Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Busy day

--After getting the kids on their way to school, it was 'get stuff done time'.

1. Winterize the house: Lower the storm windows, remove the air conditioner units and vacuum all the junk out of the windows while at it. The junk consists mostly of dead moths and cob webs.

2. Went for an 11.8 mile run. I flew: For the first time since mid-Summer's Yankee Homecoming race, I was able to do more than 10 miles in less than 8:00/mile. And that was a race, while this was just a work out. In keeping with the aviation theme, the course is named after a landing strip and my pace was 7:47.

3. I had a quick mango/banana shake and then off to help-out with the Bay State Marathon. My running club, the Greater Lowell Road Runners put on the race and so all the members are expected to help-out. I handed-out race packets to a pretty steady stream of runners for four hours.

As an aside: Just the other day, I had been looking at mortality data for smokers and one of the reports had an interesting way of presenting the data. It seems that the chances of getting a large number of diseases is higher in smokers and it is higher to the extent that it is equal to the rates seen in non-smokers who are 5-10 years older than the smokers. I saw the opposite effect, at least in the appearance of runners. As part of the process of handing out race packets, we would look runners up from a list. The list also gave their age. They mostly looked 5-10 years younger than what their age actually was listed as. It's like running is the opposite of smoking. I've noticed this before.

Zipped home to work on dinner with my wife. We made rice, steak, mushrooms, green beans and a dessert of freshly fried apple cider doughnuts.