Author Archives: Court

About Court

This is Courtney Vallentyne's blog.

Self Portrait

Posted on by

This perfectly captures what I look like in most pictures.  Expecially ones taken of myself.

Who am I kidding?  My smile doesn’t ever look half as relaxed as this guy.  He’s a natural.  What a showoff.  He obviously got his teeth whitened recently.

Associated story:  Macaque steals photographer’s camera, figures out how to take killer pictures with a pro camera in three seconds flat, hams it up, becomes Internet celebrity, blah blah, seen it a hundred times.

This guy has definitely got the chops to really make it.  Man.

WordPress 3.2

Posted on by

Good lord, but WordPress is fantastic.  The latest release is absolutely awesome, it’s hard to believe that this is free software.

Anyway, this is nothing but a placeholder to test out the new theme, which is actually included with the latest WordPress, which is also pretty awesome.  Lloyd is gazing balefully at you right now in the header image, but that’s because that’s the only image I had handy.  I will have to find something more appropriate.  Anyway, nice work on the WordPress.  I likes it.

Bassett Hounds

Posted on by

There are a few times when owning two dogs is less than fun.  Like this morning when somebody puked on the carpet, and there’s just no other place to puke than carpet, despite all of the tile and hardwood to choose from.  Or when I am taking dogs outside to pee for the millionth time in the pouring rain.  Or when I leave for work and I hear the sighs of two dogs as I close the door.  However, that quickly goes away when I see something like this:  Bassett Hounds Running

Good lord, I can’t handle the cute.  One thing is for certain, and that is Basset Hounds are not “Built For Speed”.  You can actually see the leg skin moving….  This guy is concentrating as hard as he can on just not tripping on his ears.  His lips must obscure his vision from time to time.

I just know that Lloyd has this kind of picture in him, he has almost as much loose skin as these clowns, and of course he can actually run, unlike these guys.  I need to get a picture of Lloyd running, or figure out how to take one.  My camera-fu isn’t up to the task.

Anyway, there you go.  You can’t tell me these pictures don’t make you willing to forgive quite a bit of carpet puke, and lots of trips to the backyard.  I know it worked on me.

Thanks Boing Boing

Race Recap

Posted on by

Ok, so that was just about as hard as I predicted it to be.  Despite telling myself to just focus on running at a steady pace and to ignore everybody else, I really didn’t do that.  I started at the very back of the pack, hoping that the traffic ahead of me would slow me down and make me run at a reasonable pace.  In fact I was just in front of the Nordic Walking ladies, so I nervously kept some distance in front of them, hopefully out of pole-swinging reach, in case they held any hard feelings for our past run-ins.  At the starting gun it was awesome, all of those people running at the same time.  Anyway in spite of me telling myself that there was lots of race to run, I loped along at a very very unreasonable pace, passing much smarter people than I everywhere.  I was far too busy running to notice their (probable) knowing smirks at my misplaced enthusiasm.

Anyway this worked great for the first 4km or so, and then the day got hotter and I got tired.  Really tired.  Then all of these smart people started to trot past me and I felt not so smart.  At around the 7km marker I scoffed that someone was probably in big trouble since they messed up the 9km marker and put a 7 there instead.  And the race still didn’t end, and I had to keep lurching along like some kind of guy who thought he could run a race with hardly any preparation, and gallop the first 4km and think he could keep that up for the whole 10.  Yeah, just like that.

So needless to say it was harder to run that particular 10km than any of the other 10kms I have run in the past.  Yeah.  However I was happy to see my wonderful family waiting for me at the finish line cheering me on, and the last 10km didn’t seem so bad now that it was done.  Several bottles of water and a patch of shade and the real sweating can properly begin (why is it that the sweat seems to be worse after running is over?) and life is very good indeed.

So, despite messing up in the worst rookie way possible, I did manage to hit my goal of finishing in under an hour:  58min, 26sec.  I was pretty surprised to be able to do that actually, considering how very very bad the stretch between say, 5km and 9km was.  The last half let’s say.  Yeah that part. I’m happy with my time, except that apparently there were 59 guys in my age group that finished ahead of me.  That can’t be right, can it?  Yes, yes it can.  Get off your ass, Vallentyne and actually prepare for the race next time…

So, there you go.  The first one done, and not the last.  Next time I think maybe I will run with earbuds and some music to help keep me in my own race, and not try to beat everybody in the first 300m.  Yeah, that should be better.

Pre Race Post

Posted on by

In a fit of stupidity earlier this month I registered to run my first actual race, the Kanata Canada Day 10k.  As with most of these things as I registered I was stoked and fired up with the drive to kick some butt on my first race.  I still had four long weeks to get my aging body into race shape.  Besides, I had already started running this year and was feeling cocky about my fitness level (as measured by running alone of course).

The weeks went by and I was getting some runs in, maybe not as many as I had hoped, but I will catch up and really log some serious klicks (I told myself).  More time passed, with runs fitfully scattered in a very irregular fashion here and there. 

So today I decided to take stock of my training (in an effort to make myself feel better about how I will do tomorrow) and it seems that I decided unconsciously to only run 10 times this year before running a real race.  What?  That can’t be right.  Even worse, of those 10 runs, only 4 of them even come close to 10k.  So, needless to say this did the exact opposite of making me feel good about tomorrow, it made me feel way worse.

You can mock my feeble efforts to date here:

http://runkeeper.com/user/cvallentyne/activity

Yes, that isn’t enough training.  No, I don’t think I will “kick butt” tomorrow.  Yes, I do think the other racers will be better prepared.  No, I shouldn’t just be sitting here typing and drinking root beer, but it’s too late now.

So there you go, a little pre-race guilt freakout for your reading pleasure.  I promise to report back after the race and let you know what lack of preparation gets you.

On another note, I found a great running blog today:  Science-Based Running   Go and check it out, it’s really good stuff.

Observing The Technically Unskilled

Posted on by

I will admit that there might have been a time, maybe two times*, that this has happened to me and the experience caused my very sanity to careen dangerously close to the guard rail, narrowly avoiding the plunge right into snarky geek valley.  Nobody likes a know-it-all and certainly nobody likes to feel stupid, but I have very very little patience for people who never get it. Ever. 

It’s a personal flaw, I realize that.  I’m working on it.  In the meantime, here’s a perfectly executed doodle that captures this kind of emotion for me.

Thanks Boing Boing, and Reddit

 

* – ok, maybe hundreds of times