Hello. I'm Forrest. Forrest Gump.

(This really isn't all that interesting.)

I might not be running across the country like Mr. Gump but I've been running.

This morning the odometer on my account on our treadmill turned over 2000 miles.


Without leaving the house I've run from here to Birmingham, Alabama. It's taken me a little less than three years. I apparently average around 5.4 MPH.

I think the calories burned (the 48K) must go back to zero every so often otherwise that's only 24 calories per mile.

(I told you that this wasn't very interesting.)

Here's Lance!

A recent water bill had a note enclosed telling us that the intersection just to the north of our house was going to be closed today for an hour because the Amgen Tour of California was going to be passing through. Lance Armstrong was going to be in it!

Since it was just a two minute walk to the intersection we decided that we'd watch. It turned out to be a fairly popular spot to watch the racers. We watched from a little way up the hill so we had a view of the racers' approach and turn up Bear Valley Parkway. We just saw the mass of bikers so we couldn't pick out Lance from the rest of the main pack.

There's not much to see but I made a movie of the event. After all, how many times does a major bike race pass through your neighborhood?




Here's the line of cars leaving our little street (and some parked ones).

And here are the cars parked in front of our house. Notice the pickup parked beyond our mailbox.
The driver of the pickup is the person on the phone in front of the SUV on the left. He's asking somebody for help getting unstuck from the mud. He decided that the spot where our water pipes were replaced would be a great place to park. Unfortunately, it wasn't. He sank into the mud.

He got out of the mud. We have new depressions for water to fill when it rains again.


Here's a Google Map of the part of the race we saw.  We watched from the red pointer and the bikes travelled along the blue line (in the direction of the arrows).

View Larger Map

Sexism

Let's dig a little deeper into my storehouse of grudges.

When I was going through elementary school we had an annual citywide track meet where the fastest, or otherwise most athletic, kids would represent their classrooms in various track and field events. With any luck our classroom's entrants would bring home a ribbon.

One year, the fifth grade, I think, I got to run in the 50 yard dash. I think I was eliminated in the first heat. But I was the fastest boy in my classroom in short distance running! I had no expectation that I'd get a ribbon.

Boys and girls didn't compete against each other. Except for a few events, they don't compete against each other in the Olympics. But I had a little problem with that notion back then.

There was a boys-only event and a girls-only event. The boys had the Football Throw. Big whoop! Throwing footballs was something I had never considered being a worthwhile use of my time.

The girls got to compete in the Jump Rope. The competition was simply who could skip the rope the greatest number of times in something like 30 seconds.

I was the champion rope jumper in my fifth grade classroom. I wasn't a girl so I couldn't compete in that event of the track meet.

No fair!

I'm sore to this day.

I really wasn't a champion rope jumper. I could turn my own rope and jump very fast. But I never could do the Double Dutch. I never figured out how to get started. I would always snag one of the ropes.

I really wanted to jump Double Dutch. That is what really is gnawing at me after all these years.

Let's do the timewarp again

Last year I was having terrible pain in my right shoulder when I reached behind my back or tried to scratch my left shoulder. After a couple of months of having to rub my back against a tree when it itched I finally saw the doctor. He sent me to a physical therapist to deal with my shoulder impingement. My treatment was to do exercises to strengthen my back muscles to realign the bones in my shoulder. I got to string my Thera-Band bands around a post and pull my arms and shoulders back. After a short time I had gotten a lot of my range of motion back and could put on my belt without agony. I kept hitting plateaus and wouldn't feel that I was making any progress for long stretches (but I did keep making progress).

Late last year I thought that maybe I wanted to do some new aerobic exercise along with my treadmill. They say that rowers give you a great workout. And they work the back muscles. So we got a new piece of exercise equipment. We got a WaterRower.
So now in the mornings I jog for a while then row.

I guess because I'm using smaller muscles with the rower (and those muscles are not all that accustomed to being worked), the ten minutes on the rower feel about ten times longer than the twenty minutes on the treadmill. Time sure does drag along. (But it does seem to be getting a bit faster.)

Sonicare Toothbrush
Speaking of time standing still, there are times I brush my teeth before going to bed and it takes forever for those two minutes to finish. According to the toothbrush's manufacturer the brush gives me 31,000 strokes per minute. Occasionally when I just want to get in bed I feel each and every one of those 62,000 strokes. Those two minutes are agonizing.

Wanna get high?

I got high at lunch today! I set out with my new DeLorme Earthmate GPS PN-20 (their web site seems to be broken right now) and climbed the hill near work. The little GPS doo-dad recorded my every move. Here's a picture of my journey.Work is at the bottom of the trip and up the hill is toward the top. The graph at the bottom shows my altitude vs. distance. From my low spot to the top of the hill is about 500 feet (so I got a little high!). I was puffing for a while.

From a spot near the top I took this picture:
The foreground was burnt in the October wildfires and the buildings in the center of the picture is where I work. (Remember, you can see larger versions of the pictures by clicking on them.)

While I was at the top I chatted with someone who was walking his dog. A friend of his is the forest ranger who was in charge of the controlled burn that turned into the Cerro Grande fire. What a small world, huh? His house was down the hill from here and didn't burn.