Day to Day

After a long lapse, I'm updating the blog. Since updating, we took a pretty sweet trip to Spain, which I hope to post a recap at some point. In short I'll just say that southern spain is a very arid landscape and the weather is hot. We saw the Vuelta

In preparing for the Columbia Gorge Marathon on Oct. 25th, I had been getting into some good form. It's been 5 years since I've ran a road marathon(ran Portland marathon in 2004 in PR time) and I'm really looking forward to this one. The course is challenging and it's got a view of the gorge most of the way. If the weather's bad it could turn out to be an epic cold and windy death march. Two weeks ago I did yasso 800s averaging 2:46 per half mile, which (according to Bart Yasso) translates to the potential of being able to run a 2hr 46min marathon. I pre-ran the final 18 miles of the CGM course felt great. I was all scheduled to run a half marathon tune up last sunday, and then last week, on a 'recovery' run at forest park, I was running on the trail and instead of staying on erickson drive, I needed to warm up so I ran up to the wildwood on wild cherry trail and came back down dogwood, where I proceeded to crash on the down hill, tripping on a root or rock or something. It wasn't running fast, but running downhill that translated into a harder fall, and I didn't catch myself really at all, and basically landed on my side and managed to scrape both the left and right shins (very minor road rash). The worst was the impact to the lower right ribs, and if you've ever had a rib injury you know the drill. Hurts to laugh, hurts to sneeze, hurts to cough. Well try running. So I tried running 3 miles last week and it was not happening. Rested the weekend and got a couple hours on the bike yesterday in a desperate attempt to keep the fitness. Feels a little better this week than last week (but it's more sore after the bike ride), so my status is day to day for the CGM.

I'm nearing completion of school and will be looking to land a job staring in 2010 (around Feb or March). What does that mean? I don't officially get done w/ school until June2010, but I only have one class for the spring term. So the job will probably be here in the valley (portland / hillsboro area). My plans are to get employment in the semiconductor industry as it relates to solar cell manufacturing. The outlook looks pretty good. The program at the school I'm in really could prepare a student for potential employment in the wind, solar (manufacturing), solar (residential), hydro, bio-fuel or electrochemistry (fuel cell) industries. At this point I'm hoping the solar manufacturing thing works out, as I already have an internship at the largest solar cell factory in the Americas. And my senior project (call it Bachelors Thesis) topic is studying the light induced degradation of mono-crystalline CZ silicon solar cells.

Hope somebody still reads the blog, and hope to write a killer race report for the gorge marathon. And if the race doesn't go so well, that's ok, but I should be on the starting line.

stuff

A couple weeks ago I harped on mass transit in the northwest. Well, It turns out, I was stupidly mistaken. In my previous post, I referenced a video that profiled Bogota's mass transit system and how awesomely cool it was. It was like a light rail, only there were no tracks, just roads where only the buses drove. So, I ran into this blip.tv video done by 'YERT' and basically I feel now, like I should delete the post I made a couple of weeks ago because in fact, Portlands system does kick ass, and low and behold, there is a wonderful example of bogota's system RIGHT HERE in the northwest, just about 70 minute drive from Portland, in 'weirder than portland' Eugene. Surprisingly, since moving to Oregon in 2004, I have only been through Eugene a few times, and a couple years ago, when I was doing the Tour of Willamette bike race, I noticed this odd construction, looked like some sort of train route next to the road, but they were not building train tracks. I couldn't really figure it out, so I sorta just chalked it up to part of the weird-ness that is Eugene. So you have to go to about 1/2 way through this video to get to the Eugene stuff. I obviously hadn't done my homework, when it comes to trash talking the mass transit systems around here.



In addition to that sweet video... there's a guy in Idaho, who thinks the world can be powered by solar roads. I have some doubts, and one of them is studded tires. And the other is big trucks. I mean if you're going to use that many panels, why not just put them on the roofs of buildings. Or in the median.