Oof. Remember when I used to have time to blog? Me neither.
Ironically, I finished this drawing almost a month ago, when we were visiting Baltimore. But I didn’t get it posted the week we came back because we were packing for the move, and then we were moving. After the move, first I couldn’t find the sketchbook. Then I found the sketchbook but I didn’t know where my eraser (the one surviving eraser at this point), so I couldn’t finish the sketch. Last night I decided to get my act together.
I’ll file this under: SF429.S63 L86 2013, which stands for: Animal culture–Pets–Dogs–By breed, A-Z–Shiba dogs.
I ran the Baltimore Running Festival half marathon on the 12th of October. It was fun. I was going to write a race report, but let’s face it: The chances of that happening are kind of slim at this point. I get up every morning at 5:30 to start work on my thesis, then I work out and do actual work, and after all that I have no energy left. So enjoy a few photos from the run:
My MTA ticket. I <3 public transit.Looking skeptical before the race.There was a goodly walk from where we lined up to the starting line, the last bit was uphill. It was a bit confusing. I bet people who actually read their race packet knew about this though.It’s the Natty Boh man. We’re in B’more, hon.I’d been reading _From Hell_, and this building looked strangely like some freemason business.
Running past empty rowhouses.Post-race. I finished in 2:00:07.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything (the plot, anyone’s perceptions of graduate school/me) to say that my advisor and I have a somewhat rocky relationship. It consists of him mostly ignoring forgetting about me and me alternately making desperate bids for his affection and raging about his inattentiveness. Super healthy. One learns so much about relationships and professionalism in graduate school. But on the plus side, things are getting better. He finished reading my thesis and made comments on it that were quite helpful. And we did actually have a nice (i.e. productive) conversation about some of my translation’s idiosyncrasies. So things CAN get better.
And I should add that my advisor is a really nice fellow. I’m also acquainted with his wife, who is wonderful, and I don’t wish either of them any ill.
I promise my next comic will not be a meta-mopey grad-school-is-hard feel-sorry-for-myself fest. Probably. We’ll file this one under LB2385 L86 2013b for Theory and practice of education–Higher education–Academic degrees-M.A.
What else can I blog about? I ran a 5k a few weeks ago. Despite my foot injury, I finished in 24:40, good enough for 4th place in my age group. Also, I had a lot of fun running with a family friend for whom it was her second 5k ever!
What else? Plantar fasciitis. It should I guess come as no surprise to anyone who has been on the internet that when you google something and you see five hundred potential cures, none of them work. That seems to be the case with PF. My foot is still about where it was when I posted the last comic several weeks ago.
I’m trying not to get too depressed about it. I have an appointment with a PT in a few weeks and in the meantime I’m still running three times per week. That’s okay. (Ok, it’s not something I’m okay with, but it’s something I have to do.)
I’m actually pretty frustrated and depressed. I’ve had to switch from doing the full marathon in Baltimore to doing the half. In the meantime, I’ve decided to pretend I’m training for a half IM, so I’ve been doing lots of bricks (or at least swim/bike days; it turns out that if you want to do a brick before work you have to get up at 5am).
So my past week looked like this:
Sunday: Swam 3550 yards/Biked 23 miles
Monday: Ran 7 miles (also lifted weights)
Tuesday: Swam 2500 yards/Biked 16 miles
Wednesday: Ran 9 miles, ellipticaled 2 miles (plus lifting and aikido)
Thursday: Swam 2550 yards/Biked 17 miles
Friday: Blerched.
Tomorrow is my long run (about 13 miles), then another brick on Sunday. I’m going to try to push the bike ride a bit longer, maybe to 25-30 miles.
I also bought new insoles and a Strassburg Sock in a desperate attempt to heal myself with placebos.
The past two weeks have been a bit stressful. At the beginning of the summer, when it became apparent that I was not going to finish in time to defend at the end of spring term, I set August 9th as my official personal deadline for completing the draft of my thesis. Around the same time, B accepted a role in a play (The Merchant of Venice) that was set to perform the weekend before my deadline, meaning that we had dinner with several relatives that weekend. I also went to the show twice. It was a great performance, but that’s still a loss of time.
We also passed an unhappy personal anniversary on August 3rd. And finally, for reasons that I swear seemed reasonable at the time, we decided to start looking for a house.
Anything else? Yes. I hurt my foot and had to take a week off running at the time I most needed to be able to run.
That’s actually the whole reason I drew this comic. I wanted to blog about my plantar fasciitis.
I’m not really sure what happened. My pet theory is that getting a huge bruise on my shin at Dances with Dirt made me roll in a weird way during aikido the next week. This probably put more strain on my plantar fascia and led to the injury.
After swimming seven miles per week for two weeks, I finally saw my sports medicine guy last Monday (the 5th) and got a diagnosis. The sheet the guy gave me said “limit running,” but not no running, so with the help of a pair of orthotics, I’ve been running about every other day since then, a total of maybe 30 miles last week. (That figure includes time on the elliptical, though.)
I can’t tell if my foot is doing better than it was last Sunday. I did just spend seven and a half hours over the past three days at an aikido seminar (my present to myself for finishing the thesis) and it didn’t fall off. Conversely though, it doesn’t feel amazing after all that. The weather changing a lot today was a confounding factor too.
I am trying to put into practice some of the zen techniques I learned at my seminar, but it’s hard. I have difficulty just relaxing and waiting until I get better. (Obviously, right? Because I am still running.) I think the problem is, you can’t just force yourself to be calm. You can’t force yourself to find enlightenment.
But, as they say, you can clean up your room. You can open the window and sit. And when the breeze comes through, you can notice it.
So I will clean up my room. Not just so I can sit, but because we have to sell the condo now.
This is wandering a bit. I hurt my foot but I finished my thesis. Yay.
I’ll file this one under LB2385 L86 2013 for Theory and practice of education–Higher education–Academic degrees-M.A..
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love(?) the Pain
So, begin at the beginning. Back in April I did a race called the Trailbreaker Marathon. While I was there I met this woman named Shannon who is a super-dedicated runner who loves to race. We hit it off, and she suggested we get the band back together for a trail race up in Merrimac, WI (about 55 minutes from here) called Dances with Dirt. After some discussion, we decided to do the marathon, and I thought no more about it for a while.
During May and June it rained most of the time, so I did only a few short trail run. This was probably, in retrospect, an error. But I’ve done a lot of trail races as a tourist–someone who runs trails infrequently.
Packet Pickup. Photo by Shannon.
Friday the 12th of July. I headed up to Devil’s Head Resort. Shannon and I ate a large quantity of pasta and picked up our race packets. Another friend of hers (Ruth) had come up from the Milwaukee area to do the 50k, so we all had a very early night. I unfortunately passed on the opportunity to sing karaoke to a bar full of intoxicated golfers. Next time. . .
The next morning, alarms were going off at various times. I tried resolutely to ignore them all, and I think I caught a few minutes of sleep between whenever Ruth’s went off (4:ohmygod) and mine (the much more sensible 5:35). I got dressed and put in my contacts. Then I decided something was wrong with my left lens and took it out briefly. Then I thought everything was fine.
Because checkout was 11:00, we would have to run a 4:30 or better to be back to the room by then. Since the course included about 3700 feet of elevation gain, we decided to err on the side of things taking a long time and packed all our belongings to put in our cars before the race. Then we had to jog to the starting line. (Call it a warm up.)
Just before the gun, when the announcer was saying “Thirty seconds until we start,” I noticed that my left contact was twisted. I have a pretty bad astigmatism in my left eye and need to wear special contacts for it. They’re called “toric lenses.” Anyway, when you wear this type of lens, if the lens is not properly oriented on your eye, things can look blurry. The clear vision in your other eye can compensate somewhat, but you still have a weird feeling of seeing…not quite double, but not quite single either. I tried quickly to fix the lens, but I didn’t have time (or clean enough hands) to take it out and inspect it. In retrospect, I should have MADE the time.
Hindsight is pretty much the only thing I have 20/20 vision on.
At the gun we charged off. The first half mile of the course was nice—flat, occasionally paved, and the weather was gorgeous. Then we hit the first hill.
I’ve mentioned before (I think) that I’m not a huge single track person, and this is why: As soon as we hit the hill, we started walking. The person in front of me (a guy in a green shirt and VFFs) controlled when I started jogging and stopped again, and he was in turn controlled by the person in front of him. In this configuration you can never feel rested from the breaks or ready to stop running because you’re not in charge of when you run or don’t run.
The hilly section didn’t last forever, though, and we settled down into some very runnable terrain, with the exception of a very rocky portion. I’ll get back to this later. At the time, I joked to Shannon that it was like running tires on a military obstacle course. There were some hills, but nothing seemed severe in light of what we had just traversed (everyone hiked that initial hill because it was steep).
The climb up to South Bluff. Photo by Shannon.
Just after mile 10, we began a climb up a section of roughly paved cement steps. There was a tall rock to our left and a drop to the right. Occasionally we could see Devil’s Lake peeking through the trees on the drop side. After about two leg-killing miles of this, we reached the South Bluff aid station—possibly the most magnificent aid station I’ve visited. From there, we had a view of the lake and the entire valley. Hawks (or vultures, I couldn’t tell) circled above us. I felt a wave of vertigo and edged away from the cliff.
About three quarters(?) of the way up. That’s Devil’s Lake behind us. Photo by Shannon.
On the way down the other side, Shannon said that every step of the last twelve miles had been worth it, just to see that view. I think about 80% of the steps were probably worthwhile.
The next part of the run, miles 13-17, were a very runnable bit of downhill single track. It was all firm dirt (with an occasional but not problematic mudhole). I celebrated by falling down. Actually I fell down three times between mile thirteen and mile fourteen. On the first fall, I bloodied my shin. The second and third falls just stung my pride, or so I thought. I think partly the problem was not seeing super clearly as I tried to make up time by flying down these narrow trails, and part of the problem was that as I become increasingly tired, I probably lift my feet less and less.The view from the top. Photo by Shannon. Or actually by someone she handed her camera to. But her camera.
Eventually we emerged from the single track onto a flat grass prairie area. I heard and then saw two sandhill cranes flying over. Then I realized we were going to have to go up the hill we’d just come down again. Only first we were going to have to run across the grassland to a turnaround (mile 16-ish) and back. Fun.
After the turnaround, Shannon started putting on the gas. I suddenly realized that my right hip—which had taken the brunt of the third fall—was hurting, and I couldn’t keep up with her. Eventually she said she was going to push the pace to see if she could get back to the hotel in time for a shower, and I let her go. It was not going to be a day for breaking speed records.
This would be the point where I realized that I don’t hate singletrack nearly as much as I hate two-way singletrack.
The hill really stood out over the grassy area; I could see it rising up on the horizon well before I reached it. Shannon was gone by this point, leaving me to hike back up the hill using a ten/ten pattern I made up: jog for ten steps (counting each step when your left foot hits, so really twenty step), then walk for ten steps (counted the same way). Eventually I got to what I thought was the top…only to find that it kept going. That hill was basically miles 17-20. I thought about Napoleon invading Russia. I thought about the Bataan Death March. I thought about how much it would suck to fall down again (I was running over big chunks of rock or shale at this point). I noticed that going down hills was becoming increasingly painful; something had gone wrong with my left knee. That was weird.
Then, a bit past the top, I fell down again.
I got up and cried a little. I was rude to some passers-by. And then. . .I kept going, shambling along at a steady run-walk. I think I was hitting about 12 min/mi, a bit faster on the flats. I had ten kilometers left to go. Any idiot, I told myself, can run a 10k.
I was back at the first major aid station (major means they have food). It marked the 20.5 mile point. I grabbed half a boiled potato, dipped it in salt, and scarfed it down. I would have had more, but I didn’t want to overload my stomach and cause myself even more grief. I dumped a cup of water over my head too, because it was getting hot out.
The last few miles of the course were the same as the first few miles, except backward. So remember that really rocky section I mentioned earlier? At full health I could probably have done that at a goodly clip, but this time I was reduced to hiking. A few people passed me, not many, and I watched the clock tick toward five hours, then past. I was pretty sure I was going to be the last one finished. How embarrassing.I rolled in the mud. Photo by Shannon.
At one point, a guy came up behind me. He crashed along for a while, slowing down when I had to slow down on the downhill. He said, “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.” Then he passed me. A few feet later he fell ass over teakettle.
He got up, laughed, and said it was the first time he’d fallen all day. Luckily he left before I could hit him.
At just about 26 miles, which is to say .2 miles from the end, I emerged from the woods onto a paved bike path. It looked flat, so I decided to make a concerted effort to hustle for the finish line and at least cross it looking strong. The bike path turned suddenly into a gravel road that went up a hill, and then halfway up it turned right into a thicket of bushes. I started into the bushes, pushing myself down the hill there, and suddenly I was airborne again.
I sort of rolled over in the dirt and cried. I was never doing any trail races ever again. I was never doing any marathons again. Obviously my ACL and my meniscus were probably torn or shattered. Nothing would ever be good again.
Then I realized that the 50 milers and 50k runners who were still behind me were going to find me lying in the dirt, and I had to go another hundred feet to finish. So I got up. I staggered, bloody and covered in mud, across the finish line in 5:18:42.4.
One woman, an older lady, looked at me as I shambled up and said, in the kindest possible voice, “Would you like some ice cold water?”
YES, I would. I asked about a first aid tent. But before I could hustle off, a woman with a clipboard asked my age group and told me I’d got fourth place.
I won a pint glass.
I won 4th place! First place was a bucket.
Fourth place! I’ve never placed at the marathon distance before. I felt perplexed, and somewhat better than I’d been feeling a few minutes before. I hazarded that if my knee survived, I would probably run again (a good thing, since I’m already signed up for The Baltimore Marathon).
The paramedics working the first aid tent sat me down on a cot. They carefully washed my legs off and diagnosed me with road rash. I got a big bandaid and some antibiotic ointment on the big gash on my shin and something called “chigger cream” on my other scrapes. The chigger cream had lidocaine in it, so soon I was able to hobble back to my car, free from the obnoxious grating in my knee. I still had enough water left to wash off my hands. Then, like Tricia McMillian, I finally fixed my contact lens.
I turned on the AC and played rock music at an unjustifiable volume all the way home. By the time I arrived, I’d recovered my humor. Also, Bryan was making brownies. He didn’t know they were post-marathon-for-Em brownies (he thought they were for some friends who were coming over). They were delicious.
A post-script on my knee: After our friends left and Bryan went to rehearsal, I looked up the symptoms of ACL tear (key words: knee instability, pain so bad you want to puke) and meniscus problems (key words: knee freezes or locks up) and realized I had neither of those problems. When Bryan came home, we determined that the problem was in fact my SI joint had got stuck. I probably jammed it when I fell the third time (a fall that left a lovely constellation of bruises on my right thigh). We unstuck it and my knee was back to normal the next day.
Finish: 5:18:42.4, 4th in my age group, 9th woman overall. 43rd overall in the race. What I didn’t realize—the fastest time was only 4:09. Compare to other recent, local marathons: Grandma’s was won in 2:11, Lakefront 2012 was 2:27, Green Bay was 2:18. This is the difference that 3,000+ feet of climb over rough terrain makes: about two hours.
My friend Tiffany requested a comic about my 50k experiences. This is more or less accurate.
This is the thing about exercise: It doesn’t exactly get less painful as you do more of it. Well, on a practical level, the delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) can get a bit less, but whatever you’re doing–running, lifting weights, swimming–it will still feel hard. Today I was at the gym and I squatted 125 lbs for reps, which is the most I’ve ever done. I’m nearly at my goal of squatting my body weight. (Ironically, before I got serious about lifting and put on 5 lbs of muscle in my back/shoulders, that was my weight.) And the thing is, it feels really hard to do that. About as hard as it felt when I was just starting to do squats and using just the bar (45 lbs). But now I can do the higher weight and not get broken in half. Running is similar. My feet still hurt like they did when I did my first marathon (or first 5k, I think). But I go farther.
The Mad City 50k, which is the race depicted here, is always a good time. A lot of friends of mine are on the committee that puts it together, but even before I’d met them I’d done the race and learned what a great event it is. And it’s nice to feel like I know a large number of the people I’m running next to and the volunteers who are hanging out.
The race consists of five 10k loops of the Arboritum. My plan was to do the first three loops at a consistent but conservative pace, then try to pick it up for the last two. Instead, I went at a good clip, finishing in just about one hour (9:45 pace) for the first 10k, then 58:27 and 58:39 (9:24 and 9:26 pace) for the next two laps. I kept falling in with the lead woman runner and her pacers, who were at times clocking close to an 8:30 pace. Whoops.
I knew the fourth lap would be the toughest, mentally speaking. This was also when my stomach decided to act up and I started getting all kinds of cramps. Eventually I stopped to use the restroom, which helped a bit but slowed me down some. Eating some potato chips also helped–maybe I needed some salt? I finished the fourth lap in 1:09:42, an 11:13 pace. Ouch.
The talking backward thing, by the way, has its origins here. I think I listened to this song a day or two before the race. SO there you go.
The last lap I tried to push the pace, but my legs were pretty dead. I was talking to random strangers and to myself, anything to make the miles go by faster. Unlike the last time I did the race, I didn’t meet anyone going my way at my pace. That was unfortunate. I really pushed it over the last mile and a half, passing a bunch of people…most of whom were doing the relay, but a couple of whom were in the 50k. I finished the last lap in 1:02:18 (10:01 pace) to complete the race in 5:09:44, good enough for 5th place among women and (I think) 2nd in my age group.
We’ll file this under GV1065.17.U4 L86 2013 for Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Marathon running—Special topics, A-Z—Ultramarathons.
Pre-race. Photo by Bryan.On my way to the finish.Almost there.Winner.
I drew this two weeks ago when I had just run a twenty-miler. The following Saturday I ran 21. And yesterday, I ran a marathon. This comic continues its relevance to my life. We’ll file this under
GV1065.17.T56 L86 2013 for Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Marathon running—Special topics, A-Z—Tiny robots.
I finished the Trailbreaker Marathon in 4:08:43, 7th in my age group. I ran the whole race with a woman from Minneapolis named Shannon, which made the whole thing seem rather quick. (Well okay, not exactly quick–it was still four hours. But it was quite tolerable.) The race course was very flat, with the exception of one rather long and gradual hill. I actually welcomed this on the way back (it was an out-and-back course) because it gave my legs something to think about.
My stomach, which has occasionally caused me grief on long runs before, stayed quiet. I thought I might be able to do a 4:15, but Shannon was on track for a bit of a faster race (her PR is about 30 minutes faster than mine), and I decided I wanted to keep running with her because she was quite entertaining to talk to. The aid stations were a bit irregularly spaced, which made my gel-every-six-miles strategy a bit tricky (I like to take my gels with water and had forgotten my water bottle) but I survived. It sprinkled a bit but then it stopped. I don’t know. It was a race that went very well, so there’s not that much to remark on. Here’s a photo of me, Shannon, and a fellow named Bill who did the first half of the race with us.
Shannon took the photo, by the way–I stole borrowed it off her Facebook page.
I know that last week I promised I would have an analysis of the free will/determinism problem I posed. But I did a marathon yesterday, and then today I was working on editing my thesis proposal most of the day, so the short of it is that my essay is half written and I have to go to bed now. I will have it completed in a day or two, though, so check back. Same bat time…
Another sketch from our trip to Thailand. This actually happened at a down-at-its-heels hotel in Chiang Mai. Eventually Andy and Sara got to move to a slightly better room…but they didn’t manage to get one with a double bed. At the time, I complained that we had landed in the Chiang Mai version of Pham Ngu Lao, a street in Ho Chi Minh City known for cheap/seedy backpacker hotels. I think, having looked at a lot of other hotel reviews, that most places in Chiang Mai are like that. It wasn’t a bad hotel, exactly…well, it was. But it was clearly a nice hotel about ten or fifteen years ago when it was built. And then nothing was updated again.
My nemesis
There was a fiendish device on the bedside table. You can see it in this photo to the right (and now you all know the name of the hotel, oops.). You push a button and the lights turn on or off. Somehow we managed to push the buttons so that around about five o’clock in the morning, the lights started to turn on and off by themselves. You can imagine, given how jet lagged I was, how well that went over. I thought the place was haunted. I guess this was state-of-the-art in like…1980.
I’m maybe a bit bitter because the room smelled like smoke. But later on that day, after our freaky awakening, B got sick and basically slept in the room for 12 hours. I figured at least the sheets were clean and the AC worked.
A few trial sketches of Andy.
These are my preliminary sketches of Andy, done to prep for this comic and Em oi! #374. I guess he’s lost a fair amount of weight since he got back to Texas, so these are not entirely accurate.
Today we went to see Oz the Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz. I found that in the years since I first saw the original, the details of the land of Oz have gotten tangled up in my head with other fantasy places, like Wonderland, Middle Earth, and Australia. There were some details that struck me as kind of bizarre–why would you have a field of poppies that can cause everlasting sleep right next to the Emerald City? Isn’t that a liability case waiting to happen? The witches were also interesting, although I was sad that they went with the old trope of “dark hair bad, blond-y good-y.” Glinda the good witch, played by Michelle Williams, reminded me of Galadriel (blond hair, long white gown, kind of ethereal expression). Then I remembered that amazing scene where Galadriel almost takes the ring, but doesn’t. Wow, she’s a really interesting character in that scene. Too bad Glinda was just blandly kind. Of course it is nice to have one character who is kind, but… Also I am not sure how I feel about the turning-green-as-externalization-of-internalized-self-loathing? And of course no one can out-evil Margaret Hamilton.
There was a lot about families in it though, and a kind of magical scene where Oz (played by James Franco) glues a little china doll’s legs back on. I maybe got a little verklempt.
Now that I think about it, maybe Glinda was a bit more manipulative in the first film, since she doesn’t tell Dorothy how to use the slippers to get home until the very end of the book…
Today I got up and ran 18 miles (well, 18.25). It was an interesting run. I was up in the night with indigestion (from 2:30-4 am) and only got out of bed around 8:30, an hour later than my alarm was set for. Actually, at 8:15, Bryan rolled over and said, “Why are you still here?” I took some drugs and set out, going easy, waiting to see if anything bad would happen…but nothing did. I got tired, since I did the whole run on only 190 calories (two gels, one 90 cal, one 100 cal) plus the glycogen stored from yesterday’s overeating (the thing that caused me so much trouble). Anyway, I mostly shuffled along at 10:30-10:40 minutes/mile, more than a minute slower than my planned race pace. Toward the end, I tried to pick things up and ran a 9:54, but then my stomach started to ache and said, “Don’t ever do that again,” so I finished slow. (I wasn’t going to call B to pick me up with two miles to go.) At least I finished.
This is wandering, probably because of my weird interrupted sleep. I’d better bring things to a stopping point.
This comic will be filed under P306.94 .L86 2013, for Philology. Linguistics—Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar—Translating and interpreting—Translating services. In case you were curious, if you search for the heading “translation,” all you get is class numbers related to specific translations–translating the bible, translating Emile Zola into English, etc. The correct subject heading for translation as the subject of a work is “translating and interpreting.” I had to look it up.
This was drawn from a conversation we had on our drive back to Madison on Xmas Day. I had the comic 80% done before we left for Thailand, but I didn’t manage to get the last two panels colored and the whole thing scanned until just now. I should add that I know Berkeley was really refuting Locke more than Descartes, but I understand the objections to Descartes much better, so I drew him.
This is hardly the first time I’ve touched on Berkeley’s philosophy in the comic. He has long been an obsession of mine, given that immaterialism (also called idealism) is so damn weird.
The gentleman with the wig there is Samuel Johnson. According to legend (and Boswell), Johnson had this to say about Berkeley:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it THUS.’1
Of course, Berkeley would not have accepted this as a refutation, because both the stone and Johnson’s foot exist in Johnson’s mind.
Finally a comic dating from Ly’s tenure in the Czech Republic. If you happen to be an atheist or agnostic, Berkeley’s philosophy becomes very strange, because whose intellect is watching the entire world? It’s troubling. Having just come from Thailand, I suppose I’m pretty sure that it still exists, or at least I’ve got friends there who might tell me if it ceased to exist. But I can’t be sure.
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll file these under B1348 .L86 2013, B1348 .L86 2007, and B1348 .L86 2007b, for Philosophy (General)—Modern (1450/1600-)—By region or country—England. Ireland. Scotland. Wales—18th century—Individual philosophers—Berkeley, George, 1685-1753—Criticism and interpretation.
Yesterday we came back from Thailand. Yesterday was Friday, but we actually got on a plane in Chiang Mai at 17:30 on Thursday to fly to Bangkok. From Bangkok, at 23:30 we got on another plane and flew to Incheon airport in South Korea (a very nice but intensely baffling place). We’d all been up since about 7:00 on Thursday (although we dozed on the plane, it was that weird fugue sleep you slip into on an airplane), so when that plane landed we were a bit loopy.
We got breakfast. I took some photos:
B’s strawberry cream cheese waffleSara’s blueberry bagel. I think the other available flavors were “garlic” and “plane.” When I saw the flavor list is when I began to suspect that something about Korea is a giant joke being played (on me, I guess?).This was called “stick pie.” It was crispy.
Those are the only photos I took in the airport. I took lots of photos in Thailand, though (about 300 I guess). Here are a few:
Various Thai Fruits!ผัดพักบุงไฟแดง, or stir-fried morning glory. In Vietnamese, the plant is called “rau mung.” (Please excuse my lack of diacritics.)Sara makes a friend at the place we studied cooking.Cooking the morning glory with Maew’s instruction.
I also took photos of wats, monks, that sort of thing. I’ll upload those later.
Anyway, I started training for my upcoming 50 km races this morning after I got up. The first is April 30th and it’s about 14 weeks away, which also means I have about 14 weeks until my birthday and until my THESIS has to be done and and and. So the 50k is really what I am focused on, since it is a lot less frightening. I thought running was going to be terrible because it is cold out (about 46 degrees colder than Chiang Mai was). But in fact I had a great run. I hit my planned tempo for the majority of the miles, had a runner’s high all day, and felt very strong. I stopped at 14.4 miles, but I could have gone much farther, I think. The only way it could have been better is if I’d remembered to bring water. Whoops.
Well this entry is already treatise-length, so I’ll leave off here. Hope you are all having a good winter/January!
1 Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood. Project Gutenberg, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm. 12 January 2013.
During the two week “no caffeine” period, my brother Daniel and I both found that we missed not the stimulant but just coffee itself–the ritual, the warm beverage in the morning. We both began drinking decaf as a result, but I’ll tell you a secret–decaf just doesn’t taste as good as regular. Or at least, I’ve yet to encounter a brand of decaf that could hold a candle to my beloved Trung Nguyen.
I am still caffeine-free though (as far as I know. Like, I ate a cookie called a “mocha cookie” the other day, but it didn’t really taste like coffee and I didn’t feel caffeinated afterward). I actually feel pretty good, and mostly not sleepy in the afternoons like I used to get when I was drinking a lot of caffeine. I don’t know how long I will stay decaffeinated, though.
I have a lot of heart rate data for myself, since I usually wear a heart rate monitor when I run. It would be interesting to do some analysis on it and see if my average HR (while running) has changed now that I am off caffeine. I think it might have…but there are too many other factors to really say for sure. Oh well.
We’ll file this under RC567.5 .L86 2012 for Internal medicine—Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry—Psychiatry—Psychiatric aspects of personality and behavior conditions—Drug abuse. Substance abuse—Caffeine.
Yesterday I participated in the 21st Annual Literacy Network Run/Walk. Formerly known as the Canterbury Run/Walk after a much-beloved, now defunct bookstore, this was actually the first 5k I ever ran way back when I started running (I finished last that time). I wasn’t really going to write anything about this, but then I won 4th overall among women (results). I finished the 10k in 50:54, which is about an 8:12 pace. It didn’t feel like I was near my VO2 max or anything, but my legs were tired, so that’s as fast as I ran. I guess I shouldn’t have knocked out 12 miles on the dreadmill the day before?
The field was very small this year (101 finishers) because it was absolutely pissing down rain the entire time. Around mile 3, the rain slowed briefly, but then it picked up again. There was not a dry inch on me anywhere when I got done, and I still had to run two miles back to my car.
So for your amusement, here are before and after photos.
I was going to make B take a picture of me, but he was up at 5am with insomnia and decided to sleep in instead of getting up to watch me dither around. So I took this myself in the bathroom mirror.Back in my car, about to choose between heat blowing on me and keeping the windshield unfogged.
I want to add two final thoughts to my race report from the Milwaukee Marathon. One is that both of the photos in the post were taken by MM people/their hired photographers and “borrowed” by me. The other is that twice on the course I heard the song “Gangnam Style” by Psy. I’ve also heard it on the radio recently–the mainstream, commercial, top 40 radio. I am really excited that an Asian pop song would make its way over here…but if South Korea is going to be the part of Asia that finally explodes into mainstream American consciousness, I have totally backed the wrong horse (China, Viet Nam, เมืองไทย).
Hey guys, I ran a marathon! And I went sub-4 (in the most dramatic style, 3:59:59). This past Sunday, October 7th, I got to join about 3100 other runners in the 32nd annual Lakefront Marathon in Milwaukee. This was my third marathon (though my fifth race of 26.2 miles or more). But it almost didn’t happen. Take a look at this chart showing my running distances for the year.
As you can see, in June and July, my mileage fell dramatically as I pulled up lame with (what I was told was) a strained (“torn”) quad. By the time I was getting back on my feet (early August), I had only about ten weeks to train (including taper). My PT suggested that I should consider doing a half instead of a full; a suggestion I immediately discounted because: 1. He’s not a runner and doesn’t really understand what is required to train for a half versus a full (to be honest, I’m not sure he believed me when I told him how much I ran), and 2. I was already signed up for Lakefront.
Mid-August, I sat down and made up a training plan. Essentially, I run five days per week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. I planned to run my normal mileage on Tuesday-Thursday (generally eight to eleven miles per day depending on whether B wants to run or not, including a speed workout on Thursday) and then to increase my Saturday long run, ultimately to a distance of eighteen miles, and do a shorter long run of ten to twelve miles on Sunday. This is essentially what I did (though I topped out at twenty instead of eighteen). I also ran a test half marathon at the end of August when I was in Salt Lake City, and I came in at 1:59:26. According to the McMillan Running predictor, this suggests a marathon time of 4:11:21. But do keep in mind I was running at altitude, which can slow you down by about fifteen seconds per mile (I got this figure from my brother; no idea if it’s true or not, but I’ll pretend because then it sounds impressive to have broken two hours).
Before my injury, I was attending weekly track workouts. Of course, that had to stop, and once I was back to running, I started to worry that the workouts had caused or aggravated my injury, so I decided to hold off on returning until after the race. Instead, I did speedwork on my own on Thursday mornings.
I have two main routines I do:
1. Lupton 800s. These are my version of Yasso 800s, a workout typically done on a track that involves an 800 at speed x, then a cool-down for time (so if you run the 800 in 3:30, you get 3:30 to recover). Doing 10×800 is often felt to be useful in predicting marathon times-for example, if your average speed for the set was 3:30 per 800, you could probably expect to run your marathon in 3:30:00. My variations are based around not having a track readily accessible near my home, so I run my 800s on a mile-long, flattish stretch of road near my house. My cool-down, instead of being time-based, is distance-based–the other half of the 800 to get back to the “starting line” at the beginning of the mile stretch. I started with a set of seven and worked up to ten, slowly dropping the time I was aiming for. In the end, I was averaging about 3:54.
2. Dual Pace Runs. I read about this in one of the endless newsletters Active.com sends me, and it turned out to be pretty fun. Warm up for a mile at whatever pace you fancy (I usually do about a 10:50-11:30, because I’m running with the dog). Then alternate between your half marathon pace and your marathon pace, doing half a mile of each for eight miles. Then cool down for a mile. So since my half pace was about 8:50 and my MP about 9:10, I’d run half a mile at 8:50, then slow down and do half a mile at 9:10. I like this workout because the distance is short enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming. This is also the longest workout I can do before leaving for work.
The Week Before
I posted midway through last week that I was feeling less crazy than I usually do during my taper. This proved true until about Thursday, when stress and other worries combined to turn me into a pacing, bread devouring fiend. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Anyway, the real issue started on Friday, when I woke up with a scratchy throat. I thought perhaps I had just been shouting too much during play practice, but on Saturday the feeling persisted. In addition, on Saturday for some reason I was achy. I don’t think I overdid it on Friday–my exercise level was normal or even reduced for me. This was troubling.
By Sunday morning my throat didn’t just feel scratchy, but had worked its way to painful and swollen. As I hauled my body out of bed at 5:30, I offered it a deal: Get through to noon in one piece, and I’ll give you a long nap and some time off next week. I dressed in the silent house (we were staying at my in-laws) and grabbed a breakfast of two slices of toast with PB and bananas. Then I sat down and tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on my reading until it was time to go. Of course, we left a few minutes late, because that’s the kind of people we are, and then the highway between West Bend and Grafton was detoured and, and, and. B left me near the starting line with about 20 minutes to go (because of how drop off and pickup worked, we didn’t get any pre- or post-race photos, sadly). I immediately went into Grafton High School (i.e., the starting line) and started hunting for a bathroom with a line shorter than ten people. No luck, but I did manage to get through and get out to the actual starting line just as they started playing the Star Spangled Banner. It was an impressively bad rendition, and I spent most of it trying to get my watch to connect to the satellites.
And then we were off! I had originally planned to run at a relatively slow pace–maybe 9:30s–until mile five, then pick it up and go 9:00-9:10 to mile twenty, and finally drop the hammer and see if I could do some 8:50s in the last 10k. But on race day, I started out pretty fast, and wound up staying at about the same tempo overall for the whole race. I had also planned to take a gel every seven miles. I stuck to this plan, had no stomach pains, and felt great. It was nice to pass people at mile twenty instead of bonk and spend two or three miles walking tearfully and in pain. I did have to make two pit stops. At some point, my watch got out of sync with the mile markers on the course, so I hit 26.2 right at the 26 mile marker. At that point, my watch said I had about two minutes to get to the finish line under four hours, so I took off as fast as I could. Final time: 3:59:59, good enough for 41st in my age group. Very dramatic too. My sore throat had cleared up a little ways into the run, or the endorphins hit and I didn’t notice it anymore. I did nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and the cold hit me for real on Tuesday night. Now I’m feeling much better. What worked:
The speed work. If I’d done more intense sprints, I would have been faster, but for ten weeks I’m pretty satisfied.
Nutrition plan. Three (decaf) gels and water at every aid station.
The last-minute decision to adapt my pacing plan to how I was feeling.
My shoes (Brooks PureGrit) were great and supportive and my socks (Balega) did not give me blister problems. Hurrah.
What could have worked better:
Clothes. I dithered about this and eventually went with shorts and a long-sleeved shirt because of the cold. My legs were fine, but my hands were quite chilly at times, especially when we were hit by a headwind off the lake during the last three miles.
Pre-race eating. I managed to go into the race a bit heavier than my normal racing weight, and also I ate a huge meal the night before and had to make two pit-stops. Should have taken a loperamide, I guess.
Due to a misunderstanding, B met me at the art museum instead of at the finish line, so somehow wound up walking down four flights of stairs to get to where his car was. I would have preferred not to do that.
The taper was relatively successful, I’ll admit. I wish I’d toned it down toward the end of week two and taken Friday completely off as well.
That’s really about it. I’m quite satisfied with how it all went. The course was great, downhill (and with a tailwind most of the way), and the crowds were enthusiastic. I saw a couple of signs that said “Run, random stranger, run!” and one that said, “Go Emily!” While I was clearly not their Emily, they still held it up and cheered as I went past. Best of all, near mile 18, someone had set up a “Paul Ryan Finish Line.” The last time I ran a marathon, Obama was running for his first term and there were people in the crowd holding signs reading, “You can DO it.” (That marathon was in DC.) It was nice to see something along the same vein here, though with a more Wisconsin-appropriate twist.
Now that I’ve done a couple of 50ks, it’s easy to forget how big a deal running a marathon is for almost everyone. I’ll admit it, this was kind of a big deal for me too.
