XTerra 6 and a Crazy Few Weeks

August 31st was the last race in the XTerra 2009 Trail Run series. This one was up at Shakespear Regional Park, a nice short drive from Albany. I ended up running with a few coworkers from ASB: Marco and Stephen, who also did the Riverhead race, and Rohith.

As usual for the XTerra races, the organizers did an excellent job in designing the course. We covered some of the same ground as the night run the evening before, but we also made our way all the way around the headlands on the rocky shoreline. I'm really bummed that all my photos from my little waterproof camera came out overexposed (I was trying an experiment with higher ISO setting to keep the shutter speed fast). But suffice to say that it was pretty tough keeping 10k per hour pace across slippery low tide rocks. :-)

After the coastal part, we cut into the center of the peninsula and did some running through the paddocks with the cows and sheep. That portion went a lot faster, even with the hills.

This was actually the first XTerra Long Course that I managed to finish in under two hours! It was only 17k, but still, I'm quite happy with that. My overall rank at the end of the series was 11th of 114 in the Men's Open Long Course category. Overall, there were about 300 runners in the Long Course group.


View Larger Map

In other news, for those of you that haven't heard: I'm going to be moving back to the states at the end of October. So yesterday was my last day at ASB, and today is my last day at Datacom. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be doing some travelling around. First up is a week and a half in Rarotonga with Kel, Gayle, and Claire. Then Kel, Claire and I are headed around the East Cape, and back to Chateau Tongariro for some Skiing at Ruapehu. Kel and Claire are then headed down to Wellington for a weekend, then the three of us are headed to Sydney for a couple of days. Yow! Anyway, probably lots of photos coming soon!

Night Trail Run at Shakespear Regional Park

I just got back from an 11.5 Km night trail run up in Whangaparoa. I never would have thought that the limiting factor on my run time would be my cardio fitness, and I certainly wasn't expecting to finish so close to an hour (1:04:06), but I fell in with a group that had nice bright headlamps. I pushed hard to keep near enough to take advantage of multiple lights. One guy in particular had a huge spotlight mounted on his shoulder, there must have been a battery for it in his hydration pack. It was nice having him about 20 meters behind me for a good chunk of the race. :-)

The course was exellent . . . it was about an even mix of gravel road, single track, and paddock fence-lines. At one point we were running along a ridge with views of the Auckland skyline across the harbour on one side, and a stream of little multi-colored lights trickling up the hill out of the dark on the other.

I wish I'd had my little camera and a gorilla-pod along for that moment. At the finish, I did manage to grab my SLR and a tripod in time to catch some of the later finishers coming through:

As usual for TotalSport events, there were beer and sausages at the finish! Tomorrow is the last XTerra race at the same location. I'll get to see what we ran through tonight, plus a bunch of coastal rock scrambling.

Tumblr Badge for Blogs and CSS Troubleshooting

My post on how to use CSS to restyle Tumblr's default blog widget has been quite popular. One commenter pointed out that it wasn't displaying properly in IE6 or IE7 (surprise). After a bit of investigation, it turned out to be the Usual Suspect: browser differences in default Box Model behavior.

Specifically, it appears that IE versions lower than 8 use a large amount of default margin to move elements to their default starting position in a container.  Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, on the other hand, seem to use about the same amount of space, but in Padding. You can see the difference in the two screen captures below.   The Red border is the Tumblr_Posts div.

Note that in Firefox above, the whitespace is on the inside of the Div, it's a "Margin" of about 50 pixels. In IE below, it's also about 50 pixels, same resulting position, but caused by outside the Div "Margin" space.

My goal with the stylesheet was to keep a minimum of whitespace between the outer container (Green border), and the little photo boxes (inside the red box). I did that with the first CSS property that came to mind: Margin-Left. I raised that number until it looked how I wanted it in Chrome, doublechecked it in IE8, Firefox, and iPhone Safari, then published it. Unfortunately, since IE6 started with Margin-Left at about 50px, the impact of setting Margin-Left to -30px was a 80px move in IE (compared to 35px in most other browsers). The result was the posts were chopped off about halfway across by the border of the sidebar.

The solution, as with most things in computing, is to reboot. ;-) Specifically, set all the box model numbers to the one number that puts all browsers on equal footing: zero.

Zeroing out both margin and padding did exactly what I wanted in the first place: let the Tumblr Post boxes fill the containing div. Any number would work actually, as long as you set them all explicitly, rather then letting the browsers use their assorted defaults.

.tumblr_posts
  {
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px; 
  }

Anyway, hope that helps. If you went and read up on the CSS Box Model, or have wrestled with this stuff before, you'll probably find this amusing:

CSS is Awesome! Mug on Zazzle


Here's the current, corrected CSS:

.tumblr_photo
  {
    width: 110px;
    height: auto;
    float: right;
    margin: 7px;
    border: 2px black solid;
  }
  .tumblr_posts
  {
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px; 
  }
  .tumblr_post
  {
    font-size: x-small;
    list-style-type: none;
    width: 210px;
    padding: 7px;
    margin: 5px;
    max-height:200px;
    overflow: hidden;
    border: thin black outset;
    background-color:#78a;
  }

Legend of the Seeker

Kel and I have gotten hooked on the Legend of the Seeker TV series. It's the latest from one of my favorite writer/producer/directors: Sam Raimi (Spiderman, Evil Dead, Hercules, and Xena). Like Hercules and Xena, it's filmed here in New Zealand.

I had to laugh while watching the pilot when I saw them go from riding horses in the Southern Alps to rolling down the North Island West Coast dunes in a matter of seconds.

I'm pretty sure the spot in the dunes where this scene was filmed is at Bethell's Beach where I was running The Superdune race just a week earlier. Though it could be the Te Paki Dunes up north. Either way I've been there . . . love it! :-)

XTerra Race #4 (Waiuku)

Last weekend was race four in the XTerra trail run series. This was the furthest I've had to drive so far. The race HQ was a ways south of Waiuku, nearly two hours from the North Shore, where the Waikato River meets the Tasman Sea. I'm glad I made the trip. Unlike the last race, this time the weather was perfect, and I think this was the best course yet.

That said, you can see from the photos that it had been raining right up to the day of the race. There were a number of large puddles out there, including this one right at the start.

The course itself was amazingly fast. It's almost 3km longer than the Riverhead course, but I finished over an hour faster, and that's got nothing to do with anything I did between those two weekends. ;-)

I actually thought for a minute that I might break two hours for the long course in this race. But once again I'd underestimated the sadistic streak of the race organisers: in the last few klicks some horrific mud pits appeared out of nowhere, and the finish was a load of sand hills. I was so shocked to be struggling with what had seemed an easily reachable goal a few minutes earlier, that I neglected to grab any pictures of the mud pits. They really were one of the nastier surprises of the series. Nice work guys! ;)

So even if I didn't manage to break 2:00, I'm still quite happy to have knocked an hour off my 20k time. I've noticed that I've also broken into the top 10 in the overall rankings for the series long course. As with the Beach Series, mainly by virtue of attendance. But hey, swag is swag (if I can sneak a few places higher by the end)! ;-)

XTerra Race #3 (Riverhead)

Last Sunday was race 3 in the XTerra Trail Run Series. This time it was right in my backyard, just a 20 minute drive down the road to Riverhead forest. A couple of my co-workers decided to do the race as well: Marco (one of the members of our lunchtime running group) and Steve. That was probably a good thing, as I was pretty close to going back to bed when I woke up to pouring rain. ;-)

I'm glad I didn't, it's always good fun splashing through the mud and puddles once you're out in it. With the rain, this course was quite tough. We pushed fairly hard, but still came in at 3:03:11. Marco's wife and two little girls did the short course, they came in just a bit after us, with their umbrella's and gum boots. :-)

Next race is down at Waiuku, where the Waikato River meets the Tasman Sea. It's not far from Port Waikato, where my friend Tony and I once went to have a look (from a distance) at the Weathertop location from the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Hopefully the weather's nice that day. I wouldn't mind grabbing some photos, as that's another part of the Auckland region that you'd rarely have any reason to pass through.

The Watchtower of Amon Suil

XTerra Race #2 At Hunua Ranges

Sunday I ran race 2 in the Auckland XTerra trail run series. This one was at Hunua Ranges regional park. Once again we had perfect weather for it! The morning started out quite foggy, but unfortunately I was running a bit late, so there was no time to stop for photos of the misty hilltops on the way in. :-( The shot below was taken with my little point-and-shoot by sticking my arm out the car window!

The course was amazing. Damn tough, (as they'd warned us). At one point we were climbing UP the Downhill Mountain Biking National Championship course.

Which reminds me: my running shoes have pretty much zero tread left on the soles. I think I may go for a pair of proper trail running shoes before the next race at the end of the month.

Despite the toughness of the course I'm quite pleased with my race. I ran 2:59:30, which is almost an hour slower than the last race at Woodhill, but felt like a good effort on the Hunua course.

Next race is at Riverhead, right in my backyard. I was hoping for a fast course, but the race organizers are predicting a mud-fest . . . That's fine by me too! :-)

New Zealand Music Month

May is New Zealand Music Month. Last year I put up this post with some of my favorite NZ music. I figured I'd do the same this year. So here in no particular order or chronology, is some of my favorite NZ music since the last post.


Evermore - Between the Lines


Minuit - Species II


Tiki Taane and Julia Deans - Our Favorite Target


Opshop - Maybe


Midnight Youth - All on Our Own


Bulletproof/Tiki Taane - Dark Times


Kora - Skankenstein - The video is kind of distracting, but I like the tune. These guys are from Kel's hometown of Whakatane.


And of course what NZ music collection would be complete without Flight of the Conchords. I had this song stuck in my head all day after I saw the episode:

Flight of the Conchords - I Told You I Was Freaky


I like these guys too, but for some reason they don't allow embedding of their YouTube video.
Nesian Mystik - Nesian 101

XTerra Trail Run Series: Race 1 (Woodhill Forest)

On Sunday I ran the long course (21.5km) in the first race of the Auckland XTerra Trail Run Series.

Despite the forecasts, it started out as an absolutely beautiful autumn day. In fact it was perfect to the point where I had to stop several times during the drive there along the Coatesville-Riverhead highway to take some photos. Fortunately I had plenty of time to spare so I stopped to grab a coffee and pastry at the apple orchard cafe just out of Kumeu as well.

The venue for the race was Woodhill Forest, best known as a mountain biking and motocross destination. The terrain was fairly flat sandy logging roads through red pine forest. It actually reminded me quite a lot of Chequamegon National Forest back in Wisconsin.

I'd decided in this race that I'd focus more on racing, rather than all the picture taking I did during the Superdune. At the start I lined up around the middle of the pack, and when the horn went off, I took off fairly aggressively. About 10 minutes in, I started feeling fairly run down. That isn't too unusual early on given my usual lack of warmup, but I was also a bit disheartened by the number of people passing me. I seemed to be losing quite a bit of ground in the field from my starting position. I was a bit bummed out by that until we hit the first water stop at 2.9 km. I glanced at my watch and saw that we'd come in quite a bit under 15:00. Doh! That wasn't too far off pace for my fastest half marathon. I eased back a bit and seemed to have settled into my place in the pack.

From there on I pretty much cruised along. The trail was nice and smooth, without any significant climbs, and quite good traction for all the sand. I hit the sign for 16km at about 1:24, so I had well over 30 minutes to run 5k and still come in under 2:00. That made me quite happy. So I picked up the pace a bit. I remember looking at my watch at about 1:47 and thinking: I've been running like clockwork, and the terrain's been the same, we can't have more than about 2km to go. Just then we hit the sign announcing "1km to go". Disturbingly, it was positioned right in front of a tangle of deadfalls. They turned out to be the gates of hell. ;-) From that point on it was a roller-coaster dune-slog. I had to laugh every time I staggered to the top of a sandy hill to see more sand as far as you could see. It took me damn near 20 minutes to cover that last "1km". I finished in 2:09:26.

Next race in early June is at Hunua Ranges. Rumour has it that the course is way tougher. I'll have to put in some hill work before then. Fortunately, I'm back at ASB starting next week, so I've got my lunchtime running partners back! :-)

After the race, I wandered around and took some photos of the beach at Woodhill. Typical west coast beach: mile after mile of beautiful sand, and not a soul in sight. I also stopped in at Muriwai beach on the way home. By then the weather had turned to crap, but it kind of suited the pounding surf. The fishermen and the kite surfers certainly didn't seem to mind.

Star Trek Rocks

In honor of the premier of the new Star Trek movie tonight, I thought I'd share this little Facebook exchange I had with my friend Kevin last week. It's Facebook, so read from the bottom up. This made my day:

In Facebook, I posted the link to the Wikipedia article on the episode, but I should have posted this link to the YouTube video that's the #1 listing in a search for "Worst Fight Scene Ever". You can also see those rocks in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, numerous music videos, and just about every low budget Sci-Fi T.V. show ever made. ;-)

Superdune Half Marathon 2009

On Sunday I ran the Superdune half marathon. I was excited to do this race as much for the location as anything. Bethells Beach is one of the west coast black sand beaches. I've seen lots of photos of it in books and postcards, so I was looking forward to seeing it myself and grabbing a few photos of my own.

Bethells Beach is a ways from Albany, but it didn't take as long to get there as I thought it would, no more than 45 minutes of the hour or so I'd planned on.   After parking and signing in, I had almost two hours to kill before the race start. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the van at the race HQ, picked up my camera, and headed down to the beach. The light was flat and grey, with a bit of mist, but I could see patches of sun now and then. Only a couple of my morning pictures turned out, but I could see that there was potential for later.

I wandered around for a bit, then headed back to HQ for the race briefing, and to watch the multisport race start.

The start of our race took us into the black sand dunes straight away (hence the name).

Around the other side of the dunes, we dropped into a shallow creek, and followed it along like a road. I always love these bits of an off-road run. It's like playing in the puddles on a stormy day  when you're a kid. It's not something you'd usually do if you just came out here to go tramping around outside of the race format.

After the creek run, we climbed up a large hill overlooking the beach. I won't post everything here, but there are a few more photos on Flickr. I'll probably add a few more to that set as I fix them up.

The course then dropped down off the hill and back onto the beach. We had one little channel crossing to do (about knee deep) to get back onto the main beach.

After the beach run we had a massive uphill climb followed by roller coaster ups and downs. I think the stats on the course were that the highest point was 230 meters or so, but the course as a whole has 750 meters of climbing. Yow! It was quite a slog on the uphills, and the red sticky clay that piled up on your shoes and accumulated every loose thing you stepped on didn't help. ;-)

The view from the top of all that was quite amazing. It always blows me away how far 20 kilometers is when you see it all laid out like this. In the photo below, the race start is about where you see the structures at center-right. The dunes are out of frame to the right. The first big climb is the dark green hill right in the center, with the course rejoining the beach on the far side. The beach run is obvious, and the red clay climb goes from there to the point where this photo was taken (which I think is just past 12-15k or so).

After the big climb, we dropped down through some pine forest, back to the dunes and the creek again. We started the first hill again, but this time around we cut out of it early and made a beeline back to the finish.

I'd finished near the tail end of the mens 21k field with a time of 2:33 (too much time messing around taking photos I think).   There were still plenty of multisport racers out there. I watched a bunch more people finish, then I grabbed my SLR and headed down to see how things were looking at the beach.

Despite my sore legs I made the hike down to the far end of the beach to check out the big sea cave and see what was around the big rocks at the end. On the way back the sun popped in and out of the mist, creating a rainbow over the beach. The combination of patches of blue sky and the white puffy clouds was quite amazing. I'm really bummed that none of my photos come close to doing it justice.

I'm not sure what the problem was. I shot with almost the same settings, lenses, and filter setup that I used for my Coromandel photos, but those turned out much better. I think maybe the UV and Polarizing filters on my small lens didn't work out well with the misty clouds. Unfortunately, due to an accident years ago involving a drop from some height and a rock, the threads of the UV filter are pretty much locked into my small lens. :-(

Anyway, here are my favorite few from that hike after the race. There's more on Flickr, and I'll add in whatever others I salvage in post processing as I get around to it.







I was also bummed to see that almost all the surfers were gone by the time I got done taking photos. That usually means that its either no longer fun or getting dangerous. Ah well, probably best that I wasn't too tempted to grab my boogie board. Another hour or two of kicking around in flippers probably would have been way too much for my worn out legs.

Another Photo in Wikipedia

This one's in the German Wikipedia article on the Tongariro River.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongariro_River