Brian Sawyer

UPDATE: My Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge fundraising page is ready to accept donations. Thanks in advance for your support!

Exactly two weeks ago today, I started a new training videoblog. Beyond moving all running-specific chatter away from my main personal site here, I had another specific purpose in mind, which I didn’t reveal at the time because my plan required acceptance of an application I’d filed on that same day. I received that acceptance today, and I’m excited to share the news with my followers here, in the hopes that you’ll also follow and support me over there.

First, a little background. Training for and running the San Francisco Marathon this year was incredibly important and rewarding for me, and the experience made me want to use a similar opportunity to do something even more important for others. I want to take on a challenge much bigger than anything I could accomplish solely for myself.

As you may also know, Kristina has participated in the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge twice, and each time she inspired me by her commitment, passion, and success. Her athletic accomplishments inspired me to run San Francisco, and now that she’s not applying for DMFC herself this year, her charitable achievements have inspired me to carry the torch that she started. I have been truly moved by her work for DFMC, which has highlighted the research her contributions have funded. It’s an effort I want to be a part of myself.

So, I was thrilled and honored to be selected among many applicants to run the Boston Marathon in April to raise money for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Though I must raise at least $3,250 to support research that will help eradicate cancer, my personal goal will be significantly more ambitious.

The DFMC raises funds for the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The DFMC directs 100% of funds raised to the Barr Program, which enables gifted young scientists at the leading edge of discovery to achieve better cure rates and to enhance patients’ quality of life.

I hope you will support my challenge by giving a gift to my run and, in doing so, help bring an end to the challenge of cancer. I haven’t been assigned a donations page yet, but I’ll post it to my sidebar and my About page as soon as I have it. Please consider following me there, as my training blog also begins to document my fundraising efforts for this cause that’s so much bigger than my own humble performance. Thanks in advance for any donation you’re able to make, and I look forward to seeing you around there soon (or, actually, you seeing me around there, I suppose). I truly appreciate your support.

I finally got around to writing up my race report for the marathon I ran a month ago, and for the past week I’ve been blogging it in several guest posts over at Marathon Mama.

Now that the whole thing is up, here’s a roundup of all the pieces:

• Scratching My Seven-Year Itch
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act I
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act II
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act III
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act IV

Thanks again to everyone who supported me throughout my training, followed me during the race, and left such thoughtful comments for me on Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. I really appreciated it and know that all many of you wanted in return was to actually hear how it went. So, these posts are for you (you know who you are).

Okay, first off, my memory isn’t so short that I don’t remember what I wrote in January about the intrinsic rewards of running my own race and the corresponding implication that I would likely never desire to run another marathon ever again. As it turns out, a few months later, though I still believe the first part, the second part has gradually evolved into an actual need to run another marathon.

I don’t feel the need to analyze this swing too much (and I hope nobody else does either), but I can say that I know of three significant reasons for my change of heart:

1. Running has become much more important to me than I thought it would. I got back into running to get in shape, lose a few pounds, and generally look and feel better about myself. Since accomplishing those objectives, I’ve found how helpful the practice is for mental clarity and focus. That is to say, I no longer see running as a means to an end. It’s become an end in itself for me.
2. Someone close to me has served as a constant source of inspiration. It’s hard to watch, support, and feel constant awe and amazement for someone so passionate and talented about something you yourself do for more utilitarian reasons and not get swept up in the excitement and feel the need to take your own practice to the next level.
3. I simply have felt the need, for a while now, for a big hairy audacious goal. I want to do something significant, for myself. I want to chart a course for a distant destination and reach it. I want to see just how far these legs and this heart can take me.

I’d kept this idea to myself for a while, largely because of my previous public stance on the subject, but I eventually let it slip that I was considering training for the BayState Marathon in the fall. I wanted to run a marathon, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it (financially) by choosing a “destination race” (Lowell is the closest possible location for a marathon for me).

But then I learned that the San Francisco Marathon was scheduled for July 26. And I’ll be at a professional conference in San Jose on July 24. All I needed to do is stay an extra couple nights (one extra night, really, because I probably wouldn’t take the redeye on the 24th) and I could scoot up the coast to see the city by the bay and run across the Golden Gate Bridge. Twice. I registered on Monday.

Here’s a map of the course (view large):

But enough of all this apologia, which was necessary to defend myself against possible critique but which isn’t really the point of this post. I really want to talk about my need for a good, geeky piece of training technology to help me reach my goal.

There’s already one Garmin Forerunner 405 in our household, which I desire but which is pretty much always spoken for by its rightful owner. I figured I could get a more economical pedometer or spend somewhere in the range of $160-$200 for an earlier model Garmin, but I did just get a pretty extravagant birthday present, which makes investing in another expensive gadget hard to justify.

But then I saw a way of actually leveraging my pricey new gadget with a free application that could give me everything I need: Google’s My Tracks. The appeal of my phone actually serving as my GPS training partner was too good not to investigate, so I downloaded the application and gave it a spin. I wasn’t disappointed.

As mentioned on the Official Google Blog, My Tracks was developed as a “20% project” with the following features :

• Record and visualize GPS tracks while running, hiking, biking, skiing — or any other outdoor activity
• Get live statistics, such as total/moving time, (average) speed, distance, and elevation profile
• Send performance statistics to Google Docs to build a training history
• Mark places and describe activities for others to discover via Google Maps

I took it for a spin this morning and found it intuitive and incredibly easy to use. Here’s the information screen (on the left) and the elevation profile (on the right) for my run:

Just about all I’m missing in the stats are my mile splits, which I think I could actually get but haven’t figured out how to do so easily (i.e., without marking each mile manually while I’m running). And the elevation information will be particularly helpful for my training, as I’m actually seeking out hills (without much trouble) to help train for this particular race, which has never been accused of being a flat course.

All this information is great on the phone, but with a few quick touches on the screen, it becomes much more useful as a record. When I was done running, I just selected the option to send the map that was created on my run to Google’s My Maps, and the route went away to look like this:

You can even click on the route to get the specific stats for the particular run:

And the same click sends this information to a spreadsheet in Google Docs, recording everything you’d want to track in a training program:

Future runs will feed right into this document, perfect for keeping an eye on my improved speed (that’s the idea, at least) and cumulative mileage.

So, I think I’ve found my geeky running companion for this training round. It’s certainly by no means a watch (carrying it and pressing the touchscreen with my sweaty fingers will be cons I’ll have to deal with), but it will get the job done with a gadget I already own, which makes me feel better about the price of that gadget and happy to not have to invest in another.

Here’s something interesting: “Running My Own Race,” by LiveJournal user alexbutlervc* (not his own race, as it turns out):

If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s awfully similar to a post I wrote in January. Yes, that’s me in the picture, and even the links are mine (to my Twitter stream and my MapMyRun.com profile).

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve had my content plagiarized (though this stung a little more both because it was pretty personal and because I’m actually trying to parlay a version of the content into a different venue), so I wouldn’t even comment on it if it weren’t for the bizarre differences I noticed after my first glance. Take a closer look at that first screenshot, and then look at this one:

If you’re going to plagiarize me (and unless you’re actually trying to pass off my content as your own, there’s really no need, given my liberal Creative Commons license, which basically just asks for attribution and noncommerical use), at least use my own words! I know I’ve never begun a sentence with the phrase “mouth of need.”

Typically, when I’ve seen content from my blog appear elsewhere on the Web, it’s usually been the result of simple cut and paste or some kind of bot, just scraping the content and running with it, but what’s going on here? It’s like my post was run through a translator into another language and then converted back into English. Or something.

But the look of pain in an image is universal and doesn’t require translation:

Now, if I were to see my own likeness warped in the same way in which my words were garbled, well, goodly, most of the fashion, that would be a different narrative.

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* No links to provide, because the user has already been disabled and the post has been blocked, within an hour of my complaining to LiveJournal (thanks for the prompt attention, LiveJournal).