Ran the Twin Lights Half Marathon on Saturday morning, and while it was hillier than I expected, and I missed my per-mile-pace goal (6:30), I was pretty happy with a 54 second PR and 7th place overall finish, 1st in division.
First note? Free pictures! All the pics the race photogs take are available for free download after the race. Awesome! And the reason there’s a big, goofy vanity shot at top of this post.
Kris, the kids and my sister Ana came down to the race with me and had a wonderful time of sun and sand on Good Harbor Beach while I ran, poured out some huge cheering and support at the finish, and then back to the beach again. That is one beautiful beach, which rocky steeps on both ends and a view of both lighthouses to the north.
It was a fun race – a little warm (high 60s? maybe low 70s?) and sunny, but with a nice breeze. The course was scenic, although to be honest, not quite as scenic view-for-view as either Cape Cod Marathon or Smuttynose in New Hampshire. On the other hand, the run through Rockport center was pretty and the crowds were great! The staff was friendly and the course volunteers were enthusiastic.
I started with the lead pack, forced myself to put the brakes on over the first half mile and let myself fall back to about 10th, aiming for a 6:25 split (got 6:27).
We started climbing shortly thereafter and it seemed like we never really stopped until after mile 7, then there was another beastly one around 9-10. I eventually passed four or five people, mostly on the uphills or at the tops of the hills (I can’t run fast downhill to save my life) and was passed twice, around mile 9.
Great sportsmanship and courtesy by all the guys who finished right around my time, especially Andrew Young, who finished next ahead of me (followed his purple shirt for last three miles and never did manage to catch him!). Winning time was 1:13:50, David Swanson from Cambridge. Fun to run into Manchester’s Matt B. and his wife at the start and again at the finish.
A few constructive criticisms: 1. they don’t close any part of the course to traffic or have a huge amount of traffic control, and on some of the narrow roads winding through neighborhoods at the turning point, I felt like cars were whipping around corners and right at us. 2. They used plastic cups at the stations instead of paper. Man these are so much harder to squeeze into the perfect drinking crevasse, I don’t know why any races use them. 3. The traffic to get in and out of the parking lot at the beach was horrendous. We didn’t mind because we got there early, but don’t cut it close getting here or you’re likely to still be waiting to park when the race goes off! 4. No awards ceremony. I probably notice this only because it’s the first time I won my age group, and basically you wait around an hour and then go to a table (same as number pickup) say your name and get your medal. I wanted a podium, like at AppleFest! I know, more vanity.Overall, great day with family in a fun race on a challenging, interesting course.
And that’s the spring season. Started with me deciding to forgo a spring marathon while I finished letting a bad case of runner’s knee heal up. I backed the mileage down from the marathon 50s to the non-marathon 40s and ran some decent speed workouts and then beat my 5K PR (was 18:56, now 18:39) on Saint Patrick’s Day at the Shamrock Shuffle in Lebanon (21st overall, 8th in age group). Followed that up with a non-PR run at Soup Kitchen 10K in Nashua, hot day, hilly course (40:10, 10th overall, 5th in age group).
Now it’s on to the fall – Reach the Beach and the fall marathon, which will be Baystate. Training remains both my greatest source of therapy and my greatest challenge – especially as my family life and work and work travel schedules all seem to be accelerating like mad. But it’s all good – and if I’ve got to get up extra early to squeeze in some miles in some foreign city before a long day of work, well, who would complain about that? It’s a treat.
Tags: gloucester, half marathon, Running, training
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A particular passage from John 12 caught my ear this morning during Mass. Jesus looking toward the eventual horror of his own crucifixion says: “I am troubled. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”
It’s powerful because it reminds us, sometimes the toughest challenges we face are the very reason we’re here to begin with.
This resonates with leadership roles. Anybody in a leadership role – and I think most of us find ourselves with the opportunity and obligation to lead in our lives – will eventually face a tough decision, a moment of crisis, a painful dilemma. This passage can help remind you, on those toughest of days, that crises provide you the opportunity to exercise your purpose.
I love it when things are running smoothly – who needs to go begging for trouble? – but I know soon enough something won’t be smooth. And it will be my obligation and duty to face that trouble and help find a way to a solution. And whether you lead in business, in government, in your community,the military, or your family, you have the duty as well. But remember, it’s more than obligation; it’s an honor to be called upon to serve in difficult times. And a fulfillment of the purpose for which we are made.
I committed this passage to memory this morning to have readily at hand when I need to remind myself of this. But the last line may well limn the whole as you plunge “once more into the breach”: “Father, glorify your name.”
Tags: gospel, leadership
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Saturday, Saint Patrick’s Day, was the first race of the season for me – the Shamrock Shuffle out in Lebanon, an NH Grand Prix series run. I ran 18:39 (:5:59 pace) on this slightly rolling course. A couple of decent little climbs in there, especially the one in the first half of mile three. I was 21st overall, and 8th in my division. Man, this over 40 crew is tough competition! Bunch of guys from the club were out for the race, including Porter (who be me by 8 seconds for his own PR), Peter B., and Anders. Saw Mike Bradford as well, coaching a talented high school runner. Wonderful race. Kris and the kids came out to the race with me and had fun playing while I ran and then we all had a nice lunch out and toured the Enfield Shaker museum in the afternoon.
This was the first race after a bit of a fallow period wherein I babied a bout of patellar tendinitis (runner’s knee). This nagging injury caused me to take a spring marathon off my schedule – I didn’t think I’d be ready to start hard training early enough. And given the intensity of my work schedule and family life this spring, I didn’t see a reason to push it. So not having the formal rigor of a marathon training schedule is part of the reason I found myself in Lebanon yesterday. Though with a last minute back strain making even bending over to tie my shoes a challenge, I almost didn’t bother to go.
A few training notes
From early December through January, I ran 25-35 mile easy pace weeks. I’ve now had 5 weeks at 40+ miles with speed, tempo and long runs leading up to this first race. Some of the speed work has gone well, but I am still feeling miles away from the intensity I was able to bring to intervals at the end of last season. Which made me dubious I’d be able to run even as well as my last race, much less improve on it. On the other hand – among those tough rebuilding workouts, there were glimmers of something else, an evolving base, season built on season, that hinted at capabilities that might overshadow last year’s, just by virtue of having last year’s work under my belt. Having started running seriously fairly late (37), the impact of this growing base of years still seems very powerful.
Schedule, what schedule?
I’ve been traveling a good deal for work lately, and between that and a busy family life, I’ve had to squeeze running in during the odd hours. That means some early mornings at home or on the road, a few miles hear and there during a lunch break, and some night running. I’ve run at dawn in Tulsa, San Diego, and Los Angeles so far this year, and seen many an interesting sight as the sun comes up. I haven’t been using a training plan this spring, just trying to insure I run about 40 miles a week, with at least one long run, and preferably two speed workouts a week, one interval, one tempo. Otherwise, I’m enjoying a bit of unstructured training, running these when they fit into my schedule and my legs want to do them. I wouldn’t trust this sort of non-scheduled training for a marathon, but it seems to have worked for this 5K!
Last season
Last season ended with a couple of highlights -Cape Cod marathon PR (3:04:57) at the end of October and a 5K PR (18:53) on Thanksgiving. My spring marathon, Gansett, was also a PR at the time, 3:08:07, and so Cape Cod felt like real progress – without having to increase training miles beyond my usual peak 55 per week. I felt great after both, and it wasn’t until some early December speedwork (5K pace interval workout – 10×400 on the track) that the bout with runner’s knee began.
Tags: 5K, PR, Running, training
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Was reminded this morning as I read how potent I find these passages from Tennyson’s Ulysses:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
Something in there for all travelers, no? Yet bittersweet in reminding us of how much we will not see. But take comfort in this last one:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; And tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
This does not seem like a young man’s poem, and it’s interesting to me that I have taken so much from this poem, in so many different ways, since I was in college. In fact, I related more to the speaker then in my early 20s, dwelt more on ideas he’s expressing, then now in my 40s. These years, we dwell on different things, when there is time to dwell at all! In any case, like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, this poem has had something new to say to me in each stage of my life.
Read the whole poem here. http://www.bartleby.com/246/375.html
Tags: poetry, Tennyson, travel
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On a recent series of flights, between getting work done and staving off perhaps the most magnificent migraine I’ve had in years (sinus and altitude induced, who can say, but fitting for an Ash Wednesday), I dipped again into Nicholson Baker’s clever comic novel about poetry, The Anthologist, and read about the Victorian poet, inventor of the roundel, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote these stunning, chill-inducing lines:
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We’d hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.
I’m not sure how I’ve managed to rummage around in poetry and literature for so many years and not become acquainted with this poem – though Baker (or Baker’s poet narrator in The Anthologist) says that Swinburne, “the greatest rhymer in human history,” fell victim to the backlash of Futurism, and though his poetic descendants remain well known, he has all but been forgotten.
Which is too bad, if this poem is any indication of the greater body of his writing.
Here’s the poem in its entirety:
A Match
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
IF love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or gray grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune,
With double sound and single
Delight our lips would mingle,
With kisses glad as birds are
That get sweet rain at noon;
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune.
If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death,
We’d shine and snow together
Ere March made sweet the weather
With daffodil and starling
And hours of fruitful breath;
If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death.
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy,
We’d play for lives and seasons
With loving looks and treasons
And tears of night and morrow
And laughs of maid and boy;
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy.
If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May,
We’d throw with leaves for hours
And draw for days with flowers,
Till day like night were shady
And night were bright like day;
If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May.
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We’d hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.
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The scene along the road early this morning during a long run hrough the sweeping hills of Sterling, Mass. And surrounding towns. Beautiful, and it looks like the sap is already running. Though this morning with temps at 14F, I think the only sap running was me.
Tags: Running
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There’s a snake wrapped around a newspaper in my mother-in-law’s fridge. There’s also a cow with a plastic shark’s fin strapped to its head sitting at the dining room table stuffing money into a cash register. There’s a vise attached to the kitchen table. In the vise there’s a brain. And that’s how I’m learning German.
Learning to speak a non-native language (mediocrely) has been a longtime relaxation and rejuvenation tool for me. It’s like taking my brain out for a run. So when time permits, I listen to language CDs during the inbound half of my commute. For years my focus was almost exclusively Spanish (with just a tiny bit of French thrown in). But since going to Munich a few times for work, I’ve discovered I really like the sound of German. Add to that that I’ve got some genetic roots there (along with, it seems, just about everyplace else), and the fact that business will take me back again this March, and there’s plenty of excuse to put my Spanish on hold.
So how does all this relate the menagerie of bizarre images that have taken over my mother-in-law’s house? Well that comes from the fact I just finished reading Joshua Foer’s terrific book “Moonwalking With Einstein.” The details Foer’s immersion in the world of competitive memory events, and details a mnemonic technique in use since classical times called the “memory palace.”
The theory is, our brains aren’t built to hold data very well, but they are incomparable at storing images and spacial relationships. Makes sense, right? Our not too distant ancestors needed to know how to get back to the village and which mushroom would kill you if you ate it a lot more than they needed to remember phone numbers.
Anyhow, by using the memory palace technique people since the Roman orator Simonides have been executing stunning mnemonic feats by building a mental map of a place, and then populating that place with crazy images designed to spark memories. I’d heard of the memory palace technique before, but never from so enthusiastic advocate as Foer. I was inspired to test it on my German.
I used my mother-in-laws house as the memory palace for all my German words because I know the space very well, have pleasant associations with it, and I’m already using my house for other mnemonic catalogs.
To illustrate how this works, let’s take a second look at those images I described in the opening paragraph. The German word for eat is essen. So Snake, coiled around a Newspaper, in a refrigerator. Not the most elegant mnemonic, but it worked. It was an early one. At first these felt quite hard to come up with, and I thought – this is going to be a terribly time way to remember words. But very quickly, it gets easy and one can snap an image into existence at will. Fun.
The cow with the shark’s fin on its head putting money into a cash register is a better image. That’s the one I use for the German word kaufen, which means to buy. The brain in the vise? German word for “know”, which is weiss. Pronounced vise. My mother-in-law’s house is starting to get crowded – I’ll need to move out to the garden soon. But it really has amazed me how easy it is to retrieve words stored in this fashion. And frankly, even though you can use the technique to “walk through” the memory palace and retrieve every word you know, in order, forwards or back, easily, you don’t really have to. Because once the word’s in there, it seems to be at your disposal in conversation as well.
I could go on, but that would belabor my point, which is: The Joshua Foer (imagine the tree on the U2 album cover with a four-leaf clover hanging from it) book is a great, fun read and depending on your enthusiasm for the techniques, could give you a leg up on memorizing all kinds of things, from the names of folks you meet at tradeshows, to grocery lists to, well, German.
Tags: books, German, Language, language learning, spanish
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Beloved family and friends,
As I sat down to begin penning this 2011 Burden Family Christmas missive, I was struck by a single, clear, profound thought: “Dear heavens, there is not enough single malt Scotch in the whole state of New Hampshire to get me through this task.” Regardless, let us soldier on and see how far we get, keeping in mind that if we do drain the state dry, from Manchester, the Massachusetts border is only 30 minutes away.
A traditional holiday letter might at this point regale you with a year’s worth of charming anecdotes about the precociousness of the family’s children: little so-and-so just published his first virelai nouveau, in French, based on Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, blah, blah blah. At which point the reader is left wondering if Fabrice’s many affairs in Naples are in fact good subject matter for even the most precocious seven-year-old, and what the hell is a virelai nouveau?
But as you know, we have refused to allow David (9), Sofia (7), or Isobel (4), to write any of their poetry in French – at least until they have mastered all the lyric forms in Spanish and German. And while they have complained bitterly about this throughout the year, we have held firm on the point and are glad to have done so. This means, however, that we have fewer examples of their precociousness to boast of in this letter, particularly ones that will appeal to our francophile correspondents.
I must admit that we have been less strict with Gabriel (6 mos.) and he is allowed to compose in any language he pleases. A recent work is entitled, “Goo.”
Speaking of Gabriel, he’s new to this whole Christmas mise en scene, this being his first holiday season ex-utero. He is delighted by the lights, the sounds, the smells of the season, as evidenced by how wide his eyes open as his adoring siblings drag him around the house with their hands under his armpits as though he were a cat, his little pajama-swaddled body dangling like a December dumpling. It is interesting to note just how much delighted joy can resemble abject terror.
***
All right, back at the old iPad virtual keyboard, glass refilled. While I was at it, I took ten minutes to peruse my and my wife’s Facebook feeds, having realized that I have traveled so much for work this year I have no idea what’s happened. Not because I wasn’t here a good amount of the time, or giving a sufficient amount of attention to Kris and the kids, but simply because the constant altitudinous high speed trips have caused more than a little “time dilation.” As physicist John Carroll’s A Time Travel Web Site points out, “a fundamental postulate of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is that the laws of physics hold true for all inertial frames of references.” In other words, having spent so much time in airplanes, I’ve not missed things that have gone on this year, they just that they haven’t happened for me yet. The good news is that I have only aged half as much everybody else in the family. (I’ve managed to counteract this effect by running as many miles as I’ve flown, in all sorts of harsh weather, thereby aging my face until it’s as craggy as an ent. Edward James Olmos sends me skin care tips.) I’m greatly looking forward to June 2011, when I turn 41 and we experiment with taking a month-old baby camping in the White Mountains. According to my own Tweets, we have (had) a lovely time.
Roaming farther down the social media timeline, I see that we laughed quite a bit, gave the kids plenty of hugs, watched David and Sofia go back to school – fourth and second grade! – drew like mad, that favorite family pastime, sang songs, wrote countless volumes of stories, built empires in Lego and then constructed the trebuchets with which to destroy them.
Sofia, the Cat Whisperer, reports that despite the smell, both felines are still alive and as charmingly surly as ever. The turtle slumbers in the basement, an ectothermic leviathan whose baleful eye closed for the season’s hibernation before he could finish the last, desperate fish swimming through the little castle, which he has named Pyke of the Iron Islands. Geek.
Finally, here at the last, even the most mordant, Swiftian author of the pre-Epiphinial epistle might be tempted to turn maudlin and mawkish, or worse, sincere — to renege on the promise of whiskey-soaked sarcasm with which he essayed forth, and type something serious about the depth of love and gratitude he has for his family, his friends, and all the great blessings God has commended to his stewardship. He might swerve then to the deeper meaning of the season, past the frenzy of commercialism, the Black Friday Walmart waffle-maker brawls and insipid contemporary “holiday” songs, and comment in full Chestertonian throat on the awesome mystery of an all powerful God choosing divide the very nature of history and reality by personally entering the world, not in the guise of a king with a flaming sword, but a baby, born in the humblest circumstances imaginable, to reconcile all of humanity back to the unity with Him for which it was created. It’s not hard to see why a writer would struggle not to let his carefully constructed voice lapse in order to offer genuine comment on these important matters.
I however, will do no such thing. The glass is empty, the fire is burned down to embers, and somebody’s got to bring the trash to the curb and turn the Christmas lights out before bedtime. I guess I’d better go wake up Kristen.
Tags: Christmas
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Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary today (and a Holy Day of Obligation). This is one that many folks misunderstand and think relates to Jesus’ conception, but in fact commemorates the Catholic belief that Mary herself was immune to original sin, even from the moment of her conception.
Here’s a nice piece on it from the Catholic Encyclopedia and today’s Mass readings from the USCCB.
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