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!)