Lisa and I survived our marathon this past weekend but just barely. We were cruising though the first 20 or 21 miles and we were on pace to finish about 4.5 minutes under my previous marathon PR of 3:35:12 when Lisa rolled her ankle pretty badly. I wasn't about to let her miss qualifying for Boston so we started alternating running and walking. I kept a close watch on the time and we finished officially at 3:39:03 to get Lisa her sub 3:40:00.

Prior to that incident her and I were flying along. We got a slow start trying to navigate all the people but we settled into something between an 8:05 and 8:10 pace all the way until mile 20. We had a few miles under 8:00 and a few over 8:20 but mostly we were feeling really good and steady. The course was very flat and scenic which helped to offset the lack of hundreds of thousands of fans and other runners. The biggest challenge for me was mental. Towards the end (even before Lisa rolled her ankle) the miles seemed to stretch out and it felt like ages between each mile marker sign. My cardio held up fine just like in Boston and I had some stiffening of my quads again but this was significantly less since there was no three mile hill to climb.

Overall the course was a lot of fun and I would have absolutely set a PR if I hadn't hung back to get Lisa across the line. However, I'm really happy with how the race ended and I'm really proud of Lisa for qualifying despite her injury.

mile	split	total
1	miss
2	17:51	17:51
3	8:18	26:09
4	8:13	34:23
5	8:08	42:31
6	8:10	50:42
7	8:22	59:05
8	8:08	1:07:13
9	8:11	1:15:24
10	8:20	1:23:45
11	7:46	1:31:32
12	8:06	1:39:38
13	8:19	1:47:57
14	7:52	1:55:50
15	7:56	2:03:46
16	8:04	2:11:51
17	8:09	2:20:01
18	8:05	2:28:06
19	8:06	2:36:13
20	8:11	2:44:24
21	8:21	2:52:45
22	8:27	3:01:12
23	9:21	3:10:34
24	9:45	3:20:20
25	8:27	3:28:48
26	8:35	3:37:23
finish	1:42	3:39:05

I started training for this during the second week in June and ended up covering 549.3 miles over the course of 18 weeks in training and the race itself. At one point during the training I missed out on a 50 mile week entirely and I spent a few weeks battling stomach problems that caused me to cut some runs short. Given all that, and the fact that I trained about 575 miles for the first marathon I am really happy with my performance here. I'm going to be running Boston in April again and I have some ideas to radically change up my training.

I took Monday off to relax and recover from the race and used to it finish off my next 5 Space Marines.

newest 5

all 10 that I've finished

I'm happy with how these guys are turning out. They're currently missing decals on their shoulder pads because I haven't figured out a good way to apply them. There is a good tutorial that I found online that I need to try out before I go wasting the decals that I need.

After rallying to tie the series 3-3, the Red Sox lost to the Rays on Sunday. It was a bummer but I'm glad they fought back and didn't roll over and give it to the Rays.

mile 13


finish!

I'll admit that I spent most of yesterday thinking about how sad it would be when the Red Sox lost Game 5 against the Rays. When I left work a little after 8pm and it was 2-0 bad guys I lost most of the enthusiasm I had for getting home quickly to watch the game. I stopped watching in the 7th inning when the Rays get a double steal on Paplebon to put men on 2nd and 3rd with no outs.

Apparently I should have more faith. The Red Sox scored 4 in the 7th, 3 in the 8th, and then sealed it in the 9th, and I missed it. I found out they won by reading the front page of someone else's Metro while I waited for the train this morning. I spent half an hour this morning at work reading articles about the win, but this one in particular does a great job of capturing the energy and intensity that I imagine accompanyed those last three innnings.

Now it's back to Tampa to play Game 6. Go Sox!

I was not really happy with the red on this model so I went at it again last night. First I added some shading to bring out the depth, and then I tried to add some more highlights and brighten up the ones that were already there. I don't think it worked very well, to be honest. I still think the red is pretty flat overall, and now that I've been screwing with it repeatedly I think it looks sloppy.

The next idea I had was to add some battle damage to distract from the poor highlighting. I didn't really think out the placement, size, or shape of the scratches much and I think the model's left side suffered as a result.

Ultimately, while I'm not happy with how he came out I think that I learned a lot of things that I can apply to the next warjack that I paint.

<-- good side, bad side -->

good side

I spent several hours this weekend painting a Khador Juggernaut and this is the result (photographed poorly - they don't show the highlights that do exist however faint):

I had a lot of trouble conceptually highlighting the huge red armour plates. My typical strategy of line highlighting was pretty useless on the vast, flat expanses that needed to be highlighted. I went for what I thought would be natural highlights but I'm not satisfied. I don't think I executed my plan correctly and I don't think I have enough contrast for the highlights to be visible. The Warmachine rulebook has some good reference pictures and I'm going to try to use them to touch up this guy. I'm also thinking of trying to paint on some battle damage, but I'd like to get the highlights correct first.

I decided to enter a second army into the Tale of Painters on Librarium Online. In addition to my 1000 points of Crimson Fists I will be working on 500 points of Khador. The Juggernaut represents 100 points done already so my first month's submission is already take care of. Once I get those next 5 tacitcal marines done I'll have my Fists sumbission done for the month also so I think I'm in pretty good shape to take care of both.

Once these two projects are done I am thinking of doing some Cygnar models. The two that have really caught my eye are Coleman Stryker and the Journeyman Warcaster.

Coleman Stryker (image from Privateer Press)

Journeyman Warcaster (image from Privateer Press)

Khador has a feeling of steampunk Russion, and Cygnar has a knightly feel to them. I also really like the vibrant blue color of their armour.

My next marathon is coming up on Sunday. I think if I can run a 3:40 and help Lisa to qualify that I'll be happy. Somehow I managed to get a blood blister on one of my big toes; hopefully that won't be too much of a pain in the ass.

Spoony was in town this weekend for regionals. It was really good to see him. Since I had Monday off (hooray Chris Columbus!) Laura and I got brunch at the Center Street Cafe. It was really good and a lot of fun. Even though we've been dating for over two years now I still like going on dates with Laura.

The Red Sox have dropped two straight to fall behind 1-2 against the Rays. Hopefully they can pick it up tonight and bring it back to even.

I managed to assemble the next 5 marines while watching the Red Sox beat the Angles but I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had time to clean or prime them. I tried some more dynamic poses with these 5 - some of them worked and others not so much.

My taper jitters have come back. The runs that I'm doing as part of the taper have not been enough to eat up all the energy I have so I've been a little jumpy the past few days. My two runs this week have thus far been pretty good and I'm anticipating another good one this evening.

I watched the most recent debate and was generally unimpressed with both candidates. Neither one would answer a question directly and they just rehashed the same points from the previous debate. I think Obama won, but only because McCain lost worse.

While we're on the subject, I've been reading some more interesting articles about McCain and Palin. I'll be the first to admit my liberal bias, but I think it's worth giving these articles a read anyway.

A few weeks ago I sumbitted my Massachusetts voter registration paperwork and as the deadline approaches, I've been checking cityofboston.gov to see if they have processed my paperwork. They hadn't as of a few days ago so I e-mailed them but got no response. Since it is important to me that I be able to vote I called City Hall and asked about it. They told me I am registered to vote (hooray!) and that the online database isn't updated as regularly as their databases are.

Some photos from the 5k this past weekend:

My first Crimson Fist squad is done!

The three in front are the product of last week's work, and the two in back are a few months old. Those two I'm not really excited about and if I were to strip some models one day, those would be the first two I'd try.

I'm going to be building another 5 bolter marines tonight (hopefully) in an effort to knock off the boring guys first. Those 10 guys will be my first Tale of Painters II submission from the painting event going on at Librarium Online. This first ToP was the reason I finished up my Wood Elves and in six months I'm hoping it nets me 1000 points of marines.

Lisa and I ran a 5k this weekend in Somerville with some friends. I was hoping to go sub 18 and get a PR but apparently all this marathon training has blunted my speed a bit and I finished in 18:49. I'm still really happy with how I performed and I know that with a little speed work I could crush the 18 minute mark, seeing as I wasn't breathing hard at the end of this race at all.

We also did a 12 mile run this Sunday at 8:47 pace. This is also not as fast as I would have liked it to be but again I'm happy with it. After some rather poor showings on the previous weeks' long runs I was happy to get a quality run in before the marathon.

Friday after work Laura and I saw Burn After Reading. It was very well acted and the dialouge was clever and funny, but I wasn't totally sold on the movie. The plot was pretty complex and I had to focus on what was going on. This would have been fine if they had built it up to some huge climax at the end, but when the movie ended I felt let down.

I cooked burgers last night for Laura and I. Laura wasn't confident in her ability to eat a whole burger (a justifiable concern) so I made her two sliders. Early reports were positive and I haven't heard any terror stories about her body rejecting them, so I think she probably liked them.