Michaela Sue

Joyce and I went shopping at REI on Sunday, since I needed a few things.  I also found a few things I didn't know I needed, as usual.  As is also commonly the case, an hour or so of standing around an slowly walking around the store in the usual way left me with lower back pain.  It's quite uncomfortable but by no means debilitating pain, and after levering myself into the car and sitting down for five or ten minutes I'm fine again.  It's weird though, to compare the sort of thing that causes me low back pain, which is walking around slowly at a shopping mall or in a trade/product show (or, less commercially, a museum), with this partial list of things that do not cause me back pain:

• Running a half marathon


• Cycling 120km


• Three hours of kayaking


• Two hours of cross country skiing


• Speed skating


• Weightlifting


• Snowshoeing


• Walking 5+km outdoors at a good pace

On the one hand, this is great.  Should I waste a day at a shopping center looking at stuff I don't need and probably buying something I don't need?  No, that causes physical pain, better to do something comfortable like run 10km or do some speed skating practice.  On the other hand, WTF!?  I mean, really, WTF?!  How is it that slow walking is painful but actual athletic activity (well, slow athletic activity, but, still) isn't? 

When I'm on the oval during a speed skating session, I'm one of the slow people, and I try to stay out of the way of the fast people. At all other times and places on ice, I am a speed-crazed maniac. It's not surprising that this is, in general, the case, but the extent to which this is the case is a bit amazing. It's a really dramatic difference. The really fast speed skaters can double my best speed. Out at Red Arrow there are people moving at barely walking pace and the very fastest people aren't any faster than me. It's just weird going between one situation and the other.

I haven't felt all that musically motivated recently, but I had lots of fun at the con. rose1thorn sang along with me on a bunch of songs on Saturday night, and sweetmusic_27 also joined along singing the chorus in "Nuts From The Hazel Tree." I'm guessing I looked like I was having a lot of fun during that song with the two of them, because I sure felt it.

Though a bit out of practice I played the allemande from Bach's supposedly-in-A-minor-partita and it went tolerably well. sweetmusic_27 was sitting next to me drinking a wonderful Scotch whisky with the most delightful aroma that I could smell while I was playing. I kept thinking I just had to finish the piece and then I could beg some off her.

Earlier, the concert by billroper and daisy_knotwise (plus sweetmusic_27, because everything is better with fiddle) was fun. That was an amazing test of the musicians' ability to just keep on playing no matter what chaos the two little girls plus any additional little girls and boys who joined in the chaos caused. It was extremely cute.

Toyboat was also fun. Electric fiddle! Can't go wrong with that! They have an immense pile of gear, I got roped into providing a tiny bit of help setting up. The sound mix mostly worked fine, but the recording may not have been set up exactly optimally. You could sort of tell when the sound engineers billroper and tollers burst out laughing after Banned From Argo, looking at the trace in the recording software that was pretty much full-time clipping. Everything, I guess, really was louder than everything else. The mix to the speakers was fine, though.

Opinion poll/quiz of the day:

[Poll #1523201]

Ever watch TV news? This is the template for every story.

So. Totally. Me.
( Frazz )

I'm just back from a short walk through the woods. Clear sky, -16°C air temperature, approximately full moon high overhead, Orion high in the sky, the Seven Sisters shining--or maybe five of them in the hardly-black moonlit sky. Even after the warmth and rain last week the ground is mostly snow covered and reflective, the trees are bare and cast little shade, and it's not dark out at all with the moonlight. The cold dry winter sky is hardly black with all the moonlight but is still clear and the brighter stars show clearly. Even though, as I always say, it's just waste and pollution, the smoke rising from each chimney on each roof of the row of buildings is pretty. It takes a lot more clothing to be comfortable at -16°C walking than it does when skiing (cold weather makes for fast skiing I always say, because the harder you work the warmer you'll be, and on a good cold night that means going very fast!) but it's easy enough to dress for comfortable walking. (Medium wool socks and fairly ordinary boots, the heavy thermal pants under ordinary jeans, sweater, light jacket under the outer jacket, thin glove liners and heavy gloves, a neck gaiter that's probably not really needed, and hat with headband under it for complete ear coverage. For skiing I might use the same heavy fleece pants with tights over them, just the light underjacket alone over a warm shirt, and much thinner gloves over the liners. That's plenty if the heart rate will average in the 140s and peak in the 180s.)

The Instep Icebreaker Indoor Half Marathon was this morning. My time was 2:00:19. This was my first organized formal race of any distance in any sport. That's about five minutes faster than my best time at the 21.1km distance in training. It was a lot of fun. And for some reason I'm really tired. The people who just can't get enough have the Gold Medal Challenge, the half marathon today followed by the full marathon tomorrow. There was also a relay marathon today, I know at least one person did that and the half and will do the full. I'm just not quite up for that... While we were running a few of the members of the US Olympic long-track speed skating team were training on the ice. All around a great event, if you are looking for a marathon or half marathon at the end of January in the Milwaukee-area, this is the event for you. The weather indoors is always perfect, about 10°C. Outside today: Cold rain and fog. Good day for an indoor event!

I had intended to go to the ice center yesterday after going to the library, but it was beautiful and sunny and clear out, and a reasonably comfy -10°C or so, and I ended up spending the whole afternoon walking around the city and in the parks near Lake Michigan. (Photos!)

At night I went out for another walk (which ended up being 7.2 km and 1:20) mostly on my local path through the woods, also partly through the local neighborhood where most of the Christmas lights are still up. The sky was clear, Orion was high overhead, the nearly full moon lit the snow covered ground. I saw a jet with all the strobe lights flashing leaving a short contrail that the moonlight lit. The temperature had dropped to -17°C, and I was a bit overdressed for it, but that's easy to remedy.

( photos )

My employer is trying to encourage us to be healthy. They have a web site we can use to track our health and fitness. It is hilarious.

First thing is, it's very American and I can't figure out a way to change the units to the standard ones, and I'm not about to convert everything to miles or pounds to use a web site I had no interest in using in the first place.

It has a calender to enter your "aerobic miles." But there is no field for what you were doing. Apparently they figured you'd just add your running and cycling (and speed skating, skiing, etc.) together into "miles." What's the difference anyway? And there is no field for time or speed, which is pretty much the entire point of using software to track your exercise. And no fields for the heart rate data. It's just so comically useless, I can't imagine what the designers were thinking.

It's like some giant stereotype in action. Some manager on his fourth heart attack got a bunch of painfully stereotypical never-exercise computer programmers and locked them in a dark basement room with a few cases of Jolt cola and told them to write a fitness tracker.

I'm going to stick with my spreadsheets.

Well, I'm very curious how tired and achy I'll feel tomorrow. For now I actually feel fine.

I've been itching to try a fast 5km run, so that's what I did this morning. It really didn't feel like it was going well, my heart rate stayed fairly low, I was breathing very hard, and it didn't seem as fast as I'd hoped. In the end, though, my time (25:39) was just seconds longer than my personal best. On the one hand, I was aiming for a new personal best, on the other, essentially equaling my best time on a morning when things were just not going right isn't so bad. Also, I was pretty much totally wiped out when I set that best, today, not so much.

After a few hours and some food, I figured I'd go to the Pettit Center. I'm going to be running a half marathon there at the end of January, so I really ought to do some running on the track that encircles the ice. 11 laps is 4.95km, and 27:30 at a easy-feeling pace is not bad at all for me. I'll have to try some different clothing to find something just right for the temperature in there. The rubber running surface is nice even if it is worn-looking, and just as skaters get to watch the runners, runners get to watch the skaters, so while it's endless loops around the oval there is at least something to see.

Then after a short break I went out on the 400 meter oval ice for a half hour. Now I remember why I like that so much. A long-track speed skating oval is, after all, meant for speed. It's huge, there is lots of space to go fast. Nothing like coming around one of the turns and seeing 100 meters of mostly clear ice ahead. I can never resist applying all available power. I mostly spent the time getting used to skating again after the summer away from it. A few hundred meters backwards (love having the space for easy backward skating), some slow skating, some bursts of speed, 500 meters at maximum effort, and general fun.