Whenever anyone asks me "what's up," I actually attempt to paint an accurate summary of my day-to-day happenings, a pie-chart of my routines.  Usually it's "working, running, cooking."  The running actually takes the least amount of time out of those three, but it seems to occupy the majority of my mental day.  If I'm not running, I'm thinking about all the running I'll have to do.  As of today, I am exactly three weeks from running my third marathon.  I have been trying to run my third marathon for a year now, having missed both Phoenix and San Diego.  I think it might actually happen this time, in Denver.

Today was my last really long run before I taper down my distances.  The last 20 miler and I really wanted to make it count.  Only a little less than a year ago, I wanted to turn one of my 20 milers into a longitudinal trek across Dallas, just to prove it could be done.  I gave up when it got too logistically difficult and cut the Northern terminus back to Walnut Hill, which is close to, but not quite, the Northern border of Dallas.  I realized this time that a latitudinal attempt makes a lot more sense.  Rather than consult a Mapsco, which was in the next room and would have been the most efficient reference, I decided to stay in my chair and look for Dallas city limits maps on google.  I found what I thought showed Dallas as a white blob surrounded by other multi-colored blobs and worked out a route stretching from what I thought was Mesquite to Irving.  I found out later that I'd actually worked out a route from Sunnyvale to Irving, which means I traversed the entire "x" dimension of not only Dallas, but Mesquite as well.  I pasted the map below for your entertainment/awe, because I'm exactly THAT pleased with myself.



I actually ran it in the reverse direction because a) It gave me the advantage of a net drop in elevation and b) It was much easier to get a bus on the Irving side.  My brother had originally agreed to both drop me off and pick me up, but finding the exact border between Sunnyvale and Mesquite proved more difficult than anticipated.  He didn't have time to wait for me at the Irving end, so I took buses back to my place.  I started about 6:20 and finished the 20.5 miles 2 hr. 26 min. later.  All in all, one of the best runs I've had.  I gorged on Cafe Brazil afterward.

But can he do math?  And which is sexier?  It occurred to my brother and me that this new gymnastic scoring system is all wrong.  You have a difficulty and an execution.  You have a value of performance and a weight.  Those two quantities are just waiting to be multiplied and what do they do, they ADD THEM.  Here's what should happen. Analyze a routine, give it a weight of difficulty.  Then, assemble two separate judging panels.  One panel will ensure that the routine is followed out as submitted.  The other panel will be entirely unaware of the weight of difficulty and will judge the execution and submit a percentage as a result.  Multiply the two.  So if someone has a 6.2 routine and executes it at 90 percent, the score will be 5.58.  Adding them is applying a mathematical presupposition that doesn't fit the reality of what's being measured.