Crud 8 Hour (and 24): quality event but too much for me now…

Today I participated in the Crud 8 hour trail “run” (I walked most of the time, though I mixed in some jogging during the first 2-3 hours).

The event itself: the race directors go all out. The trail is interesting and superbly marked; even *I* couldn’t get lost (and that is saying something!) The aid station (which you see every 3.5 miles) is well stocked. The swag is generous (shirt, canvas bag, finisher’s award which you can see below).

They also offer a 24 hour event which starts at 4 pm on Friday afternoon.

The course: a 3.5 mile trail loop with a 1 mile “end of the race” loop for those who finish their last “long” loop after the “45 minutes to go” mark. This year, there was only 1 really muddy spot (shoe sucking) and a couple of “somewhat avoidable” mud spots and two minor stream crossings. But the race directors, while giving you plenty of shade from the sun, also gave you several quad burning hills. This is NOT an easy course!
The vast majority of the course is single track; there are some “road like” parts and some “triple wide” stuff near the end of the loop.
There are a few rocks and roots but not many; these were never a factor for me. It can get muddy if there is lots of rain.

It is pretty though (and set in Jubilee State Park; here are my photos of that park but much of the trail I show is NOT on the race course)

My race: simply pathetic. I had dreams of finishing beyond a marathon (7 loops plus 2 one mile loops); I ended up with 6 full loops and 1 one mile loop.
(note: loops are 3.5 miles ( 5.63 km), and 1 mile (1.6 km)). Yes, it got a bit warm

(via Weather Underground)

My laps: 57:11, 1:02:46, 1:01:37 , 1:06:07, 1:38:16 (hell), 1:30:29 (6 minutes at the aid station), 24:12 for the last “1 mile” loop.
The first two laps saw me mix a little jogging in; lap 3 had maybe a couple of one minute jogging breaks early but was mostly walking.

What happened to me: basically my right leg (knee) went south on me on the “lap from hell”: lap 5. I couldn’t straighten my knee at all (not even close!) and I had pain behind my knee. It was killing me for a while. I stopped…and what turned it around is that after slowing to a crawl, I found a fallen tree, sat on it and stretched the afflicted leg out. That really helped! Ironically 3 other runners stopped and we all chatted. I got back up and finished out the lap, thinking that I would bail. But I had 2.5 hours left and I wasn’t feeling that bad (overall) and my knee had stopped hurting.

So I stated lap 6 thinking “ok, I’ll make up time”. Wrong….I found out that there was a reason my knee stopped hurting: I was going slow! So I slowed down to a pace that was pain free for my knee and just swallowed the embarrassment when the other runners would ask me if I were ok.

Though I got tired, I really never got into the “serious exertion” zone; my knee wouldn’t let me. Sure, my quads were trashed and that is why my knee got painful to begin with. My quads were not trained for these hills and when they became fatigued, the support that they gave my right knee (the one I got operated on last July) vanished, hence the pain. Were I in better shape, I doubt that this would have happened.

So the upshot is that I did NOT get nauseated nor did I get overly tired. My legs did get fatigued; my piriformis didn’t bother me. Today I was limited by my knee and quad conditioning (lack thereof).

I remember getting very cranky at times; I cursed my body and I had to pull over to let someone faster pass me many, many, many times. But the other people (runners, race officials and volunteers) were so friendly and nice; it warms my heart to think about them.

And back to the course: the hills were not as steep as McNaughton nor were they as numerous. But there weren’t the long “stretch your legs” sections either; McNaughton has lots of those.

I’ll post some photos and results when they become available.

21 May 2011 (am)

The President talks about education and the merits of “race to the top”.

I might be occupied for a while and shall get back later (should be (mostly) fun!)

20 May 2011 PM….

This will be even more disorganized than normal….

The Republicans were confident that they would win in conservative Jacksonville Florida. They didn’t:

Republican leaders said over and over in recent weeks that a race for mayor of Jacksonville amounted to the first big Florida fight in the 2012 presidential race.

“The liberal organizers who want to keep the American people enslaved by wasteful spending and hideous deficits need to know that they have jumped the gun on 2012 and have awakened a sleeping giant,” Duval County Republican chairman Lenny Curry declared this month before handing a $50,000 check to Republican mayoral candidate Mike Hogan. “We’re going to send a message that Florida is red.”

Republicans better hope Curry is wrong about the race being a harbinger, because an African-American Democrat named Alvin Brown this week was elected mayor of Florida’s largest county. Across Florida and the country, stunned Republicans are struggling to understand the narrow upset in conservative northeast Florida.

“Jacksonville has always been a conservative stronghold for Republicans, and we’re going to have to really study what happened in this race,” said Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos, a U.S. Senate candidate who had expected Hogan to win handily. [...]

Bottom line: the Republican may have well been hurt by having to embrace the Tea Party. Of course, there is probably some local factors and I know that I am ignorant of those…but then again it was the knowledgeable “serious” Republicans who had been predicting victory.

International The Israeli Prime Minister may have misjudged Americans:

Update In the comments, Dr. A reminds me that “expect” can also mean “anticipate” rather than “demand”; e. g. I “expect” that Dr. A. will vote Republican even if they run a rubber chicken.

For whatever reason, I tend to react strongly when a foreign leader disrespects the United States, and its President. I didn’t like it when Hugo Chavez of Venezuela insulted President Bush; I don’t like listening to Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan lecture the U.S. on its sins, and I’m not happy when certain Pakistani leaders gin-up righteous indignation about American behavior when it was their country that served as a refuge for the greatest mass murderer in American history.

And so I was similarly taken aback when I read a statement from Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both House of Congress.”

So Netanyahu “expects” to hear this from the President of the United States? And if President Obama doesn’t walk back the speech, what will Netanyahu do? Will he cut off Israeli military aid to the U.S.? Will he cease to fight for the U.S. in the United Nations, and in the many international forums that treat Israel as a pariah?

I don’t like this word, “expect.” Even if there weren’t an imbalance between these two countries — Israel depends on the U.S. for its survival, while America, I imagine, would continue to exist even if Israel ceased to exist — I would find myself feeling resentful about the way Netanyahu speaks about our President.

Remember that on a cumulative basis, we’ve given more aid to Israel than any other country:

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. From 1976-2004, Israel was the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance­, having since been supplanted by Iraq. Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel.

(via: the U. S. Congressional Research Office)

Ignorance: yes, some high school student challenged Rep. Bachmann to a debate about the Constitution. Nothing new here; anyone can challenge anyone to debate about anything (even though I think that Ms. Bachmann is profoundly ignorant or at least pretends to be). But now this student is receiving …..death threats?

CHERRY HILL, N.J. — A New Jersey teenager says she’s received threats since challenging U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann to a debate over the Constitution.

Ann Myers challenged the tea party favorite in a letter dated April 29. After it started getting media attention last weekend, commenters on tea party websites have threatened to publish her home address and some have threatened violence.

The 16-year-old from Cherry Hill says several commenters have called her a “whore.”

Her father, Wayne, says he’s concerned for his daughter’s safety.

But Cherry Hill Police Lt. William Kushina says anonymous online threats like these are usually empty.

Myers says the Minnesota congresswoman misstates or distorts facts about the Constitution. Bachmann’s office told The Courier-Post of Cherry Hill that it won’t respond to the debate challenge.

I wonder how many of these threats contained misspellings and grammatical errors?

More ignorance:

The key thing here is that this clown says that “every President, up until 2008, acknowledged Jesus…”
First: Thomas Jefferson was, at most, a deist; he even created the Jefferson Bible in which he stripped the Gospels of anything supernatural. Next: President Taft was a Unitarian; Unitarians denied the divinity of Jesus as an official part of their doctrine! He wasn’t the only one; there 4 altogether: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft.

Note: some atheists have tried to claim President Obama as “one of us”, but sadly, he really isn’t:

Key quote: 1:44 to 2:05. No atheist would say this; they would say something more generic like “I pray and read the Bible”, etc.

20 May 2011

Workout notes Walked 6.5 miles; 4.1 with Lynn. I started at 6 in the morning and we had GREAT weather. That will end this weekend.
I want to swim and lift over lunch but will force myself to moderate. I want to go long tomorrow and need to save some energy for it; I can swim and lift on Sunday.

Posts
General: if you like funny military sayings and cool photos of aircraft, check this out. It is a slide show of photos with pithy sayings.

Rapture

No, I mean the one that this article is talking about:

The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday.

The three teenagers have been struggling to make sense of their shifting world, which started changing nearly two years ago when their mother, Abby Haddad Carson, left her job as a nurse to “sound the trumpet” on mission trips with her husband, Robert, handing out tracts. They stopped working on their house and saving for college.

Last weekend, the family traveled to New York, the parents dragging their reluctant children through a Manhattan street fair in a final effort to spread the word.

“My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace Haddad, 16, said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.”

Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months. [...]

It is easy to laugh at these deluded idiots. But I have some pity too:

While Ms. Haddad Carson has quit her job, her husband still works as an engineer for the federal Energy Department. But the children worry that there may not be enough money for college. They also have typical teenage angst — embarrassing parents — only amplified.

“People look at my family and think I’m like that,” said Joseph, their 14-year-old, as his parents walked through the street fair on Ninth Avenue, giving out Bibles. “I keep my friends as far away from them as possible.”

“I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore,” he said, “because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.”

Bottom line: “respecting religious beliefs” just because they are religious beliefs is just plain stupid.

Speaking of religion, here is an interesting critique of a The Good Delusion critique. (hat tip: Jerry Coyne). I’ll go a bit further: Dawkins’ book is on target because it attacks religion as it is practiced by the vast majority of believers. Very few believe in the word salad gods of the philosophers and theologians; they want a god that will cure their uncle’s cancer, keep their country from being attacked and get them a raise (or job). What kind of deity demands worship anyway?

Politics

President Obama and Israel
President Obama’s Middle East proposal is interesting:

President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far — a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama’s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president’s plan to endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state.

Mr. Obama did not back down. But the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a “train wreck” coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.

Mr. Netanyahu, his close associates say, desperately wants Mr. Obama to use the diplomatic muscle of the United States to protect Israel from the vote, not only by vetoing it in the Security Council, but also by leaning hard on America’s European allies to get them to reject it as well.

The thing to remember is that our proposing something puts less pressure on Europe to act, and Israel will ALWAYS get a better deal from us. What we have: lots of foreign aid to Israel and a veto in the U. N. Security council.

This is a complex issue; here is an interesting take on it. There is more here than meets the eye.

Hulu – The Colbert Report: John Lithgow Performs Gingrich Press Release

Video description: Stephen enlists John Lithgow to read New Gingrich’s press release.

Hulu – The Colbert Report: John Lithgow Perform…, posted with vodpod

College Misery: College Grads Expect Coddling. A No “Duh” VidShizzle.

some truth here

College Misery: College Grads Expect Coddling. …, posted with vodpod

Newts and Lizards, Oh MY!!!!

First: some Newts (ok, A “Newt”)
Paul Krugman isn’t so much surprised at Newt Gingrich’s pathetic performance this past weekend (ending with his “if you quote me you are lying” (paraphrased) statement). He concludes:

[...] I never thought I’d miss Newt Gingrich — and maybe I won’t have to; such people are amazingly resilient. But anway, between this and Gingrich’s earlier declaration that anyone who quotes him correctly is lying, he’s been giving great entertainment.

Now you may ask, how did a once-powerful figure become such a clown? But that’s the wrong question: what you see now is what he always was. The real question is why so many media figures pretended, for so long, not to notice.

Emphasis mine. But hey, Dick Morris likes him.

Lizards: Jerry Coyne blogs about a recent discovery (fossil) which provides a transitional from between lizards and amphisbaenians (worm lizards; surf to the blog for a photo)

A paper published in Nature today by Johannes Muller and colleagues (abstract only) goes a long ways towards constraining our speculations. In the paper, they describe a new species of lizard from the Eocene Messel shale of Germany (Messel is a famous lagerstatte: a deposit with extraordinary fossil preservation) as a transitional form from ‘normal’ lizards to the amphisbaenians.

The evolutionary tree continues to be filled out, even as the Republican tournament to lose to Obama continues to wither.

Dare I negotiate this into my contract?

Talk about a fringe benefit:

One of the biggest insurance companies in the world held a party for salesmen where they were rewarded with the services of prostitutes.

Munich Re is the world’s biggest re-insurer – in other words, the company acts as an insurance company for other insurance companies.

One of its divisions, Ergo, told the BBC that the party had taken place to reward salesmen in 2007.

A spokesman said the people who organised it had since left.

The gathering was held at a thermal baths in the Hungarian capital Budapest as a reward to particularly successful salesmen.
‘Whatever they liked’

There were about 100 guests and 20 prostitutes were hired.

A German business newspaper said the prostitutes had worn colour-coded arm-bands designating their availability, and the women had their arms stamped after each service rendered.

According to Handelsblatt, quoting an unnamed participant, guests were able to take the women to four-poster beds at the spa “and do whatever they liked”.[...]

Then again, given how far science is advancing, one might never know if “she” is real or…

Back in 2007, computer chess programming guru David Levy wrote a provocative book about robot-human relations entitled Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. In it he made a number of bold predictions regarding future relations between humans and machines, the most surprising of which being that we would fall in love with robots.

Fast forward 4 years (and almost 3 Moore’s Law cycles) and it seems as though his predictions are no nearer coming true than they were when he made them. David Hanson’s skin has gotten more realistic and more people know about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s real looking androids, but many important developments stand in the way of our considering robots something we could one day fall in love with.

So what’s standing in the way of our moving more quickly toward robots as companions?

In an interview with Levy earlier this year, Dr. Kim Solez inquires into what obstacles there are in creating the robots envisioned in Love and Sex with Robots.

Perhaps surprising, Levy doesn’t think there are any real psychological obstacles in the way of our making robots our romantic companions. In fact, he thinks, “It’s almost entirely a question of investment.” [...]

19 May 2011 (noon)

Workout notes I didn’t feel good in the morning.
I had to force myself to walk to the pool; I swam 1100 yards and did PT/Stretching/sit ups afterward:
4 x (25 front, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free)
5 x 100 free on the 2: 1:49, 1:50, 1:49, 1:48, 1:48

It didn’t feel that bad. I need to work on getting my elbows higher though; that is probably why my times were so glacially slow.

Politics
This is Dick Morris on Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, beating Obama in a debate? Yeah right. Both Mr. Morris and I would love to see Mr. “please don’t quote me” Gingrich win the Republican nomination!

Science/Mathematics
Jerry Coyne’s post is rather funny:

But when you go to the paper, you’ll see that its abstract is so opaque to a non-mathematician that it might as well be written in Martian:

We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney move in dimension 4 by constructing higher-order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on immersed disks in the 4-ball, we identify some of these new invariants with previously known link invariants such as Milnor, Sato-Levine, and Arf invariants. We also define higher-order Sato-Levine and Arf invariants and show that these invariants detect the obstructions to framing a twisted Whitney tower. Together with Milnor invariants, these higher-order invariants are shown to classify the existence of (twisted) Whitney towers of increasing order in the 4-ball. A conjecture regarding the nontriviality of the higher-order Arf invariants is formulated, and related implications for filtrations of string links and 3-dimensional homology cylinders are described.

(Presumably “Arf invariants” don’t refer to the unchanging vocalizations of a dog. )

This shows how far removed mathematics is from even other scientists. Or are our own biology abstracts just as opaque to mathematicians?

Answer to his question: yes, at least to me.

Note: the paper is about 4 dimensional topology; few non-specialists would understand this abstract either, though the Arf invariant (named after a Turkish mathematician) is really a quadratic form over the field of order 2. It has applications in knot theory and in graph theory.

Osama bin Laden’s Replacement – The Colbert Report – 5/18/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

ColbertNation.com video – Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command gets passed over for a temp who doesn’t even have a beard.

Osama bin Laden’s Replacement – The Colbert Rep…, posted with vodpod