Training Log Archive: iansmith

Calm mornings with a hot mug of tea invite reflection, and I find my thoughts wandering at length this morning.

1. While I haven't made up my mind, I am considering stepping down from the NEOC Board of Directors when my term expires in June. I have accomplished some of my policy goals, but the Board functions as an oversight body. I believe I can accomplish much more personally and as a club member if I focus on the VP Events role. I'm even looking towards stepping down from that after another year or two, but there isn't infrastructure and training in place to compensate for a sudden change in leadership. This deadline will make more acutely aware of my policy goals and what I mean to accomplish before I'm done.
2. What I really need as VP Events is a second person just like me - to whom I could confidently delegate any number of tasks. The problem with delegation is that it rapidly increases communication costs. I think there is a lot of advantage to centralizing much of the responsibility - e.g. for permit applications, scheduling plans, insurance data, and general awareness of the club machine. With a second copy of myself, the workload for each of us would become manageable. It's unlikely that a club member would be amenable to investing fully in the role right now, and I'm not good at recruiting. I will start training a replacement, and figuring out the optimal way to distributing the tasks among many rather than one or two. For the "Events department", I really think a group of three superstars is preferable to decentralizing the responsibility among ten or twenty.
3. It turns out that I have difficulty sleeping past about 8:30 or 9 in my new apartment; the windows let in much sunlight to my bedroom. In general, this is good - it's harder to oversleep, which is a cause of difficulty. Conversely, this requires me to be more disciplined about when I go to bed, because otherwise I will just break down as my sleep deficit increases without the relief valve of oversleeping. This is a good exercise.
4. The military industrial complex is a fascinating system that has existed in this country for more than sixty years. While there has been considerable effort to make the system more efficient - e.g. the Arleigh-Burke class destroyer consolidates five or six warship classes from thirty or forty years ago; the F-35 in principle provides a single solution to the multi-role fighter needs of the armed services - the military system is constrained to a minimum size by a vast set of requirements, including some cyclical requirements. One of the reasons stated in this NPR article for avoiding cutting weapons programs is that it's costly to restart them, and in the absence of a continuous flow of cash and acquisitions, industries like nuclear submarine production will be unsustainable and fail. I find this interesting because other capable navies, like the Royal Navy, have instances of classes of specialized weapons systems, like nuclear submarines, in smaller numbers than the US considers unsustainable. I haven't studied the economy of scale problem, but the claim that the defense industry cannot be sustainably shrunk seems spurious. I have long advocated, e.g., that an eleventh supercarrier is unnecessary. The US's eleven supercarriers are more than half of the twenty in the world, and the most powerful and capable.
5. I refuse to live an ordinary life. "You can settle for a less than ordinary life. Or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special?" "I dare you to do better."

After getting some work done this morning, including resetting the NEOC e-punch units, updating the codes on the recreational controls, and typing up course notes, I set out to meet Jeff Saeger to set controls. There are 60 total controls distributed among the Traverse and recreational courses, and I took 26. After finishing the Traverse controls, I started on the recreational controls, but decided to retire after setting four in the dark. I have eight to set tomorrow morning, and I need to put out water at two controls and streamer the walk to the start. If I finish everything in time to my satisfaction and am feeling strong, I will run the Traverse - ostensibly to wake up controls and ensure they are all there, but really just because I want to run the Traverse.

I spent considerable time doing what bgallup refers to as "prospecting" - jamming the stand into the ground hoping to find purchase in dirt and not rocks. I usually had to spent at least a minute finding a stable location for the flag. I brought out my brand new pair of X-talons for this outing, primarily because the severe degradation of the 201006 X-talons coupled with the severe rockiness of the Blue Hills hurts my feet. I want to save my Orocs for races, and the new X-talons felt delightful. My shins hurt at the very start of the outing, but after a few minutes of running in the woods, they improved considerably. I may cut back my road mileage in favor of trail running as I ramp up my base during the winter.

I felt a little lonely at the end, wandering through the dark with my pitiful headlamp in search of recreational streamered locations, but I found solace in the tender and thorough embrace of a stand of green briar at the bottom of a rocky hill.

C • Burnout 5

Eight minute core + supplemental exercises. My emphasis today was on obliques.
Leg lifts, cherry pickers, 2x oblique situps, kayakers, plank, kayakers, tuckups; 2x side plank, 2x supermans.