Archive for July, 2007

The new place

July 31, 2007 at 12:28 am · Filed under Personal

Cath and I moved into our new place this Saturday. It was a big move, but we hired movers and they were really good. Amusingly, the head moving guy is a big video game fanatic, saw some of my video game boxes, and started talking to me about games. For the rest of the move, he kept discussing games with me. I think he is more into video games than I am, and that’s saying a lot! I think we are going to try to play online sometime. So, in the moving process, I made a new friend. :)

I’m really happy with our new place. I love having a yard, I love owning our own place. Our kitchen is wonderful. We still have several weeks worth of unpacking to do, but we’ve got enough stuff out to get by day-to-day. Unpacking is stressful because you have to find places for everything, but it will eventually get done.

My current conundrum is what to do about the Internet. We need wired access in both the study (for my computer) and the living room (for the Xbox). Right now, the cable modem is in the study feeding a wireless router, but the signal is too weak in the living room for a wireless bridge (do we have metal in the walls?). I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out the best way to do this, but I think I’m going to have to run a cable all the way across the apartment. If I do it right, hopefully it won’t look bad.

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Tennis

July 20, 2007 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Tennis

The two sports I do most are running and tennis. Tennis is a holdover from my teen years, when I took a lot of tennis lessons from ages 13-18. I pretty much stopped playing in college, then picked it up again a few years ago. I really enjoy it, even moreso than running, but it’s an expensive hobby and it’s hard to find places to play and people to play with. But I do love it.

I’ve been taking a tennis class at Harvard for the past few weeks, and I’m having a great time. Each time I improve a bit, which I guess comes with just starting to play again. Last night, my serve was just killer. I haven’t really tried to serve big so far this year, but last night we were practicing our serves, and I decided to go for it. To my surprise, a lot of them were going in. When we started playing matches, I kept going with a big, flat first serve and a slice for my second serve. My results were mixed; there were some games that we lost because of double faults, but there were other games where I didn’t have to hit ground strokes at all because my serve was so overpowering. I also learned that a big slice serve can be as effective as a big flat serve, because you can place it better.

I’d really like to join a competitive league or a ladder or something so I can play matches. I know there is an MIT tennis ladder, and there is also a for-pay league called Tennis Northeast. One of these days I will get up the initiative to actually sign up for one of these.

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Race report: Minuteman Classic 5-Miler

July 5, 2007 at 12:09 am · Filed under Running

Earlier this week, Cath told me she wanted to run a race on the 4th of July. She came across the Minuteman Classic in Concord and decided this was the one to do. I didn’t really want to do it because I didn’t feel prepared, but on the other hand I’ve been running a lot lately and doing some tempo runs. So this morning we set out for Concord with our friend Arvin.

The race was pretty small, maybe 3-400 people. But the crowd looked fast, with many people who looked like experienced runners. The course was very pretty, running through downtown Concord. It was mostly flat, with a few small hills.

I went in shooting for under 40:00. I ran the Zoom Through the Zoo 4-miler in Memphis in 31:55, so with my current fitness I thought I could do better than that. I hoped to pace myself better than I had in Memphis. My race plan was to go out at a comfortably hard place (close to the 8:15s I’ve been doing as tempo runs) and start to push after the first mile or two.

In reality, I ended up running my first mile pretty fast. My watch said 7:15, but the marker was definitely short. I’d say I really was on a 7:40ish pace. My second mile was listed as 8:04 (7:39 if we assume I ran a 7:40 first mile). Third mile, 7:42, fourth, 8:15, fifth 7:44. Overall finish time: 38:59. That’s a 7:48/mile average, the best pace I’ve run in any race. So I was very happy with my performance.

The McMillan pace calculator predicts that an equivalent 5k performance of 23:31, which is significantly better than my current PR of 24:38. It’s not anywhere near my summer goal of 22:00, but I think I can at least get close to that with more training. It doesn’t seem so out of reach now.

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been doing a tempo run of 3 miles at 8:15ish pace. I think they really helped my performance in this race, giving me a better sense of what it feels like to run near race pace and also knowing what kind of pace I can hang onto for race distances. Up until now, I’ve done pretty much all my training at an easy 9:15-9:30 pace, but I’m starting to believe that speedwork is the best way to increase my race performance.

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