10K on the Shore

The weekend before Memorial Day, Sarah Ball Cornell flew up to Philadelphia to see us (probably more Rachel than me, but I like to think she came to see me, too) and run a 10 K in Cape May, NJ. Cape May is on the southern most tip of the Jersey Shore and is actually a pretty cool place.


We arrived Friday evening after making a 3 hour drive that should have taken an hour and a half without Philly traffic. Since it was the weekend before Memorial Day, which marks the beginning of the peak season, Rachel was able to land us a hotel room at a pretty good deal. Cape May, like most of the rest of the Jersey Shore (Atlantic City, excluded) is a quaint little town with old motels rather than modern skyscraper hotels.

After the race Saturday morning, we ate breakfast at the hotel and went shopping. Our first stop was Morrow's nut house above where we couldn't resist taking a picture.

After shopping, we drove to the winery on the outskirts of Cape May. Yes, I did say winery in New Jersey. It is the Garden State after all. I suppose a vineyard could be loosely interpreted as a type of garden. Although it is not quite Napa Valley or Sonoma, Cape May Vineyard is 13 acres of vineyard that actually produces some decent wine.

While at the vineyard, we learned of a new way to taste a port. It is called a "Tim Tam Slam". For those who are not familiar, Tim Tams are ironically an Australian chocolate bar, which Rachel and I came to love on our trip (if you remember, it is listed as one of my favorite things about Australia in a previous blog). You bite the opposite corners off of the Tim Tam and then suck the port through one of the holes, as Sarah is demonstrating here.

Following our tasting, we stopped at the free zoo on the way out of town. It was actually pretty cool. They had a tiger, a lion, a couple of bears, red panda, lots of birds, including 2 enormous bald eagles, some lemurs, alpacas, llamas and an ostrich (probably some other stuff I am forgetting).

I must admit that I am quite amazed at everything I found in Cape May. It was quite a trip.


Reflections - 10K's Are a Lot of Work

Running a 10K is a lot of work. 'How much work?' one might ask. Well, for a guy like me, A WHOLE LOTTA Work - approximately 9 million foot-lbs or slightly north of 12.2 million joules for my French readers. This amount of work was calculated using Newton's age old equation of Work = Force x distance.

I must alert my readers that this amount of work is only a linear approximation. As everyone knows, force is a vector measurement and is not, by definition, linear. This approximation also does not take into account elevation changes during the run, wind conditions, the coefficient of friction on my tennis shoes or any van der Waals forces or hydrogen bonding that may have occurred between the pavement and my shoes.

Most importantly, I am relying on the fact that only lawyers and Whirlpool sales guys read this blog and are thus not able to back my weight out of the calculation.