Julien's fuzzy blog

Yesterday Karim and me went running a nice 26km in Richmond Park, located in South-West London (zone 4). With a surface of 10km², it's 4 times a big as Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens together ! As a matter of fact the main running loop is twice longer (11.5km).
This park is a really great place to run, with sand tracks running in the meadows, the ferns and the woods. We even saw a deer, which are quite common apparently. People are pretty more friendly and talkative there than in Hyde Park.
With 16km on Saturday, that's just 42km in the week-end . I will now start to reduce the training volume during the 3 weeks remaining before the Amsterdam Marathon.

Yesterday I acquired some videos of me moving around, aiming to reconstruct a 3D model. In order to get the camera parameters, I also acquired a couple of sequences with a grid for further calibration.



By the way, you can also see a bit of my "fashionable" red tight T-shirt. Theoretically used as a hiking underwear, I found it suitable to contrast with the background... but also to get lots of comments !

New small game: you may have noticed that I put an icon on the left of title bar a couple of weeks ago. Where does that come from ?

By the way, nobody found how to reproduce the bug... It's done by importing a simple PNG image file in PowerPoint.

A nice runner gathered here most of the TV and radio programs about the trail:

• 1 min on EuroNews
• 2 min on TF1
• 3 min on France 3 Rhone-Alpes
• 5 min on France 2 (Stade 2)
• 1h30 on France Culture (radio)

All of them in French I'm sorry

Yesterday, four men died during the Great North Run (half-marathon). I'd like to take the occasion to reply to a popular idea about running to death.
Lots of people believe that the longer you run, the more you're heating and therefore the more likely you are to die by over-heating. As a matter of fact ultra-races are really dangerous. That's absolutely wrong! You have pretty less chance to die running a 100km than a 10km. Because the pace is far slower while running 100km, the body produces less heat. Over-heating occures during more intense (and therefore shorter) exercise. If the weather is not too hot, over-heating is not a serious problem during an ultra race.
Obviously if you run the Bad Water Ultramarathon (217km in the Death Valley, temperatures up to 55°C) or the Marathon des Sables it's a bit different...

Oh, I just noticed I forgot to tell you that on the UTMB food points there were lots of organic, spelt (épeautre) and seed germs bread ... Some will understand, others not.

Yesterday night, after a VIP annual diner that sounded pretty posh (I wore my suit, but no tie ), around 20 of us went to a pub nearby to celebrate something. Thanks a lot to all that went there and also to all that just couldn't... I had a great time !

Today I had once more in my life to use MS Windows to write a couple of slides. I don't really understand how people can use that s***. After waiting 30 minutes for all the updates, I got loads of error messages all the time, crash notifications, etc. The CPU was always busy for some reason. I wanted to change to wallpaper, but it only takes BMP files and 'Paint' was not able to open my JPEG to translate it (convert wp.jpeg wp.bmp rules). I couldn't even launch IE once, it crashed before. Using Mozilla, I couldn't listen to the radio online although the plugin was installed. Then PowerPoint drove me crazy with the spacing and alignment in bullet boxes that were always everything but what I wanted.

Small game: can you reproduce this bug of a MS software ?

A farmer in Brittany (west of France) invented a process to brew a kind of beer from milk, using bacteria involved in the kefir. It's composed of 75% milk and 25% malt, for an alcohol rate of 2%.
original article on liberation.fr in French
translated by google (approximative)

Warning: fuzzy blog entry !

More and more people keep asking me why I've not posted anything last week. A couple of answers and notes:

• when's the last post on Tbo's blog ? (do not invert month/day...)
• I'm quite happy to know that some people get kind of addicted to this blog
• nothing really exciting happened in my life last week...

Post-UTMB thoughts:
It's hard to believe, but the race went actually pretty easier than I expected. I also recovered really faster than I thought I would. Probably because I didn't push it hard enough though... Next year, on top of the 1st objective which is obviously to finish again, I'll then set as a 2nd one to finish in 32h or so. I'll probably dedicate my year training specifically for this event. Which means less speed training, longer distance and more mountain training . Amsterdam and maybe London marathons will be some kind of secondary events. I found running a marathon was a great thing, but running in the nature is much more enjoybable.
I was thinking about organising my own trails in UK or in France, to be run alone or in a small group. Why not try to run the West Highland Way (from the north of Glasgow to Fort William) in one stage for example ?

I've started to run again on Sunday, but far too much as I've cumulated more than 38km in 4 days. As I'm a bit sick, I'm resting again for a couple of days.
Actually the more I run, the more I need to run. I guess there's a limit. Have I reached this limit ? Some people (including Guang-Zhong, sic) started to tell me I'm running too much. That's maybe true, I don't know. Have your say by posting a comment !

Yesterday I went to watch a comedy starring Theo, called The Open Couple.

"The play deals with the fate of women in a society in which both the social system in which they live and its dominant ideology are shaped by men. The story revolves around a couple which is contemplating the virtues and vices of an open relationship."

It was really funny and true at the same time. Also, I think Theo's personality was rather suitable for the character he played ... It was professionally interpreted, I had a really good time.

I can't wait getting the full-size pictures... So hereafter some of the mini official photos.

Beginning	Middle	End

Also I forgot to thank Yoyo for his blog full of advice and the nurse at the refuge Bertone.

I'm a bit tired these days, and unfortunately I've just fell aslept in front of my desk. When I woke up, my file was full of spaces . Kwrite, the text editor, didn't seem to appreciate and crashed !