Wow, I haven't blogged since Friday. Heh.

I'm still getting everything together for the Whitney trip. We leave on Monday, and I want to have everything ready to go so I'm not all stressed out. On Saturday I went to the Folsom REI gear sale and they had more stuff than I've seen at any gear sale to date. But did I find anything that I wanted or needed? Nope. My wife found some shoes & boots for the kids, and Gregory got a marshmallow gun, but that was it.

I still needed more food for the trip, so I picked up a couple more Mountain House meals. With the Folsom store being so small, I decided to drive over to the Sacramento REI to pick up my synthetic thermal underwear. Come to find out, the construction on the store has made them reduce their inventory, and they didn't have anything in my size! So I drove to the Roseville store.

On the way through Roseville, I stopped off at Trader Joe's and got a dried fruit for the trip, as well as a cheese roll stuffed with ham and a loaf of dense bread. Good, good stuff. At REI, I picked up the thermal underwear.

Then today at lunchI ran 5.5 miles. I am just *loving* the weather lately! The high today's supposed to be 79, and while I was running it was a mere 64. 64 degrees!

I ran to the gym (3.25 miles, something like that), then did some weights in supersets of two:

1A: Bench Press, 3 sets of 6, 115lbs
1B: Dumbbell Curls, 3 sets of 6, 25lb dumbbells
2A: Chin-ups, 1 set of 2, 2 sets of 1
3A: Dumbbell Shoulder Press, 3 sets of 10, 25lb dumbbells
3B: Reverse Crunches, 3 sets of 10

Afterwards I ran the rest of the loop back to work, a little under 3 miles. I stopped the GPS timer when I stopped at the gym, then started it once I left again for accuracy. 50:18.79 for the loop, 9:13/mi which is almost :45 better than my last couple. I only worked the weights for 10 minutes. 726 total calories burned.

Today was another great run! Once again traffic wasn't cooperative. It has to be my timing coming up and going down the overpasses, but I always end up with 20 cars going onto the freeway whenever I need to cross! So I have to stop for sometimes 30 seconds or more for them, it sucks. At any rate, my pace was exactly the same as the other day, and my time was one second faster. And to top it off, I didn't feel like I did yesterday, which is great, hehe.

Most interestingly, the HRM and the GPS were IDENTICAL for calories burned: 690. I have no idea how that happened, the GPS is time & distance only. I suppose it's accurate at this point.

So anyway, 5.5 miles, 52 minutes, 690 calories burned.

Hey guys, I finally got around to trying out geotagging. It took some serious research to find the tools! It's still obscure for some reason.

A quick bit of background, part of the reason I took my Canon 10D with me on the last segment of the Tahoe Rim Trail was geotagging. I wanted to get the process down so when I take my trip to Mt. Whitney, I can have the pictures, with the GPS track, geotagged in Flickr, and mapped onto Google Earth. I haven't taken it to Google Earth yet.

So anyway, I took the pictures, and have the resulting jpegs in a folder. You can do this with the RAW files, but since I already had the jpegs on Flickr, I started there.

After lots of research I found a program called Geosetter. It works WONDERFULLY. When I put the .gpx file into the same folder as the images, once I clicked on the folder holding the images, it knew to use that file. It then was able to interpolate the data based on EXIF dates, and finally save the GPS data to the EXIF of the images.

Finally, I replaced the images already on Flickr with the updated ones. The process would have been a lot quicker had they not already been on Flickr, I could have just done one upload. You do need to tell Flickr that yes, you want to automatically map EXIF information.

Once I did that, the images were mapped within Flickr. Each image shows its city location, and a link to Map, which when clicked, shows the image on a map. Since this was backcountry hiking, I had to turn on the Satellite map. Here's a sample:



The rest of the images from that hike are here.

I apologize for not all the files being geotagged, but the images not taken by me didn't have timestamps. It seemed to work out pretty well! Not being a Picasa user, I'm not sure how it handles the images, but Flickr seemed to work out well.

I'll be geotagging a lot more images, as well as doing it for all the pictures from my upcoming Mt. Whitney trip.

It's AMAZING what a little cooler weather can do. Today it was a cool 63 degrees during my run, very abnormal for 10:30 on an early September day. For example, last week it was 80 when I went out. At any rate, I had the best run I've had in WEEKS.

Everything was better. My breathing was great, I wasn't fatigued, I felt like I could go on forever. The weather was awesome, my pace, while not my best, certainly was better than it's been. Well, you've heard me whining that my average has been more like 11 min/mile lately.

My pace was 9:42! That's the best it's been since before my bout with chest congestion, which was a few months ago now. Seriously, I did 5.25 miles in 52 minutes. And afterwards? I feel great!

While not accurate (I wasn't wearing the strap today), the GPS estimates 690 calories burned.

Anyway, I'm glad it was a nice day today.