Concrete is Evil

As a runner, I notice certain facts of life that I didn't before. Take water for instance. If you're sitting in an air-conditioned office all day, you can get away without much hydration. It won't affect you a terrible lot. Now say you're running a three-hour marathon. Big difference. Don't drink your H₂O and you're guaranteed to see (and run into) many strange things, including but not limited to: pink elephants, water buffaloes, and zombies (the latter are actually your fellow runners, but they appear malicious and hungry when viewed through the dehydration reality field, DRF for short).

But I'm not writing about water today. Topic? Paving surfaces. If you're driving in a car, you probably don't really care if the State decided to use concrete, asphalt, gravel, or dirt. It just doesn't affect your life in a personal way. Ditto with shoulder width. Hey, as long as you've got a 12-foot wide lane to drive in, you could care less about the space between the white line and the edge. Besides, most municipalites are thoughtful enough to provide pedestrians with a thick slab of concrete to walk on. The uninformed refer to this as a sidewalk. This term is too innocuous for me.

Let me reiterate. Many roads don't supply a shoulder, so the only safe place for a runner is the... thick slab of concrete. This is very important. Remember: sidewalk = thick slab of concrete.

See, concrete is evil. It doesn't matter how hard you pound the stuff, it won't budge, dent, or collapse in any way. It also lasts forever, which is probably why it's such a popular building material for bridges, skyscrapers, bomb shelters, and other structures you want to stay around for a long time.

Here's the catch though: the law of conservation of energy. For example, when you push on a wall, the wall pushes back on you with equal force. See how that works? Energy is conserved. Same with sitting in a chair. Gravity pushes you into the chair, and the chair pushes you up with equal force. Nobody moves, nobody wins (unless the chair breaks).

Okay, with the rudimentaries out of the way, let's look at what happens when you run on grass. Sure, some of the downward energy is reflected back upwards (which is good, otherwise you'd fall through the ground), but a lot is absorbed and diffracted by the grass and (presumably) soft dirt underneath. Your leg joints and muscles (read "shock absorbers") like this, as there's less energy that they have to absorb after each footstrike.

You know what's coming next. Concrete, that evil paving-surface-from-the-abyss. When you run on concrete, just about all the energy hitting the ground gets reflected back to you. Don't get me wrong, at first it's a pleasant experience. Properly poured concrete is a very stable, grippy surface that makes running easy. Too easy. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience, but certain runners take this stable surface and start running faster, harder, and effectively grind their legs into dust without noticing. Energy isn't the only thing that's conserved. Pain is too. Not that I have anything against Newton, but think he should have annotated his findings with notes on the physiological impacts of his laws.

So yeah, I'm sitting here in pain. My feet hate me, my calf muscles too. I got 12 miles into the run before my body's self-flagellation protection mechanism forced me to slow to a walk. I'm going to need aqua-jogging therapy for a month. Oh well, some lessons are harder than others. Zing!

Predawn Insanity

I am a runner. Not a die-hard fanatic, mind you. I tend to avoid ice storms, forest fires, earthquake fissures, and other acts of God that aren't covered by my life-insurance policy. Running has its perks. It's good for your bones, cardiovascular system, and mental sanity. My modus operandi? Reap the benefits of regular exercise without incurring the penalty of sudden death. Simple.

Historically, running has been a hit or miss proposition for me. Thanks to some friendly competition, though, I've spent the last month training for a 10k race in April. Typically, I'll do a long run on Tuesday, a tempo run on Thursday, and sprints on Saturday. As of the fateful morning, my training was going well, no injuries.

Trouble is, my schedule was plotting to kill me.

See, I needed to meet a friend for an all-day painting job at church. Departure time? 8:30am. On a Tuesday. My schedule had specified a 10 mile run for me on that day. The plot began to thicken.

Best I could figure, I had to wake up at 5:30am, go running at 6:00am, return by 8:00am, scarf down breakfast, shower, and leave for church by 8:30am. Perfect.

Except for the fact that sunrise didn't hit until 7:00am, this was completely routine. Normally, I run during the day. But hey, I figured I hadn't been scared of the dark since junior high. I was tough, I could take it.

The day started without a hitch. I woke up to darkness, dressed in darkness, read my Bible in darkness, then ventured into the 28° F dark expanse outside.

There's something to be said for the so-called "runner's high". I was freezing my buns off, walking laps around the driveway waiting for my GPS to lock onto satellites, preparing for a frigid dash into the darkness. My mood? Euphoric. (Don't let anyone tell you that endorphins don't lead to suicidal tendencies. They do.)

Crunching down the frozen asphalt. I began my 10-mile run with a blazing 7:30 first-mile split. With the light from my flashlight bouncing off my puffing, quadruply-layered form, I must have resembled a slightly out of shape, overweight will-o'-the-wisp. Sometimes I'm glad I live in a rural community. There aren't a lot of people around to witness the embarrassing things I do at 5:30am in the morning.

Four miles later, my quadriceps were definitely hurting. Flying down a 1000' foot descent will do that. Good news, from there it was all uphill. I took a left onto a busy rush-hour conduit and starting dodging traffic. Fact: you haven't cross-trained until you've spent half your time leaping into and out of the drainage ditch. Bonus training tip: if you need turnover training, find a skunk in one of ditches. Trust me. It helps.

Long story short, in spite of a strained iliotibial band, rural roads with hairpin turns and rural-sized shoulders (read, no shoulders), and maniac drivers who weren't expect the level of running fanaticism expressed by yours truly, I survived. Current score: Schedule (0), Daniel (1). 

Minimizing Fiscal Fretfulness

A penny saved is a penny earned
-- 18th century wisdom.

A mocha saved is a carribean vacation earned
-- 21st century wisdom

All kidding aside, this is largely how we view the concept of saving today--skimping on daily luxuries will enable us to afford the big-ticket items of life. Fair enough. The catch: you can't expect a financial miracle if you don't watch your big-ticket spending.

It's a matter of scale. Consider a mortgage where you're locked into paying $1600+/month for 40+ years. Kicking your daily coffee habit might save you $60/month, but that's small peanuts compared to the mortgage. Which decision makes a bigger impact, cutting back on coffee or living within your housing budget?

I'm not saying that Benjamin Franklin was wrong. On the contrary, I think his proverb makes perfect sense. It's just that we tend to look at spending from the bottom up instead of from the top down. The long-term ramifications of buying a Corolla instead of a Corvette are far greater than the ramifications of buying a Mac instead of a PC. If you're going to agonize over a bugetary decision, make sure your agony is proportional to the relative value of the item under consideration. Clear as mud? Let me give a specific example:

Let's say that you're in the market for some new hiking boots. You want to buy a quality product, but you don't want to make a financially irresponsible decision. After long deliberation, you've narrowed the field down to two products: 1) a pair of Coleman hiking boots, costing $60, and 2) a pair of Danner hiking boots, costing $300. What do you do? Here's where my premise comes in. I don't think it really matters which choice you make. Choosing Danner isn't going to relegate you to the poor farm for the rest of your life. It may be a $300 purchase, but compared with the bigger purchases in life (remember the mortgage? the car?) it really doesn't weigh heavily in the grand scope of your financial future.

There's a reason I wrote this article. It bothers me when I see people stress about the "small things" of life, like the next tank of gas or the month's electricity bill, when I know that better stewardship of the "big things" in life would largely obviate these concerns. True financial hardship does exist--I'm not denying that--but Americans are generally below par when it comes to financial stewardship.

Disclaimer:
Okay, now before I get in trouble, if buying those expensive boots means you can't pay next semester's tuition or buy groceries for a month, ignore me. Short term constraints may dictate a different approach to spending than an idealistic long-term approach, like I'm advocating here. Feedback is welcome.

Hiking South Sister

Oregonians familiar with the state know of the Three Sisters. Towering 5,000 feet overhead, with a total height of 10,363 feet, the South Sister is the highest of the three... and paradoxically the easiest to climb. (Though "easiest" in this context is like saying it's easier to survive a nuclear war than a hydrogen holocaust).

Starting from Devil's Lake--a tranquil body of water on the south side of the Cascade Lakes Highway--our hiking group started up the incline. For some reason, it seemed like a brilliant idea for me to load my backpack with 30 pounds of camera equipment, food, water, and enough layers of clothing to survive the aforementioned hydrogen holocaust. More on that later... (the weight, not the holocaust)

The trail to the top is 5 miles in length with an elevation gain of 5,000 feet. Not bad, eh? What's a 20% grade, you say?

Well...

Calculating an average grade is all well and good, but nobody told me that 4,000 feet of that elevation gain is condensed into the final two miles. Better make that a 40% grade...

Ouch...

Now, keep in mind that this isn't a nice happy stroll up a somewhat steep asphalt path. No. This beaut of a path--which looks more like a cross-country jaunt across Mars--consists of hundreds of switchbacks with a thick coating of scree. For the uninitiated, South Sister scree consists of loose pebble-to-fist-sized rocks with the consistency of pumice (okay, they are pumice). Climbing scree isn't a terribly rewarding experience. It's reminiscent of climbing up a sand dune... a sand dune with lots of sharp, abrasive rocks just waiting for the next victim to fall onto them. (I kid you not; the Red Cross doesn't have it this good).

Once I had managed to stagger to the top, I was faced with another choice. Right or left? You see, the trail to the top first hits a false summit. The real summit is on the opposite--North--side of the caldera. Figures.

Anyway, it turns out that my choice of direction--left--wasn't exactly the best choice. While hikers headed clockwise around the caldera are greeted with a nice friendly hiking trail that even toddlers would approve of, hikers headed counter-clockwise around the caldera get to try their hand at rock climbing. Yay!

I wish I could say I get a thrill out of making things difficult for myself. The truth is that oxygen deprivation at 10,000 feet makes the human brain a bit slower than one might suspect. Rock climbing was fun and all, but the thrill was finally stumbling to the top of the real summit and taking a look down... waaaayy down. A step back or three felt like the best choice just then for long-term health and prosperity.

All in all, the hike to the top was a trip I'll not soon forget. Especially those moments such as discovering that my 8-pound tripod was useless because I'd forgotten an allen wrench, or running out of water 2/3rds of the way to the summit, or....

Ah yes... memories... priceless.

Keep smiling,
- Daniel

The End of an Era

Today I walked out of HP for the last time, thus ending an era of updates from the Corvallis front. Fear not, however, as I'll soon be broadcasting from another front: the home front. No doubt FEI will be a change for the better. At least I'm hoping so. Either way, the time down in Corvallis has been memorable for many reasons, most of which have already been duly recorded in digital format and archived for posterity's sake.

I've learned a lot about myself. Yes, I have a sense of humor. Yes, I'm more dependent on social interaction than I first thought. And yes, I'm missing a few bats in my belfry (see the car keys post if you doubt that last one).

Would I repeat my apartment experiment again? Most certainly. It's a rather expensive way to live by oneself, but I thoroughly enjoyed the freedom that it represented. However, better than renting would be making a large down payment on a house and working to own it outright. To me, that's by far the more inviting choice, and, as opportunity presents itself, I'll keep this option in mind.

Now... if only I can finish with my schooling. It doesn't matter how you slice it: tuition is expensive, whether you're paying for it upfront or through student loans. Hats off to all my fellow compatriots who are seeking to reduce the time and capital needed to earn their degree. There's great wisdom to be found in their endeavors.