*grunt*

10 miles.

95 minutes.

Feel like a man.

A man who runs slowly.

And whose calves are completely exhausted now.

And well ok it was actually about 9.85 miles so a man who rounds up to the next integer.

But a man who is now up to 20 miles for this week.

A man who's careful about ITBS.

A running man with a goal.

Less than 4 hours.

26 miles.

Two Bags

I don't travel all that much but I fantasize that I will do a lot of it at some point during my life. Preferably soon. I'm also a fan of being prepared and thinking things through, which means that I need some durable luggage options for traveling. Finally, I'm sucker for luxurious detail for its own sake. It's really fortunate then that I'm thinking about these things because I just have too much money sitting around and I really must spend it. So, for shortish travel, I think a nice Glaser duffel bag will do.


But what about work documents, laptop, pens, and the like? Surely I won't put them into a duffel bag? OK, maybe I will since Glaser does offer modular organization inserts for their hand crafted and customized bags but I wouldn't want to put in my 1 hour of work per week as the head of Making Lots of Money, Inc. carrying around a duffel. How crass! This is where the Rocket Bag comes in. Yes, it sounds a bit like the briefcase of a certain improbable jet-pack aided Disney hero from the days of yore (yore mama!) but it's actually quite a bit less cheese and quite a bit more Le Grand Fromage des Kings et les Hommes avec Way Too Beaucoup de Money, Edition Limité. Regardless of your gender and sexual orientation though, you are a metrosexual if you get one of these:
See what I mean? You do. The bag of French yuppie kings.

Both of these options are supposed to survive a million miles of air travel, various kinds of weather and adversity, nuclear blasts, and come through it all looking as good as, if not better than, the day you got them. Also, you'll travel much lighter with these bags because they'll take care of that annoying extra wad of cash you've got in your back pocket.

Now I wonder if the 7x7x7 fits into the Rocket Bag...

The Plan

I read about Yasso 800s so I knew what they were. Idea is you take your goal marathon pace and substitute "minutes" for hours. You then take those minutes and run 800m intervals (with 400m jog in between). So for a 4 hour marathon, do 4 minute 800s. 3:30 marathon, 3:30 800s, and so on. You work up to 10 of those during your marathon training along with distance runs and such, and you're ready to do the marathon at your goal pace. Simple, really.

Sounds sort of easy but it's pretty brutal when you're on your last set of 800s, whether it's 3, 4, 5, or 10. If I do them right, my diaphragm hates me and it takes a little while to recover. Afterwards, I don't really want to puke but I can tell my abs are a bit overworked. That's what they feel like.

I'm toying with the idea of running the Santa Barbara Pier to Peak half-marathon (all up hill, about 4k feet elevation, end of August) so Brandon clued me in on hill workouts: run up a steep gradient hill hard for 2 minutes, jog back down for 3. I haven't scoped out the good hills around where I live so I go to the gym and set the treadmill for a 10% uphill gradient for the uphill bits and 0% gradient for the "downhill" bits.

For both the Yassos and the hills, I'm getting about four repetitions before I'm beat. I'm still getting used to it too so it takes a lot out of me and my long runs on the weekend suffer unless I rest for two days. All part of re-learning the process I guess. Big overall plan is to push up the hill repeats and alternate between Yassos and tempo runs. Once I get comfortably back in to the double digits (still at 8 miles for the long runs), I might do more hills and long weekend hills. I'll be pretty happy if I can finish the Pier to Peak without breaking my legs again. And then, I don't know, the Shanghai Marathon?

7x7x7

DO WANT.

Subjective-C

Reading through primers for Objective-C, I'm struck by the use of new names for existing concepts. For example:

A protocol declares methods that can be implemented by any class. Protocols are not classes themselves. They simply define an interface that other objects are responsible for implementing. When you implement the methods of a protocol in one of your classes, your class is said to
conform to that protocol.

Interesting, so a protocol is just an interface that other objects implement. In other parts of the world, we call such an interface an interface.

A class in Objective-C can declare two types of methods: instance methods and class methods. An instance method is a method whose execution is scoped to a particular instance of the class. In other words, before you call an instance method, you must first create an instance of the class. Class methods, by comparison, do not require you to create an instance, but more on that later.

So instead of declaring methods static, we now have somewhat less expressive notations of "-" for instance methods and "+" for class methods. Class methods are different than static methods, Apple tells me, but why do we have to resort to "+"?

When you want to call a method, you do so by "messaging” the corresponding object. The message in this case is the method signature, along with the parameter information the method needs. All messages you send to an object are dispatched dynamically, thus facilitating the polymorphism behavior of Objective-C classes. In other words, if a subclass defines a method with the same signature as one of its parent classes, the subclass receives the message first and can opt to forward the message (or not) to its parent.

So the "message" you send (with quotes) is equivalent to calling a method (without quotes). Also, what part of polymorphic inheritance isn't already part of other OOPLs, like Java?

Final gripe that may just be a n00b question: If the "messaging" syntax is represented by [object :parameter], how do you do method chaining?

[[[object method1:parameter1] method2:parameter2] method3:parameter3]?

That looks ugly.

Still wondering why we need another language to program on a different platform but maybe I'll change my mind once I delve deeper. For now, Apple seems to be continuing to do its thang of making a big deal out of existing concepts. XCode does "Data Tips". Great. What other decent IDE doesn't?

Sado-MAso

So earlier today somebody made a reference to a post on this blog and it was terrifying. I got over it with some meds I got from that happy Asian dude down at the corner of Main and Abel. Anyway, since I risk boring all of three of you with this stuff, I figure it's just your bad luck that you're reading this post.

I'm once again a total pansy as far as running is concerned since I haven't run for about 3 years now. I've been bed ridden with a debilitating illness and my muscles have atrophied to the point of needing crazy people from Zion to stick needles in me while Laurence Fishburne gets all philosophical on mine ass. But progress is being made, even if in the passive voice! Last week I did a "run" of 3 miles at 10:00/mile and I felt like an asthmatic smoker with one lung and half a leg. This Sunday I managed 5 miles at 9:40 feeling like a normal person with normal lungs and completely average legs. Today I felt like King Kong on crack because I ran until my diaphragm wanted to punch my guts in. Awesome!

Mile 1: 3/4 - 2% - @10:00 | 1/4 - 6% - @11:30
Mile 2: 3/4 - 2% - @10:00 | 1/4 - 7% - @ 12:00
Mile 3: 1/4 - 0% - @10:00 | 1/4 - 1% - @ 10:00 | 1/4 - 2% - @10 | 1/4 - 8% - @12:30
Mile 4: 1/4 - 0% - @10:00 | 1/4 - 1% - @ 10:00 | 1/4 - 2% - @10 | 1/4 - 9% - @13:00
Mile 5: 0%, accelerated steadily from 10:00 down to 7:20.

So, not exactly an impressive workout but also pretty good given that I'm paralyzed from the waist down. At least I'm not some crazy ultra-marathon runner gunning for the Leadville.

Per Se...

...is, among many things, a highly rated restaurant by Thomas Keller in New York.

It is also Latin for "of itself" or "by itself" or "with reference to itself".

There is no such thing as "per say", except as a homophonic yet mistaken spelling of "per se".