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Li'l Phil says: "Protecting your eyes against UV radiation is not only the smart choice, it's the fashionable one too!"
As some of you have heard, my Western States race ended early and far from the finish line. Here's my self-pitying report for Runner's World.
Naturally, some people did finish the race, permitting me to determine a winner in my prediction contest. Below is a summary of the voting and actual race performances. The format is: name: votes received; place (among runners of the same gender), time.
MEN
Jae-Duk Sim: 9 votes; 10th place, 18:44
Lon Freeman: 9 votes; DNF
Greg Crowther: 7 votes; DNF
Erik Skaden: 5 votes; 2nd place, 16:36
Brian Morrison: 5 votes; DNF
Brian Robinson: 2 votes; 23rd place, 21:20
Graham Cooper: 1 vote; 3rd place, 17:11
Andy Jones-Wilkins: 1 vote; 4th place, 17:20
James Bonnett: 1 vote; 12th place, 19:41
Jon Olsen: 1 vote; 16th place, 20:26
David Goggins: 1 vote; 21st place, 20:52
Jim Huffman: 1 vote; DNS
Joe Kulak: 1 vote; DNE (did not enter)
WOMEN
Nikki Kimball: 25 votes; 1st place, 18:12
Kami Semick: 7 votes; 8th place, 21:40
Anne Lundblad: 6 votes; 9th place, 21:46
Annette Bednosky: 2 votes; 6th place, 21:15
Bev Anderson-Abbs: 1 vote; 2nd place, 19:31
Karine Herry: 1 vote; 3rd place, 20:12
Julie Fingar: 1 vote; 15th place, 23:34
Noticeably absent among the list of vote-getters is men's champ Hal Koerner, who clocked an impressive time of 16:12. Surprises among the women were less dramatic, with 4th-place Caren Spore (20:36) being the top finisher not to receive any pre-race votes.
Although no voters correctly guessed both the men's and women's champions, three people (AJW, Craig Thornley, and Leanne McCulloch) came quite close by endorsing the combination of Erik Skaden (2nd male) and Nikki Kimball (1st female). Based on the predictions of winning times, the tiebreaker goes to AJW. Please step forward to identify yourself -- the world wants to know if you are 4th-place finisher Andy Jones-Wilkins -- and claim your prize! Thornley and McCulloch will be awarded consolation prizes of some sort.
I'm blogging about Western States for Runner's World. Here's the first of two scheduled posts. It contains a certain amount of genuine arrogance, but in my own defense, the final title ("Greg Crowther's Half-Full Plan To Win The Western States 100 Mile") is cockier than the one I submitted. I do very much want to win but am not at all confident that I will win. Just so we're clear on that....
Meanwhile, there's still plenty of time to enter my Western States prediction contest. Plenty of reasonable votes have been cast so far, but where are the Eric Grossman and Hal Koerner supporters?
How about a little prognostication contest? Tell me which man and which woman will be the overall winners of the Western States Endurance Run and you could wind up with an inexpensive but oddly gratifying prize!
RULES
1. The contest is open to anyone who lives in a place where this sort of thing is not forbidden.
2. To enter, submit a comment on this entry with the full names of the people you think will be the overall winners (one male, one female). For tie-breaking purposes, also submit a predicted winning time for each predicted winner.
3. Time predictions should be given in hours and minutes elapsed since the start (e.g., 17:52 means that the 100 miles will be covered in 17 hours and 52 minutes -- NOT that the person will finish at 5:52 PM). If seconds are specified, they will automatically be dropped (e.g., 17:52:44 will be truncated to 17:52). Once a given time has been submitted, it cannot be used by any subsequent entrant.
4. One entry per person, please. (And don't try to get tricky by submitting multiple comments under different names!) If someone enters more than once, only his/her first entry will count.
5. The deadline for entering is Saturday, June 23rd at 5:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time. (That's when the race starts.)
6. Contest entries will be compared to actual race results using a proprietary algorithm. Picking me to win will not be advantageous unless I actually do win, so flatter me at your own risk. The contest winner will be announced next week on this blog.
7. The contest winner will choose from among the following prizes: (A) $25 of credit at the Western States Store; (B) a rare copy of the out-of-print Science Groove CD Muscles & Magnets; (C) the opportunity to write a guest entry on this blog.
8. In submitting entries, participants agree to the waiver below.
WAIVER
I understand that posting comments on blogs is a potentially risky activity. I promise that I have prepared adequately for this task. If anything bad should happen to me as a result of participating in this contest, it's my own damn fault.
Purpose of the trip: to attend a COST B22 conference on drug development for parastic diseases.
Number of presentations at this conference: 37 talks, 59 posters.
Number of these that I understood completely: 1 ("Welcome to Dundee" by Sir Philip Cohen, Dean of the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.)
Best student poster, according to the panel of judges: "Meta caspase of Leishmania major parasites: arginine specific serine protease with a role in yeast programmed cell death" by Iveth Gonzalez et al. This narrowly defeated "TbAT1/P2 and drug resistance in Human African Trypanosomiasis in the field" (Anne Kazibwe et al.) and "Inhibitors of 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase as potential treatments for HAT" (Gian Filippo Ruda et al.), among others.
Best poster title, according to me: "Trypamosoma cruzi and beta-lapachone derived naphthoimidazoles: induction of alternative death styles" by R.F.S. Menna-Barreto et al. (The poster was about how these drugs can kill the parasite in different ways, depending on the stage of the parasite's life cycle.)
Best self-effacing remark made during a talk: The comment by Mike Gelb (from the University of Washington) that his lab's modification of compound JJ121 to retain inhibition of lanosterol 14-demethylase while eliminating interactions with protein farnesyltransferase in humans was "like falling off a log."
Best use of ambiguity during a talk: Vincent Delespaux (from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp) talked about parasites' development of drug resistance ("Isometamidium resistance in T. congolense: a possible role of secondary multidrug transporters?") and at one point also noted his difficulties in persuading funding agencies to support this research. His next slide was titled, "Trying to survive a hostile environment."
Most vivid critique of research priorities: People who focus all their efforts on sequencing DNA are, according to Matt Berriman, "Just tossing genomes into the furnace."
Approximate number of jokes made during the conference about Alan Fairlamb's love of trypanothione reductase: 15.
Approximate number of rabbits seen during a one-hour run in Dundee: 100.
Biggest drawback of Scotland's beautiful public parks: the absence of public bathrooms.
Least tempting ad seen in a restaurant window: "Haggis Samosas Are Back!"
My office for my new job is in the University of Washington's Health Sciences Building, the same building where I spent several years as a graduate student. That's not the weird part, though. The weird part is that, although I'm now in a completely different field, and although Health Sciences is an enormous structure (a third of a mile long and, in one part, 16 stories high), I'm stationed just down the hall from the lab where I did my graduate work. I go up one floor to the hospital cafeteria for mid-afternoon salads, just as I used to. Sometimes I park at the bike rack I used to use -- although my bicycle is nicer now, my helmet and lock are the same -- and sometimes I run into my old adviser there.
One obvious difference is that, although I'm once again on the negative-1st floor (or the 0th floor, depending on your numbering conventions), my new boss' office is on the 13th floor. At the start of a recent meeting with him, I casually mentioned that all the stair-climbing might help me prepare for my next event -- "a 100-mile race with 18,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain."
"Oh, are you doing Western States?" he asked with an equally casual tone. "I once had a rotation student [Carol O'Hear] who ran that one. Her first time, the medical staff made her stop at mile 97. She was really upset about that."
A boss who is familiar with and unfazed by 100-mile races? That's different, too.
On Sunday I headed out for my final pre-Western States long run: three laps of a hilly 16-mile trail loop around Tiger Mountain in Issaquah. Ralph Pooler, also training for WS, had shown me the loop nine days earlier, so now I was ready to navigate it by myself. My car was fully stocked with Gu2O, water, PowerGels, and crackers and cookies. I had even brought my bathroom scale so that I could monitor my hydration status from lap to lap. Nothing could possibly disrupt my carefully planned afternoon workout.
Nothing, perhaps, except for the trio of Mike Adams, Krissy Moehl, and Scott Jurek. I was all of 38 minutes into my first lap when I encountered them on their way from one distant place (Rattlesnake Ridge?) to another (the Red Town trailhead at Cougar Mountain). I quickly abandoned my original plan in favor of going wherever they were going at whatever their pace was. 48 miles is an awfully long way to run by oneself, and I couldn't resist having some company for two or three hours.
The company was great while it lasted. Then it was time for me to retrace my steps back to Tiger with the help of Scott's handwritten directions. By the time I finally weighed in back at the High Point trailhead where I had parked, I had lost ten pounds -- over 6% of my body weight. I also felt nauseated, a rarity for me, and more than a little tired.
If this had been a Western States aid station, the hydration cops would have forced me to stop until I had regained a few pounds. As it was, though, I was free to take as many stupid risks as I wanted. My first instinct was to grab a couple of bottles and head back out, so that's what I did. It seemed like a good exercise in summoning up the will to continue.
As I started walking up the West Tiger 3 trail, the part of my brain that was still working reconsidered the decision I had just made. How much did I really know about the sequelae of moderate-to-severe dehydration? At what point do the organ systems start shutting down? Perhaps right now was not the time to find out.
I turned around, jogged back to the car, got in and drove home. For today, 40 miles would have to suffice.
Although my wife and I watch only one TV program -- House -- our lack of cable TV service makes it hard to keep up with that show. Until recently, we relied on my brother-in-law to "TiVo" it, and we'd watch it on evenings when we invited ourselves over for dinner. Then my sister gave me an iTunes gift card for my birthday, which allowed us to reduce the frequency of our "militant yet lazy houseguest" visits by downloading episodes onto our computer.
This past week, we made it through our entire backlog of old episodes. Now what? We decided to sample some earlier work of House cast member Robert Sean Leonard -- specifically the movie Dead Poets Society. I really liked it overall, which made me all the more upset that protagonist John Keating (played by Robin Williams) is guilty of one of my pet peeves: quoting the final lines of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as if completely oblivious to the overall meaning of the poem.
Maybe I'm being overprotective of Frost's words, since I grew up in Vermont, which claims him as one of its own (though New Hampshire and Massachusetts might disagree). But really, if you make a film about an inspiring teacher with a profound understanding of poetry, and if the erudite instructor, in urging his students to find their own voice, offers up a few stirring lines of poetry in support of that notion, is it too much to ask that he recite an excerpt whose sentiment is not completely undercut by the poem from which it comes?
If you are considering using the last two or three lines of "The Road Not Taken" as part of your email signature or home page or yearbook profile or graduation speech, please read and think about the whole poem -- all 20 lines, reprinted below -- before heading down that particular road.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I've probably been cramming too many ultramarathons into the first half of this year. One indication of this is the fact that I haven't done any sustained, serious training since February; almost all my time since then has been devoted to recovering from one race or resting up for the next one. The latest example is my current training program for Western States, which, in a nutshell, is: (1) recover from the Miwok 100K for three weeks; (2) train hard for one week; (3) taper for three weeks.
It's kind of ridiculous, but it does force me to think very carefully about my priorities. With phase 2 lasting all of a week, I can't squeeze in more than a couple big workouts, so the two I do had better be good ones!
In descending order of scariness, the aspects of Western States that concern me most are: (1) the 23,000 feet of cumulative descent (which is sure to destroy my quads); (2) the sheer length of the race (38 miles farther than I've ever run before); (3) the probable need to consume "real food" (in addition to the sports drinks and energy gels to which I'm accustomed) during a race of this length; (4) the extreme heat of the first 80 or so miles; and (5) the many uphills (totaling 18,000 feet of elevation gain).
Living in Seattle, there's not a lot I can do about #4 without resorting to drastic measures such as running while wearing excessive clothing or running on a treadmill in a stuffy room. (No, thanks.) But my hard week includes two long (48-mile), very hilly runs during which I'll practice consuming pretzels/cookies/etc., thus simultaneously addressing concerns #1, #2, #3, and #5. Then in the last three weeks I'll do some additional uphill running, which in moderate doses shouldn't prevent my muscles from recovering from the hard week. Aside from that, I'll just do a lot of easy 6-mile commuting runs.
Completing this lackluster "program" won't do much for my confidence, but harboring a bit of humility and fear may prove useful on race day.