User:Steven J. Koch/Running challenge 2010

This is the main page for Steve's part of the Running Challenge 2010 with Antony Williams. See the bottom of this page or this link for background.
 * Goal: To get in a lot better shape & better at running, while encouraging people to donate to charity at same time.
 * Competition
 * I find it 10,000% easier to get in shape when there's some kind of competition. The competition doesn't always have to make sense.  Therefore, even though it's still not clear what the competition is between Antony and I, or how to judge the winner, it nevertheless feels like a competition to me, and that's sufficient.
 * A new competitive element will be provided by the pledges. I'm hoping people will make pledges that increase in value the better I do in the final competition.  For example: $5 if I can run a half marathon in better than 1 hour 50 minutes or $50 if I can beat 1 hour 42 minutes.  I'll set up my own pledge in that manner so people can judge what I may be able to achieve
 * Final event
 * I haven't decided on this yet. It's likely to be a 10K or half marathon in Albuquerque sometime in April or May 2010.  I can start training now even though I don't know the event, because I'm starting at ground zero (haven't been running for several months)
 * Unser Half Marathon, April 17 possibility.

Pledges
In this section, we'll keep track of pledges. Pledges can be for any charity, and people can handle the money themselves. That is, it's on the honor system, unless some way of tracking it emerges. I'm going to make my pledges to go towards asthma research...hopefully Antony can help me choose foundation. My favorite pledges will be those that increase in value, depending on how I perform in my final race.

Training progress


In this section I'll use some kind of combination of google spreadsheets, friendfeed, and whatever to show my progress in training. I may try out Nike+, as Antony talks about, but I'm not sure yet. I want to try out news ways of capturing my data, because it has synergy with our own goals for open research in the lab.

Initiation of challenge
This challenge was initiated via discussion of Antony Williams and Steve at ScienceOnline2010. Here's a related friendfeed thread. 