9/24/07 - 9/30/07 not actually STANFORD (380 minutes, 8000m time trial)

Sunday, 9/30/07 (60 minutes)
Ran as the sun set. My anterior tibialis were sore after the time trial, so I took both yesterday and today easy.

Saturday, 9/29/07 (am jogging at Riverside, pm 30 min with Ian)
I arrived at the gym almost ten minutes before anyone else, in the kind of morning where every sound only magnifies the quiet. I lay down on the island at the parking structure's entrance, and tried to make the moon float past the clouds. It's a perceptual trick. The motion of the moon across the sky is very slow by human standards, about 360 degrees per 24 hours, or 15 arcseconds per second. The is about the same speed as the tip of the minute hand of a clock 10cm in radius, viewed from a distance of about arm's length. That is, maybe, detectable. But the problem is that unlike the minute hand of a clock, the moon has nothing stationary behind it. Its motion relative to the stars and planets is much slower, and so you'll never see the motion of the moon by watching it with the naked eye on Earth. But when the clouds float by overhead, it can appear for a moment as though the moon is sailing through them, slicing its way past and illuminating in pale tones only its closest companions, for a few brief moments, until they move on, and are forgotten, replaced by new clouds, just coming into view. The moon consumes all of one ten-thousandth the night sky, as I estimated by holding my thumb up out in front of my face. But that one ten-thousandth can assume the attention of a man, or even of an entire race, when the moment is right.

Things quickly become different when there are people around. Though the night is equally dark and the moonshine equally brilliant, the splendor evaporates in the soft murmur of human voices standing not far away. So I went from forgetting about 99.99% of the sky to forgetting about all of it, which is a bigger shift than it mathematically appears. The guys performed shockingly well at Riverside. Matt, Sachith, Ben, Nathan, and Garrett all had big PR performances. With Cupcake finally asserting his desire to compete on the SCIAC stage again, the men's team now has three competitive runners up front, and a couple more who can run well against the some of the scoring runners from Cal Lu, La Verne, and Whittier. The SCIAC is still fairly-clearly divided between the teams that are trying to win year to year (this year, I'll pick Oxy, PP, CMS, Redlands in that order) and the teams that are racing against each other in the bottom half. But in that bottom half the competitive level has been rising for a few years now, at all the schools. I'm glad to see it, and only wish I had one more chance at racing for an all-conference spot.

After placing last in 2006, the men may move up a couple of spots this year, the last for Matt and David, who came in three years ago as the program's shining hopes. The women also had a good day. Katherine is unlikely to admit to being satisfied with a race performance, ever, but her blog entry is about as close to that as I expect to see. Justine continues to improve, and our 1-4 spread was only 36 seconds (although the 5th runner was another 40 seconds back of that). The only SCIAC competition available was from Redlands and Pomona-Pitzer, last year's 1st and 3rd place teams, but the women are ready for multi-duals, and could easily surprise some of the teams who beat them last year.

Also, I spent a lot of time playing this game with Matt where you throw a piece of fruit up in the air, then try to hit it with a second piece of fruit before it comes back down. It was pretty hard, but in the end I started playing with rocks, and then I won twice in a row. Finally, there was no Gerry Lindgren this year, since Hawaii didn't come and also he was fired for being insane, but I did get to take mile splits standing next to Steve Scott.

Friday, 9/28/07 (8000m time trial)
Missed the plane to Stanford due to general stupidity. Time trialed on the track instead. 8000m in 25:41.
5:11, 5:09, 5:07, 5:08, 5:06
Halves of 12:56, 12:45. 5000m in 16:06
Felt pretty okay. My right leg got tired before my left one, probably from going in circles. Other than that I was fine. No sprint, felt like a 90% effort.

Thursday, 9/27/07 (70 minutes, strides)
Doing this run has become sort of a default when I don't know what else to do. It's like trying to put everything on hold for a day. Long enough to be a legitimate training run, easy enough not to take anything out of you for a hard effort the next day.

Later, I was presented with a test of my manhood - an unopened glass jar of pasta sauce with a tight lid. I took several unsuccessful tries at opening it, redoubling my efforts only when Soyoung suggested maybe she should go find someone else to do it for her. I wiped the sweat off my palms and immediately heard air sucking in under the newly-liberated jar.
This reminded me that it's grip strength, not "twisting ability" that limits your ability to torque the lid - hence the usefulness of a thin, flat sheet of rubber designed for the purpose as an aid in opening the jars.

Suppose the jar will be opened when you apply a torque T Nm to the lid. Then the tangential force to be applied to either side of the lid is T/r N where r is the lid radius. If you plan on doing this by gripping with your hand, you'll need to have enough friction to prevent slipping, so mu*G > T/r, where mu=coefficient of friction between your hand and the lid, and G is the radial force applied to the lid, limited by your grip strength.

Making an experiment just now, I found that I am unable to do a "hands pullup", where I pull myself up a few centimeters by curling my hands into a ball using grip strength and keeping the angle of my forearms constant. I conclude my single-hand grip strength is less than my body weight of 700N. With a generous mu of .5, I can apply no more than about 200N (45 pounds) of tangential force to a jar lid. However, in my adult life I have not encountered any jars which I have been unable to open. I conclude that most American jars are not tightened with a force greater than 200N, but probably many are tightened with greater than 100N force, because I've frequently been asked to open jars by my mom, who I roughly judge to be no less than half as strong as I am.

Wednesday, 9/26/07 (70 minutes, strides)
My right achilles was sore during the run last night, but fine today. I think this may be because two days ago I was particularly aggressive in my rehab exercise, while yesterday I intentionally took off. So I think the exercises are helpful in the long run, but they day after they actually weaken me a bit.

In the past, I've gotten injured, started rehab exercises, shown no improvement, stopped rehab exercises, gotten better, resumed training, and eventually re-injured myself. My thinking in this process has been "these exercises aren't making me better. I should stop them." Then when I do stop them, I miraculously heal. But I've been adopting the thinking of a guy who learns about lifting weights to get stronger. So he goes to the gym and lifts weights. The next day he's sore and weak. So he stops doesn't lift. The day after that he feels great. So he assumes lifting makes him weak and rest makes him strong. Idiotic, perhaps, but it's what I'm frequently guilty of doing. There's also the rationalization: "I don't have time for such-and-such today, and besides I'm not hurting right now anyway." No matter how many aphorisms about ounces of prevention I hear, it never seems to sink in. But at least I've achieved temporary reprieve from injury, and am probably racing for the first time in a while this weekend.

We had a big snafu with the Juice team and being denied entry into the Stanford Invite. I think the race director is just mad all the good teams are running at Bill Dellinger instead.

Tuesday, 9/25/07 (90 minutes)
Good run with the NFTC (North Field Track Club), whose activities consist of Ian and I putting in some laps. Here is a fun math problem that I read from a book. It's not exceedingly difficult, but once you understand what to do there is room for some cleverness in the execution:

Three men (Adam, Alan, and Ryan) and their wives (Kara, Sara, and Shayne) were comparing their previous week of training. They noticed that each runner wound up for the week running the same number of total runs as they averaged miles per run (so if they ran five times, they also averaged five miles per run). Each husband ran 63 more miles than his wife. Alan did 23 more runs than Shayne, and Ryan did 11 more runs than Kara. Who is married to who?

I like this problem because for me, the moment I read the last line, my reaction was simply surprise. Who is married to who? That didn't seem to be where they were leading me (although on rereading it's the obvious thing to ask), but the fact that you can glean it from the information given is what makes the problem cute. (I considered calling it "elegant", but I think that word is better reserved for more meaningful uses).

Toy math has been helpful for me lately. I have one regular tutoring customer now. I like this kid - she's polite, smart, and most importantly, eager to learn. We were working today on the concept of acceleration. While this may seem straightforward enough, since people can intuit acceleration directly because we physically feel it, I was really hoping that she could get how the relationship between position and velocity is the same as the relationship between velocity and acceleration.

I don't think I'm a very good tutor, yet. I try hard at what I'm doing. But have you ever tried to teach someone to whistle? It's not possible. You can tell them each of the things they need to do, with their lips and tongue and how to breathe, but they will just sit there blowing air around and getting progressively more frustrated. The only way someone learns to whistle is by going and actually trying the thing for themselves, playing around and experimenting until they get it. At first they'll get it one moment, and forget it the next, and have no control over it. But once they have the basics of how to make some noise, the rest comes far more easily. The whistler will only get there, though, when they find they really want to, or else they'll never put in the effort required.

Teaching a math or physics concept is just the same. I cannot possibly teach you the concept of a derivative. I can explain it, ask you leading questions about it, give you examples of it. But the understanding, you must do for yourself. My job as a tutor, then, isn't to teach the concepts. It's to make you want to learn them. And here's where math came in.

Both my student and I were exhausted from banging our heads against the wall trying to communicate on this particular subject. I was giving example problems, trying to lead her on in small conceptual steps. And at one point, a problem required, as part of its solution, the computation 31-17. She dutifully wrote it out on the page (this is my favorite student, the one who doesn't automatically reach for the calculator for every computation).
31
-17

31
-17

2¹1
-17
___
14

Which is fine. It's right. It's effective. But it's not fun. So I saw an opportunity here, to help us both out, by taking a break and having some fun with math.

"That's right," I said, "but let's see if you can do it in your head. What's fifty eight minus twenty three?". No problem. You can easily see in your mind that you subtract the ones digits (three from eight) and the tens digits (two from five) separately, and then put them back together to get 35. She got it. "Good, try 91-31." I gave her a couple more, then asked, "What's 56-39?" Stumped. Once you try to "carry digits" as elementary school teachers would have it, it gets inordinately more difficult. So I told her I would teach her a short trick. I wrote this out (she is used to algebra, but not calculus):
56 - 39 = x
40 - 1 = 39
39 = (40 - 1)
substitute in
56 - (40 - 1) = x
56 - 40 + 1 = x
(56 - 40) + 1 = x
16 + 1 = x
17 = x
"But that's so complicated. It has so many steps. I can't do all that in my head!" she protested. I told her to have more faith in herself, and did a few more problems with her. Soon, she found that I was right - she could do the problems quickly in her head. 64-15 becomes 64-20+5 = 49. She can subtract any two two-digit numbers now just as fast as I can. So after this break, we went back to work, and in just five minutes she was answering questions about acceleration perfectly accurately, despite our having worked fruitlessly on it for a long time before before the math excursion.

My guess would be this sort of break worked because:
1) It gave her confidence - she was soon doing something she didn't know she ever could, and doing it easily.
2) It was fun. If you used to scrub the toilet with a toothbrush, and suddenly someone gave you a brush for Christmas, you'd probably go scrub the toilet with it right away. It's still a chore, but it's the comparison with what the thing used to be that makes it so suddenly enjoyable.
3) It was a break. Maybe we could have talked about tennis for five minutes and done just as well.

These things together had the effect that when we went back to the textbook, she was excited about learning, and keenly receptive for more. Hopefully, with many more such tidbits thrown into tutoring sessions throughout the year, my students will see that there is more to math and physics than formulas and methods to follow. I want my students to intuit answers before finding solutions. I do not want them to know anything by heart. I want them to know it by gut.

All this has little to do with running, except that the fundamental principle is the same. The ultimate motivation must come from within. No one can run your repeats for you any more than they can put the principle of least action into your head. You must do it for yourself.

Monday, 9/24/07 (no run)
Off. Soyoung finally came back from Korea! I decided to make food for her, but my muffins tasted as bland as cardboard. Actually worse. Think, "as bland as a bleached, desiccated cardboard cutout of Bob Dole," and you're getting close. Also made Hungarian Goulash, and completely forgot to make noodles. I suck at cooking, and probably always will due to anosmia. Of all the senses to lose though, smell is not that bad. At least this way I can stand my own company.

Book review: Marty Liquori's Guide for the Elite Runner (3 stars)
Another book review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (4 stars)

If you click the above links then by something from Amazon, I will personally get a 4% kickback. I hereby vow to devote all funds gained in this manner to the greater good of the Caltech cross country and track teams, probably in the form of fruits, or if profits exceed expectations, new copies of Running Times for the training room.