Zetetical Society Meeting Notes

February 2, 2012

Time Off

Filed under: Running — Aram @ 10:16 am

Well, the foot damage seems to have progressed to the point where I have to take some time off from training to heal up the damage. Six days? Six weeks? Who knows.

Initially, my plan had been to keep on top of endurance training by hitting the bike hard enough to be able to bounce back into high mileage of the foot improves and hopefully make my April and May races. But now I think a better plan would be to wander around the house in my bathrobe with a half empty bottle of Bailey’s and a half smoked double corona muttering “can you hear the loons?” It’s no worse for my dignity than a spinner bike in front of the TV, but it has the added feature of being a priceless investment in future family support for any volume of training.

January 29, 2012

This week in ow my foot

Filed under: Running — Aram @ 9:53 pm

Yeah, yeah, so I quit running for good last week.

I did basically a 42 mile week this week, 33 running and the rest in cross training on the bike.

The plantar fascia injury is totally blowing up. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

January 22, 2012

Training: Bah. Running: Humbug

Filed under: Running — Aram @ 2:21 pm

Time for my semi-annual “I’m quitting running for good” speech/post.

I just got back from doing 18 miles in the snow in New Balance MT10s, and before God and man, I declare that I’m never running anything over a 10K again unless lives are at stake. If I survive this afternoon, I’d rather eat soy and wear shape up shoes.

I put another 100 miles on the 993s and they did wonders for the foot injury, but feel like running in a poorly-thought out cross between ski boots and a foam cowboy hat. Today, the prospect was shoveled suburban sidewalks and a maybe a plowed high school track if I was lucky, so I put on the MT10 minimalist trail shoes out of fear that I’d hit a lot of ice and blow out my ACL. The 993s are ok on a clear road if you love big heavy shoes that weigh about as much as a knee-high combat boot. On ice… Let’s just say I want to live.

MT10s are basically magic sneakers in the snow. They even create enough traction to run on sidewalk ice if there is a little bit of snow to get some purchase. I did a mile on the track even though it wasn’t plowed. I can’t say enough good things about the shoe. They’re a bit funky on the road since they don’t have a very well-defined area to land on, but the minute there is snow or trail, they’re outstanding.

I’m done with distance. After an hour, I start getting bored. My legs feel dead after 12 miles. My soul feels dead after 14. I have no desire to put in the work to build up a speed base. Mile 18 of today’s run was done at something like a 15 minute pace. I can walk that. I’m doing 42 miles a week and 30 of them are junk miles.

I’m not sure exactly what motivates most runners, but I think it’s just the right mixture of narcissism and self-loathing. It’s all the ego-gratifying smugness of a 5 day a week yoga habit, combined with an incredibly low payoff for the time put in. CrossFit Drywall’s joke about running being a byproduct of boredom addiction seems apt, especially in the dead of winter. It doesn’t even make you thin or strong unless you’re under 30 or starve yourself. There’s a better class of runner that none of this is true for. I’ll never be one of them.

January 3, 2012

Last week in the chilly tedium of training

Filed under: Running — Aram @ 10:25 am

The plantar fascia injury turned into a non-event after a few days with heel pads. A week in MAXIMALIST shoes, New Balance 993s, got me through. I ran about 30 miles and cycled for forty minutes. Getting through 16 miles on Saturday surprised me. I like saying “MAXIMALIST!”

This week, I’m going to try the New Balance MT10s and go back to the 993s if there’s any foot pain. I’ll shoot for 32 miles of running and see how it goes.

December 26, 2011

This week in the depths of, uh, training…

Filed under: Running — Aram @ 9:12 pm

I’ve exhausted the universe of running shoes.

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I think it’s finally happened. I’ve run out of shoes to try. I blame the minimalist shoe movement. I can actually run in minimalist shoes without knee pain. My knees feel wonderful. I just got a pair of New Balance MT10s that I simply love. It’s just that I can’t run in minimalist shoes without foot pain.

What I thought was a heel bruise from hitting one too many pieces of gravel is actually classic plantar fasciitis. I’m hoping it is from running over gravel in shoes that don’t protect from gravel. I basically managed to struggle up to just shy of 5 hours of running and cross-training this week, but had to cut my long run short because my foot started coming apart at the seams. I wake up every morning with my left foot half curled up in a ball, hobble off, and spend the day unwinding it until it’s just a spot of pain on the heel.

One answer would be to go back to a more supportive shoe, but that would immediately cut back on the mileage I can do because my knees and ankles are in agony in traditional shoes now. I will try to work up to a more supportive shoe if I can. I can also try massage, splinting, icing, etc. etc. We’ll see. It’s better than it was at the start of the week even with the shortened long run. Hopefully I can get back in the game with some shorter runs and this will heal up so I don’t have to DNS my spring races.

December 18, 2011

This week in the unspeakable horror of training

Filed under: Exercise,Running — Aram @ 8:46 pm

Week one of my latest 24 week training cycle and in typical form I have already managed to injure myself to the point where I can’t run well. Heel bruise. Hopefully not plantar fasciitis. I’m now walking a fine line between form and function in shoes. If a shoe has a heel drop, I immediately cripple my knees. However, all the flat shoes of this world are either too narrow to fit, or too thin on the bottom to protect my feet. I’m giving the inov-8 F-lite 230 a chance for now. A bit narrow for me, but seem to be flat enough. Maybe I can make my own rock plate for them for some of the gravel I go over. Twelve miles in them on Saturday got a bit dire towards the end, but I’m hoping I’ll get the hang of them soon. If not, they’re perfect for lifting and kettle bells and should last forever there, so no harm no foul.

Schedule is totally off. It’s now 7:30 on a Sunday just after dinner and I’m hoping once the kids go to bed that I can cram in a few miles on the spinner bike to meet my training goal of four hours and forty minutes for this week. Blah.

December 2, 2011

Biting the Garden State that Feeds Me

Filed under: Life — Aram @ 11:55 pm

About once a decade, I move to New Jersey and completely and irrevocably ruin my entire life.

As life-long habits go, it would seem to be an easy one to break. There’s Boulder or Seattle, places I’ve never been, but which seem demonstrably more appealing than New Jersey, so much so that I would try to move the family to either sight-unseen. There would have been staying in New York, which is actually pretty wretched most of the time, but at least comes with some sort of bragging rights. At this point, there’s even Boston. But no, some combination of an Armenian community school, and being within an hour and a half of work and off we go.

The earthquake, hurricane, and freak snow storm with falling branches weren’t what finally broke what little good will I had. The Kafkaesque commute, blue laws, endless traffic on weekends and suburban sprawl weren’t it. It wasn’t the horrible running on sidewalks which mysteriously end after a quarter mile and get replaced by six inch wide gravel strewn shoulders or send you sprawling over their uneven edges. It wasn’t the prospect of raising sons in matching Jets tracksuits. It wasn’t even that Garmin seemingly has no understanding of highways with traffic lights and keeps trying to route us home via the middle of downtown Newark. In the end, it was the report that the decent Thai place by us was empty at 8 PM on a Friday night except for one guy eating alone.

Is this seriously the most depressing comfortably affluent place on earth?

November 3, 2011

CPR = PI/2

Filed under: New York City,Running — Aram @ 9:04 pm

OK, this is the nerdiest thing I will ever notice about running in Central Park. [Maybe] It’s at least your daily dose of Sacred Geometry as Total Coincidence. [Maybe].

I’ve been running mostly 5Ks as of late and they’re 3.1 miles. I’m glad I checked, I’ve been running them as 3.12 and therefore have just shaved a few seconds off my miserable 5K time. Around Central Park’s Reservoir Path, that’s just shy of twice around. If you start at Engineer’s Gate right at the middle of the memorial to John Purroy Mitchel, run north, and stop just short of the second revolution where the smooth ramp up from the bridle trail just to the south of the memorial meets the running path, that’s spot on. As I was finishing up my run tonight got me to thinking about the full distance.

All the way once and your fancy GPS watch should read 1.57 and change. It gets rounded to 1.58 in the guides. That means within a very reasonable margin of error, someone made the reservoir to be pi/2 miles around. Since the reservoir was man made according to plans laid out by Nineteenth Century engineers, and has a somewhat irregular shape to it, I wonder if  that was on purpose, a little math joke in the landscape? Or is it a complete accident, the sort of coincidence that makes even the most absurd numerology seem possible to some?

October 8, 2011

Things which surprised me in Hong Kong

Filed under: Travel — Aram @ 10:33 pm

I tried doing a big rehash of the Hong Kong trip last month, but it wasn’t going anywhere since it was a slow tour of things everyone knows about Hong Kong. So, I thought instead I’d just mention a few things which surprised me:

1. Chicken Feet are a horrible food.

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This really did surprise me. For years, I’ve seen chicken feet going by at dim sum places and figured I was missing out on something out of cowardice. I was expecting something that was all the positive things that would come to mind from something which looks like a cross between General Tso’s and chicken skin. They’re actually awful. They’re like the size of monkey’s paws and are like a sticky and rubbery version of the bad end of a poorly cooked chicken wing. Skip them. Have another pork bun.

2. Chinese Buddhism is not afraid to rock a weird aesthetic.

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The 10,000 Buddhas Monastery in Sha Tin. You climb 300 steps past scores of these weird golden Buddhas. Some are stern, some are comical, some are  downright bizarre. At the top is a giant pink temple. The only monk at the monastery seems to technically be the preserved body of the founder since there are none in residence. And there are more than 12,000 Buddhas.

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I’m used to Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism, which I guess are both simply more popular in the West, so I wasn’t prepared for this. It’s someone’s sacred spot. You don’t want to compare it to hole 18 at the weirdest miniature golf course in the world. But it’s kind of like that.

Oh and I was lucky to find the right place. No signs until you’re on the grounds. The directions in my guide lead to what I think was a cemetery below the temple, but I knew it  just didn’t look right (no statues, escalator). Had there not been a senior citizen’s tour group wandering by in the right direction, I don’t know if I would have found it.

3. The best way to get around a hilly city is a massive escalator as long as you’re only going one way.

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They have a half mile escalator right up the side of the peak from the area by Central Station up to Soho. It’s basically a moving elevated walkway. It runs down in the morning and up the rest of the day. I thought that was a little odd. All the trouble to built a half mile escalator, but it only runs in one direction. Maybe two moving walkways would be a total waste of resources?

Still, I loved the thing. I went back to it again and again.

4. There is a place in the world with Mildly Sweet Oreos. No, really. For when you wouldn’t want the excess of  the High-Test cookies.

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September 11, 2011

A Traditional English Clover Garden and the Very Fabric of a Lawn

Filed under: Life — Aram @ 5:46 pm

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Like most of you, I labor under a number of personal delusions which get filed away as “rules I observe” and a particular onerous one has involved a belief that you should always clean your own home and by extension now, mow your own lawn. This was further extended to weeding the flower beds when my father glanced at them and went “there’s a lot of work to be done there.” I grunted and drooled as I relived that childhood memory of him laying me out flat in the dirt by accidentally hitting me in the head with a rock he was clearing out of garden. At the time, he agonized over if I would hold that against him, and we’ll find that out one day when I get power of attorney and he’s in a home. But I digress.

So, the weeding has been fine. I learned to weed when I was very young. Take out the small plants by the root, the plants that aren’t the main plant in the area. Not the snapdragons! Not the azeleas! The little green plants sticking up next to them! I can do that all day, every day. Except there’s a nagging voice which keeps going off when I pull out clover in the beds. Is clover a weed? In flower beds is it a weed because it’s not a more important plant? Is the clover there on purpose? Have I been eradicating the very thing which makes the flower beds nice? I keep the moss and that’s not a big plant. I know the name of clover, so it’s not like those anonymous little ugly plants next to the obviously more important ones. Will the neighborhood association one day drop by and go “How’s the traditional English clover garden the previous owners had cultivated? It was the prize of this neighborhood. Oh my God, it’s all dirt, what happened?!”

I’m going to have to ask for professional help on this one. Or possibly just seek professional help in general.

The same voice went off as I raked out a large trashcan worth of those maple propeller seeds and dead grass from the front of the lawn (photo above). They had fallen and been mowed into the lawn and the grass underneath them had died. It seemed to make sense to get rid of them, so I raked and swept them out. And all the time, I’m looking ay my patchy, self-maintained lawn and then at the beautiful lawns across the street that the services deal with. They’re thick and lush. All green, no dead spots. And who ever sees someone raking their lawn in late summer? I imagine that everyone driving by is thinking, “Look at that jackass, raking out the propeller seed and dead grass mulch lattice that is the very fabric of his lawn.”

Time to seek professional help.

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