2nd Annual Trail Travail

With the date fast approaching for my 2nd Annual Trail Travail, I have started a participant-driven site for comments regarding the inaugural Travail as well as ideas for the 2008 running. We'll see how this works. Being new as I am to the blogging world, I might have to tweak the workings on that one. I am hoping to get the runners and volunteers to talk about the event while I just soak it all in.

The Trail Travail was the brainchild of myself and Terry Ashby in the Fall of 2006. We created a 'non-race' for more advanced runners. It is an homage to the fabulous James River Park Trail System - for those who run the trails all the time and those who are new to the area, but familiar with single-track running. We came up with a 14-15ish-mile run with only 6 blocks of road exposure, and topped the day off with a party at Terry's with beer, soda and pizza. All free of charge with a field limited to 30. I managed the race and took photos of all runners and volunteers, and Terry ended up participating. It also coincided with long-time 'Thursday-Night' Richmond Road Runner Gary Hearn's birthday. Check out the course and the blog!

Redesigned Website

Though I'm still uploading the interactive maps and race course graphics, the new backlightdigital.com site is live. Take a look if you haven't already. I have to thank Reggie at CurveTheory for the new look. It's certainly easier to manage now. The bio/about page is being re-written this week, and I might make one or two changes on the contact page, but I'm quite happy with the new professional look. Thanks again Reggie!

The Next Hairbrained Scheme

I've signed up for the 2008 Swinging Bridge 50K on January 19th. I'm seriously undertrained and nursing a 4 week old ankle injury, but I'm still planning on starting the Bear Creek Lake State Park trailblazing ultramarathon with my camera gear on my back. What I'm most worried about is the lack of any real trail for much of the first 20 miles, and where there is visible singletrack, it's mostly covered with 6 inches of dead leaves. We shall see what transpires. I should at least get shots of everyone after the 10 mile turnaround.

This will be my second 50K (assuming I finish) with my gear - or without for that matter. The first was the Bel Monte last March. That wasn't too bad - until about mile 22 when it started to get too warm during the mile-and-a-half uphill switchbacks. Then it was topped off with 4 miles of jagged rock-hopping down to the Sherando Lake area. I was fortunate enough to have trained better for that one. Michael George, Mike Lipton, Mike Gholson and I spent 8 hours doing the 'Double' on Three Ridges and The Priest.

I need to make some modifications to my backpack if this becomes a regular occurrence. The camera support at the bottom of the pack tends to rub my lower back raw when I reach a 9 minute pace or better. I emailed the MountainSmith folks to see if I could help out with R&D on a new 'runner's' pack, but haven't heard anything as of yet. It would also help to have a more sweat-resistant padding against the wearer; maybe with some rubberized channels to wick the moisture down to drip off to the ground.

Photo Management

I'm almost finished organizing over 40,000 photos with Adobe's Lightroom software. It's been a tedious process, but any future work should be a breeze. I was almost finished 2 weeks ago when my Maxtor One-Touch external hard drive decided it couldn't read several dozen photos. They were either 'corrupted' or an 'unreadable format.' Needless to say, I was more than a little annoyed. I lost about 20 photos that I had not backed up with a CD yet - let that be a lesson to me - so it could have been worse.

I moved all the photos back to the original hard drive and reformatted the Maxtor. Then I put them all back only to find the same problem happening again. Luckily, CompUSA (who is going out of business, by the way) took it back so I could get another. This time I went with the Seagate Free Agent Pro. I think I read somewhere that Maxtor and Seagate were actually the same company, but I didn't want to risk wasting another 2 weeks with the same style hard drive.

So, now the photos are all in place and I'm going back through the DVDs and CDs to make sure all the files are the same in both places. This is somewhat harder, as the removable media was organized differently when I burned it all.

Next on the agenda is adding metadata and rating all the better photos.