# blueollie

## Recovering from a stinging rebuke (resentment and whining alert)

Workout notes: easy 2 mile jog on the treadmill (22:15). I just had breakfast and am waiting for rush hour traffic to lighten up a bit before getting on the road.

Weird FANS note: I did one lap with Centurian John Greene. He is also a math professor; he was working this years event as a volunteer. We..talked math.

He told me about two of his published results. One was about unique factorization domains (UFD): his result showed that every UFD has an “almost Euclidian algorithm”. His other was about the trace of 2 x 2 matrices and how the trace behaves under matrix multiplication. It turns out that when 3 matrices are multiplied (in various orders), a certain property is obeyed with probability $p = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$. Note: the assumptions is that the matrices have real entries and that the entries are selected via a normal probability distribution.

Now how cool is that? I had a moving mathematics seminar. 🙂

Note on yesterday’s baseball game and today’s hotel stay
Yes, I had club seats (splurge, though I paid a discount price). I was uncomfortable with all of the service (being deferred to by attendants, etc.). I ate breakfast at the hotel. I got the “full” breakfast and ate..what I normally eat. My tummy just can’t hold that much anymore. I don’t like trying to drive while stuffed.

For me, luxury (middle class luxury anyway) is a big waste of money (even when purchased at discount rates), or at least these luxuries.

I’d never cut it as a Republican. 🙂

Accepting defeat and moving on

This result stung. I won’t pretend otherwise. I was struggling 1/3 of the way into the race and that is not a good place to be, at least so early on. I’ve thought about what went wrong, and it is possibly one of two things:

1. I didn’t do enough of the “right kind” of training (e. g. monthly 6-8 hour training sessions) even if my total weekly milage was ok.

2. I just can’t do these events any longer.

And yes, there is a bit of envy when I see the successful basking in the glow of their successes …my thinking “dammit, that used to be me”. Well, it is not me any longer. When it comes to sports, you are what you do…that is, what you CURRENTLY do, not what you did 10-12-15 years ago.

But there is still plenty of time for redemption. I have some ideas for a math paper (more important than my sports), and I still am on track to attempt to run a marathon this fall, hopefully in less than 5 hours. My “long run pace” is right as is my training mileage, and this weekend’s event didn’t set me back. So I have goals to work toward, and striving for these, rather than envying others or longing for past successes, is the way to emotionally heal. Nurturing resentments doesn’t help.

And there is my home. My wife: yes, I am glad that the fitness bug bit her in a minor way. This should add some quality of life for her and I want to remain encouraging. But: last night, she listened to my whining for about a minute or two and then wanted to know if I remembered her text about what SHE did…parked 2.5 miles away from lunch, walked to lunch, and walked 2.5 miles back. Yeah, I know, my first marathon and 50K were very slow (7:12, 8:40 respectively, but remember I was going at my “I hope to go much longer than this pace”) but in my current emotional state, it is hard for me to work up much enthusiasm for my wife’s “feat”, even if she got a ton of “likes” for it on Facebook, way more “likes” than any of my marathons/50 milers get. 🙂

But that’s how it works. A “I got an A on my calculus test” gets more attention than “I published another math paper”; it is WHO you get the kudos from that counts.