I Live in Iowa: Week 41

This was such a fun week! I have such a great life. Often I wonder what purpose is it that I have so much when others have so little. I mean this about everything. I have accumulated more wealth this past year than other do in five years. I have some of the most amazing family and friends. Where do these people come from? How in the world am I fortunate enough to be friends with them? How is it that I had such a wonderful formal education? I mean seriously, I went to one of the top 5% of public schools in Kansas. I went to the college that while ranked only in the 50s by the standard rating agencies, has the 9th highest starting salary for undergraduates. In my opinion the measure of starting salaries is a little more descriptive of the value of an education than a ranking based on class size or starting salary compared to cost of attendance. By the way, WPI ranks higher on the starting salary scale than MIT. I'm just saying.

I worked 42 hours and finished some more projects this week. This is great I am hitting my stride, it just took a nine month warmup. Projects that formerly took days and weeks I am doing in hours or days. I feel almost guilty when I start a project and finish it less than three hours later. I feel like I shouldn't be going that fast. However, I still have significant room to grow and improve in the areas of structural evaluation. The things that we are doing with nCode and load surveys are pretty interesting and still not optimized for accuracy and efficiency. Honestly, in five years on products that we have been making for at least 10-15 years we will not need to physically test before we start selling them. Maybe it sounds like magic to imply that something will be able to go from computer screen directly to customer without us trying to break a few at our proving grounds, but the time of that is nearing, and we aren't even close to atomic scale modeling yet. (When we get to the point where normal cluster computers can model structures at the atomic scale and include everything like discontinuities and welding we will really begin using engineering minds.)

I ran two races this week, the mile and the 200 meters. Both went well. The mile I ran in 4:39.59 going through the first 809 meters in 2:15 I slowed down significantly but managed to recover enough to run 33 something seconds in the last 200 meters. The 200 I ran in 28.52 and received deal last place by more than a second out of the 38 people who raced it. I was so slow that about a dozen women beat me. Hopefully, my two races provided some inspiration to the members of my team. For the sprinters I hope that they saw how I put myself in an uncomfortable position and gave it what I had. I ran a sprinter workout with them on Tuesday and was tearing it up in front of them. Hopefully they can say, 'hey this guy only raced two seconds faster than he was running repeat 200s this week. Maybe I can pick it up in practice a little bit.' For the distance runners I hope that they can look at my 200 and think, 'I'm faster than that in the 200, I should be a little closer to him at the longer distances.' Plus, I feel we have a good relationship among our whole team right now, but it could be better. We are having some of our distance runners run 4x200s and 4x400s in meets and the occasional sprinter workout. Similarly sometimes we get the long sprinters to do a longer workout or outside distance day with us. I feel that bridging the gap between strait sprinters and strait distance runners is important to building a loyal team. If you can get those two different groups together you will end up with the jumpers and throwers being in on the huddle as well. When everyone on the team knows everyone else and respects them, you get a lot more cheering and encouragement. Oh yeah, I ran 72 miles this week it was my first 70+ mile week post-CIM.

In other news, I am trying to get a team for Reach the Beach New Hampshire this year. If you would like to join and be part of a relay and run three legs totaling about 20 miles over 24 hours let me know. WPI Alumni runners preferred, but I will take others as well.