Swift Fish Net

I had been looking forward to getting my iPad on April 3 ever since I put in my order a few weeks ago. In the shipment notification from Apple, the delivery date was even printed as “Delivers by Apr 03 ,2010″. Unfortunately, Saturday April 3rd has come and gone, but my iPad never showed up. At the moment, I don’t know who screwed up. I do know that not only did UPS fail to even attempt to deliver my iPad, but they also have the audacity to lie in their tracking info. I was at home all day waiting. There was never a knock on the door from a UPS delivery person. There was no door tag left on the door. In fact, based on the tracking for most of the day, it didn’t even look like my package ever went out for delivery. It remained at DEPARTURE SCAN since 8:15AM through approximately 9:45PM. At no point was it ever set to OUT FOR DELIVERY as typically happens when UPS is attempting to deliver something. Then, all of a sudden the status changes to Exception with the note THE RECEIVER WAS UNAVAILABLE TO SIGN ON THE 1ST DELIVERY ATTEMPT. A 2ND DELIVERY ATTEMPT WILL BE MADE / PACKAGE WILL BE DELIVERED NEXT BUSINESS DAY-NO SATURDAY GUARANTEE. So now I don’t know when I will be getting my iPad, but I certainly won’t be sitting at home waiting for it on Monday, since I have to work.

This actually wouldn’t have bothered my half as much if UPS hadn’t flat out lied in their tracking. I know perfectly well that a delivery was not attempted as I was very much available to sign every single minute of the day from before 8:00 AM through midnight, yet in the tracking they imply that it is my fault! I hope that Apple never ships anything with UPS again. I am curious to find out if others in the Rockville, MD area had the same problem.

Last year finished up on a rather promising note as far as running goes. In late August, I ran my second fastest 10 Mile at Annapolis. Then a couple of weeks later I ran my third best half marathon at the Parks Half-Marathon. I got through my thirteenth marathon with my third Marine Corps race in the time range I was aiming for between 3:15:00 and 3:20:00. I struggled with the last 5K which became rather painful with my legs cramping up, but it was a huge improvement over last year’s run on the same course under very similar conditions. It was my second best ever marathon time. It took me longer than I would have liked to recover, so I decided to train for a shorter Spring race rather than doing another marathon training program. The goal is the Pike’s Peek 10K with MCRRC SDP. I’ve never trained specifically for a 10K. I have mostly concentrated on longer races like half marathons and marathons since 1996. Not having to do 20 mile training runs is a welcome break and will allow me to get in some short races during the training. Just to get used to some faster racing after the marathon, I ran 10 mi., 6km XC, 8km, and 5 mi. races starting in late November through December. The first three were not really all out efforts. The 5 mile ended up being a personal best, but when considering that it was only my second ever 5 mile race it perhaps is not saying much. Even so, I was quite happy with the result. It is the best I’ve felt with racing since early 2005.

So, now it is into February after going mostly easy with the training through January after donating blood and then getting rather sick for about four days in the first week of 2010. Despite that, I have gotten in the first 4 track workouts with SDP, although the last couple I had to do on my own on Thursdays. It is difficult to get to the track on time after work. The snow this weekend makes my usual running routes mostly impassable, but I did get in over 16 miles on Friday: 5 mi. in the AM and 11.5 mi. around sunset during the first couple of hours of the developing nor’easter. Yesterday, I ended up just going on a walk (if you can call it that) in the snow.

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Yesterday’s long run brings me to the halfway point of my current Marine Corps Marathon training with MCRRC XMP. Two twenty milers are now completed, but there are three still to go. The next few weeks should be interesting as I’ve got a couple of races coming up with the Annapolis 10 Mile next weekend, and then the Parks Half-Marathon a couple of weeks later. It has been a long time since I have raced, so I am rather curious to find out what times my current training will result in. The vast majority of the training seems to have been long slow distance with hills and a few marathon pace runs.

For some reason, every time I do a software update of OS X 10.5 Leopard on my dual G5, I get a kernel panic that freezes the system after the restart and usually before I even log back in. The freeze occurs quite randomly at some inconsistent time interval after booting the computer. The updates only affect my G5, as my MacBook Pro has never had this happen. While I have no idea about why it works, there is actually a fix for the problem, which so far has worked every time to get me back to a stable system at least until the next software update.

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I wake up this morning and take a quick glance at my clock. It is blank. It is still dark. In the bathroom now, there is a flash like lightning. The light doesn’t turn on. I grab my flashlight and wander through the apartment. Something is wrong. I shine my light around. In one spot, everything stays dark. I sense something about to attack!

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Yesterday, I ran my twelfth marathon in the same place as my first ( in 1996) with the Marine Corps Marathon. While I didn’t have a particularly good race, it was good to get back to the marathon distance after a three year break from marathoning. I had hoped to run somewhere between 3:30-3:40 but ended up over 3:50. I started out right on target at a little over 8 minute per mile pace through the first 10K, but for some inexplicable reason, without intending to speed up at all, I was suddenly cruising along at around 7:30 pace. I knew I wasn’t currently trained to run at that pace for an entire marathon, and my lack of concentration early really cost me later on. I was just about out of energy by 18 miles with almost a third of the way to go, so I shuffled along the rest of the way with occasional walking breaks.

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I frequently run on the Rock Creek trail in Maryland for training. This morning was no exception on yet another warm and humid summer AM. This morning I passed another pedestrian going in the opposite direction when he said,

“There’s a deer right there!”

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I spent a few days in Florida around Memorial Day. It was really great to get away and just relax for a few days! A selection of activities is as follows…

• Tampa Bay Rays Vs. Baltimore Orioles: The Rays completed a sweep with a walk-off RBI double
• Kayaking the Weedon Island canoe trail
• Geocaching on Honeymoon Island

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Most of my runs tend to be fairly repetitive. I don’t notice much of a difference between them from one day to the next, but every now and then there are special days like today that stick out. I think it is related to a number of factors with weather, energy, and state of mind all being in the optimal zone to combine for a great run.

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I don’t follow NCAA basketball at all during the regular season other than reading the occasional sports headline, so when it comes time to fill in the brackets for tournament challenge contest entries in March, my picks come down to fairly random guesses with an occasional upset thrown in. My picks tend to be biased by schools I have actually heard of or upsets that I would like to see happen when I don’t particularly like a team. In order to remove that level of bias from my picks this year, all of my entries are chosen randomly by a script I wrote with the weighting based on historical records of seed versus seed in the NCAA tournament. There is also some weighting based on the actual difference in seed value as certain match-ups don’t occur very frequently because they arise from upsets.
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