inauspicio.us

got pretty far ahead of myself this afternoon and …

got pretty far ahead of myself this afternoon and signed up for a half ironman in maryland on june 8 of next year. hopefully, i’ll be ready for it by then. it’s one of the fastest courses in the world (winning time last year was 3:44 by double hawaii ironman champion tim deboom), and a hawaii qualifier so the competition should be great. hopefully it will be a good opportunity to have at my half-ironman pr, my softest pr despite having trimmed it by nineteen minutes this past september.

i like the half-ironman because i can conceptualize the times as similar to a mile run on the track, scaled up to hours. the training is more time intensive, but at the end of the day you’re looking at similar statistics: few men have gone below 4:00; no women have gone below 4:00; winning times at club-level events are usually around 4:20; and so on. it just feels like the times scale well. anyway my goal for next year is a time in the low to mid 4:20s. i’m planning two half ironman distance races, one in june on a flat course in maryland and one in new hampshire in august with hills. so there will be plenty of opportunity. and, hopefully, plenty of time to train. i will really have to start spending some quality time with my bike.

anyway. other stuff today? its almost christmas, and i’ve been spending a lot of time at work writing a new Acceptable Use Policy. it would actually be easier to read if it were written as a mathematical proof, but few people would stand for that level of apparent obfuscation. also, conclusive evidence that my mother thinks i’ve not actually moved away and become a grownup but rather am spending a prolonged time at summer camp: she sent me a care package today. really. not to trivialize it: it was extremely touching, everyone agreed that the cookies were great, and frankly i need the cookies more now than i did at summer camp. as far as i am aware, my mom bakes cookies once per year, at christmastime. chocolate chip, from the nestle toll house recipe, and sugar cookies made with a press from an old, secret family recipe. i’m sure its still the same press we had when i was four: two turns for a nice looking cookie, three for a huge, shapeless blob that sticks to the extruder plate. anyway, it was both touching and hilarious to get an honest to god care package in the mail. like i said, it felt like summer camp all over again, only without so many bibles floating around.

summer camp, funny that you should mention it, was actually my first persistent exposure to the bible. having grown up mostly UU, i didn’t really know much about it. i had the bible i’d gotten when i was eight from sunday school, with my name written in it. but i never, like, read it or anything. except the last verse of revelations “may the grace of the lord god be with all the saints¹.” anyhow when i got to the lutheran summer camp at the somewhat impressionable age of thirteen, i was not so jaded as a lot of the other kids were about it. i showed my parents when i got home: “check this out! ohmygosh, its such a funny book! look: ‘when abraham was 253 years old he had a son called joshua. and abraham lived after the birth of joshua for 517 years. thus all the days of abraham were 770 years, and he died’” and so on. i thought it was just about the funniest thing i had ever read.

next time we will deal with a clever use of recursion in the new cceptable use policy. stay tuned.

¹Some versions omit “all”, others omit “the saints.” the footnote, truthully, was my favorite part.