Hills, Hills, Hills

Terry is out of town, and he left me in charge.  Well, it was really just to write the blog post, and it will be short!

With the Boilermaker under two weeks away, it is a great time to do a little hill work to get the body used to the interesting course in Utica.  We will do an easy group warmup of 1.5 miles and then tackle that hill.  It is good to try for your 5k pace each time up the hill and run easy on the downhill to recover.  You should base the number you do on your fitness level, but ask me for a recommendation tomorrow if you are unsure.

I will be sending out an invite for the post-Boilermaker outing on Facebook.  Keep an eye out for it :)

Not Quite a Carbon Copy (CC)

I wanted to pass along a little bit of news from the Liverpool Relay for Life event that happened on Friday into Saturday.  The event raised over $65,000 and the LM team that we are a part of raised over $13,000 at last count.  Pretty amazing totals!  Our running team played a much different role as we ended up running about a third of it.  We did a lot more walking and a lot more interacting with the main part of the event, but our non-stop running was missed.  Someone got my attention in the middle of the night and referred me to someone else who had been approached by someone else and had specifically asked "What happened to the Lockheed runners this year?".  So, people on other teams noticed.  It's up to us if we decide to care about that or not?  Think about that next spring when it's time to sign up and decide if you would like to INSPIRE others again.




Today is one of the two days between mid-March and late November where there is no TRY.  Enjoy the novelty of it as the CC takes over for a night.

Last year, some writer did such a fine job writing up advice for the Syracuse Corporate Challenge, that I am just going to point you to it and advise you to read through it all.

A quick takeaway for people that don't dare click on links anymore...come to Liverpool.  Run or walk or cheer.  Mingle in the company tents afterwards and eat your dinner.  Then walk over to the Retreat for one round of inter-company socialization there.  Oh, and don't melt.

I'm all a-twitter

Only one more week until the Corporate Challenge.  To finish up our buildup, here is the suggested workout I posted a couple weeks back:
June 12th: 5 mile total run with 2 one mile intervals, followed by one 1/2 mile interval.  Mile warm-up, 1 on, 1/2 off, 1 on, 1/2 off, 1/2 on, leaving a 1/2 mile cooldown.  Meaning 2 1/2 miles of exertion.

Once again, the weather forecast is threatening.  I'll be there, regardless.  Choose for yourself if you want to brave the rain.  

This is a topic I've wanted to bring up for a while.  How many of you use Twitter?  My informal polls of group members have led me to believe that only a few of you do.  Which surprises me.  Especially since almost everyone has a smart phone now and access to any of several Twitter apps to make it really easy to use.  Twitter has become my go-to source for catching up on sports news and news news and some humor sites.  It helps me more easily keep tabs on my precious Phillies, but also helps me know what is going on in the Syracuse area.  From updates about downtown festivals, to what the county parks are up to, to the Syracuse newspaper articles of the day.

I get the impression that some people still don't understand what twitter is all about, so I'll do my quick sales pitch on why it could be worth your while:

Twitter allows users to do the equivalent of a short facebook-like status updates (limited to 140 characters) but most "tweets" have a hyperlink to the related story or video or a photo in them to make that amount of characters more useful.  In order to use twitter, you never need to tweet anything out yourself, in fact most regular people I know do not.  But by making an account you can choose who to follow (basically a "like" of a business page on facebook) and then when someone you follow tweets something, it shows up on your timeline (same as the facebook news feed).  Facebook and Twitter overlap a lot -- both have stolen from each other, certainly, so you can get a lot of the same information in both places and I feel bad for businesses that have to put all their information out there in all these different ways...not to mention Tumblr and a couple other similar things that I haven't bothered to figure out yet myself.

Back to my point - as you build up the list of who you follow, you build up the list of information sources that you'll get updates from.  It's great for sports as most sports stories are now broken first via Twitter.  And many athletes themselves now have an account and put personal information and thoughts out there for the world to see (usually a disappointment, actually).  Some people I know follow entertainment celebrities, and I assume it's the same thing with them -- it can be better not to realize that famous people are just like us...putting out meaningless updates that no one would actually care about if they weren't famous.

I have two accounts I keep up, one is @terrycuse (the accounts always have the "at" sign in front of them), which is my personal account.  I use that as my daily go-to list of what I want to read.  Before Twitter, I would 'surf the web' and go to my sports sites and news sites and humor sites...but now I just follow all those sites Twitter feeds and at the end of the day - I just pull up my twitter timeline, skim back to where I left off -- and then scroll through the day seeing all the various updates that all the sites did and click on the links on the ones I care about.  It's been a major time saver for me, allows me to keep my facebook likes to a minimum, and once in a while I chime in myself and it's always interesting when someone more famous then you replies or retweets something you've sent their way.  (Just don't be those annoying people who try to get a celebrity to retweet them on their birthdays...that's weak.  Really weak.)

My TRY account is @thereisatry and I use that to follow a bunch of running related sources.  I don't check that on a daily basis, but have turned to that a few times already this year to get some useful links to put in my weekly blog updates.  Including a coupe I'll add as a reward at the end for people that have read this far!

So, please consider trying Twitter...and let me know if you find it worthwhile.

Some twitter gold for you:

Yet another article explaining why you need to vary your running workouts and some more detailed reasons on why speed work is so important.

And a quick hitter from Women's Running on how to fuel and re-fuel on your running days, with an emphasis on how good low-fat chocolate milk is for a recovery drink.  (It's no wonder that cows are such good distance runners!)

Potent Potables

A bit of a mish-mash for this week's update:

1) Our workout was mentioned in last weeks plan -- four half mile repeats as we build towards the Corporate Challenge.

2) Reminder that we have access some to some free and discounted tickets to the Syracuse Chiefs baseball game after our run (on June 5th).  Sounds like we have 3 definites and few maybes.  We'll get the final tally as we meet up in front of the stadium and then split the ticket costs between those of us who attend.  (We have either 3 or 5 free tickets to share among the group...then the rest we'll pay $8 for...so it's going to be very cheap after we split it...and you won't have to feel guilty if you decide to leave after a few innings.)

3) Team Beef needs our sign ups soon.  So, who wants to sign up and run with a free Team Beef (tech) jersey in the Boilermaker?  You get a free gift and also get an option to attend a post race party at "Seymour's" in Westmoreland.  (Which will be on your way back to Syracuse after the BM post race party.)  The runner and immediate family is invited.  They will serve beef (of course) with sides and cake.  And it's all free.  I wonder how good the Team Beef jersey will look while wearing a cow hat?  Hmmm?

4) Team RUNder Construction was a worthy successor to the Centipediatricians at Paige's Butterfly Run.  Aaron and Bob can hold their heads high, though, as this win will go on the trophy with the slowest of the three victories.  Most of you can see the photos on facebook, so I'm not going to re-post them here.  But keep an eye out there as the event photos become available later this week...there should be plenty of opportunities to soak in the glow from the vests.  And the double glow from Duerr and I taking our bromance to the next level.  The most important thing is that everyone involved had a great time again and added a lot of joy to others around us at the event.  I hope that one of these years TRY can put another centipede team into the race and double the fun.  (I'm not offering to organize it, but am encouraging someone to step up that thinks it looks like a good time.  It is.  And is worth the time and effort it takes to make it happen.)

We made a new friend during the 3k walk portion of the event!  And nothing against the current and past members of TRY - no doubt we've had some hotties - I'm looking at you Brian Bastian -- but our new addition instantly became our cutest member ever (it didn't hurt that she went out of her way to kiss up to me either).  Here is proof of "Briana's" cuteness from last years photos that were used on this years website:

Finally, there is a great video from the event that shows off RUNder Construction in all it's glory.  You want to make sure to pay attention to the look that Duerr gives me at the 15 second mark.  Yo, Duerr, eyes up here!  Enjoy.