E.H. Lupton's Blog, page 12

Em oi! #370: Up to Our Old Tricks

Click to view an incredibly large version.

This comic took forever. I think you can tell why. I wrote the script back when we were in Salt Lake City. Actually, I wrote it on the plane back to Madison. Then I started to draw it…and then I started working on preliminary thesis research. B thinks that more abstract comics like this are “the way to go,” or at least what I should be doing more frequently, but they tend to be long and therefore time consuming.

We’ll file this under BF2050 .L86 2012 for Occult sciences—Human-alien encounters. Contact between humans and extraterrestrials—General works.

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, at least if you celebrate that holiday. We cooked for 10 people…actually we cooked for 30, but we invited 10. Next year, maybe we’ll make a bit less food (we made: risotto stuffed in a kabocha squash, roasted Brussels sprouts with cranberries and a balsamic glaze, oven-fried potatoes with pearl onions, roasted root vegetables, challah, camenbert en croute, and roasted garlic. Also people brought lots of stuff.). As I realized halfway through, most people are not as excited about Brussels sprouts as I am. (Well, they’re wrong.)

For dessert we wound up with: apple pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate marble cheesecake, caramel brownies, clementines, and strawberries. And frozen yoghurt. It turns out that despite the “live and active yoghurt cultures,” frozen yoghurt doesn’t agree with my poor lactose intolerant intestines. I guess I need to get some lactase pills–the leftover froyo isn’t going to eat itself.

It’s interesting…in Thai, the holiday is referred to as “วันขอบคุณพระเจ้า” literally “The day to thank G-d.” In English we just say “Thanksgiving,” i.e. “Giving Thanks,” without specifying to whom we are giving thanks. Personally I took the opportunity to give thanks to…well, my family, mostly, for coming to my house and letting me cook an absurd amount of food for them.

Em oi! #369: Cold Turkey

During the two week “no caffeine” period, Daniel and I both found that we missed not the stimulant but just coffee itself–the ritual, the warm beverage in the morning. We both began drinking decaf as a result, but I’ll tell you a secret–decaf just doesn’t taste as good as regular. Or at least, I’ve yet to encounter a brand of decaf that could hold a candle to my beloved Trung Nguyen.

I am still caffeine-free though (as far as I know. Like, I ate a cookie called a “mocha cookie” the other day, but it didn’t really taste like coffee and I didn’t feel caffeinated afterward). I actually feel pretty good, and mostly not sleepy in the afternoons like I used to get when I was drinking a lot of caffeine. I don’t know how long I will stay decaffeinated, though.

I have a lot of heart rate date for myself, since I usually wear a heart rate monitor when I run. It would be interesting to do some analysis on it and see if my average HR (while running) has changed now that I am off caffeine. I think it might have…but there are too many other factors to really say for sure. Oh well.

We’ll file this under RC567.5 .L86 2012 for Internal medicine—Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry—Psychiatry—Psychiatric aspects of personality and behavior conditions—Drug abuse. Substance abuse—Caffeine.

Yesterday I participated in the 21st Annual Literacy Network Run/Walk. Formerly known as the Canterbury Run/Walk after a much-beloved, now defunct bookstore, this was actually the first 5k I ever ran way back when I started running (I finished last that time). I wasn’t really going to write anything about this, but then I won 4th overall among women (results). I finished the 10k in 50:54, which is about an 8:12 pace. It didn’t feel like I was near my VO2 max or anything, but my legs were tired, so that’s as fast as I ran. I guess I shouldn’t have knocked out 12 miles on the dreadmill the day before?

The field was very small this year (101 finishers) because it was absolutely pissing down rain the entire time. Around mile 3, the rain slowed briefly, but then it picked up again. There was not a dry inch on me anywhere when I got done, and I still had to run two miles back to my car.

So for your amusement, here are before and after photos.

I was going to make B take a picture of me, but he was up at 5am with insomnia and decided to sleep in instead of getting up to watch me dither around. So I took this myself in the bathroom mirror.

Back in my car, about to choose between heat blowing on me and keeping the windshield unfogged.

 

I want to add two final thoughts to my race report from the Milwaukee Marathon. One is that both of the photos in the post were taken by MM people/their hired photographers and “borrowed” by me. The other is that twice on the course I heard the song “Gangnam Style” by Psy. I’ve also heard it on the radio recently–the mainstream, commercial, top 40 radio. I am really excited that an Asian pop song would make its way over here…but if South Korea is going to be the part of Asia that finally explodes into mainstream American consciousness, I have totally backed the wrong horse (China, Viet Nam, เมืองไทย).

Milwaukee Marathon

Hey guys, I ran a marathon! And I went sub-4 (in the most dramatic style, 3:59:59). This past Sunday, October 7th, I got to join about 3100 other runners in the 32nd annual Lakefront Marathon in Milwaukee. This was my third marathon (though my fifth race of 26.2 miles or more). But it almost didn’t happen. Take a look at this chart showing my running distances for the year.

As you can see, in June and July, my mileage fell dramatically as I pulled up lame with (what I was told was) a strained (“torn”) quad. By the time I was getting back on my feet (early August), I had only about ten weeks to train (including taper). My PT suggested that I should consider doing a half instead of a full; a suggestion I immediately discounted because: 1. He’s not a runner and doesn’t really understand what is required to train for a half versus a full (to be honest, I’m not sure he believed me when I told him how much I ran), and 2. I was already signed up for Lakefront.

Mid-August, I sat down and made up a training plan. Essentially, I run five days per week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. I planned to run my normal mileage on Tuesday-Thursday (generally eight to eleven miles per day depending on whether B wants to run or not, including a speed workout on Thursday) and then to increase my Saturday long run, ultimately to a distance of eighteen miles, and do a shorter long run of ten to twelve miles on Sunday. This is essentially what I did (though I topped out at twenty instead of eighteen). I also ran a test half marathon at the end of August when I was in Salt Lake City, and I came in at 1:59:26. According to the McMillan Running predictor, this suggests a marathon time of 4:11:21. But do keep in mind I was running at altitude, which can slow you down by about fifteen seconds per mile (I got this figure from my brother; no idea if it’s true or not, but I’ll pretend because then it sounds impressive to have broken two hours).

A Note on Speedwork

Before my injury, I was attending weekly track workouts. Of course, that had to stop, and once I was back to running, I started to worry that the workouts had caused or aggravated my injury, so I decided to hold off on returning until after the race. Instead, I did speedwork on my own on Thursday mornings.

I have two main routines I do:

1. Lupton 800s. These are my version of Yasso 800s, a workout typically done on a track that involves an 800 at speed x, then a cool-down for time (so if you run the 800 in 3:30, you get 3:30 to recover). Doing 10×800 is often felt to be useful in predicting marathon times-for example, if your average speed for the set was 3:30 per 800, you could probably expect to run your marathon in 3:30:00. My variations are based around not having a track readily accessible near my home, so I run my 800s on a mile-long, flattish stretch of road near my house. My cool-down, instead of being time-based, is distance-based–the other half of the 800 to get back to the “starting line” at the beginning of the mile stretch. I started with a set of seven and worked up to ten, slowly dropping the time I was aiming for. In the end, I was averaging about 3:54.

2. Dual Pace Runs. I read about this in one of the endless newsletters Active.com sends me, and it turned out to be pretty fun. Warm up for a  mile at whatever pace you fancy (I usually do about a 10:50-11:30, because I’m running with the dog). Then alternate between your half marathon pace and your marathon pace, doing half a mile of each for eight miles. Then cool down for a mile. So since my half pace was about 8:50 and my MP about 9:10, I’d run half a mile at 8:50, then slow down and do half a mile at 9:10. I like this workout because the distance is short enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming. This is also the longest workout I can do before leaving for work.

The Week Before

I posted midway through last week that I was feeling less crazy than I usually do during my taper. This proved true until about Thursday, when stress and other worries combined to turn me into a pacing, bread devouring fiend. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Anyway, the real issue started on Friday, when I woke up with a scratchy throat. I thought perhaps I had just been shouting too much during play practice, but on Saturday the feeling persisted. In addition, on Saturday for some reason I was achy. I don’t think I overdid it on Friday–my exercise level was normal or even reduced for me. This was troubling.

By Sunday morning my throat didn’t just feel scratchy, but had worked its way to painful and swollen.As I hauled my body out of bed at 5:30, I offered it a deal: Get through to noon in one piece, and I’ll give you a long nap and some time off next week. I dressed in the silent house (we were staying at my in-laws) and grabbed a breakfast of two slices of toast with PB and bananas. Then I sat down and tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on my reading until it was time to go. Of course, we left a few minutes late, because that’s the kind of people we are, and then the highway between West Bend and Grafton was detoured and, and, and. B left me near the starting line with about 20 minutes to go (because of how drop off and pickup worked, we didn’t get any pre- or post-race photos, sadly). I immediately went into Grafton High School (i.e., the starting line) and started hunting for a bathroom with a line shorter than ten people. No luck, but I did manage to get through and get out to the actual starting line just as they started playing the Star Spangled Banner. It was an impressively bad rendition, and I spent most of it trying to get my watch to connect to the satellites.

And then we were off! I had originally planned to run at a relatively slow pace–maybe 9:30s–until mile five, then pick it up and go 9:00-9:10 to mile twenty, and finally drop the hammer and see if I could do some 8:50s in the last 10k. But on race day, I started out pretty fast, and wound up staying at about the same tempo overall for the whole race. I had also planned to take a gel every seven miles. I stuck to this plan, had no stomach pains, and felt great. It was nice to pass people at mile twenty instead of bonk and spend two or three miles walking tearfully and in pain. I did have to make two pit stops. At some point, my watch got out of sync with the mile markers on the course, so I hit 26.2 right at the 26 mile marker. At that point, my watch said I had about two minutes to get to the finish line under four hours, so I took off as fast as I could. Final time: 3:59:59, good enough for 41st in my age group. Very dramatic too. My sore throat had cleared up a little ways into the run, or the endorphins hit and I didn’t notice it anymore. I did nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and the cold hit me for real on Tuesday night. Now I’m feeling much better. What worked:

The speed work. If I’d done more intense sprints, I would have been faster, but for ten weeks I’m pretty satisfied.
Nutrition plan. Three (decaf) gels and water at every aid station.
The last-minute decision to adapt my pacing plan to how I was feeling.
My shoes (Brooks PureGrit) were great and supportive and my socks (Balega) did not give me blister problems. Hurrah.

What could have worked better:

Clothes. I dithered about this and eventually went with shorts and a long-sleeved shirt because of the cold. My legs were fine, but my hands were quite chilly at times, especially when we were hit by a headwind off the lake during the last three miles.
Pre-race eating. I managed to go into the race a bit heavier than my normal racing weight, and also I ate a huge meal the night before and had to make two pit-stops. Should have taken a loperamide, I guess.
Due to a misunderstanding, B met me at the art museum instead of at the finish line, so somehow wound up walking down four flights of stairs to get to where his car was. I would have preferred not to do that.
The taper was relatively successful, I’ll admit. I wish I’d toned it down toward the end of week two and taken Friday completely off as well.

That’s really about it. I’m quite satisfied with how it all went. The course was great, downhill (and with a tailwind most of the way), and the crowds were enthusiastic. I saw a couple of signs that said “Run, random stranger, run!” and one that said, “Go Emily!” While I was clearly not their Emily, they still held it up and cheered as I went past. Best of all, near mile 18, someone had set up a “Paul Ryan Finish Line.” The last time I ran a marathon, Obama was running for his first term and there were people in the crowd holding signs reading, “You can DO it.” (That marathon was in DC.) It was nice to see something along the same vein here, though with a more Wisconsin-appropriate twist.

Now that I’ve done a couple of 50ks, it’s easy to forget how big a deal running a marathon is for almost everyone. I’ll admit it, this was kind of a big deal for me too.

Flowers from Mormon Central

I took this picture at the Mormon Holy See in SLC a few weeks ago. Tonight my brother Daniel helped walk me through the process of making it “less red” (per B’s request). I think it looks pretty good now.

Say what you will about the Mormons (and I’m sure you will), they certainly have some nice gardens in Temple Square.

 

Em oi! #368: I guess maybe I am, actually

“Gold Digger” by Kanye West (feat. Jamie Foxx) is actually a pretty good song, using a back riff reminiscent of Ray Charles (I cannot claim that this came to me spontaneously; I heard an NPR program on Ray Charles the other day and the song got mentioned). Before the other day, I’d only heard it made fun of on the Daily Show. Anyway, I thought maybe I would try to write some lyrics that were a bit less…demeaning? (Actually I haven’t decided if I think the lyrics are demeaning or just kind of cynical. Hah.)

Clearly, I’m bound for the big time with this lyrics-writing business.

I have now completed the paper that was preoccupying me for the last two weeks (actually the last six months, but there were times I wasn’t actively working on it). Hopefully by December I will have finished all my revisions and submitted it for consideration for the printed volume from the conference, and then I can stop thinking about it before it turns into a dissertation. Because it is that way headed. Feh.

I’m on taper for the Milwaukee Marathon next week, which is great fun. Um, sort of. In general, I am feeling a lot less taper madness than usual, possibly because I am using a different tapering strategy (something more like this). But with the stress for the conference, I did wind up running (reduced) mileage every day last week, instead of taking off Monday and Friday like I am supposed to. And I am feeling fussy about my weight again…this is something I go through about a hundred times per year, and I know I will be back to normal within a few weeks of the race, but man. But as B put it this morning, the week before a marathon is not the time to decide to lose weight. And I have noticed, with an increase in sleep and in calorie intake, that my running is faster and that I feel stronger. So maybe I’ve put on some muscle and it’s not a bad thing.

I am going to go do my work now. I’ll be back next week with a race report, and hopefully a new comic too. Maybe some photos later in the week if I’m lucky. Lots of exciting things* have come up in the last couple of weeks, but most of them I can’t talk about yet. But watch this space.

We’ll file this comic under TN420 L86 2012 for Mining engineering. Metallurgy–Ore deposits and mining of particular metals–Gold and silver ore deposits and mining. Precious metals–Gold ore deposits and mining–General works.

* Exciting things in a professional capacity. I’m still not pregnant.

Em ơi! #367: SLC Diaries, part 1

Oh my friends, I have been busy. I have so much I want to blog about, including other comics and a book review I’ve been sitting on for two weeks, but it all has to wait until some mythical time “when my other work is finished.” Yes. Well. I’m off to Montreal for the weekend, and I’m hopeful that I will at least get another comic sketched out.

This comes from a trip B and I took two weeks ago to Salt Lake City to visit my brother and his wife. I will confess–like, I think, all dog owners, I think the breed of dog that my dog is (shiba inu) is the best breed, so when I meet other dogs I usually think, “Well, but why didn’t you get a shiba?” But Mac immediately became one of the animals I care a lot about, bypassing that question entirely. He was entirely sweet and amazing. He’s also very relaxed. The difference between an almost two year old dog like Maya and a ten year old dog is incredible.

Filing this one under: SF429.C3 L86 2012 for Animal culture–Pets–Dogs–By breed, A-Z–Cairn terrier.

Here are a few photos from the trip. Click to embiggen.

The Thai actually says something like, “Cruelty is not silent.”

I ran over some of those mountains on the left there. I don’t know which one specifically. It was called Little Mountain.

Em oi! #39, 78, 90, 94, 147, 149, 158, and 162: Running Jokes

GV529 .L86 2007 (Recreation. Leisure—Physical education and training—Gymnastics. Gymnastics exercises—Heavy exercises—Jumping exercises.) Guest appearance by Ly!



GV498 .L86 2007 (Recreation. Leisure—Physical education and training—Gymnastics. Gymnastics exercises—Calisthenics. Group exercises—Rope jumping or skipping.) Guest appearance by Chandra!

GV1061.8.P75 L86 2007 (Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Other special topics, A-Z—Psychological aspects.) Guest appearance by my sister-in-law, Claire.



GV1061.8.P75 L86 2007a (Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Other special topics, A-Z—Psychological aspects.) Same deal, pretty much. Guest here is my brother Daniel.

RC553.M36 L86 2008 (Internal medicine—Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry—Psychiatry—Specific pathological states, A-Z—Masochism). Daniel again. He actually owns a ton of shirts with stripes on the front, in case you were curious. Or maybe he owns only one shirt like that and I just have some weird belief about his wardrobe. That could also be true.

GV1065.17.T73 L86 2008 (Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Marathon running—Special topics, A-Z—Training). I think that when I drew this, I was actually training for my first half marathon. I remember telling B when we met that my memoir will eventually be called I Wish I Were Eating Curry Right Now. It’s a recurring theme in my life.

GV1062.5.M3 L86 2008 (Recreation. Leisure—Sports—Track and field athletics—Foot racing. Running—Distance running—Individual races, events, etc., A-Z). Here, M3 is the Cutter number for the half marathon at the Madison Marathon.

HD9993.S952 L86 2008 (Industries. Land use. Labor—Special industries and trades—Recreational equipment. Sporting goods—Special products, A-Z—Swimming pools—General works. History.) The pool in question is at the Princeton Club West. In case you were curious. Now I mostly swim at the local Gold’s, which has solid lane lines. I miss the Roschach-like tiles on the previous one.

A ton of people have come up to me in the last two weeks to tell me they want to start running. Even my mom is getting in on it. (Hi, Mom!) So to celebrate, here are some of the comics I’ve drawn about running. Not all of them, even–I have drawn a lot of comics about running I guess.

Anyway, I am not feeling especially funny this week and I need to take some time off. I’ll be back next week with new stuff.

Book Review: Naked in Korea: A Kentuckian’s Tales of Teaching & Kimchi

Chandler, Sean M. Naked in Korea: A Kentuckian’s Tales of Teaching & Kimchi. N.P.: Amazon Digital Services, 2012.

Sean M. Chandler tweets a lot. Unfortunately, it’s all pretty repetitive: read [some blog entry], buy [some book] on Amazon. This pattern has been maintained for the entire time he has been a twitter user I followed; in fact, looking at his tweets now (20:49 on 22 August 2012), four tweets in the last three hours have been promoting the book I am reviewing, seven have been links to various blog entries he’s written (mostly not new, just re-tweeting old things), and one has been a re-tweet of someone else asking for people to buy a different book on Amazon.

This is incredibly obnoxious, but also effective, since it did in fact get me to read the book. I’m not sure how I feel about this strategy, overall. But I am sure how I feel about Naked in Korea.

To give a brief summary, as one might guess from the title it does in fact concern Mr. Chandler’s time in the Republic of Korea, also known as South Korea. After finishing his MA in diplomacy and international relations, he decided to move there to teach.1 He lived and taught in a small town (Ildong, although confusingly at first he mentions another city, Pocheon) not far from the DMZ for one year. Various things happened to him during this time. Then he went home. In the interim, he also provides a guide (like a low budget Lonely Planet) to various things in Korea: food, shopping (he seems to delight in pointing out shopping opportunities for ladies–because ladies love to shop, am I right?), and other points of interest such as mountains and festivals.

Anyone familiar with my background will understand why this book initially sparked my interest: I have taught in Asia (specifically, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam). I study Asia. And I am a huge nerd about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Beyond that, my generation (which is Mr. Chandler’s generation) has been internationalized to a much greater degree than any previous generation. Teaching English overseas is no longer unusual, no longer the domain of a few Peace Corps volunteers. One CNN article from 2009 notes an increase in applications to some teach abroad programs of up to 70% over the six months between September 2008-March 2009. And to think a little bit with some of the ideas Ben Anderson discusses in his fascinating book Imagined Communities (review to come), it seems like the constant influx of English teachers into foreign countries is not just meeting a demand, but one of the ways in which English/the West maintain a certain basis of soft power. It would seem, at first glance, that someone whose background is in international relations and diplomacy (as Mr. Chandler’s is) might have some interesting things to say about all these situations.

Sadly, this was not the case; Chandler is not interested in writing anything even remotely intellectual. The closest he comes to profundity is when, after a skirmish between North and South Korea shakes up the region, he tells his girlfriend, “You can only rattle sabers in a room for so long before someone gets cut” (chapter 11, location 3399),2 a comment that is at best uninteresting and at worst, naïve about the history of and relationship between the two Koreas. He seems to have wanted to write a book focusing on teaching in Korea, but he skims over most of that without giving much discussion to teaching certifications (TEFL/TESOL/DELTA), the recruiting process, in-country orientation, or tips or tricks he might be able to offer other teachers beyond “Don’t bend over” (seriously). Worse than that, his writing just isn’t very good.

He does mention early on that “I consider myself an above-average writer” (chapter 2, location 453), and it’s clear that yes, he does actually think that. In reality, he writes like a blogger: most of his stories are told instead of being truly shown (in the literary sense), and he has a tendency to foreshadow things excessively instead of letting them unfold on their own, thereby ruining both suspense and humor. Take, for example, these paragraphs:

[After setting off on a hike with some Koreans, we] walked about a kilometer down the road and, sure enough, there seemed to be some semblance of a trail leading towards the very visible mountain high above us through the trees.

Now, you’re probably trying to race ahead of me by assuming that we got lost on this unassuming “trail”. That’s not what happened…but, Boy, did I think it was going to. [Punctuation/capitalization are author's; chapter 17, location 5108]

This illustrates my complaints. There’s no real description of anything in the scene, and instead of letting a story unfold, Chandler rushes to reassure us of the outcome. This happens throughout the book. What few characters there are (with the exception of Mr. Lee, Roy, and a few Americans) go almost entirely unnamed and undescribed, not so much characters as cardboard cutouts that populate anecdotes or seem to have performed some action behind the scenes. For example, his landlady is mentioned only in passing as someone who “was approximately four-feet tall, 100 years old, and had survived the Korean War (I assumed) by exploding tanks with harsh, calculating glares, spoke exactly zero words of English and utterly terrified me” (chapter 14, location 4201). In other words, she sounds FASCINATING. But that’s all the information we really get about her—certainly not a name, and no on-screen interactions that might somehow dramatize the anxiety.

I was originally worried that the book would be so much neo-picturesque romanticization of Asia as a backdrop to white dude’s adventures (see also: every single movie made in the West about Asia), but in fact Asia barely appears. At one point Chandler mentions that after a year he had failed to learn the names of most of the other teachers at his school, and they had failed to learn his. He has, in other words, made an impression on no one, and vice versa; a good summary of the problems with the book.

In many ways, Chandler doesn’t come off as an especially likable character in the book. He doesn’t portray himself as especially intelligent (he mentions at one point that he struggled to master Spanish, which—seriously, dude? And he certainly doesn’t mention hiring a tutor to teach him Korean or anything) and he certainly has nothing of interest to say about DPRK despite the fact that he majored in international relations and has an MA in diplomacy. He doesn’t know how to showcase embarrassing incidents to examine his own foibles and the humor contained therein (for one example, see his story about singing karaoke on a bus with a bunch of his fellow teachers—it just comes off as awkward and uncomfortable, when clearly he intends it to be a humorous example of cultural differences). And to make matters worse, he makes constant, inexplicable, inappropriate references to films and TV shows. For example, when discussing the Thai island of Phuket:

To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, as he and Luke Skywalker stood on a cliff looking down at the desert city of Mos Eisley in “Star Wars”, we could not have expected to find “a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”. [Punctuation is author's; chapter 20, location 6029]

Or, when discussing his teaching schedule:

36 students divided across the 45 minutes a week I was scheduled to spend with each class…in an 18-week semester…generously afforded me approximately 22 and a half minutes to help each student learn English. In other words, roughly half of a single lunch block.

Star Trek geeks, you may now set your phasers to “stunned”. [All punctuation sic, italics are author's; chapter 7, location 1728].

There are so many questions here. Why does Star Wars get quotes while Star Trek gets italics?3 What on earth is the point of adding these quotes and references at these points in the story? Why does he feel the need to hit the reader over the head with how much he knows about films?4 Indeed, for a writer he sure watches a lot of films. In the entire book he mentions three books he has read: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice. Yet he lists a plethora of films, not just referencing them as above but offering a film recommendation at the head of each chapter, and his list of Korea-related resources has no books at all, just tv shows and websites. I find this suspicious, since I strongly believe that writers need to read extensively. But perhaps he does read and just doesn’t ever talk about it (perhaps coincidentally, he mentions terrifying restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken more times than his MA does).

I cannot spend too much time criticizing Mr. Chandler’s writing, because its problems have one clear source: This book was self-published, and as such reflects all the problems I think of when I think of self-published books. The most pressing is the vast number of typos, grammatical/punctuation mistakes, and similar issues that could have been dealt with had Chandler simply hired a competent editor.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of hiring an editor would have been that she could have drawn the disparate anecdotes that make up the text into a true narrative arc. As I began to see when I neared the end of the book, there really is a story here to be told. As I see it, near the beginning of his time in this rural Korean community, Chandler meets this man he calls Mr. Lee, and is hired to give Lee’s son Roy (his English name) English lessons. These lessons are paid for through a variety of incredible adventures—swimming lessons, hiking up mountains, trips to festivals, and a tour of the DMZ. He even claims to have run a half marathon with Lee on no training(!). These anecdotes, strung together, could make a credible and entertaining memoir. As it is, the book is lacking, and I cannot in good conscience recommend buying it.

Ultimately, I wish Chandler luck. Being a so-called indie author who self-publishes is a tough road to walk. At the moment, he doesn’t seem to have put in enough time honing his craft to walk it well, but he may well get there someday.

Other works cited:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New ed. London: Verso, 2006.

1His reasons for moving to Asia at all, let alone Korea specifically, in addition to his reasons for deciding to take up teaching when he had clearly been training for a career in a more political field remain hazy, but I can’t fault him for that. I certainly don’t have a reason for choosing Viet Nam over other countries other than “I thought it would be fun to learn another Asian language.”

2I’m reading on a Kindle and there are no page numbers. “Location” seems to be the closest I can get to precision, but it is approximate.

3The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition), also known as the source of truth, says italicize both titles of films and tv programs, but individual episode titles get put in quotation marks (section 8.185). APA style concurs with this.

4As an aside, the first paragraph quoted, for example, might be made better if he’d written something like “A more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Phuket cannot be found,” thereby giving a somewhat more oblique reference while still getting his point across. He’s probably right about Phuket, which is a notorious ex-pat hangout. I just hope he isn’t one of those fools uneducated people who pronounce the name of the city as “Fu[c]-ket.” Ugh.

Em oi! #366: The Fountainhead, a summary

B, who has not had the dubious pleasure of reading Ms. Rand’s works, looked at this and said, “Does Francon really marry half the men in the novel?” Yes, she gets married three times, the last time to Roark, who previously raped her. And that is kind of why I have difficulty taking The Fountainhead seriously. I haven’t even gotten to the part where Roark talks about “Prime Movers” and how he shouldn’t be punished for blowing up a building because he is more special than everyone else.

Seriously, Rand is like if you took Nietzsche and put it through a sieve so you only got the overman (aka uberman) stuff out and forgot all of the compassion. Nietzsche, who once threw his arms around the neck of a cart horse to stop it being flogged, who wrote to a friend (after he’d gone crazy, admittedly) that he was having all the anti-Semites shot.

So yes, she missed the boat somewhere. Though I do think that Paul Ryan’s particular blend of Catholicism plus Objectivism makes him much more Swiftian than Randian. I do wish the media would stop saying that we here in Wisconsin like him; the man is a total tit and we are aware of it. He keeps getting elected because his district includes all the horrid little white flight suburbs outside of Milwaukee.

Filing this under B945.R233 F6 L86 2012 for Philosophy (General)—Modern (1450/1600- )—By region or country—United States—By period—19th and 20th centuries—Later 19th and 20th centuries, 1860-2000—Individual philosophers, A-Z—Rand, Ayn—Separate works, A-Z—The Fountainhead.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done Rand, by the way: #352 also features her crazy-looking cheekbones.

Also, here are three great pieces of trivia I found out while researching this comic:

Ayn Rand took her first name from the Hebrew word “a‘yin” (עין) meaning “eye.”
She eventually signed up for both Social Security and Medicare.
At her funeral, someone brought a wreath of flowers in the shape of a dollar sign.

Moving on, I ran a race yesterday. It was the Run for Snow 14.5 km trail run in Elver Park. I was very excited to be racing again.

Of course, I was so excited that I forgot my camera, so I only have two photos, both taken from the organizer’s website.

Waiting for the gun. Photo by CXC Skiing.

The race had three distances: 5.5km, 9km, and 14.5km. I signed up for the longest of these.

It was a very small field–about 14 women and 18 men in the 14.5km, with the same or fewer entrants in the other two distances. I seeded myself toward the front (why not) and so when they shouted “Go” I was almost immediately passed by everyone.

My legs were pretty cashed from my long run (13 miles) the day before, it turns out. I still have all my cardiovascular endurance, but I’ve lost some running-specific strength over my little vacation.

The 14.5km course was in three sections: a three-mile (ish) loop, a four mile (ish) loop, and then the first loop again. I say “ish” because my watch went a bit crazy and only recorded part of the race (about 8 miles of it?) so I’m not entirely sure how long each loop was. Here is the map it came up with:

I have circled the actual location of Elver Park and the run in blue. We did not cross the road (Gammon) at all.

The first section seemed to be mostly uphill, but long, gradual climbs, very run-able. I enjoyed it. If I’d been on the first three miles of an ultra, I might have walked, but I didn’t have to. The second loop had a number of sharper climbs and some very technical sections of trail (i.e., trail with rocks and tree roots on it) that make one pay close attention. It was at this point that I realized another woman was behind me by maybe 50 feet or so. As we went into the third loop, I had to pull myself out of my head and actually race to make sure I didn’t get passed. It was hard (at one point my stomach started to cramp and I thought I was done for, but it resolved without issue), but it was a great final section, and I managed to hold my position! I finished in 1:22:47, good enough for 4th woman overall and 2nd in my age group. Out of three. So not that impressive, but I had fun.

I look strong! Nice. Photo by CXC Skiing.

Upcoming races include:

Salt Lake Emigration Canyon Half Marathon–2 Sept.
Lakefront Marathon–7 Oct.

I’m hoping to do a couple of local races I do every year (Literacy Network 10k, Berbee Derby 10k) and I’m hoping to head to Lake Forest for the Dream for Eileen 5k. But that’s it. Maybe something bigger in the spring, once I’ve gotten my mileage back up.

The Dairyland Dare

So I have been putting off writing this for various reasons. I guess the biggest one is my own idiocy though, so here we go.

Sorry, this is going to be long.

The Dairyland Dare or DD is an organized group ride, not a race. As you may or may not be able to tell from looking at the DD website, although there was chip timing, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to actually retrieve my time from, so unlike every other event I’ve done, I have no idea how I did relative to other people. They didn’t post timing info until this morning (Saturday, 18 August). Full results can be found here. To find my results specifically, hit CTRL+F and type “815.”

It turns out I finished 6th in my age group (out of 7 women), or 258th out of 312 people who did the 150k. My watch time was 7:24:15.88, but my chip time was 8:31:11.

Yeah, I lost.

I originally started training for the DD back in late May/early June, right before I hurt my leg and had to stop running for a while, primarily because I wanted to do something bike-related without suffering drowning myself during another triathlon. I’d elected to prepare for the 150k, and then maybe “if things went really well” I’d do the 200k (distances go from 50k/31 miles to 300k/no one knows how many miles this is). After my injury, the PT gave me permission to do whatever I wanted for cross-training as long as it didn’t hurt, and since biking generally didn’t hurt, it seemed like a fine way to keep my cardiovascular fitness and prepare for an interesting challenge while waiting for my leg to heal so I could get to some damn marathon training.

RIGHT SO what actually happened was that I found that biking alone takes a lot longer than running (I can run 15 miles in under two and a half hours. To bike 50 miles takes at least four hours, and 50 miles isn’t even an exceptionally long training ride). Usually I do my longer runs with friends other people (haha, Noel) such as my running group, B, or even my dog. But I don’t know anyone who bikes. This makes things a bit boring. The best ride I had was where I met up with someone who needed directions and was forced to ride with me for a good ten miles.

The other thing I discovered is that I’m pretty slow. On one really good ride I hit 14 mph average, but although my goal was to average 15 mph, I was usually MAYBE around 13.x. This would always demoralize me, but also it extended the amount of time I had to spend out biking–if you’re only going 15 miles, an extra two miles (about nine to ten minutes) is no big deal. If you’re going, say, sixty miles, the difference in time becomes 4.6 hours at 13 mph versus 4 hours at 15 mph—a difference of about 40 minutes, a long time!

My training was not awesome. I did most of my riding out on the Ironman WI bike course, which is a GREAT course, but about half the total climb of the actual DD course (by which I mean the DD course has 10k feet of climb over nearly 100 mi, so 50 mi should have 5k feet; the IM course had about 2.5k feet of climb over 50 mi). I peaked at a long ride of 70 miles or 238.33 miles for the week, then took a two week taper.

Then, only a week before the event, we went through a family crisis that I won’t rehash here, except to say that it was kind of difficult and traumatic. At the time, I told B I wasn’t sure I was still up for the DD. B said he thought I should not give up, that I would be unhappy in a few weeks when I looked back on all my training and realized it was all for naught. I thought this had some wisdom to it, so I agreed that I would persevere. Under the circumstances (lack of sleep, inability to eat a large quantity of food at once, anxiety), I gave myself permission to do the 100k if things went really badly.

Waiting to take off.

The first 50k

B drove us out to Dodgeville on Saturday morning and I started out in the 7:00 wave (a bit later than I’d wanted to, but not a big deal). The early part of the course was very fast—I did the first 5 miles in 17:29.41, about 17.2 mph. I was exhilarated through the early miles, and thought that if I could keep the pace up, I would be done in way less than my estimated seven hours.

After the first rest stop (mile 16-ish) I noticed the hills were changing in character a bit, getting steeper and longer. The maps distributed to us marked most of the really steep hills, but after a while it began to seem more like the markings were just to indicate a road that was incredibly hilly. Toward the end of this section, I noticed my knees were hurting on the hills. I finished the first 30 miles in 2:13:22 [watch time; I don't have the exact time for the first 50k because 1. My watch records a reading every 5 miles and 2. It was actually like 33 miles instead of 31]. At the end of the first 50k, I stopped briefly to take off my long-sleeved shirt and raise my bike seat (a bike seat that is too low can cause knee pain). I was feeling pretty good at this point.

The second 50k

The second 50k started with a long flat stretch going down the road between Dodgeville and Governor Dodge State Park, and I made good time. Because of some detours, we got two loops of GDSP, about which let me just say—wow, what a beautiful park. I hope I get a chance to go back and run some trails in there. I know I’m not a hard-core park-going person, but I can kind of not believe that this place is within an hour’s drive of my house and I’ve never done a race there!

The main road around the park makes a loop of just over five miles; the first half is primarily downhill and very fast, the second half is mostly uphill and very steep. About two-thirds of the way through that uphill, we hit mile 38 and the next rest stop. When I got off the bike to use the latrines at the rest stop, I noticed I was feeling some pain under the ball of my right foot. This had happened once before on a training ride and a friend had suggested it meant my cleats were too far forward. However, although I actually had a pocket knife with me, I was worried that changing anything would make the situation worse, so I just grabbed a gel and a banana and got back on the bike.

In retrospect, this was stupid—any change would have potentially been an improvement, and if not, well, considering how things came out it would hardly have been worse. BUT I couldn’t have known that at the time, I guess.

On my second circle of the park, my knee (left knee) started acting up again, so I stopped and raised the seat again. This time it didn’t help, which should have been a clue for me…

I got to mile 50 at 3:44:11 and took this picture:

I was feeling good (the pain was going away when I got off the bike, so I assumed it was nothing serious) and even jauntily texted my mother to let her know I’d call her in another 47 miles. I did ask the medic on duty at the rest stop if he had anything to help me, but the best he could do was offer me an ice pack. Not too helpful.

At mile 57-ish (officially 58.4, but that’s not what my watch said), I came to the turn-off for the 150k. I still kind of wonder why I did this, because it was pretty clear that my knee was not going to get better, and my right foot was hurting every time I pushed down on the pedal on that side.

And, you know, I could have turned around, too, because it seemed like almost as soon as I got off the 100k route, things went directly to hell. Between miles 60-62, there was a hill—just a long, slow grinder that went on for the better part of two miles and left me in pain and exhausted with nearly forty miles to go.

I reached mile 65 in 4:25:08.

The third 50k

Looking at the map for the 150k, I noticed we were running out of hill markers—three remained before the first rest stop, then two more, then another two and we were done. At the point I stopped to look, I had already ground up that long hill I already mentioned (County Z), so I really had only six hills left! Huzzah. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as all that.

Here, in case you are curious, is the elevation profile for miles 60-97.

Do you see how between miles 70-75 there’s a dip, then a really strong rise? That was one of those hills that sort of rises up in front of you like a wall. It was at least as steep as any of the really big hills out on the IM course (like the one on Old Sauk, or County highway Jj going into Mount Horeb, which I know is not on the official IM course but 92 was closed this summer), and quite long. I saw a number of people getting off to walk (including one tall man in a blue jersey [Mr. Blue] who I’d been trading places with over the hills for five miles), and the guy ahead of me in a red white and blue jersey that said “Brooklyn” on the back was progressing up it in a series of switchbacks. Of course, it didn’t look too bad compared to what I’d been training on, so I dropped to my smallest chainring and went right up it.

If I hadn’t already been in pain, I actually don’t think it would have been too bad. It was definitely the steepest hill of the day, though, and I was more than a bit demoralized when I got to the top (another rest stop, around mile 74) and realized how long this was taking. I was not going fast, nowhere close to the 15 miles per hour I needed to hit 7 hours…and of course I actually completely blanked on how long I was spending at rest stops, because I was stopping my watch. At the mile 74 rest stop, I texted B an apology. He said he was fine, happy to wait, and he’d see me at the finish.

At this point, I figured—eleven miles to the next rest stop (about 40 minutes?) plus another twelve or so to the finish after that. Totally do-able. Only four more hills. So I took off.

The next rest stop was near mile 85 (at the time I texted B. that I was at 84.23, so that must be it). At the time, my average speed was 13.2 miles per hour. I hit mile 85 at 6:26:37, which is a long time to be on a bike. I was also pretty demoralized by this point, but there were only two more hills between me and a hot shower. I said as much to Mr. Blue, who happened to be returning to his bike at the same time as I was.

“Two more hills, that should be easy for you.”

I laughed.

The first hill (Farlook Road) was a grinder, nothing too terrible. Slow, but I managed it. But then we came back to County Z and County Z at ZZ. This was not so much a single hill as a series of hills similar to the one I’d ridden up on County Z during my first visit. It took me a while and several short but steep climbs to realize where I was. Finally I hit a section of downhill. I was flying and there were no more big hills between me and the finish line. I reached down to grab my water bottle.

Suddenly, a bee flew into the gap between my sun glasses and my eye. With one hand holding the handlebars and one holding my water bottle, there wasn’t much I could do. I screamed in an undignified manner and flailed uselessly. With my left hand, I managed to steer the bike to the side of the road and stop. Almost simultanously, I unclipped a foot so I wouldn’t fall over, return my water bottle to the water bottle cage, and grab my glasses off my face. By this point the bee, being fed up at being trapped, had stung me. On the eyelid.

Suddenly the bad mood, fatigue, and low blood sugar I’d been fending off for the last twenty miles came down around my shoulders. I stood at the side of the road and cried.

Another rider I’d passed earlier went past: “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t answer. As she rode off, I heard her say to her friend, “It must be some kind of insect bite.”

Yup. That was at mile 88. I reached 90 at an average speed of 12.1 miles per hour and finished (96.62 miles total) in the times mentioned above, average speed of 13.0 mph. Not awesome, but at least I crossed the finish line under my own power. B met me, by the way, and very kindly brought me my stuff so I could shower; then we went home and I crashed on the sofa for a while.

I look sad and chubby here. In reality I am neither most of the time.

And that’s everything that happened and nothing that didn’t.

Well, onward and upward.