Winning Is Fun

My younger son's all-star soccer team won their second consecutive tournament yesterday. They won the championship game 3-0 so there were no shootout heroics. He did make one beautiful save. The other team hit a perfect cross from the right side and he jumped up to get his hands on it, which deflected the ball to the left. As another player from the other team came in from the left to hit the deflection, Henry darted to his right and kicked the ball out of bounds. Even Henry was impressed by it. The team was in overdrive for this whole tournament though, outscoring their opponents 24-2, with both goals-against coming on penalty kicks.

Blogs I Still Read

I'm not sure if blogging has become so mainstream that nobody talks about it anymore, or if it's a fad that has passed its peak. Personally, i read very few blogs regularly now, and a good percentage of those are work-related. Among the hand-full that i still visit almost daily are:

• WarrenEllis.com - Warren is (unbeknownst to him) sort of my Beatrice, in the sense that he is my guide to a kind of underworld. Plus, there are often pictures of persons unclothed.
• Postmodern Sass - Still fun to read, still sui generis, not still in Canada.
• Global Guerrillas - Because it scares me.
• BoingBoing - More of a metablog, but in a good way. Basically the Slashdot of oddness.
  

I think there are two main reasons why my blog enthusiasm has waned. The first is that i just can't stomach reading political opinion anymore, even if (maybe especially if) i agree with it. The other is that anything that's interesting on the web will be forwarded to me within 15 minutes by my virtual network of acquaintances. For example, the Peanut Butter Manifesto, about the problems of my beloved employer, was IM'd to me by three people.

Highlights of November

Some stuff that happenened this month:

• I ran a 1:23.52 half marathon at the Silver Strand Half Marathon, my personal best and a good sign that i'm on track to run sub-3 for my next marathon.
• Henry is playing goalie for his league's soccer All-Star team. They just won their first tournament and he was the hero of the championship game, saving the first two goals when the game had to be decided by penalty kicks after a 1-1 tie.
• Nathan played the cello for his school's advanced orchestra in a public concert at the local performing arts center. He also played with the younger middle-school orchestra because they didn't have a sufficiently advanced cellist yet.

Henry's at the bottom of this pile:

Voter Apathy

This seems like it should be a good time for one of those long, philosophical posts on my view of the world. I'm pleased with the results of Tuesday's election, i'm elated that Rumsfeld is gone, and i'm relieved that Bush won't be able to use his last two years to screw things up even worse. But the only thing remarkable enough to capture my notice is how little i really care. At least we get to have a little fun at the expense of the right for a while.

Sex and Candy

Halloween again. All holidays should be based around the idea of candy as currency. My sons chose the following for their costume themes this year: Nathan is a skateboarder from the Dogtown era; Henry is, for the third straight year, the grim reaper. There was a report on TV about how costumes for women (and girls) are now less about being scary and more about being sexy. I guess the theory is that ghosts and vampires are pretty tame compared to all of the crap out in the real world that can scare the hell out of us. So if a teenage girl wants to scare somebody, she can at least scare her parents.

Mid-Life Crisis Car

Should this be my mid-life crisis car:

http://www.porsche.com/all/caymansem/product/

Spain

[Started this on September 18, but got sidetracked]

Emily and i left for Spain early on Sunday morning-- San Diego to O'Hare to Madrid by Monday morning. We had to get to Bilbao by Monday evening, so we had already reserved a rental car. In all the times i've been to Europe, i've never driven so that was an adventure. We had a bit of trouble getting out of Madrid, but eventually we just started following signs heading toward Burgos.

The terrain just north of Madrid looks remarkably similar to southern California, including the brown vegetation. The freeway looks similar also, except that the signs are in Spanish. Just what is a "Cambio de sentido", by the way? We stopped in a town called Lerma, just short of Burgos to try to get some lunch. None of the bars, restaurants, tapacerias, whatever, looked particularly inviting, so we just went to a local market and bought some stuff to make sandwiches and we managed to negotiate the purchase of 3 apples and 2 peaches from the produce lady.

North of Burgos the terrain starts to get hillier, until it's basically mountains near Bilbao. As you enter Bilbao it seems like a fairly bustling metropolis, but it's actually a fairly small city that just doesn't really have any outskirts. Nonetheless it took us quite a while to locate the hotel. The whole "grid" idea isn't widely used in European cities, and Bilbao is no exception. I'm sure it all makes sense once you've been there a while, but the combination of round-abouts and apparently random one-way streets reminds me of playing Zork in college.

Eventually we found the Sheraton and tried to take a nap. Couldn't sleep too long though since there was a reception that night at 7. I was tired, but i figured it would be best to go to the reception, have dinner, and try to get on a fairly normal schedule. After the reception, Emily and i and my colleague Todd and his wife and daughter, and several of the employees of the host company went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. It was only 9pm, which is apparently a bit early by Spanish standards, but they served us anyway. Most of the food was excellent, but i also formed an aversion to a standard north-Spanish dish, which is basically cod (bacalao) in a sauce called "pil-pil".

The next day was the first day of the conference, which included my presentation. It went OK. The afternoon sessions were hard with the jet lag in effect, but i started to feel better toward the end of the day. After the conference we got a guided tour of the Guggenheim. The art was somewhat sparse beyond the permanent displays, but the building is amazing. It looks so bizarre and disorienting from the outside, but it's quite soothing and well-structured inside. The most memorable exhibit inside was the set of giant steel sculptures by Richard Serra. Although you can't touch them and they don't move, it's still an interactive exhibit of sorts, since you can walk around and within the sculptures.

We had dinner that evening at another hotel, although it was not dinner in the sense i'm used to. Basically it was an extended cocktail party with lots of wine and hor d' oeuvres. Not quite tapas, but not quite traditional course either. It was fun. An excellent way to do dinner for a large group of people, since you can move around and change conversation partners.

The highlight of the next day was Chris Anderson of "Long Tail" fame. He's turned the idea into something of a cottage industry; and it does seem like a valuable insight with regard to the Internet's impact on markets. Paul Lamere also gave a fun presentation on his work on content-based recommendation.

I skipped the afternoon session so that Emily and i could have lunch and see some of Bilboa. We went to a place called Victor Montes in the old part of Bilbao. We had pigeon and some nice Rioja. We went for a walk afterwards, trying to find a church called the Basilica Begona,which turned out to be closed. We spent a couple of hours walking around the mall across the street from our hotel, and had dinner in our room.

The next day we got up and started driving back to Madrid. The drive back was pretty much the same as the drive up, until we got to Madrid and got sort of lost. It took us a while but we finally located ourselves on the map. We circled around our hotel on Gran Via for a while until we finally found a parking structure at the Plaza del Carmen. We checked in at the hotel and walked back to the car to get our luggage, whereupon we found that the side street next to our hotel is the workplace for a fairly significant number of prostitutes. So far my opinion of Madrid was low, and i found myself wondering how to say "shithole" in Spanish. We went for another walk and went to the Prado Museum. The art at the Prado was interesting to me with my humanities background, but it was just too much after a day of fighting traffic and trying to get oriented.

The next morning we left plenty early to get to the airport (we thought). We got stuck in a bit of traffic, but nothing too bad, and we managed to get the rental car returned and up to the terminal with about 2 hours to go before the flight. There was a long line for baggage/boarding passes, but we didn't worry too much since we had plenty of time.

We got the ticket counter with just about an hour left before our flight. We started to check in, whereupon the guy at the counter told us that the flight was "closed" and that he couldn't give us boarding passes. We thought he must have mistaken our flight number so we started explaining that we had an hour still, but he told us that they close out the flights 55 minutes before the flight. We screamed and yelled and begged and pleaded, but to make a long story short we missed our flight. Fortunately, there was another flight to New York that day, and we managed to get on it, though of course we'd missed our connection, and my dad was scheduled to leave San Diego the followed.

We ended up spending a night in JFK, but we did get a flight home early the next morning. We had to arrange for some friends to get the kids so that my dad could make his flight. It was not a fun experience, but at least the kids didn't have to go through it. My advice: DO NOT fly Iberia airlines unless you happen to be Iberian.

I like Spain, though i don't think i got to see the best of it. The food and wine are good, the climate is nice, and the people are friendly. I speak just enough Spanish to get myself in trouble, and the Spanish lifestyle fits in nicely with my essentially nocturnal nature. I still want to get to Barcelona and the south of Spain, but this was a nice introduction.

Summery Summary

The problem with blogging is that when there's actually stuff happening in my life, i don't have any time to blog about it. Summer's about over, the kids are back in school, so i figured i'd write myself a brief synopsis of the last month.

Nathan is now in 7th(!) grade and Henry is in 4th. They're both playing soccer again this fall; they've been practicing for about a month, but games don't start until this Saturday (9/9).

My job has been kicking my butt. I finally managed to hire all of the people that i had reqs for, but we still have about 3x as much work as we have capacity for. We also have frequent changes in direction and priority; so much so that even agile methods can't handle the chaos.

Emily and i are going to Spain next week. I was invited to give a presentation at this event, so we decided to make a small vacation out of it. We'd have probably stayed longer, but my dad is coming out to watch the kids and we didn't want to have him away from home too long with my mom still recovering from heart surgery.

I ran the America's Finest City half marathon a couple of weekends ago. I ran my personal best (1:28.12) and my first half-marathon under 1:30. I need to shave off about 3 minutes by November when i plan to run the Silver Strand half.

The Dismantling of My Psyche

The mid-life crisis is most often viewed as a desperate attempt to cling to youth. But i think that most of the mid-life crisis variations are about a transition from the illusions of your youth to the reality of life: literal disillusionment. Some of the realizations that you must confront are bleak: yes, you are going to die some day; no, you are not going to realize all of your dreams. Others are just sort of depressing. You are officially too old to be referred to as a wunderkind. You are no longer eligible to win the Fields Medal. You've passed a point where your body is not going to maintain itself.

The hard part though, at least for me, is the more mundane stuff. By the time you reach 40+, your degree of career success is fairly apparent, so if you're not recognized among your peers it's probably not because you haven't blossomed yet. Any physical imperfections are no longer diminished by youth, so if you were beauty-challenged to begin with you can't fool yourself into believing that you are "quirky" or "alternative". You're just ugly. If you haven't taken the risks you wish you had, you probably aren't going to.

What you're left with are self-imposed challenges that mean little to the rest of the world (i run marathons and do martial arts). And if you're lucky like me, you have family. You can't take credit for your family, but if they love you and you love them then they contribute in some intangible way to your self-esteem. Being that middle-aged dude who lives alone in a studio apartment and talks about his "girlfriend" would be suicidally depressing to me.

But you realize at some point in your growth process that it's all illusion, even the things you hold most dear. This is, i think, the mid-life crisis, and it happens in mid-life because that's the first point in your life where your fear of the unknown is overridden by the knowledge that there are worse things than death . You have to tear down all of the elaborate mental framework you've built up over the years, and then find something useful to build out of it. If you can, i suspect that your later years can be a time of self-realization and enlightenment. If you can't, your later years are a tedious series of near-identical days that you eventually hope will simply end.

If all this sounds vaguely Buddhist, that's not really my intention. I don't claim any sort of awakening has or will occur. In fact, i feel that it's the opposite in the sense that i have no greater understanding of reality, except the realization that it is and will probably remain elusive. Not only do we have these pitiful excuses for sensory organs that allow us to only vaguely and partially sample our environment, but we cling to primitive models of interaction to make sense of our human relationships: faith, trust, morality, family, religion. All in all i love life and am grateful for the opportunity to have existed; but that doesn't mean that it will have mattered.

Sub Three

This last week marked the first week in a 24 week training program for my next marathon. My goal for the this one (Carlsbad Marathon, Jan. 21) is a bit ambitious: i want to break 3 hours. Sub three hour marathons are not rare by any stretch, but for me it's going to be a serious challenge. First, it's more than 15 minutes better than my current PR, which is a huge jump. Second, i'm not really built to run fast. Although i'm down to around 10% body fat, i still weigh in at about 180, which is about 50 pounds heavier than elite runners. Finally, i'll be 43 by that time.

The first step in my preparation has been to try to lose weight. I'm shooting for about 175, and around 8% body fat by race time. So far that's been hard, though i've managed to lose almost 5 pounds. The program i'm trying to follow is from Pete Pfitzinger's "Advanced Marathoning". It ranges from about 50 to 70 miles per week. That's a bit more mileage than i'm used to, but i think training volume is going to be key. I know i can run the sub 3 pace for a half, so the trick is going to be to get myself confident that i can maintain it past 20. However, doing 10-15 mile runs mid-week is going to be hard to maintain.

My first week was mixed. I did a really nice 7 miler on Thursday. I felt relaxed and finished right around 50 minutes, which is just a touch slower than my necessary marathon pace. I did a slow but OK 10 miler on Friday, and an adequate recovery run on Saturday. But my 13 mile run yesterday was a chore. Doesn't help that i was up late Saturday and drank too much, but still i'd have hoped for an easier run. This part of the program is an endurance "mesocycle", so i mostly just run a lot of miles. Not much VO2 max stuff until later. The only speed work at this time is some 100m strides built in to the Tuesday run.

I'm not sure if i can deal with making several attempts at this goal, as i did with Boston qualifying. Given the step up in mileage, training duration, speed, etc.; i can't imagine doing this every year until i succeed. I guess it will depend to a certain extent on how close i get. If i miss by a minute, i might be motivated to try again. If i miss by 10, it'll be hard to justify.