Recently, I received a questionnaire from Susquehanna University, my alma mater, asking about my Peace Corps service. I thought my responses lent themselves to a blog post. I elaborate on the "right" time to serve, my living conditions, work placement and what I found most challenging as a volunteer. Overall, I highly recommend Peace Corps. It exceeded my expections and I treasure the experience. I also posted some pictures.
Peter Drucker said: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” and while I’m sure he wasn’t referring to triathlon or even athletic training, his wisdom still applies. I’ve created a simple template to track two workouts a day per week, including data on time, distance, resting heart rate, physical and mental exertion and workout notes. The templates are based on concepts outlined in Joe Friel’s “Triathlete’s Training Bible” and Chris Carmichael’s “The Lance Armstrong Performance Program.” I was inspired to create them by Douglas Johnston, who created an amazing set of DIY planner templates that I use every day. This is the first version of the Triathlon Training Log template. Please drop me a line with constructive specific ideas. Enjoy!
For the last few weeks the New York Road Runners have been saying that the race routes may be altered to accomodate Christo and Jean-Claude’s "Gates" project. I’ve been watching the pieces be put into place over the last few weeks, but today, the Gates and their saffron banners waved at runners all along the 9.3 mile race route. The Gates made me realize just how many miles of path there are in the park; the saffron banners were just low enough so that I could jump and touch them. Gorgeous!
Bloggers Note: Today’s blizzard got me thinking of Siberia, so I exiled myself to my computer and resized a few photos, which don’t quite do the terrain justice. I wrote this piece in 1997 not too long after I got home and hoped to sell it to the Newark Star-Ledger or the NY Times. No such luck, but here it is. – Ted
Let’s play word association. I say Siberia. You say the first five words that pop into your head.
"Snow, Dr. Zhivago, Snow, Bears, Snow, and Exiles."
No points for repeats–I’ll give you one for bears, and allow Dr.
Zhivago, but you won’t find any snow in Siberia in the summertime, and
the exiles living in Siberia now are there of their own free will, so
are no longer exiles at all. So what does happen in Siberia these days?
I did my first race in Central Park with the New York Road Runners–the NYRR Fred Lebow Classic 5 mile run. The night before the race, Deb (my partner) asked why I’d want to take the train into Central Park to run 5 miles when I could just as easily run that distance in Brooklyn. I just said "it’s different"–not a great answer. What makes it different? Normally running is a solitary activity. It’s me, my iPod, stopwatch, some days, a heart rate monitor, other days, our dog, Hazel. Yesterday it was me and 2,700 like-minded runners. I felt like a member of the tribe. (Eons ago, I reckon fleeing predators was not fun–now we do it to exercise the parts of our body that atrophy from knowledge work.) It’s motivating to see so many people who share in the passion for running and sport. It was a perfect day for a race, sunny, 36 degrees. Unlike a morning run, for which I have estimates for distances these scored races are provide an accurate fitness snapshot. Knowing that I have a race on the calendar is a great reason to get out and train. The race is the reward for the work I put in on training days. Oh, and most important of all, it’s great fun.
New York Road Runners is an amazing organization–they organize races, classes and even have a community foundation to get kids in the city to start running. To learn more or join, visit their website.
"Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die." — U2, Crumbs From Your Table
" The astounding tragedy in the Indian Ocean is not just a human disaster of unbearable magnitude. Nor is it a matter of fate. It is the consequence of years of underinvestment in the scientific and technical infrastructure needed to reduce the vulnerability of developing countries to natural and environmental calamity." From an editorial by Art Lerner-Lam and Leonardo Seeber, seismologists with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and Robert Chen, a geographer with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network. Maxx Dilley, Deborah Balk, and Klaus Jacob also contributed to this essay. Full editorial at the Los Angeles Times (registration required.)
Kakutani (NYT) panned it, but Begley at the New York Observer said it was "lots of fun." I thought, heh, I like Wolfe and count Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full among my favorite novels, and so I gave I Am Charlotte Simmons a read. Sadly, I wish I had waited until this 2 and a half-pound tome was on the remainder shelf. Be warned, this review is a spoiler, if you’re planning on reading Wolfe’s book you might want to skip this entry.
The Working Families party called the other night soliciting a contribution for their campaign to raise the minimum wage. The New York State minimum wage is currently set at $5.15 an hour–a proposal in Albany would raise it by $2 to $7.15 an hour. I’d given them a contribution for this cause before, but the act sent me back to my microeconomics textbook–wasn’t raising the minimum wage one of those policies that hurt more than it helped?
By now, everyone knows that Mozilla’s Firefox is eating away at Internet Explorer’s market share. It’s no wonder, innovation of Internet Explorer creeps along with releases of the Windows operating system. In true open source spirit, Firefox allows for anyone with a little know-how to contribute and improve the product. Case in point is the Mozilla mycroft project, home to browser search plug-ins, which "allow you to access a search engine right from your browser without having to go to the search engine’s page first." It’s pretty handy–I use it to search Amazon, track Fedex packages, look up entries in the Wikipedia, etc. Quite often, I need to google something at Columbia University, so today I wrote a Firefox plug-in that will google those pages. I’ve submitted the plug-in to the folks at the mycroft project, but in the meantime, you can download the zip file. To install on the Mac, you’ll need to drop it in: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins On the PC, drop the files in: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ Happy searching. (Thanks to Alan Bramley, who originally developed this plug-in for the University of Virginia. I modified his work for the Columbia University plug-in.)
Unos, dos, tres, catorce [1,2,3,14]
Turn it up loud, captain! – from Vertigo, u2’s new album.
—
I’m at my desk like any other day, and I hear a band outside. It’s not uncommon–bands play on the quad at Columbia all the time. I thought I recognized the beat–but I didn’t know the song. Then I looked outside. I put the beat with the image–“that’s U2!!!!” I sprinted down the stairs and into the street. It looks like they’re filming a new video for their how to dismantle an atomic bomb. They’re on a tractor trailer driving down Broadway. I ran with the band (and throngs of other fans, happy-struck by their good fortune) from 116th St. to 110th. See the Photo Album for pictures.