Done!!!

I survived The Relay. 12 persons, 2 vans, 199 miles, team 52 did it in 29 hours 35 minutes. I ran 16.2 miles, average 7 minutes 58 seconds per miles. I almost die on my last leg :P I kept questioning myself why I would be so stupid to join this, and wanted to give up so many times for the last 3 miles. But somehow, my legs managed to drag me through the finish line. It was painful, but fun!!! Will I do it again? Maybe... maybe...


Angela and Eric, the only 2 people form Hong Kong in this team


Van 1 at our finish point


Team 52 at the 199 miles finish point

Sailing

Have not been blog for a while. Finally have the motivation to blog again - I went sailing last Sunday with my co-workers. It was Mike's first time to be the caption of a sail boat after his training. Well, we had a blast! Too bad I had a bad sea-sick, even after taking Dramamine. In fact, the drug made me sleepy, and worsen my sickness. Oh well, I still enjoyed the trip. I had so much fun going out to sea, learning the complicated terms to describe simple things like wind coming in from left or right (oh, I don't remember any of them now :D). Tons of things to check before going to water (e.g. pumps, values, engine, oil, etc). Even with all the checking, we have unexpected problems when we got out: we went straight into thick fog (had to navigate with compass, sea map, Serguei's GPS and his brain... man, without Serguei, we would be doomed), the engine overheated (we were in the middle of nowhere with mild wind, and wanted to get back to land faster, so we used the diesel engine), the onboard GPS was totally broken, we used wrong wind speed scale (true vs apparent)... hey, but caption Mike led us back safely, and he parked the sail boat perfectly (parking a boat is way more difficult than anyone can imagine).

Pretty interesting stuffs. I might learn it if I can fix my motion sickness :P

Count down to "The Relay"

Only six more weeks before "The Relay". The week, we are going to switch to a more aggressive training schedule. We will be training to run just like in the real race, i.e. run three segments, each 8 to 9 hours apart. This is on top of our week day normal running schedule. OK, the schedule for this weekend will be three 3.5 miles segments at Friday 7 pm, Saturday 8 am and then 5 pm. Don't know if we could handle this kind of crazy style of running... Going to know soon :) If we are doing ok this weekend, we will increase the mileages by 10% each week until October 15. Run run run!

Angel Island camping trip

Recently I went camping with 3 of the my cell group buddies on Angel Island. Nice place! We went there only for 1 night and 2 days. It was surprisingly quiet and nice, and much less windy than expected. I was afraid our heads will be blown away by the wind before the trip :) Our camp site was facing the ocean. Well, a view like this is going to cost you at least a couple of million dollars (if you buy a house in SF with this view :D). We experienced this for one day, $20. Not too bad :) I also consider Angel Island camp sites to be good, much better than the usual American style car camp sites (i.e. the "bring-your-satellite-dish-campsites" :D) I still miss the camp sites in the Canada Algonquin Provincial Park. Anyway, more photos of this trip here.

Finally...

Last Sunday (8/28/2005) was our trip sharing. It was the last chapter of our China trip. Finally I am done with all the China trip related stuffs. From preparation, going to China and back, debriefing, post-production (pictures, etc) and then sharing, took us almost 3 months. It was really something. So many happy moments, so many sad moments. I still remember the young people from the dumpling place, just like everything happened yesterday. I will remember this trip forever.

What was I up to lately?

Well, dealing with 2800 pictures is not fun, especially when my computer (geek alert!) swap drive was set to PIO mode (instead of UDMA)... in short, rather than 40 MB/s, I was swapping in 2 MB/s. Yes, that really hurt. I only noticed (and later fixed) the problem when I was burning the DVDs, after I was done with the pictures editing. Sigh... So, for the past two weeks, I was suffering from diarrhea for the first week, and editing and buring pictures for the second week. Oh, I also managed to run 3 times (6 slow miles twice, 4 fast miles once). More to prepare for the official church sharing. It will be in our church LGCC on Sunday 8/28. Let me know if you are interested, and I will give you more details.

Have not updated the blog for a while...

I have not updated the blog for more than a month. No, I am not THAT lazy. During the time, I went to China for a short term missionary trip. I need to start a new blog for the trip for security reason. I was planning to move everything over here... but I am just too lazy :) So here is a link to the China's trip. Oh, the choice of words were a little bit unusual due to, again, security. So do your best to guess the meaning :) Enjoys!

My best 6-miles for now

Back to running on 400m track. This first 3 miles was around 8 minutes 27 seconds per miles. The last 3 miles was 7 minutes 49 seconds per miles. I am indeed quite surprise by how fast I could run once warmed up. I thought I could never break 8 minutes mile. One top of that, I was running two lane away from the inner circle, and (accidentially) ran one extra lap. That is, I ran ~500m more than 6 miles. The final result: total time for 6 miles was 48 minutes 49 seconds. Average 8 minutes 8 seconds per mile. I am happy :)

Did not blog for quite a while...

Oh well, too many things to do lately. Learning Frontpage and brushing up my HTML for the China teaching trip, running twice per week, picking up SSL / TLS for work, etc. My life is overwhelmed.

Anyway, this is what I found worth blogging (via Engadget). Amazing pictures! They took those pictures with a 4 billions pixels camera (compared this to the "Professional" SLR Canon 1Ds Mark II... ONLY 16.9M pixels!) They can zoom way in and you can still see all the details. Kind of like a spy-satellite keep zooming like no ends.

One of the zoomed-picture make me laugh very hard... Guess what they were doing :) Click the link to find out.


Here are some very nice pictures: