A Penguin in the Orchard

26 weeks and counting.

This is the first week of training for the Cellcom Green Bay Marathon ’15. This will be my first full Daniels’ Running Formula training cycle, also. I’ve worked two cycles from his program, though both have been abbreviated. I’m excited to reap the benefits from a full 26-week program.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this should be the race that actually sends me to Boston in 2016. Though I qualified at the Quad Cities Marathon in September, I didn’t qualify with a time that would get me in. To do that, I need to shave no less than 2 minutes from my time during the 2016 qualification window. That will have to be in Green Bay. Truth is, my goal for this race is 3:30:00 – another 9-minute reduction from the previous PR. With 26 weeks to train in earnest, I think that’s a tough but attainable goal.

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The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said on Thursday that the “post-Snowden pendulum” that has driven Apple and Google to offer fully encrypted cellphones had “gone too far.” He hinted that as a result, the administration might seek regulations and laws forcing companies to create a way for the government to unlock the photos, emails and contacts stored on the phones.

via F.B.I. Director Hints at Action As Cellphone Data Is Locked – NYTimes.com.

Here’s the thing for me. It should be hard for the government to look into my phone. That difficulty comes in two forms: legal and technical. Apparently, the legal obstacles are much lower than we thought. The NSA has been eavesdropping for years and no one has paid any price. So, I have no problem at all with making it tougher technically.

But, really, who believes the FBI and other law enforcement agencies will be permanently stymied by encryption? All we can do is make it harder and hope to stay just a bit ahead.

Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. RICE has been the go-to treatment plan for pain and soft tissue athletic injuries since the term was coined in 1978. The method helps relieve pain by stemming inflammation in the RICE’d region. But in March, the man who coined the term announced that suppressing the body’s inflammatory response to exercise may actually delay healing.

via Outside Online

I gave up the anti-inflammatories a few years ago, after a degenerative medial meniscus tear. I felt like I needed to know how much actual pain I was in rather than mask it and continue to do damage. I think I’m better for it – being able to let my body tell me when I need some rest. This finding suggests staying away from anti-inflammatories for a different reason, and it’s one of those that seem almost intuitive. If blood is the means by which we heal, why would we reduce the flow of blood to a stressed or injured area?

With the Quad Cities Marathon behind me, I’m starting to work through the plan for the Cellcom Green Bay Marathon on May 17, 2015.

Green Bay is an important race in the quest for Boston. Though I qualified for Boston 2016 at the Quad Cities Marathon, I’m what’s commonly referred to as a “squeaker.” That’s to say that though I met my qualifying time requirement for Boston, I didn’t meet it by enough to be accepted into the 2016 race. I ran 3:39:20 at Quad Cities, a scant 40 seconds below my qualifying time for 2016. For 2015, the cutoff for acceptance was 1:02. So, while it’s a huge milestone to be able to say I’ve qualified for Boston, it really means nothing as far as being able to run the race, just yet.

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Since upgrading to iOS 8 on the iPad, I’ve had this weird issue. The home button recognizes a single press as a double, dropping me into the multitasking screen. I can reset the iPad and it goes away temporarily, but it always returns. Various Apple forums have pointed to hardware issues, but it showed up only after a software update. It didn’t seem like a hardware issue to me.

This morning, I uninstalled SwiftKey, an app I’d installed right away when I upgraded to iOS 8. The problem appears to be solved. I’m not sure what the interaction with the home button would be, but its behavior is back to normal with SwiftKey gone. I replaced SwiftKey with Swype and haven’t had any further issues.

It’s the engineer in me. Or, maybe I’m an engineer because I love this stuff. For whatever reason, I keep pretty detailed training data for each marathon training cycle. If you’re interested, it’s all here in an Excel spreadsheet.

If you can use the spreadsheet and/or formulas in your own training, please feel free. The only tab I didn’t really keep up was the Food Groups tab. That’s for tracking the number of servings from each food group consumed each day. The Plan tab contains some mileage and time calculation formulas that I used for setting quality runs. And, the Cal % tab contains some Daily Activity Time calculations that I didn’t keep up for the duration. Those were originally intended to create totals to guide the carb intake, per The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition.

I haven’t sifted through all the data just yet, but I can always pick out one or two things that are useful for the next training cycle. Let me know in the comments if something stands out to you.

A service member carrying the US and POW flags at the Quad Cities Marathon. I believe this group ran the race in full gear.

This is definitely an annual highlight of the race: the bagpiper on the I-74 bridge, less than 2 miles in.

I got in a slow fiver last night. It was the first since the Quad Cities Marathon and my first as a 2016 Boston Marathon qualifier. Those first runs after a race always have a special quality to them. It’s as if running takes on a new and different meaning with every race. This one was that times ten.

Circles, ellipses, and parabolas were my love when I was a young man, but are very rare in the wild. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, merely because most of the world is of great roughness and infinite complexity.

via In the Mind of the Fractal King – Preview Issue: The Story of Nautilus – Nautilus.

Kreek hands his oars off to a crewmate and squeezes through the hatch into the tiny sleep cabin. He curls up on the waterproof padding that serves as the crew’s bed and is just starting to drift off when he feels a few splashes of water lick at him. The next moment, a flood rushes into the cabin, trapping him. Then the world turns sideways.

via What happens when four guys try to cross the Atlantic…in a rowboat – Sportsnet.ca.

For the last four years, Robbie Mitchell and his team have been inventing ways to describe an entirely new suite of education possibilities. As Knewton’s Head of Marketing and Communications, he has not only helped shape the company’s identity, but also the way it approaches marketing to get the most traction possible.

via The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers.

The speed bump won’t be because our devices are getting faster, but they are. It won’t be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. The Web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.

via How a new HTML element will make the Web faster | Ars Technica.

Frankfurt Skyline by bahnmeisterei, on Flickr