1/21/08 - 1/27/08 Wet and Mild (390 minutes, 1 steady state, 1 tempo)

Sunday, January 27 (60 minutes)
Here is a story. It is not a story with guns and long legs and dead people and kissy face stuff like movies it is not a deep moving story like one with deaf blind orphan half-human-half-chimpanzees trying to understand their speciesal identity and find their place in the world/marsupial exhibit it is not a simple beautiful story like Hemingway on ice with Chinese Confucianism but no firecrackers in it it is just a story about a mosquito with no future in life.
Today there was a rain on the outside of my window so I made a comic about dying insects and chaos theory and the comic was this:


Okay so i cannot draw because when i was little i fell down the stairs and hit my head on every single one, which was wood (the stairs) and then on the concrete floor and i remember it but it's a fake memory because i can see myself from five feet back and that's not possible but it really happened because my mom says so even though she was not there which is why i fell down the stairs in the first place and the fall made me a bad drawer and a wonderfully cogent of parceller of words like this.
That means I have to steal it. The pictures. The bug lamp and the strange attractor are easy but the mosquito is hard and made of chitin. You cannot digest him unless you are a frog, which you are not because then you cannot read, unless you are a prince but you are not because then you would probably have built up your immunity to most common poisons by now so that jealous nephews of dukes cannot usurp your birthright. That is not the case, so you cannot digest a mosquito even if you want to really bad. But you can have malaria, if you want, which literally means "bad air" because it gets blown in on the West Nile wind of the East (Orient Express)
So the mosquito, I was searching for it like it was searching for my blood, which is rich and juicy, and I found this:
It is beautiful. Like if someone took Monet and translated it into a prose poem, then Babelfished it to Russian, then Chinese, the Bushman language, then back into a picture again, except with more genius and less water lilies.
And there are more. Here is the site. And here are more of my favorites:








Saturday, January 26 (80 minutes)
I'd have done 90, but I had to go to work. Stupid work. FU and your gospel soul steel band with people dancing in the aisles of Caltech's auditorium. Things are weird.

Friday, January 25 (70 minutes, strides)
A fortuitous locker room encounter with Kangway left me one leaf of endive poorer and one running partner richer. Well worth the trade off. He claimed I could surely do ten reps of 100 pounds on the bench, so after running I did ten reps of the bar + 50 (that's 95 total, right?) So while neither of us is proven correct, I judge that Kangway wins the technical argument, in that I probably could do ten reps of 100 pounds, but I win the moral argument, in that I'm correct in judging myself to by embarrassingly weak.
I did eight striders, then afterwards three all-out 100m races against the sprinters. I lost them all (in fact Becky nearly beat me in one race), but was receiving very little assistance from the wet grass and mud I encountered in lane negative one. (Ian calls this lane zero. I think lane zero is the rail.)


Thursday, January 24 (15 minutes tempo)

15 min tempo at Lacy, negative splitting. My mind tells me this is too short for an effective tempo run. I think the main reason my mind says that, though, is that I read it in lots of books and on the internet. The reason people wrote it in books and on the internet is presumably that they have the wisdom of years of experience, but sometimes I suspect the reason is more that they read it from lots of OTHER people in OTHER books and OTHER internets. This is why I am still interested in creating a distance running log with an ulterior motive - to collect massive amounts of statistical data from runners.
Of course there would be tons of noise, but if you get thousands of people contributing you might learn something useful.
I'm reading a JavaScript book now, so I am in fact finally doing something towards making this happen.
Also, the data at existing running logs is probably enough to work with, if you're clever and can get your hands on it, but I also want to make a log just to have it. I honestly think I can make one better than the scores upon scores of competitors out there. This is probably just a reflection of my own arrogance, but I think I'll give it a shot anyway.

Also, here is the first minute of a presentation on the precession of a gyroscope, which I gave in science writing class today. The total presentation was 5 minutes, and I did not use a single equation or mention Newton's laws. I did give a symmetry argument though, which I thought was very clever and completely unconvincing to any intelligent person.



At the end of the workout I did 4x200 at "distance runner speedwork pace", meaning whatever pace I felt like going, which was probably 31/32.

Wednesday, January 23
off

Tuesday, January 22
60 minutes easy

Monday, January 21 (steady state)
I didn't run until late, and it was dark, wet, and cold. I felt pretty crappy for the first couple of miles, and my hamstring was still sore from last week. After four miles I started feeling better. I did ten 1600's consecutively on the track (too dark to go elsewhere) and split it 29:20/27:57 for the 8000m halves.
This was fine with me.

No comments: