Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Last weekend, a bunch of friends and I crammed into a couple vans and participated in the Texas Independence Relay. The 203.20 relay race started in Gonzales, Texas…

We ran throughout the beautiful Texas countryside… town to town…

I only managed to get two legs in before my IT band said no more. I’m pretty sure this injury was a result of the Austin marathon and over-training… I plan to switch to the bicycle for the next few weeks while I recover. Thankfully, my awesome team managed to pick up the rest of my legs. We eventually made it to the Houston downtown area…

In the end, we managed to get to the San Jacinto Monument in 24:59:10!

I believe we placed in the top 5, but I’m not sure. I’ll know when the final results are posted from the race. On the whole, I highly recommend anyone who wants to do a relay race to do the TIR, there’s no better way to explore the Texas country side.

I was introduced to Fat Bet recently.

I have a couple colleagues participating in a “fat bet” and I’m a bit surprised with their progress. The way it works is you simply wager some money and set weight targets amongst a group of friends. You track the progress of each other online and in the end, the person that reaches their target first will win the most money in the pot. As a bonus, if you’re a spectator to the bet, you get an overview of everyone’s progress via a console…

If you dive deeper, you can see a graph of how close people are to meeting their targets…

So far it seems to be working well. There’s also a comedic bonus of hearing about your colleagues trying to sabotage each other’s fat bet by bringing in donuts and breakfast tacos into the office (human guile at it’s finest).

In the end, I guess an incentive of money tied to people’s pride works well ?

Last week, I was on business in London but I had a bit of time for pleasure.

I have an extensive bucket list. One of those items was to have fish and chips in London.

Check (I could go without the mushy peas though).

While I was there, I also had the opportunity to tour the Tower of London.

I highly recommend the tour… the English loved their executions. On top of the history lesson, you get to see some sweet armaments…

The final verdict? Beautiful city with a lot of rich history. I could go without the cold rain though

I’m running the Texas Independence Relay again.

203.20 miles and 40 relay legs of running goodness…

This time I have the honor of being team captain and organizing the logistics of the race. After calculating our current leg times, I’m predicting that we will finish under 24 hours which is my goal. Last year the team finished just about 24 hours and we received 3rd place in the open mixed division.

My goal is to best that time from last year and hopefully finish in the top three again. I will take pictures and document the journey as much as I can!

Yesterday, I participcated in the Austin Marathon which happened to be on Valentine’s Day.

The weather was beautiful in the morning, albeit chilly for Austin. I had a great start, hitting the 5K mark at about 22:27 with the 3:10 pace group. I continued on and hit the 10 mile mark at 1:12:21 with the 3:10 pace group. Just before the half marathon mark, I had to take a pit stop due to some stomach issues and tried to catch up to the 3:10 pace group. The pit stop was longer than I wanted it to be as I ended up crossing the half marathon mark at about 1:35:46 which was slightly behind my goal pace. I kept trying to chase the 3:10 group but couldn’t catch it after my pit stop. I crossed the 20 mile mark at about 2:30:03 which in my definition, equates to dragging ass. I managed to finish the marathon in 3:21:50…

My goal was 3:10 but I obviously missed it this time around. My stomach never felt the same after the pit stop and I had trouble catching up. If I take any lessons from this race, it’s to avoid pit stops at all costs. It breaks your rhythm.

My next marathon will be the Chicago Marathon where I will run a sub 3:10

I nearly died laughing at the latest Dilbert.

Ah, the life of a consultant.

Oh, and Scott Adams is a treasure.

Last Saturday, I trekked out from Austin to Lake Houston Wilderness Park for the Piney Woods 10mi Trial Run. Nothing like a three-four hour drive leaving Austin in the middle of the night to run a trail race.

It was a cold and muddy day sloshing through the trails. I had a great start to the race and jumped out in front to hang out to second place most of the race. The mix of single track and stretches of road was fantastic, the course was never boring. The only mishap I had was towards the last half mile of the race where the trail was poorly marked and I choose the wrong turn. I had to pedal back and that’s where a couple of people caught up to me and then I wiped out pretty badly on the trail while fuming about the poor trail marking.

I managed to finish the race in 1:14 and finished first in my age group. I came out of the trails pretty much covered in mud… my socks were no longer white but a dark shade of gray…

After the race, everyone bunched around the fire pit to get some warmth and also to chow down on some BBQ and beer. The BBQ was excellent and the race organizers did an excellent job supplying the attendees with unlimited BBQ and beer.

In the end, it was a fun race and I hope they put it on again next year. My only advice is that if there’s a split on the trail, please take extra caution in labeling where to go for us runners who get tunnel vision sometimes

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to run in the RunTex 20 Miler. All I can say is that it was freezing (for Austin) and I wasn’t ready for the cold…

I ended up finishing the race in roughly 2:29:30 which equates to about a 7:27/mi pace.

How did I feel? Pretty roughed up… my legs were fine but my stomach was in knots after the race. It didn’t help that when you finished the freezing race, there was nothing warm at the finish to consume. I mean, thanks for the bananas but I would have paid $20 for a cup of coffee at the point. My pace is still a bit slower than I want it to be. I should be running a 7:15/mi pace if I want to qualify for the Boston marathon this year when I run the Austin marathon in February.

I had a colleague of mine recently come to me and ask how to travel more optimally given that he’s taken a consulting job, that you guessed it, involves about one hundred percent travel. I’m coming close to breaking about 1,000,000 air miles so I figure I would share some wisdom I acquired over the years regarding traveling.

Airlines

The first and foremost thing you need to do is get status on an airline and choose an airline alliance. It makes a world of a difference when traveling, from free upgrades to just saving you time at the airport (e.g., quicker lines). I fly American Airlines (AA) which is part of the oneworld alliance whenever I can. To help you get status, some airlines have “challenge” programs like AA which helps getting some level of status easier. For example, I can do the platinum challenge on AA and get platinum status with only flying 10,000 miles versus the usual 50,000. I highly recommend browsing the Flyertalk forums and FlyerGuide wiki to see if your airline has a program. Another option is to do a “mileage run” which allows you to get status by flying a route to get the most miles for the lowest price. It’s a bit crazier than the challenge route but hey, you can always turn a mileage run into a vacation

Most airlines also allow you to fly standby on earlier (or even later) flights at NO COST. As a frequent traveler, this is something you can take advantage of to get home earlier or get somewhere later.

In terms of managing your itineraries I recommend a service like Tripit.com to keep things in one place. Also, there are services like Kayak.com that help you search for cheaper flights across airlines if price is an issue for you. For more advanced users, you can check out ITA Software’s search which powers a lot of what the airlines use for their booking systems.

Also, if you’re interested in how much miles a route will be, I tend to use the Great Circle Mapper to get a good estimate. For example, if I was going to go to Frankfurt from Austin with a stopover in Dallas, I would get a map like this…

Airplanes

If you fly a lot, having a good seat is important. If you’re a techie, it’s also important to have a seat with power so you can use your laptop in the comfort of your seat. I use the website SeatGuru to find out information about the variety of planes there.

Remember green seats are good!

Baggage

Never check in your bags. Period.

Airports

Airline lounges are key if you’re stuck in an airport for a long time. One thing to note is that if you have an American Express Platinum card, it gives you access to pretty much any airline lounge out there. In the oneworld alliance, I’ve found the best lounges to be from Qantas and British Airways. Depending on the airline alliance you choose, feel free to browse other airline’s lounges within your alliance (they usually let you).

I also recommend that you have hotel reservation lines on speed dial. On top of that, I have some specific airport hotels (Chicago Hilton and DFW Hyatt) on speed dial in case I’m stranded at an airport. If there’s really bad weather, chances are everyone wants to stay at the closest hotel available. Don’t be the guy that gets to sleep at the airport because you weren’t savvy enough to get a reservation.

Hotels

For hotels, just like airlines you should choose an alliance as you’ll get better benefits that way and more rewards. There’s lots of options to choose from, but I highly recommend staying with the Starwood or Hilton set of hotels. They tend to have the most hotels available worldwide and when it comes to cash in reward points, they make for nice vacation lodging.

Cars

To keep up with the mantra of picking an alliance, in rental car land it’s important to just stick with a brand. There’s quite a bit to choose from but I recommend using Hertz or Avis as they are the stronger brands out there. I’ve heard good things about National and used them for a recent ski trip but I’ve had no issues as a long time Hertz user.

Summary

So if I was going to summarize my advice, I say that choosing an alliance for both an airline and hotel is the most important thing you can do to make your travel easier. Other than that, enjoy your time in the sky.

Anyone else have some good travel tips?

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate in the somewhat informal 1.1.Run in Austin. There’s no better way to start out the new year then heading out for a nice run to fight a hangover or post new year’s blues. Especially when it involves people running in their skivvies.

The route was interesting in that no one really knew what it was until the start of the race. The race started from Jack and Adams Bicycles and involved finding the shortest route to Rogue Equipment and back.

In the end, I believe I managed to finish in the top three. Thank you to Jack and Adams and Red Licorice for hosting the event. I recommend you do the same thing next year.

Here’s to a successful year of running in 2010!