Training Log Archive: iansmith

While admittedly this video advertisement for Tough Mudder is 4 years old, it has 7.5 million views. Spartan Race trailer, with a similar 3.7 million views. Both of these (successful) obstacle course/endurance franchises are somewhat successful - 2 million Tough Mudder participants as of 2015, and 272,000 Spartan finishers in 2014. Both seem to use hyperbolic marketing - e.g. "possibly the toughest event on the planet", and both seem to draw grandiose inspiration about how finishing a race will change your life and motivate you to greater ends.

I find most of this rhetoric hilarious - is a rope climb really a "world class obstacle" compared with, say, running up Surebridge? - but the ideas behind them certainly resonate. I see Rundle as a challenge against which I want to test myself.

But the broader question: can orienteering appeal to a broader audience? I don't know that we need to market ourselves as some x-treme activity that demonstrates to all your social media friends how badass you are, but when people think of orienteering, they seem to often imagine boy scouts standing with a compass taking bearings. As opposed to this wicked cool video about orienteering made by Puresive films, "Go Hard or Go Home" featuring the Hubmanns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnE-hftGQoU

These are also neat videos, from Oringen 2016 and 2014 (bahaha Jonas Leanderson fixing his hair). The challenge is to get non-orienteers to see this material. I think the short video - maybe 30s-2m - is one approach; it can be embedded on social media, maybe even used as commercials. Static pictures can also be impressive if done well; I'm not sure really.

To make it more concrete, what could we do for $50,000? Ideas:
1. Hire Puresive Films or some equivalent to take enough video footage in Harriman (e.g.) or at an event with suitable fast, photogenic people to make a few ads. Market these videos and materials heavily.

2. Concerted ad campaign - these short videos, posters of people bashing through the woods (or something), inspirational messages about conquering your fears or whatever. Seriously, who would pay $90 to jump through mud and hop over slightly burning wood when you could run around in Pawtuckaway or Harriman?

3. Accessibility: people need to have events to go to. Billygoat, Highlander, Traverse, national meets are all amazing, but they're relatively difficult for total neophytes to access. There is, however, this neat format of the urban sprint or city race (London, Venice) that is extremely accessible and doesn't require much special training. The Spartan races have 4 distances - 3 mile, 8 mile, 13 mile, and 26 mile, and the finishers were inversely correlated to distance. In 2014, 65% of the finishes were on sprints. Imagine a national series of city races and sprint festivals all around the country. It's a short jump from sprint to park to forest.

C • World Class Obstacle 23

Climbing at Brooklyn Boulders with bgallup. I climbed three autobelay pitches before Ben arrived, then probably did 8-10 with him. I sent my first 5.9! It was a glorious little overhang. Admittedly, gym difficulty notations are a bit arbitrary, but it was still a fun moment. Later, after poking around on a 5.10b that Ben did, my forearms were so spent that I completely whiffed on a 5.7. The 10b had some slopers that really wore out my grippy muscles. Fun times.

Today's official climbing word (from wikiP, so who knows):
Sloper - A sloping hold with very little positive surface. A sloper is comparable to palming a basketball.

Unofficial: schiessegrippen - The intense feeling of disappointment when finding a difficult crux after a jug or good handhold.

Just amazing:

#gpsanimation from #woc2016 Middle Women: See how Emily Kemp is in the lead until just before the arena passage - and Alexandersson takes over the lead and takes GOLD when Kemp does mistake! #orienteering​

A video posted by World of O (@worldof_o) on Aug 23, 2016 at 9:58am PDT

C • Thanks 2

Run to track workout. Uneventful.

Track workout! Many of the usual suspects were in attendance - Patrick, Amore, Kevin, and Terry. I just missed drills, but I hopped on board for the last bit of strides. The workout tonight was 3x(1200, 600), with a 1 minute break between 1200 and 600 and 2 minutes between sets. I hung on to the group for the 1200s, but I would fall behind on the 600s. I decided to skip the last 600 because the wheels were falling off. We finished with 2x200, which is always fun.

My calves were a bit tight, and I felt a little tired, but I'm happy to make it through the workout.

1200s: 4:27, 4:31, 4:39 (glacial)
600s: 2:04, 2:07
200s: 36, 35

Ugh, mornings. GPS track was wonky to start, and I felt really lethargic. I started to loosen up a bit by the end, but I'll reiterate: ugh, mornings.

I came across this commercial for the Canadian olympic team while watching CBC's olympics and was inspired. Ice in our veins (is probably not good for circulation).

C • ice in our veins 2

Easy peasy Skyline run. My legs felt a bit tired and heavy from yesterday. Also, today was my first Skyline run since I rolled my left ankle hard two weeks ago, and I had some concerns about its resilience. It held up ok, though I had one wee roll. My lower left leg feels a bit strange, though it hasn't been hurting or uncomfortable. I continued my latest audiobook, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It has been interesting but unremarkable.

From NPR, apparently the US has a feral cat problem. The introduction of 80-100 million predators into the ecosystem has wrecked havoc on populations of wild animals. Apparently Trap-Neuter-Return programs haven't demonstrated much impact on the population. I speculate that this is because the population is saturated for other reasons - i.e. the number of fertile cats is not a limiting factor, and so you need to remove huge chunks of reproducing adults before the population is dented. It seems that mass euthanasia is one of few viable solutions to addressing the problem, but I wonder if that would work. For the sake of argument, suppose within a region (a county, say), we euthanized all the feral cats. Wouldn't that population eventually rebound from the steady supply of people losing their pets? Is it even technically feasible to euthanize tens of millions of animals, humanitarian concerns aside? And yet, it seems the greater tragedy is the devastation and suffering both of the wild population of animals on whom the cats prey and the cats themselves. Life as a feral cat cannot be pleasant. This is a problem our civilization created and must address.

C • cats 11

Event: CNYO Regaine - Letchworth State Park East
 

Track workout - the first in quite a while. My workout was 4x800 + 2x400; I ran in silence, and the track was a bit damp from overzealous lawn watering. It's definitely time to get back on the bandwagon, as it were. My cadence is slow, and my breathing was labored. In the past, I might have run 2:44-2:48, but I set a more modest goal of 2:50-2:55. Music appropriate for intervals albeit not as good as East German techno.

Splits:
800m: 2:54, 2:52, 2:55, 2:55
400m: 79, 79

I aspire to a well-ordered life - a life of meaning and direction. I wonder sometimes what that is. I've often imagined if we prepared a large ensemble of independent Ians, how could would the best among them be? It's not healthy to compare myself to this Ian, for he is unrealizable. But perhaps life is not about achieving order and objectives, but about striving. Life is not some contrived script of destiny and fate, but a random walk, a stochastic process. And who can say where the winds of time will blow?

Easy run home.

Wrestling with linear mixed models, stochastic gradient descent (to fit the LMMs), and how to present my vision for OUSA.