Six, or is it seven, hours I won't see again.

On Friday, flushed with my enormous success in the $24+2 (and also with some Allanmere shiraz, and a bit of Jameson's) I was looking around for new worlds to conquer, and (remarkably sensibly) settled on a few freerolls.

One of them was a first round, 10FPP, "Moneymaker millions". Circa 12:30 am local time (6:30 am Eastern), I was through to round 2. Unfortunately, I'd never managed to build up a big stack, so I actually had to sit around and play, rather than going to bed in "sit out" mode. The last few eliminations were painfully slow, as we played hand for hand once 59 players were left (50 to qualify). It seems to me that there must be some way to speed these things up -- one thought that came to mind was some sort of schedule where the top five stacks (or something) at various level changes, are removed from the game and qualify automatically.

Round 2 was at 0800 today (Sunday) for me, not a problem, since I'm that rarest of academic species, an early bird. Anyhow, with 240 to qualify, I exited with about 320 left, when my 9BB push with AQ ran into AA. Probably just as well as, had I qualified, and then, improbably, qualified again in the third round, I would have had to start negotiating with PokerStars, since I don't think I could actually be in the Caribbean on January 6.

In the other big news of the day, I ran over 10km for the first time since restarting my running this year. In fact, it was closer to 11km (about 6 2/3 miles for the metrically challenged). Google Earth is such a great tool. Aside from driving around in a car (not always possible), it used to be really difficult to measure running routes -- usually you had to work backwards from time to distance.

Now it's time to start working a bit more on speed -- my default pace at the moment seems to be about 5:30/km, where I used to feel that 5:00 was a pace I could run at forever. Of course two decades have passed since then, and perhaps I should allow for inflation ...