10/1/07 - 10/7/07 Emit at aloof gels gets Teg's leg fool at a time.(420 minutes, 1 steady state, 1 interval session, 1 fartlek)

Sunday, 10/7/07 (60 minutes, strides)

Book review: Avoid Boring People , James Watson. 5/10
(now links to Ideotrope instead of Amazon. Couldn't buy a grape with the Amazon money.)
Also should appear in The California Tech.

North field run, completes a good week of running.

On the crapper, I picked up Parade magazine, and flipped to Marilyn vos Savant's column. I read this column because I am severely annoyed by vos Savant's profession, which is essentially "Professional Smart Person." My goal is to find her mistakes and thereby simultaneously achieve forms of deflation of my target and self-exaltation. This is illogical, since Marilyn herself has no idea. See, the reason you point and laugh when someone trips going down the stairs is that it makes him feel bad. It's not the pointing and laughing that makes you feel better about yourself. It's the pain eating away the other person's soul that makes you feel better about yourself. And I'm frustratingly incapable of fomenting soul-consuming pain in Marilyn vos Savant.

In her most recent column, vos Savant replied to an astute reader who wondered why he could stick his hand in a 450 degree oven for several seconds with no ill effect, but sticking his hand in 212 degree boiling water for the same duration, would be severely scalded. "Okay," I thought, "good question. Has to do with the density of the medium, which affects the rate of molecular interactions, which transfer thermal energy..." But no. vos Savant simply replied that air and water have drastically different coefficients of heat transfer, and that this also explains why potatoes cook faster through boiling than through baking.

This is borderline idiocy. To measure this heat transfer coefficient cited would involve exactly the same sort of interactions vos Savant was supposedly trying to explain. Her answer had as much physical content as, "it is that way because it is that way." (Well, maybe not that little. It did have the content "your hand interacts with hot air and water in a way similar to how a potato interacts with them.") But despite the vacuity of her response, I can imagine millions of Americans reading this exchange and giving a long, knowing, "ooooooooh," as if God had just beamed enlightenment down on them from heaven.

This sort of thing makes me angry. And I have a little theory, that I use sometimes when I'm angry, and generally it makes me lose my anger. The theory is that when I'm angry at something, it's because I'm projecting a fault that I see in myself on to someone else. To explain: I see faults in people all the time. (Okay, that sentence didn't come out quite the way I was hoping, but after the discussion of public mockery as a spiritual practice I better not pull any punches now.) But they don't anger or annoy me. Someone drives erratically, and I think, "Whoa, bad driver. I'll keep my distance." Not, "Fuck you." Someone uses bad grammar on an internet message board and I think, "this is difficult to understand." Not, "Learn some damn English, dimwit."

But if you slow me down because you're poorly organized, or can't do something you promised because you slacked off on your work, it has a much better chance of making me mad. I think the difference is that, whether or not I'm a good driver or grammarian, I have no insecurities in my abilities in those areas. I'm at least decent at them, and I don't care much if I make a mistake. Organization and procrastination are two problem areas for me. I think that I'm only mad when I see these faults in others because I'm frustrated by my own struggles with the same problems.

This is a strange reaction. On the surface, you'd think I'd be more sympathetic towards people with the same weaknesses I have, and intolerant of people who can't do the things that I do easily. But observation suggests this not to be the case. It could be a reflection of my personality. Maybe when I generate anger, it's generally directed at myself, and only gets channeled out to others when I use them as effigies of me. Whatever the reason, when I stop and think about this, my anger, or impatience (which feels to me like simply a less-intense version of the same emotion) fades.

I'm not the only one who wants to bring Marilyn down. A google of her name yields, as the fourth hit, a page dedicated to documenting her every published fault, complete with big, bold, proclamations of Marilyn's error, accentuated with liberal use of superlative language, overdocumentation (a favorite tactic of detractors, vitriolists, and conspiracy theorists), and exclamation points. After a few minutes of browsing this page (and I'm sure there are more like it), things came into new perspective.

Give the woman a break. She's not a writing a scholarly research column. She's an entertainer, writing for a cheaply-produced throw-away entertainment magazine. Yes, there are mistakes, and yes, Marilyn vos Savant is an easy person to hate, given her presumptuously-implied advertisement of being the world's smartest person. But anyone else would make mistakes, and advertisement is just the way our society works. So yeah, Marilyn's column is sometimes crap. When I consciously realized that Marilyn's crap irks me because I'm afraid I also misunderstand and overlook important aspects of the things I'm trying to explain, I gently put the magazine back down on the floor, rather than tearing it into strips to wipe up with.

Saturday, 10/6/07 (steady state)
8xarroyo tempo. First 1.5 laps with Matt, after that he went up ahead and I was by myself for the next ten miles. Final watch time was 1:12:52, but that's incorrect because I had to take a shortcut or two to avoid the cops.

What does the police department do with their horses anyway? As far as I could tell, they were just sitting idly on the trail chatting the entire morning, getting in my way. Don't you guys have some protecting and serving to do? Tell me one way in which a horse benefits the police. Do you canter down bad guys on the horse? Can you see foul play from a hundred yards away atop the high perch of your saddle? Maybe, if your horses were racehorses, I could understand keeping them. Racehorses are badass. But your horses trot slower than a normal person walks. To the gallows. Those horses were the rejects from McDonald's.

Friday, 10/5/07 (30 minutes)
Backflipping through hoops; standing on one hand, on top of ladder, on top of a board, rolling back and forth on a coffee can; and lying on my stomach, pulling my feet up in the air behind me all the way over my body and laying them flat on the ground next to my chin, are some examples of the things I did not do today. However, I did watch other people do these things, and it gave me a somewhat-humbler outlook on the athletic ability I'm displaying by touching my toes.

I saw the Shangri-La Chinese Acrobats in Beckman, and their feats were simply astounding. These performers combine balance, strength, power, agility, flexibility, and pretty much any other athletic measure you can think of, with the exception of cardiovascular endurance. Which made me realize - I completely ignore almost every athletic measure you can think of, with the exception of cardiovascular endurance.

I used to love sprinting. And baseball. And swimming. My attentions flipped through rock climbing, weight lifting, karate (extremely briefly), and a host of impromptu exploration. But over time, these have evaporated. This doesn't bug me at all. To say I appreciated the show would be an understatement; to say I was awed by it would not be much of a stretch of the truth. But I felt no desire to emulate them, as I previously would have (and did after seeing the Peking Acrobats ten years ago).

I would say I've come to terms with being a one-dimensional athlete, as is necessary for a distance runner, but "coming to terms" with something implies sacrificing for it. By this point, the fact I can't take up rock climbing or karate doesn't feel like a sacrifice any more. It simply feels natural.

I have no intellectual analog. Although I'm aware that eventually, I'll have to choose an intellectual discipline to pursue if I want to master it, and others will suffer neglect because of it, I don't yet feel capable of excluding the possibility of becoming a writer to study physics, or to exclude becoming a physicist to become a teacher, etc. I can't imagine devoting the bulk of my intellectual effort to one (or two) things. But maybe time and maturity will eventually change that, as they once did athletics.

Thursday, 10/4/07 (fartlek)
4 on, 2 off * 5 with Kiesz. I had some reservations about working out in consecutive days, but I simply banished them to Castle of Good Intentions where I send all my reasonable autoadvisory ruminations.
It took one repeat for my legs to come alive, but after that I felt good.

Wednesday, 10/3/07 (intervals)

I spent the last hour watching Youtube videos of great distance races, indexed here. Some showed tremendous courage, like Dave Wottle's come-from-way-way behind victory in the 1972 Olympic 800m. Others were feats of unfathomable greatness, like Alberto Juantorena's frontrunning victory in the same event 4 years later, in which he set a new world record and trounced a field of 800m specialists. But the treasure was this video: a geniune, slow-motion, Hicham El Guerrouj nipple slip.

Yesterday I realized that aside from some strides/reps, I haven't done anything at 5k pace or faster in a long time. I don't need too much of it, since I'm training for 13.1, but the rule of thumb I hear is go 10% on either side of your race pace (or variations of that rule) for your workouts. So I did 3x1600, going 4:54, 4:50, 4:45. I didn't feel wonderful, but I got through it fine and wasn't toasted afterwards, so I figure it's good solid work.


Tuesday, 10/2/07 (60 minutes)
My nonsense sentence title for this week's entries both references the fourth-place finisher at this year's world championships and is read identically forwards and backwards.

While I'm on the topic of foolishness, I'll describe another math trick I used today. My student was doing a problem that required her to compute 23.4^2. I shocked her by announcing the answer immediately. There are two parts to this trick. The first part is to do the beginning of the problem really fast, so that you know the required computation is 23.4^2 long before your student does, and you have some time to work on it. The second part is the trick part, which I got from a book.
This particular problem could be done directly without too much difficulty, that is
23.4*23.4 = (20+3+.4)*(20+3+.4) = 400 + 60 + 8 + 60 + 9 + 1.2 + 8 + 1.2 + .16, which if you keep a running tally as you go along, possibly condensing some steps by doing 23.4*20 all at once, you will find is 547.56

But take note of this:
suppose we want to calculate the square of a number, a
a^2 = ?

algebra says
(a+x)(a-x) = a^2 -x^2
a^2 = (a+x)(a-x)+x^2

which originally looks harder. but let a = 23.4 and x = 3.4, and you have
23.4^2 = 20*26.8 + 3.4^2
26.8 is easily doubled by taking 52+1.6 = 53.6, so 20*26.8 = 536
for 3.4^2 (which you should do first, so you don't forget the 536 in the mean time) can be done by the same trick:
3.4^2 = 3*3.8+.4^2 = 3*(4-.2)+.16 = 12-.6+.16 = 11.56
Adding these
23.4^2 = 536 + 11.56 = 547.56

So we worked through this, and through a few easier examples, and now, even if she doesn't completely understand 1-D kinematics, my student can find the square of a number better than her teacher can. Also, she thinks I'm pretty much on par with God. Which has me worried, because I've used my most-handy arithmetic tricks up already, and we're only a few weeks into the school year.

Of course I have more (various approximation methods, for example), but they'll be less applicable as we go along. My favorite foray in this vein of playing around is the article "Logarithms!" by David Mermin.
I'm not a master of using his techniques yet (why would I be when I have a calculator, or better yet, the Google toolbar, right in front of me), but reading that paper, I love the obvious joy he gets out of just playing around with numbers to see what he can find.

Note: article on JSTOR. Caltech IP or other access needed to read it.

Monday, October 1, 2007 (90 minutes)

My plan was to do a progression run, with the last thirty minutes getting eventually down to a tempo-like pace. But either because it was hot, because I haven't done it in a while, or because my focus was lacking, I didn't hold much faster a pace over the final half hour than over the rest of the run. My mind would wander, and then a minute or two later I'd realize I let the pace slip again. I think next time I'll only consciously try to pick it up over the last 15 minutes, then gradually extend that as I do more progression runs.

I've been neglecting my core work again, which I really shouldn't. I used to think I had a pretty strong core. Then I saw this video:


I also made a unintentionally long post on Katherine's topic on the jock blog, a portion of which I'll copy here in hope of getting a response on what I am most interested in.

i couldn't tell you the cellular or molecular origins of either type of stress. what i keep hearing is that muscle soreness is due to "microtears", but from what i understand this is not certain. as far as being generally tired, i'm equally stumped. pH and blood lactate levels return to normal just hours after working out, as do body temperature and heart rate. i'd imagine blood sugar, and cellular sugar and ATP levels also are normal not long after a hard workout. heck, on average a stem cell can divide once per day, so if you can make a whole new cell in that time frame you'd think a cell could clear out metabolic waste in that time easily. i'm left to hypothesize something hormonal is taking place after hard workouts. if that's true, it could explain why some performance-enhancing drugs work by reducing recovery time between workouts, because drugs could presumably either act like hormones or regulate hormones related to that lethargic feeling the day after a hard effort.