Running Up North:

A few things that I have learned while running up in Northern Minnesota this week is that it is a lot better than trying to run on the streets of Shanghai with 20 million other people, cars, scooters, and bikes. Also that there are still drawbacks to getting away from everything, such as horse flies.

However, there is a slight silver lining to this in that I have found out that horse flies without any wind can fly almost exactly at a 7 minute mile pace. This is only really good when you workout calls for a tempo run faster than a 7 min pace, but good to know none the less.

The Great Fire Wall of China:

First off I apologize for lack of posts and updates the past 3 weeks. My reasoning is that I was in China for work and the Chinese government has managed to censor the internet, this means a lot of sites are simply blocked while in China. You may have heard about the problems that Google has had with China.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many blogs, especially on Blogger( a google run site) are blocked. So my absence from the blog was a forced one. Unfortunately for many running, I was quite busy while in China and did not have a whole lot of opportunity to run. I stayed in Shanghai, which has about 20 million people and it is less than an ideal place to run. Too many people, cars, bikes, scooters, buildings traffic, crazy drivers and pollution.

I did manage a few runs but the weather was nearly 90 degrees everyday with nearly 100% humidity, so even when I did get out it was difficult to get any quality runs in. Here are a few pictures from the trip and I'll be posting again on a regular basis, don't worry.

Quote of the Day:

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

-Albert Einstein

I am not too much for physics but I did find this quote quite interesting and I think that it certainly relates well to distance running. I think that most distance runners can recall a workout, race or even just a section of a race that you felt like you were flying and the miles flew past. Then there are races that feel like the are an endless and pain stricken endeavor. I don't know that it is quite as complex as Einstein's theory of relativity but I think that some of those concepts can apply to running.