Category: Thinking (Page 5 of 14)

Taper Time Analysis

November 5, 2012 / Scott / 2 Comments

Now that the hard work is done, it’s time for tapering. That means tending to phantom injuries, freaking out every time I hear one of the kids cough that they are getting the flu and I will catch it too, and checking the weather forecast every 8 minutes.

But it also means filling up the liver and muscles with glycogen and running every mile knowing that I’m only doing it to stay sane, not for fitness.

I haven’t fretted over data/times/pace for this training session like I usually do. Part of that is because I have so much other stuff going on, and part of it is that when training using the FIRST program, it doesn’t really take over your life the way a 6-day-a-week program does. It’s kind of nice.

I did a 23 miler for my last long run yesterday, and I averages 8:59–much faster than I’d planned on running, and a little surprising. I’ve figured out that I need to eat a LOT more than I had been eating (no complaints here), and as a result I have yet to feel the wall this time around.

Anyway, I was going back and comparing this peek week training to the peek week of my best marathon. I’m liking these results:

2003 Peek Week

42 total miles (4 sessions), 6 hours and 35 minutes (9:24/mile average)

2012 Peek Week

40 total miles (3 sessions), 5 hours and 59 minutes (8:59/mile average)

The two big things I notice are that I ran roughly the same miles in both years, but this year I’ve done it in one less session, and at a faster pace. Also, my longest run in 2003 was 20 miles instead of the 23 I did this year.

I’m hoping this means a faster race. 3:49:59 was the original goal. Starting to think 3:44:59 may be a real possibility. It’s all going to be in the execution.

I’ve been running negative splits every day. Do I start with the 3:55 group for the first half and chase down the 3:45 group, or do I just start with 3:45 and try to hang on? That pace sounds tough for me right out of the gate.

Post-YamJam12 Email Reduction Exercise

November 1, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming since YamJam…lots of ideas tumbling around in my noggin about how a Yammer network can be energized. Here’s one I came up with and proposed internally that drew the sound of crickets. I still think it’s a good idea, so please tell me why it’s not.

You may have heard of No-Email-Fridays, when people shut down Outlook for the day and refrain from sending or receiving emails. That idea has always intrigued me, but I realized that there are two big problems with it. First of all, it doesn’t really stop you from using Email (The Missus coined the phrase “Stale-Mail”, which I really like), it just changes when you use it. You’ll more than likely set up an auto-response the night before letting anyone who contacts you know what you’re doing, which actually adds messages to the mix, and then spend Saturday or Monday responding to the messages you would have normally responded to on Friday.

What have you actually achieved there?

Secondly, you’re going to annoy everyone who isn’t playing along. The people who get the auto-response explaining what you’re doing will likely think it’s ridiculous, and if you don’t set up the auto-response you are going to be ignoring people. People tend to dislike being ignored.

But what if you entered into mutual “blacklist” agreements with people who understand the need to reduce emails? It’s pretty simple–you simply agree to stop emailing each other. You can call, you can use a tool like Yammer, you can Skype…whatever.

But no emails.

To gamify it, you could implement a rule that anyone who slips up and sends an email has to donate $1 to charity or buy the other person a cup of coffee. The penalty phase of this could get really fun and creative.

I think this would be an easy way to immediately reduce email. So easy in fact, I thought up a wrinkle to make it challenging. What if you were required to recruit one more participant in this program every week or month? It would require some evangelism, but I think it would be worth it.

Shoot holes in this idea for me please.

Gmail Feature Want

October 22, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

Dear gmail: give me a way to act on an email (“Like”, “Thanks”, “Will Do”, etc) by just pushing a button. Let me configure these myself. If the original sender is a gmail/Google apps user, actions can just appear as attributes of original message with a browser notification if that’s what the sender is configured for. If outside, or if the sender wants message notifications to continue, go ahead and send the person an email for me.

But don’t make me type these things out a hundred times a day.

Even better–you could give me the option to white-list individuals to turn their messages into Google+ posts instead of emails from my perspective and I can just +1 them from there.

Thanks!

Scott

The Hell You Say–Age Group Doping

October 18, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

Tell me doping isn’t happening on a pretty broad basis among age group athletes, and I’ll be more surprised than if you told me it is.

No sour grapes here, mind you. I’m an MOP age-grouper, and I’m only racing myself. So it doesn’t matter to me if age groupers are doping or not. It just seems very likely that it’s happening.

Let’s look at my age group as a ferinstance. If you check out the bikes at a big event, the nicest bikes seem to be in the 40-50 yo age group. It seems like there’s a higher density of high-end bikes there than there is even in the pro group. Based on nothing other than the bikes I see, I’d guess (have no stats on this) that the median income of my age group is well above the median income for triathlon pros, and my observation is that lots of guys in my age group don’t have a problem dropping cash on gadgets and equipment.

In other words, they are more than happy to pay for speed.

In addition, I’d imagine it’s not very tough for a guy in this age group to obtain prescriptions for a wide-range of pharmaceuticals that can help their performance. The question is, how many would actually do it?

Let’s look at a hypothetical situation many of us may be able to relate to. Let’s say an athlete starts off in triathlon in his 30s and works up to the 140.6 distance. Over the next few years he completes multiple iron-distance races, reads a gazillion books, buys a top-of-the-line bike, hires a coach, gets his diet in order, and trains like a madman with hopes of one day qualifying for Kona. We’re talking about years of preparation for a single goal.

He wakes up one day and he’s 39 (turning 40 in the calendar year). He’s moved up an age group, and does a little research to find that he’s on pace to be about 10 minutes away from winning a Kona slot at his A race which is scheduled later in the year. Ten minutes doesn’t sound like much, but then again, 10 minutes is a lot of time to cut off of the time he’s worked so hard to get over so many years. Can you imagine the level of temptation he’d be facing to employ every tactic available to get that 10 minutes and get that Kona slot?

Think very few triathletes would do that just because it’s against the rules?

Remind yourself of that next time a peloton blows by you on the bike during a race.

Now, if all those people in all those pelotons in all those races are willing to let people see them break a rule to go faster on race day, why would they care about breaking a rule in the privacy of their own homes during training to go faster on race day?

October 10, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

An observation:

People who drive slower than me are idiots. People who drive faster are maniacs.

People who make less than me are lazy. People who make more are greedy.

These two statements are equally true, rational, and reasonable.

Your Sport’s Punishment

October 8, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

The end of “running-as-a-punishment” in sports? This is ridiculous on so many levels.

As a coach, I’ve actually planned on including some punishment running as part of a rugby practice before it has even started. Pretending to be displeased with the performance and effort level of your athletes can help them break through a plateau and push themselves to a place they didn’t realize they could go.
Group “punishment” can help a team become a more cohesive unit as it creates an “us-against-the-coach” situation. It helps a team build a group mentality weeks before ever facing a real opponent.
Knowing that punishment running is on the table creates artificial pressure during training. In games, there are built in consequences (it’s called the scoreboard) for lazy play and mental errors. You need to find ways to create that pressure in practice. My college rugby coach never used the word “mistake”. His preferred term was “conditioning opportunities”.
There’s a huge psychological advantage to be gained at game time knowing that the other team has not outworked you in practice, that the game will be so much easier than your preparation was, and that there’s an expectation of effort (with consequences).
And then there are the days when your practice plans simply can’t work in enough high work-rate activities to provide your players with the fitness time they need. You don’t want to make them run just for running’s sake, but if you can make it seem like they caused themselves to have to run, you once again raise the expectation level.

We’re getting soft.

HT Remy’s World

Everything I Know About Polls

September 28, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

I learned from “Married With Children”.

Bud Bundy: We’re taking a family poll.

Kelly Bundy: What are we going to do with a pole?

Bud Bundy: We’re going to stick it in your head so we have a place to hang the sign that says, “Duh!”

Kelly Bundy: Great. You guys won’t let me pierce my nose, but you’re going to put a pole in my head.

Think about it America.

Idea For New Television Show

September 26, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

A booksmart/streetdumb professional basketball player studying to get his master’s degree in economics secretly pines for his sports agent’s sister–a police detective with a tough-as-nails exterior and a heart of gold. Of course, the ditzy-but-smart athlete messes up every case the object of his affection works and thereby ruins his chances of ever wooing her.

Luckily, the agent always has his client’s back and is able to repair the damage caused, at the same time discovering that the suspect the police were pursuing was innocent and the person you least expected was responsible. This makes his sister look brilliant.

In Season 2 we learn that the agent secretly has a crush on the basketball player, and in the season finale he bursts into the guy’s mansion to express his feelings, where he finds his client making out with his sister.

A song by The Fray plays as we see scenes from the dialog-free aftermath this event caused, including the player missing a series of free throws at the end of a game and costing his team the league championship and resulting in a potential trade.

Who will represent him in the trade negotiations now that the agent has moved to Vancouver to find his spirituality?

What will happen at the police station now that she doesn’t have her brother to help her solve cases?

How will the distance affect their relationship if he really does get traded to Dallas?

Season 3 is gonna be awsum!

Cocoa Beach Rule To Protect Cyclists and Joggers?

September 11, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

On one hand, I‘m in favor of this.

On the other hand, I really like running stop signs and hopping onto the sidewalks when I’m on my bike. Both are illegal.

Lots of time I’ll run in the road instead of the sidewalk because I want the asphalt surface instead of concrete or want to avoid sprinklers. And I often run in the middle of the street to avoid running on the slanted crown on the side of the road.

What if all the things I do wrong are enforced too?

How about we just start by dinging people who throw cigarette butts out of their windows for littering?

August 29, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

As seen on our Yammer network yesterday:

“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”

–-Muhammad Ali

On one hand, I really like this. On the other hand, I dunno…it’s fairly certain I won’t ever be a world champion of anything, but I like the training.

Most Accurate Drug Test Out There

August 24, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

Not piling on Lance Armstrong. The guy’s amazing…no matter what. And it’s important to note that he hasn’t admitted to anything.

But let’s get real. Here’s all the testing we really need.

[poll id=”12″]

If “Yes”, we can say with reasonably strong certainty you’ve done something the USADA wouldn’t like at some point.

If “No”, well…nobody seems to care, unless you are a professional rassler.

August 23, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

On the mobile app, when I take a photo to post to G+, why isn’t there a step in there that lets me apply a filter a la Instagram? Seems like a feature they could implement pretty easily, but it’s not there.

At least give this to users with Android devices, you know?

Another Boring Running Post

August 23, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

It’s been a while. If you aren’t interested in running, I’m taking a page out of the book of @newscoma and sending you to a photo of something you don’t want to eff with.

Now…

Some random things that have gone through my head during recent workouts:

Running indoors is nice and cool. But it sucks. Treadmills suck in general. And running on an short indoor track is no fun, especially the turns.
The key to running your best 5k is knowing that you’ve run waaaaay further and waaaaay faster in training. You’ve just never run this far this fast. I guess that applies to most other distances.
I miss my junk miles.
If I had junk miles in my schedule, I’d end up running too many of them too hard. When my current schedule says “easy”, I run it as easy as I possibly can.
My chattiness is inversely proportional to my weekly volume.
I thought I liked swimming, but maybe I don’t. Haven’t really missed it.
Pressure makes diamonds.

August 17, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

There used to be a website called Recipe Chimp that let you enter ingredients and spit back a recipe for something delicious you could make from those ingredients.

How about this instead…

Enter the number of neighbors you think are home right now, and the site will give you a recipe for something delicious you can make out of items you can likely borrow from each of those neighbors.

On The Paul Ryan Pick

August 14, 2012 / Scott / 0 Comments

Idea for a drinking game: a shot of espresso every time you read the words “Paul Ryan” and “math” in the same sentence.

If this guy goes all Ross Perot and starts showing a bunch of charts and graphs printed onto sturdy cardboard, he’s done for. But if he can show those same charts and graph in a Power Point with carefully selected fonts at a Lunch and Learn with free turkey sandwiches, chips, and sodas…well, then his message can’t help but resonate.

I also wonder if the fact that his name is “Paul” factored into the decision at all. Maybe there were hopes that name in itself would carry a few votes?

2003 Peek Week

2012 Peek Week

Gettin’ After It!