Adam Hooper's Blog

Late last year, I was meandering around the Upper West Side of Manhattan, absorbing my new neighbourhood. As on most beautiful weekends, a street was closed and festivities were afoot. Gravitating towards the action, I was pleased to witness elated racers conquering the New York City Marathon.

I had to smile and cheer at every runner trickling in. The finishing times were likely quite bad by the time I started watching, but these heroes had nonetheless managed to slay Goliath.

And I thought to myself, “that must feel amazing.”

Research

Back then, while I enjoyed walking around New York (perhaps the most walkable city on Earth), I was far from athletic: the only footwear I owned were dress shoes and loafers. Before committing myself, I wanted to learn what it takes to run a marathon.

Marathon knowledge is easiest to find in books, coaches, prevous marathon finishers, and the Internet. Naturally, I relied upon the cheapest and most accessible of those options.

Learning a new topic takes time: I find the brain can only learn so much about a topic without active participation. The only facts I completely absorbed were:

• I would need to train for six months;
• I would often be seriously tempted to give up; and
• Yes, I was able to do it.

I suppose that was all I needed to know: I bought a pair of shoes and started running.

Beginning Training; First Lessons

Enthusiasm is an athlete's greatest blessing and most dangerous curse. On my first day, as I did not know how far I was able to run, I decided to run until I dropped. Jogging very slowly, I ran around Central Park and then home: six and a half miles without pause.

Ah, how naïvely proud I was: I had just run a quarter of a marathon (26.2 miles, or 42km) on my first day of training, and I felt great! I triumphantly lopped the first two weeks off the training schedule I had found on the Internet, which had suggested I start with a paltry four miles until week three.

Not even one month into my training, I felt like my kneecaps would pop off each time I stood up, and I was unable to descend staircases without using handrails. I was forced to rest one entire week and I only ran twice on another week; and even after all that rest, I ran slowly and carefully, stoically enduring intense pain. While I could hit the six-mile mark, the achievement was not worth the pain.

I learned that the shoes I had bought (from a mainstream athletics store) were not right for me. I bought a new pair of shoes from a specialty store and my “runner's knee” gradually faded. I was struck by a mild bout of “shin splints” as I broke in my new shoes, but that pain only cost me three days' worth of training.

While my enthusiasm kept my goal in sight, it had cost me. Because I tried to bypass the first two weeks of easy but valuable training, I had to endure severe pain and sacrifice even more training time than I had skipped.

Increasing Intensity

Marathon training consists of several “short runs” and one “long run” per week. At the time, I figured the reasons were psychological; now I realize they are part of a cycle of building and rebuilding one's system.

My short runs started at three or four miles of length and ended at six or seven. I started with three short runs per week; I ended with four. Each short run keeps the body in tune, reminding it to convert food to energy and to transport oxygen to the muscles as quickly as necessary. Short runs sessions are also an opportunity to practice speedwork (through short or long sprints), oxygen absorption capacity (by fast, distance running), and cross-training (usually biking or swimming), all of which stress the body in new and important ways; alas, through inconvenience and ignorance I missed most of my opportunities to practice these alternate activities as I focused strictly on ordinary running.

My long runs started at six miles and ended at just under twenty-one. These runs are crucial in increasing endurance: a very different aspect of training and one which is of vital importance during a marathon. Long runs stress bones and joints, with the aim of strengthening them; but most importantly, long runs teach the body and mind to work together. There are limits to both: the body can become injured, dehydrated, or completely devoid of easily-accessible energy (glycogen): all potential marathon emergencies. Meanwhile, focus is needed simply to keep going: a lapse in concentration could slow me down significantly or prevent me from watching the road, risking injury.

Long runs deplete the body's stored, easily-accessible energy (the glycogen in the muscles and liver): aside from the rest needed to repair the inevitable, minor muscle and bone damage caused by constant pounding of pavement, it can take days simply to regain the stores of energy expended during a long run. I spaced my two longest runs (both over twenty miles) only five days apart, instead of the standard six; after the second, I was so exhausted I feared I might collapse in Central Park before I could stagger home.

Training is a matter of cycles: tricky short runs interspersed with easy runs, long runs padded by short runs, intense weeks punctuated with restful weeks. Cycles test, heal, and focus the system, all while making each round of training a fresh experiment. The body becomes a machine, learning how to satisfy the mind's demands; the mind, on the other hand, learns how to challenge and care for the body..

This part of my marathon experience was fascinating and rewarding for me, and aside from my lack of speedwork and cross-training I feel I generally did a great job. Had I trained another two weeks, I could have learned which pace I should target during the marathon and how best to overcome my body's natural aversion to digesting while eating; instead, I decided to stay on schedule and learn the hard way.

The Taper

Bones and joints suffer a constant beating; muscles develop micro-tears; energy stores are constantly depleted and replenished: training takes its toll, and none of these effects are helpful come marathon day. Luckily, the body retains most of the benefits of training for a month without exercise; so the two or three weeks before a marathon are best spent recuperating rather than intensifying training. At my peak, I was running 45 miles per week; yet in the final three weeks of training (with two abbreviated long runs), I probably only ran a total of 65 miles.

Because my runs were shorter, I started running mornings instead of evenings. This helped set my internal alarm clock for 5:00am, the time I would need to wake in Ottawa for the 7:00am starting horn. Of course, a healthy lifestyle is indispensible as the body is healing: my bedtime became 9:00pm, I cowered from friends' coughs and sniffles, I gave up all unhealthy foods, coffee, and alcohol, and I set my social life on pause. My abbreviated training and increased health left me ceaselessly energetic, such that my only desire was to run; but I followed the tapering discipline perfectly, with no regrets.

Marathon Day

My training was a mixture between following experts' advice (with discernable benefit) and throwing it aside (to my detriment); marathon day itself, replete with energy and excitement, was no different. Though a thousand factors could finish me before I finished the race, I knew when I awoke from my (predictably) restless sleep at 5:00am that I was completely ready.

At the starting line, my fellow racers fell into two categories: past marathoners and new recruits. Experienced marathoners had one and only one piece of advice: all I should really concentrate on is finishing.

Both literally and figuratively, I was filled with more energy at the start of the race than I have ever felt before. Since I had never decided upon a pace and I knew most people run their marathons faster than training runs, I figured I would be relaxed and patient and see where that would take me.

I was relaxed, cheerful, and excited; I found myself effortlessly plodding along at a pace which would end the marathon in 3:45: faster than I had anticipated, but as I had never calculated my appropriate pace I figured I might be okay.

A general weakness I discovered during training was my difficulty with keeping down foods and fluids ingested while running. (Most people, even endurance athletes, have this exact problem.) During a marathon, water is absolutely necessary to avoid dehydration, and food or energy drinks are necessary to defer physical exhaustion: while training is indeed transformative, some bodily limits cannot be erased, and marathons surpass those limits. Something went wrong before the halfway point: due to my breakfast, the excessive heat and sunlight, the crowds and onlookers, my faster-than-usual pace, powdered Gatorade, or maybe just the excitement, I stopped at the side of the road and vomited.

Thrice.

One does not train for six months, feel fantastic, and then give up two hours later. I immediately forsook Gatorade in favour of water and the energy gels I had thoughtfully stuck in my pocket. I gradually waved goodbye to my 3:45 pipe dream, but overall I was doing surprisingly well.

Near the halfway mark one of my starting companions—another marathon virgin—ran up to me. I told my story and he told his: he was happily following a 3:50 pace. We ran together for a bit, but I knew I had started the race too fast and my only recourse was to let him forge ahead of me and, in the course of several minutes, disappear up ahead.

Resolve had replaced excitement, and the crowds of runners and onlookers had thinned to small groups and lone runners such as myself. The sun was high and ruthless, and the road, though mercifully flat and picturesque aside the Rideau Canal, was unnervingly unending. I happily heard whoops at the finish line across the canal as the winners accomplished their goals around 2:15; and I eventually fell into the deliberate, monotonous mindset I had gained during training: the frame of mind, I learned, I should have been holding all along.

I met another of my starting line companion, a veritable marathon expert who had run the Boston marathon two months earlier. (Merely qualifying for the Boston marathon is a stupendous achievement; running two marathons within two months of each other, by all accounts, borders on insane.) Her happy advice was to “just finish.” She reminded me that finishing was, after all, the only goal I had set for myself; and thus I learned from her that the first marathon is nothing more than another learning experience. I performed an in-flight inspection of my physiology and found I was in fantastic shape, with no sore muscles, joints, or bones; though my energy was draining, there was nothing to stop me from eventually reaching the finish line. My companion and I drifted apart; and I turned my mind to sticking one foot in front of another.

I had reached the three-quarters mark in under three hours, but I knew a four-hour finish was unattainable. During a marathon, most of an athlete's energy comes from the glycogen stored in the muscles and liver; around this point in the race, the body has consumed its maximum glycogen capacity. By eating energy gels and drinking energy drinks along the way, some of this energy should be replaced; in my case, depressingly, several hundred calories were lying in a pool of vomit ten miles away. I was now extremely careful about eating and drinking, so there was no way for me to ingest significant amounts of energy. My body's only option was to start burning fat: a much slower process, and one which cannot sustain a running pace. I had hit “the wall.”

I had hit the wall during my final long runs, and I knew what to expect. I simply had to slow my pace: as my last droplets of glycogen disappeared, I slowed by 30%, stopping to walk two or three times per mile. This section of the course was rather uninteresting, so I whiled the time away by trying to calculate and recalculate my expected final pace. My brain was playing tricks on me, but three times I calculated I could hit 4:15 and only once did I calculate 4:30, so I figured I had a shot at 4:15. (An exhausted runner's mind is rather comical.)

My pace was slow and steady: I suppose I had “beaten” the wall, in that I had adjusted to my body's limitations and had mentally and physically reduced the damage to my final time. Though all my training math had been in miles, I was extremely happy that the race was demarcated in kilometres: each marker was a source of motivation, and the smaller distances helped me keep a more accurate pace.

In Ottawa, I learned, the half-marathon starts two hours later than the marathon, and both groups of runners run the same final stretch to the finish line. We few, proud marathoners found our paths were criss-crossed with those of countless cheerful, 2:15 half-marathoners. I was bitter about weaving through crowds to get water at refueling stations and having to check my blind spots before taking walking breaks; but I was also happy to have so many people running alongside me.

About a mile from the end, the 4:15 “pace bunny” (well-marked volunteer running at a set pace) passed me: the final stretch of my mind game had begun. I ran up to him and made sure he noticed me and thereby motivated me; and even though my pace had been slower, I put mind above matter and pushed my limit. Finally, there were signposts at every hundred metres and the road dipped into a sea of ecstatic spectators, clappers, thunder sticks, whistles, smiles, and cheers: energy entered from all sides as I passed the pace bunny, my family, my friends, and, finally, with my arms and smile aimed heavenwards, the glorious finish line.

I had finished in 4:14.

My first thought was, “this feels amazing.”

And my second thought was, “I bet a second marathon feels amazing, too.”

I have neglected my blog and will continue to do so for at least another week; in the meantime, a former roommate has written a fabulous piece for the New York Times about my current apartment's view: Parallel Lives.

My office in SoHo is similarly proximate to parallel workplaces: should I break the unwritten rule, I would be spying upon finance companies, design firms, Internet start-ups, and laser light show producers, all 12 feet away. At least my bedroom window faces diagonally, so at night my view is an unthreatening brick wall.

This story has hit all major news websites, but I want to plug it here, too: Ben Affleck's five-minute film about the UNHCR in Eastern Congo. (UNHCR means United Nation High Commission for Refugees: the agency that sets up refugee camps.)

The film has smiling people, which constantly awes me when I witness poverty, and which Ben Affleck deliberately wanted to demonstrate: these are real people. Hats off for an unconventional and powerful approach to the genre.

(The documentary cleverly omits the part of the story where the UNHCR sheltered the army of genocidaires largely responsible for starting this conflict, back in 1994; but it also refrains from reminding us that we the Western people spent decades hurling causes of war into the region, so I suppose both oversights cancel each other out.)

Again, watch this five-minute film about an entire people's way of life. It should help put our own economic crises into perspective.

A five-foot-tall transvestite, dressed in drag, walks up to me at the Posta Mpya public transit hub late at night in Dar es Salaam, happily yammering words I cannot understand. I smile and shrug, and eventually he moves on to his next comic victim, never missing a beat in his monologue.

Ni mchizi yangu, a passer-by jokes with me: a Swahili pun, in this context straddling the line between, this is my buddy and, this is a crazy person. Out of the spotlight, I am free to look around: I notice that a crowd is laughing at my accoster.

This is yet another little moment from my life in Tanzania which recently rushed back to me when I least expected it. My reminiscing usually begins with smells, sights, or phrases; but this particular memory of Tanzania came from a crazy person in New York:

I was walking to the movies with a friend. We arrived at the pedestrian decision point between hurrying north to beat the light or waiting a second for the light to turn so we could head east. A man loomed towards us, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, and loudly asked: Y'avalight?

Sure, enunciated my friend, producing a lighter and igniting it near the accoster's mouth.

The man ripped the device away and flicked it viciously, focusing his entire existence on the transferral of fire to his cigarette. Once finished, he gave it back roughly, muttering, vowel-free, tks.

The traffic lights decided our next move: east. This man trudged in the same direction, at our exact pace: worried, we accelerated. As the man finally faded from our world, we detected that he had veered into the middle of the intersection. The last thing we heard him shout was, Apbtkd!

That was scary, we agreed, after gaining half a block of insulation.

There was something different about this man: something which set him apart. What was it?

This enthusiastic smoker was hardly the first person in New York to set off my ingrained normalcy radar. Walking home from work one day, I spotted a black cat perched on the head of a man who was strolling down the street. One week earlier, some coworkers and I ate lunch in downtown New York while a man outside the diner patiently teed six empty beer cans into a line on the street, pulled out a driver, lined himself up, and deliberately, one at a time, whacked each can into traffic.

I felt I gained some insight last weekend, as I discovered some people who seemed to blur a line between me and crazy: the coffee lady and the junkies.

The coffee lady came first. While trekking across a Brooklyn Bridge laden near collapse with tourists, I was perplexed by the common phenomenon of otherwise sensible people stepping in the extremely clearly delineated bicycle lane; even more comical were the reckless bikers who would yell, ring bells, shout warnings, and swerve, but who would adamantly refuse to decelerate to avoid their witless obstacles. As I approached the Brooklyn side of the bridge and the tourists (curiously averse to stepping past the centre of the bridge into a land unexplored by the gawking masses) receded, I spotted an approaching woman, eyes scanning the inches in front of her feet, mouth muttering incomprehensible phrases, with a coffee on her head. Two thoughts sprung to mind: first, that the wind was bound to blow this poor woman's coffee away; and second, that here at last I had found somebody who respected the bicycle lane.

The junkies appeared on my return to Manhattan, at the direct centre of the Manhattan Bridge footpath. Three of them were lolling over one another, backs against the side of the bridge, eyes dead. After months honing my ability to avoid subway screwballs and street psychos, I knew the footpath would bring me within a foot of these social deviants and I braced myself for the worst; but as I walked past them they gave me a completely normal New York greeting: eyes staring straight ahead, no words spoken, no sign of acknowledgement. And while they were doubtless well past the point of making a rational decision on the matter, I was nonetheless set aback by this one stab at normalcy.

I suppose the interesting feature common to the coffee lady and the junkies was their similarity to myself. Just like me, the coffee lady walked in the proper lane; just like me, the junkies observed social etiquette. Instead of being a different species, they became ordinary individuals with one bizarre twist: the coffee lady is normal except for the cup of coffee on her head (which, I assume, she replaces after every errant gust of wind); the junkies are normal except for the abnormal chemicals they recently absorbed.

Perhaps the smoker just needed a cigarette really badly, and perhaps we caught him at an unfortunate time as he tripped and thus stumbled into the middle of the intersection accidentally.

And come to think of it, why do I refrain from wearing a cat on my head, driving empty cans into traffic, and dressing in drag at a bus stop in Tanzania? These may not be normal activities, but when I give the matter a bit of thought, they sure seem like fun.

Part of me feels inclined to wait for the first snowfall, strip to my boxers, and run down Broadway shouting, I like pizza! at the top of my lungs. Call me crazy, but I somewhat doubt I would be the first to do it, and I suspect several so-called normal people would agree with me.

There seem to be two aspects to my world these days: real life and engineering. Both vary from stressful to challenging to, at times, rewarding.

Most people who read this blog, I suspect, read it to find out about real life, not about engineering. But I feel I have a fair amount to contribute in the latter category, so I hereby announce the grand opening of The Engineering Section of my website, catering to a new potential group of readers with wildly different interests.

My engineering section is blog-like, but is completely separate from this, my actual blog. I encourage interested software engineers to subscribe to the feed in my Engineering section, as I encourage my current readers to stay tuned here while I write my next proper blog post involving a guy wearing a cat as a hat.

I was planning another blog post today about New York, but with the world the way it is, I cannot bring myself to write it.

1. In Democratic Republic of the Congo, a new French word is born: reviolé. Rebel forces plunder all they can from the villages they attack (with an insinuation of the word plunder more evil than most people can fathom). Government soldiers, defeated, extract everything they can from the people they are paid to protect as they retreat. Atrocity rates are so unfathomably massive that women who have been raped in several, unrelated incidents is becoming a nonzero demographic. The Congolese government looks in the other direction while its own employees commit atrocities; the UN peacekeepers (the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world) cower in impotence, other international bodies are powerless to interfere, ordinary Congolese men are brushed aside, and Congolese women have no recourse: they must suffer, repeatedly, disgusting humiliation I can scarcely imagine.
2. Not to be outdone, a 13-year-old rape victim in Somalia is stoned to death on adultery charges by one of the many groups hoping to become a government, in a stadium packed with a thousand murderous men.

My heart goes out to the victims of this most base, evil, vulgar, and despicable crime: especially those women honest and well-meaning enough to shed their dignity and publicize their suffering. I am sickened by the existence of masses of men in the world who are so unmoved as to lower themselves to rape and murder... and by the fact that I have something in common with them.

I wish I could chop theirs off.

My website, for whatever ludicrous reason, comes up as the #1 Google Search result for Kisambaa.

Since I am now considered the authoritative source on Kisambaa, I should explain a bit about it: it is the native language of the Sambaa people in Tanzania, who live east of Arusha and just across the border from Kenya. How are you? in the afternoon is onga mshi, and the correct response is tiwedi. I do not know the formalities for morning, nighttime, thanks, or farewells. In fact, I know practically nothing about Kisambaa.

I found a website called Ethnologue Report which says 664,000 Sambaa people exist. I would take that website's information with a grain of salt, however: its entry on Swahili suggests that Kiswahili only has 540,000 mother-tongue speakers, while in reality Zanzibar alone accounts for 1,000,000 Swahili people and I expect a significant subset of the younger population of Dar es Salaam (population 3,000,000) also speaks Kiswahili better than any other language.

Factoid: most native Kisambaa speakers know Kiswahili as a second language.

Factoid Number Two: Since I am writing English, I should really be writing Sambaa instead of Kisambaa (for the same reason I would write French instead of Français); but if I had done that to begin with my website never would have been the #1 search result.

What does gambling mean to you?

To me, gambling is a lark. Last night I won sixty cents on a horse named Pacific Flora: my tactic was to select the horse with the slowest-sounding name, and after searching the big book of small numbers in vain for a name along the lines of Bro-Can Leg, I decided seafaring algae might be comically slow as well. Pacific Flora somehow managed to evolve its way to first place.

Then I saw the slot machines.

Insert $1 to $100.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times; I eventually lost every penny; and I went to a different machine.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times. This time, I did not even bother looking at the screen. I already knew how the story would end, and the flashing lights and electronic sounds were distracting me from a conversation I was having. Sure enough, after pushing the button a few times, the machine diplomatically encouraged me to pay up or leave, refusing to illuminate its bet button.

Bored, I decided to walk around.

But I could not walk: I could only swim in a sea of slot machines. I came to realize I had been gambling at the fringe of a venture 5,000 machines across. As I delved deeper into the building I lost sight of all landmarks: only row after row of blinking lights and losing betters greeted my eyes, stretching to infinity—a financial infinity for those shrewd enough to design it.

I got lost.

Twice.

Ordinary people devise systems to beat these machines: simultaneous bets, fluctuating antes, and strict, superstitious mathematical formulas, hopelessly created to compete with mathematical formulas which (and you would think committed gamblers would pause to consider this at some point) are invariably designed by smarter, more educated, wealthier people who themselves do not bet with their creations.

At the corner of the complex, adjacent to the exit, sits a small, underused row of counters labeled REDEMPTION. It lent a biblical tone to the evening: with deliverance so convenient and well-advertised, evidence suggests the vast majority would prefer to sacrifice money, time, and sometimes souls to mechanized thieves and their devious designers.

What does gambling mean to me? In this instance, it means the aggregation of poor people's money in rich people's pockets.

But I am still missing a sense of scale. In the coming year, Yonkers Raceway will triple its number of machines, effectively tripling its ability to accept $1 to $100.

People are different across streets and alike across oceans.

Though I have not spent much effort recreating my old website, one small accomplishment is my "My Code" section. This lets you view some source code I have written for school projects and pet projects. It is ideal for university students and people interested in learning to program. Most of the code was written in C, Java, and Python; and at the time I write this, all of the code was written at least two years ago.

Check it out at http://adamhooper.com/code.