Rapper dan een Ezel half marathon

Yesterday, I ran my second half marathon in my life, the 'Rapper dan een ezel' 1/2 marathon in Kuurne.  Having finished my first one in 1:38:36 (12.84 km/h), I decided to set my goal for this one at 1:35:00 (13.33 km/h).

Being very enthusiastic about the whole thing of trying to break my personal record, I decided to start with a 12-week training schema some 3 months ago.  I started training in July when I was in holidays... so there was plenty of time to train and in July and the beginning of August, I kept up with the scheme quite well... but then, the first two weeks of August we went to France for the British Open paragliding championships and this somehow broke my training rhythm.  After we got back from our holiday in France, I had to work again and there was less time for training... the only training-sessions I had were the 30 minutes easy runs together with Hanne, at quite an easy pace... and OK, I have to admit... it was not just because of a lack of time that I didn't train much anymore, i simply also was a bit lazy...

So... my preparation for this race was not ideal, but being a man of my word I decided to participate anyway.  Last time, I also hadn't trained for it and for sure I was planning to reach my goal of 1:35:00.  The task was easy: I had set up my Garmin Forerunner at 13.5 km/h and all I had to do was follow my Virtual Partner on that little machine!  For the first two laps, I constantly was some 50m in front of my Virtual Partner... with a nice 4:30 min/km which would lead me to my personal record... This went well until around km 13 in the third lap where I started slowing down.  I had been trying to follow Maaike Ryngaert in the second lap, and now I paid the price for that :-(  Although not as fast as planned, I managed to stay below 5:20 from km 13 to km 17, but the last 4 km were just hell.  My only goal during the last lap was not to walk, as I did in my first half marathon, thereby hoping to still run faster than my personal record 1:38:36.  Knowing that my last 4 km were all somewhere between 5:52 and 6:00, it was quite clear that this race would not end in a personal record... I finished 270th out of 541 participants in 1:45:24.2 which is a weak 12.01 km/h... not something I should be proud of.

Lessons learned:

1. If you want to perform well in a half marathon, you have to train!
2. Trying to follow women who run faster than you is not good for your pace at the end of the race.
3. Maybe I should just skip the Garmin Virtual Partner thing... all it does is make me run fast the first 10km and slow the last 10km...

Some pictures of the race can be found in my Picasa Album.  You can also checkout my Garmin tracklog to see how I ran my first kilometer in 4:16.4 and my worst kilometer in 6:00.1.

Belgian Ardenne Paragliding Open 2011: Task 3

Today, I had to choose between running (Warandeloop) or flying (BAPO).  Because the weather was announced good, I decided to go flying and skip the running.  It turned out to be a good choice.  Let me explain why...

I started the day with getting up at 6h45 and taking my train at 7h40 from Kortrijk to Godinne.  Arriving at Godinne, my first mission was to walk to take-off along a rather unknown trail:

For those of you who don't know it, here's the tracklog of this walk.  This trail is less convenient than the one where you go left at the roundabout because it is steeper and there is more annoying vegetation:

In my opinion, you don't gain that much time in taking this path...

My first flight wasn't much of a big thing.  I landed after 42 minutes without making any distance.  Plenty of time for taking some pictures of the other pilots still battling their way up

I hiked back up along the easy trail, and quietly prepared for my second and probably also last flight of the day.  My expectations weren't that high... my mind was set to a bomb-out flight and I was already thinking of at what time I would be able to take the train back home after my landing.  It turned out completely different!  After some ridge-soaring action, i found a thermal that brought me to 1491m and there I decided to head for the first waypoint.  Once there, I was already quite a bit lower, but I simply enjoyed the flight and the nice view on the city of Namur.  I found two other smaller thermals somewhere east of Namur, and headed for the next turnpoint... which i didn't make.  I had to land after 19.8 km open distance, which is my personal best in Belgium!  My previous best was 18.3 km from Coo :-)  No need to say I was a happy man!  The tracklog of my flight is here.

After having packed my glider, I arranged with the organizers that I would send them my tracklog file afterwards, because I wanted to catch my train in Namur, which was about 8 km away from my landing spot.  After an 8 km hike through several small towns...

... I finally made it to Namur's trainstation, right on time for the 19h21 train to Brussels-South!

As Murphy always strikes when you don't need him, my train in Brussels-South had a delay of 32 minutes... so I arrived in Kortrijk around 22h15 instead of 21h45 as I had planned... I jumped on my bike and was finally home at 22h30... tired, but satisfied!

More pictures of today can be found in my Google+ album.  Feel free to comment!

The bet

A few weeks ago, I've made a bet with Eef, a colleague of mine.  The purpose of this post is to make it official.  The bet goes as follows:

If Eef has a Google+ account before January 1st 2013, then she buys me French fries (with ketchup), a Bicky Burger and an Ice Tea.  If she doesn't have a Google+ account by then, then I buy her the same, or another similar menu that she likes and which is in the same price category.

Looking forward to January 1st 2013, I salute you!
Bart

Paragliding: a sport or a risk?

The last few days have been really dark for the paragliding community.  During the World Paragliding Championship, two (very experienced) pilots crashed and did not survive.  On top of that, in the same weak, Xavier Murillo (one of the important people behind the organization of the paragliding world cups) was missing in Peru and after a search and rescue operation was found dead in the mountains at 4800m altitude.

Today, I heard about a fatal accident of a Belgian pilot that I knew personally.  He is leaving a wife and two young children...  Especially this last fact makes me very sad about the whole situation.  Being a young father myself, I am more and more wondering whether I should continue with this 'sport' or not.  No matter how safe we try to fly, no matter how good we are, no matter how careful we plan our take-off and landings, no matter how good we study the weather forecast, accidents do always happen.

On the one side, there is the joy of flying, the wonderful delight that we experience while thermaling, while being at cloud base, while making a transition.  When I'm up there in a nice flight, I often think of my father who passed away more then 14 years ago.  Somehow, I feel connected with him when I'm up there all alone.  But when I'm grounded, reading about all these fatalities, i cannot get it out of my head that some day, i might be next.  Is that really what I want?  Do I really want to leave Tine and Jenne alone on this planet.  No I don't!

But I also want to live!  And paragliding is part of that!  People who do not fly, probably cannot understand why it is so hard to quit our sport, even if we hear about fatal accidents, even if we know there is a risk.  It is a strange battle inside, and I guess the adventurer in us wins...

Paragliding is not something that I do for the adrenaline rush.  My personal motivation is twofold: first of all, i feel connected with my father when flying.  Secondly, having experienced his battle against cancer from very close at the age of 18, i now know that I should squeeze as much out of life as I can.  Paragliding is part of that.  I hope Tine and Jenne can understand... and I hope they can forgive me if I make a mistake here...

Belgian championships half marathon 2011

So... today was all about running a half marathon.  Tine, Jenne, me and our Croozer Kid for 2 decided to take our bikes on the train and head for Diksmuide where the championship took place.  For Jenne, it was his first train-trip.  Although from the following picture one would think that he felt quite uncomfortable, he actually did enjoy the train very much!

Tine was the photographer of the day and cruised around with the Croozer to shoot some pictures somewhere half-race.  Jenne controlled the whole thing and gave instructions to his mom and other marathon-marshals:

 

As for the race... i finally figured out one should train for half or full marathons!  Having not trained too much the last weeks/months, I've put my goal at 1:30:00... which later turned out to be quite wishful thinking...  The start was OK, as the following pictures proves:

Quite fast I was 250m ahead of my Garmin Virtual partner (which was setup to run 14 km/h).  Somehow, the first kilometers I had the feeling that I was going to be able to keep up this tempo... but wait... this is a half-marathon, isn't it?  And one should not underestimate half marathons!!!  All went fine up until 10km... from then on my 250m started to shrink... after 14kms I was zero meters in front of my Virtual Partner and from then on, things went bad... very bad... See my Garmin tracklog for the proof!  This picture was taken somewhere between 14km and 15km, a very miserable moment:

I got behind my Virtual Partner very quickly.  I ran my first wishful thinking kilometer in 3m51s, and my worst kilometer in 6m59s... notice the difference of 3m08s!  Before the race, i had in mind to run the whole thing... I was definitely going to run the whole 21km!  But hey... this is a half-marathon, isn't it?  And one should not underestimate half marathons!!!  Somewhere around 17km, i was half-dead... and my body told me that I had to walk otherwise I would probably crash... so I walked... shame on me!

I finally finished the race in 1:38:34 (time from my Garmin), which is a modest 13 km/h.  I think I now know that training is the key to succes... luckily, it was fun after all and Jenne was so proud of his father's gold medal!

Finally, I am on Google+ !!!  Watch my profile!

Smooth, smoother... smoothest!

After a visit from Mr. Gardener, the conclusion was clear: we had to level our garden even more!  So that was what we did today.  I hope Mr. Gardener will be happy with the new result:

Note that we didn't have a spirit level.  The only tools we used were:

• a spade and a shovel
• a garden and leaf rake
• a rope and some wooden sticks

 Life can be so simple sometimes...

Open Source alternatives for Adobe Dreamweaver

Quite recently, Tine got interested in digital photography and now she is looking for a way to put her nice pictures online in a nice personal website.  The question remains: what software-tool should she use to make this website?  From what I asked her, I have the impression that she will only need a static website with some photo gallery, so I'm looking for good Open Source alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver.  I'll try to summarize my findings in this blog post.

• KompoZer 
• Aptana Studio

Real-time GPS tracking

For a while now, I've been looking for good real-time GPS tracking options that work with my Android phone.  I want to use this technology for the following things:

• When I'm away from home, to let my family know where I am.
• If I go running or hiking, to let others follow me online and in real-time.
• For fun and safety while paragliding, also in real-time.

Some criteria that are important to me:

• low battery consumption
• possibility to view everything live in Google Earth
• preferably allow customization of the time between two track points
• ease of use

These are the current solutions that I came across, together with their advantages and disadvantages:

1. Google Latitude: advantage is that it falls back on mobile phone or WiFi networks for the localization if GPS is not available.  Battery consumption seems also ok.
2. Gaggle with LiveTrack24: seems nice for paragliding, but looks a bit overkill for simple running or hiking.  Rumors indicate that it has a high battery consumption...
3. InstaMapper: haven't tested this one yet, but might be an option for running...
4. WiaTrack for GPS-Trace Orange: haven't tested this one yet.

If you have other (preferably Free and Open Source) suggestions, please let me know!

Kortrijk Loopt 2011

Yesterday, a lot of recreational runners gathered at sports centre De Lange Munte to participate in Kortrijk Loopt, a quite commercial running event here in my city.  I was one of those participants and decided to go for the full 11km, just to check the status of my physical fitness and to have a reference race for future comparisons. Here are some pictures of state-of-the-art running-action:

Unfortunately, Murphy stroke me again... after a full one and a half minute of racing, the battery of my Garmin Forerunner 305 decided to give up... so there I was for the rest of the race without the technology that would deliver me all the statistics that a scientist could ever dream of! Luckily, there was a backup solution: the electronic time recording setup by the organizers. However, big was my surprise this morning when I found myself classified as a 'Did Not Finisher' in the end results! Of course I finished! Of course I would not give up on a stupid 11km race like this! Who the hell did they think they are, putting me in the DNF status!

I immediately emailed the organizers and after a few minutes got a friendly reply saying they were looking into it. And yes, a few hours later, they seem to have corrected my result. I am now listed 85th out of 929 starters of which 914 finished the race. I have squeezed the 11 km in 46m03s, which gives me an average speed of 14.34 km/h or 4m12s per kilometer. The complete results can be found here. The organizers assured me the correctness of my result with the following email:

Dag Bart, 

Deze uitslag is 100% zeker en geregistreerd door onze computers.

Normaal gezien moet je over 2 aankomstmatten lopen bij de finish. Deze liggen net achter elkaar, het tijdsverschil is dus haast nihil. De gecombineerde registratie levert je resultaat op. Als 1 van beiden ontbreekt, vissen we je resultaat op door de jouw registratie op 1 van beide matten op te zoeken. Deze uitslag is betrouwbaar en correct en bewijst het nut van een dubbele registratie aan de aankomst.  

Vriendelijke groeten, 
Lien

I guess this means I can be 100% sure of my result... *fwew*... Murphy didn't strike that hard after all!

Spring cleanup: basement part 1

Today, Tine and I decided to do some spring-cleaning.  Our goal was to tackle a small part of our basement and be happy with that... the rest of the basement is planned for later ;-)  After a few hours of cleaning up dust and reorganizing things, this is our result:

 Notice the nice spot for my paragliders on the left, and the mathematical subtlety by which everything is organized!  We are doctors after all, aren't we! :-)

Demolition Day!

From now on, Friday June 10th 2011 will be known as Demolition Day!  At noon, my collegue Bert and I decided to join forces and get ready for some reinforced concrete pole demolition action.  Bart decided to go for the hard work...

... while Bert preferred the more subtle steel cutting action:

After less then 30 minutes, the job was done...

...and we decided to reward our efforts with some nice French fries from frituur De Beke.  Yummie!

Perfect sky

People sometimes ask me what the best weather conditions are for paragliding.  Whell... today, I think we got pretty close:

The gray building you see is where I work.  The picture was taken at 17h43.  Observe the nice, little, white and fluffy clouds.  At the bottom they are flat (that's cloudbase).  At the top they have more irregular shapes.  These kind of clouds are perfect indicators of rising air: they show us where the thermals end.  All we paragliding pilots have to do, is circle around underneath them and hope that we will go up :-)

The other nice thing about the cloud-formation in the above picture, is that the clouds are quite close together, forming nice cloud streets.  Paragliding pilots try to hop from the bottom of one cloud to the other, thereby trying to fly as far a distance as possible.

Ekiga.net and Android... mobile VoIP without tears!?

Now that Skype has fallen into the hands of Microsoft, I am exploring the VoIP market for more open and free video-chat solutions.  Without doubt, the alternative is SIP.  If you support the Open Source philosophy, you quickly end up finding Ekiga a good SIP-client because it is free and works for both Linux and Windows.  Consequently, you create yourself an Ekiga.net account.  I have such an account, and now I want to start using it with my Google Samsung Nexus S smartphone, running Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.  My most important goals are:

• being able to make SIP video-calls
• doing this from behind my wireless router or NAT
• being reachable at my ekiga.net SIP-address

Getting things up and running seems not so easy, especially because I do not only want voice, but also video.  Within this post, I will try to summarize my findings concerning Ekiga.net and Android-based smartphones.

Interesting to know is that most of the times, I'm behind a wireless router with all the NAT-trouble that comes with it.  So quite frequently, when my Nexus S connects over WiFi to the Internet, it has a local IP-address within the 192.168.1.X range.  For SIP, this often seems to be the bottleneck...

Android 2.3.4 native SIP-client
If you are behind NAT, then with this client you will not be able to register and get a `606 Not Acceptable' answer from the ekiga.net server. This problem is also nicely described at http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#ekiga.net

As long as Android's native SIP-client does not support some kind of NAT-traversal technology like STUN, ICE,... you will not be able to register.  See also the feature request at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15685

Sipdroid 2.2 beta
Registering with Sipdroid works just fine.  However, to traverse the NAT, you must enable the use of a STUN Server under the Advanced Options.  The name of the STUN server is stun.ekiga.net and the STUN Server port is 3478.

I have been able to make voice-calls with this client, but no video-calls.  If anybody knows how to do it, please let me know!

CSipSimple
With this client it is currently not possible to make video calls, but support seems to be on the way, see http://code.google.com/p/csipsimple/issues/detail?id=112&q=video

Jitsi
This client has no port to Android yet, but according to http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#android this is planned for 2011 or 2012.

Digging it flat

Today was the day: I was going to spade the garden and I was going to do it fast!  The plan was to get started this morning and see how far I could get.  While I was digging my way towards hallucinations, Tine closely followed me with a rake to fine tune the result of my intensive labour.  At 19h30 local Belgian time, the end result is something we are both very proud of:

 

Seems like it's getting time for a call to Mr. Gardener!

Concretely getting rid of concrete

In one or the other way, I have to get rid of 5 reinforced concrete poles in my `garden'.  I was able to dig them out, but now I have to somehow transport them to the dumping ground.  Because these things are quite heavy, this is a difficult task for a man without a car.  I think I have two options:

1. According to this page i apparently have the right to get one free (big) garbage collection from the city of Kortrijk.  I could use my free ticket for this year to get rid of my concrete poles...
2. I could use a grinding disc, cut the 5 big ones into smaller chunks and drop the chunks myself at the dumping ground.  The only problem is that I don't have a grinding disc :-(

If anybody can help me out with my poles, please contact me!

Killing the buxus!

It has been almost 3 years now that we have this big, fat buxus in our garden.  Tine liked it, i didn't.  I wanted to get rid of it.  After I finally convinced her that removing this damn thing was like the best thing we could do to the world, today was D-day: time for destruction!  This is the sucker before I attacked him:

This is how the bastard looked like after a few strokes with my saw:

And a few more cuts later, he didn't seem to be too happy anymore:

The final struggle to the root was damn hard, but the battle was won by me and I nailed the damn thing.  Look at him crying for his mommy:

Of course, I could not have done this without the help of my brave son, who's always ready for some buxus-destruction:

Thanks, Jenne!

Airtour 2011 cancellation

Yesterday, I decided to withdraw from the Airtour 2011 hike-and-fly paragliding
competition.  I do this for personal reasons and because my family is of the
uttermost importance to me.  My cancellation might come as a surprise to the
people who know me and who know how higly motivated I was to take part in this
race.  Deciding not to compete was quite difficult, but I know for sure that it
was the right thing to do.  My family needs me and i want to be there for them.

Library issues

Going to the library with Jenne always takes some time... Instead of choosing books, he prefers playing around in the local library playground :-)

Android blogging

Just testing the Android Blogger app. If this works, I'm ready for mobile blogging!

Blogger kickoff message

Hello world!  Today I decided to setup a Blogger account, mainly because I want to share the world my Airtour 2011 experiences... but maybe this blog will also prove useful for other things... we'll see :-)