Carl Hutzler’s Blog

On July 21 and 22, I had the distinct pleasure of providing support to one of the nation’s top 100 mile endurance runners, Davy Crockett.

While Davy is not a professional/sponsored runner, I consider him one of the best ultra marathon runners in the nation because:

1. He runs four or five 100 mile races a year….and FINISHES!
2. He is 49 years old
3. He typically finishes in the top half to third of the field.

For this, I have great respect for him.

Davy asked me if I would like to handle and pace him during the Vermont 100 race this year. After a little discussion with Rylan and figuring out logistics, I agreed. I drove up to New York on Thursday night and stayed with my friend Kenny in Brooklyn. Then early Friday I completed the drive to Woodstock, Vermont, about 30 minutes from Killington, up in the Green Mountains.

Read more

A Bill Cosby kinda moment….

At the beginning of the summer, Jake (my 9 year old), Anna (my 6 year old) and I went to Fletcher’s Cove near Georgetown to do a little canoeing on the C&O canal. Afterwards, we went to Georgetown for some lunch at Chipotle, a burrito/taco restaurant.

My daughter had to use the bathroom at the beginning of the meal. I told her it was OK to go and she did, but she came right back and said someone was in the bathroom. So I told her to eat a little and check again in a few minutes. She checked again and it was still busy, according to her report.

By the time we had finished, she had checked about 4 or 5 times and was beginning to get upset at the person who was inside and taking so long. I was curious now, so Anna and I walked over to the restroom together and I read a sign to her. “Bathroom Key at Register”. I laughed and explained it to her and we got the key. And to think she would have kept on going back to check over and over :-)

Sequel (in another Chipotle restaurant no less!)

Yesterday we went to the Chipotle by our house, out in nice safe suburbia. We were finished eating and I got up to clear the trash and use the facilities. When I came out, I saw Jake but no Anna. Jake said she went to use the bathroom. Then I saw Anna at the register talking to the clerk.

Anna and I made eye contact and she scurried over to me. She said that the door to the bathroom was locked so she went to the clerk to get the key. I scratched my head as I had just used the bathroom and there was no key required for me. But I also knew that sometimes the women’s room has a key.

So we went over to the hallway where the bathrooms are located and I watched as my little girl walked straight past the women’s door, passed the men’s door and down to the “Water Heater” door which (thankfully) was locked. She came back after showing me that it was locked and I showed her where the women’s room was located. She smiled in her “darn it” kind of way and used the bathroom.

Life at six.

For the last year or so, I have been inspired to learn how to light things…people, things, scenes, anything. By light, I mean the purposeful introduction of light into a photograph to get a desired effect or a look.

I have concluded that learning how to light is hard!

Without backlights (left) With backlights(right)

Read more

I posted about the new CircaVie.com site a few days ago and had a question in the comments area about how I embedded the Flash animation into my blog.

It is a good question and it was not 100% easy to do. I tried something similar a while ago with a youtube video and had similar issues.

I first tried a number of Wordpress plugins I found but none seemed easy and most of them just did not work. They got the Flash animation to embed, but then all the blog posts afterwards had formatting issues.

Finally I found a site where someone named “guitarman” said that removing extra white space was the secret. That indeed worked! Evidently WP will replace whitespace in your embed code with <BR> tags which messes up the embed code in the final post.

So I simply removed the carriage returns and other spaces and embedded the code. PS: you have to the embedding of the code by going into the Wordpress text editor (the normal one you use to post a blog entry) and clicking on the CODE tab so you can just paste in the HTML code.

Feel free to view source on the post to see for yourself.

We jumped in the car (well, we carried the kids into the car) and hit the road at 6:30am and drove to the beach yesterday. Spent all day there and left around 10pm. It was a long day but a lot of fun….beats staying the night for $200 and spending Sunday in a 125 miles rush hour. :-)

Click on the scary clown for more pix….