Note: this is a rant.

For year, I've browsed the web with Firefox set to “Allow pages to choose their own fonts: no”. It worked everywhere very well, and I had a consistent style across pages, and I wasn't forced to see the (IMHO) very ugly Microsoft-fonts look-alikes.

That all changed until GitHub introduced their “Octicons” font, and represent icons with characters, instead of actual icons. Now I either am forced to:

• not be able to use GitHub's web interface, or
• allow all sites to use random font of the day, or
• start playing with custom style-sheets and overrides and whatnot

Grr… At least they added text labels too, so at least I get a small box with F044 and label “Admin”.

Just got bitten by this, so note to self:

• the pbuilder image might have installed iproute automatically, due to isc-dhcp-client dependency, so it's not an entirely clean build environment
• if you have a source package which generates both an arch:any and an arch:all package, make sure to test building “all” packages and only the binary one(s), via pbuilder --binary-arch; otherwise you might get surprises due to Build-Depends-Indep being pulled in by default

Yes, I'm talking about Debian bug #671981. Fun!

This year was the 10th anniversary of the Zürich marathon, so they had a new category: 10km “city run” (at least, I think it was a new category). So I went along, thinking 10k would be a nice Sunday run.

But oh, even the famed Swiss organisational skills fail some time. And when they fail, they fail hard.

First, if you have 3 events all going on at the same time (marathon, team run, city run), please, please mark the road appropriately. The finish line was marked only marathon and team run, so I didn't even knew when I finished, I only realised “well, that must have been it” when I reached the place where I gave back the transponder chip. This marking issue was on-going for the last ~500-600 metres, as I thought I was lost when running along a road marked (again) only with marathon and team run and almost exited the road to look for my actual trail. Of course, if I had remembered that the finish is common to all three categories, all would have been good, but don't ask me to remember such stuff at the end of a race.

Second, clothes storage. They had clothes storage organised nicely, in railroad freight cars, 500 people per car. This went well, except that they underestimated the number of people registering, so the last car had well over 700 bags, which created a huge bottleneck for this single car, which of course was where I also had the clothes (as I registered late). So I run for ~1 hour and then spend 30 minutes getting my clothes back.

This wouldn't have been an issue, if the weather would have been fine. But it started raining seriously 500 meters into the race, and by the time I finished I was already fully drenched, just in a t-shirt (thanks fully with long pants) and waiting in the rain for 30 minutes was… painful. I think also unhealthy, due to the abrupt switch from running to just standing in the rain. I haven't been so cold in a long while. By the time I got home my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't unzip my jacket (and I couldn't stop shaking, which is not a good sign).

So yeah, I learned a few things. Try not to use the clothes storage if you can (it was the first time I used it), especially if you can pick up the stuff they give you a day early (and I could have gone to the race directly dressed) and I hope the organisers learned to provide better conditions just in case it rains. Which in Zürich happens, well, quite often.

People were joking in the line: "1 hour running, 1 hour picking the clothes, 1 week sick". I hope I won't get sick (a hot tea after a hot bath can do wonders), but still, at least my voice will sound like after whole-night partying.

OK, rant over. What about the race? It's nice (except the very dark overcast & rain, as said), through the centre of the city; as a friend says: “Running on Bahnhofstrasse is cool”. Otherwise, 10k seem to go quite quick nowadays ☺. Having ~1,600 people all in red t-shirts was funny, especially if you're trying to look for friends. It was a very diverse crowd, you could see more varied people than in the other races (where more running-focused people seem to come); here there were all kind of people, children, teenagers, adults and so on, no per-category start or such.

As to myself, I still am bothered by some small injuries, so I can't enjoy the nice result I got: 47m26.4s, for a 4m.44s/km! Yay! Of course, the reason I run so fast was because I was cold and needed to run to heat up. Also, again a flat race. I should start getting friends with hills. And due to the fact that it was a more diverse crowd, for the first time I didn't class (in my age category) around the ~66% down the list, but around ~44% only (~13 minutes slower than the winner). Yay!

Another weekend, another running opportunity!

This was a nice, simple, fast race. The announcer was claiming (if I understood correctly) it is the fastest race around Zürich: completely flat, on an airfield (which unfortunately meant all paved road). The weather was perfect (for running), a bit cold but no problems with overheating. So I managed my fastest time ever: according to the my Garmin (which for the first time recorded a slightly longer distance than the official one), I managed to run 10.18km in 50:39, which makes it 4:58/km! For the first time, below the 5:00 mark, yay! I'll ignore the official marking which claimed 10km in 50:57, since that “ruins” my nice result, hah!

Back to earth however… let's see some stats about this race. Just to put it in context:

My current running speed is lower than the winner in the 70+ age category by a significant amount. Based on the graph shape, I would probably win at the 85+ category ☺.

Or to put it in a slightly different context, a cultural one. Back in my home country (Romania), a 70-year old person (especially male!) that is still able to move around well and to manage by himself is (most of the time) an exception. Of course there are many old men who are doing well, but in general old people are (usually) considered “deprecated” by this age. In comparison, in Switzerland, they are still active and are doing sport. And some of them, as you can see, doing it quite well.

The difference between these two cultures in this regard (sport) is huge. Doing sports (except playing football) is considered something unusual, and in my home town there's a somewhat linear relation between people's age and their weight (both are monotonically increasing). When I first came to Switzerland, I was shocked to see so many people over 50 that are fit and active. Now, every time I go back to Romania, I'm shocked to see people so many people overweight and looking more than their actual age.

I can't help but wonder what is the cause of this disregard for health or aversion to sports. Just the fact that "it's expected" for older people to be unhealthy? Is it somehow related to the difference in income/standard of life (I can't see a trivial connection)? Is it to lack of education about how to live a healthy life? Or maybe it's not a country difference, but rather the fact that I grew up in a quite small town; people in Bucharest are indeed looking more after their health than in my home town, and are therefore fitter. Who knows…

Anyway, rant over, and I'm still happy that I managed to beat my own record, thanks to a flat race and favourable weather!

Last Saturday I went to another running event: Männedörfler Waldlauf, a run through very nice woods on the eastern side of Lake Zürich.

It was a somewhat hot day (the race started at 15:20), and it was a bit more difficult than the last race, and just a tiny bit longer (11.5km); all this plus not enough training in the past two weeks resulted in me doing a worse time: 5:38/km according to my Garmin. At least, the race was my last run in March and it concluded/achieved my overall running goal for the month: 100km (was in fact ~107km). I known I have to raise this for longer races, but I'm not in a hurry—I think I need a couple of months at this level before increasing the training level.

Results aside ☺, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the place and the lively crowd—possibly because of the nice weather. The run was also nice, both through woods and through open hills; the only small downside was crossing about four times circulated roads (of course, with traffic stopped when runners were crossing it). The view from the hills east of the lake is very nice, especially as one is nearing the end of the race.

I'll have to see if at the next race I can improve my time—it should be a completely flat city run, so… I mean I can still blame the heat, right?

And in somewhat related news, Garmin's training effect index is surprisingly accurate. It "knows" when I'm not pushing myself hard enough, and instead of a 4.5-5 (out of 5) score it just gives me a meh-level 4.0 or even 3.5. Quite nifty, using one's own conscience as motivation ☺

I'm still (ever) looking for the portable, somewhat lightweight photo system but with fast AF, adequate low light capabilities system. Also, I love prime lenses.

I have a Nikon DX format camera, but none of the zoom lenses are what I want, and Nikon hasn't updated their wide primes. So I tried for a while a Fuji X100, which has much better ISO/noise results than my camera, but it focuses very badly in low light. What's the use of the low-light capability if you can't focus? So, after also fighting with the UI, I realised that the Fuji was not for me, and went back to my Nikon. And the first photo I took again with a DSLR was like “Yes, this is what I expect: shutter half-press, instant focus, confirmation beep, shutter full-press, photo taken, ready for next one”. Don't get me wrong, the Fuji X100 is a very nice camera, but it is not a DSLR; and I realised I wanted a portable DSLR, not simply a portable camera.

What I did learn though from the Fuji is how good the 23mm (35mm FX equivalent) lens is for “general”, i.e. street photography. And it was also a prime.

So after much head-scratching, I got myself a Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D lens. Yes, I know, it's the old 'D' type, the optics are the same for about 20-25 years, and it's not as sharp as the 're-issued' primes (not even close to the famous 35mm f/1.8 G DX), and it has lots of flare in direct sunlight (as common with wide-angle lenses). However… it's a lightweight (270g), small (64.5×46 mm) and quite nice lens. And to be honest, I rather like the old-style distance scale (since it has lots of numbers!), so it compensates for the lack of AF-S. The only downside of the non-AF-S is that it wouldn't work on some of the DX bodies.

As to the image quality… actually a bit better than I expected. Here is a picture I took in Zürich, granted in perfect light. JPEG, straight-from-camera, just with EXIF data removed (click on the link for the original, full-size image; note that the camera was configured for the 'medium' size instead of 'large'… you can see how careful I am when taking pictures: not):

Near Zürich Central

Settings were:

• Exposure Time: 1/500 sec
• F-Number: f/8.0
• ISO: 200
• White balance: set to "Sunny", 'A2' setting
• Focus distance: 3.55m (set by camera; I wonder why…)

I think this is quite good quality for a non-processed JPEG; and given how light the lens is, and that it can go down to f/2.8 (with more softness, though), I think this is quite good for a travel lens.

And since I have a short trip coming up sometimes soon, I'll only take this lens, to see how it goes as an all-around lens. If it doesn't perform well, I can always blame my bad technique

PS: I had to learn about the 'underlay' plugin in ikiwiki, as I didn't want to commit megabytes of basically read-only, binary data to git; it works well, so I'll be able to post more pics in the future.

Today I went to the Laufsporttag Winthertur, another 11km run. Overall it was a smaller event (about a third of participants) than the Bremgarter Reusslauf; the organisation was OK, but you could see that it was smaller-scale.

The big difference was that this was definitely not a flat course; the official course lists 150m gain in altitude, my Garmin recorded 220m (given that it has a barometric altimeter, and that the course was hard, I tend\^Wwant to believe the latter).

The course starts with 50m of flat, and then up and up until you're in the woods, at which point it's a one third flat, one third down, one third up course; by the 8th km or so, you start the final descent (back to the starting point), and you simply go down and down for a long while, until the final (about 800m) flat distance. You can see a nice graph of the elevation profile here.

I thought that since I'm not used to hills, I will simply go slower, and finish about 10 minutes later. However, I definitely underestimated the “competition effect”, and how much one can get into the spirit of the race ☺. The end effect was that by the official timer, I finished about 1m30s faster than the previous race. I was so glad that the race was over that I forgot to press 'stop' on my Garmin ☺; also, it recorded only 10.51km (with the missing 500 meters all occurring in the last 2 km, I wonder what's up with these inconsistent numbers?). The final descent was so long that I managed to do kilometres 9 and 10 (according to the Garmin) at 4:34 each, which is something I definitely can't sustain (for 2km) on flat land. Speaking of the group run, it was nice that from about the 6th km until the end I have run in the same mini-group with two other people; it was helpful to have someone to follow/help you keep the pace (even though I finished last of this mini-group, ha!).

This time I also had the heartbeat sensor, and I found out that I averaged about ~13 more bpm than in my training (flat) runs. So that's what running alongside other people does: it makes you push yourself (much) harder. On the cadence part, I was again averaging ~82 (times two), and for the last ~5 minutes I was running constantly at 83. Did I mention I like stats? ☺

One thing that surprised me on this hilly race was that most people kept about the same speed on downhill as on the flat parts; I wonder why, for me it seemed easy to go much faster (within the same heart rate). It is harder on the knees, so you have to be careful on how you set the foot down, but not that much that I would keep the same speed. Hmm…

And speaking of hilly races: one of the brochures I saw at the race was about this race: Glacier 3000 run, a 26km run with a “nice” 1,900 meters of gained altitude (starts at 1,050m and finishes at 2,950m). Basically, up, up and more up. Nice, but one would have to be quite crazy…

That's all, thanks for reading!

Thanks to Thomas' help and gentle reminder, I finally managed to upload a new version of doc-rfc.

Why is this noteworthy? It's not really, I just wanted to say: any package for which running lintian on it takes around 5 times the build time, is special ☺.

Today I had the first running race of 2012. Well, actually, it was my first race in Switzerland ever… so double first.

And, if I have to be precise, it was my first run with a shiny new Garmin 910XT; while I had it ordered for more than a month, out-of-stock and other delays converged such that I received the new toy the evening before the run. After getting it, I walked around a bit to confirm it's not DOA, read the manual, and hoped it's not too different in basic operation to my old Garmin. So a triple first.

Also, (this is the last one, I promise!) this was the first time I ran with a foot pod (pedometer), so it was the first time I got actual cadence measurements.

The run

I went to the Bremgarter Reusslauf, which is an 11km flat run held in the woods near Bremgarten, a very very nice small town. I have never before visited it (even though it's quite close to Zürich), and I was pleasantly surprised by it. I should go sometimes back and visit a bit more.

The weather was cloudy (and just a tiny bit foggy), a bit cold but not much. From this point of view, it was good running weather, but it detracted from the scenery. Otherwise, the course itself was very very enjoyable, I could have used a camera lots. At one point, in the middle of the (light, not dense) woods, the course passed beneath the arm of an excavator which was like a mechanical arch (in the middle of nature); at another point, we crossed the river, and the sight was so nice I had to stop myself from stopping and admiring the view ☺.

The course is marked as a 'flat' one, but I've read some blog posts saying that this is not entirely true, so I was prepared for 'the worst'. Actually, I found it to be surprisingly well behaved; even though the finish was near the start, it seemed to me to be 60% downhill, 30% flat and only 10% somewhat-uphill.

Garmin 910XT

I didn't quite know what to expect, upgrading from my Forerunner 205. I read the very nice review on dcrainmaker, but in practice I didn't know what to expect (review awesome, but soo detailed). The new toy seems more stylish, so I expected worse UI or behaviour. On the contrary, it worked very well; much more responsive to changes in direction/pace (my 205 used to delays tens before adjusting the pace, the 910 is very fast), and new minor features (like auto-lap) were nice (I was able to track average speed on each 1KM lap, very useful). It's a ++ on the upgrade, with the big downside that so far it doesn't seem to work under Linux ☹.

It also has a barometric altimeter, but I didn't calibrate it (explicitly); so while the absolute measurements might be off, the relative elevation changes were much more sane than with 205 (GPS is not too good at elevation changes, as far as I know).

One funny thing about the delays in getting the device: before the race, another runner asks me (note: the conversation was in German, accuracy not guaranteed):

— Is that the new Garmin?

— Yes, it is, just got it last evening.

— (showing me his identical watch) Ha! Me too, I got this only two days ago!

So yes, I think a few people were happy to get their new toy before the race.

I also have now a heartbeat sensor, but as I never used one before, I didn't want to try it the first time during a race; so I skipped on that. The foot pod on the other hand is practically ignorable, so I took that along (sometime I think I run just because there are nice running toys ☺).

As to accuracy, it was quite OK; it measured 10.86 km instead of the official 11 km, but most/all of the difference was in the first km of the run (inaccuracy while starting to run? who knows).

I'll have to see how the watch performs while cycling (uh, I didn't do that in a long while) or swimming (…I didn't do that in an even longer while), but for running it's a good upgrade from my old watch.

Results

My normal run pace is about 6min/km, which is quite slow. So I didn't expect anything of the race, except to finish it. There were lots of people participating (> 2,600 in the main 11km category).

I started slow, because I know I usually start too fast and get tired quickly. This allowed me to not feel the first, and only, significant hill, and after that it was or seemed all downhill (literally, I mean, not figuratively), so in the end I had (for me) a very good time. By the Garmin, I run 10.86 km in 59:01, to an average 5.26 min/km. By the official results, I had 11 km in 58:56, with a pace of 5.21 min/km. I have never before run 10k faster than 5:30, so I was very very happy.

As for individual laps (1 km) as recorded by the Garmin:

• first km, 6:09
• second km, 5:35
• third km, 5:42
• after that, all laps were below 5:30 (except the 8th, 5:32)
• 10th lap was 5:03
• 11th partial lap was 4:09

On the overall ranking, I ended up 362 out of 394 in my category. Hah! I'll try to remember this race simply for my own pace results, and ignore the ranking ☺. Honestly I'm not sure how people can run twice as fast… need to train more!

The foot pod gave me a cadence of 83 steps per minute (average, max 88). This was quite surprising for me, I expected to be significantly below the much talked about 90 steps per minute. But anyway, I have lots of work ahead of me to improve my running speed.

Overall, it was an excellent day, and I'm looking forward to the next races in/around Zürich. But I should be careful not to overdo-it, like I do whenever I get excited about something ☺.

I've been wanting to write a blog post about running for a while now; things like that I finally registered for a few upcoming races in and around Zürich (which I hope I planned correctly, not like last year), or that I finally managed to find a schedule that allows me to run both in good and bad weather, or other boring things like this.

However… what I want to write now about is the morning run I had today. I woke up, planning to run at work during lunch or something like that, then I looked outside: snow! For the first time in about a month or so, real, serious snow falling, and white all around.

I didn't want to miss this opportunity, so I first checked the temperature: 0°C (±2°), which is fine (I don't have gear to run at -10°C, for example), maybe a bit wet but acceptable. Got dressed, and went outside. Even the alley to the apartment building was not yet cleared ☺.

So I went on my usual 10K run to work and it was, by far, the best run ever—or at least the best for the past 6 months, my memory is short ☺. It was wonderful, snow falling down, the woods black and white, and a bit of wind. I managed to run about one thirds with both eyes open, about two thirds with just one eye open (heavy wind from one side), and some short streches with both eyes closed, due to heavy wind from ahead. I also had a better pace than expected; about 20 seconds slower per km, which is good, given that running in snow is harder than on clear ground.

One surprising fact: usually I cross on average about one other runner each two-three hundres meters. However today, in the entire 10K, only one other runner. On top of that, a few people seemed surprised at work that I chose to run on such “terrible” weather. Why were people so “scared” of snow? To me it was wonderful, I felt completely like a child again, being able to plough through ankle-deep, pristine snow, ignoring (or rather enjoying) the cold wind, forgetting everything else.

Too bad the snow half-melted by evening. I miss winters with lots of snow…