Sunday Dec 31 |
 | Running 16:00 [1] | |
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| to work and back before heading to the airport. |
Saturday Dec 30 |
| Running 1:44:00 [2]8.75 mi (11:52 / mi) | |
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| From Spouting Horn to Wonderland. Then from Central Square home. |
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| C • nice run 10 |
| Running 1:10:00 [3]5.4 mi (12:57 / mi) | |
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| Ran at "energy conservation" speed to the Bicycle Exchange, where I was able to talk knowledgeably about the bottom bracket and convince them to fix it... But that meant I had to jog back home again too.
The problem with the bike the other day was that a spoke broke. |
Friday Dec 29 |
| Running 20:00 [1] | |
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| to the point before the commute in to town. |
Thursday Dec 28 |
| Note | |
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| Dear Diary,
Mom and Dad invited 4 of their friends over for dinner on Christmas. Over appetizers there was some discussion about whether Arthur Miller had actually served any jail time, or how he got out of it, when he was indicted on contempt of Congress charges. At dinner the conversation turned immediately to politics, and we sized up a dozen Democratic presidential and vp candidates, and their wives. I liked how the women at the table were keenly aware of what political/intellectual talents each spouse would bring to the office. Then, they mentioned Laura Bush. Great hair was all they had to say. Plus some speculation on what could possibly bring her to stay with that guy... It turns out someone wants to interview Aaron on film about his interview on his MLK Jr experience, which I guess I should find out more about sometime...
Dave went through a bunch of my dad's killer scrapbooks and pulled out all sorts of information about family traits, history & so on.
Well, I guess I should log my "training."
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| Bicycling 15:00 [1] | |
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| I set out on my first bike ride ever from Cambridge to Nahant, which I think would have been about 18 miles on the route I was to take. There was lots of traffic and I hit many lights. The bike was still making those clunking noises in the bottom bracket. After I went under 93, there was a big clunk and the bike did this weird braking thing like anti-lock brakes on-off-on-off. I dismounted and decided that the bike was unridable. I thought about how cell phones are occasionally useful. But I don't have one. I soon realized I was two blocks from the Sullivan Square T station, and took the train to Wonderland, leaving the bike behind.
Did a few desultory leg lifts later, in Nahant. Wrote it off as a rest day. |
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| C • Women & their men 3 |
| Note | |
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| Much as I think it would be hip to find sappy stuff vomitous, I am really a sucker for romance as a genre. When I was a kid, I really liked the LIW series book in which Laura and the Wilder boy go for sleigh rides and there are a lot of big blizzards. So you can imagine my delight at the Little Romantic House on the Big Snowbound Prairie story we have developing on the sf/kissy logs. Blizzard's comin'... When they run out of pizza, will they have to start eating the seed grain? When they run out of fuel, will they have to burn the furniture to heat the water for those hot showers? |
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| C • And will they be featured in t... 5 |
Wednesday Dec 27 |
| Running 38:00 [1]3.0 mi (12:39 / mi) | |
| (sick) |
| Bridge circuit.
My back, at the base of my neck, hurts when I run, maybe from the pounding of my recent jogging. I tried to run carefully without jostling. Sometimes I worry that I have a disk slipping or something.
Still have that sore throat. Hoping the bug doesn't travel down into my chest. |
| Note | |
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| "Rogaine Mind" training: Mom and Dad had a copy of Mother Jones lying around and I perused the article about a guy who drives in such a way that he gets way better mileage. The results are striking - twice the mileage, or better. |
Tuesday Dec 26 |
| Running 24:00 [1]2.1 mi (11:25 / mi) | |
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| early, before heading to O'Hare. |
| Running 59:00 [1]5.1 mi (11:33 / mi) | |
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| Ran with Dave to the Museum of Science, but Body Works was sold out. So we ran to Kendall Cinema, but the next movie was Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and I wasn't up for that. So we ran home.
On the way home from T F Green airport, we read excerpts from a book Dave got from my brother Doug for xmas, called "Off the Map", about all sorts of explorers. Amundsen, Scott, Whymper, Lewis & Clark, Magellan, Shackleton, etc. I considered logging it as "Rogaine Mind" training.
I like reading about the few explorers who did what they did with grace and little or no loss of life. Like Amundsen, and Lewis & Clark. And I guess I also find fascinating the gruesome stories resulting poor planning, stupid decisions and bad luck. Or good luck. Shackleton's story is a good one, with all its chapters. I hadn't before realized he set out at the beginning of the first world war. The occasional news of his adventures was a welcome break from war news in the papers. But when he got back, his lecture circuit didn't draw the crowds that it would have pre-war - people now had their own stories of suffering and sacrifice and didn't need to experience it vicariously. |
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| C • Off the Map 8 |
Monday Dec 25 |
| Running 1:13:00 [1]6.5 mi (11:14 / mi) | |
| (sick) |
| Ran in the Sauk Trail forest preserve alone this time, so slower. Saw two deer, a cardinal, and a dead raccoon. Stopped to stretch a couple times - lower back is a bit sore.
I can remember when returning home for Christmas meant temperatures in the teens, a keen wind, and snow. No longer. |
| Running 59:56 [3]6.5 mi (9:13 / mi) | |
| (sick) |
| Same route, with Dave. Saw no deer, only a dead kitty and lots of live squirrels.
Hey, I ran half a marathon today! Slower than molasses, and in two chunks, but still. AP helps get me going - notice the sudden uptick in activity once I got a little feedback. |
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| C • Nice 1 |
Sunday Dec 24 |
| Running 1:15:00 [3]7.1 mi (10:34 / mi) | |
| (sick) |
| To the forest preserve from Mom & Dad's house. The woods seemed eminently orienteerable, especially at this time of year. Dave ran with me, and slipped on some black ice and fell. |
| Walking 30:00 [1] | |
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| To church and back, past Blackhawk Elementary school and the Tower Plaza. |
Saturday Dec 23 |
| Running 53:00 [1]4.0 mi (13:15 / mi) | |
| (sick) |
| Rainy in Nahant. Jogged on the interior of the island so my red hat wouldn't blow off. Migrating ducks. |
Friday Dec 22 |
| Running 46:00 [1]4.4 mi (10:27 / mi) | |
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| To school then work. I went to school for a parent breakfast and 6th grade showcase and a choral concert. My kids are already in PA with their dad, so it was just me. I found out that Isabel has been cast as a poppy and as a tornado dancer in the spring production of "The Wiz." On the run back to work I came across Terry's ex-boyfriend John (is that name right? i'm so bad at names) who was doing an errand at the post office. He is trying to finish up the public version of Scratch (a kid-friendly programming environment). We commiserated about Seymour Papert, who is apparently still in a coma from his recent accident abroad.
The buzz at the school was about fellow parent Guy Stuart, who jumped into the Charles River yesterday to rescue a guy from a sinking car. The Boston Globe quoted him as saying, "It was cold, very cold." Here's a picture of him afterward:
Ah, here's more on the story from a different paper (Metro Boston): "We were on the bank, and the car started to go down, and the three of us said to ourselves that we've got to go out there and get him," Stuart said yesterday, as he sat in a pickup truck wrapped in a towel. Stuart said the other two unidentified rescuers told him to open the back hatch door of the submerged car and the men pulled Im out of the SUV. Several police officers then swam out and brought him to shore.
Guy coached both David and Isabel in soccer, in prevoius years. He is a sociologist, I think, at Harvard, and at one point put in a grant to study my home town (the planned community Park Forest IL), which was the subject of a previous (1950s?) study, famous in some circles and recorded in the book "The Organization Man." But I think the grant did not get funded.
Guy was one of the Cambridge contingent we brought to the last NEOC A meet, and I believe was the one who suggested that our group create a "Cambridge cheer", which went something like, "Gay marriage! Universal health care! Gooo, Cambridge!" |
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| C • That rocks. 2 |
| Note | |
| (sick) |
| Sore throat. Parting gift from a laid-off colleague. |
| Running 45:00 [1] | |
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| From Lynn to Spouting Horn Road |
Thursday Dec 21 |
| Note | |
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| OK. I confess my powerlessness over my training and I have decided to turn myself over to a higher power. To wit, trainer "Nicole" from the Atlantic Sports Club. Starting in January. Until then, I expect I may continue to wallow. |
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| C • F45 6 |
| Walking 8:00 [1] | |
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| Oooo. Pretty Impressive. Walked/jogged to work. |
| Note | |
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| Last week when I went to DC for the day, I had the opportunity to do an experiment I'd been interested in for some time. We flew into National and were heading to a hotel in Bethesda. My fellow travelers had ordered a car to drive them, and so I took the subway to see who would be faster. It was roughly equivalent, but my delays were fewer than theirs, so I won. And my way was cheaper and presumably more carbon-neutral. Tried it on the way back too - same result. My delay on the return to the airport was a 20 minute navigation error: I took the wrong green line train. I blame it on being too distracted people-watching (AOWN), and not thumbing the map. |
Wednesday Dec 20 |
| Running 16:00 [1] | |
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Tuesday Dec 19 |
| Running 20:00 [1] | |
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| Early morning. In a bit of a slump. |
Monday Dec 18 |
| Running 45:00 [2] | |
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| To school for a parent teacher meeting, then an unplanned stop at Lisa D's house on Broadway, and then ice coffee & corn muffin @ D&D, and on to work. |
Sunday Dec 17 |
| Running 16:00 [2] | |
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| Brief run; returned to hang out with David on his birthday.
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Saturday Dec 16 |
| Walking in the woods 2:00:00 [1] | |
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| Spent a couple hours putting 24 controls (envelopes with puzzle pieces) out in the woods. Back at home, the kids arrived for the birthday party. David gave them a powerpoint "training" for the orienteering activity. Teams were to divide up the controls so that they could all be retrieved; the walkie-talkie communication was fun but not necessary. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and a few more kids are sitting ducks for us O recruiters. As a party favor, we signed them all up for NEOC.
Later we went to see "Happy Feet", which I totally loved. Especially having seen "March of the Penguins." |
Friday Dec 15 |
| Note | |
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| Been awfully busy lately, and haven't exercised. Spent the day in Washington DC again today. Just a little running in the airport and subway stations...
But tomorrow I get to go the woods, to set controls for David's walkie-talkie orienteering birthday party. 6 teams, 6 2-way radios, 6 backup cell phones, 180 puzzle pieces scattered at 24 controls. Teams communicate so that they efficiently find all the controls - but only one team needs to visit teach control to get the puzzle pieces. Puzzles tell the combination for the lock to the chest... |
Monday Dec 11 |
| Running 23:00 [2]2.4 mi (9:34 / mi) | |
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| To school for a parent breakfast. |
| Running 19:00 [2]2.1 mi (9:02 / mi) | |
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| To work from school |
Sunday Dec 10 |
| Running 1:25:39 [0]7.52 mi (11:23 / mi) | |
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| With Dave. |
Thursday Dec 7 |
| Running 12:00 [1] | |
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| Work commute |
Wednesday Dec 6 |
| Bicycling 8:00 [1] | |
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| Work commute. Didn't find time to run today. Had a nice evening with the kids, though. We had a rubber-band-shooting fight until Isabel took one in the eye, and later watched most of "Reduced Shakespeare Company" where they claim to present all of Shakespeare's works in 90 minutes. The kids loved it. |
Tuesday Dec 5 |
| Running 1:00:00 [2] | |
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| Back to Olden Road, then along the creek a ways. |
Monday Dec 4 |
| Running 35:00 [2]3.2 mi (10:56 / mi) | |
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| A trip down memory lane...
I woke up at 4 am, took a plane to DCA. Missed the first snow of the season :-( :-( which I had been looking forward to sharing with the kids for weeks now. There will be other snows. I heard that Isabel went to school with a wig and different clothes & backpack, to play a trick on her classmates, "like you, Mom", but it didn't work out. I heard that David woke up cranky and was upset all morning (until he left for school), slamming doors and complaining. Maybe he missed me.
I spent the day at the board meeting for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. In the morning several NIH Institute Directors spoke to us about funding for biomedical research and so on, and then in the afternoon we heard from Chairmon Barton (R-Tex), who authored/championed the NIH reauthorization bill that with any luck will pass the Senate unanimously tomorrow (apparently it has to pass unanimously or else it doesn't count). It was interesting to hear his views of what NIH needs to change as opposed to the Directors' views ([1] we're already doing that, and [2] doing it "officially" would create more bureacracy) ("it" = more cooperation between Institutes). We cast straw votes on our federal research funding recommendations. I always eat a lot at these things, because they have food lying around. Today I decided to skip dinner. But I ate dinner after all, and decided that I'm in eating-a-lot mode at this time - after all, I want to fit in with the F45 club that I'll be joining on 1/1/07, and it seems that eating is a thing the girls are into right now. I had some wine too, and talked to fellow board members about orienteering (natch), living in Uppsula (guy to my left), modeling coagulation in the blood with complex dynamical systems equations, and so on. Then the dessert speaker, the President of the AAMC, talked, and I was psyched to hear him say that we can't just advocate for more funding for biomedical research (which careful, reputable FASEB does very well), but we need to go beyond and change the conversation back to values. It's become too much about interests, everyone getting their own. And we need to talk about some social values... Which of course I liked to hear but didn't get exactly how I'm supposed to voice when we're in meetings with congressional staffers. I asked, and when I ask stuff like this, you can hear how frustrated I am at not getting it, and I got ribbed afterward for being hard on the guy, but I just really want to know how I can effectively use this little perch to ask for some degree of sanity and doing-the-right-thingness.
I went for a jog before dinner. We're in Rockville, and I lived in Rockville exactly 20 years ago, not far from this hotel. I went onto google maps to figure out where I'd lived, and I couldn't remember the address, south of the White Flint Mall I thought, and definitely north of the beltway. Didn't find anything looking familiar, so I went into hybrid aerial photo / map mode, and moved about until I recognized some street names, faint ghosts in my mind, like Trivial Pursuit guesses. Boiling Brook, Rocking Horse... Olden Road, that was it. I jogged to Olden Road, trying to relax my mind and let old memories in. On the street I remembered, 4701 was our house. I went to the park at the end of the road to OK relieve myself (aging thing), and was startled by a couple of deer. I lived on Olden Road for a year, with my fiance, working in Virginia and taking graduate courses at U Md, and studying the beats, Kerouac and Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, until I realized that things weren't working out and moved back to the warm womb of MIT.
It was cold out, winter cold. The jogging felt easy. As I neared the turn onto Rocking Horse Lane, I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of longing and loss, some memory too buried to resurrect images, just the feeling. I thought, I am acknowledging the sweetness of that brief domestic life, with takeout Chinese and cozy cheap wine - ah, but the alcohol was a problem in the end. |
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| C • eating-a-lot-mode 7 |
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| C • eating-a-lot-mode 1 |
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| C • eating-a-lot-mode 1 |
Sunday Dec 3 |
| Note | |
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| Yesterday my son David told me that one of the college kids helping out with his class at school knows about orienteering and has done it.
I asked him how the topic of orienteering had even come up. I thought it a good sign that David was talking about orienteering. Perhaps they had been talking about hobbies that they each enjoy?
Turns out it came up in a discussion about famous people.
David asked her, "Have you heard of Samantha Saeger or Ross Smith?" That's how the orienteering conversation started.
:-) |
| Bicycling 40:00 [3] | |
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| Forgot to bring the soloist practice CDs we'd copied to opera rehearsal. So I drove back home, and then biked back.
This is a time of humiliation. I can't sing well, but I'm in this opera. I am slow at orienteering, but I'm in training to try and kick butt in a rogaine. When I run or bike, people around me are going faster. All my computational biology colleagues at work were laid off, and I was put into Clinical, where I don't understand most of what happens around me. And my brain is failing more than ever, resulting in a steady flow of small embarrassments. Etc. I figure it's good mental training somehow. |
Saturday Dec 2 |
| Running 25:00 [3]2.2 mi (11:22 / mi) | |
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| Ran to the MIT track. Ran around it 4 times, 2:07, 1:57, 1:56, 2:15. 8:15 total. Is that a quarter mile track? |
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| C • is that a quarter mile track...? 9 |
| Running 2:20:00 [1]10.4 mi (13:27 / mi) | |
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| From Cambridge, to the Fells, around the woods, then back |
Friday Dec 1 |
| Bicycling 1:00:00 [3] | |
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| To appointment in Arlington and then to work via the coffee shop. |