The Evil Eyebrow

Month: January 2011

  • Running without Ego

    I have a philosophy that I try to embue in the people around me who are also participating in endurance sports. It is symbolized by the phrase, “Run Without Ego.”

    What it means is that you should be running/biking/swimming/rowing/whatevering for you, and not for anyone else. The converse to that is that it’s about you, and not anyone else. This is important for several reasons:

    • If you’re only competing with yourself, you don’t have to worry about anyone else’s goals and/or abilities. I recall the situation of a friend (Hi Mike!) who decided, more or less randomly, to run a 10k. He turned in something like 1 hour, with no training. Grrrr… However, I retreated to my philosophy wherein it’s more important that I congratulate him for his ability to do that, rather than be envious or angry that he could beat my 10k time (of that moment) without having put in the effort I had.
    • When I’m training, and doing something like a run-walk program, there is a temptation to modify the speed—or convert the walk to a run—if someone else is watching. The evil thought goes through your head, “That girl/guy is a runner. And (s)he’s watching2. I’d better pick it up so I don’t look like a doofus.” No, no, no. It’s always important to stick with your training program and not give in to those fears. Run for yourself, and not for what other people think.
    • Mental health during competitive sports, in my opinion, means concentrating on yourself and not so much the other person.

    When racing, I am competitive with the people around me, but only in the sense that a person may be ahead of me, or coming up from behind me, and I want to keep my ranking as high as I can. Using other people as Rabbits in a race is an excellent motivator. However, my philosophy of Running without Ego lets me use those people not as race competitors, but as mental incentives. Honestly, Running without Ego doesn’t get much of a test during races for me because, as I’ll never be near the top of a race, it doesn’t matter so much who is around me. Only in triathlons, where a person’s age group is written on their calf, will I have any idea if the person I’m competing against is someone who’s name may be near mine in the age group rankings. I just try to turn in my best time and one of these days, I may place in the top three of my age group.

    This philosophical outlook gets tested occasionally. For example, today I ran across a posting entitled How to Hack a Marathon if you aren’t a Runner1.

    A few years ago I ran the San Francisco marathon without training and finished it in 4 hours and 28 minutes.

    Instantly, a rage blazed up within me, consuming all coherent thought. How dare this person do that! I’ve trained for three marathons (completing only one) and I just barely broke 5 hours, and it sucked! [mental screaming ensued]3

    But, then I backed off and thought about it and grudgingly thought, “good for him.” If he can put down his pen and then go run a marathon, more power to him. Maybe he should train some and then he’ll run a marathon really damn fast but in the grand scheme of things, it’s about him and not me.

    I keep this attitude, especially when I’m encouraging new runners who are having difficulties and/or referring to themselves as “slow”. You’re only as slow as your pace. Your fast pace may be my slow pace, but that doesn’t make you slow. It makes you going your own fast pace. If you work at it, that pace may improve. Or it may not, depending on factors that might be beyond your control. The important thing is to be competitive with yourself and not with anyone else.

    1: Although by my definition, you are a runner if you sign up for a marathon.

    2: Possibly, “…and she’s hot!”

    3: Actually, the real reason this angered me wasn’t because of the article itself. If you click through, you’ll see that the attitude of the post was, “hey, we thought why the hell not, so we did.” BUT! The article had been linked from Lifehacker&mdas;hwho will receive NO linkbait from me on this one—with the title of (basically) “Go out and run a marathon without training. Here’s how!” Personally, I find that irresponsible because they’re asking people to injure themselves if they try. Sure, some people will manage, but others could have serious problems.

  • Craft Weekend

    We are hosting a Craft Weekend at our house starting tomorrow. The stated purpose is to “get shit done.”

    I declared this particular activity because I last put a picture into a scrapbook around the end of 2006. Thusly I have December of 2006, and all of 2007-2010 to put together. This may take a little bit of time so, I’m going to claim a table and go nuts for 20 hours or so and try to knock it all out.

    All of the complaints and moaning and bitching I’ve been making about Idimager came about (generally) because I’d been trying to go through my backlog of image files to produce the pile of pictures shown here.

    Pictures for the Scrapbooking Weekend

    Those three boxes contain 822 4x6s and I’ve got another 207 sitting in an envelope at home.

    Wish me luck.

  • State of the Union vs. Real Politic

    Container ship Bahia Laura

    Last night’s State of the Union address was standard and predictable: high-minded appeals to a better future and how we’re going to get there, with few specifics. States of the Union are never very specific, however and the Republican responses to it were also predictable and standard. Honestly, yesterday was a pretty boring day for politics, nationally, and the theme of the day was “reduce spending”.

    Georgia, however, has an interesting stake in this reduce-spending game. You may not be aware, but the Port of Savannah is one of the busiest container ports in the United States, generating a lot of jobs for Georgia. You may also not be aware that we are three years away from the completion of the Panama Canal Expansion project, which will allow supersized container vessels to more easily traverse the oceans. Georgia has an interest in attracting these enormous ships to our ports, but in order to do so, the Savannah River has to be dredged. The current depth of the river is 42 feet, but there needs to be 48 feet in order to pass the new ships.

    This is an expensive proposition. Cost estimates I’ve seen range from $500 million to $800 million (here’s one). Georgia wants the federal government to kick in a good portion of that.

    This has run our home-grown congressional legislation, who are mostly Republican, squarely into a philosophical quandry: How to get the money while still appearing to reduce spending?

    On the face of it, individually I don’t see that Georgia Congresscritters will have any real problem at home if they push for both. Their direct constituents (i.e., the ones who will vote for them in two years) will be happy if a huge glut of federal spending comes their way. However, this will present itself with more difficulty in a national election. The concept of the Albatross comes to mind.

    My personal Congressman, Tom Graves, who is now on the appropriations committee has stated that he will not support an earmark for the port. This differs from both my Senators, who will. You may recall back in November there was a symbolic pledge by both the House and Senate Republicans to swear off earmarks for two years. However, one of those little things that make such a difference is that there was nothing in that pledge that said they had to vote against bills that do contain earmarks. If somehow those earmarks ended up in there, they could just whistle a happy tune and claim they had nothing to do with it.

    How will this all fall out? Who knows? Politics is a slippery game. We’ll just have to wait and see.

  • Today's Sunrise

    Today's Sunrise

    I get some good sunrises at work.

  • Other Interesting Race Timing News

    I seem to make it a habit of examining race timings.

    However, in this case, no real analysis was needed: I think the ATC has messed up some timings from Saturday’s race.

    I clocked a 26:00 for that race, according to my watch. According to the official race results, I actually ran a 25:40!

    Usually I wouldn’t complain when the race results differ from my own measurement in the good direction, however twenty full seconds is an awful lot, and certainly not explained by measurement anomalies on my end. I could accept five seconds easy, having to do with when I pushed buttons as I crossed the timing mats but twenty is outside my willingness to believe.

    As a check, here are my mile splits:

    • Mile 1: 8:39
    • Mile 2: 8:15
    • Mile 3 (calculated, no split): 8:16
    • Mile 3.1: 0:50 (8:20 Pace)
    • Total: 26:00

    You’ll just have to trust me that those splits fit well with my level of effort.

    So, hmmm… I’ll be passing this along to the ATC, for their consideration.

  • Inside an Accordion

    Inside of an Accordion

    We took a detour on the way home from the Peachtree City 5k/10k to deliver Sharon’s accordion to a repair shop. I got to see what the inside of an accordion looked like!

    Honestly, I had zero mental image of what the thing was going to look like when it was pulled apart. Thusly, I was thrilled and excited to see all the little pieces and gizmos.

    Click through the image to see the notes I put on the picture.

  • Atlanta Track Club Peachtree City 5k/10k 2011 -and- Injury Update

    Racers Ahoy!

    I ran today with Keith and Jaime the Atlanta Track Club 5k/10k in Peachtree City (we all ran the 5k). I turned in a 26:00 according to my watch and both Keith and Jaime broke their previous PRs. Go us!

    This race is always fun, and in my experience now, always cold (n=3). It was about 28 degrees Fahrenheit at race start, so a bit chilly, but no real wind.

    Given my experience of one week ago, I took it a little easy during the race. I put in about 85% effort. Nicely (although not coincidentally) this activity did not bother my back strain in the slightest, aside from the drive to and from the race where I was sitting in the car.

    This tells me several things:

    • The strain was definitely the quadratus lumbarum because if it had been the multifidus or the erector spinae (or some combination of the above) I’d have been having more issues
    • It’s not my running muscles that need to be worked on in my abdominal strengthening work
    • The quadratus lumbarum is definitely not a running muscle

    I went to see a physician on Friday to start a professional treatment of my problem, but I have a whole post just for that. Look for it soon.

  • Astrology takes another Whacking

    Horoscoped - Information is Beautiful

    It appears that Astrologic horoscopes from Yahoo have a bunch of similarities. Big surprise, I know.

    Click through the image to go to the Information is Beautiful site that includes discussion of how that did this.

  • I Learn my Job Every Day

    2010-10-17_IMG_2436

    If you had asked me yesterday, “Bill, can you prevent pedestrians from crossing a bridge during construction?” my answer would have been “Sure.” And I would have been wrong wrong wrong:

    From the 2009 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD):

    04. If the TTC [Temporary Traffic Control] zone affects the movement of pedestrians, adequate pedestrian access and walkways shall be provided. If the TTC zone affects an accessible and detectable pedestrian facility, the accessibility and detectability shall be maintained along the alternate pedestrian route. [emphasis added]

    Aha! This has implications because on one of my projects. I am proposing to close a bridge across an interstate for a weekend. During this time, I have to figure out how to get people over, under, around, or through the construction.

    One idea is to set up a van shuttle from one side to the other, using the detour route. We shall see.

    I had not been aware of that particular mandate in this most recent version of the MUTCD. Just goes to show that even “experts” don’t always know everything.

  • Not enough Math Geeks

    The biggest fundamental problem1 with working as a Traffic Engineer is that most of my colleagues don’t get my math jokes. For example, I will have to explain this to a lot of people in the office today.

    1: Truly, this is the biggest problem. Huge, even.