Last night we went paddling off Waikiki and…whales! Close too! They were so close that I thought: ummmmm….that’s close enough actually. It’s a big animal and a small canoe. We saw a mom and a baby humpback. The baby breached and there were tail flukes and pectoral fins. Good times.
This is what it’s like writing code sometimes with our esteemed graduate students, like panicsort:
Chillin with my dogs:
Our team successfully defended our 2012 Hapalua relay title this morning. I ran first and got our team off to an inauspicious start, when I missed the start. I blame that on the (figurative) starting gun going off at 7:10 when it was supposed to happen at 7:15. But I hopped a fence, ran over to the chip mat and got to chase down the other teams so it wasn’t so bad. I didn’t realize until after I finished that it didn’t really matter when I started since it was chip-timed anyway. We were battling with another team, when our 6th (of 7) leg started his 1.8mi run we were down 30s or so. It was looking bleak for the Toe Jammers. However! Our guy passed the other team and our anchor leg extended the lead to claim victory. We all won a felt-lined wooden box, with which we can store all of our Hapalua Relay finisher’s medals. FYI our final time for the 12.6 mi course was ~1:25, so there you go.
We got to run with Patrick Makau, Jimmy Muindi, and Nicolas Manza this morning for a couple laps around Kapiolani Park. It was pretty dang awesome. They started off really slow and there were ~25 people in our little pack. One woman kept running right in front of Makau which made me nervous. Patrick kept pointing out hazards so we wouldn’t trip. On the 2nd lap they sped up a little bit, and I started to hear some heavy breathing. By the end they were really rolling and it was just me and another guy that kept up with the trio. The last quarter mile was ~5 min pace which is way slower than Patrick’s marathon pace, but that dropped me and the other guy and they just floated away. I got my picture taken with all of them and my interactions with Makau were the following– I asked him if he was running London this spring, he said he was, then when we passed by the zoo, the monkeys were going crazy as they always do when the sun comes up. Patrick looked confused and mimed a monkey call, and I said there was a zoo nearby, lest he think Hawaii has wild monkeys. Then when we finished, Lindgren was running by and I told them how he was a great American runner in the 1960s, and once held the world record in the track 6-mile. They seemed the most interested in this last bit of information and pointed and talked amongst themselves. Anyway, it was good times for sure, probably the only chance I’ll get to run with the current standard-bearer in the marathon. This was a really cool event, I don’t think you could do this in New York or LA else there would be a thousand people there. I noticed that Makau has very thin calves, other than that he looked like a pretty normal runner dude, he can just go like hell.
Talia and I get to run with marathon world-record holder PATRICK MAKAU on Saturday!!!!! Super stoked.
PanSTARRS (lower-right, dusty tail) and Lemmon (upper-left, ion tail)
We were going to see Anna Karenina in the theaters, but it didn’t get great reviews and lasted about a week so we missed it. Finally we watched it over the weekend. I think, especially without having read the book, it would seem to be an overly stylized movie with a boring plot. So maybe the reviews are understandable. But really it was super fantastic! Loved it. Probably my favorite movie of 2012, along with Frankenweenie.
Noctambulator 