Cleveland marathon

On Sunday I ran the Cleveland marathon, my first attempt at that distance. In short, I survived it reasonably well, finishing the race in 4:07, not far from my "A" goal of four hours. I finished the morning happy with the results of my training and under the impression that ratcheting up my performance the next time around (ahem!) will be quite feasible.

Supergolf slid into a probably-legal [1] street spot a bit after 6:00 for a 7-am start. There was still lots of close parking available; we camped out and watched a medium-sized downpour. (I must have been in a triathlon mindset where arriving an hour early is pushing it; setup here consisted only of pulling on runners and sauntering into the madding crowd.) 50F would have been about perfect without the rain, but I generate heat pretty well, so I stuck with my planned outfit: an ancient EMS tech T and my cheapo Adidas outlet-store shorts. This was the largest race mob I've encountered; the marathon and half-mary started together with about 6000 runners. I was surprised how quickly the herd spread out to leg-extending distance after the bell; it took me almost 3 minutes to reach the starting line, but was up to a full stride shortly thereafter.

The rain eased up after only a few minutes; as I recall, it was still sprinkling at the mile 2 water stop (enough for an easy joke about getting wet from careless cup-throwers), but not much thereafter. It remained pretty cloudy for 90 minutes or so, then ambient brightness increased slowly from there. The first couple of miles were downtown and semi-jovial; I passed lots of people (as usual, I started too far back) and trashbag-poncho-wearing wimps chatted while transforming their gladware into slippery road hazards. From downtown, the race continued onto the (closed to traffic!) Route 2 Shoreway, a stretch of elevated freeway with nice views of Lake Erie, the flats district and the Cuyahoga River. I don't remember any of that; I do remember that the pavement was grooved parallel to my direction of travel (with approximately eight grooves per width of my left shoe), the painted lane markers were still slick from the moisture, and my passing-to-being-passed ratio was between six and seven. This is typical: miles 4-5 are difficult, then my legs would start to get into their long-run groove.

And, they did. By the time we came down from the highway, past Edgewater and into Lakewood I was in a running mood. I lived between 8:30 and 8:45 for the next several miles, passing a few more people, but I'd found about the right pace surroundings by this point. There was a good crowd gathered at and around the turnaround at W. 117th (we had run West from downtown, then went South a block and turned East to run along a parallel road back toward the city). I had been running with Nic until I took a short break for weight optimization near mile 5, but caught back up with him and Emily at about mile 9, as we approached the Detroit Rd. bridge back into downtown.

Somewhere amongst obsessively checking my Garmin for pace (and playing the game where I check my circulating O2 partial pressure by seeing how long it takes to calculate my average pace from total time and distance) during this interim, I thought about how much sexier my ankle muscles were than at the beginning of my training in January: another indication that my brain had switched from glucose as a fuel source to that funny steam coming up from vents in the street. I have put my ankles to good use, though: I've run about 350 miles so far in 2008 [2]; I wonder how much I've run in the first 27 years of my life combined? Anyway, I am probably in the best physical shape of my life, and like the idea that I still have lots of room for improvement.

Mile 10, right before the bridge: a small pep band. Blue marching uniforms, shiny Sousaphones, 4/4 arrangements of 70s pop tunes, oh my! They noticed one runner hollering a "Go Band! Yeah!" as we jogged by, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

The half-marathon crowd started to speed up as they approached their turnoff; I sped up a bit, but mostly resisted the herd mentality and looked around for blue bibs to stick near. The trip through downtown was quick, and a few miles later I could see the familiar clock tower of the BRB. Around the art museum and botanical gardens, past CIM and onto MLK we went. MLK was closed to traffic as well (I wasn't sure, since it has nice paths alongside); most of the street is well-shaded, but the open sections revealed that the sun had come out in full. I chatted with a group of first-timers also timidly still aiming for four hours for much of the MLK leg, and said hello to Janet, with whom I had the fortune of doing a training run a few weeks ago and who would have been far ahead of me under more favorable circumstances. I felt rather not-like-I-hit-a-wall through miles 18 and 19 and made the turn onto the lakeside running path back toward downtown.

At mile 20 I checked my watch for a finishing-time prediction: I had 10k left to run and was just over three hours. I think it took a good mile to synthesize a quotient, during which time I also decided that the likelihood of keeping up my 9-minute pace (9:05 average at the 30k mark) was quickly diminishing. I felt some of the 21-mile wall that marathoners describe, but also found that the headwind threw off my stride a bit. It was time for a few calories (my last 2 clif blocks; I chewed 2 at mile 8 and mile 15 as well) and a water stop. I wasn't sure if Señor Asthma (my alveolae are Spanish) was bugging me or not, but an albuterol assault helped significantly. So, either I was having trouble or I have a great suggestion for next year's Tour de France contestants.

[Photo: running back toward downtown, ca. mile 22]

Around mile 22 I walked through a water stop and saw someone quad-stretching by bending their knee and holding their foot up behind them. My oxygen-deprived cingulate cortex said "ooh, that would feel good!", and before I could intervene my knee passed about 30 degrees of flex and instigated a hamstring cramp the size of, well, my hamstring. Given the options of starting to run again or fall to the ground crying, I elected the former; this worked well, as my the time I'd run through the cramp/pain, I had another mile under my belt.

From there on we were back in downtown. I caught up to Joe H., who also runs with the Lyndhurst Second Sole group and with whom I'd been exchanging cruise-control settings all morning; he was nice enough to wish me luck before taking off. I kept my slow jog until a short uphill near Browns stadium, which I walked, then picked up to "if I'd been running like this the whole time, I'd have finished before breakfast" pace for the last couple of miles through the crowd. The final quarter-mile or so was a straight stretch to the finishing arch; the gratuitously overamplified PA and cheering clumps of spectators or long-finished half-marathoners gave me plenty of energy for a final a tempo stride to the end.

[Photo: the home stretch]
[Photo: almost there]

And that was it [3]. I grinned, I think; it took a few seconds to realize I was in as much non-injury, exercise-induced pain as I'd even been in, but not so much that I minded or doubted for a moment that what I'd done was a bad idea. I clicked 'stop' on my watch, grabbed a water and a chocolate milk and wandered into the crowd.

[1] I worry too much; by 30 minutes later cars were parked in much less-legal spots all around us.

[2] For a better training summary, see my training summary graph. I aimed for a (increasingly-long) long run each week, which pops up above the cluster of midweek faster runs. I've apparently learned how to run faster as well: a linear fit to the pace for all of those runs reveals that I would have run 5.9 mph on New Years Day and am increasing by 0.006 mph per day. That underestimates my gains, of course, since I would run faster yet if eight miles was still my "long, slow" run, but gives me an excuse to use Excel for a blog post nonetheless.

[3] And, here's the gmaps view of the course, as reported by my GPS track.

Fatherhood and whiny pop

The probability of a particular album being chosen from my CD case is, to first order, a function of the how good the music is and how long it's been since I've listened to it. There are probably some subtle effects (I often get a good tune stuck in my head, and want to listen to it again after a few days), so the density function looks something like this.
I found myself on the rightmost end of the orange curve recently, when I pulled an album by the band Something Corporate from my car case for a head-bopping commute in the VW. This is bad music, in the sense that it is harmonically simple, unimaginative, unmusical, over-engineered, predictable and whiny. I envision the musicians from Semisonic deciding they weren't getting to 'express' themselves and forming this group instead. That said, amongst such magna opera hooks as "be my punk rock princess" and "I kissed a drunk girl" was

Son / one day you'll be a man / and men can do terrible things

which caught me off guard and my attention. Well played, Mr. Corporate. Now I'll blog about the line and switch back to Steven Page and Colin Meloy for squishy tunes about fatherhood, putting your album back in its case for an expectation-value duration of two years.

Although I appreciate the sentiment, I'm not sure that* men can do terrible things. Free will might be real, but it might also make sense as an abstraction of a deterministic reality: certainly, we can envision a deterministic system so detailed that at the level of (modern) observation we're convinced that we control it. Under that layer is a stochastic reality, then under that, getting smaller and smaller, more determinism. Then Bill of O pleads, "enough!"

[*] A matter of word choice: I'm not sure what the distinction among "if", "that" and "whether" is, in this context.

Net art

I live about two years behind the rest of the internet class, so it was about time that I discovered a web-based comic entitled Questionable Content. It's a soap opera featuring 20-somethings, indie music, a majority female cast, coffee and some robots. Verily.

I found the author's description of how he constructs the artwork particularly interesting. The comic looks hand-drawn but synthetically colored; in fact, it's drawn directly into Photoshop using a pen-on-tablet type interface, then shaded in using some semi-automated image processing. That's right, my image processing aspires to find its way into papers in low-impact engineering journals; this guy retires on it.

A few people I know use similar tablets for note-taking during class or meetings. There are some like this one that are less clumsy than carrying around a tablet PC but hold memory for several 'pages' of notes before plugging them in and dumping them to a workstation for storage. I tend to take notes in graphs, figures and concept maps rather than text, so a keyboard doesn't do me much good (although a guitar-synth might), but one of those would be a quicker interface into basketnotes than my current method of running ink-on-vellum through the office scanner.

Credit regulation and the middle class

I've been mentally erring on the side of laissez-faire (yes, I spelled that correctly on the first try) when it comes to the current "credit crisis", swaths of mortgage foreclosure in Northeast Ohio, and the like. After all, I'm a middle-class guy who was skeptical of what mortgage banks claimed I could afford, and settled on a modest house and mortgage terms that I knew I could continue to afford through all but the most catastrophic of personal hypotheticals. (Given my monthly Babies-R-Us bill and continuing ownership of said house, I'd say I've succeeded.) Then again, my strategy only worked because I didn't believe what the mortgage industry claimed, and I suppose I shouldn't expect all consumers to behave so... intelligently?

Elizabeth Warren at Harvard has authored books and articles making the case for more attentive government regulation in credit in this very readable article in the university's magazine. I also recently read her testimony before a congressional committee on similar subjects, which included a straightforwardly-explained comparison of the median class in the 1950s and the present.

Umlaut abuse?

In recently reading an interesting New Yorker article about Tiger conservation in India's Sundarbans Tiger Reserve [1], and noted the following.

He continued, “Fortunately for me, all the six years I stayed there as field director, not a single tiger was killed by the local people—not a single one. It was only due to the coöperation I got.”

Wow; was that umlaut used to indicate the pronunciation of the second oh? Shaken, I googled "umlaut cooperation" to investigate whether this travesty was in common use. Among discussion of previous NY use of the construct in the word reelect, there was mention of the umlaut's use in French (I'm sure the symbol is called something else) to indicate the enunciation of a second vowel sound, e.g., naïve. I'm less offended now, having been familiar only with its sound-changing use in German.

My day will now be unsettled by this personal decision. Do I apply this is everyday writing? After all, NY is probably grammatically snooty, which I also like (to pretend) to be. Faced with readers' (perhaps non-native English speakers) convenience in mind, is the umlaut an acceptable compromise between hyphenation (co-operation?) and suck-it-up-and-remember-the-pronunciation (cooperation), as I would traditionally write?

[1] As a bonus, I had to look up the animal krait, and was reminded by wikipedia of its place in the Kipling short story "Rikki Tiki Tavi", a childhood favourite.