Month: March 2014 Page 2 of 3

http://www.strava.com/activities/120431661

Prana has been erratic this week. I’m trying to take it easy this week to focus my attention on the long run at the end of the week. I was sub 6 minutes on one section today and then the wheels came completely off.

I started to get a cramp and then my stomach revolted and I started to grind down. I stopped a couple of times to see if it would pass and then I thought I was going to get sick.

I ended up walking the last .5 mile back to work. To add insult to injury – I got cat called from some homeless dudes on 12th ave. And by cat called I mean cat called like I got in Las Vegas by the drunk ladies from Edmonton that I ran into at 5am in the lobby of the Cosmopolitan. “Hey red shorts! Come over here and talk to us…”. The homeless guys were more, “dude! Nice shorts!”. I would have walked over and said… I’m not exactly sure what I would have said, but I needed to get back to the office post haste. I had issues man.

It really may be that I’m running into a wall and I need to make some changes to get to the next level. I’m suspecting mostly diet and timing. Sounds so damn prima donna, but it’s all about the details. People who perform at high levels just don’t do the same things as regular folks. That’s just how it is. It’s the trade.

The trails were super nice though. Marquam is starting to dry out and the trail around some of the bigger muddy parts is compact and dry. Very runnable. I was jumping down some steep sections today …  catching air 🙂

Thinking about the 1st law of thermodynamics today on my run. I think the seed was planted from article at Brain Picker that I read yesterday.  Specifically about Aikido and energy:

Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power. In aikido, an uke, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or nage, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending. There is no word for competitor, only for the one who is giving or receiving the energy.

and

The first law observes that the internal energy of an isolated system obeys the principle of conservation of energy, which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

I’ll have to come back to this idea, but it was really around the context of extracting performance from a system. On my run I was the system – my 5th mile was under 7mins That’s really fast for me and it takes a lot of energy (and a good slope) to get the system moving that fast. The energy for that performance was in the system the entire time though.

Another systems thought that I’ve kicking around is the idea of leaky systems (this time not me, but I guess it could apply). Not only leaky systems, but “purposefully leaky systems”. The ones that come to mind the big social networks and what they leak is personal information…on purpose. Think of LinkedIn recommending people they mined from your Gmail account. Gmail is leaking, and LinkedIn is participating in information arbitrage. The more I think about it… I think this is the rule, not the exception.

This is a great read!
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/10/sarah-lewis-the-rise-failure/

I’m reading  this right now. I’ll add The Rise to my reading list though.

[vimeo 50545521 w=500 h=281]

Little Dragon – Ritual Union live at AUFNAHMEZUSTAND from svenson suite on Vimeo.

http://www.wonderballroom.com/event/503337-little-dragon-unknown-mortal-portland/

http://www.strava.com/activities/118824296

I worked really hard today. And it felt like work the entire time. Rough day.  Not really sure where to categorize this one because I had PR’s on many of the really difficult sections. I always stepped on the gas if I felt my legs slowing down a little bit – I was digging and it was there, but it also felt like an ass-kicking.

My headspace was not in a good place this week. I managed to not get sick. My entire team was taken out by some mysterious flu-like illness. I dodged that by cutting back on my commute (I drove to work one day) and by taking out one day of running. I had no choice because my schedule was so packed. But I also coded in the evening all week and sliced off at least an hour and a half of sleep. I was on a razor thin edge all week between work/other work/running. It’s always a trade-off and this week I over-extended but got lucky.

When I looked up at a long series of switchbacks from the bottom of a really long climb, I literally became nauseous and I doubted myself. Another section I literally told myself aloud, “run m’fker!” when my focus was slipping. I had a good primal scream at the top of council crest right before I started descending (it’s the highest elevation of the run). That always feels really good.

Also saw some weird stuff on one section near the zoo. It was a homeless woman pushing her shopping cart packed full of her belongings (it was a hiking trail… in the woods), walking up to another pair of homeless people…and I think one of them had a baby. I could see the baby’s bare head sticking out of blanket. I did a quick wtf and kept going… but really beat myself up for a while for not just giving them the fleece hat I had in my pack. I have more than 10 fleece hats.

Nutrition:

• It wasn’t cold and I was drinking often. 2 bottles of cytomax wasn’t enough. I finished both bottles early. I was carrying 3 Nuun tablets and I was going to refill a bottle and drop in a tablet at Marquam shelter but the water was turned off. Then I was going to fill at 5th near PSU, but I realized when I got there you actually can’t fill a bottle with the city water fountains because they just shoot water straight up (not to the side). So I stopped my watch and ate a Clif shot, drank and then pushed for home.
• I had 4 Clif shots today (no solid food) … 2 vanilla and 2 espresso (caffeinated). On an empty stomach a caffeinated gel is like rocket fuel – and I felt that today after each one.
• I ate breakfast before I left – and I need to stop doing that. It’s too much food in my gut and I feel it during the last 45 minutes or so. I need to eat a light dinner before a long run and just a banana or half bagel w/almond butter before I leave. Today I had half a bagel, bacon and eggs.

I stopped and took a few pictures today.

I’m exhausted. And I’m worried about the 50k.

http://www.strava.com/activities/118305044

After climbing a series of switchbacks and then descending rapidly on twisty, muddy trail; the forest canopy opens to the sky. Down an embankment a small creek carrying the day’s rain winds through the forest to the Willamette River.

Hemlock, Spruce and Doug Firs rise from the ferns toward the sky dressed elegantly in their moss green dinner jackets. Such formality from my friends the trees.

“Good afternoon gentlemen”, I say. “…just passing through.”

Or the most existential running koan of all:

What are you running from, what are you running to?
– C. Rivard

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O8bGf0X9yU]

What you are…what you actually are, is being. Being is not the mind thinking. Thinking is a movement, a motion. Being is the silence that precedes the motion. You cannot see it; you cannot grasp it because you
are it. The feeling that you are. The unadorned naked awareness that is always there, rarely heeded, is what you always have been, always will be. Cannot not be. You can’t look for it, because it is what is looking. It is
like space, you can’t see it but everything is in it. Everything is it. So I say to you, ‘be aware when you are unaware,’ let its presence warm you, fill you. Be present in the Presence.

– Krishnamurti, speaking to actor Terence Stamp.

This is a short book report.

The book.

Warning: You will not be magically bestowed creative confidence by reading this book. I do not think I’m an anomaly.

If you’re a suit, or not a creative person… or something other than a designer (or if you want to unleash …something… in your cube farm). This is the book for you. BUY THIS BOOK.

If you are in the creative field: PASS. Your time would be better spent sketching.

The thing about the IDEO boys is that they have a lock on the message around design and business, but for the business audience. This is a business book about design. And honesly, there are better ones.

The one takeaway that I found valuable is to get moving – making, designing, exploring, etc. Rather than thinking. Which I find quite ironic a message in a business book about how to build creative confidence.  They could have spared the anecdotes (heyo Akshay), trimmed 100 pages and had people out the door being … creative.

I actually think this is a better message, from Ira Glass:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY]

And so ultimately, confidence comes from experience – of doing the thing again and again, sometimes good, sometimes bad – but ultimately, the good increases and the bad decreases.

So … do MOAR!! (but go easy on yourself… stop to eat ice cream and get massages occasionally).

*The exercises in the back of the book were pretty good. Mind maps, etc. Although I think Dave Gray does better in Gamestorming. That’s a book every creative should read. It’s rad.

http://www.strava.com/activities/117826750

When I looked at my schedule this morning I resigned myself that today would be a day of meetings. I was booked straight through lunch with a break in the early afternoon and another meeting at 4pm.

I zipped my muddy (but dry) running kicks into their Manchester United shoe bag (purchased at the Heathrow Nike store) and was totally fine with leaving everything on my shelf in the locker room until Wednesday and just taking the day off. Taking one for the team.

My 2nd breakfast (everything I’ve brought for lunch) is typically dispatched by 11am and by noon I’m ready to run. Today I walked into a meeting at noon, then another at 1 that ran late until 2:30.

Back at my desk I checked my calendar, skimmed email and then looked over at my colleague and called it – I’m out, this is my window. I’ll be back in an hour.

I think that a lot of things in life are about timing and patience. Trust that you’ll know what to do when the time comes. It’s difficult to tune into those signals – but with practice you learn to recognize the opportunities. There is an acute sense of focused energy and purpose that becomes absolutely clear. When you have a shot, you take the shot. The window opens, you jump through it.  You may land on your ass and fail miserably and want to cry in your beer at your misfortune… but the amazing thing is… if you’re the least bit self-aware – you just learned a valuable lesson 🙂 [Unfunnily… consider the alternative of never taking the shot. Anti-funny.]

I think that people who are happy, well adjusted and “successful” (whatever that means) have fallen on their ass more times than can be remembered. They just have the statistical advantage of more shots.

Anyway. The window opened and I jumped through it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k1UvozPeTw]

…in the Gray Lady

http://www.chrisrivard.com/the-future/