Britt's Blog

This is a video from last year, but it gives you a sense of scale of the Board Room (which was downstairs in one of the Exhibit Hall this year (boo). Sorry the quality is so poor, but it does lend an appropriate sasquatch-film atmosphere to the three frames in which I walk past in my yeti hat at the 1-minute mark.

This year, Team Ithaca representation was weak, but we had a lot of fun with Dan, Amy and Zach.

New games played:

• Galaxy’s Edge Previously unknown to me, yet not a new game. We kinda liked it. The military control resolution is kind of brain-hurty and neat.
• Darjeeling Tea! Yay!
• Pack & Stack An all-too-eerily-accurate simulation of moving, including not being able to get the right truck from U-Haul.
• Steam Excellent new track-building, goods-delivering game.
• San Juan All the best elements of Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico, in one convenient package.
• Le Havre OMG too effing long.
• Race for the Galaxy: Brink of War Prestige can bite me.
• Nautilus Neat underwater exploration game with a a pretty board. Unfortunately, it just barely surpassed the fiddly-bits limit.

We never did quite manage to get into a game of Martian Rails. It was not available at Origins 2009, and we’ve been trying (in a half-hearted way) to get a copy for a while, though I’m deeply disappointed by the fact that the cities are drawn from fiction, unlike Lunar Rails, which awesomely uses actual lunar geography.

Acquired:

• Darjeeling, Assyria, Street Illegal and Dragon Parade (You get two randomly selected free games you get when you first visit the Board Room with your ribbon. This is the first time we got bumpkis in the Board Room raffle, which was a disappointment. :( However, Rio Grande Games provided free lunch and dinner for the Board Room, which was pretty extravagantly generous of them! Thanks, Rio Grande!).
• Powergrid China and Korea boards, RftG:BoW (at the Rio Grande Booth)
• Steam, Fredericus and Oriente (at the Mayfair Booth, the last two at deep discount)
• Suitors.

(Can’t wait for this week’s boardgame night: Origins Swag Edition!)

On the not-spending-all-my-time-inside front, I did manage to go running three times along the Scioto and Olentangy Greenways that follow the rivers through downtown Columbus. (Yay for Google maps, without which I would never have known that they exist.) The Olentangy Trail was especially nice.

This morning there was a thin layer of snow on the ground. I went out to run, and when I turned around and saw my shoeprints, I realized that I had left an interesting trail.

Actually, my feet were just about as cold as you might assume. I think I need to get the kind that actually cover the tops of your feet, or I’m gonna give myself frostbite.

I disapprove of apologizing-for-not-posting posts, so suffice it to say that I remember that I owe you an entry on yeast, and let’s pretend I didn’t start off this way. :)

Today was the inauguration of Beloit College’s new president, Scott Bierman—an Ithaca, NY native, incidentally. Any day when I get to dress up in my Cornell-red PhD robes and my poofy hat is a good day. It’s very silly, but I admit that like a little of the pomp, and a skosh of the circumstance.

I also get warm fuzzies from being part of a college with such a long history. Beloit College was established in 1846, before Wisconsin was even a state. (Cornell University? Meh, it’s okay… for one of your younger institutions.) Various speeches features lots of shout-outs to Andrew Chapin, Beloit’s first president, and Beloit’s crazy early days, when classes numbered around a dozen, and the faculty consisted of two professors. Hard to imagine how they conceived of a “liberal arts education,” vs. how we think of it today.

It was a very nice ceremony, quite in keeping with the air of anticipation on campus fostered by the new administration. And, the BSFFA kiddies and me were pleased by our new president’s allusions Terry Pratchett in his literate, history-conscious, warm, funny, and touching speech. (Now you wish you’d been there, don’t you?)

If that wasn’t enough, there was also an inauguration day 2.5-mile Fun Walk/Run starting at 7 AM. I managed a 12-minute pace in my Vibram 5-Fingers. (Yes, I changed shoes before the inauguration.)

Personal Best – Have a Cold? There’s No Reason to Skip a Workout, Studies Show – NYTimes.com.

Exercise does not prolong a cold, nor does it help you get over a cold more quickly, but it can make you feel better.

So, no more babying a cold by skipping or dialing down your workout!

Last weekend, I ran the (1st annual, perhaps) Bill Behling 2-Mile Fun Walk/Run.

I trained for it, sort of, which was faintly ludicrous, since it’s a two-mile run, which is nothin’, yet I nonetheless made no measurable improvement in training. But, hey, I ran hills and did intervals for a month.

I have little interest in competitive sports. This is not because I’m not a competitive person; quite the opposite. It’s because I am both competitive and extremely lame at any kind of a contest involving strength, endurance, or hand-eye coordination. So I am destined to lose, which sucks, on account of my being a competitive person and wanting to win, and all.

Well, anyway, my competitive side certainly responded to the sight of the back of the person who was ahead of me or the sound of someone coming up from behind me, and I ran really hard, and finished in 19 minutes 30 seconds, which is way better than my usual 11.5-minute mile.

I was pretty delighted, thinking that maybe the competition thing was good for me, getting me out of a rut, etc. Yet in the aftermath of the fun run, I’m right back to poking along at the same ol’ speed as always. Without the motivation to beat somebody, I can’t seem to put forth even a sliver more effort. Trying to beat my old time doesn’t trigger the magic, either—not immediate enough to rev up whatever caveman part of my brain wants very, very badly to beat that person ahead of me.

I’d kind of like to do a 5K. I had a reasonably good experience with the 2-mile race, and a 5K is the obvious next step, and I’ve been wanting to put on some more distance, and maybe having a race to train for will help a little to keep me motivated. I’m a little resistant to creating new not-contributing-to-getting-tenure sorts of commitments. However, I already am committed to running, and taking out a morning to go run at an event be only a minor complication on top of my already over-scheduled existence, so probably I ought go ahead with it.

As motivation for my running goals, I’ve started a map at Google. (Zoom out to see all the markers.)

View Larger Map

The markers indicate the furthest points I’ve been able to run to along my favorite running routes.

In the past, I have mapped out my routes so I knew the exact distance I was running. I timed my runs and computed my pace (which is dismally slow, incidentally). Currently, I’m just paying attention to time, trying to see how far I can run before it’s time to turn around and head home. When I actually looked at how far I can run on a map, I was really surprised! It helps that Beloit is kind of dinky. :)

I have two ways to strive for improvement: I can add on time to my run, and go for endurance, or I can try to run further in the same time, and go for speed. I think I’m going to be flexible on that account.

I’m also trying out a more flexible schedule. In the past I’ve run Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, because that’s what will fit into my work schedule. Now my work schedule isn’t as restrictive, and I’m trying the plan suggested at The Happiness Project, which is that you can skip exercise for one day, but never skip for two days in a row (with the exception of illness, of course.) I’m adding the rule that I will only run two days in a row, to give the ol’ bod some time to recover. Ideally, I’ll go run two days, take a day off, run two days, take a day off, etc., but there’s some flexibility there for if the weather is gross or I need to find an extra hour for work, or I’m just feeling like a day off. Of course, if the following day I’m still behind on work, the weather is even worse, and I just don’t want to get out of bed, too bad—I’ve already blown my day off!

The map will be updated as I make progress!

According to an article in the New York Times, a recent study finds that exercisers at all levels of performance, from couch potatoes to athletes, can significantly improve their endurance and cardiovascular conditioning through interval training.

I’ve been a big believer in intervals for quite a while.  I was only able to start running by alternating 2 minutes of running and 2 minutes of walking, and slowly increasing the time spent running, and I saw great gains in my speed by doing interval workouts on the treadmill.

But this article comes at a good time to remind me of the importance of intervals.  It has been a rough couple of weeks in terms of stress and fitness, and I’ve had to buckle down and persevere just to meet my distance goals.  I’m proud to say that I have met those goals, but I have basically just been slogging through the workout and not making any attempt to push for speed.  I may have been doing myself a disservice!

Looks like it’s time to get back to my usual practice of throwing in some speed intervals on the days when my distance goals are shorter, and I’ll make it a goal to do one interval workout a week.



A Healthy Mix of Rest and Motion, NY Times (free registration required)

Just a quick update on how amazingly buff I’m becoming while I’m avoiding the actual work of grading research papers.

I’ve been doing a great job of keeping up with my Master Running Plan, increasing my distance at the rate of 5% per week. That’s not too ambitious, although the increase is exponential.
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You may think from the title that I’m going to talk about puzzles or brain-teasers, but good old-fashioned sweaty, physical exercise is actually good for your brain. A Newsweek article about exercise, the brain, and psychology details exercise benefits that go beyond weight loss and muscle tone. The endorphin rush that makes you feel good right away is only the beginning. In the long term, exercise relieves stress and anxiety and improves sleep and self-esteem—not just because of effects on your muscles and fat cells, but because exercise actually changes your brain. Exercise can improve blood supply to the brain and cause your neurons to release neurotrophic factors that encourage new nerve cell growth and connections, aiding learning and actually mitigating stress and even depression.

Intriguing research also suggests that exercise’s antidepressant effects and mood improvement will not come to full fruition unless you can maintain a routine for a couple of months. This evidence supports something I’ve always advocated: starting off slow and easy, and making your first goal just establishing the exercise habit, instead of striving for gains in performance that will make your workouts more challenging (and daunting.)  Keep your workouts easy and unintimidating until you’re “in the groove,” and then you can (and should!) start setting more challenging goals.

In a blog that I follow, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin sagely comments:

A lot of people take up exercising when they want to lose weight, but I think that you’re more likely to stay motivated to exercise if you focus on the mental benefits instead of the physical benefits. Although it’s true that people who exercise regularly are better able to keep weight off, it’s very easy to get discouraged if you don’t lose weight easily — which never happens, right?

It’s better to focus on SANITY, not VANITY.

Great advice! Furthermore, exercise is not just for people who want to lose weight! The mental benefits are just one more reason that exercise should be part of everyone’s plan for healthy living.

Side note: I am using a Firefox extension called ScribeFire to make this post.  It puts an editor at the bottom of your Firefox window so you can surf around as you work on your posts without having to switch back and forth from your blog tab, plus it allows you to do cool stuff like drag and drop formatted text. I’m hoping it will encourage me to blog a little more than I have been.

I have been neglecting the health/fitness side of life in order to keep up with the professional/putting-food-on-the-table side, and the pounds are starting to accumulate.

I’ve been having trouble motivating myself to get out and run, especially on the cold mornings when it seems much more attractive to just sleep in for another hour. In the past I’ve had some success at following a plan, with, like, a goal, and a schedule, and stuff.

Shortly after I started running, I did this popular Couch to 5K Running Plan. When you’re on a plan, skipping a workout isn’t just skipping a workout, it’s a setback! It means your whole schedule gets thrown off! For some reason, this gets my butt out of bed and out on the road, though I never would have thought such an abstract, transparently unenforcable motivational doohickey would work for me. Yet, lo and behold, after several weeks I discovered that I could actually run 5 kilometers at a stretch. (That’s three of your earth miles.) Later on I had some success getting out of a slump by setting a speed goal and working toward it by upping my speed on the treadmill according to a wacky schedule that my trainer at Ithaca College helped me develop.

I am still somewhat amazed that you can just make demands on your body, and it will magically get better at doing stuff.

So in the spirit of magical self improvement, I decided to start out at a level I know I can perform right now, even in my sorry state (running 1 mile, 4 days a week) and work my way up to something respectable. You’re not supposed to increase your distance more than 10% in any given week, so I decided on a slow-and-steady goal of increasing 5% per week, with an eye to doing a longer run on the weekends to push my maximum distance up faster. I’ve decided not to worry about pace, and just build some distance. To plan my program, I wanted to use a spreadsheet, but my Mac gets all squirrely and uncooperative when I use M$Excel, so I made a Google Spreadsheet to record my running goals and progress. And, hey, you can publish these Google doc things for everyone to see, so, why not? A little social reinforcement can be a good thing.

According to the spreadsheet, it should be an easily attainable goal to celebrate my birthday by running that 5K again. Here’s hoping!