Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Boulder Dash

As I think we mentioned, we've been away on holiday for some time - and I'm sure some pictures will start to make an appearance quite soon. Since the summer holiday season seems to start around Memorial Day, we had arranged to be in Boulder for the Bolder Boulder race on that day. We'd had fun doing this two years ago, just as we were starting to run quite regularly. So we entered again.

The week we had in Boulder prior to the race was long enough to realise how hard the altitude would make things, but not enough to acclimatise to it. So we knew we were not going to be fast. A few days before the event, I got an email from the organisers offering me a free t-shirt if I ran under 40 minutes, which seemed a bit of a cruel tease. By half way round it was clear that I wasn't going to be breaking any records (even personal ones) but I managed to pace myself to my minimal goal of running faster in minutes than my age in years, which is one achievement that should get easier in the future. One drawback of starting in an early start wave (with my starting position being based on results in flat races at sea level) was that plenty of people overtook me on the way round. My time of 43:42 was by some way my slowest 10k run since the previous Bolder Boulder. Jules also was several mins quicker than before at 55:52.

Back in Japan now and summer is coming...we'll not be racing for a few months, though at least the run to work is mostly shaded by trees.

7 comments:

David Young said...

So, that would place you in your mid to late 40's. :-)
Still a spring chicken by my standards and probably young enough to be able to see more definite evidence on climate one way or another. Let me know how it turns out ;-) I'm still waiting to shoot my age in golf and may never make it.

James Annan said...

Early to mid, please :-)

I took my pacing seriously and only over-exerted myself to the tune of 18 seconds.

Paul S said...

I see Jules has noticed a newly-submitted paper on LGM simulations forced with differing ice sheet topographies, which suggests it has implications for climate sensitivity estimates. Taking a quick peek the difference between their upper-bound and lower-bound LGMs is 0.3ÂșC globally, which seems negligable.

By the way, do you know what happened to Gavin's PMIP/CMIP sensitivity paper which was in CPD a couple of months ago?

James Annan said...

I think the LGM ice sheet differences are quite large locally, but not overall.

As it happens, I was just doing some of my contribution to the revision of Gavin's paper. It will probably remain underground for some time to come (such is CP/CPD's process).

David Young said...

The paper is available on the CPD web site and has a couple of comments.

KarSteN said...

@Paul S:

I have posted an update on Otto et al. in the other thread (sorry for double posting James): More on that recent sensitivity paper
... might be in moderation yet ...

Hank Roberts said...

While you were out:

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2013/06/14/38-nh-sh-differential-warming-and-tcr/#comments