2012 Champaign St. Jude Runners

2012 Champaign St. Jude Runners
Our AMAZING group of runners for 2012~

St. Jude Supporters

St. Jude Supporters
After running for 20 hours, the thousands of supporters lining the streets to cheer our arrival is an important and welcome boost!

Friday, March 9, 2012

A 100 Mile Downhill Run to Peoria - Join the Run!

As a new Co-Coordinator with my wife, I bring a certain, let's say, computer savvy to the table. Kathleen, truth be told, is the real organizer here, but even she won't dispute that I'm in charge of computer stuff.  One look in my really only "domain" (the garage), and it has the overall look of a manic squirrel's attempt to store everything ever found. For good measure, I might move stuff around from time-to-time, but it really is quite disorderly (first step to recovery is acknowledgement, right?).

I do suspect that Kathleen throws stuff out every now and then just to try and keep ahead of the disorderly piles of junk--but I digress.

Back to the computer.

I saved last year's Champaign-to-Peoria route in GoogleEarth (did I mention that I save everything--including all my tens of thousands of computer files?), and pulled it up to look at once again. My intent was to see if I could not improve on the way we keep track of each run segment, and try to get a better grip on the pacing.

There are a lot of cool GoogleEarth tricks once you look under the hood. One of my favorites is the elevation view of any segment. It gives you the minimum and maximum elevations, along with the grade (how steep it is). In short, the wuss in me wants to ensure I don't attempt to run anything out of my league. I intend to run 20 miles this time, and don't want to burn out on some steep hills (yes, we do have hills in the area for those of you not familiar with the area).

So, I've been busy in my downtime looking over the best way to log and qualify each segment. I decided to take a look at the big picture. What does the entire route look like, elevation-wise? I selected the entire 100 mile length, then clicked on the elevation profile view.

Much to my satisfaction, the entire route, on average, is nothing more than a downhill run to Peoria. Sure there are some hills there--but hey, look at the big picture. We start at 749' MSL (mean sea level), and at the end, we wind up at 515' MSL. Even given that there are some hills there, on balance, it's a simple jog downhill to Peoria!

Easy-peasy!

Join us!!

Ed
www.custjuderun.org



1 comment:

  1. Nice job son, looking forward to much more. Dad

    ReplyDelete