the methods section their list of the settings used for collision-induced dissociation in their mass spectrometer. The list includes the notation "atmospheric gases." Atmospheric gases? Perhaps that's more commonly known as "air." There is nothing wrong with using air as your collision gas, I've done so in related work and it's as good as anything else you might use, not to mention inexpensive. No, what I have a problem with is using sixteen letters in two words to say "air."

While I always say you can't really see anything from inside a car, this isn't literally true. One thing I saw on the way home from OVFF was a man walking along the side of the highway with his can of gasoline, headed back toward his car. It was a Volkswagen, actually. A classic beetle, in his case. Not that this brings back any memories or anything. ("No problem....") He passed me later, driving at high speed.

The temperature in Milwaukee hit 22°C today, which is highly unusual for this time of year to say the least. I went downtown by bicycle, ate at the Public Market, rode around by the lake shore, and generally had a nice time out in the warm sun. There were a lot of people out. As summer turns to fall and fall wears on into the season of cold and dark, the number of people I see out on the way to work drops from the summertime six or eight cyclists and even more joggers and walkers to maybe one other cyclist and a die-hard runner or two. Everyone has been hiding indoors for some time now, and they all came out at once when the one day of record warmth came. It was just fun to see other people out again.

Last month I was jokingly wondering how much running you can do while still claiming that running is not your sport and you're really not that into it.

Anyway, I've signed up for a formal, organized, official half-marathon, to be held at the end of January in Milwaukee. INDOORS! Because in Milwaukee in January, you probably don't want to schedule that for outdoors. It's held at the running track that surrounds the indoor 400-meter long track speed skating oval at the ice center.

I have actually run 21.1km once now, on my own. It took me 2:05. The thing about doing some sort of sport like this on your own is that it's not obvious how you compare to others. Now, the easiest number of all to look up is the world record. It takes just seconds with google. The record times for full marathons, twice that distance, are just under that time. Well! The record for the half marathon is 58:33. I'm not sure I can run that fast at all, even for 100 meters. It's like the pro cyclists averaging speeds in a time trial that I cannot reach at all without a steep hill to descend.

World records aside, as far as I can tell a two hour half marathon is, if not a great time, basically reasonable for a beginner.

For all that I used to claim to not like running, I have come to like it. Some sort of competitive urge sets in to try to set better times or take on longer distances. For me it's much more of a pure athletic thing than the bicycling. Mostly I'm going somewhere on the bicycle, and want to save some energy for whatever I'm going to do when I get there, and for the trip back. Out in the real world, you go pretty fast on a bicycle and thus quickly encounter intersections, traffic lights, stop signs, and all that. A fast trip home from work is partly a matter of luck at the intersections. Lots of red lights and the trip will be slower. Bicycling involves a lot of thinking about traffic and how to navigate through it safely.

Running is slower, especially for slow runners like me, and it's easy enough to zig-zag around the neighborhood for 21km without ever having to stop anywhere. It's a pure athletic event, no navigation, no traffic safety, no destination at all. Just the Garmin on my wrist with the speed, distance, time, and heart rate data.

The thing about admitting that I like running is that I'll have to stop making fun of those crazy runners and their crazy sport. No more claiming that it's crazy to run twenty kilometers when a sensible person would get on a bicycle and ride one hundred-twenty kilometers, or would ski 20 km at a temperature of -20°C. Anyway, somehow, when written down like that, my old favorite activities don't really sound any less crazy than the running.