After my initial foray a couple of months ago, I’m still getting my feet wet (occasionally literally) with trail running. I didn’t do much of it in September or October, but I’ve picked it back up in November, and have now hit the trails for the past two weeks in a row. Last week’s run was a roughly clockwise circumnavigation of the trails surrounding Belmont Manor, and today’s was a loop through Rockburn Park. Several observations:

• I still stumble occasionally, though it’s much less frequent with the Vibram V-Runs than it was with Xero Mesa Trails with a full toe box.
• The biomechanics are different from road running. It’s somewhat akin to the differences between road and mountain biking. Trail running is less forgiving of overstriding and heavy stepping. If I come down hard on a rock or root, I feel it. My feet, particulary the arches, have been a little sore after the past two runs. I suspect this will improve as I get better at it. Light, springy, high steps and fast cadence seem to be keys. It’s important to bend the knees and engage the core muscles.
• Autumn leaves add an extra challenge, because they cover up obstacles like the aforementioned rocks and roots. I really have to be laser-focused on what I’m running over, even more so than with mountain biking.
• I noticed that I ran more confidently after I fully warmed up, which took me about 3 miles. Today, I ran 0.6 mile to the trailhead, then 4.5 miles on the trails, then 2 miles on pavement. Next time, I’m going to try running the road segment first, to see if the extra warm-up helps.

I suspect that because trail running requires me to pay much closer attention to technique and biomechanics, over time, it will make me a better road runner. I’m going to try to do it once a week (conditions permitting) and see how it goes.

In other news, I’m back to doing some housekeeping with our home network. I run two instaces of Pi-hole on our LAN, which the router hands out as DNS resolvers via DHCP. Pi-hole is very good at blocking ads and trackers, and it works great with things like Smart TVs as well as web browsers and phone apps. Pi-hole instance #1 was a bare-metal deployment on a Raspberry Pi 3, and instance #2 ran on a Mac Mini running Docker Desktop. This all worked great, but #1 was still running Pi-hole v5, which is coming up on 2 years out-of-date. Also, because of networking limitations with Docker Desktop on Mac, I couldn’t run #2 with host networking, which made most of its logging useless, as all of the client connections appeared to come from the Docker bridge network’s IP. I had been dragging my heels with updating #1 to Pi-hole v6, as there were a lot of reports of issues doing so, and I didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of re-imaging the Raspberry Pi (which also runs a printer) if the upgrade somehow went south.

That brings us to Podman. I had previously run Pi-hole in Docker on the Pi, but stopped doing so because Docker was a bit too resource-hungry for the Pi 3. Podman is more lightweight, as it doesn’t rely on a background daemon process. It’s also easy to run rootless containers, which improve security, and it’s tightly integrated with systemd, which makes it well suited for running on Linux-derived host systems. Containerization gets me past the “upgrade paralysis” issue, as upgrading is as simple as pulling a new image and restarting, and in the event of problems, I can just revert to a previous image, vs. trying to downgrade in place. And, if I have to re-image at some point in the future, it should be relatively easy to get the containers back up and running quickly.

To make a long story short, Pi-hole #1 and Pi-hole #2 are now running identical containers via Podman. Both instances are using host networking, meaning they’ll get accurate source IP logs now. I moved Pi-hole #2 over to a VM running Ubuntu, and am waiting for all of the DHCP clients to move over to it, at which point I can shut down the old Pi-hole container running on Docker Desktop. Coincidentally, the Ubuntu VM is running in VMWare Fusion on the same Mac Mini that runs Docker Desktop. I still have a couple of containers running on the latter, but my goal is to move those onto the Ubuntu VM as well, and shut down Docker Desktop, so the Mini will then solely be used to host VMs.