I'll add more info later when my wrists and wits are feeling better.
About the Race
I don't like to think of it as a race. The competition is against and about yourself, not the others, at least for me (thankfully). This is my second one, so I got to beat my old time:| Splits: | 5 Km | 10 Km | 9 Mile | Finish | O'All | Sex | Div |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Times: | 36:00 | 1:10:43 | 1:43:44 | 2:34:12 | 9821 | 3280 | 483 |
| Pace: | 11:36 | 11:23 | 11:32 | 11:46 |
(http://www.liveraceresults.com/liveelite/)
Last year, however, there weren't nearly so many people!
The morning of I got up at 4:00am, ate an organic super food bar courtesy of Missy. It tasted great, but looked like a tarry turd forced into a square shape with nuts and chocolate chips pushed into it. I left about 4:15, walked to the Bear Creek P&R, and got picked up by Brian and Autumn.
I tend to narrowly focus on things I consider big, and so I have been unable to see past June 27th. My mind filled the sleep before with two nightmares about missing the race; neither of them I got even close to the starting line. In the first I woke up at 5:46 am, freaked out, and then looking at the clock it was suddenly 6:49 and I knew I'd never make it. At the end of that one I was in my old home in Cinebar. So then in the second I somehow transported or took a wrong portal or something and ended up in Cinebar. I walked through fields in the pre-dawn coming to the realization I'd never make it to Redmond in time, but ... then I decided I was only partially there and needed to wake myself up. I started biting my arm to induce enough pain to wake me and soon after I did, still much too early.
Twenty-five thousand people signed up from all over and of all shapes and sizes. How many of them chickened out, overslept, or fell ill to prevent their participation? Luckily, not Autumn or I. Placing things on a particular place and time is partially a gamble. It can't be repeated or postponed. Instruments of terror for a subconscious sandbox. I ate a pair of cheap, microwaved, spicy beef burritos the previous afternoon; knowingly set myself up to wonder how normal my bowels would stay.
Thank goodness for the porta-potty! For tons of people they had tons of your favorite green shit sheds. One the south end of the starting village, the units were fewer and the lines longer. While Autumn waited in those I headed north and found what looked like hundreds of them requiring no delay whatsoever. Prior to standing for an hour in corral 34, I had to actually sit in one; what a hassle! A childhood of outhouses has seared an indoor toilet obsession into my psyche and plastic seats on ponds of pooh are frickin' gross, man!
Autumn didn't estimate her time, so she ended up in the third-to-last corral. What they did is divide up a drive way into thirty-six sections using volunteers with signs and rope, then you got placed based on how fast you guess yourself to be. That also got reflected as your bib number's prefix. You could move to later corrals without any official consent, but you couldn't move to earlier (lower numbered) ones or you'd be disqualified. The announcer made it sound as if disqualification would occur even after you started running; we weren't the only anxious people to puncture the initial paranoia with logic.
Next year I'd like to start in a faster corral, if nothing else to have to dodge less people. When it was our turn to go, we immediately hit wall after wall of walkers. I even cut the starting part out of the above video, because it's so anti-climatic. It's not immodest to guesstimate a 5+ minute loss alone due to the dance maneuvers required to squeeze past slow plodders, and the energy lost to it. Perhaps if the organizers pushed road rules (pass on left, slow on right), it would have been smoother.
The I-90 tunnel turned into another choke point for an entirely different reason. With so many people it felt not only cramped, but lacking in clean air and ... well, someone in front of me farted too. With 70% females, a good percentage probably blamed me. While I flailed uselessly to escape the stink cloud, it hit me that I had forgotten to put on deodorant. Whoops!
Vocal spectators and especially the cheerleaders helped a ton. There's a magnificent feeling of mutual energy amongst the moving mob, but they're generally silent minus the huffing. It's an extra boost to have outsiders yell encouragements as you pass. I don't remember cheerleaders last year, but those girls were especially great. Just after the 12 marker, going up an incline with very little juice left, a group of them near-unanimously held out their hands. It reminded me of those racing video games where you roll over arrow-signs for temporary speed increases. I hooted and hollered as I got my high-fives, then whipped out my camcorder for some of the final footage before crossing the finish.
I hadn't much analyzed the course map besides the major hills and markers, so I didn't know where it would end. Coming down the viaduct parallel to Qwest Field, I totally thought the turn into it was the last stretch. I turned on those big leg muscles, powered through the U-turn, and nearly fell to see the finish line all the way down at the parking lot! I dropped back to a jog and waddled much closer before picking myself up for a short, final sprint.
Shade could be found at the edges where scrawny trees or shrubs overlooked gigantic flats of Cytomax bottles bundled tightly in reams of plastic wrapping. Near one of these, we sat on a pallet. It didn't last long, I ended up lying back on it. Autumn and I had started to walk across the lot when the sun suddenly got very bright and I knew I was moments away from passing out. So we stayed there, near the corner and the volunteer's section, for quite some time to recuperate.
Next year? Hell yeah!
About the Video
Made with footage from a Canon FS100 camcorder (yes, I carried it the whole way) using Adobe Premiere CS4 on my ThinkPad T400 running Windows 7 (Build 7100). I went out an bought a monitor ($120 after tax at Staples) to extend my viewing area into something reasonable; CS4 isn't even usable on a single display.
Concatenating all the clips would have resulted in a boring, shaky, and unwatchable mess so I came up with the idea of making a "movie trailer". Through SoundtrackNet I found Trailerhead's The Immediate and chose the track "Serenata Immortale". The song provided three theme changes, so that gave me four sections to work with which I labeled Introduction, Gathering, Running, and Finishing. From there I simply fought with the software to place the pieces at the right times and speeds.
One particular aspect which drove me nuts was deinterlacing. Most MPEG-2 devices, this camera included, shoot interlaced anamorphic widescreen. It basically means the picture quality is crap and you have to exert effort to clean up. For this, I incorrectly assumed that CS4 would (being part of a modern non-linear editing suite) do this automatically. No, no; not so. Unfortunately I found the Field Options selection and painstakingly turned on "Always deinterlace" on all the clips in my sequence. Are you using interlaced video in CS4? Do not do use this feature! The result is worse than if you simply export your rough cut with interlacing and use VirtualDub or FFmpeg to finalize.
Given the particularly tremorous nature of my shots while running with a tiny handheld, the blending of fields caused something akin to double-vision. After an hour or so of fighting with various methods of clean-up I ended up on the most simplistic: scale it down. The resolution of the original is 720x480 anamorphic widescreen meaning if you watch at 720 pixels wide, it should be about 376 pixels high at 16:9. Anyway, I halved the height and calculated the proper width, for square pixels, to be 426. Effective result is essentially a smaller progressive video. Some artifacts remain, especially where I sped things up in CS4, but I assure you the original is way more seizure inducing!
My recommendation to you and me: avoid interlaced capture as much as possible. I knew the limitations when I bought it, but I did not anticipate filming something with so much movement either. I could have avoided this hassle entirely using a progressive recorder. In the absence of purchasing something better, deinterlace your clips prior to altering their play speed!
1 comments:
And holy crap! Congratulations!!!
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