Training Log Archive: iansmith

Easy peasy Skyline run. My legs felt a bit tired and heavy from yesterday. Also, today was my first Skyline run since I rolled my left ankle hard two weeks ago, and I had some concerns about its resilience. It held up ok, though I had one wee roll. My lower left leg feels a bit strange, though it hasn't been hurting or uncomfortable. I continued my latest audiobook, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It has been interesting but unremarkable.

From NPR, apparently the US has a feral cat problem. The introduction of 80-100 million predators into the ecosystem has wrecked havoc on populations of wild animals. Apparently Trap-Neuter-Return programs haven't demonstrated much impact on the population. I speculate that this is because the population is saturated for other reasons - i.e. the number of fertile cats is not a limiting factor, and so you need to remove huge chunks of reproducing adults before the population is dented. It seems that mass euthanasia is one of few viable solutions to addressing the problem, but I wonder if that would work. For the sake of argument, suppose within a region (a county, say), we euthanized all the feral cats. Wouldn't that population eventually rebound from the steady supply of people losing their pets? Is it even technically feasible to euthanize tens of millions of animals, humanitarian concerns aside? And yet, it seems the greater tragedy is the devastation and suffering both of the wild population of animals on whom the cats prey and the cats themselves. Life as a feral cat cannot be pleasant. This is a problem our civilization created and must address.

C • cats 11

Event: CNYO Regaine - Letchworth State Park East
 

Track workout - the first in quite a while. My workout was 4x800 + 2x400; I ran in silence, and the track was a bit damp from overzealous lawn watering. It's definitely time to get back on the bandwagon, as it were. My cadence is slow, and my breathing was labored. In the past, I might have run 2:44-2:48, but I set a more modest goal of 2:50-2:55. Music appropriate for intervals albeit not as good as East German techno.

Splits:
800m: 2:54, 2:52, 2:55, 2:55
400m: 79, 79

I aspire to a well-ordered life - a life of meaning and direction. I wonder sometimes what that is. I've often imagined if we prepared a large ensemble of independent Ians, how could would the best among them be? It's not healthy to compare myself to this Ian, for he is unrealizable. But perhaps life is not about achieving order and objectives, but about striving. Life is not some contrived script of destiny and fate, but a random walk, a stochastic process. And who can say where the winds of time will blow?

Easy run home.

Wrestling with linear mixed models, stochastic gradient descent (to fit the LMMs), and how to present my vision for OUSA.

Climbing with Joe at Brooklyn Boulders. I did a long 5.8 on autobelay, some short 5.7s and 5.8s, and bouldering.

The original plan for today was 4-5x800m, but the MIT track is closed for construction. So, instead I ran a tempo run along the Esplanade. It was a balmy 26 C, and the pedestrian traffic along the river was motivating. My plan was to run 4 km at 4:00 - 4:06/km, but I tacked on a few hundred meters more for good measure. On my cooldown, I ran a few bouts of strides to get my turnover up and to test how fresh my legs were. I need to keep my cadence high, and I think the path to victory requires East German techno.

Easy peasy joggeroo. It was a bit toasty, but invigorating. My body is learning to deal with the heat.