The fire began last Tuesday
And busily through the week
Had been covering Santa Barbara
In an evanescent reek.

I get the impression, from the inciweb site — though they are careful not to say anything explicit — that the fire has been contained toward the cities and the east but is continuing to grow west and northwest. Which suggests that the danger to my house (always slim) has become slimmer

However the air I breath is full of ash still, and it sounds as though that will continue for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t fall abundantly, but very gently, very slowly. I test this by leaving my bike locked up outside, and then, when I return an hour or two later finding a faint speckling of white ash upon my black seat.

I haven’t run outside since the fourth. I’ve been doing my runs on a treadmill in a gym — hoping that the air inside has been somewhat filtered and so less hazardous. This morning I arrived only to discover I had left my running shorts at home by mistake. So I ran in my bathing suit (which I had taken, by mistake. The bathing suit and short being roughly the same colour).

It’s warmer, inside, with no breeze; so I sweat more, which means I have to take my glasses off, which means I can’t see much of anything. I can’t recognize people who greet me. Another disadvantage of inside running is the question of how to blow my nose. Outside I can snort onto the ground, but that is not a reasonable option inside. A stack of tissues doesn’t work well because they tend to flutter away in air currents and even if they did hang around, they become so drenched the moment they touch my sweaty face that they can’t effectively absorb more moisture.

The treadmills at my gym have little signs on them saying you can only use them for half an hour if others are waiting. So far, others have not been waiting. My shortest workout is 45min. More annoying the treadmill will turn itself off after an hour — you go from full speed to a full stop in just a few seconds. Finally some of the treadmills will go no faster than 6 minute miles. That’s 10k race pace for me — a speed I like to surpass from time to time.

Normally we do a speed workout on the San Marcos track… but that’s the Red Cross evacuation center. It might be rather crass to wake them up at 6am. I may need a fast treadmill tomorrow

Yesterday afternoon the light was a watery brown, the sun veiled in smoke. Ash fell intermittently and lightly.

Today dawned all foggy. I hope that will give the fire a hard time. Yet the fog is probably low lying, and the fire above 1500ft so there may be bright sun for the fire.

Fog and smoke — a London Particular.

As I was running this morning I was struck by the thought: A religion is like a monarchy — there are no checks and balances in either. You can’t argue with the word of god any more than you can argue with a king. But at least with a king it is possible to verify that the king did indeed say that.

The proponents of monarchy point out that there have been good kings. I grew up with the romantic notion of Good Queen Bess (not the current one, the one 4 centuries ago) — but as I grew older I learned she had a really nasty spy network and secret police.

My mother likes to point out all the good religions have done, the hospitals started, the educational institutions endowed. I tend to see all the harm, the wars started, the restrictions on thought.

But however good a religion may seem yesterday it can change. My mother is an Episcopalian/Anglican. A religion currently undergoing a civil war as one side supports homosexual rights and another (stronger) side does not. Once again those supporting human liberties are being attacked from overseas. It is hard to believe in the “goodness” of religion as I watch. There are no checks and balances. How can anyone argue with the word of god? How can you argue with the bible?

Of course it is easy to see that modern religions are works of fiction. The Book of Mormon is based on a fantasy short-story published in the early 1800s. The sacred books of the Scientologists are science fiction novels.

Perhaps the bible is different? Yet when you look at the Gospels you find downright lies. Herod didn’t massacre the innocents. Jesus’s family didn’t go to Egypt to escape him (that one always bothered me — they were poor — where would they find the money to move?). There isn’t a Jewish prophecy saying that the mother of the Messiah would be a virgin. For that matter, Jesus was not named “Emanuel”. There wasn’t an earthquake or a darkness when Jesus died. The list just goes on. The bible looks as unbelievable as the other religious sources I’m aware of.

The “Gospel Truth” is an oxymoron, a fallacy.

My statements above are easily verified by comparing one Gospel with another. People have been doing that at least since the Enlightenment. And the Jews have been complaining about misusing their prophesies for millennia. Yet because the bible is the word of god no bible has been issued with a list of errata.

This is dangerous. It shows a willful desire to reject objective truth.

For a long time, I didn’t think it mattered. After all “God died at Auschwitz”, eventually that would sink in. Eventually people would accept evolution and stop the assault on our education system. But then 11/9/01 happened and the US went on a crusade against “bad” muslims. And suddenly the dangers of religion became all too visible.

A madman in Afganistan points out that the Koran has passages which advocate (and therefore God desires) holy war. An idiot in Washington tells us God has told him to attach Iraq.

How can anyone else verify what god wants?

There are no checks.

We’ve slowly been doing away with kings.

Give me Atheism, or give me death!

Jenna asked me how long I thought it would take to run White River.

I’d really no idea. I told her so.

Then I made a guess. Let’s see the closest I’ve come to a 50 mile trail run is the Catalina trail marathon. Which had about half the distance and half the elevation. So let’s double that, and add an hour ~ hour and a half and round off to a nice number. Let’s guess 8 hours. About.

Then I got home and looked up the results.

In 2005, Mike Swan ran the course in 8 and a half hours.

Mike is faster than I am. And an experienced trail runner. 8 hours is out of the question. Perhaps 10?

We shall see.

So many of the accounts in Running through the Wall talk about how ultra-running has given them new confidence in themselves.

I don’t believe it.

Or, I don’t believe it will have that effect on me.

Oh, I’m sure it does for some people. And I expect it is the kind of story that editors like to collect. But could it affect me that way?

I certainly lack confidence. But I don’t lack confidence in my ability to push myself. I lack confidence in my ability to deal with others. I have absolutely no idea how to start a conversation — oh I can lecture, but that’s not a conversation. A blog is perfect for me, a nice monologue where I can’t see when people get bored and stop reading. I used to go out with a woman who would laugh at me whenever I attempted to make small talk — so now I don’t go out with anyone and no one laughs.

I just can’t see how running could help that. All that time out on the trails alone.

Of course, I don’t know that I’ll be able to run 50 miles. I expect I can. I hope I can. It will be interesting to try. (And rather embarrassing if I can’t because my parents say they’ll come watch). But I don’t really expect it will build significant confidence.

I know I can push myself through 6 miles of steadily increasing misery when I hit the wall at mile 20 of Cal International Marathon. I know I can write the best open source font editing program in the world. If I run 50 miles, I expect that to be just more of the same.

But I don’t think it will help me talk to you.

Two friends pointed out to me that last Thursday the New York Times ran an article which briefly mentioned my program, FontForge. As far as I know this is the first time the conventional media has mentioned my work. So that was very neat.

But then I started complaining to myself about how they’d spent more time talking about another program which was far less capable than mine.

So I reminded myself of Drea’s comments the other day. Being mentioned at all is a compliment.

Why, Thank you!

Today is Carolina Day.

A holiday most have never heard of. People tend to forget that the war of American Independence was fought in the South just as it was in the North. And so the battles in the South have been ignored.

The battles in Lexington and Concord are well known (and commemorated by the Boston Marathon), but who has heard of the battle of Sullivan’s Island?

I spent every summer of my youth on Sullivan’s Island, and the event was drilled into me.

In late May of 1776 the British decided to capture the city of Charleston (the largest port in the South, the fourth largest city in the colonies, and capital of the richest province). To this end they dispatched a fleet of 20 ships which was to land an army and take the city.

Sullivan’s Island is right outside Charleston harbor. There was a half-built fort on the island. This was all the protection the city had. The fort had only 26 guns, and enough ammunition for each gun to be fired 28 times. The fleet had ten times as many guns (262) and no dearth of powder. There were ~400 men in the fort and another 700 on the Island entrenched to prevent a force of 2900 British marines from landing.

Somehow the British did not understand the local tides. Three of their ships ran aground, and their battle plan (which depended on being able to sail behind the Island into shallow water) failed completely. Their attempt to land a ground force to take the fort from behind also failed, again due to lack of understanding of local currents. They suffered heavy casualties, and were forced to destroy one of their own ships before they withdrew.

Six days later the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Sadly, the 28th of June is no time to run a marathon in Charleston. I expect that is why this epic battle is practically unknown.

My friend, Jim Sloan, gave me a book for my birthday: Running through the wall — Personal Encounters with the Ultramarathon.

• blisters the size of silver dollars
• torrential downpour
• blizzard
• we didn’t have to worry about the copperheads, rattlesnakes and water moccasins. They would all be hibernating. … the alligators should be dormant
• hallucinations
• my knee!
• hypothermia
• like most trail runs you might miss these markers and get some “extra running”.
• dehydration
• … my second sunrise on this run. Most ultrarunners dread dawn — the hours between 4am and 6am

Well I’m planning on running only 50 miles, so a second sunrise seems unlikely (unless I really screw up — even a walking pace covers 50 miles in less than 24 hours).

I’ve been worried about nutrition (the wall), and that hardly gets mentioned.

The human body can run hard for about 20 miles, and then it runs out of easily used fuel. You can play tricks with the body and make it store a bit more fuel by depletion and carboloading — thus one can (with luck) finish a hard marathon without hitting the wall. But you can’t carboload enough for 50 miles. You’ve got to eat significantly on the course (more than just gel packs).

Naifly I had assumed this was going to be the major difference between an ultra and a marathon. In anything under a marathon the wall is irrelevant. The marathon is right on the edge, where you must worry about the wall but can (with luck) avoid it. You can’t avoid it in a real ultra. I assume there is no point to carbo-loading.

One thing that has worried me is that on my 200mile bike rides my stomach tended to rebel after about 10 hours, and I couldn’t eat real food beyond that (only gel packs, which become nasty after a while). Well, I should complete 50 miles in under 10 hours. But it’s harder to digest when running than when biking. Perhaps the limit will come earlier when running?

I guess I haven’t really done a run that truly pushed my endurance. I’ve only hit the wall once in a race. But the two 200mile bike rides I did were certainly endurance races. I need to think in terms of them.

What about elevation. I’ve never run at altitude. At the top of Pier to Peak (roughly 4000ft) altitude doesn’t seem a problem. But when I visited La Paz Bolivia (roughly 10,000ft) simply climbing stairs was a challenge. What will ~7000ft be like? Dianna suggested that I visit Lake Tahoe beforehand to acclimate.

Weather. Is always chancy. Still high summer is the dry season. On the other hand perhaps it gets hot? The website doesn’t provide standard temperatures.

Ah, but Dave Webster points me at a link. Highs in the mid-60, lows in the mid-40s. That, at least, doesn’t seem a problem.

But there is always my body. Will it break?

Rusty had us run by time today. Not by distance. He didn’t really give us a pace either. “Start out with 95 second quarters, and then run what feels right.” Hmm. We were to run for two minutes and then jog for a minute and then repeat — 10 times total. To add a soupçon of additional confusion we were to run in the outside lanes so we didn’t know how long each lap actually was.

And was the 95 second quarter pace for the inside lane? or the outside? Rusty didn’t clarify

Presumably because it didn’t matter, we were to find our own pace. Practice for those races without mile markers

I found it very odd. At one point, about a minute and a half into the two minute hard run, I found myself speeding up, thinking I’d get there sooner (and so get it over with sooner) if I just ran faster. But it didn’t matter how fast I ran, two minutes was two minutes — there was no “there” to get to.

Another point when I lapped some people for the second time, I was feeling very smug: “I’ll be finished long before they will be,” I thought to myself. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how silly that was. We’d all finish at the same time, when 30 minutes were up. I might go further, but I’d finish no sooner.

Somehow my brain is so used to thinking of running a distance that it is very hard to grasp the implications of running a time.

And that was why Rusty chose this workout — to mix us up a little and stop us being complacent.

It used to be common to have “1 hour” races, where the goal was to see how far you could go in the time rather than to reach a specific finish line. I’ve never done one. I think it would be weird. I’d like to try it — would it feel like a race? Would I get the adreneline boost a race gives me?

I suppose it would have to be on a track. Ug. Running roughly 40 times around a track sounds dull. And confusing — who would be counting each person. Perhaps that’s why they’ve fallen out of favor — the logistics of counting make it impossible for a large field to race.

Still, it would be odd.

I don’t like running the 4th of July race. It is too hot. Or on those times when it is foggy, it is too hot and too humid.

It’s probably not really that hot — not to a walker anyway — but to a runner — the sun beats down and there is no shade on the bike path.

I decided I was going to volunteer.

Then about 3 weeks ago my left knee started hurting. Who knows why, my knees have minds of their own and do the strangest things. So now I have a perfect excuse for not running the 15k.

And now I want to.

Today is my forty-nineth birthday.

Now 49 is not a number which inspires much excitement among most people (unless they happen to be missing three fingers). I haven’t found any 49 mile races. But next year I will be 50, a number which somehow seems more significant.

So next year I would like to do a 50 mile race to celebrate my new age-group. I’ve never done an ultra, so I asked Mike Swan and Stu Sherman for advice, and both suggested the White River race up in the Cascades. It’s in July, so not exactly on my birthday, but close enough.

I think 30 miles is about the longest run I’ve ever done, and a marathon is the longest race. This is an experiment.

But the point of this message is to ask: “Would you like to run with me next year up in the Cascades?”