Marathon Training

Tagged along with the Team in Training workout in Central Park, just did some hill work, nothing crazy, but it was a good workout.

Dead White Men

"undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s."

Very, very interesting article in the Times Book section. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially in the context of arts education and what it really means to “expose kids to the arts.” That phrase, thrown around a lot, is so loaded. It can be paternalistic, almost colonial (i.e. how do we “civilize” poor minority kids by exposing them to "great high artworks” and) or it can be empowering, helping kids find what’s beautiful and profound everywhere, even in their own experiences (which is my thing with 7ARTS).

But you don’t want the pendulum to swing to far in either extreme, how do you strike the balance between pushing someone outside of their comfort zones by providing "historical context" and reaching deep into the traditional "canon", but also exposing kids to works by people that are culturally relevant to them? As much as I believe in the opening of what we consider "the canon" (though I think the concept of one common canon a is long dead concept") I have begun to feel huge gaps in my own knowledge of Western culture, especially because I went to an art school focusing on studio art, my liberal arts education was much less broad than it could have been. I completely identified with this:

"As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

I never thought I’d reach an age where I actually began to see some merit in where E.D. Hirsch was coming from with his concept of “Cultural Literacy.” Maybe I’m just getting older and more Republican.

Bring on the dead white men, stat!

Marathon Training

Did 11 miles this morning at the NYRR long training run. I ran with the 10 minute/mile group. My legs were on fire at the end, I went to Djoniba's class on Wed and Fri and had my speed workout Thursday.

Go New York Go (away)

I’m done with the Knicks until Dolan and and Zeke go.

They were the first team I ever really closely followed beginning in the early 90s and to watch the franchise devolve from a hard-working team that scrapped and clawed for everything they earned in the league into a bunch of overpaid underachieving players has been extremely painful.

This whole Anucha Brown Sanders case is the final nail in the coffin though, it reveals how fucking completely amok the franchise is and that responsibility goes straight to the top at Dolan. This guy couldn’t lead people out of a fucking paper bag, let alone a franchise.

Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ star guard, testified in federal court yesterday that he had sex with an intern for the team after a group outing to a strip club in 2005. The intern worked for Anucha Browne Sanders, who is suing Isiah Thomas, the team’s coach and president, for sexual harassment.

Asked to recall what he told Kathleen Decker, the intern, Marbury testified, “I said, ‘Are you going to get in the truck?’ ” She agreed, he said.

Earlier, Browne Sanders, a former senior vice president for marketing for the Knicks, testified that Decker was one of several employees who told her about abusive behavior by Hassan Gonsalves, a cousin of Marbury who worked for Browne Sanders in a low-level job. Gonsalves got the job through Marbury’s request to James L. Dolan, the chairman of Madison Square Garden.

Gonsalves was later fired for sexual harassment.

NY Times

I expect pro athletes participate in their share of sexual shenanigans, but this is about managing your workplace and it reveals how Dolan simply doesn’t have control of it. It seems he’d rather be liked then set limits, from giving Zeke free spending reign without demanding any accountability (and extending his contract early despite his own stated requirements), to letting Steph’s cousin be hired for some bull shit job (Starbury’s already on already on contract, you don’t have to hire a knucklehead from his entourage if you don’t want to).

What’s also been clear from the coverage of this case is that Sanders repeatedly had difficulty getting Thomas and the Knicks to participate in marketing for the team.

I remember thinking that the TV promos on MSG for the Knicks featuring local New Yorkers interacting comically with life-size cut outs of different Knicks were clever and endearing, but I wondered why none of the actual players were actually participating live. Apparently, because they had frozen Sanders out refusing to work with her, a movement led by Zeke. How the fuck do you allow this Dolan? You may not care about creating a hostile-free workplace for your female employees, but this affects your bottom line. I’m going to guess that all standard NBA contracts have clauses requiring participation in marketing and PR for the league and franchise. If I’m the team owner and my marketing director tells the players to be part of a campaign they better hop the fuck to it and play nice. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to get paid.

But, it seems like Dolan wants to be one of the boys so bad, that he didn’t intervene in that and other situations and which is why this whole shit has spiraled into the mess it is.

Duck Folan

Marathon Training

Speed workout

2 miles warm up to Astoria Park track

1 mile at 8:06
800 meters jog
1 mile at 7:57
800 meter jog
1 mile at 7:25

1 mile cool down

total workout: 7 miles

Escalating Commitments

After my 9-mile run, I headed to NYC Center to try to get the jump on their Fall for Dance Festival. Tickets are 10 bucks and each night is four very different types of dance troupes. After being not too inspired by the shows I saw at the most recent NYC Salsa Congress (and downright horrified when I saw Al "Liquid" Silver put on blackface for his James Brown impersonation-you know that feeling of horror and fear you get when you're experiencing someone doing something incredibly racist that's not aimed at your ethnic group? That's what I felt, I was kind of waiting for him to get jumped by all the black people in the audience, but everyone loved it, go figure. That routine merits its own whole other blog entry actually at some point) the City Center Shows seemed like a good chance to broaden my exposure to dance.

Tickets went on sale at 11, I got there right at 11 and the line stretched around the block.


I was willing to wait about 3 hours and I thought I would wait and get a sense of the pacing and see if it was worth it. The first two legs took about 2+ hours so I thought the final leg down 55th street to the box office wouldn't be much more than an hour. I don't know what the hell happened but I didn't make it to the ticket booth until 4:00. The final block was a backbreaking 3 hours. I can't figure out why it took so long, but at that point I had committed too much time to back out and I kept adding to the amount of time I had originally been willing too wait. Flashback to grad school and sunk costs and escalation of committment. But in my case I'm sure the dance shows will be all worth it and my behavior was completely rational.

Marathon Training

Schedule called for 9 miles in 10:29.

I did 9 miles in Central Park in 1:27:45 which comes out to 9:45 a mile. I'm a little concerned that I'm running this far below what my splits are supposed to be, but I'm not running harder than what a long run pace should be (conversation pace). At first I thought that maybe that the times were going to get much faster later in the schedule, but they don't. I may be pushing myself too hard or the runners world training calculator grossly underestimated what I'm capable of (haha).

Marathon Training

I experienced the first hitch in my training schedule, I skipped my workout yesterday (too tired after a long day at work), but made it up tonight:

Tempo run 7 miles total

2-mile warm up

4 miles at an 8:59 pace

My actual splits were:
1 in 9:01
1 in 8:38
1 in 8:48
1 in 8:21

1 mile cool down.

To be honest, the cool down was a mix of walking and jogging, actually running the cool down is getting harder and harder after my tempo runs, but I figure its still part of my mileage so I gotta work that out.

The Eye of Sauron

It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves.

Michiko Kakutani on Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

I guess this is why she gets paid the big big bucks to review books and I don't. She's prettty much summed what impressed me so much about the book which is how seamlessly Diaz manages to move from the big picture (the grand narrative of history to the small picture) the micro view and more importantly connect the two without privileging one over the other.

The way Trujillo dominates the lives of their characters makes me think of Park Chung Hee and the conflicted place he must hold in the psyche of many Koreans. On one hand, he's the father of modern Korea (try getting my father to say anything bad about him) and arguably the reason South Korea is not a third world country today, but at the same time a pretty damn Trujilloish dictator in his own right. Ironically, I didn't immediately think of the dictator to the North like the reviewer in the Voice did, calling Trujillio, the DR's very own Kim Jong Il. But I guess its easy to forget that it took some time for democratic elections to take root on the American client side of Korea too.

Marathon Training

Did my long run today, was supposed to do 8 miles at 10:29 but I didn't have a timer but I did do 8 miles in Central Park this morning.

Footsie

On the tape, Craig and the arresting officer can be heard arguing over what happened in the men's room minutes earlier. Craig acknowledges that the men's feet bumped but says nothing improper happened.

"Did we bump? Yes, I think we did. You said so. I don't disagree with that," Craig said.

I've taken ALOT of shits in my lifetime and I don't know how you could bump feet with someone in the stall next to you "by accident."

Oscar Wao is not Asian

I just finished this and I want to read it a few more times, but I have to say I'm very impressed, especially considering the leap he made from Drown (we only had to wait some 10 years).

Drown was great, but still just a bunch of short stories, vignettes. What Diaz has done with "Brief..." is create an epic story spanning three generations, numerous cultures, races and much more. The shit he's managed to weave together is so much more ambitious than Drown and I think it works, especially the omnipresent shadow of Trujillo looming over all Dominicans like a Darth Vadar, Big Brother, Eye of Sauron etc. I was worried that like Nas with Illmatic, Diaz may not have had much left in his tank after (I think) spilling the guts of his entire life in one incredibly tight, successful and memorable piece that rocketed him to fame at a young age (like Nas with Illmatic), but I'm glad to see his evolution.

There was an interesting article in the last issue of Poets and Writers about how his early success made it hard for him to write again, but I think he's done it. Hopefully his next book won't take another decade.

NYC Marathon Training

Tempo run:

2-mile warm up to Astoria Park Track

Supposed to do 3 miles at an 8:59 pace and did:

1 at 8:59
1 at 8:38
1 at 8:18

1-mile cool down (shuffle) back to my apartment.

Total: 6 miles

Gloria and Anil's Wedding

I just spent the weekend in Portland Maine stuffing myself silly with seafood and watching my friends Anil and Gloria get married. It was a great weekend especially because it was a weekend out of town with a lot of my closest friends who are like an extended family to me. Here are some pics from my (shitty) camera phone. I've got to upgrade, I think I got some decent shots despite my technical limitations:

Marathon Training

Correction on what I wrote earlier afternoon.

My long run was 7.32 (not 7.5) miles in 1:26 in Portland ME (I was there for Anil's
wedding). I was supposed to do them at a 10:29/mile pace so I was off
a bit. I also stopped a few times to check directions so that may
have been the reason. The first 4 miles are great because they are right along the water, first on the ocean, then in the back cove. The last 3 were a little confusing because my map print out was small and I wasn't sure where to turn at a bunch of points. Here is the course:


Courtesy mapmyrun.com

Hiking

Went hiking with the fam today, lots of fun. Hariman State Park.

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Torqued Ellipses

There's no gestalt reading. You don't know the form even if you walk around it several times. When you walk inside the piece, you become caught up in the movement of the surface and your movement in relation to its movement.

Richard Serra on Torqued Ellipses

Richard Serra is one of those giants of 20th Century art, whose work I'm embarrassed to admit, I've only experienced in slides and text books. I know about him through readings in art theory and case studies (Tilted Arc in the Federal Plaza). In my mind, he had devolved into the one-sentence you can use to quickly categorize a lot of artists (in his case, he was the white guy that did big steel sheets that pissed people off). But on a day trip to the Dia Beacon today, I had a chance to walk through Torqued Ellipses, one of his more notable works.

Incredible.

To move through them and feel the movement in and out of structures so stable and solid while you weave through yourself them was almost a spiritual experience. Light sneaks in creating a dramatic effect. The warm rust colors against the limited lighting reminded of how Mark Rothko had wanted his paintings to be a spiritual experience exhibited only in low light (one of his last projects was a chapel). The surfaces are incredibly painterly in their texture and colors. Even if they were flat they still would be beautiful. And apparently, just building the shit was an engineering feat in and of itself.

Wow, hell of an experience. Richard Serra, in my book, is now the white guy that does really cool big steel sheets that piss people off.

marathon workout

This morning's workout-tempo run@ Astoria Park track

1.5 miles warm up
1600 mt 7:52
800 jog
1600 mt 8:15
800 jog
1.5 mile cool down

Was supposed do each mile at 8:24 and am still learning to pace myself-went out like gangbusters on the first one then gutted the second one. I assume that my goal for these should be to get the times close to each other at the right pace.

Workout-8/19/07

I was supposed to do 6 miles at 10:29/mile and meet a co-worker at 8:00am for the run. But...I stayed out a little too late last night for a friend's birthday party and slept through my alarm and got there really late and she had (understandably) took off without me. I cut across the park and caught her at about mile 3. I ended up doing the whole 6 at what felt like a 10:00 clip but I didn't have a time so you'll have to trust me.

NYC Marathon Training Kick Off

I'm training for the NYC Marathon and I'll be logging workouts here to keep myself on track. I downloaded a training schedule on RunnersWorld which has a handy training calculator that lets you plug in some variables to give you a personalized schedule. I was a little alarmed that its only two days a week, but the mileage makes sense and as long as a I stick to the intervals and do cross training on off days hopefully I will be ok. Here's the schedule. Its based on my:

Most recent half marathon time: 2:00
Weekly running base going into the training period: 10-15 miles/week
Target Race: Full Marathon
Race date: Nov 4, 2007
How hard do you want to train? Hard
Long run day: Sunday

My first official work out was last Thursday morning, a tempo run. I'm not used to running against an interval, but I did it:

1 mile warm up (my house to Astoria track)
1 mile 8:30 (on the track)
1 mile 8:30 (on the track)
1 mile 8:40 (on the track)
1 mile cool down (back home)

Tomorrow:
6 miles at 10:29 in Central Park.

For those of you interested, my cross-training is 2-3 dance classes/week (African and Salsa). I'd like to add in a 3rd running work out a week to do drills. I need to add in some strength training.