I Live in Iowa: Week 97

Another week in the bag. I will tell you what. I was tired a number of times this week. I had two under six mile running days. I slept ten hours Friday night. And at the moment I just finished a 20.6 mile run so I'm pretty tired again.

When a complex finite element simulation converges for the first increment after lots of convergence issues it's an exciting day. So Abaqus outputs a file with the extension .sta. For Abaqus Standard this records all of the increments that occur. Instead of the .sta file showing:

Attempt:  Time Increment:
1U          0.01
2U          0.0025
3U          0.0008125
4U          0.0002031
5U          5.076e-5

Indicating the file did not converge after five attempts to reduce the time increment, the file shows:

1           0.01

Meaning one increment converged without cutting back the time increment, it's party time! In fact, I am working on several variations of the simulation and one of them was something like:


1U          0.01
2U          0.0025
3U          0.0008125
4U          0.0002031
5             5.076e-5

Meaning that it just converged at a very small time increment. I was pretty happy about that too. In short, I had some good moments at work Thursday and Friday. Then I went in on Saturday and ate up over 750 GB of RAM and 48 new Intel Sandy Bridge cpus running my complex jobs.

I like work because I can put it in a box north of town. In school, there is always work to be done and it can be accessed from anywhere, which made it more stressful on the weekends, but I was way more productive on the nights and weekends. That being said, I miss school for the ability to go in at 8 PM and pound out an hour of work without a meeting or email to distract me.

Coaching was a nice week. It was nice because two athletes had pretty big races in the mile Saturday. One ran 4:38 and another ran 4:40, which are both PRs by maybe 5-6 seconds each. We are moving in a good direction! (Now if we can just get everyone to run for the next few weeks over spring break and as the majority of the team takes a break. College runners get a break after outdoor track in May and after cross country in November. They are only slowing themselves down if they take a break every time school takes a break.)

My own running went quite well. Two good workouts 6x1000 and 3x600, 3x200 and 86 miles for the week. The 1000s my total quality time was 19:18, which is good for me especially considering I had only 200 meters of jogging rest. The 600s were great! I did them all in 1:40! I am running a mile at a high school indoor meet this Friday and I think I can break 4:30. We will have to see, but there are two guys in the race both planning to go under 4:30 so I should just be able to hop on the train and run a PR.

Not much else. Happy Lent!