PhD defense completed

Well, the long road is at last near its end. Transitioning from one path to another, this time in Halifax. I'm feeling a mixture of joy, exhaustion, and I don't know what else. This has everything and nothing to do with running. I started my PhD with little more than casual running experience. It was used as my backup plan in case the snow wasn't good for skiing. Often I would even run with poles. Then I came to McGill. Nothing of that nature changed initially. I was busy with school, learning the city, and trying to understand what my research project was going to be.

Do weights have anything to do with sprinting?

I was doing some squats yesterday morning. Today I'm trying not to think about tomorrow's defense, so I wrote this post. Here goes.

I was thinking about my previous post which briefly mentioned good lifting technique. What I wrote was when lifting heavy, you must keep your heels firmly planted on the ground. You benefit from wearing shoes with as little cushioning as possible. You'll see people wearing Vibrams at the gym these days. Don't laugh, they have the right idea; laugh at the ones wearing thick-soled shoes believing this to be a good idea. Never mind, the whole idea of keeping on your heels was what as interesting to me: it got me thinking about its connection to running.

Filling holes

As a semi-competitive runner enthusiast (5 years so far), I have been playing catchup on the science and history of the sport. I have not read enough about running to be called well-read. Missing from my shelf are many of the obscure books and even a few popular ones like Duel in the Sun and The Perfect Mile. It seems every second book I see is one I do not recognize. Once you start looking, there's a lot to catch up on, especially when you're a slow reader. This doesn't bother me so much because no matter how much you've read there's always someone out there better read than you.

Movie review: Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

A few days ago I decided to watch Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute long Tokyo Olympiad, chronicling the two weeks of competition of the 18th summer games. The games were originally intended to be filmed by Akira Kurosawa, but things fell though after he demanded total control of the opening ceremonies. Japan's officials preferred to hire someone who'd play up the post-war reconstruction and economic growth of the city. Obligingly there are early shots of old buildings demolished to make way for the new 71,000-seat National stadium. It's fair to say the movie was unavoidably inspired by Riefenstahl's 226-minute-long Olympia (1938), an artistically-managed depiction of Berlin's summer Olympic games.

Exercise according to a philosopher

I'm reading a little philosophy. I wasn't a big fan of studying the subject on its own, but lately that's changing. God knows why I started now. That being said, I've taken a liking to Seneca (The Younger) who, according to wikipedia was born in 4 B.C., died 65 A.D. and lived much of his life in Rome. As a Roman Stoic, he lived during a time of the decadent period (good timing). He fashioned gems like

We all sorely complain of the shortness of time, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives are either spent in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do. We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them.

Getting back into weights

Yesterday I didn't do much of anything exercise-wise. In part that was because a snow squall was lulling me to stay indoors. I walked home through the snow, which takes about 25 minutes, and spent the night reading instead of heading to gym. On the bright side, coming off the heels of a good sleep the day left me time for some interesting new chemistry project ideas. Not sure if they'll see the light of day, but I enjoy a good thought experiment now and then.

Photo from serious running

All fine to rationalize, but because of all that sitting around I had a crummy night's sleep compared to yesterday. As important as it is to rest, too much of anything can be too much (duh). Right now I'm at a point where my nerves need a stimulus of some kind, and more than 45 minutes of walking. I vowed to pool run, though it seems today fate had other plans.

I made a crossword

Well looks like my Achilles still hurts a bit. I did my first pool run yesterday but it won't be my last. Going to take some more time. I never should have gone on that morning run on that faithful day two weeks ago. Sigh. Straw that broke the camel's back, etc.

Why only write about running?

Is there some unspoken rule that when you start a blog you are expected to write about a single subject? I have no issue with that sort of dedication, but when the possibilities of topics could be endless it feels self-limiting to pigeonhole yourself by default. It's a personal bias, but I see enough overspecialization in academia as it is. Having said that, grad students tend to be the ones you find most hyper-focused; I feel well-rounded professors should be writing blogs too. So it goes.

McGill Team Challenge

I spent most of Saturday volunteering for the 17^th McGill Team Challenge. This race lies at the midpoint of every Canadian's indoor track season. Six weeks out from CIS and it's time to show your stuff.  The meet was very well run, events started as scheduled, and it looked as though there were enough volunteers to keep things going smoothly. Help came in part from us members of Montreal Endurance, also decked out in our fresh team logo for some free advertising/good PR. My job was to check in athletes before the requisite hour prior to their events. Given the noisy environment it wasn't an ideal job for someone with APD. To me most names sounded the same, especially in French "Did you say LeDuc or Medoc?" Nothing worse than repeating your name while stressed for your race.

Running injuries

Well yesterday was a complete fail. I stepped outside at 6:30pm, planning to meet with people at the McGill indoor at 7 only to realize my achilles tendon still hurts when I run. So that was a no-go. Oh well, guess more rest is necessary. Might switch back to pool running. I still don't have anywhere near the soreness of pain from the last time I did this, also it's a different part of my tendon. I tend not to repeat the exact same injury twice. Maybe that's a good thing. A better thing would be to avoid injury. Smart, but not smart enough.

Indoor races and airports

My defense date might be February 15th. That's getting close. Nerves are starting to fray. Always anticipation is the worst form of fear. I don't think there's really anything else to it.

I will be running a practice indoors this evening at the McGill 200m track. It's a nice one, but very crowded due to lack of perimeter around the track. No idea what they were thinking when they designed it; never seen another track like it (it's admittedly better than the track at Carleton U, shaped like a rectangle so unusable for competition).

Done another run

About 30 minutes into my run, about halfway though, I was worried that my achilles was getting worse, not better. It hurt a little in start, but I vowed to keep this run super easy. And I really do mean easy. No getting excited and picking up the pace. From now on my mission is to run my easy stuff as if I were walking. In other words there should be no effort whatsoever. The nice thing about that is somehow the body knows what you're up to and helps you along. Like a happy horse that you just gave some slack to. Suddenly the whole body is on board, and your hips start to swing a little and you land a bit more on your toes.

Why I'm writing this blog

I figured if I waited until inspiration hit me for every post I'd never have consistent entries. I was on hiatus for a while mostly because I doubted the reason for writing this thing at all. I'm not married to the idea of running any more than I'm married to chemistry or movies. I tried to make this a blog about running, then realized that's a red herring, as naturally no-one can spend ten paragraphs writing about their awesome workout.

Fractal geometry of running

I'm almost done reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (second edition). The main focus of the book is on "Black Swan" events, which are unexpected events that are both under-represented and therefore ignored in many models of the economy/finance/statistics, etc. It sounds even as I write this sentence silly that someone would need to pointing out extreme events are rare but important. But the point is more subtle having to do with how we perceive low odds of 1 in 10,000 (happens once a decade) the same as really low odds of 1 in 10,000,000,000 (happens once an eon). For instance although a human population's height and weight are Gaussian (the chances of meeting an 8ft tall person is closer to the latter value), if incomes were distributed in a Gaussian manner then the odds of a Warren Buffet existing would be the same as a 14 ft. person. Rather incomes are scaleable; as incomes increase the fraction of comparatively richer people remains the same. This leads to his point that we spend most of our lives in a Madelbrotian universe more than a Gaussian one.

Ugh

Well, the 5k Endurance is over, and all I can honestly say is 'ugh'. To rephrase that a little, it was not a good race and I felt slow, but I pushed hard enough to make it an honest effort. But in some ways it was OK, considering where I started. I ran a 16:15 time trial in early April, which felt really slow. Then after returning from my achilles tendon injury (healing time 4 weeks in all) I ran 15:53 in May at the Ottawa Race weekend.

St John's vacation over and back to Montreal

I took some time off from writing but not from running. It was a busy two weeks. First things first, a summary of the Tely 10, which I ran two weeks ago. I was excited to come in second with a nine second PB of 52:27, a minute behind Colin Fewer. There was some good competition this year with Grant Handrigan just behind me (he beat me last year; seems we take turns passing one another) and Fewer took home the prize for the seventh consecutive time. One of the nice things about the Tely is that since the Telegram newspaper is the main sponsor, it obviously gets considerable coverage in the paper. This meant even my 'lowly' second place got a few lines of interview Q&A in the Monday edition (mostly asking me about how the race went and what I was doing in St. John's). Any interview is a bonus; you feel like a real athlete. A lot of papers wouldn't think to mention a lowly road race let alone ask the opinions of even lowlier runners! I guess with 84 runnings of the Tely, it's building a considerable history behind it.

Stuff I thought would make me faster

I am about to read Shermer's The Believing Brain, a book about how we come to believe in things, and how often we get fooled in the process. I thought I'd list some of those things which had me fooled, and how I've since stopped believing in them. I am happy to say my mindset is skeptical, but optimistic. I take equal pleasure discovering something is true or outright false.
       I should point out that nothing on this list is completely wrong. If any claim was totally false then we would be foolish to believe it for any length of time. You would be hard pressed to find anyone advising you to drink 5 gallons of water per diem, run with rocks in your shoes, or chug a beer before racing (then again...). In contrast, these items were convincing because they appealed to some kind of rational way of thinking. Sometimes they were even based on solid scientific research. Science likes averages (as it should), but it's possible for an average value, like an average family of 1.8 children, not to represent a single actual family. If vitamins did not work for me, I cannot claim they will not work for anyone.
Here is a list of what I believed would make me a faster runner.

Tely 10

Next Sunday on July 24th I will be running in my fifth Tely 10 in St. John's Newfoundland, a ten mile point-to-point race sponsored by the local Telegram newspaper (hence the name). It runs like a miniture Boston Marathon in that it's mostly downhill and there's fleet of school buses that ferry you from downtown to the start line. It starts in the town Paradise, just outside of St John's. They've always started from the same place so now there's a permanent start line and mile markers. It has been around since 1922, which makes it one of the oldest races in Canada. In fact Newfoundland was not part of Canada in the 1920s (one of those easy-to-forget factoids). I recently read a book on history of the Tely 10, which recounts stories from every year of the race from 1922 to 2000. Early on they used to not close the roads to traffic, so one year a lead runner got hit by a car. The things we take for granted nowadays...

Thinking about running

Runners fall into three categories: the talkers, the music listeners, and the quiet ones. If you run a lot, you will probably find yourself in at least two of these groups. (Whenever I pool run, I no choice but to listen to the radio playing or nothing at all). I find the majority of my time is spent in the last group, running on my own. Of course running ‘silent’ does not exclude the possibility of being in a group; there are many occasions where everyone is too tired to talk, or maybe just have nothing to say at that moment.

Why run?

If you never asked this question someone else probably will, like your family or friends. Do you run because because it’s inexpensive? Because you don’t need to travel? To be part of a group? Feynman once said "Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it". Maybe the same could be said for running. Certainly it is not done strictly for practical reasons.

Is there something that sets running apart from other sports?