Just a little note to say I’m currently away for a short break and will return Nov 30, 2009. I managed to catch-up to the latest round of comments/questions I received over the past 10 days or so but I will not be responding to new ones until I return.
Have fun with those forms!
What a perfect morning for a half marathon race! My goal was 1:30:00 but the weather was perfect, I felt really good and God answered my prayers with an official time, and personal best, of 1:28:59 (that’s a 4:14 kilometer pace for 21.1km) and a chip time of 1:28:54 (obviously I was very well positioned being only 5 seconds behind the start line). The rest of my stats are available online at Sportstats. (For comparison, my fastest time on record, so far, had been 1:36:54 at the Ottawa Race Weekend 2009 Half Marathon last May.)
This being only the second annual Army Run, the race was still small in comparison with the Ottawa Race Weekend. There were just under half the number of participants at a total of 4270 runners which made it much more enjoyable for me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s awesome to see and be with all those runners but bigger crowds pose more logistical challenges than smaller ones.
This race was special, being a way for Canadian civilians to support their troops and for the troops to say “thanks” for the support. A cannon was fired instead of the usual blow horn for the start of the race, a group of injured soldiers (one single-leg amputee hoping to break a 1:20:00 record, one double-leg amputee and others in race wheelchairs) participated, military bands were playing at various locations throughout the course and a group of soldiers were just beyond the finish line handing-out the dog tag-style finisher medals. Pretty cool!
A military band at the start line.
My sprint to the finish line — you can see I’m just about to cross over and the official time clock reads 1:28:58.
Few! Those 16 weeks of hard training really paid off!!! 🙂
I have been hard at training for a half marathon since I last ran in the Ottawa Race Weekend (OK, I took a week off after that race, but don’t tell anyone!) I had been targeting the Fall Colours run since it’s a good course, not too crowded, the temperature is usually just perfect (starts-out around 9C/48F and warms-up to around 14C/57F) and the leafs have turned to gorgeous colours on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend.
This year, however, I’ll be attending the Adobe MAX 2009 Conference the week prior to that race so I decided to set my sights on the second annual Army Run. It would be dangerous to plan to run right after a business trip since I don’t know what shape I’ll be in when I return.
My goal is still to break 1 hour 30 minutes for my half marathon time. I usually don’t attempt to raise funds for the races I do but the Army Run is in support of injured soldiers and military families from the Canadian Army which I think deserves our support. If you would like to sponsor me for this event to help raise some funds (which go directly to the organizations, not myself), here’s the link:
Hello everyone!
I’m back from my month-long vacation and will be attempting to catch-up on your comments over the next couple of weeks.
I had a great time staying local, doing lots of (bicycle) riding (about 180km/week) and running (1 short run plus 1 long run, averaging 24km, per week), walking, soaking-in the sunshine and watching some movies.
I also had time to hone my volunteer web design/development skills while enhancing the Capital BrassWorks* website and my InDesign/Photoshop/Illustrator skills while helping my wife, Rebecca Lewis*, with some ad designs for her new real estate business in Ottawa.
* Note that Adobe Systems Inc. is not in any way affiliated with these organizations/companies.
Well, I’m not out for coffee for an entire month but I will be away on vacation starting today, returning July 6, 2009. I will not be posting during that time period but I will try my best to keep-up with comments though it will not be my first priority…
In the mean time, if you feel like a coffee break, you should check-out the new Adobe LiveCycle Café: It’s a really cool AIR app by Adobe that integrates all sorts of LiveCycle-related resources into one convenient dashboard. It even lets you tag content for offline use and store personal notes, online or offline.
You get a really nice News page:
A view of all LiveCycle-related blogs (showing mine in the image below):
(There’s even a tab that lets you switch between “Post Summary” and “Site” to see the article via the feed or the actual web page.)
Another really nice feature is the ability to search in one location across all Adobe LiveCycle resources. For instance, I searched for “assignNode” (a function to create data nodes in the Data DOM) and actually got a hit right in a LiveCycle reference document — very handy!
Enjoy the coffee!
