Hermes 10-miler

On Saturday I ran in the Hermes 10-mile race in downtown Cleveland. I'm not a runner, but it's always more fun to jog alongside bundles of other people. In this case, about 800 people ran the 10-mile distance (there was a simultaneous 5k), including ten from my usual weekend running group, the Roads Scholars. We're not the first to pun that, though I don't know of any other running clubs to do so - only transportation industry experts and traveling part-time faculty - and I'm sure our homophonic spree en route to it was the most spectacular.

The race wasn't bad: it had a fun starting location (near E. 4th street, a reasonably hip spot), was chip-timed and featured mostly blocked-off streets. However, after the first mile or two on proper downtown roads, the course swung out onto a long out-and-back parallel to Lake Erie and I-90 (between highway and Lake out, then across the highway, then South of the highway back). The only thing exciting about that was compensating for the lake breeze and "hills" (read: highway ramps). The word on the street was that the previous year's race routed over the bridge to Ohio City and back - that would have felt more like an urban race.

My performance was fair: I hung in pretty well over the first 5 miles at 8:20/mile or so, but the return trip, a bit hillier, suffered. I walked two of the water stops, but in an unusually coordinated move managed to chew a couple of clif cubes whilst running before the mile 6 water (note: tasty and easier to choke down than gel).

Overall, just a hair under 9:00/mile - 1:29:45 total time, which put me in 385th place overall according to the race results, and 48/65 among men aged 25-29.

That said, I'm pretty sure only one other guy aged 25-29 ran this race as the second half of a 20-miler. Andrew and I made a morning of it, running a 10-mile "warmup" at about 8:10/mile, then almost immediately stepping up to the starting line for the race bell (I'm happy that race guns are going extinct). Water stops and motivation in numbers make for a great 2nd-half of a training run.

On the map, we started on the right, running West to downtown; the loops around town and spur along the lake comprised the 10-miler.

Training 2008-W17

Spring weather was in full force this week; that usually implies only one or two more sloppy snowfalls until (queue orchestra) sum-mer-tiiiiiime.

I rescued my bike from the basement, give it a quick checkup (probably too quick, but nothing has fallen off since) and commuted to school on Tuesday. The route is mostly westward, so I constructed a route parallel to Mayfield road, one E-W 5-lane behemoth, on the way there, and another parallel to Cedar road, a second major artery, on the way back. Both worked well; the first featured sanguine crossings of most of the major N-S streets and little cross-traffic at the stop signs in-between, but spotty asphalt conditions through the northern expanse of Cleveland Heights. The latter was a friendlier bike route overall, but required more in-traffic negotiation and a mile or so at the end with little choice but to merge and suffer.

I repeated the exercise (ding!) Thursday with two additional routes. All said, about 40 miles of bicycling at 16-17 mph overall, traffic stops included. Best of all, it's free exercise, time-wise: within 10% of my typical commute time by car. I'm looking forward to leaving early one morning and seeing how quickly I can ride it in less traffic.

Somewhere in-between I hit North Chagrin [sat] for some mixed trail/road running. I've found that running in the afternoon is difficult, probably because I'm not taking care of nutrition during the day. Overall: some hills to the tune of +-1000', a pleasantly increased rate of vitamin D3 synthesis, and 9.1 miles at 9:30/mile.

Friday I rested in preparation for Saturday. Saturday AM we started in the Heights for a three-part run: 7.5 miles @ 8:20/mile, followed by a short water break then 3.1 miles @ 8:05/mile, then a bathroom break and 10.1 miles @ 8:53/mile. That's a total of 20+ in about 3 hours, nicely on track for an equivalently painful race in a few weeks.

Spanish techno

Driving to work this morning, I passed two consecutive bumper stickers:

"Favored and highly blessed"
"We're all family; we all have value"

I feel a cage fight brewing. Is driver #1 better than those around him because his deity digs his trunk magnet choice? Will driver #2 pound him for being part of the problem, not part of the solution? Stay tuned. A bit later I saw one of the semi-ubiquitous "My child is a peacemaker at Coventry school" and felt better about the world.

I received a cheque in the mail yesterday, of unidentified origin but paid through a bank in Barcelona. From past experience I know this to be some sort of work-related payment (I work for a European company, which apparently likes to pay some accounts transiberianly); I also know that it'll take a few extra days for the funds to appear after depositing it, as I learned last time this happened when I planned to turn the money around for an imminent car purchase.

If instead my funds were being paid through the other Spanish banks, I'd be happy to pick them up myself.

In typing that, my cerebrum has quickly filled with the beats of Spanish Techno, one of several ueber-catchy tunes from the New Pornographers (don't worry - it's just a wiki article), whose latest couple of releases I haven't been able to entirely strike from my mind since my acquisition of them months ago. Curse you, free association!

Reviewing the New Pornographers' Challengers and Twin Cinema
Pros: folksy singing, vocal harmony, great hooks, interesting instrumentation, varied songwriting, Canadian content
Cons: just a bunch of 3:00 pop songs
Listen to: "The Jessica Numbers", "Sing me Spanish Techno", "Challengers", "Adventures in Solitude".
Goes best with: coffee, long pants, Volkswagens

Training 2008-W16

After last Sunday's long run, I took a day off then managed to hit the pool between otherwise scheduled events on Tuesday for a quick 1000m, all in 10x100 @ 2:30. That's not quick at all, in fact, but I might need some time with a coach to evolve from floundering-gorilla status.

My apologies to any gracefully-swimming gorilla readers.

Wednesday I hit the evening Striders run for the usual mile warmup to the store, 4.5 miles at a tempo pace (~8:30) and a mile jog home. I ran into (and therewith) a fellow Sammy alum who I hadn't seen in about a decade; a pleasant surprise.

Friday was beautiful and springly: call it 65 and sunny, near-perfect afternoon-break-from-the-office-run weather. I was due for some intervals, so I did 10x400m sprints ("sprints" being relative, in the 7:15-7:30/mi range) with 400m jogs (10:30) in-between. I was impressed in the aftergraph that my sprints stayed quite consistent in pace, given how tired by legs had gotten by the final few.

The weekend was rainier, but I caught a bit of partly-sunny on Sunday afternoon for an 11-mile loop eastward, downhill to Gates Mills village and then back up the Chagrin valley and home. I was aiming for a marathon-pace run (not knowing quite what marathon-pace is) and ended up with a 9:20 moving average. That included some crazy hills, so I'll do the rest of my workouts assuming a 9:00-9:15 marathon pace, meaning next week's 20-miler gets a 9:30-9:45 goal.

Spring weather is good.

Taxes

Tax season brings about token media comment about our complex slash draconian tax system. Having recently completed my own, both the level of taxation and required effort to file seem quite reasonable.

At the bottom line, I paid about 11% of my total income to the federal government, plus about 6% to Ohio (income + sales tax, approximately) and 7% to local government (sales tax additions, property tax, income tax to the various cities in which we live and work). I'm ignoring social security and medicare taxes (I don't think they show up aside from disappearing from each paycheck), and some special taxes such as those paid on gasoline, booze and car registration.

So, about 25% of my PDP (personal domestic product?) pays for all of the things that government does for me: roads, schools and libraries, rule of law, national defense, funding for basic science, and regulation and insurance. In the latter, I mean regulation in the sense of providing a reasonably safe and fair platform for human interaction (say, regulating the stock market, or enforcing equal rights legislation) and insurance in the sense that if I'm hit by a hurricane I'll get some basic level of catastrophic support.

While I don't agree with some amount of government spending (e.g., killing large numbers of people or subsidising corn-syrup manufacturers and their lobbyists), I think aside from some simplification and optimization, and of course better alignment of the government's with my personal priorities, the overall level of taxation is not unreasonable for what I get.

Even my unaccounted-for contributions to medicare and social security don't worry me. We all contribute according to our means (with the wealthy contributing relatively less, which may or may not be fair), and in exchange we know that our friends and neighbors have a safety net for post-retirement income and medical care. I ignore all of the hype about SS being the same as retirement savings and think about the system in that way: we can pay for it, and know that our fellow Americans have this guarantee (and we might, or might not, have it when we get older - but that's okay), or we can scrap the system and let them fend for themselves. I'm okay with the former.

My taxes took, for sake of argument, between 6 and 10 hours of effort in total, among keeping track of my receipts and finances throughout the year, filling out the forms, and reading IRS documents to learn how to do so. That also seems very reasonable to me, to do once per year. My taxes aren't uber-complicated, but I do the full 1040, itemize deductions and deal with a handful of second-level-in-complexity situations, none of which were difficult to address with irs.gov and a bit of googling.

So, complain away, libertarians and simplified/regressive-tax fanatics, I won't join you. The system isn't broken, and while we can all field complaints of government's efficiency, on the back of the envelope the cost and benefits don't seem entirely unbalanced to me.

Training 2008-W15

Wednesday morning, 6AM. I don't believe that; perhaps I didn't DST my watch. Either way, I'd been putting off a tempo run, still sore from the weekend half-marathon and struggled through 7 miles @ 8:52 before work. It was cold, rainy, unsteady and unpleasant overall.

Sunday morning, long slow run in the heights (gmap). Both goals met with 20.1 miles @ 10:01 moving pace. That satellite view is fun; I ran past N houses, where N is large. Doing the marathon at 10:00 should thus be no trouble; we'll see how 20 miles goes again in a couple weeks, and maybe I'll go for 4 hours (9:00) instead.

DNA as art

An Ottawa-based firm offers to take a sample of your DNA, run a PCR, and create a wall-worthy image of the blot. The whole effort runs in the $500-1000 range: a little steep for my pocketbook (I'd go for a plush giant squid first), but I appreciate the "found art" aspect of the endeavor.

As a poor-man's approach, perhaps I should collect some existing blots in the lab and take some photos, then recreate them on canvas for a similar effect.

For that matter, another type of assay might make for a geekier wall hanging. How about a full gene chip analysis, e.g.,

Training 2008-W14

Week 14 already! The marathon is at week 20, so lots of miles yet to log.

I started out the week sore from Sunday's run, taking Monday to rest and hitting the pool Tuesday for a relaxed 1000 yd plus a few lengths of rotation drills. Swimming felt great, and my breathing was comfortable throughout (nasal cilia: "ahem, except for when you practiced flip-turns").

On Wednesday I did a lunch run from the office: intervals of 1km, 2, 1, 1 with ~500m jogs in-between. At least, it was close to that. I used the garmin to measure the distances, but have it set statute measurement. I did just fine calculating metric distance and pace in my warmup and first interval, but after my legs starting suctioning available oxygen, my processing speed really slowed down. (I wonder what happens physiologically here -- it does seem real: that doing calculations is much more difficult while running quickly when (I presume) I'm running an oxygen deficit. Just lower PO2 up there?) Anyway, according to the GPS output I ended up doing something that looked like intervals after all.

My usual weekend long run group was heading to Strongsville for the CWRRC Spring Classic half marathon, either to volunteer or run. Joining them seemed easier than plotting our my own route (13 miles was on my training schedule anyway), so I pinned on a race number for my first legitimate HM. Conditions were awesome: about 40 when we started and a bit foggy, warming up to perhaps 50 and sunny over the course of the race. The course was a reasonably flat route through the Mill Stream Run metropark: mostly two laps of an out-and-back, so we got to share high-fives a great number of times with colleagues of a different pace.

I covered the first 2/3 of the distance alongside a colleague of similar pace, but then Chris (who had never run 13 miles before - ha!) went superman on us and sped up for a negative split, finishing at 1:46:01. I kept my pace, picking it up a little bit in the last mile (must.. beat.. girls..) to finish in 1:48:10. That's a PR for me (in the sense that I've also never run that fast in training), and a confidence-inspiring official 8:15/mile average, or 8:09 in GPS-land (which measured my run as 13.3, maybe accounting for starting so far back at the beginning, or perhaps I did a lot of drunken swerving after the water stops).

This morning I passed a blond whippet driving a Volvo. This didn't seem unusual, since my car is turbocharged, and the Volvo, although red, was not. I thought I recognized the driver from a class, but couldn't remember her name. I waved anyway.

Genetics and mental illness

I recently read a Cell paper from Duan et al at JHU on the role of disc1, a particular gene, on the ways neurons grow.

DISC stands for Disrupted In SChizophrenia, and that's pretty much all that's known about the gene: it was identified by looking comparing the genome of a family with a very high incidence of the disease to the 'standard' human genome. The function of this gene was studied by treating some adult mice with an engineered virus that interfered with the normal function of the gene. Adult nerve growth was in those mice was compared to that in an untreated group.

The nerves that were studied were ordinary adult-growth nerves in the hippocampus. (Yes, new nerves are growing in our brains all the time, even as adults.) In short, reducing DISC1 caused adult neurogenesis to occur more rapidly after injury, and the new neurons conducted signals more efficiently, grew more quickly and formed more synapses with existing neurons in the brain. This suggests that in people with the genetic mutation that disrupts disc1 (who are also shown to have a higher-than-average incidence of bipolar disease and depression), a similar thing happens. As other investigators have suggested that many mental disorders are developmental in nature, which could be related to unusual nerve integration, the role of disc1 in increasing the tempo of adult nerve growth and integration may indeed be related.

Political spectrum

As much as this isn't a blog about politics, politics seems to be something about which I should use the opportunity to write. While I've found that doing some actual on-paper freewriting has helped with my politically-motivated anger, the blog is convenient for its speed and link-ability.

The first time I voted was in 2000, soon after graduating from college. The only thing I guessed right on was some county-wide funding for health services, or the like. Those were the days when everyone was rich, I suppose, and could stomach pitching in a bit for their fellow man.

Less so in 02 and 04, when, yes, every single thing on the ballot for which I voted failed. Incredible. The 2004 election results were actually mentally distracting to me, almost to the point of physical illness. I'm not even particularly politically active; I read enough to understand how the system works and figure out who's mostly likely to set it in the right direction, then I show up and vote. Occasionally I share my views with others, if there's beer involved.

My misery in 2004 had two results. First, I almost entirely blocked out mainstream domestic media. The Economist covers much of what's important in the world, includes details and analysis to a non-insulting level, and makes clear their bias and sources. Occasionally I catch a few minutes of NPR or BBC news on the radio, but I switch off NPR when they're playing the "this is good reporting because we're letting two opposing idiots spew nonsense in opposite directions" game.

The second is that I tried to put some rules around my own political orientation. Certainly, a one-dimensional left versus right axis is bothersomely naive. A 2D version with social freedom on one access and economic freedom on the other is a moderate improvement:

Small Government
^
|
Soc. Liberal <---+---> Soc. Conservative
|
v
Big Government

In this case, one might think of the Democrats being in the lower left and Republicans being in the upper right, but there's no good reason why a given voter wouldn't combine socially conservative views with a desire for strong, centralized government, et cetera. In fact, as I read the "use of force" clause in the DMCA correctly, we very much have that leaning today.

The Nolan chart takes a similar approach, but clearly aims to promote Libertarianism in its nomenclature.

Even within the 2D spectrum, I have a few key views that put me at odds with easy characterization.

Fiscal conservatism making for a predictable system is good
Americans are not inherently better than anyone else
Local regulation and experimentation is better than centralized control
Capitalism is efficient because it solves many problems organically
Unchecked capitalism is both unfair and unstable
Rules based on religion are a scam
Life is better when we help each other
Life is better when we are free to live as we choose

Thus, I'm clearly at odds with government at late. Maybe it's not as clear that I would be an Obama supporter, but if you consider my demographic (young, non-hispanic, moderately affluent, well-educated) then I suppose I'm predictable.

Hmmm...