Thursday 021915

Doping is estimated to be occurring at anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3 elite athletes.

Scored a 112/82 BP today in my work place “biometric screening.”  This will mark me as pre-hypertensive in the “Vitality’ program (side note, that is a program that has roots out of South Africa and has ties to J. Dugas).  I should get additional lab results in a few days.

I love the sport but the analysis this guy does on masters competition is a whole another level above what I got.

It is Girl Scout cookie selling season again.  Apparently some of my co-workers found my post on this topic from a couple of years ago.  They have been appropriately kind to reforward me any of the emails that get spammed to our company bulletin board about whatever parent is selling these cookies out of their cube.  Apparently that post is quite humorous to them and is something they call a rant.  I thought it was rather tame and hardly a rant at all (although there have been rants on this blog).  And in an appropriate stroke of karma, these cookies are actually being sold directly in front of my work spot. 

Distance runner beats world’s best athlete in an arm wrestling contest.  Well sort of.

So I guess I have jogged with someone who has officially received a doping ban.

So was the XC course slower this year compared to last year?  Short answer: the data sez probably not.  I compared the results of the 72 common runners that ran in 14 versus 15.  Straight up, the finish time average was about 29 seconds slower in 15 compared to 14.  But, I then modified the average calculation to only consider those that ran within a minute of their time last year.  There is a lot of things that can get a guy’s results to  vary year over year outside of the course.  They could be more fit or less fit, have a great or bad race in one year or the other.  And they all get older.  One guy in the 80 year old division ran six minutes faster.  With that, the course comes up 3 seconds slower.  With that, I’d have to say the course considerations were a non factor.

Afternoon – again, press for time so I pressed the button to get what I could in the time I had.  13.2, tempo-ing it with a bio break between the Ketner Loop and Johnson Loop.  Probably one of the better tempos I have actually had in a couple of years …