Training Log Archive: iansmith

To kayaking, then to my office for several hours of work. I was famished after my kayaking expedition, so I stopped by a grocery store and purchased 4 liters of powerade (at 50 cents per liter!), a pint of blueberries, and four pieces of fried chicken. Between my brief and uneasy sleep and arduous kayaking trip, I am tremendously fatigued.

I decided to go out for a two hour kayaking session for some fitness training. I have seldom been on the Charles in any capacity since I stopped rowing crew my freshman year of college, and the river was more tempting because of my leg injury.

Boating, particularly in small craft is wonderfully serene. Interacting with the environment, moving under your own power, and gliding on the water is freedom! I had expected to be brooding, but the joy of the river and the exertion were too great.

I set out from Charles River Canoe and Kayak near Harvard Square. This experience was my first time in a kayak, and I enjoyed the rhythm and effort very much. I found the experience to rely less heavily on a single muscle group than canoeing, and while the effort was great, the muscle stress was more uniform. I imagine I used my arms more and my core less than I should have; my technique is flawed.

I rowed west on the Charles for 45 minutes until I reached the Watertown dam (with rapids!). Both westbound and on the return, I paddled past a wedding ceremony on the dock of a boathouse on the south shore. On the return trip, the procession was in progress; I hope none of the wedding pictures have a shirtless kayaker splashing around. After passing the launch point, I paddled down to the Weeks footbridge before returning.

I learned something about myself today: as much as incorrect grammar and graffiti separately bother me, graffiti with poor grammar frustrates me more than the sum. Evidently displeasure adds non-linearly. I read "Who do you row for?" marked under a bridge. That remark is acceptable as dialog in a motivational movie, but as an enduring marking on the public domain is unacceptable.

I feel a bit like General McClellan sometimes. He was a commander of the main body of the Union Army based in Washington, D.C. during the early Civil War. McClellan was a meticulous organizer - he drilled, trained, and prepared the army better than anyone else, but when the time came to strike, he proved indecisive and unable to act. Even though his force was far superior to the Confederate Army under Lee during the peninsular campaign, he called for reinforcements, dug in, and lost his advantage. He was a brilliant organizer, but an incompetent commander.

My life up to this point has consisted of preparations, a building of strength, and a refining of skill. I have given some thought to the question of "what do you want to do with your life," but evidently not enough to be convicted. I want to live a life of purpose, but what does that mean? I suppose I want happiness, but how is that defined?

Our society is an optimization problem - sustaining the set of people on finite resources. The solution our society has found is not optimal, of course. But an individual's life can also be described as an optimization problem - we try to make decisions that maximize some objective function.

And so the obvious question: What objective function should I use? (or, eerily, what objective function am I presently using?)

My mighty steed is breaking down and is in dire need of maintenance. As soon as my roller blades arrive in the mail and I have an alternate form of transportation that requires neither running nor walking, I will get it repaired.

I may stop logging my commute, since it's not demanding enough to constitute training. However, it's useful for tracking mileage on my bike and my activity in general.

Commute + IHOP.

Supreme Allied Commander Gimpy goes to work. Among my reflections of social conventions, I have been thinking about the mechanism by which we choose spouses.

C • wait we get to choose? 8

Set up a doctor's appointment for next Tuesday to get the leg checked out and quite possibly amputated and replaced with bionic prosthesis.

After some reflection, I have a viable model for accounting for the social constructs and human communal behavior starting from two principles:

1. We have a preference function that orders any set of possibilities
2. As living, sentient organisms, we prefer to live, and this motivates the preference function. We prefer states that increase our probability of life (though our preference function is not perfectly optimal). If we lacked this quality, we would not survive to procreate.

This is not overly surprising, and something of an obvious conclusion. However, today, a number of pieces fit together in ways they hadn't before. I was specifically pondering the question of why I care about the well-being of other people, or why my utility (preference) function has some dependence on the utility functions of other people. This is one extension of my pondering of morality and social systems more generally.

I met SGB, Lori, and Presto for our increasingly routine circuit training. We were joined by feet, who was in Boston for a conference, and who apparently has changed his primary club membership away from CSU. We will face a different feet in October. Ross was busy running intervals on Summit Ave and was detained by other commitments.

We completed three cycles of ten minute-long exercises, including:
Tuckups, telejumps, rotating planks, kayaks, metzler devils, pushup rotations, one-legged hops, lunges, hip thrusts, and dying bug.

I lack stamina, particularly on the abdominal exercises like tuck ups, kayaks, and even the dying bugs. I will grow stronger as we do more of these sessions, and I look forward to full faculty with my left leg, which would enable much I have excluded - the telejumps, metzler devils, and some of the drills.