Primordial Ooze

In a month or so, I’ll be running in the JP Morgan/Chase Corporate Challenge race. It’s a short 3.5 mile road race. Before I do it I’d like to make sure that I won’t embarass myself and collapse in Central Park.

I’m always inspired by my friend Martin who not only ran the Buffalo Marathon, but the gruelling Pikes Peak marathon to boot. One guy at work also ran a marathon (I think the Chicago Marathon) and someone at my Tae Kwon Do school ran the Long Island marathon… a few of them.

I’m not saying that I’m trying to prepare for a bloody marathon, but I’d like to at least FINISH the Corporate Challenge.

I went and started running around town in order to get prepared. I wanted to know how far I was running in the 40–50 minute jaunts I was taking. So, I noted a few addresses and a few street names and I was able to plot my route without too much trouble. I used Google Earth to tell me the Longitude and Latitude coordinates of my “waypoints” and the Google Maps API to plot it all. The results are here.

Currently I’m only running 3.4 miles. I’m sure I could do more as I’m really not that tired when I get back home. The reason I’ve been limiting my runs to 40–50 minutes is mainly because I’m kind of afraid to go further… worried that I’ll poop out on the way back (I do NOT want to WALK back) plus, I’m a bit impatient too. I either want to get to work (in my morning runs) or I want to get back to my kids (in my weekend runs). As the running gets easier, I hope I can either extend my running time or simply run faster.

Maybe I’ll lose a few pounds in the process. I’m 179lbs now and my “normal” weight is like 190. I’m only 5'5'' so this is kind of high. Still, I’ve been making good progress.