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Funny how much better things feel if they start out poor and get better, instead of starting out good and getting worse. And even if conditions are deteriorating, if the rate of change is slow (or slowing) somehow it doesn't seem so distressing.
Immediate personal case in point: the main furnace (heat pump) at home died more than a week ago and won't be fixed for several more days. It's an exotic ultra-high-efficiency model, still under warranty, and replacement parts have to come from out of state. Winter weather in the area has been frigid. We tried to warm a few rooms of the house using electric space-heaters, without much success. Cooking and running the natural-gas stove (with constant monitoring and a carbon-monoxide detector in the room, don't worry) helped.
But next a blizzard struck the area, bringing more than two feet of snow and cutting off all the electricity. That got a wee bit discouraging! But we were already making-do, so we added more layers of blankets and kept on cooking etc. And to pile on the suffering, I did a first pass through my income taxes by flashlight—and got a paper cut in the process.
And then, after 33 hours, the power came back on. Yay! Paulette and I laughed together and agreed that things didn't seem so bad now after all. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," as the Joni Mitchell song says.
(cf. PowerCurves (1999-06-18) on hysteresis, Andrew Tobias's remarks in NoRetrenchment (2002-08-05), and Z. A. Melzak's comments on annealing and Nazi concentration camp survivors quoted near the end of ResetTheThermostat (2004-04-01) and YearsOfWandering (2006-02-02) ...)
- Monday, February 08, 2010 at 07:03:15 (EST)
"Amateurs practice until they can get it right; pros practice until they can't get it wrong."
(but cf. UproariousAmateurishness (2004-07-12), ...)
- Sunday, February 07, 2010 at 16:08:55 (EST)
Another one of those delightful names that catch my inner eye and ear: Vartan Gregorian. Born in 1934 in Iran, thanks to the help of strangers (plus a lot of determination) he made it through tough times to the US, got a great education, and became a professor, the president of a university, and eventually the head of the Carnegie Corporation, a major charitable foundation.
Gregorian is a modest, charming, cheerful person, as comes out constantly in his talks and writings. As he says in a 2003 interview, re one motivation for writing his autobiography:
... I wanted people to know that life is not all cynical, that there are kind, wonderful people who do good things, help other people out of a sense of humanity, charity, religious obligation, ethnic pride, whatever. They help each other, and acknowledging that was the purpose of the book.
... another book that I need to read someday soon!
- Friday, February 05, 2010 at 05:05:11 (EST)
Such silly advice! Why should "instincts" be better than thoughtful, systematic collection and analysis of data? Yet people are constantly told "trust your instincts" when running through potentially-dangerous areas, evaluating strangers, etc. Maybe it's because one can never be proved wrong or held liable for recommending "trust your instincts"? Or maybe it's an implicit endorsement of prejudice?
- Thursday, February 04, 2010 at 05:02:20 (EST)
In the chapter "How Long to Practice?" of Wherever You Go, There You Are Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about the magic of the moment and the value of even a glimpse of awareness:
For those seeking balance in their lives, a certain flexibility of approach is not only helpful, it is essential. It is important to know that meditation has little to do with clock time. Five minutes of formal practice can be as profound or more so than forty-five minutes. The sincerity of your effort matters far more than elapsed time, since we are really talking about stepping out of minutes and hours into moments, which are truly dimensionless and therefore infinite. So, if you have some motivation to practice even a little, that is what is important. Mindfulness needs to be kindled and nurtured, protected from the winds of a busy life or a restless and tormented mind, just as a small flame needs to be sheltered from strong gusts of air.
If you can only manage five minutes, or even one minute of mindfulness at first, that is truly wonderful. It means you have already remembered the value of stopping, of shifting even momentarily from doing to being.
(cf. Work of a Lifetime (2009-02-01), Plenty of Time (2009-03-09), Every Moment is an Opportunity (2009-03-24), ...)
- Wednesday, February 03, 2010 at 05:01:50 (EST)
How to quickly write an article for school, newspaper, magazine, or web? Simply "... take a partly true, modestly interesting idea and puff it up to Second Coming proportions." You can't miss! And if you do it well enough, there might be a book in it ...
(adapted from [1]; cf. BasementWorries (2002-06-15), ThatWhichIsNotSeen (2002-09-05), AggressiveAggregation (2007-05-10), ...)
- Tuesday, February 02, 2010 at 08:10:05 (EST)
| The graph of distance versus pace for my runs in 2009 shows that an old rule-of-thumb—my maximum speed gets ~1 min/mi slower every time the distance doubles—seems to have altered. The dashed line at the bottom of the chart slopes at about 0.6 min/mi. My rate of breakdown is flattening! |
As Year of Running - 2009 discussed, last year was a surprisingly good one for me. Among the reasons for "improvement", if such it be:
But the biggest "secret": setting the bar low by being a long-term lazy bum. This is also known as "sandbagging"—many thanks to Wayne Carson and Ken Swab, my mentors on that tactic!
(cf. SpeedUpSlowDown (2004-10-18), Running2006Analysis (2007-01-27), ...)
- Monday, February 01, 2010 at 18:06:22 (EST)
Albert Einstein once wrote:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
This resonates strongly with comments by philosopher Daniel Dennett on how big a "Self" really is—how it's not just a pointlike mote of a mind, or a little homunculus inside a head, or a spongy network of brain tissue. "Self" extends out to encompass the whole body, its interactions with objects including other "Selves", and beyond that the entire world.
Granted, most of those interactions are slower, more intermittent, and less causally-crucial than what goes on deep in the core of the neural network. But the book in the library down the street is still a part of "me", ever since "I" read it some years ago. It continues to influence mental states and processes.
Likewise the tangled web of ^zhurnaly notes-to-"self" here ...
(Einstein quote from Chapter 12 ("Glimpses of Wholeness, Delusions of Separateness") in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living, from the New York Times in 1972, from a 1950 letter; cf. FoamOnTheOcean (2000-07-23), UpheavalsOfThought (2002-06-29), EinsteinianAdvice (2002-11-25), EinsteinCredo (2005-01-20), Unselfing (2009-01-14), Indra's Net (2009-06-21), Unselfing Again (2009-11-01), Total Interconnectedness (2009-12-25), ...)
- Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 12:01:18 (EST)
Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad (the 1880 quasi-sequel to his The Innocents Abroad) is fun, occasionally, but also tiresome, frequently. Sharp observations in magical detail leap off the page. Plodding, predictable bits of exaggeration lay there. Appendix D, "The Awful German Language", is a case in point: hilarious exploration of linguistic issues of gender and declension, next to deadly-slow extended anecdotes and dictionary quotes. Perhaps an edited "best-of" version would be more readable; perhaps it should have been more harshly edited originally.
(cf. VeryGood (2001-08-18), MyMemberSays (2007-02-06), Earworms (2009-06-09), ...)
- Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 08:09:24 (EST)
An instructor in a computer programming class observed earlier this week: "More often than not the modeling is more valuable than the model."
(echoing the proverb "Plans are worthless, but planning is essential."; cf. PlansAndSituations (1999-08-13), TooSlowAndTooFast (1999-09-25), ...)
- Friday, January 29, 2010 at 08:40:41 (EST)
When a drummer made a mistake recently during an orchestra rehearsal the conductor threatened, "If you keep screwing up, I'll take away one of your sticks and make you come up here!"
- Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 04:48:18 (EST)
Early afternoon and work is quiet enough that I have a chance to get out and run, foolish as it may be with my right knee still twingey when I descend stairs or sit too long. The usual three fast loops on the woodsey paved trail, witnessed only by squirrels, with marked miles accelerating: 9:11 + 8:21 + 7:16, that last at near redline.
The next day my knee makes serious complaints when descending stairs. I rest it a couple of days, and over the weekend watch DVDs while pedaling on Paulette's recumbent exercise bicycle, about 90 minutes each day. The machine claims it's ~21 miles and ~700 calories, though my pulse is barely above 100. I am sweating a lot though ...
- Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 05:41:53 (EST)
| Sunlight's sheen on spandex Draws silver contour lines On the rump of the runner ahead |
(cf. longer version, Sun on Spandex (2010-01-20), ...)
- Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 05:22:40 (EST)
Blistering pace! CM Manlandro is wearing new shoes, and they (or her feet) still need some time to adapt. We start in front of my home at 0530 and follow neighborhood streets to the Capital Crescent Trail. After the high trestle, however, CM pauses to adjust a sock by the light of my flashlight and detects a blister forming. We turn back, take a side excursion toward Grubb Rd but decide to abandon it, and end up retracing our way home again in 38 minutes. Perhaps CM's feet were stressed out by her run yesterday in the rain, and that plus the new type of shoes (her old favorite model was discontinued) caused the problem?
I do the dishes, and when Barry Smith picks me up we proceed into Virginia, where we park at Difficult Run and Georgetown Pike just before 8am. Sara Crum appears moments later, and through the mud we go downstream on Difficult Run Trail (the Fairfax Cross County Connector Trail). The Great Falls Park trail map shows most of our route: we take the Ridge Trail to the Old Carriage Road Trail to the park visitor center. After a restroom break we continue up the Potomac River on the Pawtomack Canal Trail where we see two pairs of mallard ducks and one pair of deer. We turn back after ~53 minutes just inside Riverbend Park and retrace our path, pausing occasionally for Barry to take photos with his cellphone, and are back at the cars another 53 minutes later.
- Monday, January 25, 2010 at 04:38:07 (EST)
"He speaks a wave lag from Liverpool, and he can voker romeny." The most noteworthy feature of Michael Crichton's third novel, The Great Train Robbery (1975), is its adroit use of Victorian-era criminal slang as it dramatizes an 1855 British gold theft. "He was a buzzer turned rampsman." The story flows fast, the characters are exaggerated, the atmosphere is distracting, the history is partly true. "He was working his usual operation, with himself as dipper, a stickman at his side, and two stalls front and back." Much of Train Robbery reads like a movie script, which in a way it may have been. "It's fair aswarm with miltonians." Cute, lightweight entertainment.
- Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 11:34:56 (EST)
At the office a few days ago a colleague was trying to find a lost memo, and scolded himself by quoting a rule he should have followed: "Never throw anything away!"
"Ah," I said, "but at my home by practicing 'Never throw anything away' we've proved a corollary: 'Never find anything when you need it!'"
- Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 16:42:40 (EST)
The MCRRC "Shooting Starr" 4 miler begins with tension, as I try to handle my duties as a novice Parking Volunteer. After dithering between the big starting-line lot and the much smaller registration-lot I opt for the latter. I let people park there temporarily while signing up for the race, then move their cars. It seems to work, mostly. Christina Caravoulias visits with me and takes photos. Race Director Eric Bernhardt is ubiquitous and controls the chaos well; he also gives a moving pre-race talk reminding us all of Jim Starr, whose memory the event honors.
I meet Dondra Coniglio, from Columbia MD. This is her very first race ever, and she's hyper-nervous. Her training during the past month or so hasn't gone beyond 2-3 miles. I tell her to hang with me, and we do the race together, splits 12:14 + 12:39 + 13:23 + 12:26 with occasional walk breaks. We try to catch Christina but lose sight of her after about three miles. I chatter away and allot Dondra only one "I'm sorry" per mile, of which she uses two and keeps two in reserve.
- Friday, January 22, 2010 at 04:40:13 (EST)
From Coming to Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn, in the chapter "Two Ways to Think About Meditation":
This other way of describing meditation is that whatever "meditation" is, it is not instrumental at all. If it is a method, it is the method of no method. It is not a doing. There is no going anywhere, nothing to practice, no beginning, middle, or end, no attainment, and nothing to attain. Rather, it is the direct realization and embodiment in this very moment of who you already are, outside of time and space and concepts of any kind, a resting in the very nature of your being, in what is sometimes called the natural state, original mind, pure awareness, no mind, or simply emptiness. You are already everything you may hope to attain, so no effort of the will is necessary—even for the mind to come back to the breath—and no attachment is possible. You are already it. It is already here. There is no time, no space, no body, and no mind, to paraphrase Kabir. And there is no purpose to meditation—it is the one human activity (non-activity really) that we engage in for its own sake—for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.
- Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 04:41:53 (EST)
| Like the shimmer of spotlights On alabaster statues of ancient athletes — But alive — as we climb the hill Sunbeams glint off spandex tights, Sketching curves, shiny contour lines, Across the torsos of runners. |
- Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 04:53:07 (EST)
I'm still #47 on the waiting list for the Massanutten Mountain 100 race this May, but comrade Kate Abbott is already in and we're training together in hopes of running it together. Today, Friday, we both play hooky from work to get a preview of the first dozen or so miles of the course, including the infamous Short Mountain. I arrive at Edinburg Gap early but miss the turn to the parking area and have to circle back to find it. My wanderings include an involuntary trip up the All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) Off Road Vehicle (ORV) drive, scary scraping of the MINI Cooper's chassis on the ice, and a nearly-slip-off-the-road turnaround. I'm properly parked just as Kate arrives. We leave my car behind and ride together to the Caroline Furnace Lutheran Camp where the race starts and finishes this year.
Today's trek is mostly a fast walk with occasional runs where possible. In near-freezing weather just before 9am we're off, climbing steadily for the first 3+ miles along Moreland Gap Rd. At the orange-blazed Massanutten Trail we begin a segment that Kate did last year with Carolyn Gernand. Instead of thorny blackberry bushes we crunch along through brown leaves and shallow snow, sporadically interrupted by icy patches. Pickup trucks are parked on the forest road that we cross after a few miles. We take off extra layers and roll up sleeves as we warm up.
Kate's cellphone rings as we plod along the ridgeline of Short Mountain. It's Caroline Williams, fellow runner whom we helped crew for at MMT last year! (cf. Massanutten Mountain Midnight Madness) I text a memo to Twitter/Facebook: Massanutten Trail - Short Mountain ROCKS! From the start we've climbed ~1600 feet. Then it's down down down, ~1100 feet, until after ~4 hours we arrive at mile ~12, my car, and refuel. In the actual race this would be within the cutoffs, but not by much. Today we've got enough time to spare that we decide to continue for another couple of miles along the Massanutten Trail. We climb ~1000 feet to Waonaze Peak on Powell Mountain, then take the Bear Trap Trail down to the ATV/ORV path, aka Peters Mill Run Road.
I stumble on a stick and fall, but land on hands in the snow with minor abrasion. The ATV lane is covered with ice and mud, so our shoes become heavy. We're finally back at my car, ~16 miles total, and take off shoes to avoid mess. Kate returns via I-66 to pick up her sons and I take I-81 and US-340 through West Virginia and Maryland to dodge bad DC-area traffic before a holiday weekend.
- Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 04:57:10 (EST)
Tombstone trivia: although contrary to legend a 17-sided polygon is not inscribed on mathematician Karl F. Gauss's grave marker, there is a number featured on the headstone of physicist James P. Joule:
| 772.55 |
... his measurement of the conversion factor between mechanical energy and heat energy. The current value is a bit over 778 foot-pounds per British Thermal Unit (BTU), so Joule's value from 1878 is low by about a percent.
(see [1] and [2] for photos of Joule's memorial; cf. SeventeenSides (2005-02-10), ...)
- Monday, January 18, 2010 at 04:40:24 (EST)
Shoes crunch on the snow as a last-quarter moon rides high and lights the Capital Crescent Trail. Temps are in the mid-20s but when the wind pauses it feels quite warm; when it blows, rather chilly. In downtown Bethesda at 7am Sara Crum arrives halfway through my Snickers candy bar. Gayatri Datta is soon there too, so we set off along Leland St towards Rock Creek. Our route is down Beach Dr to Bingham and back, then north on Jones Bridge Rd to Rock Creek Trail and onward to the water fountain at Old Spring Rd. Loops up and down the Mormon Temple hill occupy us until Gayatri's GPS indicates it's time to head back to Bethesda via the CCT. Our conversations are splendid, as so often they are during long runs when folks can say anything. Family, injury, health, training, politics, relationships, ... all's fair game when on foot and sweaty.
As we cruise between high fences that protect the beautiful Columbia Country Club from the threat of crude runners, what should I spy beside the trail but my lost water bottle! It fell from my fanny pack here a fortnight ago (see 2009-12-27 - Icy CCT) and lies there in plain view. Contents frozen solid, duct tape and rubber band intact. Woot!
- Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 05:53:45 (EST)
Some bad poems stick in the mind. I still remember a bit of low dactylic doggerel by John W. Campbell, editor of the science-fiction magazine Analog, who wrote an editorial in the mid-1960s complaining about increased regulation of nutritional supplements. "The FDA's gunning for vitamin pills" was the refrain, and in one line Campbell took a poke at James Goddard who was then head of the Food and Drug Administration. "Someday Goddard, not God, will be dead," Campbell predicted.
Campbell (a heavy smoker) died decades ago, but his verse resurfaced in my consciousness last month when James Goddard passed away and an obituary appeared in the New York Times [1]. Goddard tried to base government regulation on evidence, not anecdote. That's hard for people to handle. Even otherwise-rational folks—like Campbell, like activist fund-raisers for medical research on particular diseases, like science writers for the NYT who should know better—often let wishful thinking and coincidence sway them into bogus beliefs. The headline-writer for a book review last year came up with a cute (if violent) metaphor for what's needed: "Firing Bullets of Data at Cozy Anti-Science" [2]. More target practice is needed ...
(cf. VulnerableTheories (1999-05-17), AlteredNative (2002-01-24), ModernMedicine (2005-04-29), ...)
- Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 05:40:41 (EST)
Corner of Mackall Av and Sorell St: as I jog by the teenage couple is standing in the road, kissing, only coming up to take a breath of winter air every so often. Ten minutes later, on my way back, they're still there keeping each other warm. We're on a neighborhood byway near Langley High School. Perhaps they got lost on their walk home? (^_^)
A hawk perches on a telephone line. This afternoon Stephanie and I had planned to run together, but work preempts her so I head out alone. Snows has mostly melted off the sidewalk; a few piles remain where plows have pushed white stuff off the roads. I climb cautiously over mini-icebergs as necessary and trot west-north-west to Mackall, as Stephanie and I did a couple of months ago (2009-11-20 - Georgetown Pike). It's less than 20 minutes from my start when I arrive there, after dodging cars from high school students intent on escaping the walls of academe. I haven't checked a map and turn north on Mackall in vain hope of doing a neighborhood loop. Alas, it only leads me to a dead end at Holland St, so I have to backtrack past the young lovers in the lane.
- Friday, January 15, 2010 at 04:48:16 (EST)
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) somehow escaped my reading list for decades, until Robin gave me a copy for Xmas 2009. The book depicts the hazards of chemical pesticides and herbicides in meticulous detail. Most of the science is good, though there are statistical fallacies or misunderstandings (e.g., concerning cancer rates). Carson's work was, and remains, important in its promotion of systems thinking: the need to understand interrelationships, not isolated pieces of the puzzle. Sections foreshadow recent scandals involving deadly poisons in imported foods. Silent Spring is moving, however, in spite of—not because of—literary merit. It offers a catalog of issues and ideas, but Carson's language is generally far from poetic.
Most fascinating to me, however, are tidbits about the town I grew up in and around (Austin, Texas, in Chapter 9) and a discussion of the groundbreaking work of USDA entomologist Edward Knipling. Dr. Knipling's son Gary is a local ultramarathoner whom I've had the pleasure of running with many times. Small world! And even smaller: another fellow trail runner, Lyman Jordan, tells me that he grew up near where Rachel Carson lived and wrote—only a few miles from my home. Through the neighborhood flows Sligo Creek, Lyman notes, in which he played as a boy. Then it was rich in wildlife, until overuse of pesticides killed the frogs and fish and other creatures there. It has since come back to life.
- Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 04:43:58 (EST)
| Air breathes me Water drinks me Earth strides beneath my feet Sky tips up my chin, so Stars can peer into my eyes |
- Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 04:34:29 (EST)
Clair is on the recovery road from foot and knee injuries of 2009, so armored with new lavender-and-black Sugoi winter wear she ventures out with me this afternoon to circle the parking lot perimeter. We discuss aid station themes; Clair has extensive experience at the Hardrock 100 miler, and as a ski patroller. The wind cuts into us and my knees turn red. Lap one is ~10.1 min/mi. Our second circuit is ~9.9 pace, as the short walk break is canceled out by Clair's dash to the finish—or what she mistakes for the finish, which turns out to be 20 meters or so before the actual end. But she continues her kick strongly and afterwards confesses to having been a sprinter in high school. I do one additional 1.5 mile lap solo at ~7.5 min/mi. Showoff!
- Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 04:36:26 (EST)
In the chapter "Sitting by Fire" of Wherever You Go, There You Are Jon Kabat-Zinn muses on the difference between ancient times when sitting around the fire was a quiet time for reflection, as opposed to today's artificial environment:
Instead, we watch television at the end of the day, a pale electronic fire energy, and pale in comparison. We submit ourselves to constant bombardment by sounds and images that come from minds other than our own, that fill our heads with information and trivia, other people's adventures and excitement and desires. Watching television leaves even less room in the day for experiencing stillness. It soaks up time, space, and silence, a soporific, lulling us into mindless passivity. "Bubble gum for the eyes," Steve Allen called it. Newspapers do much the same. They are not bad in themselves, but we frequently conspire to use them to rob ourselves of many precious moments in which we might be living fully.
It turns out that we don't have to succumb to the addictive appeals of external absorptions in entertainment and passionate distraction. We can develop other habits that bring us back to that elemental yearning inside ourselves for warmth, stillness, and inner peace. When we sit with our breathing, for instance, it is much like sitting by fire. Looking deeply into the breath, we can see at least as much as in glowing coals and embers and flames, reflections of our own mind dancing. A certain warmth is generated, too. And if we are truly not trying to get anywhere but simply allow ourselves to be here in this moment as it is, we can stumble easily upon an ancient stillness—behind and within the play of our thoughts and feelings—that in a simpler time, people found in sitting by the fire.
- Monday, January 11, 2010 at 04:42:18 (EST)
A red-headed woodpecker blows past and perches on a tree to watch me. A discarded Christmas tree lies in the middle of the road, shoved there by 20-40 mi/hr winds. Temps are in the 'teens and the wind chill index in low single digits. I envy lady runners and their wisely warmer arrangement of certain bodily organs. The nozzle of my water bottle freezes solid after an hour and the electrolyte drink inside turns into a slush, reminding me of Barry Smith's kind offer yesterday to buy me a 7-11 "Slurpee" when he stopped to get coffee while giving me a ride home (cf. 2009-01-02 - Frigid CCT, Beach, Leland)
Today's solo run is an out-and-back from home to CCT to RCT to Candy Cane City, where I cross the footbridge and take roller-coaster Leland St to Wisconsin Av in Bethesda before turning back. Outbound facing into the wind is a bracing experience; the homeward journey feels slightly more comfortable. I kick out the final mile in ~9.5 minutes.
- Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 10:38:41 (EST)
Arnold Bennett, British novelist/essayist, endorsed journal-keeping in his article "The Diary Habit" published ca. 1910 (see DearDiary here, (2001-03-19)). Perhaps in rebuttal A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh, wrote a hilarious essay with the same title. An excerpt:
A newspaper has been lamenting the decay of the diary-keeping habit, with the natural result that several correspondents have written to say that they have kept diaries all their lives. No doubt all these diaries now contain the entry, "Wrote to the Daily — to deny the assertion that the diary-keeping habit is on the wane." Of such little things are diaries made.
I suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays—that nothing ever happens to anybody. A diary would be worth writing up if it could be written like this:—
MONDAY.—"Another exciting day. Shot a couple of hooligans on my way to business and was forced to give my card to the police. On arriving at the office was surprised to find the building on fire, but was just in time to rescue the confidential treaty between England and Switzerland. Had this been discovered by the public, war would infallibly have resulted. Went out to lunch and saw a runaway elephant in the Strand. Thought little of it at the time, but mentioned it to my wife in the evening. She agreed that it was worth recording."
...
Alas! we cannot do this. Our diaries are very prosaic, very dull indeed. They read like this:—
...
Wednesday.—"Played dominoes at lunch and won fivepence."
If this sort of diary is now falling into decay, the world is not losing much. But at least it is a harmless pleasure to some ... But there is another sort of diary which can never be of any importance at all. I make no apology for giving a third selection of extracts.
Monday.—"Rose at nine and came down to find a letter from Mary. How little we know our true friends! Beneath the mask of outward affection there may lurk unknown to us the serpent's tooth of jealousy. Mary writes that she can make nothing for my stall at the bazaar as she has her own stall to provide for. Ate my breakfast mechanically, my thoughts being far away. What, after all, is life? Meditated deeply on the inner cosmos till lunch- time. Afterwards I lay down for an hour and composed my mind. I was angry this morning with Mary. Ah, how petty! Shall I never be free from the bonds of my own nature? Is the better self within me never to rise to the sublime heights of selflessness of which it is capable? Rose at four and wrote to Mary, forgiving her. This has been a wonderful day for the spirit."
...
(for the full text of Milne's essay "The Diary Habit" see [1]; it also appears in the collection "Not That It Matters" [2] or [3] or [4])
- Saturday, January 09, 2010 at 05:40:57 (EST)
 | Here at a glance are all the runs I logged in 2009: a total of ~1486 miles on 140 days, averaging ~28 miles/week. |
2009 was quite a year. Looking back, the most memorable events weren't races—they were excursions with friends, sights seen, stresses survived, and "trail talk" that can never be repeated but will long be recalled. Among those to be thanked: Barry Smith, Caren Jew, Christina Caravoulias, CM Manlandro, Emaad Burki, Gayatri Datta, Kate Abbott, Ken Swab, Mary Ewell, ... and a host of others who may prefer to remain anonymous, comrades who made (almost!) every step a delight.
But races are races, and 2009 brought a goodly number of good ones, plus a plethora of noteworthy training runs. Some salient journal entries:
Later, analysis of speed versus distance and the factors that perhaps went into a lucky 2009 ...
(cf. Running Logbook, Running2006Analysis, ...)
- Friday, January 08, 2010 at 04:44:47 (EST)
"I recognize you with your clothes on!" I tell Sara Crum when we meet at 8am in downtown Bethesda. (It's a twist on her comment when by chance she saw me in a McLean restaurant, not in running attire, and I didn't know her—cf. 2009-10-17 - Chilly CCT.) Barry Smith and Gayatri Datta are here too. I've been invited to meet some of their friends in the "Winter Maintenance" running group. Besides Sara, and Rebecca Rosenberg (2009-09-26 - CCT RCT Loop Plus), there are Amy and Ann and Casey. A subset of the crew are running next weekend at the Disneyworld marathon. Several are taking the "Goofy Challenge", a half-marathon the day before the full race.
Starting at 7am from home I jog via the Capital Crescent Trail, as the moon shines dimly through rapidly scudding clouds. Today there's a high wind alert. Temperatures hover in the 20's. Melting and refreezing makes slippery spots worse than a week ago (2009-12-27 - Icy CCT). The group heads back along that same route to Jones Mill Rd, where we turn south, then take East-West Hwy to the Meadowbrook Stables, and after a restroom break there proceed on Rock Creek Trail to Beach Dr and downstream to just past Bingham Rd. We turn back when Gayatri's new GPS says 6 miles. Half a mile north of the DC-MD line we veer from Beach onto Leland St and follow it back to our start.
Leland zigs and zags but generally trends parallel to East-West Hwy. Sara and Barry explain how to tell if you're off course: "If it's not hilly, it's not Leland!" There are challenging slopes that we charge up. Back at the parking lot Gayatri's GPS says 10.7 and I add ~4 miles for my pre-group run. Barry gives me a ride home, car heater set to max as we both attempt to thaw our frozen hands.
- Thursday, January 07, 2010 at 04:41:19 (EST)
| Pond fountain builds volcanic rime-cone North wind blows tears into eyes Two snowflakes sidle down to kneel As dawn lights the altar |
(another ^z winter-commute Twitter-poem effort; cf. Ice Sculptures)
- Wednesday, January 06, 2010 at 05:06:27 (EST)
"Go ahead, it's fine!" I encourage the women standing in line to get into the men's restroom as I'm on my way out. The MCRRC New Year's Day 5k race begins in a few minutes, and the queue outside the ladies' room is far too long. No harm; runners do far less conventional things outdoors before many races! This year the Half Beast is gone: volunteers can't give me bib #333 during the distribution of numbers, and I settle for #222, a third of the biblical Number of the Beast. I've been #333 since 2006, so it's time for change.
Gayatri Datta and I ride to today's race with Barry Smith, who is back from running the Honolulu Marathon 2009 and is signed up for the Disney Marathon next weekend. Gayatri plans to do a multiday stage race in the Himalayas come next October. We chat in the car and I salute their energy. Christina Caravoulias takes pre-race photos and runners wish one another Happy New Year. At the starting line Wayne Carson lines up near me, and sandbagging banter ensues.
Today's run turns out OK, a new PR for the 5k by about 20 seconds in spite of suboptimal pacing. Splits by my watch: 6:54 for the first mile, then 7:00, and the final ~1.1 miles in 8:02 (a pace of ~7:15). I finish 7th out of 21 in the 55-59 year male group, official time 21:54. After the race Mical Honigfort tells me about the group run yesterday on the Appalachian Trail that I skipped due to snow and freezing rain.
- Tuesday, January 05, 2010 at 05:02:53 (EST)
For Xmas this year I got a copy of the 1928 book What to Read in English Literature by Jack R. Crawford. Like a smart tour guide, Crawford offers advice on which authors and books are worth seeking out. Many names on his list are new to me. In particular, my eye was soon caught (for reasons those who know me will have no trouble identifying) by William Wycherly. Crawford observes:
William Wycherley (1640?-1716) brought comedy to the lowest point of degradation that the English stage has witnessed. It is true that he had predecessors in this art in Dryden and Mrs. Aphra Behn, but Wycherley's work is worse because it is written with skill and remarkable literary power. He is a great writer, although he chose to write filth.
Not only does The Country Wife (a comedy that the squeamish reader will not venture to read aloud in the family circle) reflect the intense enjoyment of the followers of Charles II in the only joke many of them seem to have appreciated, but it also relates dramatically the quest for the only object that appears to have been worth a Restoration gentleman's efforts. Nevertheless, the comedy has such vigour and power, such wit of epigram and is such a total negation of all decency that it succeeds with a reader by its sheer force and skill. It is a masterpiece of the pornographic, (1675).
Wow! Both filth and comedy—what's not to like? But alas, standards have changed; The Country Wife turns out to be rather milder to modern eyes than perhaps it seemed a century or more ago ...
(see [1] for discussion, and [2] or other sources for the full text)
- Monday, January 04, 2010 at 04:42:03 (EST)
Kate Abbott warns me that it's cold outside, and I soon discover how right she is. Three afternoon laps accelerate, from ~9.5 to ~8.8 to ~7.7 min/mi pace, as wind gusts blast from the northwest and my eyes water. A single other runner, dressed in black and lavender head-to-toe, is circling the perimeter in the opposite direction.
- Sunday, January 03, 2010 at 05:28:13 (EST)
| Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment. |
... a comment by Dogen-zenji (1200-1253), as quoted in "Mistakes in Practice" in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (1970)
- Saturday, January 02, 2010 at 05:35:28 (EST)
In the overnight parking/maintenance lot a fleet of buses idles noisily, fog rising above them, at 0655 as I crunch past on the Capital Crescent Trail headed west. Dawn glows fuchsia in the southeast and I can make out a few of the ice hazards underfoot. Parts of the CCT are clear, in various cases due to recent rain, sunlight, salty runoff from nearby roads, reflected heat from local buildings, or public-spirited shoveling. Other parts of the trail are refrozen-slippery, and though the bank thermometer and the official NOAA weather page say temperatures are in the mid-to-upper 30's, frosty patches on cars and puddles testify otherwise.
I manage not to fall in the dark, in spite of several "Oops!" moments, and arrive safely in downtown Bethesda (~4 miles @ ~11.7 min/mi). Other runners are getting ready to venture out and we chat about the relative treachery of the trail surface in various directions. Then Emaad Burki and Alyssa Smith arrive, followed soon by Ken Swab and then CM Manlandro. Everyone is wearing tights except me. We admire the flashy harlequin-checkered Eric Clifton leggings that Santa brought Ken, and proceed southwest. Ken and I take the lead, chattering about the Miwok 100k in California. It's Ken's next big race, on 1 May 2010.
After about 0.7 miles we look behind us and see Emaad, Alyssa, and CM far in the distance. Returning to them we learn that for multiple reasons they don't actually want to get seriously damaged today. Emaad and Alyssa both are recovering from injuries (hip and calf problems, respectively) and have the Disney Marathon in a few weeks. CM is young and would have more years to suffer than the rest of us if she got hurt. So we head back cautiously and proceed through the CCT tunnel under Wisconsin Av to the next mile marker (~12 min/mi pace).
The rest of the group sees the icy trail ahead and decides to run along plowed/salted neighborhood streets to get their mileage in. I continue homeward, but in the light of day realize how dangerous the ice was that I couldn't see before sunrise. The final miles are relatively clear, however, so I accelerate to do them in 10:35 and 9:14 respectively. Belatedly I discover that my water bottle has bounced out of my fanny pack somewhere near the Columbia Country Club. It was ~7 years old, a giveaway from RnJ sports, with duct tape and a rubber band around it. May it rest in peace.
- Friday, January 01, 2010 at 18:28:00 (EST)
From the mad scientists who brought you Powr SpüngZ, Bäkn StripZ, and CPAP BongZ, a new product you never knew you couldn't live without: NiTie-NiTe GlasseZ!
You're signed up for an ultramarathon, say your first 100 miler, that's going to demand overnight running. You plan, sensibly, to practice in the darkness, a new challenge. But your family and your work make it impossible to get away for large chunks of time between sunset and sunrise. What to do?
Just put on a pair of NiTie-NiTe GlasseZ at midday and start crusing! Our custom-made goggles use only the finest #14 welder's glass to turn noon to night. They produce a stygian darkness that you've gotta experience to believe. In the middle of your field of view you will see, as dimly as if lit by a headlamp with dying batteries, faint glimpses of the world in front of you.
Fall down? You bet! Stagger into trees? Fer sure! Get lost? No question! NiTie-NiTe GlasseZ gives it all to you—and more. Your friends will chortle as you stumble off course and wander aimlessly down the street. Each pair of NiTie-NiTe GlasseZ comes with a free time-lock-on headband to keep you from taking them off prematurely. Put NiTie-NiTe GlasseZ on and you're committed ... or you should be! Call now—operators are standing by.
- Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 08:25:07 (EST)
For variety I go counter-clockwise instead of my habitual clockwise circuit around the parking lot perimeter. Today it's a bit chillier than yesterday, with a gusty northwest wind. As I begin a young man in black tights with a red-trimmed cap zips past me. I resist temptation to give chase (fortunately for me it's not a young lady) and let him build up a lead. He reverses course after a mile and thereafter we encounter each other twice every go-around. My pace accelerates steadily: 9.7 on the first orbit, then 8.8, and finally 7.9 min/mi.
- Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 04:49:05 (EST)
The Death of Achilles by "Boris Akunin" (a pseudonym) is one of those rare books that I abandoned after less than 100 pages. It's a mystery novel featuring Erast Fandorin, described in the blurbs on the jacket as "a Slavic Sherlock Holmes"; the author is praised and compared to Gogol, Chekhov, Poe, Dumas, and Ian Fleming. The plot crawls, the prose plods, the characters stagger, and the 1882 Moscow setting droops. When the hero immerses himself in ice water. meditates, and then practices martial arts with his Japanese quasi-ninja manservant I think of Inspector Clouseau, not James Bond. But the book isn't funny enough to be a pastiche of the detective genre. Perhaps the translation is troubled, or perhaps I'm just not in the mood?
- Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 04:38:34 (EST)
"It's warm outside!" the young lady tells me in the hallway when, on her way back from her run, she sees me outbound.
"But your legs are glowing," I note, observing her flushed-pink thighs.
"No, you'll be fine," she insists again, immediately arousing my suspicions. "You don't even need gloves."
"That's good, since I forgot mine!" I reply. But she's right, mostly. The temperature is in the upper 30's and I pull my sleeves down over my hands. When the parking lot perimeter aims me into the north wind I do get chilly during my first couple of laps. But once I begin to pick up the pace—or perhaps once everything is comfortably numb?—I don't notice the cold. Four roughly 1.5-mile circuits go by at paces of about 9.9, 9.6, 9.0, and 7.8 min/mi. The propane-fueled snow-melter is spewing out dirty water. When I head indoors to change back to work clothes, I see my own flushed-pink thighs.
- Monday, December 28, 2009 at 04:54:31 (EST)
| Ice sculptures Tickled by silver moonbeams Melt into giggles |
- Sunday, December 27, 2009 at 05:11:30 (EST)
From the diary of Samuel Pepys, 25 Dec 1665:
To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them. ...
(ref. [1] or [2]; cf. DearDiary (2001-03-19), TidyTime (2001-04-28), PeepingSam (2001-06-05), TripleThrills (2003-01-11), HolyMatwimony (2003-12-13), ...)
- Saturday, December 26, 2009 at 07:04:37 (EST)
Anger, a wee little book by Robert Thurman in the "Seven Deadly Sins" series, is a heavy-handed mystical sermon—mostly uninteresting. But one paragraph lept out at me, a discussion of the essence of mind from a Buddhist philosophical/theological perspective:
... The Buddha discovered in himself the delusional, self-absolutizing habit-pattern at instinctual and intellectual levels, and took up the challenge to verify if he really did exist in that substantial, unique, independent manner. He dissected his mindbody complex with intensive critical insight and one-pointed concentration, and eventually broke through the delusion by failing to discover any absolute self within. He then avoided reifying that failure by taking mere nothingness as a self, as some modern materialist thinkers have done. Instead he understood the ramifications of that failure as being the absolute relativity of the self, its total interconnectedness, its illusoriness or virtuality, and so on. This freed him to develop his relative, virtual self as a living work in progress, actually limitless in horizons of excellence, given endless time for evolution.
This resonates strongly with (my impressions of) philosopher Daniel Dennett's comment: "You'd be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself large." ... and with Ken Knisley's remark about people as ongoing projects: "How should one ongoing project, like me or like you, think of and deeply regard this panoply of other ongoing projects, peculiar living creatures that they are?" ... and with the beautiful reflexive-reflective image of Indra's Net.
- Friday, December 25, 2009 at 07:38:28 (EST)
Robert Hughes, Australian art critic, is also an angler. His little book A Jerk on One End (1999) is subtitled "Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman". It combines sharp prose and commentary with delightful self-deprecating humor. In Part I, for instance, Hughes muses about seeing:
... To fish at all, even on a humble level, you must notice things: the movement of the water and its patterns, the rocks, the seaweed, the quiver of tiny scattering fish that betrays a bigger predator under them. Time on the pier taught me to concentrate on the visual, for fishing is intensely visual even—perhaps especially—when nothing is happening. It is easy to look, but learning to see is a more gradual business, and it sneaks up on you unconsciously, by stealth. The sign that it is happening is the fact that you are not bored by the absence of the spectacular. ...
... and a little later, a parallel between fishing and writing:
... The fundamental experience of fishing consists of dropping a line into the unknown. You can guess at what is down there; you can make your best estimates based on tide, habitat, feeding patterns, and so forth; but you do not really know. Whatever takes your hook therefore has a character of revelation, even if it's only a flounder. It may be edible or not; thorny, spiny, or beautifully sleek; equipped with gnashing jaws or relatively passive; but there is always, assuming that you aren't sight-fishing, the magic moment when the thing struggling on your line down there could be anything. The similarities between the writer's work and the angler's need not be labored, but they exist: The writer lets down his or her hook into the deposit of memory and experience, the semiconscious fluid—not the dark, abyssal unconscious, which is out of reach, but the tidal zone where word, phrase, idea, and memory circulate in a kind of half-light, forming their unpredicted patterns. With luck, you bring something up. If it is undersize, you toss it back.
... and in Part III, a whimsical-shocking turn of the tables:
Fishing is a cruel sport. All blood sports are, though that is not necessarily a reason for abolishing them. How would you like it if fish and angler were reversed? It is a bright, breezy May day and you are strolling along one of the piers at Malibu. You stop at a vendor's cart and buy a hot dog with mustard and relish. You lean on the railing and take a first bite. Suddenly your gullet is convulsed with a choking pain and a sharp pull snaps your head forward and down. Something hard, sharp, and metallic is stuck in your throat. The shock is completely outside your experience. In an effort to resist it, you run frantically back and forth on the pier, but the pressure is inexorable, and your lungs have begun to fill with blood. Over the side you go, and hit the watr wildly struggling. The unidentifiable force drags you down. On the bed of the bay, something enormous and unknown grabs you and, if you are lucky, kills you with a blow to the back of the head. If you are not so lucky, death comes more slowly by drowning. Either way, perhaps mercifully, you cannot hear or understand the Thing on the seabed chatting to its fellow Things about how well you fought.
Shocking and debatable, yes. Hughes admits that we can't really know what it feels like to be a fish. And Nature in our absence is cruel. But nevertheless, even putting aside an individual fish's potential suffering, there's the larger question of overfishing, extinction of entire species, pollution of waterways and the oceans, etc. Big issues, worth pondering. Hughes addresses them thoughfully.
(cf. SeeingAndForgetting (1999-07-15), ArtNewspaper (2001-08-04), Omnivore's Dilemma (2009-05-16), ...)
- Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 07:40:24 (EST)
The air is pregnant with a looming blizzard that will bring 20" of snow tomorrow. Paulette and Gray are visiting Deb Sagerholm's shop, Marco Polo's Treasures, where I leave the car. I know I've seen this industrial park from Rock Creek below, so with a zig and a zag around the outside perimeter of security fences I stumble my way downhill. Two friendly dogs bark at me from the Purple blazed trail where their owner is letting them roam. I progress upstream for about a mile, losing the trail and re-finding it repeatedly. Then I join Rock Creek Trail near the Beltway and commence five up-and-downs on the big hill by the Mormon Temple, the hill CM Manlandro calls "The Silencer". From Beach Dr to Kent St along Stoneybrook I go, about half a mile at 6% grade (150 feet climb) and the same amount down. My up times average 5:03 (fifth one = 4:49) and down times average 4:36. At 5pm sharp the Xmas lights click on and visitor's cars begin to cruise the Temple parking lot. I head home via Ireland Dr, up the grade that CM cursed when I snookered her into ascending it at the end of her first 15 mile training run (cf. 2008-12-13 - Rock Creek West Loop).
- Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 04:40:29 (EST)
Kind correspondent Lila Das Gupta clearly knows how much I like (1) lists, (2) self-improvement homilies, and (3) optimism; she recently offered these "Twelve Characteristics of Tough-Minded Optimists" from Alan Loy McGinnis's The Power of Optimism:
... and Lila points out that these also work for marathon runners!
(see also Lila's blog and OptimistCreed (1999-04-16), MoveOn (2007-01-16), SolveTheProblem (2007-05-24), ...)
- Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 04:45:43 (EST)
Computer scientist Jim Gray vanished in 2007 while sailing on the ocean. He came to mind again recently when a New York Times book review appeared of The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, a collection of essays in Gray's honor by his colleagues.
I only met Jim Gray briefly, a dozen or more years ago at a long-forgotten group project meeting. Of him I only recall his grizzled beard, his friendliness, his sensible remarks, and his habit of standing up to stride quietly around the room while others talked. He was suffering from back pain at the time, he explained, and this kept it under control.
Gray was a database expert who thought big, orders of magnitude larger than current information technology capabilities. His Turing Award lecture explores a dozen key research challenges. It includes part of a delightful list that Gray attributes to David Huffman, another famous CS researcher:
... charming thoughts, if a bit too CS-centric. I would correct it to say that Physics holds patents on space-time and mass-energy—but yes, I'm a physicist! (^_^)
Reading about and remembering Jim Gray brought to mind Jon Mathews, who also sadly was lost at sea during a 1979 sailing voyage around the world. I took a few classes from Mathews and admired him greatly. Perhaps over the years I've become more like him than I anticipated (or could have hoped). The thoughtful remarks by Robert Walker [1] sharpen the memories:
Jon was not like most of the other people on the physics faculty at Caltech in his motivations and his approach to science. He had great versatility — as do some of the others — but I think his most outstanding characteristic was that he was a scholar, and his scientific motivations stemmed from that. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the various characters traveling together on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Among them was a scholar, about whom he said:
A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That un-to logik hadde longe y-go ....
Of studie took he most cure and most hede.
Noght o word spak he more than was nede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence,
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he Ierne, and gladly teche.I think the last line describes Jon particularly well. What really interested him was learning a new subject, which he did with great intensity and remarkable intellectual power, but he was never so involved with his own long-range research that he was unwilling to be diverted and give attention to a new problem — provided you could get him interested. Then he would be of great help.
A scholar: learning and helping others. Another way in which Jim Gray resembled Jon Mathews. I'd like to be more like that ...
- Monday, December 21, 2009 at 06:59:22 (EST)
Two sad endings: last Sunday the final Angus Phillips column ran in the Washington Post [1]; yesterday Peter Seinfels announced that the next "Beliefs" column in the New York Times will be the last. Both men write extraordinarily well. For 35 years Phillips explored the outdoor worlds of hunting, fishing, sailing, etc. For 20 years Steinfels explored the interior worlds of religious philosophy. As he said in his penultimate essay, "In Tapestry of Columns, a Search for Threads" [2]:
... intelligence and critical reasoning are essential to adult approaches to faith. In short, theology matters. It is curious that so many otherwise thoughtful people imagine that what they learned about religion by age 13, or perhaps 18, will suffice for the rest of their lives. They would never make the same assumption about science, economics, art, sex or love.
The same applies to Nature—one can always learn more. Both Steinfels and Phillips introduced me to new ideas and experiences, concepts and challenges I had never imagined. Perhaps their articles will be anthologized, so I can read them in years to come ...
(cf. Where Was God (2002-09-14), Angus Phillips (2007-11-26), Secular Conscience (2009-02-17), ...)
- Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 12:45:16 (EST)
Tired-feeling legs for the journey out to the jogging path, but when a big doe startles me just past the three-quarters mile mark of my first circuit I feel suddenly energized. The next time around I'm looking for her, and I see two deer there. Will there be three on my final lap? Yes! A medium-sized fawn is now eyeing the crazy runner in shorts and gloves as he attempts to accelerate his pace. Miles by the painted lines are 9:51, 8:50, and a startling 7:26. Only one other person is out in this upper-30s weather, skin of ice remaining on puddles, fallen pine cones littering the asphalt.
- Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 09:27:45 (EST)
Friend Caren Jew recently shared with me a race report by Sophie Speidel, who finished the aptly-named Hellgate 100k this month in under 15 hours. That report in turn led to an article by Eric Doehrman titled "Refine Your Mental Flexibility by Making the Most of Your Pain Cave". It offers a metaphorical step-by-step guide to feeling more at home in one's head during hard physical activity:
1. Find the address. You have to figure out where uncomfortable starts.
2. Stop by and stare in the window. Spend a few minutes there at first.
3. Step inside for a bit. Look around and know that you can leave at any time.
4. Decorate a bit. Find the cues that signal when you are at threshold and use them to decorate. Your rapid heart beat can represent a wall hanging and the burning in your legs could indicate that you have taken to the stairs. Take the discomfort that you feel and make it your own — by doing so you have taken control. When you are in control you can push harder in your sets and reach heights that you never thought possible.
5. Get some furniture. Find positive motivating thoughts (furniture) that you can use while you are there to make your stay more comfortable. An athlete that is in control and who is comfortable pushing themselves to the limit will develop an instinct for maximum performance.
6. Paint the walls. Focus on a color that soothes you and helps you get through your set. The ability to control your focus during threshold sets is the key to success in every workout that you do.
7. Leave on your own accord. You are now in control of the Pain Cave and you can feel free to call it your "Happy Place" if you like.
Doehrman cautions that it takes time, and practice, to move down this list. I'm definitely still in the first few baby steps of the journey; I've only recently begun to push significantly beyond my comfort zone when running, thanks to encouragement by comrades such as CM Manlandro. The mental experience is a fascinating one, with connections perhaps to Buddhist mindfulness meditation techniques. I'm learning, slowly, about separating physical feelings from the me who observes them. Hmmm ...
(cf. Lorraine Moller (2009-12-12), ...)
- Friday, December 18, 2009 at 04:49:49 (EST)
It's Diane Pham's first race, and she has picked a fine day for it: temps in the mid-30's, rain that chills to the bone, slippery leaves, and monster puddles. "You're lucky," I tell her, "since now all your later races will seem easy!"
The "Bread Run" is a traditional DC Road Runners Club event with a friendly theme: bring a loaf of homemade bread, and get in free! Donated breads are given out as door prizes at the end, and almost everybody who runs and waits around gets something. Christina Caravoulias and I ran the 2007 Bread Run, so when I learn that Diane had signed up for it I decide to run it with her, to help make sure her experience is a good one.
Diane gets lost on the way to the race's start/finish in Glen Echo, but I talk her in and she arrives with 5 minutes to spare. I tear a plastic trash bag with my teeth to make an impromptu rain shield; Diane dons a Mickey Mouse poncho. We lurk in the back of the pack and cross the starting line 8 seconds after the "Go!" Steady trotting ensues, with splits of 10:36 + 10:45 + 11:33 + 11:04 + 10:47 + 11:38 and a final fraction of 1:52 for a total of 1:08:24. The slower miles correspond to hillier course segments. The official record shows us at 1:08:25, 77th and 78th place of 105 finishers.
Cheerful Clare Storck of Cheverly runs with us most of the race; she's doing it to raise funds for a friend in need, and hasn't run much for a few years. Diane claims to have only been training for a few weeks, mainly on treadmill, but she's clearly fit and confesses to have cycled some years ago along the C&O Canal towpath part of the race route. Near mile 4 we have a pleasant surprise when Diane's husband Matt and her two sons materialize to take photos and cheer her along. I entertain Clare and Diane with anecdotes and advice as we trot along.
After we finish we go into a Glen Echo park building, drink hot apple cider and hot chocolate, eat cheese and bread and jam, applaud the winners as they are announced, and—as I predicted—all get to take home a loaf of bread. Brava to Diane on her initial outing!
- Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 04:43:11 (EST)
In June 2008 a thoughtful article by Jan Hoffman appeared in the New York Times. It was titled "When Thumbs Up Is No Comfort" and discussed how metaphors for illness can be helpful or the opposite. I shared it with two friends who were suffering from cancer. One is still alive; the other, Bo Leuf, died earlier this year. A key point that Hoffman makes is that violent conflict is often not a good image for a cancer victim's situation:
Dr. Gary M. Reisfield, a palliative care specialist at the University of Florida, Jacksonville, believes that the language used by cancer patients and their supporters can galvanize or constrain them. Over the last 40 years, war has become the most common metaphor, with patients girding themselves against the enemy, doctors as generals, medicines as weapons. When the news broke about Senator Kennedy, he was ubiquitously described as a fighter. While the metaphor may be apt for some, said Dr. Reisfield, who has written about cancer metaphors, it may be a poor choice for others.
"Metaphors don't just describe reality, they create reality," he said. "You think you have to fight this war, and people expect you to fight." But many patients must balance arduous, often ineffective therapy with quality-of-life issues. The war metaphor, he said, places them in retreat, or as losing a battle, when, in fact, they may have made peace with their decisions.
To describe a patient's process through illness, he prefers the more richly ambiguous metaphor of a journey: its byways, crossroads, U-turns; its changing destinations; its absence of win, lose or fail.
And likewise so with life—another journey that none of us gets out of alive ...
- Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 04:44:03 (EST)
In Walden (chapter "The Village") Henry David Thoreau tells of navigating through the darkness, in itself and as a metaphor for life:
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
- Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 05:26:15 (EST)
 | "And that reminds me of the NCT marathon ..." — "Well, when I did the NCT marathon, it seemed to me that ..." — "My NCT result suggests ..." — etc., etc. Yes, it's a fortnight after the Northern Central Trail Marathon, and at least once every mile today I manage to work it into the conversation (or rather, my monologue). Apparently it was a peak experience of my lifetime. As the day goes on my obsession becomes something of a running joke (pun intended). Kate Abbott kindly puts up with me, but I notice that she seems to go a little faster every time I say the letters "NCT". Coincidence? And did I mention that I finished in 4:01:06 at the NCT last month, a 24-minute improvement in my marathon PR? |
The VHTRC's Magnus Gluteus Maximus is a low-key go-as-you-please event. In 2006 I did ~21 miles of the MGM with friend Caren Jew, and in 2007 managed ~10 miles with new trail runner comrades Kabrena Rodda and Kevin Lee. Today Kate Abbott and I hope to go a bit farther, but we also have a significant schedule constraint: the party this afternoon for Kate's eldest son's 11th birthday.
So half an hour early we start down the southern pink-horseshoe-blazed trail, saving a mile from the regular route. Downstream on the Bull Run Trail to the Marina we go, where we discover an aid station set up but unmanned. We snag a handful of munchies (including greasy-salty fried-corn cheesy-balls), drink a few sips of Coke, and trek onward. The fastest runners from the official 8am start begin to pass us about half a dozen miles into our journey, and thereafter we've got company much of the time.
The hose from my hydration backpack freezes solid and I'm without water for the first couple of hours. Eventually I figure out that I can tuck it inside my shirt and thaw it, and after that I'm fine. Kate reveals that she's been doing that all along. "Why didn't you tell me?" I ask.
Before we start Kate gives me a baggie of tasty peanut-butter M&M candies and Utz mini cheddar-cheese cracker-sandwiches. I nibble on the contents all day and finish during the final mile. I'm grossly overprepared and never need to eat any of my candy bars, energy bars, etc. ("You're a mobile candy store!" Kate exclaims when she looks inside my pack.) But better to be ready than the opposite. I don't need any of my pills today either; the only twinges are the usual ones in the left foot metatarsal bones.
At Fountainhead helpful volunteers tell us which way to proceed, and though I pay them no attention Kate is listening. A few lost runners are wandering the parking lot, so after getting them back on course Kate and I trot along to the next aid station where we drink soda water and continue. A wag has posted a sign that says "NICE RACK" on a tree that we pass. Gary Knipling, never inhibited, quotes it with a twinkle in his eye as he catches up with us. "There's a lady present, Gary!" I sternly admonish him. "This is the 21st Century—you're not too old to learn some manners!" He cheerfully ignores me.
The clock is ticking toward our deadline, so at 10:56am we tag the marker post and turn tail at the entrance of the infamous "Do Loop", rather than attempt the 3 mile circuit. Back at the aid station we top up Kate's Camelbak and my Nathan vest-pack. I dig through the box of snack-size bags of chips and in the bottom find the last one of crunchy Cheetos—woot! (Kate located one earlier there, and I'm inspired by her example.) The tasty combination of grease and salt stains my gloves and reinvigorates me. I take the lead for a while, then give it back to Kate who has a perfect sense of pace. Our legs are a bit tired now, after her triumphant JFK 50 miler and my NCT.
We chat with each other as we run, about fitness, family, friends, fun, and frustrations. Other runners continue to pass and I overhear good stories about ultramarathon experiences they've had. Just after the Marina we pause to read the text of a small memorial to a girl who died here 22 years ago.
A fast racer, Perry, from southern Maryland catches up with us as we're approaching the soccer fields. He stumbles but avoids a fall. I quote the second stanza of my comic verse Face Plant, much to Perry's amusement. Kate explains that I burst into spontaneous poetry recitations during long runs. The performance usually succeed in driving away anyone within earshot, Kate adds. Perry makes his excuses and heads onward soon thereafter.
When we reach Bull Run Trail milepost 10 we're at the bottom of the horse path that we decended almost seven hours ago. Kate and I check our watches and see that there's ample time for an extra mile, so upstream we head along the Bull Run Run course past BRT milepost 11. Along the way another runner catches up with us, but at our advice she takes a short cut upward. We follow the traditional steep northernmost trail up to the Hemlock Overlook lodge, running as much as we can at this point. We both need the experience on rocks and hills for next year's races.
Black truly has a slimming effect. When elite ultrarunner Michelle Harmon sees me post-run she exclaims, "Mark, you're only a shadow of your former self!" I gently disagree. Credit goes to my ninja-like costume today: sable tights, shorts, and long-sleeved shirt.
Kate and I snag slices of pizza and head for home, Kate to manage her son's birthday party, I to rest and recuperate. We've both entered the lottery to get into the Massanutten Mountain Trails 100 miler to be held in May 2010. Kate claims not to have heard me months ago when I told her that MMT is one of the toughest races in the East. She's already in; I'm #87 on the waiting list. My fingers are crossed ...
- Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 20:10:06 (EST)
The December 2009 issue of Running Times has an interesting set of mini-interviews titled "Pain: How Top Athletes Manage the Mental Stress of Racing" by Sarah Barker. The most sensible and inspirational commments are by Lorraine Moller, a New Zealander who's almost as old as I am and who won the Boston Marathon (1984) and took bronze in an Olympic Games marathon (1992). Moller observes:
I never thought about pain as a force to be reckoned with. Pain was a danger signal and I heeded it well, thus remaining mostly injury-free.
I don't like the word 'pain' to describe running. Pain is a completely different thing from being out of your comfort level, which most top runners relish and distinguishes them from less competitive people.
I spent more time carefully planning what I would do to combat self-sabotage than I ever did planning a strategy against a rival. Ultimately, the only rival is oneself anyhow.
In training, I would practice threshold runs with a heart rate monitor and, once I was going at maximum, I would scout for areas of tension in my body and see if I could relax them. Most often I could increase my pace by a few seconds without any increase in heart rate just by letting go. We think that faster means more effort. My intention was to go faster with less effort.
I've used tons of mental strategies, lots of games, like bargaining with myself—I'm gong to go 10 more lampposts and see how I feel—breaking the race into small, doable segments.
The thought that's in your mind is immediately reflected in the body, and since the conscious mind can only attend to one thought at a time, I try to make that a positive one. In the Barcelona Olympics [bronze medal performance] I reached a point where I wanted to drop back from the pack. A negative thought. Instead, I ran to the front of the pack, just a few steps, and thought, 'Look, I'm winning.' I immediately felt better and stayed with the pack.
...
I just love that: Look, I'm winning!
(cf. Inventing a Running Machine (2008-03-06), ...)
- Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 05:27:06 (EST)
What to say about a 1961 "cult classic" sf novel that I read multiple times in the late 60's and early 70's? Reopening Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land now, so much of it is still familiar that it must have lodged deeper than I realized. Flaws are evident, as are strengths. Heinlein's dialogue is smooth—but almost all the characters speak with his own voice, sometimes so like one another that it's hard to tell them apart. His roller-coaster plot swerves and lurches but never quite flies off the tracks; coincidence goes beyond Dickensian. Sexuality is treated with arch humor, politely and analytically—but by today's standards there's heavy-handed sexism in many areas.
Overall, though, Stranger still reads splendidly. The legendary competence of virutally everyone in Heinlein's universe is fun, if hard to believe at times. The clever mix of fantasy, religion, and science somehow works. "Grok" and "Thou art God" aren't clichés. Jubal Harshaw, elder demigod of the story, is easier for me to identify with now that I'm 40 years older than I was last time I cracked the book. And the "lessons" brought back from Mars by protagonist Valentine Michael Smith—patience, objectivity, joy, fearless love—yet remain. A book worth cherishing, not worshiping.
(cf. MarryTheOne (2005-05-20), Hurry Patiently (2008-12-14), ...)
- Friday, December 11, 2009 at 05:13:31 (EST)
| The Massanutten Trail is built of gaps: Shawl Gap; Veach Gap; Sherman, Milford, Habron Gap, Notches in a ridge line, spaces, voids, Emptiness where valley touches hill, Clefts where saddles bridge the land and sky ... Pits and crevasses, outlines, silhouettes, Miles to walk until the next crossroads, |
- Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 04:35:39 (EST)
Salt crystals crunch under my shoes—the concrete is encrusted with leftover halite from anti-ice treatment of a few days ago. Temps in the mid-40s and a north breeze make for a comfortable trio of loops around the parking lots in early afternoon, accelerating from about 10 to 9 to 8 min/mi pace. (Raw times by my watch = 15:02, 13:12, 11:36) I zig-zag to take sidewalks rather than my usual route along the side of the road or the grassy/muddy shoulder.
- Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 04:47:09 (EST)
Simon Blackburn's Being Good: A short introduction to ethics is a cute little philosophy book that, not surprisingly, raises more questions than it answers. Along the way it offers a host of interesting thoughts and anecdotes. For example, in section 2 ("Relativism") Blackburn highlights the line between imposing one's moral standards and refusing to support evil:
... [This] counteracts the idea that we are just 'imposing' parochial, western standards when, in the name of universal human rights, we oppose oppressions of people on the grounds of gender, caste, race, or religion. Partly, we can say that it is usually not a question of imposing anything. It is a question of cooperating with the oppressed and supporting their emancipation. More importantly, it is usually not at all certain that the values we are upholding are so very alien to the others (this is one of the places where we are let down by thinking simplistically of hermetically sealed cultures: them and us). After all, it is typically only the oppressors who are spokespersons for theirculture or their ways of doing it. It is not the slaves who value slavery, or the women who value the fact that they may not take employment, or the young girls who value disfigurement. It is the brahmins, mullahs, priests, and elders who hold themselves to be spokesmen for their culture. What the rest think about it all too often goes unrecorded. Just as victors write the history, so it is those on top who write their justification for the top being where it is. THose on the bottom don't get to say anything.
In section 3 ("Egoism") Blackburn talks about knowledge and proof and close-mindedness:
... The philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) told a story about describing a case to the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. Adler listened to the description, and unhesitatingly pronounced castration anxiety, father jealousy, desire to sleep with the mother, or whatever it was. When he had finished, Popper asked him how he knew. 'Because of my thousand-fold experience,' came the reply. 'And with this new case,' said Popper, according to his own report, 'I suppose your experience has become a thousand-and-one-fold.' ...
The final paragraph of Being Good offers a guardedly-cheerful view of the state of the world:
But if we reflect on an increased sensitivity to the environment, to sexual difference, to gender, to people different from ourselves in a whole variety of ways, we can see small, hard-won, fragile, but undeniable causes of pride. If we are careful, and mature, and imaginative, and fair, and nice, and lucky, the moral mirror in which we gaze at ourselves may not show us saints. But it need not show us monsters, either.
(cf. HumanNature (1999-12-05), ThinkAgain (2002-08-29), ...)
- Tuesday, December 08, 2009 at 04:42:41 (EST)
Snow on Saturday turns to ice overnight and helps CM Manlandro sensibly to decide not to run with me at sunrise on Sunday morning. So Caren Jew, recovering from calf muscle strain, introduces me to the trails of Sugarloaf Mountain. The main parking lot is full; Caren drives down Mount Ephraim Rd until we find a pull-off at the Yellow Trail crossing. We trek clockwise along that trail, hiking not running, and soon meet a VHTRC crew finishing their ramble: Joe Clapper, Michelle Harmon, and Nathan Soules. Greetings, a couple of quick photos, then the discovery that Joe's foot is mysteriously bleeding. Onward: across small streams that wet our feet, over hills that offer lovely vistas, and down rutted fire roads. After a couple of hours of excellent conversation—dream descriptions, family gossip, future races to do together, etc.— we spy Caren's car ahead. Caren insists on running the final stretch.
- Monday, December 07, 2009 at 05:54:04 (EST)
An aphorism from Robin Zimmermann that I've not been able to find anywhere on the 'Net:
| Attack before you're ready! |
... meaning, I suspect:
And perhaps it has several other interpretations, depending on the situation—that's what makes a good maxim, eh?
(cf. BeUnprepared (2004-11-09), Five Minutes Early (2009-05-14), ...)
- Sunday, December 06, 2009 at 09:30:50 (EST)
I like Australians. Well, OK, I like almost everybody—but somehow I really like Australians. Maybe it's their clichéd national characteristics: practical, proud, yet self-deprecating. The song "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba—even though it's British—has that feel in its refrain: "I get knocked down / But I get up again / 'Cause you're never gonna keep me down ...".
So creeping slowly toward the point: on the new-book shelf at the local public library the book Finding the Quiet catches my eye. The author's name, Paul Wilson, reminds me of F. Paul Wilson, a science-fiction writer I remember from decades ago. So down take I the book. Paul Wilson is an Aussie, not an sf writer, who calls himself "The Guru of Calm". Ugh! The beginning of his book is extraordinarily off-putting—full of "I" this and "me" that. Double-ugh! After dithering and almost returning it to the shelf, finally I check it out. I expect to skim and then return it in a few days.
But after that distressingly boastful preface, Finding the Quiet shifts gears and becomes, for the most part, something rather close to the Engineer's Guide to Enlightenment that I imagined more than a decade ago. Yes, it's far from perfect. In fact Part B falls into the "F'ing Ineffable" pit of mysticism that, in my present state of unenlightenment, is seriously annoying. Maybe some day it will make sense, though somehow I hope not.
But for ~160 pages Paul Wilson does a solid job of categorizing and analyzing the major varieties of mindfulness meditation. He gives a neat taxonomy, a roadmap of three paths that he identifies as:
In other words, Reflection vs. Projection vs. Now.
Wilson's suggested practice of what he terms "The Quiet" begins with what he calls CenterWidenListen+Observe: center (take a breath, notice what's supporting you, straighten your spine); widen (broaden your attention to include peripheral vision); and listen (sense your breath and the subtler sounds around you). As Wilson says, this is "more of an attitude than a function" and eventually becomes "a state of not doing anything, but doing it with attentiveness." Then observe: move into one of the three practices, deep or directed or aware.
The down-to-earth nature of Paul Wilson's prose is charmingly captured in a remark he makes in passing. While discussing meditative hand positions (aka "mudras") and the virtue of the simplest one, he says, "There are many others, but their subtlety eludes me and I've yet to meet anyone who will attest to their usefulness."
I love it! Wilson's gentle dismissal—"... their subtlety eludes me ..."—applies to a boatload of mystical frou-frou. Let's throw it all overboard and get back to now ...
(cf. Wherever You Go, There You Are (2008-10-26), Meditation Made Easy (2008-11-01), Coming to Our Senses (2009-01-01), ...)
- Saturday, December 05, 2009 at 19:23:48 (EST)
Bus-commute acquaintance Lorraine and another lady are wearing parkas and hoods against the chill northwest breezes as I run past them, sweating, in shorts and short-sleeved shirt. It's the first run after Saturday's marathon, and I stretch the old legs with an early-afternoon trio of laps around the hilly jogging path. No animals are seen in the woods, but there are plenty of pine cones and decaying leaves on the ground. A seed pod spirals down and hits me in the eye. A runner going in the "wrong" direction on the trail greets me. As planned my miles accelerate: 9:21 to 8:11 to 7:24, that last at near-top-speed. One sock develops a hole in the heel and I throw it away when I get back to the dressing room.
- Friday, December 04, 2009 at 04:43:07 (EST)
A little booklet called "The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools" fell into my hands recently. It's by Richard Paul and Linda Elder of the self-styled Foundation for Critical Thinking. Among the ideas it offers is a list of "Essential Intellectual Traits":
OK, there's redundancy in the list of attributes, the prose isn't golden, and the origin and completeness of the criteria could be questioned (I'm criticizing!) ... but overall, it's a cute catalog of ideals to strive for, eh?
- Thursday, December 03, 2009 at 04:50:46 (EST)
Recently the comic newspaper The Onion ran a delightful-mindful-philosophical article titled "December Named National Awareness Month". It begins:
In an effort to combat what organizers are calling "our current epidemic of complete and utter obliviousness," the American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things has declared December "National Awareness Month."
"All across the country, millions of men and women are dangerously unaware," AFPAT spokesperson Karen Teeling said during a press conference Monday. "What's worse, the vast majority of those suffering from this debilitating state of mind don't even know it."
"That's why this December we're asking that all Americans stop whatever it is they're doing, and take a moment to open their eyes for once—just once—in their lives," Teeling added. "It'll make all the difference in the world."
(cf. Shake the Pillars (2008-09-02), ...)
- Wednesday, December 02, 2009 at 04:38:30 (EST)
"I don't know," is my only honest response to a host of questions involving tough trade-offs, where multiple good things come into conflict. A few examples:
Rush Kidder mused about these conflicts and various ways to resolve them—Utilitarianism vs. Golden Rule vs. Categorical Imperative vs. etc.—but I don't remember a satisfactory conclusion to that discussion. Maybe there isn't a simple answer ... which takes me back to something posted here in May 1999, a Tom Toles "Curious Avenue" comic strip from a few years before that:
One character says, "Maybe you're just looking for simple answers. Maybe there are no simple answers. Problems require thought and dedication."
The other character replies, "But there are simple answers. There are just no good answers. --- Although that one was pretty good."
- Tuesday, December 01, 2009 at 04:58:58 (EST)
 | The planets are clearly in alignment this month. Comrades Kate Abbott and Ken Swab improve their JFK 50 miler time by a massive 50 minutes over last year's results. At the Northern Central Trail Marathon on the Saturday after Thanksgiving I knock 24 minutes off a PR set just last month at the Marine Corps Marathon. Official time: 4:01:06. So Sub-4 remains a goal, if the stars line up again. Maybe with a friend! The NCTM, aka the Northern Central Rail Trail Marathon (NCRTM), is predominantly a fast, flat, out-and-back along what was once the Northern Central Railway right-of-way. Hilly rural roads for the first and last couple of miles connect the crushed-stone trail to the start/finish at an elementary school in Sparks MD, north of Baltimore.
|
At mile 1 a runner near me breaks away from the pack to cross the road and kiss his girlfriend. "I'll see you at Mile 9," she tells him.
"Hey, what about me?" I ask. "Don't I get one?"
They both laugh. "We're just keeping it real," the man tells me as we run along together.
Today's conversations are all that brief: instead of a long chatty ramble with buddies I'm trying to see how fast I can solo. I remind myself along the way of strategic admonitions from friends: Ken Swab's "Run like a dog" mantra; CM Manlandro's "Fly & Die" motto; Steve Adams's "Gut it out" rule.
It's a near-perfect day for a speed test, sunny with temperatures starting in the lower 40s and rising to the upper 40s. Gusty west winds are only occasionally an impediment on the mainly north-south course through scenic Gunpowder Falls State Park. After a couple of miles I roll up my sleeves and get to work. But first ...
Doug Sullivan and his friends in the Howard County Striders have arranged to carpool to the NCTM and kindly invite me along. At 0645 I meet Doug at the Park-and-Ride lot in Columbia and we cruise uneventfully. Nick Del Grosso and Hafiz Shaikh ride up in Doug's car. We compare notes on various races and discuss training, injuries, etc. During the return journey Greg Lepore, an archivist, chats with me about his information technology work at the National Archives.
Packet pickup is swift in the Sparks Elementary School auditorium. Before and after the race I see Jeanne Larrison, who's doing the relay. Ed Schultze and I sit together on the steps in front of the school stage. We pin on our numbers and attach timing chips to our shoes. Ed has had some major knee surgeries within the past few years, and this is his first attempt at the marathon distance since then.
Standing in line for the porta-johns, I entertain a nearby runner when I tell Nick that Kate Abbott and I had hoped to be pacers for the last 60 miles of Massanutten, then correct myself to say last 40 miles. "What?!" the eavesdropper exclaims. "Last 40 miles!?" We laugh together; it puts the upcoming 26.2 miles into perspective.
Bundled head-to-foot against the weather, Betty Smith greets me at the start. We talk about her Chi Running, Vibram Five Fingers shoes, etc. I expect to find CM Manlandro, who last summer had hoped to do the NCTM. But she was a bit injured after the New York City marathon, hasn't run much for the past month, and decides to skip the NCT, in spite of promising me she would run it with me back in June. (Yes, I plan to taunt her mercilessly about that!) A young lady doing her first marathon is nervous. We talk together for a minute, and then it's time to roll.
While waiting in the school I drink a cup of coffee and eat a Snickers candy bar. During the NCTM I fuel aggressively: a package of gummy-lump Clif Shot Bloks, 5 energy gels (many thanks to the volunteer who gives me two samples), and half a dozen Succeed! electrolyte capsules. Between aid stations I sip from a squeeze bottle of salted tea mixed up this morning. I quaff a cup of Gatorade at every opportunity.
After half a dozen miles of cruising at ~8:50 min/mi my legs start to get fatigued. I tell myself, "It's OK to feel tired!" and carry on. I reach the half-marathon point at about 1:56, continuing at the same speed.
On the way back I can't help but slow down; mile 18 is the last sub-9 that I log. About mile 20 the left leg suddenly feels weak; for a while I fear a fall. From mile 21 onward the old hamstrings and calves tighten and I'm on the edge of cramping. I pop S! e-caps aggressively and take 30-45 second walk breaks about every five minutes. At this point I compute that if I can maintain ~10 min/mi I've still got a chance to finish in four hours.
During the race I experiment with "watching my breath" in Buddhist mindfulness-meditation fashion: paying attention, deliberately and nonjudgmentally, to the present moment and all that it contains. I observe my tiredness and crampiness objectively. Does it help? Hard to say ... but I do more-or-less persuade myself to enjoy whatever happens. The waterfalls and old stone buildings and rocky cliffs are lovely sights; so are the other runners whom I follow and occasionally pass, or who pass me.
"6:55? That can't be right!" I comment to racers near me as we zip by the first mile marker of the NCTM. It's far too soon for us to have gone that far. Several runners with GPS units confirm that "Mile 1" was more than 0.1 mi short. Other markers along the course are similarly incorrect, according to GPS. It's a certified course, but only after the race do I discover the official map and belatedly read the hand-printed annotation:
First mile is 601 ft short. The last two-tenths of a mile is 601 ft long. All other timing points are correct distance.
Well, duh! It would have been kind to tell competitors before they discover during the race, as I did, that their pace calculations are going to be seriously in error, especially near the end.
When the course leaves the NCR Trail and proceeds up Lower Glencoe Rd, volunteers tell us, "Only 1.7 miles to go!" My watch says 3h37m and I think I'm still roughly on schedule to beat 4 hours. But there are actually 2+ miles remaining, with hills to climb along the way. Not that it matters: I'm going as fast as I can while trying not to cramp up or fall down.
Mile marker 25 goes by at about 3h48m on my watch. Pushing hard now I pass Ed Schultze, doing great on his first post-surgery marathon. I compliment him on his speed, since he has been ahead of me all this way—and then he reveals that he started half an hour early! We cheer each other and I continue to "run" along the shoulder of the road, trying not to bump into orange traffic cones.
Mile marker 26: 3h59m, still no end in sight. Here's where advance notice of 601 extra feet in the last 0.2 mile would have been comforting, though it wouldn't have changed my result.
Finally I see the inflated balloon-arch above the finish line mat. Doug Sullivan is there, applauding and taking photos. I sprint across the sensor mat. My watch reads 4:01:07; the official clock says 4:01:20, but subtracting 14 seconds after the gun to reach the starting line gives me a chip time of 4:01:06, an average pace of 9:13 min/mi. First half ~1:56, second half ~2:05. Could I have beaten 4 hours with better pacing? Who cares? As Caren Jew says, "It's all good!"
- Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 17:22:38 (EST)
It's handy to look at big complex systems in terms of layers—so convenient, in fact, that's there's an "Open Systems Interconnection" international standard hierarchy of levels. It runs all the way from the highest "Application" level, which the user sees, down to the lowest nitty-gritty "Physical" level of voltages and cables and device pin assignments. In a sense that's where the real work gets done; without it none of the higher levels could function or even exist.
So what's below the physical level? Maybe there's a level of Law—the fundamental rules of nature that the physical level entities obey. And below that? Logic, math, ...
(cf. OSI Model; see also OnSomethingness (2000-01-17), No Concepts At All (2001-02-22), ApprovedMethods (2005-11-12), ...)
- Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 05:21:28 (EST)
In the chapter of Walden titled "Reading" Henry David Thoreau discusses how the classics should be approached:
... Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. ...
- Friday, November 27, 2009 at 04:49:59 (EST)
Caren Jew is a few minutes early, but I anticipate that and almost have my shoes tied when she arrives at my home about 0440. Stars glitter like diamonds in the crisp night sky as we trot to the CCT and proceed west, dodging ruts and muddy patches thanks to headlamp and flashlight. I point out how the three stars of Orion's Belt point to Sirius, the Dog Star, brightest in the sky.
We review observations we made at the JFK 50 miler yesterday. Caren and her daughters were at Weverton; Kate Abbott's sons and I drove along later segments of the course. As the CCT takes us through the Columbia Country Club I reminisce about the hornet stings that Caren and I acquired there exactly three months ago. We progress six miles, to milepost 5.5, and turn back then at the 75 minute point. We're right on target to get Caren home by 8am. Her husband Walter's tee time is early today. Dawn arrives and we turn off our lights.
This morning is colder than I expected; my thumbs become numb. (Another delicate area feels OK for a change, perhaps because of the relatively thick shorts I'm wearing.) When we get back to the high trestle over Rock Creek we pause, at Caren's smart suggestion, to admire the scenery. My feet slip on the wood. I scrape it with my fingernails and show Caren a trace of the frost that has formed there. Back at my home my hands are so weak that I need to use both of them just to turn the key in the front door. The car thermometer says temperatures are in the mid-30s—brrrrr!
- Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 15:44:23 (EST)
Problem solved! Thanks to helpful advice from Alex Schröder, primary creator of the Oddmuse wiki engine that drives the ZhurnalyWiki, the issue described in ZhurnalyWiki Surge Control is fixed, or so I believe. It wasn't evil SpamBots pretending to be Google's web crawler. In brief, it was a glitch in the interaction between the zhurnaly.com web server (Apache) and the ZhurnalyWiki perl script (Oddmuse) which occurred on certain pages that had spaces or other unconventional characters in their names. As the Oddmuse documentation describes it:
[$ScriptName] is determined automatically by the CGI module and used for all the links within the site. You only need to set this if the autodetection is not working. This happens on some systems but the cause remains unknown. In the mean time, just set this option to the correct value in your config file ...
So I've set $ScriptName to the value 'http://zhurnaly.com/cgi-bin/wiki' and now the links to internal wiki pages no longer accumulate clutter and grow limitlessly. Googlebot and other crawlers no longer see an ever-lengthening variety of URLs. Within a few days, I hope, as their caches clear they will stop hitting the zhurnaly.com server with redundant page requests, and my excessive bandwidth usage will cease. Thanks, Alex!
- Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 20:38:18 (EST)
A few days ago I received a warning notice from my ISP, reporting that zhurnaly.com usage statistics have shot up in recent months. Already in November 2009 the volume of pages served has gone above 10 GB. This is unhappy, since my current service plan gives me only 10 GB before surcharges begin. More than half the bandwidth has been used by hosts identifying themselves as "crawl-66-249-65-187.googlebot.com", "crawl-66-249-71-245.googlebot.com", "crawl-66-249-65-186.googlebot.com", and "crawl-66-249-65-129.googlebot.com". These could be normal Google web-crawler robots, I suppose, or perhaps imposters attempting to insert spam in the wiki.
It's unclear what I should do. For the moment, I've set the "surge protection" on the wiki engine to a stricter level, 4 pages per 20 seconds, instead of the default 10 per 20. This shouldn't affect most human users, I think, but if you find it annoying please contact me (email z "at-sign" his "dot" com) and I'll try to tune it better.
Any other suggestions? The log files show entries like this:
66.249.65.39 - - [23/Nov/2009:22:21:31 -0500] "GET /cgi-bin/wiki/HAT%20Run%202008/HomePage/Zhurnal_and_Zhurnaly/TopicLanguage/ConfoundedConflation/TopicLanguage/DangerousLiterature/ChekhovOnTolstoy/GlobeOfLife/TruthInBattle HTTP/1.1" 200 11759 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.65.39 - - [23/Nov/2009:22:21:32 -0500] "GET /cgi-bin/wiki/HAT%20Run%202008/SigilOfPower/TopicLanguage/JournalBearing/ReadLikely/TopicHumor/ConfoundedConflation/LaterDude/TopicPersonalHistory/LongDistanceFriendliness/Comments_on_LongDistanceFriendliness HTTP/1.1" 404 8175 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.65.39 - - [23/Nov/2009:22:21:32 -0500] "GET /cgi-bin/wiki/2004-08-07_-_Robert_Frost_Trail_(northeast)/HomePage/Bo_Leuf,_R.I.P./In_Memoriam/HighTension/TopicScience/MardiGras/Comments_on_MardiGras HTTP/1.1" 404 7234 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.65.39 - - [23/Nov/2009:22:21:33 -0500] "GET /cgi-bin/wiki/HAT%20Run%202008/HatRun2004/TopicRunning/HandicapJogging/TopicScience/HansBethe/TopicPersonalHistory/IntestinalInfortitude/2006-08-12_-_Iwo_Jima_Jog/HomePage/Comments_on_HomePage HTTP/1.1" 503 1894 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
... that is, a GET command every second or so for ill-formed URLs with lots of ZhurnalyWiki page names separated by slashes. I don't fully understand these log entries, but perhaps it's part of an automated out-of-control system not actually coming from Google? Or is Google just merrily crawling my pages?
This is another thing that I wish I didn't have to think about! Do I have to turn off the public ZhurnalyWiki entirely and only offer non-interactive pages? Or should I be cheerful that my pages are getting indexed in Google?
(cf. WebLogAnalysis (2001-06-02), VisitorStats (2003-10-17), ...)
- Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 20:42:12 (EST)
A proverb heard today:
| You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect. |
It reminds me of another business-world aphorism encountered years ago: "Beware what you measure—you'll get it!"
- Monday, November 23, 2009 at 22:07:15 (EST)
I've got a mid-afternoon meeting, so Stephanie meets me at 1:45pm and off we go. The weather is pleasant and as we follow the Georgetown Pike pathway we chatter about Stephanie's 10th high school reunion this evening and the Dallas-Washington football game this Sunday. Stephanie is running well and we trot along faster than we did earlier this week. The day's classes are finishing at Langley High School; our digression through the parking lots toward the track requires zigging and zagging. A game is underway on the field, so we abandon my idea of running laps. Back on Georgetown Pike we carry on until Mackall Av, then turn back. We dodge cars as students flee campus, ignoring stop signs in their haste.
- Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 18:06:17 (EST)
From Chapter Four ("The Pebble") of The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh (translated by Mobi Ho):
The mind is like a monkey swinging from branch to branch through a forest, says the Sutra. In order not to lose sight of the monkey by some sudden movement, we must watch the monkey constantly and even to be one with it. The Sutra says to be one with it. Mind contemplating mind is like an object and its shadow—the object cannot shake the shadow off. The two are one. Wherever the mind goes, it still lies in the harness of the mind. The Sutra sometimes uses the expression "Bind the monkey" to refer to taking hold of the mind. But the monkey image is only a means of expression. Once the mind is directly and continually aware of itself, it is no longer like a monkey. There are not two minds, one which swings from branch to branch and another which follows after to bind it with a piece of rope.
- Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 02:26:45 (EST)
"I'll be wearing lime green," Stephanie writes, "you can't miss me!" And indeed, there she is at 2:15pm. Stephanie is young and new to running, eager to get some experience. We jog to the paved path through the woods and run two loops at a nice, steady pace of a bit under 3 minutes per quarter mile marker. I chatter away about family and running issues—training, racing, winter gear, etc. Hope I haven't scared her off from the sport!
- Friday, November 20, 2009 at 04:43:51 (EST)
At the library used-book sale recently appeared a $1 gem: a tiny, yellowed 1964 hardback copy of Zen Telegrams by Paul Reps. It's an cheerful collection of 79 wee poem-drawings, Chinese ink-brush style—"weightless gifts", the author calls them in the foreword by editor Meredith Weatherby. Many miss the mark: they're trite, or pointless. But as Reps warns, "Any one is for one person. Like intimate conversation, it is not meant to be seen-heard by others. ... Perhaps then, only perhaps, one of these is for you. Should this be so, you are welcome to take it out of the book and hang it on your wall, knowing it was done for you with delight."
Words from some samples that spoke, for whatever reason, to me:
| brookside alive O do not hasten friend you may arrive |
and
| rocks preaching become some silent sound |
and
| waterfall no trouble at all |
Others work but only in the presence of the drawings that they accompany. Others don't. Hmpf!
- Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 06:16:05 (EST)
Waiting at 8am at the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda, I phone Emaad Burki—he's on his way, but late—and then Ken Swab—who turns out to be standing a few dozen yards away, looking for Emaad and me. Soon we're all together, trotting down the path from milepost 3.5. Emaad's friend Alyssa meets us en route. She's already done half a dozen miles with others, and reverses course to accompany us back to Fletchers Boathouse and our turnaround at milepost 8.5.
I feel an urge to accelerate and a mile farther down ask, and receive, permission from Ken. Soon thereafter, as I run under a tall tree, a splash-splatter of what looks like white paint cascades down noisily next to me. I turn my head skyward and see a pair of big turkey vultures launch themselves into space. Fortunately their shower misses me by a couple of feet!
The final four miles are fast at 8:20 + 8:27 + 8:30 + 8:08. On the way home I pick up bagels and bialys at Goldberg's Bakery in Rockville.
- Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 04:48:42 (EST)
Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987) gave a series of lectures in the early 1970s which turned into the book The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. It caught my eye at a library recently, but as I realized when I tried to read it the mysticism level was much too high. On the other hand, occasional metaphors leaped out of the muddy waters. From the chapter "Mindfulness and Awareness", for instance:
... Meditation is giving a huge, luscious meadow to a restless cow. The cow might be restless for a while in its huge meadow, but at some stage, because there is so much space, the restlessness becomes irrelevant. So the cow eats and eats and eats and relaxes and falls asleep. ...
... Mindfulness is like a microscope: it is neither an offensive nor a defensive weapon in relation to the germs we observe through it. ...
The first chapter ("Fantasy and Reality") offers a nice summary, perhaps, of the entire enterprise:
... Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes. We provide space through the simple discipline of doing nothing. Actually, doing nothing is very difficult. At first, we must begin by approximating doing nothing, and gradually our practice will develop. So meditation is a way of churning out the neuroses of mind and using them as part of our practice. Like manure, we do not throw our neuroses away, but we spread them on our garden; they become part of our richness.
That chapter concludes:
... The whole approach of Buddhism is to develop transcendental common sense, seeing things as they are, without magnifying what is or dreaming about what we would like to be.
- Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 05:02:11 (EST)
Emaad Burki wimps out, CM Manlandro's husband is sick, but Ken Swab and I meet at 0805 at the Capital Crescent Trail in downtown Bethesda. Also present is Emaad's high school classmate Matt, who runs with us down the CCT from milepost 3.5 to 6.5 and back. It's a damp morning, slight drizzle, moderate temperature. Ken and I banter about ultrarunning to amuse Matt. I'm suffering from an aching wisdom tooth and something like a bad cold, but the run helps clear my head.
- Monday, November 16, 2009 at 04:45:05 (EST)
For back issues of the ^zhurnal see Volumes v.01 (April-May 1999), v.02 (May-July 1999), v.03 (July-September 1999), v.04 (September-November 1999), v.05 (November 1999 - January 2000), v.06 (January-March 2000), v.07 (March-May 2000), v.08 (May-June 2000), v.09 (June-July 2000), v.10 (August-October 2000), v.11 (October-December 2000), v.12 (December 2000 - February 2001), v.13 (February-April 2001), v.14 (April-June 2001), 0.15 (June-August 2001), 0.16 (August-September 2001), 0.17 (September-November 2001), 0.18 (November-December 2001), 0.19 (December 2001 - February 2002), 0.20 (February-April 2002), 0.21 (April-May 2002), 0.22 (May-July 2002), 0.23 (July-September 2002), 0.24 (September-October 2002), 0.25 (October-November 2002), 0.26 (November 2002 - January 2003), 0.27 (January-February 2003), 0.28 (February-April 2003), 0.29 (April-June 2003), 0.30 (June-July 2003), 0.31 (July-September 2003), 0.32 (September-October 2003), 0.33 (October-November 2003), 0.34 (November 2003 - January 2004), 0.35 (January-February 2004), 0.36 (February-March 2004), 0.37 (March-April 2004), 0.38 (April-June 2004), 0.39 (June-July 2004), 0.40 (July-August 2004), 0.41 (August-September 2004), 0.42 (September-November 2004), 0.43 (November-December 2004), 0.44 (December 2004 - February 2005), 0.45 (February-March 2005), 0.46 (March-May 2005), 0.47 (May-June 2005), 0.48 (June-August 2005), 0.49 (August-September 2005), 0.50 (September-November 2005), 0.51 (November 2005 - January 2006), 0.52 (January-February 2006), 0.53 (February-April 2006), 0.54 (April-June 2006), 0.55 (June-July 2006), 0.56 (July-September 2006), 0.57 (September-November 2006), 0.58 (November-December 2006), 0.59 (December 2006 - February 2007), 0.60 (February-May 2007), 0.61 (April-May 2007), 0.62 (May-July 2007), 0.63 (July-September 2007), 0.64 (September-November 2007), 0.65 (November 2007 - January 2008), 0.66 (January-March 2008), 0.67 (March-April 2008), 0.68 (April-June 2008), 0.69 (July-August 2008), 0.70 (August-September 2008), 0.71 (September-October 2008), 0.72 (October-November 2008), 0.73 (November 2008 - January 2009), 0.74 (January-February 2009), 0.75 (February-April 2009), 0.76 (April-June 2009), 0.77 (June-August 2009), 0.78 (August-September 2009), 0.79 (September-November 2009), ... Current Volume. Send comments and suggestions to z (at) his.com. Thank you! (Copyright © 1999-2009 by Mark Zimmermann.)