My Track Record

None of the items below quite deserves its own entry, but they collectively indicate what I've been thinking about lately, sort of.

August 23rd: The International Astronomical Union votes to revoke Pluto's status as a planet. Some educators lament the sudden obsoleteness of nine-planet mnemonics such as "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles." My reaction is to lament the sudden obsoleteness of all those songs about the planets. Think I'm kidding? There's Meet the Planets by Monty Harper, Planet Jive by Tickle Toon Typhoon, The Planets by the Animaniacs, Les Planetes by Chris Rawlings, Planet X by Christine Lavin, Nine Planets by AstroCappella, Nine Planets by Teacher and the Rockbots, and of course the Schoolhouse Rock classic Interplanet Janet, among others.

August 25th: I'm standing at a bus stop, and I notice that several teenagers there are carrying powder-blue duffel bags. I ask them about the bags, and they explain that they are being given away as part of a new government program encouraging people to stop smoking. The idea is that you get a free bag, you pack it with clothes that have been stained or smell bad as a result of cigarette use, you take the bag to Olympia, you heave it into a landfill there ... and then you go forth and smoke no more. It sounds ridiculous, but the bag-wielding kids seem genuinely fired up about the program, bus trip to Olympia and all. Maybe the state is onto something, I think.... And then I wake up.

August 27th: I'm running around Lake Union with my shirt off when a vehicle approaches from behind. Not just any vehicle, but an amphibious Ride the Ducks vehicle full of tourists. And it's blasting "Gonna Fly Now" from Rocky -- a musical joke clearly aimed at me. So do I play along? Yes I do. Without breaking stride, I raise my right fist to emphasize that my 7:00-per-mile pace is intimidating and heroic. Then I throw a few punches for no extra charge. The tourists cheer; the Duckmobile pulls away. Surreal, but not a dream.

Posted by crowther at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week my wife and I discovered that a former world-class sprinter lives in our neighborhood.

As we drove up 23rd Avenue South on Friday evening, I happened to notice that the car in front of us sported both a track and field sticker from LSU (which has a dominant women's track program) and a personalized license plate that said "TAPLIN." Somewhere in my brain, a neuron fired.

"Hey, isn't there a really good sprinter named Cheryl Taplin?" I wondered aloud.

My wife didn't know, but she quickly found out once we got home. A "Where are they now?" article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had all the answers:

For more than a decade, after moving from Cleveland High School to Louisiana State to the U.S. national team, Taplin, 33, was a world-class sprinter.

She was a natural at track, turning out at Cleveland as a ninth-grader on a whim and claiming 19 state titles as a teenager, counting high school and AAU competition. She had her pick of colleges, choosing perennial powerhouse LSU over UCLA. She shared in seven NCAA indoor and outdoor team championships while in Baton Rouge, and was a 16-time All-American for events won, which included three national titles as a 400-meter relay runner. She won Goodwill Games and World Cup gold medals, and barely missed qualifying for the Olympic Games....

Yet at the end of 2000, Taplin walked away from running. She had torn an Achilles tendon next to her heel, and the recovery was painstaking. She was low on money. She had suffered another Olympics disappointment, though showing up for the trials in gimpy yet game condition was a victory in itself.

More pointedly, she left her sport because of what others were doing at her expense. Performance-enhancing drugs were in widespread use by her fellow track athletes, creating an uneven playing field.

"It was very unfair," Taplin said. "That's the part that was so aggravating because of all the work I was putting in with training and the mental part -- and the mental part was as hard as the physical part. To a certain extent, you knew who was (using drugs) or had an idea. For the most part, a lot of my friends that I was really close with, we all kind of stopped (competing) around the same time.

"It was out of hand. We just couldn't take it any more."

Taplin came home. At the suggestion of a friend, she sent a resume to the Mariners and was hired within three weeks. Single, she lives in the same Beacon Hill apartment complex were she was raised, occupying the unit above her father, Irving, a retired military man.

Can the complaint about drugs be dismissed as sour grapes? I don't think so. If Taplin had gotten to the Olympics, she probably would have done so as a member of the United States 400-meter relay team. So who was on that bronze medal-winning team? Chryste Gaines, Torri Edwards, Nanceen Perry, and Marion Jones. Gaines and Edwards subsequently served two-year suspensions for drug use, and Jones has admitted using steroids between 1999 and 2001. Seems like pretty good evidence that Taplin knows what she's talking about.

According to the P-I article, Taplin is now the community services manager for the Seattle Mariners, which sounds like a good job. Regardless, the fact that she felt compelled to hang up her spikes because of apparently rampant cheating by her rivals is very sad.

Posted by crowther at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple weeks ago, my aunt Beverly came out from Connecticut to participate in a hiking camp in the northern Cascade Mountains. She then hung out with us this past weekend before returning home.

In telling friends and family about her visit, I will use words like "low-key" and "uneventful." That's sort of an inside joke, since these adjectives apply equally well to most of my other social and leisure activities. In this case, however, "uneventful" was a welcome change from Beverly's previous visit, during which I came closer to drowning than is generally advisable.

As a pre-wedding present in July of 2002, Beverly took me and my then-fiancee up to the San Juan Islands for a few days of outdoorsy fun. It was a wonderful, wonderful gift, and we all enjoyed ourselves ... until the kayaking outing. The geographic details escape me, but the three of us were paddling around in a bay near the shore when I decided that it would be cool to try to use my kayak to stop an oncoming log being carried along by the current. Well, the log hit the kayak, causing it to overturn, which was OK except that I almost hit my head on the log and the nearby dock, which could have been disastrous. And to think that I pride myself on my intelligence!

This time around, rather than battling Mother Nature for survival, we watched a movie about others doing so: March of the Penguins. (Does this remind anyone of our Brokeback Mountain experience last month?) We also went to see the sound sculpture exhibit Trimpin: Klompen, which the host museum describes as follows:

Comprising 120 Dutch wooden clogs connected to a computer by concealed wires and suspended from the ceiling, Klompen is one of Trimpin’s most legendary sound installations.... In this sculpture, a percussive rhythm resonates throughout the gallery as the clogs perform a “dance” triggered by devices placed in their toes. A different rhythmic pattern ensues each time the sculpture is activated.

I'm not a big fan of either sculptures or clog dancing, but I was captivated by this particular combination of the two. Also, going to the exhibit seemed like a good way of enjoying the clogs from a safe distance. Those clogs once were logs, you know.

Posted by crowther at 11:58 PM | Permalink

Avid runners can be sorted into two groups according to their reaction to distance running coverage in the mainstream media (newspapers, TV, radio). The Suckers have been fooled into accepting whatever mediocre coverage is offered, believing that anything is better than no coverage at all. In contrast, the Cynics are quick to malign any report that does not meet their rigid and somewhat arbitrary standards. When they converse, it sounds like this:

SUCKER: Did you watch the Olympics on TV last night? It was cool that they showed the last lap of the steeplechase final even though no Americans were in it.

CYNIC: My God, what a travesty. I mean, the announcers got [steeplechaser] Wilson Boit Kipketer confused with [800m runner] Wilson Kipketer! What morons! Of course, that's what happens when you send a bunch of freakin' golf commentators to cover a track race....

SUCKER: Well, I still thought the aerial shots of the water jump were pretty nice.

CYNIC: What -- you mean the view from the Blimp? Yeah, that was wonderful. "Here's what a steeplechase looks like from our vantage point ten miles above the Earth. In the center of your screen, you can almost make out the stadium where the race is being contested. Oops, sorry, that's the town reservoir...." I wanted to hurl my daughter's discus at the screen.

I myself probably belong in the Cynic category. That's what my behavior this past week would suggest, anyway.

On Sunday, Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times wrote a column about how the Seattle Mariners can't beat the Oakland A's. An excerpt:

They aren't the best team in sports, but when they play the Mariners, the 2006 Oakland Athletics look like the 1972 Dolphins, or the '96 Bulls, or the '27 Yankees.

Beating Oakland is the milestone the Mariners can't reach. It is their four-minute mile, their three-hour marathon, their seemingly impossible dream.

My immediate reaction was to think, how can a professsional sportswriter botch a metaphor so badly? While a three-hour marathon is a formidable challenge for some runners, it has virtually no prestige or mystique relative to the 1972 Dolphins, '96 Bulls, '27 Yankees, and four-minute mile.

Once I had calmed down a bit, I sent Steve an email message which said the following:

The comparison with the four-minute mile seems apt; the mile world record was stuck at 4:01 from 1944 to 1954, and sub-four times were but a dream until Roger Bannister finally ran his 3:59.4. But the three-hour marathon? That's never been a particularly elusive goal for top runners of either gender. At the 1908 Olympic marathon in London -- the very first marathon to use the now-standard distance of 26 miles, 385 yards -- the winner ran 2:55:18, with the next three finishers also breaking three hours. As soon as women started participating somewhat regularly in marathons, they easily obliterated the three-hour mark as well. Although women were not even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon until 1972, their performances at other marathons in 1971 included a world-record 2:46:30 by Adrienne Beames of Australia and a 2:55:22 New York City Marathon victory by 19-year-old Beth Bonner.

Greg Crowther
(whose best mile time is 4:31 and best marathon time is 2:22:32)
Seattle, WA

Steve's response, in its entirety, was this:

Congratulations of [sic] a great marathon time.

Not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but Steve probably had lots of other Cynics to deal with that day.

Posted by crowther at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As far as I can tell, my boss is universally liked by those who work with her. She's intelligent, industrious, organized, and respectful of others.... But there's got to be more to it than that, right?

One of her other traits, which might seem like a liability, is her reluctance to offer strong, direct praise or criticism. I think one big advantage of this approach is that it makes her coworkers feel that they are being treated fairly and equally; nobody gets picked on repeatedly, and nobody receives conspicious compliments that could make others jealous.

Given the lack of explicit thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgments, I've learned to be on the lookout for less direct feedback. Yesterday my boss said in passing that she was "not unhappy" with my research progress this summer.

I shouldn't overinterpret this comment, but I'm not unhappy about it.

Posted by crowther at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On September 17th, I will turn 33 and 1/3 years old -- exactly one third of a century. This strikes me as a milestone worth celebrating, but how should I mark the occasion? Make a third of a birthday cake? Run 33.33 miles? The latter is not feasible, since I'll be racing the Twin Cities Marathon on October 1st, but perhaps I could run 33.33 laps around a track, or 33.33 minutes at race pace, or something like that. Or maybe I should borrow an old record player and put on some LPs (rotation speed: 33 1/3 rpm) released in 1973, the year I was born. I own "Piano Man" by Billy Joel and "Fantasy" by Carole King, for starters....

Does anyone out there have any other fun, numerically relevant activities to suggest?

Posted by crowther at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If I wrote a blues song about Sunday's workout, it might begin like this:

I woke up this morning, and ran to where the track had been.
Yes I woke up this morning, and ran to where the track had been.
Coach said, "Son, I'm sorry -- you can't do speedwork here again."

I won't be sending this to B.B. King or anything, but you get the idea. I ran from home to Garfield High School, where I had planned to do a 2 x 2-mile workout on the decrepit quarter-mile dirt track. Problem: the track was gone. Instead I saw a smooth dirt lot -- smoother than the track had been, actually -- upon which several construction trailers were parked. (Why does this keep happening to us running bloggers?)

The disappearance of the track was just the latest difficulty in what had already been a lousy week of training. The week before that had gone quite well:

7/17: 10.1 miles easy, with five 60-second pickups toward the end. Still tired from the previous Friday's workout. 7/18: 5.9 miles easy. Finally feeling better. 7/19: 3.5-mile warmup. 2400m in 7:23, 800m jog, 2400m in 7:24, 4 minutes rest (jog/bathroom), 1600m in 4:56, 600m jog, 1600m in 4:56. 3.7-mile warmdown. A very tough workout that I copied directly from Gabriel Rodriguez's blog. (Gabriel, whom I met at Altitude Camp six years ago, is sort of an imaginary rival of mine, since we live thousands of miles apart and never actually race against each other.) 7/20: 5.1 miles easy. 7/21: 6.5 miles easy. 7/22: 2.7-mile warmup. 4 x { 1 mile in 6:00-6:10, 2 miles in 10:40 } at Seward Park with Dave. 2.7-mile warmdown. Felt decent; didn't have to go all-out. 7/23: 4.8 miles easy. 63 miles for the week.

But then came some problems:

7/24: 6.2 miles easy. 7/25: 3.7-mile warmup. 800s in Dempsey; only made it through three (2:21, 2:22, 2:23) before bagging the workout. Felt lifeless. 3.7-mile warmdown. 7/26: 5.1 miles easy. 7/27: 2.6-mile warmup. 3 x 800m at Husky Stadium with 400m jogs in between. Times of 2:18, 2:19, 2:21 were not acceptable; looks like I'm still not recovered from the 7/22 workout and won't be ready for the Torchlight 8K on the 29th. 2.3-mile warmdown. 7/28: 5.1 miles easy. Still tired. 7/29: 5.0 miles easy with 100K World Cup teammate Howard Nippert.

Which brings us back to this past Sunday, the 30th:

7/30: 4.9-mile warmup while searching for a suitable workout venue. 9 x ~530m uphill near the Interstate 90 corridor, jogging back down in between. Times (1:45, 1:46, 1:47, 1:46, 1:46, 1:46, 1:46, 1:46, 1:42) were WAY faster than my 1:50 average for this workout back in October! 3.6-mile warmdown. 52 miles for the week.

So the workout turned out well after all, except for this hydration mishap:

I went runnin' up a hill; left my bottle on the lawn.
Oh I went runnin' up a hill; left my bottle on the lawn.
And when I came back down ... my old bottle, it was gone.

Yes, my water bottle was stolen during the hill repeats. A small price to pay for such a confidence-boosting workout, I suppose.

Posted by crowther at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)