Time to Split

This week is our traditional Lights on the Lake Stroll night.  Meet at the normal place and time (5:30 next to the rental building under the trees with the "dropcicle" lights) and then we'll split into a jogging group that will go to the far end and back and a walking group that will go to "The Rainbow Love Tunnel" and back.  The place gets really crowded, so we are starting at 5:35, with whoever has made it by then.  Run us down if you have a problem with traffic.  Once we are done with the 4.5 mile jog or less than 3 mile walk, we are meeting at Bangkok Thai Restaurant for the "Ivy Memorial Dinner" at 7 PM.  If you cannot do the park but want to do the dinner, you are welcome to do that. I've heard back from a few of you, but want to have an idea from most of you about dinner so I can warn them if our group is going to be large.

If you read up on the Lights on the Lake you can see Wednesday night you can do it again (with dogs this time) and that they are doing the special late night run through the lights on Saturday, January 4th.  The price for car usage is $10 per vehicle during the week and $15 on the weekends.  So, get your pre-sale tickets, or better yet, take advantage of these nights and see the lights by foot!

These were posted on Facebook, but here is a glimpse of the fun by TRYers from after the Jingle Bell Run.  There were a lot of festive costumes including a set of 9 reindeer and Santa all linked up in what would have been an epic (although too short as constructed) Paige's Butterfly Run centipede team.

 

 

 

 
I had not run the OCC loop course before and it was better than I expected.  There were enough twists and turns and ups and downs that it never felt repetitive even though you have to do two loops.  It was definitely a course where you want to run the tangents though.  I saw a lot of people wasting steps be following the lane they were in instead of picking the shortest path through the twists and turns.

Thanks to Mrs. Fitzpatrick for putting this link out there this week: Better Runners Are ... Inflexible?  Then a link within that story talks about improving your running economy by not stretching.  I knew I was doing something right!  OK, if you read the fine print, you should still stretch some as a runner, and none of us are good enough runners to sacrifice our health in other areas of our life but it is a fascinating couple articles that go into the fact that muscle fiber elasticity associated with inflexibility can be a virtue.

Finally, a fun look at flexibility - this showed up on my Facebook newsfeed and I looked into a bit and it was done for real and only needed one take for the JCVD part.  He picked a heck of a time to split:


You can read more about it here, which led me to this video with an even crazier (that is - more likely to end up dead) stunt which they called the Ballerina Stunt (which seems poorly named - it's a high wire stunt).



Some pretty amazing stuff between those two "commercials".  I think I'll go out and buy a Volvo truck now.