A.M. 10.1 with Jeff in 1:14:35. Matt Knold joined us for a couple of miles. I did explosions. Then we ran a fat mile in 5:48, and with 1.25 to go we realized Jeff was late for work. So it was a quick 1.25, and the last 0.75 not fat at all with the quarters of 86, 88, 83, 82, and 80 - total time 6:59. 83 was uphill, 82 had two turns, one of them sharp. 80 had two turns as well, but those are not too bad. The pace felt good. Did a test. 64 feet on one leg as fast as possible. Results, in sequence: right 7.0, left 7.8, right 6.4, left 7.2, right 6.0, left 6.4. The right felt snappy, the left felt like it was bumming it. Those are interesting results. I struggle with stability on the right leg, and have an odd feeling in the right glut. So I was expecting to hop faster on the left leg than on the right. But it was the other way around. So my tentative explanation. One leg hop (and possibly hopping/bounding in general) is not affected by stability issues as much as running. In running, though, stability is a bigger factor. However, balance and rhythm is a factor as well. So suppose one leg for some reason is more capable than the other. If both legs were to engage equally then the effort of the more capable leg would be getting wasted by the breaking created by the less capable leg. So it is more economical to put top effort into the weak leg, and then match the performance with lesser effort in the more capable leg to equalize the stride length from each leg. I say "more capable" rather than "stronger" because it may actually be weaker or of equal muscular strength, but more efficient. So because of that principle of balance my left leg never fully engages when running because it never has to. When it is time to hop, the right leg is no longer hampered by the stability problem, and its full power begins to shine. The left one on the other hand demonstrates its lack of development.
Assuming this is correct, an idea would be to try hopping on each leg to develop each to its full capacity, and hopefully this will cause a system reboot. But in order for this to work the boot scripts need to be functioning properly, otherwise you keep rebooting into error. But hopping on one leg here and there does not take a whole lot of time, so worth a shot. It would be really cool if the increased strength of the left push-off rebooted the stability driver on the right so it would start working.
P.M. Spent most of the day preparing for the race. Mostly refining my timing software. Now I have a solution that is completely contained on one system - I do not need separate computers/PDAs to do the timing and the barcode scanning. Flic scanner scans the barcodes, while Nokia 770 Tablet is running the timer and reading the scans in a separate thread. As a bonus I learned threaded programming in Python as well as GTK for the user interface. Next step is to be able to work with the user database on the device rather than just reading the times, scanning the bibs, and then taking it home to post-process and publish. Dreaming along, code up a registration web daemon, bring my wireless router with an EVDO card, and set up a field WLAN so that volunteers could register people through Wi-Fi devices on the spot, and so we could have the results online immediately.
Had a little adventure with the printer for the bibs and the signs, but fairly quickly worked around it with a hack. However, I do need to figure out why it stopped working normally fairly soon. Ran 1.5 with Jenny and Julia while setting up the course in 13:02. Another 0.5 with Joseph in 5:53.
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