Cramming for My Final

I’m reeling from déjà vu right now, having come inside a few minutes ago from 90 minutes in the backyard, where I was finishing my final project for my drawing class – the first time I’ve “crammed” for a final exam since about 1999, just before taking my comp exams in grad school. (Among other things, tonight I learned that mosquitos think India ink is worth investigating, but that the ink pulls them into the container, where they miserably drown. Related: be sure to cover your India ink pot when working outside.)

We were supposed to spend 10-12 hours on the drawing over the last couple of weeks; I think that – beginning with extensive measuring, continuing through a ton of sketching in pencil, and ending with hours of drawing with pen and ink and various ink washes – I’ve spent about 25% more time than that upper mark. And I’ve recited the maxim “Tone, not hue” to myself roughly eleventy billion times.

We’ll literally see tomorrow if my time has been well spent, but regardless, I have enjoyed the experiences of the course and of the project. Musing as I drew, I realized that I haven’t worked this hard on a non-parenting, non-work project since grad school – which was actually a lot more like work than this course has been.

My Mother-in-Law, Scrabble Queen

I just finished losing a game of Scrabble to my mother-in-law, my second loss of the night. This one hurts because I was up comfortably until she dropped the X into a triple-letter score, allowing her to earn 50 points for OX and EX. Ouch.

More importantly, today marks precisely one year since I began keeping a spreadsheet of our in-person and online Scrabble games. In that time, we have played a sickening 153 games, or one every 2 days and 9 hours. Over the series, she holds a comfortable lead, with 84 wins to my 68. (We also played to one tie.) That 16 game lead equals her most substantial series advantage  early last month. I led the series for quite a while last October, but only by six games at the most.

In other words, she’s a better Scrabble player than I am. But I got her daughter, so I think I’m still ahead.

Drawing after Dark

The drawing class I’ve been taking this term culminating with assignments that demand the integration of various discrete skills we had acquired (and, to some degree) honed earlier in the term. For Thursday’s session, we used black and white Conté crayons to draw a complex scene on a huge sheet of very dark, very heavy paper.

Throwing out some ideas for suitable drawings, the prof suggested trying to to draw a night scene. Since I don’t have many daylight hours in which to do any outdoor drawing, I headed down to the Lyman Lakes on Wednesday night to draw Mai Fete Island after dark. This is roughly the scene I saw – a pretty good test of looking slowly, closely, and carefully. I dunno how I did, in any objective sense, with the drawing, but I’ll try to post it tomorrow, just for comparison’s sake.

Mai Fete Island

A Few Ways My Children Annoy Me

A partial list, which in no way connotes that they’re not great little girls. But still, sometimes…

I.
The way they “need” to dry their chins and cheeks with the bath towel while they’re in the tub. Apparently, every other part of their bodies can be wet, but not their faces. After using the towel, they often drop it into the bath water.

II.
Correcting me, over and over, as to their pretend identity, even when we’re no longer “inside” the scenario:
“Time to wash up for lunch, Julia.”
“No, Daddy, I’m Sleeping Beauty/Snow White/Mary/..”

“Genevieve, let me help you get your socks on.”
“You mean ‘Big Boy.'”
“Yes, Big Boy. She needs to let me help her get your socks on.”
“You mean ‘him.'”
“Right. Him. Let me help him get his socks on.”

III.
Their amazing ability to anticipate exactly when I will say something, and then to start talking at precisely that nanosecond, with twice the volume and three times the intensity.

IV.
Their incredible need to specify, each afternoon or evening, what they would like for breakfast the next morning. With a very few exception over the last 18 months, neither one has had anything except toast with peanut butter & honey on it, part of a banana (or an apple, in a pinch), milk, and water. Yet they must specify that they’d like exactly this for breakfast every day.

Die Down, Wind (Or, I Butcher the Bottle Rockets)

With apologies to the Bottle Rockets, I offer this Northfield-specific ditty. I “wrote” it tonight while fighting the wind during an abbreviated run; it’s based on the BRs’ great “River Get Down,” which I blogged last month.

I live in a prairie town, it’s pretty little
There’s a ridge on the side and it’s flat in the middle.
When the wind comes up, it whips us around,
And blows the trash cans all over town

Die down, wind; wind, die down, won’t you
Die down, wind; wind, die down
Once again you have almost knocked all my kids down
Die down, wind, die down

Over to the park’s where my kids want to go,
To ride on their bikes, but I don’t know
When it gusts like this, you can hardly go
It’s like a tornado, down by the Econo

You can fly around town when the winds gust high
Daily gales are just the prairie style
There ain’t nothing you can do to stop them
Just hope for the best and lash down the rest

Anybody know of a good Americana band that needs new material?

Maple Syrup Run 2009

This morning, I did the River Bend Nature Center‘s “Maple Syrup Run,” a 5k trail race through the RBNC’s wonderful property on the (quite curvy) Straight River in Faribault, Minnesota. I didn’t quite hit my goal time but it was a great race, just as family friends who’ve run the race several times assured me. 

The event took place in hand-numbing drizzle which probably slowed everyone down (and which didn’t make it fun for Shannon and the girls to watch) but which didn’t much affect the course’s dirt trails over the RBNC’s hilly terrain. After the usual scrum in the first 50 meters, the racers sorted out into a single file that crossed a bit of pavement and then plummeted down to the river bottom. We wound along the river on a twisty, wet path that was reminiscent of high-school cross country races and perfect for moving up the field – you could see everyone up ahead, count off the seconds after they went through a curve, and push harder to close the gap before the next curve. I was pleased to see that my heart rate was staying at the low end of my highest range – around 165 or so, or 90% of my maximum – and that I felt pretty good.

The riverside path ended abruptly with a sharp right turn onto a stiff, steep climb that recouped all the earlier elevation loss in about 50 meters but was for good for making a couple more passes. From there, we skirted the edge of the center, keeping just inside the treeline but also passing by the Faribault prison. Talk about irony: I paid cash money to run in the cold drizzle right past a place where you can’t run more than a couple hundred feet in any one direction.

Not long after that, near what must have been the end of the second mile, the course pointed back toward the interior of RBNC’s grounds and started a long, steady climb up the ridge that overlooks the interpretive center. This section wasn’t incredibly hard, but it did have a couple false ends – turn the corner and oh crap there’s more climbing to do. My heart rate spiked and stayed high here, and I started to feel some burning in my legs, but the effort was worth it, helping me pass another three or four racers on the climb. I couldn’t quite catch one kid who was just a few meters ahead…

At the actual top of the ridge, the course bent and went almost straight down to the prairie at the core of the center. I should have tried to speed up here, since it turned out that we were less than three minutes from the finish line, but I hadn’t studied the course map well enough, and didn’t want to blow up by trying a 100 yards-to-go pace with a half mile to go. Instead, I just maintained my pace until it was obvious we were finishing. And at that point, there was no one who could either catch me or be caught, so I just cruised in at 23:15, feeling pretty good in all the right ways – tired, but not crushed and pleased with having carried out my race plan. And Julia ran right up to me to hug my legs, shouting, “Good job!” All in all, a nice way to start the season.

With my intermittent personal history of running and fitness – a lot of cross country running and skiing and track in high school, then nothing for a decade until slowly starting again to run and rollerski and cross-country ski in the last few years – I am struck by the “types” of runners encountered at races like the Maple Syrup Run and the Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield every September. There are always a few obviously fast men and women – the whippets who use their extreme fitness, paucity of body fat, complicated shoes, and $75 shirts to take the top spots. There are quite a few the more-or-less fit but not very fast folks like me, and a smaller number of people who are pretty clearly out of shape, but trying hard to get back into the swing of things (and who often run, bafflingly, in full sweatsuits). Commingling with those groups are the kids, the teens and tweens who run with each other or with parents and who invariably take off like bullets, only to fade badly by about the 1-mile marker. Today’s run had a good number of racers in this last group, and I guess the top two men’s spots went to high schoolers. On the other hand, I spent the first five minutes of the race weaving through fast-starting young guns and caught a few more during the rest of the race – though I never did catch the kid who had to actually stop and walk up the last bit of the longest climb. He was saving something for a big sprint to the line. Crazy kid.

“Athletic” Goals, 2009-2010

Sunday, I’m running a 5k race on the trails of the River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota – my first event in what I hope will be a fairly active year of training and racing. I’ve been pretty consistently training four to six times a week for a couple years now, so I hope this season – running from now through next February’s ski races – will be a good one, “athletically.”

Beyond what I’ve been doing for training (primarily hourlong runs, rollerskis, and skis, interspersed with shorter, harder sessions), I’m going to try to do at least one 2-hour session each month (probably running with poles or rollerskiing) and at least two intensity sessions in each 10-day period – more at certain points, and trying to do a lot of uphill and/or relatively long efforts, such as fast four minute uphill runs or skis.) In large part, adding these kinds of workouts is an attempt to avoid another race as bad as my horrible experience at the City of Lakes Loppet in February.

As for racing, I have five events in mind. If I can do even three of them, I’ll be happy. If I can do all five – especially the two ski races in February – I’ll be elated. And tired. And appreciative of Shannon’s needing to cover for me at home. Here is the list of goal races, along with the distance and a target time. (If anybody wants to front the money that would let me do the Marcialonga in Italy in January or the Vasaloppet in Sweden in March, I’ll be happy to do the training.)

Sunday, April 19, 2009
Maple Syrup Run at River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota
5k – 22:00

Sunday, September 13, 2009
Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield, Minnesota
5k – 20:30 or 15k – 1:05:00

Saturday, October 17, 2009
Nerstrand Big Woods Run in Nerstrand, Minnesota
half marathon/21k – 2:00:00

Sunday, February 7, 2010
City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis, Minnesota
33k freestyle – 1:45 or 25k classic – no idea what would be possible or good!

Sunday, February 14, 2010
Mora Vasaloppet in Mora, Minnesota
58k skate or 42k classic – again, no idea what would be possible or good

Springy

Even though there’s light snow in the weekend forecast, I’m okay with spring. Today I biked home through the Upper Arb, which still looks pretty winter-sleepy and brown (and even sports a few little traces of snow and ice), and tonight I’m going to go for a nighttime run in the Lower Arb along the river. Sure, I’d rather be skiing in both locations, but I’ll take what I can get!

Woodchuck Run

Apropos of my post yesterday, I wound up today talking with Nancy Braker, the director of the Carleton Arboretum and, as such, someone who knows much better than I do what sorts of animals inhabit the Arb. Though gently supportive of my desire for yesterday’s creature to have been a fisher, she equally gently told me that in all likelihood I saw a woodchuck. A Google image search for woodchucks turned up photos of a creature that looks intolerably like the beast I saw yesterday on my run. How wrong could a runner be if a runner could be wrong? Really, really wrong.

Woodchuck
Woodchuck

Spring Skiing

I’m too trashed by all that sunshine and outdoor time to do more today than simply mention that the cross-country skiing World Cup is coming to a head this weekend with a huge series of races in Falun, Sweden – the wonderfully named “Svenska Skidspelen” or “Swedish Ski Games.” Along with a friend, I’m capitalizing on my interest in this ridiculously obscure, Europe-centered endurance sport (ROECES) to blog the racing to death over at the Nordic Commentary Project. Check it out, if at all inclined.

Along with my co-blogger at NCP, we’re running a sort of low-rent fantasy-sport scheme predicated on predicting the top five racers in all the events this weekend. I’ll brag a bit by saying that I’m (ever more narrowly) winning, having made more accurate predictions (and fewer inaccurate ones) than the other participants. Yes indeedy, my knowledge of this ROECES cannot be matched, yet, by my three competitors. (Proof: I’m putting all the results of our little contest up on a public Google spreadsheet.)

Competing as the “Northfield Nine,” I’m also not doing too badly in a fuller sort of fantasy-skiing contest being run by SkiTrax, “North America’s Nordic Skiing Magazine.” Currently, I’m in fourth place out of 1o9 entrants – which puts me in line to win a pair of $500 ski boots that wouldn’t fit my skis. As a white elephant goes, this is marginally better than the prize I won in a similar contest run by SkiTrax earlier this season: free attendance at a three-day ski training camp at a resort in British Columbia. I’d love to go, but the prize didn’t include the cost of travel to BC or lodging there. Oh well. At least the prize validated my otherwise-useless knowledge of the ROECES.

Bizarro Gym

My trip to the gym today was a bizarre one, from the moment I stepped out of my office building into a ridiculously loud cacophony of birdsong. For a second, I thought maybe some students were filming a movie and running a high-volume recording of birds. Nope, just a zillion returned migrators in the trees out front.

I avoided any sort of Tippi Hedren incidents, and made it to the gym. There I discovered that the new fluorescent lights (like many, but not all, others around campus) were producing a horrible low-pitched whine in my hearing aids. (I can barely go to meetings in one campus building, the light-induced whine is so bad.) Luckily, I don’t wear my aids when I work out, so this didn’t bother me for long. As I changed, someone’s cell phone – entombed in a locker – started ringing, a crazy 120bpm rhythm with a rising melody. It rang for an appropriate number of seconds, went quiet, and then started again. Quiet, then ringing again. In a hurry to get the hell away from it, I tied my shoes in the hallway.

Down in the fitness center, I chose a treadmill offering equally good views of two different TVs. I figured that both would probably be airing the usual sorts of noontime crap, but that it would be different crap, and since I could look back and forth between them, that I would consume just half as much crap. Sure enough, the right-hand screen showed first a soap opera (all dark-haired men with lantern jaws and blonde women with Victoria’s Secret cleavage) and then live coverage of the AIG hearings on Capitol Hill (all pasty white guys gesticulating wildly and talking sternly back and forth).

Thankfully, and in utter distinction from those two sorts of drivel, the left-hand screen was tuned to a show on the History Channel: the history of ice cream. It was educational and entertaining! I actually learned quite a bit about the differences between regular ice cream, soft-serve ice cream, and frozen yogurt, and about the corporate niches of Dairy Queen, Ben & Jerry’s, and TCBY. (I also learned about the insane “Vermonster” sundae at B&J’s. The 20 scoops of ice cream just start the craziness.) Actually, come to think of it, the show was basically an advertisements for those companies and their products, a point reinforced by actual ads for DQ between the segments of the show. Well, DQ ads and ads for debt-relief agencies. Which are basically just two forms of commentary on American indulgence.

As the show wound on, its educational aspects were replaced by an insanely strong desire for ice cream, and lots of it. I ended my workout just as the show ended and headed back to the locker room, where, of course, the cell phone was still ringing, and ringing, and ringing. Again hurrying to get away from its satantic ring tone, I chose the nearest shower stall and cranked on the water – and discovered that the shower curtain was a good four inches narrower than the space between the sides of the stall. It was like showering in a hospital gown. I hurried through my shower and went back to the locker room, where the owner of the cell phone – someone who did not look like the sort of person who likes 120bpm music – was happily chatting away. Naked.

I’ve never gotten dressed so fast. I was heading out the front door of the gym within five minutes, back toward the still iced-over Lyman Lakes and my office.