My Track Record

Phil Crowther lived in a neighborhood filled with bad guys.

Sometimes they would sneak into his house and try to steal his toy cars. Phil would scare them away by shining his flashlight at them. They were so afraid of the light and would run off so fast that nobody ever saw them except Phil.

One night, Phil noticed a bad guy in the TV room. Phil grabbed his flashlight and pointed it toward the room, but the batteries were dead. For a moment, Phil froze with surprise, and his pacifier fell out of his mouth. Then he entered the room and tried to flip the light switch on the wall. The bad guy blocked him.

Phil thought some spare batteries were on the desk, so he stumbled to the desk in the dark. He ran his hands over the desk and found something that felt like a big hunk of plastic. It wasn’t a battery, but maybe it was another flashlight? Phil picked it up and aimed it where he thought the bad guy was.

Across the room, the TV turned on, producing a stream of light, music, and shouting. The bad guy was so frightened that he left immediately.

“Bye bye, bad guy,” said Phil. He looked at the remote control in his hand, used it to start a Dora The Explorer video, sat down in a comfortable chair, and put his pacifier back in his mouth.

Posted by crowther at 1:08 AM | Permalink

Until recently, I had maintained a life-long policy of wearing skimpy racing tops only for races. Donning a singlet in a non-racing context has always seemed equivalent to announcing to the world, "I take myself, and my running, MUCH too seriously."

My morning commute has prompted me to reevaluate this policy. My 5.8-mile run from home to the lab leaves me sweaty and stinky. Not wanting to overwhelm my coworkers with Eau de Crowther, I towel off and change shirts, but it would be even better to perspire less. So my old singlets -- from my rave-green one to my black-and-yellow "Bumble Racer" to my Team USA jerseys -- are back in circulation.

With my singlet and my commuting backpack, I must appear to be training for some sort of elite urban survival challenge. I guess it's OK to look funny as long as I don't smell too bad.

Posted by crowther at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

"He's got DNA! He's got DNA! But he doesn't have four nucleotides like we do; he has six!"

This is a line from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which was shown last night as a Fremont Outdoor Movie sponsored by The Coho Team of Windermere Agents to support Solid Ground.

I didn't recall E.T. as being a movie with much to say about science, but it actually explores the topic in some depth. For starters, did you know that E.T. was a botanist? That reviving-the-flowers trick wasn't magic; it was the subject of his dissertation!

During much of the movie, human scientists seem to be cast as enemies of E.T. and the people who care about him. In school, Elliott's biology teacher introduces a frog dissection exercise with dry disinterest, and Elliott seems downright heroic when he frees the frogs (and then kisses the prettiest girl in the class). Meanwhile, the government scientists who capture and experiment upon E.T. are shown in perpetual darkness, with dark and foreboding music to match.

But then E.T. dies (or seems to), and the scientists take off their helmets and we can finally see their faces and the disappointment and pain that is written on them. We realize that these people are not evil after all; they cared about E.T. and tried hard to save him, however ineffective their methods may have been.

Yes, it turns out that the human scientists are much like E.T.: frightening and easily misunderstood until you get a good close look at them. This isn't exactly a philosophical breakthrough, but it's a more nuanced view of scientists than you get in most films, where they are often portrayed as brilliant heroes or as megalomaniacal villians.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to my underground lair and put the finishing touches on my battalion of cyborg zombie warriors.

Posted by crowther at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I know I shouldn't get my hopes up, but every so often, a rumor surfaces that somebody is making a push to get an ultrarunning event into the Olympics, and whenever that happens, I feel an involuntary flicker of excitement. My marathon best of 2:22 doesn't even get me into the U.S. Olympic Trials, much less the Olympics, so my only shot at the five-ring circus would come in a much longer race (if one were added before I got too old).

Regarding the 2012 and 2016 Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently announced the inclusion of certain sports and exclusion of others. Ultramarathoning was not even mentioned as being under consideration, so I guess we still have a long way to go.

While I may never make it to the Olympics, I do hope to complete a 100-mile race some day. I don't have a particular event in mind, but I'd probably do best at a relatively flat one like Rocky Raccoon. The other night, I dreamed that I was indeed competing in a 100-miler: the upcoming Cascade Crest 100. This itself is kind of funny, since its terrain is anything but flat (as I found out firsthand in my first-ever ultra pacing experience eight years ago). However, the CC100 of my dream bore little resemblence to the CC100 of reality.

Parts of the dream race meandered through a rustic suburban environment that might have been part of a college campus. I specifically remember getting to mile 70 and being told to cross the street, enter a building (which resembled Schmitz Hall at UW except for being smaller and having a wooden exterior), climb the stairs to the 3rd floor, find Jackie the Registrar, sign her log, and then exit the building and move on to the next checkpoint.

I was leading the race, feeling strong, and elated to have only 30 miles to go. But hot on my heels were Tom Ederer (the actual winner of the 2008 CC100) and his pacer, Scott Jurek. I'll never know whether I managed to hold Tom off, since I awoke minutes after exiting the Schmitz-like building.

Some ultra enthusiasts may take this dream as a sign that it's time for me to tackle the CC100 or another similar event. For now, though, I think I'll just keep dreaming.

Posted by crowther at 8:02 AM | Permalink

Our conversations with our son usually follow one of a few basic patterns. Here's one:

Phil [pointing]: What is that?
Dad: That's a car, Phil.
Phil: Why?

Even though these "why" questions keep coming up, I can't quite tell what he's getting at. Why do I know it's a car? Why do cars exist? Why do we call them cars? Why is this particular car here right now?

Phil also asks a lot of "where" questions. They're generally easier to answer, but not always. For example, this morning I was pushing him in the baby jogger while trying to locate Mommy and her group of Sunday morning running friends....

Phil: Where's Mommy?
Dad: I don't know, Phil. It's a mystery.
Phil: Mystery? Where's the mystery?
Dad: It's right here. We're trying to figure it out right now.
Phil: Oh. [pause] Where's the mystery?
Dad: It's all around us. You're livin' it, kiddo!
Phil: [longer pause] Where's the mystery?

Posted by crowther at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Some bullet points from the past few days:

* At work, I told my boss that he was hallucinating (long story), did an experiment of my own for the first time in months, and advised a colleague to add Splenda to his mice's water. He wants to ensure that they drink the water, which contains a drug, but doesn't want to use real sugar, which might lead to bacterial contamination. The colleague characterized my suggestion as "not terrible."

* I spent a couple of evenings trying to figure out whether I can use a single application/website to track friends' blogs, Twitter tweets, and Facebook updates. The first two can be handled easily with a feed reader such as Google Reader, but integrating Facebook feeds appears difficult at best. Others have suggested FriendFeed, tweetDeck, and Gist, none of which have worked for me thus far. Can't anyone spare me from the agony of having to actually log on to Facebook?

* I did my first-ever stroller-handicapped interval workout this morning. Phil urged me to "wun wee fast" (run really fast), so we followed Mommy and her friend Tina around Green Lake while they did a series of one-minute pick-ups separated by one-minute jogs.

* Here's Phil's latest knock-knock joke.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Green orange!

* Words of the week: SOBERING and SLEAZES. I made them both in a game of Scrabble, earning the 50-point bonus for each.

* Quote of the week, from Mommy: "Phil is so adorable when he's compliant." Perhaps next week Mommy will generate a quote that covers the other 85% of the time.

As Ryan Carrera would say, that's all I've got.

Posted by crowther at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In situations where counting is appropriate, my son used to say, with the deliberateness of a toddler trying to speak correctly, "One, two, ee..." He is somewhat delayed speech-wise, so I always assumed that "ee" meant "three."

More recently, he has extended the sequence to be "One, two, ee, nine, ten."

Maybe he's really bad at counting. Or maybe he's not counting at all. Maybe when he says "ee" he really does mean the mathematical constant equal to 2.718..., and is offering the sequence 1, 2, e, 9, 10 as a Fibonacci-like challenge. What's the pattern? What numbers come after 10?

Or maybe his father is overthinking this just a bit.

Posted by crowther at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)