Still More Snow Pictures

Some more snow pictures from today and I’ve been messing around with a couple of different things in Photoshop try to create different effects.

 

 

 

 

 

More Snow Photos

I wondered around town yesterday and took some pictures of the snow.

 

 

DC Blizzard 2010

Over night we got a ton of snow and it was still coming down in the morning.

  

But that didn’t stop me from going out for a run.

Usually when I run in the snow I use my sunglasses but they get flakes stuck on them and it get foggy, and when I try to run without glasses the snow flakes get in my eyes so I decided to try out ski goggles today.

I put on the  yaktrax and off I went.

The side walks hadn’t been touched so I ran down the middle of the road in tire tracks that some people had left. There weren’t many cars out, I saw a total of two, so I didn’t any issues with being in the road.

The goggles worked well for keeping the snow out my eyes and stayed clear. But unlike my sunglasses they don’t have my vision prescription in them so I had a few instances of stumbling over an uneven snow pile or a hidden speed bump.

I did get a lot of funny looks from people out shoveling driveways. I wonder if it was the goggles or the fact I was out running?

 

The run itself was a lot of fun. I didn’t have any issues with footing and I was able to maintain a decent pace. In fact, the first mile of my run was really easy for the pace I was at, but that was due to running with the wind at my back. When I turned around I was greeted with a strong breeze and snow blowing in my face.  Visibility did get a little low when I was running on roads by an open field but because really wasn’t very cold out the weather wasn’t too bad at all.

So there you have it, my run during the blizzard of 2010.

I finished the day with an hour and forty five minutes on the bike trainer inside.

Snow Photos

Here are some quick photos I took this afternoon of the snow.

I think these last three are the best of the bunch.

 

For this last one I turned everything except the owl to black and white but for some reason I can’t get Photoshop to let me turn the snow on the owl’s nose and base to black and white so those little pieces snow stand out a little too much. But other then that I like how this one turned out. 

Snowzilla

In case you didn’t know it’s suppose to snow this weekend. A lot of snow.

It’s not suppose to start sticking to the ground and get bad until later in the day today but that didn’t stop the drive home from work today being totally ridiculous.

I had some extra hours at work banked from last week so my plan was to work a half day and then go meet some people  for lunch in Chantilly. I was coming from near College Park MD and didn’t make it there because the traffic was so absurd.

When I was in school at UMD I had some friends from PA, NY, and other parts of the north east that would always make fun of how bad DC is at handling snow and I would always try to defend DC, but after today I will no longer do that.

I was driving along I-495 when it started to flurry a bit and it was like people decided to close their eyes and drive. The snow wasn’t sticking and the roads weren’t slick but I saw 5 people decide to pull off to the shoulder and stop driving. And lots of people struggling with the concept of staying in the single lane while they are driving.

Heading towards the American legion bridge into VA I saw a surprisingly large number of police cars sitting near the median, like one every 1/2 mile and I would eventually find out why.

I got across the bridge and was heading towards Tyson’s Corner when traffic started to slow down and it started snowing heavier so I decided to bail out of lunch and head home. Since white’s ferry is closed I would have to go by Tyson’s on the way home and I figured it would be a mess later in the day.

When I turned around and started heading back to MD I was greeted with a rude surprise as traffic came to a complete standstill about a mile south of the American legion bridge. I found the traffic station and they said traffic across the Legion Bridge was ‘temporarily stopped” which I found odd. I was sitting there for about 20 minutes and then traffic started moving again. I headed home and didn’t see an accident or police off to the shoulder.

What happened is that all the police cars I saw earlier stopped traffic for those twenty minutes so that salt trucks could go by and treat the roads between I495 and 270, I guess someone thought people wouldn’t be able to drive on the road while the salt trucks were working?

I think I’m going to venture outside tomorrow to take some cool snow pictures so keep an eye out for those.

      

10 Mile Training Run

1 mile warmup, 10 miles @ Marathon Pace (7:25 min/mile), 1 mile cooldown.

That was my running workout for Saturday and I hit it exactly right.

I wanted to run with as few interruptions from street lights as crossings as possible so I went to Leesburg to run on the W&OD trail.

 

After the warm-up I was able to get the 10 miles done in just over an hour and fourteen minutes for a 7:25 minutes per mile pace which was exactly the pace I was shooting for with this workout. It’s not a race but this would be have been a 10 mile personal best for me, I ran a 1:15:10 last spring.

 

But the part about this workout that I am most excited about is that once I got into a grove it didn’t feel like a hard effort and I still had a lot life let in my legs towards the end, all of this was at the end of a 35 mile running week too.

This feeling is backed up by the heart rate data from the workout. The fact that my heart rate stays level the entire time of the intervals (spike down was a bathroom stop) means that I wasn’t running out of endurance and that I could hold that pace much longer. If I was getting tired one of two things would have happened, I would have slowed down, or my heart rate would have drifted upwards as I had to work harder to maintain the same pace. The fact that neither one of those happened is a good thing.

So things keeping moving the right direction for having a good half marathon this spring.

Ga Tech Alumni Dinner

I went the winter dinner for the DC Chapter of the Georgia Tech alumni association last week to hear P.W. Singer talk about his most recent book.

I read the book over Christmas break and enjoyed it. It talks about the rise of robotics and how it has impacted war. He spends the second half of the book talking these changes might create ethical and legal issues. He writes by using a lot stories and pop culture references so it is a good read especially if you aren’t familiar with the topic. He makes it easy to visualize and understand what he is talking about. 

For his talk at dinner he did something similar presentation to his TED talk which is a very good summary of the key ideas in the book and he tells some of the stories as well. The book is 400 pages long so if you don’t have the time for that check out the video, it’s about 15 minutes. He was also on the Daily Show last year.

After the talk he stuck around to answer some questions from the group and I got my book signed.

Happy MLK day

I had a great time with my day off work for MLK day. The weather was perfect for spending some time outside. It actually got warmer then this, I think it made it into the mid 50’s this afternoon.

I started off the day by filling up with some Pumpkin Pancakes from Mimi’s cafe that were very good.

Next was a trip to Cunningham Falls State Park. The park is in Thurmont and right next to Camp David were the President goes for weekends away from DC. And as the name implies the main attraction is a waterfall.

It involved a half mile trial from the parking to the base of the falls.

I started out with some pictures from the viewing area but it was kind of crowed and not very good for pictures. So I wandered around the rocks and found some good spots to take pictures of the falls and .

 

 

 

But I decided to do some hiking and I climbed my way to the top of the falls. I saw some deer on the way up who seemed confused that someone would be climbing up. Can you find them in the picture below?

By climbing I got to see a whole section of falls that wasn’t visible from below.

I was the only one up there, it was like I had my own private forest.

I started to my way back down and it was a lot more treacherous then way up. A combination of rocks, slick moss, and ice made footing a big issue.

One section on the way down involved me sliding down an 8-10 foot rock that was too slick and steep to walk down.

This should give you a sense of the size of the first section of the falls. Looking down from my spot near the top:

Looking up:

I actually climbed a fair bit higher then these guys are and I went up and around the left side of this picture.

I had a really good time exploring the area around the falls and getting to take pictures with my new camera toy. I haven’t had a chance to edit any of the photos so after I do that they should be visible in flickr album off the right of the page.

I also took a quick trip to Sugarloaf to take pictures. But this time of year things are really blah and not that interesting.

 

 

I finished the day with some workouts. I started with my second bike ride in 3 days. It’s that time of year to get back to biking.

I’m happy my bike power hasn’t fallen off too much in the last couple months. I took off the last half of November and all of December from biking just to focus on running so It’s good to see things have completely fallen apart on the bike.

After the bike I went out for a run and it was so warm I was able to run in a pair of shorts! I wanted to do a trail run today so I headed to the greenway tail but forgot that it rained all day yesterday and this trail was basically flooded.

I decided to try the C&O canal instead and it worked out much better.

I was right across the river from what I think is the Landsdowne Golf course.

I was better for running but as you can see by the shoes post run it was still a muddy mess.

   

So overall it was a very productive MLK day.

MCRRC Shooting star 4 miler

I had another Montgomery County Road Runners club race this morning at Sligo Creek Middle School.

And they don’t mess around when it comes to expectations as clearly stated by the sign.

 

I didn’t run this race last year but I believe they said the course changed this year. It was two loops with an extra little out and back on the second loop.

The start was a little bit odd because everyone started at the middle school parking lot

And then ran around the cars back out to the street. I guess they needed this extra little loop to make the course 4 miles.

Once out of the parking lot it was downhill and then a little off road section to get onto a trail

The course went on the trail for about a half mile and then back uphill through some neighborhoods and around the backside of the middle school to start the second lap.

My race went well. I ran with the same group most of the time and pushed my pace during the uphill sections. I had enough energy left that after getting over the final hill I made a really hard push on the downhill and ran away from the group I was with to finish in 27:20 for a 6:50 min/mile pace.

After finishing I walked over the rec center to get some coffee and a bagel.

And earlier this afternoon I got on my bike for the first time in a while to stretch out my legs and get ready for adding some swimming and biking workouts starting next week.

Cracking the big 4 0

I cracked 40 miles running in a week for the first time today. This is the biggest running week I’ve ever done and my body doesn’t feel that beat up. The week consisted of a 10 miler on Tuesday, 8 miles on Saturday with 40 minutes at tempo pace, and lots of easy runs the rest of the week. My run training has been going really well and I’m on track for meeting my half marathon goal in March.