Race Report: Glendale Downtown Dash 5k

We had a GREAT time at the Downtown Dash this year.  It was funny since we didn't lay our clothes out the night before, and we assumed our phones would wake us including daylight savings time, but it turns out that it woke us at 0600 according to the pre-Daylight Savings time, so we woke up at 0700 instead.  The race was to begin at 0830.

We got dressed and hit the ATM, parked on Wilson.  We hustled over to registration, picked up our numbers and T-shirts, then headed back to the car.  After dumping our goodies and pinning on our timing plates, we headed to the starting line.  We didn't wait longer than 6 minutes of stretching with the Radio Disney dancers, and the race was off!

The amazing thing was that we ran the entire time and a fairly steady pace, stopping twice for water.  I LOVE supported events like this that bring athletes of all levels of experience together.  I love running in a massive pack and this event hosted over 1000 runners ages 1-99.  I placed 19th out of 64 females in my age division, 448th overall!

There was also a big band stationed near the old post office.  We got to hear them twice, both coming and going.  It was also a great idea to have a two-sided water stop at the turnaround somewhere around the two mile marker.  All the volunteers were cheering us through the race, which was so sweet!  And one guy was watching us while eating a huge ice cream cone just outside the Americana, that was hilarious!

Our co-finishers were a family: five kids under the age of 12 and the mom was wearing two leis, one with purple flowers and one with green.  All the kids had some element of green in their running outfits.  Even though the kids were always stopping and starting abruptly, they were cute!  To help us across the finish line, one little guy jumped out of his stroller to sprint the last 0.2 mile.  Awesome.

shoe blues => new shoes

That old pair of Diadoras has logged 2,296.56903005 mi. They are now a puppet. I can haz new shoez.

I found out that I've been rocking MTB shoes/pedals on my road bike all this time. Also, there was a considerable amount of grit in the bindings. Thanks to Glendale Cycles for hooking it up in the 'hood.

Also, we saw a horse of a different color at the show Cavalia Odysseo in Burbank, CA. Acrobats, stunts, dancing, music, it was like the Emerald City brought before our eyes. And William Chatner was there too!

What a Super Tuesday!  Tags: clipless, cycling, dancing, diadora, distance, education, green, love, Map My Ride, motivation, mountains, pain, pedals, plants, shimano, shoes, spring, summer, teamwork, technology, weight loss, winning, winter, writing

marche

I heard the greatest commercial where they presented data supporting a fitness routine called marche.  A consistent 30 minutes per day of marche had an amazing array of benefits.  Turns out marche is a fancy French word for walking.  Hey, they're on to something.

I've been wanting to catch up for a couple days now, with myself I mean.  And for me, that translates into one last blog post for February before March Madness hits.  It's not really madness, just spring break and planning for the upcoming conferences.  What I realized over time, using MapMyFitness, is that when I burn less than 6000 calories per month, I will gain weight.  Whether that is a result of my tendancy to overeat, I cannot say.  It's just a trend I've seen.

I tried to bike to work, and actually have done it three times now.  But then I had a shoe issue, which I am currently letting stop me in my plan.  Maybe I am getting lazy.  Maybe I don't plan well enough in advance.  Maybe I'm not exactly committed to doing it.  What might the barriers be?  Well, for starters I vomited the first time.  Don't know if it was the fumes or the train or the hard cycling after not being on the bike for awhile.  After that, I spaced out my morning/afternoon trains with a longer gap in between.  But then I wore my cycling shoes all day, walking around campus, and one of them broke.

I haven't been able to get myself to a bike shop to replace the shoes.  I haven't been walking the dogs or going for training runs.  But I have been doing some pretty fabulous marche.  I've heard that the difference between obese and not-obese is 100 calories per day.  But for me, that only gets me as far as overweight.  So I guess the difference between overweight and normal weight, for me, is 200 calories per day.  I just have to change my thinking.

Also, I've found my metabolism getting caught in a sugar addiction again.  I bought a dozen day-old bagels for goodness sakes.  I have bags and bars of chocolate on my desk.  I drink coffee until the evening.  I have not been keeping up with yoga.  But I have been doing a large amount of gardening.  Hauling the soil and buckets of rain water is still a decent total body workout.

I've been to a couple of amazing seminars recently.  Michael Bérubé totally blew my mind.  I'm still thinking about his ideas regarding reproductive rights; too important to be left to bioethicists. Gary Patterson told such stories about Michael Faraday, it took us back in time like Pitbull.  I had heard a lecture about Faraday at ASU, from Sir John Meurig Thomas.  This one was different, but complementary.  Today we're meeting to set a departmental dog policy.  I may already be a violator, since I've brought Edna and Mel to work on occasion.  Edna is quite vocal but hypoallergenic.  Mel is sweet and quiet, but sheds.  Two outlaws!

She wolf pack, we gotta go marche~!

Seduction

The chemistry of seduction is an elaborate molecular dance.  I was driving to school the other day thinking about how I was seduced by the whole idea of being a working, participating scientist.  The image came into my mind about being female, being seduced, being the object, being the target, reining in the sexuality, dominating the competition, overcoming skeptics, and always going back to Eve and that tree of knowledge.

Why does sister sound like sinister?  I went to a workshop in NoHo and there was no hate to be found there.  We exorcised it...gave it a break...broke the chains...freed our hearts...Rather than the typical battles, we just showed up and gave each other our support. What if all of life was like that?

According to about.com "abilities in subjects such as math are actually strongest when both halves of the brain work together." Therefore, engaging in dance (study of music), color, recognizing faces, expressing emotions, reading emotions, following one's intuition, and producing creative work is necessary to keep the brain of a person who regularly exercises logic, critical thinking, numbers, reasoning, and language healthy and connected.

Also, thinking about body language.  My friend is starting an acting class, the first topic of which was body language.  In a classroom, I bring a set of body language to the environment.  So far, I have had the desks in my classroom in clusters of 4, split in half by a diagonal, facing front, facing side.  We're getting to know each other, the students and I.  There is a "reading assignment" and "lecture topics" list posted now for each class meeting.  I really enjoyed the Rock with H.E.R. workshop because it gave me a bunch of confidence, and a set of body postures to match.

Also thinking about didgeridoo.  We attended a public lecture about sleep apnea given by USC Medical School.  The last seminar of a 4-seminar program was about how playing the didgeridoo could improve the quality of life for sufferers of sleep apnea.  The link to an article in the British Medical Journal is here.  I was driving in my car and heard Jamiroquai Synkronized and started jamming with Wallace Buchannan on the digderidoo.  Talk about rhythms and vibe.  I don't think we'll buy one, but maybe tapping into the Hu could work with or without the instrument.

Speaking of cycling news, in the course of biking to school twice I busted my shank.  So I guess that means it's time for new shoes.  But that's two days of not driving and two days of biking a moderate distance.  It was scary the first day and less scary the second day.  I don't know what I'll do this Tuesday because I fear at any moment my shoe will disconnect itself, leaving the bottom half clipped to the pedal and the top half flapping in the breeze.

Consider the Alternative

For every consumer choice, there is an alternative "greener" choice.  I have been wanting to write this post for months (at least since September 2012) when I thought I would title the post "A House Divided" because of how my household voted in the election.  But not only that, we have different choices in terms of household goods (soaps) and sources of nutrition (food) and whether or not it is worth sorting out the recycling.  In our house, marriage means compromise and I am so happy to be using a composter and driving a Smart car that I can only do so much for the environment.

Finally riding the Fuji again

But regardless, here are a couple things I/we do to be "greener":

(1) Natural soaps in the bath for hands, face, hair, body = CT Organics

(2) Natural soaps at the sink for hands, dishes = CT Organics, Seventh Generation

(3) Natural soaps as cleaners for tile, tubs, toilets = Pine Sol, Baking Soda

(4) Natural soaps as cleaners for bicycles, countertops = Simple Green

I am attempting to battle against the alternatives:

(1) Bar soaps, body washes, shampoo, conditioner = detergents

(2) Antibacterial hand soaps = detergents

(3) Chemical cleansing = Formula 409, bleach, Comet

(4) Chemical cleansing = Windex

Buying eco-friendly cleaners

You might ask why I would crusade against these alternatives to "greener" choices... I have some sense that the synthetic molecules will eventually build up in the environment.  I worry that our rate of manufacturing, use, and excretion of detergent into the environment far exceeds the rate of its fate in the environment.  I imagine that these molecules persist in the order of 10,000 years, but maybe I'm wrong and I've been meaning to do some more reading on the subject.  Maybe during 2013 sometime.

Another thing I'm doing to be "greener":

(1) Buying local = farmer's markets, homemaking, friends/neighbors exchange, walking to downtown

(2) Living local = "day without a car" at least one day per week

(3) Commuting socially = Metrolink

(4) Commuting sustainably = Bicycle

Taking the train

I am attempting to battle against the alternatives:

(1) Buying supermarket = food out of season, trucked 10,000 miles, swollen for market

(2) Gasoline addiction = cars are status symbols and lifestyles are unrealistic for our children's children

(3) Commuting solo = lonely, stubborn, type-A

(4) Gasoline addiction = cyclists are not esteemed in our culture, safe cycling should be a respectable option!

I feel like I live in a bowl of mixed nuts.  I want all the nuts to taste well together but not every flavor is to every guest's palate.  I'm meeting lots of new people these days with classes starting up again.  It's fun.  Regardless of that I feel like a hypocrite up in front of a classroom of young idealistic people preaching about carbon dioxide emissions while driving on the freeway 80 minutes per day.

New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday I did some #madpainting, actually I painted all day and got totally exhausted and fell asleep early.  But then here I am up early in the am.  I am having a hard time putting pen to paper these days so I thought maybe putting electronic keyboard to work would flow more smoothly.

I feel like I'm not ready for the new year even though I compiled a summation of my awesomest status updates from 2012, I do not feel like it's 2013 yet.  I remember taking down 2012's calendar and posting up the new 2013 calendar and thinking, wow I didn't think I would live to see this year in history.  I had been determined to live such an amazingly controversial and dangerous life so as not to live this long.  Hey history! I've been trying to distinguish myself all these years and I'm still just a thread in the great quilt of life.

I'm not really into resolutions, but I do reevaluate my lifestyle on a quarterly or semesterly basis, one of the perks of being in academia.  You clear the decks and set a new standard for yourself and your students for the new class.  Never fails by the end of the semester everyone is back to their habits.  So why do we do it? Well this semester I resolved to commute by bicycle 2 out of 5 days in the week.  This is due to a calculation that I ran, assuming I saved or "stored" carbon credits for being a cyclist while in graduate school.  Well, now I have already used them all up by driving back and forth to school (37 miles each way).  So I will attempt to involve a bicycle in the means by which I get from my house to my office.

Got to spend a good deal of time with family this year.  In that sense our harvest has been abundant.  Our garden right now is paused with the exception of a wildflower mix that is going crazy!  The student garden is in ??? shape.  I visited it on Friday before winter break and the squash leaves had frost damage.  I guess winter is here.  On Christmas morning we ate squash from the garden.  For some reason this was important to me.  I also learned that just because it's called field corn doesn't mean you can't eat it.

Finals Week

It's hard not to get caught up in the nostalgia of the season, not to mention planning hubs 40th b-day party and a monster road trip for Christmas.  Made a calendar of my dogs last night.  The momentum of the season and all the cookies and candy are supposed to give me enough energy to finish up all the gifts, bake all the cakes, sing all the songs, grade all the labs, tally all the points, drive all the miles, well it will all be worth it, and it should be no surprise that we will get there, we've done it before, right Mel?

Melle (in 2004)

This semester has been most epic.  It's just like any kind of training, you have got to keep taking yourself to another level.  When I searched for the word on my mind I got: HigherEdJobs, Higher education, and the following song: Taio Cruz - Higher ft. Kylie Minogue - YouTube (2010).  The songs that I had in my mind were:
Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder (1973)
I wanna take you Higher - Sly and the Family Stone (1969)
Both of which are much more amazing than the modern chart topper.

But why is it called higher education?  Higher than what?  Why do we elevate ourselves?  How?  We solve relevant problems and encourage others to join us in the endeavor.  Why not integrate problem-based learning earlier in the curriculum?  Wonder if there are any out there for Chem 15.  Wouldn't some kind of environmental analysis for Earth Day be a great activity?  I'm also needing time to plan for the invitation of Southern California's undergraduate researchers in Chemistry and Biochemistry to Keck for a symposium.  Will there be prizes awarded?  If so, what should they be?  Will we have a keynote speaker for the students to interact with throughout the day?  Whew!  We have to make an announcement soon.