Once again on travel, this time in Washington DC. Got up there Wednesday afternoon and set up the lab. Went to my hotel and crashed. My wife called and woke me up at 7:30 PM, thank goodness. As I struggled to regain my senses I knew I needed to go workout because I knew I wouldn't Thursday night because I was eating dinner at another NOAA employee's house along with my Korean students and I knew I couldn't Friday evening since I was flying home. So I managed to get my running gear on and headed out. I took a few minutes for my forerunner to connect to the satellites, once it did I headed down to the national mall area. Now this was the first time I've done a truely urban run. Unlike Charleston where you don't really have to wait to long for a break in traffic to cross the street, the same action in DC would get you killed. So, needless to say, there were lots of stops at intersections. You'll be able to see that in the graph. I ran past the White House, almost going into an area I was supposed to go until the nice men with guns corrected me, around the Ellipse, up the hill to the Washington Monument, down to the WWII Memorial, down the lenght of the Reflecting Pond, paid my respects to Honest Abe (was going to run up the stairs for a Rocky moment put it was too crowded), ran over to the Vietnam Memorial (walked through this out of respect), back up to the Ellipse, around the side of the White House, in front of the White House where the nuts have their permanent protests set up and then back up into the area of my hotel. All in all a really pretty run. Seeing the monuments at night, under the moonlight makes for a really nice run.

Now once I started back up 14th or 15th Ave things got a little dicey. If you've never been to DC they have lots of traffic circles. Well it was at Thompson Circle were I got a little turned around. I spent about 30-45 minutes and about 1 mile searching for my hotel. I used this time as a cool down walk and proceeded to walk around in circles. Lots of fun. Felt like a real a**. Here's a link to a web site called Motion Based that I upload my running info to. I'm not sure you all will be able to view but give it a try. This is their new "Player". It allows you to actually see the run as it progresses. You'll see the little red pointer indicate where I was and the info bar above the map will give you the corresponding info like pace and elevation. Let me know if you can or cannot see it. http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/player/6287982

And here is a link to a map of my run, http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http:%2F%2Ftrail.motionbased.com%2Ftrail%2Fkml%2Fepisode.kml%3FepisodePkValues%3D6287982&ie=UTF8&z=14

I've also attached a KML file for those of you who would like to view my run in Google Earth.

And here's a graph of my run. Red = Heart Rate; Green = Elevation; Blue = pace all set to the distance, about 7 miles. The GPS signal wasn't great in downtown DC so the pace is kind of all over the place, heart rate is a better indicator of my effort. But I think you can clearly see that I had to stop a lot at intersections (blue line - but I did not stop THAT much. I think that had more to do with poor signal strength in the urban canyons) and you can see at the end of the run that I was walking, cooling down (i.e., looking for my hotel).