Singapore

Now it is Monday evening for me, but I realize that most of you in the States are not awake yet. Anyway, I spent Sunday in Singapore. We flew in around 1 AM and left around 8 AM Monday. Thus I had some time to tour.

To be honest, Singapore is a nice place where food, drinks and hotel rooms cost 2-3 times as much as Dubuque, Iowa. It's expensive, and rumor has it (my tour guide said) that people there only make in the 18-24k range per year. I have no idea how that much money would last a year in that city. Anyway I made a video. I didn't set it to music, but the opening sequence is also good if you listen to the first 30 seconds of The Reeling by Passion Pit.

 

Discombobulated, incoherent, overwhelming, dizzying? That's life and travel. I'm in Pekanbaru Indonesia tonight, but the next two nights will be in the "bush".

I Live in Iowa: Week 80

I just spent some time making an 83 second video about my day in Singapore, and honestly, it's more interesting than the rest of the week. However, it will take over 20 minutes to upload an 83 second video and I will probably be asleep by then.

I worked, and I suppose I worked Friday and Saturday although that really involved spending a total of more than 20 hours on planes and another five or so in airports. I slept maybe an hour or two Friday night and about four hours Saturday, although I basically skipped half a day between crossing time zones and the international date line. The first part of the week's work was the standard linear static analysis type of stuff worrying about mesh quality. It is pretty simple, but always important.

I ran five days this week. I was tired about the lackluster, but longer than 13.1 miles, half marathon last Sunday. So I took Tuesday off, and I spent most of Saturday in an airplane. I only had about an hour in Hong Kong, in the airport to stretch my legs. No workouts, but some good injury and soreness progress.

Coaching was climactic. We had the conference meet this week, and I missed it riding on an airplane somewhere over Asia. The results look like we had a good showing with a couple really strong performances. I have to talk it over with everyone before I really know what happened.

Other than that I am in Singapore. In about 11 hours my plane to Indonesia takes off, so I am off to bed. Goodnight!

Positivity Develops Motivation

I just finished reading Charlie Spedding’s book “From Last to First”. I had never heard of him either. The most significant unique achievement that is covered in the book is his run to 3rd place at the 1984 Olympic Marathon. I read more books than the average American, which does not say much, and this book stuck out more to me than most. 

So much of life is mental. I can get an A on this test. I will get an A on this test. I will set a personal record today. Most people define things in terms of “okay”, “not bad”, “pretty good”, and other mediocre, slightly negative, descriptions. Charlie mentions things like giving yourself the opportunity, and focusing on how well you can execute the ideal, the perfect, situation. 

In other words, how was the run today? It was prefect for me. (In fact I did have a perfect for me 11 miler in Singapore this morning.) That is such a huge mental shift from evaluating everything according to the fastest workout or race you have ever had. Sometimes the perfect training is slow and short. 

Obviously the book was about running. But I feel this attitude is probably more applicable toward things like an education and career. I am writing this on a 747 flying from Hong Kong to Singapore. With a measly year and a half with the company and at the young age of 26 I am entrusted with being a good candidate to travel to the other side of the world and spend time in the field. I am the only structures analysis engineer (or I like to think of myself as somewhat of a design engineer) on the trip. There will be  at least four direct Deere employees plus a number of dealer employees and customers/customer employees on this trip. I already wrote about why I have this opportunity, but it still seems strange to me that I am going. Had I been in charge, I would have asked several other engineers if they were interested before I allowed little me to go. Others have more experience. Others work more hours. Others will almost surely still be working for Deere in Dubuque in five or ten years. Honestly, I see myself as a bit of a liability. A liability in terms of the ideal 50+ hours a week quant who works for one company for 40+ years. I have never lived anywhere longer than six years. I don’t know what happens in year seven.

After reading Spedding’s book I have a feeling I am on this trip because I created the situation to give myself this opportunity. That sounds like I did a lot more work than I feel like I actually did. The situation is that engineers travel. How a person in Indonesia uses a machine is almost guaranteed to be different than how a person in North America uses a machine. Thus it helps us create more reliable machines if we can better understand how the customer uses the machine. In other words, Apple realized how much time people spend starring at a 3.5 inch screen and decided a 4 inch screen was a better decision. 

An interesting off shoot of this, since I am reading “Makers” by Chris Anderson, is the long tail effect. One size does not fit all. With the ability to customize, a tailored machine is significantly better than a one size fits all machine. Using a few simple constraints in forestry, european machines must be less than a certain width. Many countries and regions have ground compaction limits so weight and footprint matter. Other areas the loading is so repetitive that stronger structures are needed. In other words, engineers travel to understand usage patterns. I would love to go to Africa to study Internet and cell phone usage. I feel they are really in the midst of defining connectivity. 

So given the world inside my head of the opportunity to travel I assumed that at some point I would travel to other countries for my job. Once I knew I was going sooner or later it was simply a matter of letting everyone else know. Is it naive? Arrogant? Confident? I do not know. Is it arrogant to assume I will do something, then actually follow through with it?

The point of all of this is that I had a goal I was sure was going to happen, but it actually happened because I gave myself the opportunity. Well that’s not the whole story, I am incredibly blessed. But that’s another story...

The First Hour

For me the first hour in a new country is always the hardest. Everything is different. Guards carry machine guns. People speak other languages. Taxi drivers want to take me and my money places. It is usually dark outside. My host is usually someone I have never met face to face.

Once I get to the hotel it is easy to calm down and understand the situation. Is it safe to walk around outside? What is the weather like? Where can I find drinking water? Where is the fire escape? (Those are useful not only during a fire but electric outages and other less than desirable situations.)

In less than an hour I walk onto a plane to Singapore by way of Hong Kong. So much new so quick. This is going to be great!

To the athletes I work with racing Saturday: be patient at the start and hammer toward the end. You've done most of the work, now, do the last little part.

(By the way, this was written on my phone from Chicago O'Hare airport.)

Are We Weak?

Despite the voluminous writing that I do on this website, I rarely expose the darker side of my motivations. However, my 20 mile long run last Saturday has given me opportunity to inveigh my perception of our culture. (How about inveigh for vocabulary? It was not my first choice, I found it in the thesaurus and then had to use the dictionary to figure it out, but it is exactly what I mean.)

That Friday I emailed my two most consistent training partners with the opportunity to accompany me on a 20 mile run Saturday morning. One is injured and the other just ran a marathon so I did not actually except either one to come along for the whole thing. After looking at the forecast neither one was particularly enthusiastic. That is fine, no problem, if I was in either one of their shoes I would probably not have tagged along either.

So I woke up around the late hour of 7 AM Saturday. It was barely sprinkling outside so I dressed and stopped by Starbucks. I had a 12 oz. mocha and a miniature scone. One of the coaches I have gotten marathon advice from suggests not eating anything on marathon day until standing on the starting line in the last five minutes before the start. That way your insulin system does not go crazy before the race even starts. So I tried that.

Around 7:45 AM I pulled into the Sageville entrance to the Heritage Trail and had the parking lot to myself. It was not raining at all. After a couple quick stretches (leg swings) I set off. The first six miles were perfect! 50 degrees Fahrenheit and no rain. Around mile seven it started to rain, but only a sprinkle at first. I was making good time so I did not check my watch on the way out, making the first 10 miles in 66 minutes. On the way out I encountered one person around mile nine. On the way back I encountered another person, perhaps the same guy around mile 11. There is a cluster of houses around that area and I have a feeling that both of them lived very close. Neither one was dressed like the typical rail trail yuppie.

There might have been a lady with a dog on the way back, but I tried to run a progression run and I don't remember clearly.

The rain was light by my definition. It was not very windy, and while it was not warm, it was in the low 50s, which is not cold. Despite these rather moderate conditions I was out there for just over two hours, a third of which was ideal running weather, and I saw only three people at least two of which were wearing jeans and flannel. Normally given those temperatures, this time of year, Saturday morning, I would expect to see about three people per mile. If the trail was in Massachusetts you would see 30 people per mile.

While there could be many reasons, tapering for races, sleeping in, competitive season already ended, I feel as though people were scared away by the weather. We check the weather and become fair weather warriors. I find that attitude disappointing. I have gotten sick running in a cold rain, but it has to be in the low 40s or worse to really weaken me. I feel we have become so sterilized to adversity that we   hide from anything which might be out of our comfort zone.

Now I'm not saying we need to beat our heads against the wall and share drinks so that everyone gets everyone else's diseases. I am a germophobe more than most. I am also not saying that we need to go out and run 14 miles in 50 degree rain.  I am simply stating that we have this wonderful resource called the Heritage Trail in a county of 100,000 people and when it rains there are maybe 10% of the normal load of people out on it. A similar lack-of-people-on-the-trail-in-the-rain happened last year when I did my special block before CIM. I fear that our fear of suffering might inhibit us from greater tasks. Astronauts will die. People will die near the equipment that I help improve. Runners pursuing their peak will get injured. I fail all the time. You will fail sometime too. Suffering often accompanies failure. We cannot hope to progress and learn and do new things without failing along the way.

In other words, we cannot be strong without exposing ourselves to weakness. This is as true for running on a trail in the rain as it is for asking a question in science class when you do not understand.

If I Was to Start a Blog Again

I have been thinking about this a little recently. The reason being that once you start something, changing direction can be difficult. For example, I started my blog under the premise of starting a company. Then when I started the company I started a new blog directly for that. For some reason, probably because people were still reading it, I kept this blog moving. In other words, this is it. I will have this blog indefinitely. The graphics and layout will change and the content that I add will change. One day in the future I could quite possibly be talking about what to do about a daughter’s boyfriends. That however, is not in the foreseeable future. 

There are a few concrete things I would do differently if I was to start over again.

1. Set a mild to moderately focused theme. Talking about engineering, then running, then socializing, while very descriptive of my life, does not convey a clear sense of purpose. It would be better for the blog if the scope of topics was smaller and the depth great. 
2. A couple weeks of content ready to go. I would not publish it all at the same time. Simply one post the first day, another on the second and so on at a frequency that is what you plan to maintain or slightly higher than you plan to maintain for the life of the blog. For example, I typically post 4-5 times per week. The first two weeks I might do 5-6 articles to get people interested and have some content for the search engines to start combing through.
3. Generate some buzz with the first few articles. Tell your Facebook friends, Twitter friends, and even people in person about this awesome thing you started. Nearly a dozen of my friends have started blogs, but so often after a couple weeks or months it fades away. Or there is only one new article a month, which is okay, but kind of depends on the scope of the blog as to it’s impact.
4. Design it to look great and have all relevant information accessible. I really like the design of my blog now. However it went through a couple cumbersome renditions. Overall it is quite simple to navigate. I especially like the labels and blog archive features. They seem to link to relevant articles or different times in my life which give context to the other articles.

There are also a few suggestions I have for people setting out on the path to self publishing.

1. Once you start, keep going! It is not always easy to write about your topic or topics, but for the sake of the whole truth please write during the hard times as well. 
2. Develop a style. The Internet is a strange place and really there are few rules. You could start a blog about your college experience, or quest to run the Boston Marathon, and when the goal was accomplished and you wrote a couple epilogue articles, end contributing to the blog. I suppose what I am suggesting is that the blog have a plot line that builds over time with some sort of climax. Although, Seth Godin, from what I can tell, has no long running theme aside from marketing/sales/business to his blog and it’s the most popular in the world. In other words you do not need to read any of his posts to understand any of his other posts. I prefer on the other hand stories that build and continue that take a long time to tell. I know that some of my posts if read alone would not make much sense, but as a whole, the message is more complete. In other words, decide on the way you will tell the story or types of stories that you would like to tell. 
3. Include pictures, graphics and videos when possible. I realize that I publish words in far more abundance than I do pictures, charts and videos. Yet visual images convey strong messages. 

There you have it, four suggestions to do when you start a blog or website and three as you build and maintain it. 

What A Poor Performance Teaches About Long Term Development

While I will be specifically discussing my most recent half marathon, I will try to generalize this because it does apply to things like a career or our relationships. So... a 1:14:20 half marathon on a flat course after a light week is not encouraging. That's over 150 second slower than I was last year over almost the same course. One of the biggest, or best, indicators of development year to year is performance in the same race every year. For example, if a person is 50th at the conference cross country race one year and 25th the next year, that is great development. If a person runs a 5:10 mile one year and at the same race the next year runs 4:50, something is being done right.

However, progression is not linear. Some days, 2:14 marathoners run slower than 8:00 minute miles.

Speaking directly about my race, I have not had the mileage or the workouts that I had last year in the two months leading up to this race. Plus, I have been training around this ankle-shin-calf pain so I have been avoiding the quality work. Perhaps, given the work that I have put in, I had a good race. Also, we ran about 200 meters longer than we ran last year. Instead of one 100 meter out and back at mile 12, we ran one just before mile 12 and one after mile 12. Take a right turn, take a U turn, take another right turn. Not a great way to run fast for a minute. Now do that twice within a mile.

Complaining and sulking aside, the result is worse than the prior year. How does this help me progress toward my goals? First, experience is cumulative. It does not go away unless one has dementia. I do not think I could have gone out and run a 1:14 half marathon on heritage trail this weekend alone. It is a great training stimulus. After all, everything is training that is not the goal. Look at Lasse Viren in the 72 and 76 Olympics. If he could win one race every four years what would it be? The Olympics. Look at Steve Jobs, one could say that the iPhone and iPad were the only two really significant contributions in a lifetime of product design. Sure he had many successes, and we must not forget Apple's vertical closed-system integration, but he had failures too, at least as measured by sales.

Experience teaches us how we went wrong. Trying to train though a rather minor injury, which ends up keeping me from doing workouts I need, is counterproductive. I knew that, but this reminds and reinforces me.

When a young person asks an older more experienced person a question the older person will often pause, hesitate or sigh before giving an answer. Rest assured in that time multiple incidents from the past are going through the old person's head. The answer to a question is not always the same.

Plus, despite the cumulative result being unsatisfactory, there were some bright spots. After two miles the Kenyans marathoners were not pulling away so I ran up to them and passed them. I've never passed the lead pack of Kenyans before. Sure they ran twice as far as I, still two miles in they were only doing mid 5:30s. I felt as though I belonged. Like I had done the work to be up there too. Often an endeavor is more mental than physical.

In conclusion, I am more fit now than I was a week ago. I worked on my ankle so hard last night I could barely walk this morning. Strangely that is one way to know massage is effective. This injury will heal. I was able to celebrate the weekend with a number of friends both new and not as new. I realize my poor preparation contributed to my poor performance and I will do what I can in the future to avoid a similar result.