Last week I went to Kauai. And I trained. I really did train. I ran twice. I swam in the ocean and I swam in a pool.

The picture above is me between feats of exercise and tourism.

Yes, I really did exercise.

In fact my first run was epic. I ran up and down the hills with my heart rate monitor under-reporting my heart rate. And so I kept pushing my poor body harder and harder.

My swim in the ocean was awesome. I swam 1500 meters in open water. It was more like 150 meters one way followed by 150 meters the other way, but still awesome-ly epic. Nothing like pushing your body in the open water.

And then my last run was a thing of beauty. An excellent pace, awesome form – nothing but the best.

Of course, no one will ever see that data. Because my GPS, once again, failed to record my awesome great athletic performance while on vacation. First it was the Garmin in Greece and now it is another Garmin in Hawaii. Actually, the Garmin 910xt successfully captured the data, but then – possibly because of the salt from the sea, it was unable to recharge successfully. Following useless advice on the internet, I hard reset the Garmin  only to discover that I had also deleted all of my data.

Damn you Garmin. Damn you to hell.

So everyone will look at the picture and conclude that I am lying hiding behind the excellent robustness and stability of the Garmin GPS …

For those that care… The solution to the problem was rubbing alcohol. Since I had no rubbing alcohol I used vodka. Strongly recommend vodka as a better choice because you have something to drink after the rubbing.

Last night I was very sad because some decided to blow up the Boston Marathon targeting amateur athletes who run for the joy of running and their families.

Was going to write something funny and entertaining this week about my training.

Then I was going to write something depressing.

Instead, I am going to say something in defiance of this death and despair. Because in the face of entropy we can only live.

Qualifying for the Boston Marathon is what I dream about when I run a fast 10 miles..

Well to the a-holes who blew up Boston, I am still going to dream. And maybe even qualify.

In 2000 a hysterically funny internet meme emerged known as “All your base”. The meme had an incomprehensible translation of a Japanese game set to a techno dance track where the key phrase was “All your base are belong to us”.

Starting with week 10, and ending on week 22, I am involved in another incomprehensible activity called “building your base”.

What the hell is a base?

Seriously go do some research on the topic. You’d think you were looking for information on how to build a nuclear weapon or a fallout shelter in anticipation of the North Korean nuclear war. Or maybe it’s about the opening moves in starcraft.

The phrase is incredibly cryptic and bizarre. But everyone knows what it means. I mean everyone. And the keep talking about it… You feel like this stupid kid in a room full of smart people talking about stuff you have no clue about. So you start going around saying things like: Yeah I am building my base, wondering if you are doing it properly.

Now, I’ll give my coach some credit,, when prompted he offered a rather complete and comprehensive explanation of the topic, breaking it down rather eloquently for me.

And it turns out that its short hand for a very complex process in our bodies…

So let me see if I can explain it English.

To complete an endurance event you need, well, endurance. Acquiring endurance is done through a series of systematic exercises that target your aerobic capacity. Building the base is the phrase the folks in the know use to describe the activities you perform to build up your endurance.

Why we couldn’t just call it build up your endurance? Probably for the same reason we computer people say all sorts of crazy shit…

Real life got in the middle of last week, so I am little late with this weeks post. And I missed my first workout in months.

A couple of things that emerged.

1. Exercise is an awesome stress reliever. When I am feeling stressed, all I have to do is a few miles on my feet and then I don’t feel so blue.
2. Exercise is fun. Sometimes life gets so stressful that you don’t have the energy or desire to exercise because it feels wrong to have fun. Exercise is exactly what you should do.

More on Monday.

This picture is of me and a buddy of mine in 2000.

Biking and I have a long tortured history. In my pre-teen years I was all over biking. Living in Montreal, Quebec, I used to bike all over the place all of the time. The whole point of spring was to get on a bike and just go.

But it all came to an abrupt end.

Shortly before I move to Athens for good, at the age of 15, I face planted into cement. The face-plant rearranged my face, created a few permanent scars, displaced my front teeth and turned me off the sport for good.

It didn’t help that Athens between 1988 and 1992 wasn’t the best place to go biking. Finding a cyclist was like finding an incorruptible politician, very difficult to damn near impossible.

When I arrived in the US in 1992 to go to college (Brown University class of 96!), I blimped out – putting on 90 pounds over 1 year –  and by the time I was 24 I wasn’t physically capable of biking (okay walking 1 mile, but you get the point). I moved to California in 1996 and continued to live the life of the fat Greek geek. In 1998 thanks to the unbelievable support of my wife I managed to reassert control over my health and lose 60 pounds.

Part of reasserting control was getting into biking.

Now in the bay area  in the late 90’s, biking was the thing to do. And so my wife and I got into it, in a big way. Part of it was the amazing biking opportunities in the Santa Cruz Mountains, part of it was Lance Armstrong. I remember biking at least three times a week. On Tuesday and Thursday I climbed up Page Mill, and on Saturday we did at least 80-90 mile bike rides to the coast. April 15th was the official start of the cycling season when we would go up Mount Hamilton.

By the time I turned 31 we had gone from being barely able to finish the Napa Valley metric century to finishing the Death Ride.

I had these super quads and the all important cyclist muscle bump over the knee.

And then we stopped biking. It was as if we had conquered Everest and had nothing left to see.

Between the age of 31 and now, biking became a once-in-a-while kind of activity. The intermittent sport of choice had become running.

So I turn 40, and I decide to do this Triathlon thingy and think – man this biking thing will be a breeze because I so did the Death Ride.

Not.

It turns out that if you haven’t biked in 9 years, your body might remember how the pedals go but every single bike muscle has gone.

And it’s not the obvious ones, it’s the non-obvious ones. The muscles on your hands and arms, and neck are the ones that hurt the most. And you sit there on this bike pedaling and suffering…  and you wonder maybe the bike doesn’t fit … and then you remember that you once spent 17 hours on this very same bike …

And that saddle sore you realize is just a painful reminder that you once were in much better biking shape…

The good news is that all of this biking is getting some of those non-obvious muscles in shape, the bad news is that I remember how much easier this was 13 years ago.

In the 1950’s Elvis Presley disturbed America with his gyrating hips. Those moving hips were considered the tool of the devil, a form of legitimate porn. And while women of all ages screamed, Elvis gyrated… In the 1950’s this video was not safe for work, now it’s viewed as tame …o tempore o mores…

Which brings me to last week.

I was in Tahoe two weeks ago, cross country skiing at Royal Gorge. The night before I went cross-country skiing I decided to buy the book Total Immersion Swimming. Mostly because it was getting increasingly clear to me that something about my technique was just wrong. And I thought maybe a book for noobs would explain the missing link.

And it did.

The missing link was the relationship between the core muscles and the arms. According to the book if you use used your core muscles as a screw and your arms and legs as the fins, your body would go faster and longer. The theory was similar to a wind up train.

You wind it up, and the release of potential energy creates kinetic energy which causes the wheels to go around.

How absurd I thought. This Newtonian Physics is such nonsense. But… What the hell I thought. So I got up and started swinging my hands with my core and was stunned with the speed and ease of the motion.

So we went cross-country skiing, and I decided to try out this new fangled use your core to move your legs technique. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was in Heroes: Save the cheerleader, Save the world. But– omg – it worked.

I went faster with more ease than I ever had before, even though I was dragging my son in pulka.

In fact at some point my speed exceeded my technique… my poor son was the victim of that when he fell face first into the snow when the pulka tipped. You can see him here seconds before Father of the Year wakes him up with a face full of snow…

Coming back from Tahoe, with this piece of information about body mechanics I couldn’t wait to go swimming.

And the swim was awesome. After weeks of trying to understand how the various elements fit together, it clicked. You rotate your body to move your arms, you push on the buoy to reduce drag caused by the legs, you keep your arms in front to increase the body length to improve speed. It all just clicked. And whereas I used to struggle vainly to get under 10 strokes per length – only getting there through a supreme effort of power — all of a sudden it was easy.

It was awesome.

So here’s to Elvis, wherever he may be, keep on gyrating!

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After finishing my second marathon, my wife and I decided to do our annual ski trip to Tahoe

The nice thing about skiing is that it’s a nice break from the endless swimming, running and cycling I seem to be doing these days.

Good mental break.

After I return from this trip, I will be getting ready for my first Olympic Triathlon in August.

And then there is a small matter of the Athens Marathon.

And before that is the even smaller matter of picking next year’s Iron Man.

M. Night Shyamalan has had one great movie, everything else has been but a pale imitation.

His movie’s central conceit is that there is a child that can see dead people, and that the dead people don’t even know they are dead.

It turns out that this is true not only of dead people but also of stupid people.

Yup, stupid people surround us and they don’t even know that they are stupid. And we’re all stupid about something …

First read this wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Basically what it says is that before you can start teaching someone you need to know what their level of cluelessness is.  Once you establish the clueless level, then and only then can you start teaching someone how to be less clueless.

For example, the paper says for the truly clueless

1. You think you are doing much better than you were
2. If I show you the right answer you’ll think you are doing it right or even better than you are.
3. If I ask you to grade your work after you’ve seen the right answer you’ll think you did better than you actually did.
4. And you can’t recognize skill when you see it…

That’s right folks, stupid people are arrogant SOBs who think they have a clue. The world actually does work that way.

We can all wear this t-shirt:

Or put another way, I suck at cleaning the house. But I think I am pretty good at it. And I think I am doing a much better job than I am. When I am shown a clean house, I think I am doing an even better job than I actually am. But the reality is, well, I suck at cleaning the house and the house is not clean…

What I think my cleaning has produced:

What it may have actually produced:

What the paper doesn’t discuss is that the teacher and student may have a huge semantic gap. For example, when talking to some folks, I will assume that the person understands why a distributed system can not have a communication channel that hides failures. And start from that point. The person I am talking to may have no clue about why that is true and be confused or worse think they understand. And we can spend hours talking past each other…

Or my favorite, true, story:

World famous computer scientist professor teaches matrix operations to a class.

Student: Why does addition work one way and multiplication the other way.

Professor: Because Matrices and integers are a ring

Student looks funny

Professor: Because integers have the ring property as do matrices

Student still confused…

Professor: Well the ring property is something that matrices and integers have in common

Problem was that the professor had no appreciation that the student had no clue as to what a ring (mathematical object) is.

So what to do?

1. Teach people from first principles — have to find the basis
2. Build from that.

This does work surprisingly well.  But it does have some funny moments like when I talk to people … Conversations will begin like this:

How much software have you written? Do you know what X or Y is.. And then once the starting point is established the conversation can begin.

So how does this apply to my training. The level of cluelessness I have is quite amusing. And it’s also amusing to see the semantic gaps I have. The good news is that having been on the other side of this equation I at least am able to recognize some of it. Which is why I will ask questions about specific words… Like … for example … what is a cool down?

The process of becoming less clueless is what I like to call Climbing The Clue Ladder:

1. Believe you are greater than you are. Read instructions and information and be confused. The problem is that the information is saying “Matrices are a ring” And you have no idea what a ring is … And unlike the student, I don’t even realize that the key word is ring…
2. Start to learn about the technique basics and realize where you are clueless. For example – my mechanics of my stroke are wrong. I am rotating my shoulder. After staring at the video and doing more research I realized what I was doing wrong and that the arm extension wasn’t a rotation but a movement of the arm in the way the joints allowed. I could go on and on. I had stared at videos for many hours, read information but my cluelessness had to diminish to the point where the information began to bridge the semantic gap.
3. Look at video and start to pick up on things you never even noticed were there.
4. Progress…

This a fun process that I am enjoying… Climbing the Clue Ladder is fun.

Every Thursday morning sucks. Every Thursday I hit this brick wall. I wake up tired. The accumulated stress of workouts and work has almost drained me. And I realize every Thursday that there is four more hours to go …

For those who care by Thursday I’ve:

1. Sunday: Bike 1:20->1:45
2. Monday: Run 1h, Swim 40min
3. Tuesday: Run 1h45
4. Wednesday: Swim 40min

And then I still have to

1. Thursday: Run 1h, Swim 40min
2. Friday: Run 2h

It’s a permanent brick wall that I have to go through. My body is screaming: give up. The exercise has exhausted my brain, my legs and my arms. And I just want to give up.

If you’ve ever worked at a tech start-up you’ve seen this before:

My Thursdays are my weekly Trough of Disillusionment about this whole Ironman plan.

And I think to myself another year of these Thursdays and I just want to give up.

And it would be so easy to just quit…

And it doesn’t get easier after I finish my run and swim on Thursday. And it certainly doesn’t get easier on Friday. By Saturday, I’m just wondering what in God’s name was I thinking… This is insane.

And then by Saturday night my body is feeling better. And my energy level starts to kick in…

But on Thursdays, I remember what Hannibal said to his generals:

aut viam venviam aut facias – I’ll either find a way or I’ll make one.

And so I find some way to get through that brick wall

and make it to Sunday where I start this cycle all over again…

Christians believe that Lucifer, Satan, is a fallen angel. That his hubris lead him to be cast out of Heaven.  He falls from nice cool heaven, to end up in blistering hellish heat. Given my run today, I felt like I had been sent to some blisteringly hot hell hole..

In many ways, I felt like a fallen angel today. Normally I go for a run in the evenings when it is nice and cool. Today I had to go in the middle of the day. 

This is what I thought I would look like:

Such form, such poise, such speed, such beauty…

I’ve lost weight and I crushed my last long run in awesome time… Today I was going to run with no kid stroller, and I was going to come home in blistering form.  Pride!

But the Good Lord likes to punish pride… and so instead I looked like this:

The problem was that I completely miscalculated how much water I needed to drink. After the first three miles I drank 1/2 of a cup of water. After 6 miles I drank another 1/2 cup of water. Between miles 6 and 9 I was  cramping, unable to move my feet – my cadence was collapsing etc. At mile 9, I drank a cup of water … and then as my body started to recover, I ran into my house and drank …

Not quite … but if I could have I would have. And the last mile and half was actually quite pleasant…

Moral of the story if you want to look great while running in the sun remember this image:

Drink early, drink often.