So the half-marathon was a bust. I got up to about 9 miles in training but I think I increased my mileage too quickly. I was doing great with the program at the start, but after having missed a few weeks of training because of a house move (stupid mistake, never stop the training!) I think I jumped back into it too hard. That combined with the toxic problem just knocked me out for good.

To make up for letting mom beat me I decided to up the ante to a full marathon by the next Dallas Whiterock marathon.

I don’t think I could ever do these:

1. Mark Covert has run at least one mile every day since July 23, 1968
2. Xu Zhenjun Ran a Marathon in 3:43… backwards.
3. Three men ran 4000 miles across the Sahara desert in 111 days
4. 7 Days, 7 Continents, 7 Marathons
5. Finish Badwater
6. Dean Karnazes running 350 Miles Non-Stop
7. Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie Marathon World Record Time of 2 hours, 4 minutes, and 26 seconds
8. “Running God” Yiannis Kouros, who ran 303.506 km or 188 miles in 24 hours

I’ve been struggling with a problem in iTunes where after deleting files and moving my iTunes library from computer to computer it eventually ends up having several missing songs. The songs still show up in the library but they are missing from the disk. When you go to play the song you get an annoying grey exclamation point and iTunes asks if you’d like to find the song. Eventually I stumbled accross this fix in a comment response to an iTunes rant blog:

In the meantime, here’s the solution I came up with for the multiple dead track issue:

I’m not sure how I missed this. It’s been out since 2005 after all.

I present to you the Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman:

This comic strip is based on the ground-breaking PC game Half-Life 2, by Valve software, and is created with the brilliant Garry’s Mod tool, which allows users to enter the game and basically play God by spawning and manipulating physical objects, posing character models, creating special effects, and taking pictures.

The wife and I went down to cheer mom & dad on and she shot some pictures. We missed dad by just a few minutes (he ran faster than he thought he would) but caught mom right when we expected her. Unfortunately we didn’t get pictures of her though. Something about trying to switch from pictures to video and it not working or something.

So instead we only have pictures of random runners and I was reprimanded for not uploading any.

Well then. We can’t have that so here they are:

So a couple days ago Google released StreetView for Dallas. I remembered seeing what I thought was the car while jogging in September based on reports from San Francisco which was one of the first cities to be mapped out by Google maps. After a couple hours of clicking my way down some of my training routes and sure enough… there I am on Google maps.

Click for bigger version.

Cool.

The real car looked just like the pictures from people in San Francisco.

It came, it went. I didn’t go.

Mom and Dad both finished and kicked some butt. I’m jealous.

Kind of. I’m still doing better but I think it’s too early to say my knee is better. I think the long run on Sunday aggravated it.

A while ago my company did two things:

1. They acquired some of those elecontric sensor flush systems for the toilets. I’m not sure how much this actually saves since people can just push the little button to manually flush as often as they want and also people still can make a horrible mess, automatic or not.

2. They finally got some of those disposable paper liners for the toilet.

Yay! So after resting some I got in a good run on Friday (3.5 miles) and another good run on Sunday (5 miles).

I’m going to head out again today… but the real question is: Am I ready for the actual 13 mile run next Sunday?

Unfortunately I don’t think so. Missing a whole month of good training took it’s toll and I was really sore on Monday after the long run.