Saturday Reminder

What? A post mid-weekend when we're all out and about? That's right. But I forgot to add a few things to my Friday post. Two reminders, really.

First: the women's Olympic marathon is on tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM Eastern time. Yeah, it's crazy early, but that's an 11:00 AM start time in London, so it could be worse. Imagine if they decided to start at 8:00 AM GMT. As it stands, I'm going to set the TiVO to record the whole thing so I can watch it later in the day. I'll be up, but out running myself when they cross the finish line.

The Americans in the field are Desi Davila, Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan. Here's an article from Runners World laying out the odds for the Americans in the super stacked Olympic field. Kenyans Mary Keitany and Edna Kiplagat, along with Russia's Liliya Shobukhova Nonetheless, I'm rooting for them and hope at least one of them gets on the podium tomorrow.

Secondly, and not running related, early Monday morning NASA's Curiosity rover vehicle will approach and then land on Mars. The mission kicked off last November with the launch of Curiosity into space for the ~150 million mile journey from Earth to Mars. At around 1:00 AM EST on Monday morning, the craft will begin its descent into the Martian atmosphere. If the landing is successful (fingers crossed!), the 2K pound rover will explore an area of Mars thought to have a good chance of once supporting water, and thus possibly life. The rover will operate for several years, although the small nuclear reactor onboard (!) can power the craft for up to 14 years. The descent will take seven minutes, but it takes communication 14 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, so NASA will receive confirmation that the craft has started its descent seven minutes AFTER it's already landed. Crazy!

Anyway, here's a story from NPR about the anxieties and challenges of taking a huge multi-billion dollar spacecraft, shooting it into space at another planet and landing it safely on said planet. Amazing stuff.

And with that, I bid you a fond weekend until Monday. Details on Operation Cannoli then as well. Maybe also some running stuff.