Erwaman's Personal Journal - September 2009

I go to this hotel I've never heard of called The Study at Yale and as soon as I enter, someone asks me, "Here for the blood drive?" I say "Yeah" and he points me in the right direction. I enter the donation room and see a bunch of people lying around on cushioned tables and lots of screens set up around the room. Already, I was not liking this, but I guess seeing everything in front of me was better than being brought to a separate room to do the actual blood withdrawl.

A receptionist greets me and asks if I've donated blood before and I tell her I'm a first time donor. She says, "Great! We love first-time donors!" Then I paged through this binder of information. Pretty standard stuff - the only thing that caught my eye was in the description of the procedure, it said they would first draw a small sample of blood to see if I was anemic before drawing more blood. I thought, "Oh great, so they have to poke me twice."

I finished reading and signed a form. The receptionist then gave me a sticker

and a coupon for a free carton of Friendly's ice cream. (I ended up giving the coupon to Lairmate Erik Santoro because there are no Friendly's within walking distance of Yale, but since Erik lives in CT, maybe he or his family could use the coupon.)

I went to go sit down and wait to be called, but before I even sat down, a doctor waved me over. His name was Ron and I follow him behind one of the screens set up around the room. I see a bunch of disposable stuff on the table so I assume this is where I'm getting my blood withdrawn. But then I realize this is probably where they prescreen me before making me lie on bed and draining my blood for ten minutes.

Ron immediately got down to business. He applied some iodine to my left middle finger and then inspected my arms. He decided my left arm would be good for the blood donation. Then he said he would prick my finger to get a blood sample. Gah! I'm starting to heat up from anxiety. Ron put this spring-loaded needle on my finger and pressed the release trigger. Very suddenly, I felt a sharp jab and my middle finger was bleeding. He squeezed my finger tip to force some more blood out and then he scraped some onto a glass slide which he inserted into a machine.

Wow! I never knew they had such a simple but efficient tool for doing finger pricks that minimized the pain. I had always thought a doctor punctured your finger manually with a needle. I remember from sewing in Home Economics in middle school how painful accidentally stabbing yourself with a needle is, so I envisioned a finger prick in the doctor's office to be just as painful. I thought it must suck to be a diabetic and have to do daily finger pricks to test blood sugar levels (before they came out with non-invasive electronic monitors). But now I understand there's a spring-loaded finger-pricker that's quick and not as painful. I wish I could've kept one as a souvenir to analyze in more detail how it works.

So the machine analyzed my blood sample, and my iron level was okay, so he did some more tests and then he asked me some questions. Most of them were about whether I had received or given money for sex or drugs in the past 12 months. Lots of noes - then he asked whether I'd been outside the U.S. or Canada in the past 12 months, and I said, "Yes - Mexico, on a band trip."

Then he had to find out many specifics about my trip - that I flew in to Mexico City, flew out from Monterrey, and traveled via bus through the country. I had to tell him the specific cities I visited in the sequence I visited them: Mexico City -> San Miguel de Allende -> Real de Catorce -> Monterrey. Conveniently, Real de Catorce was an obscure mountain town that he could not find in their online database. So he had to call in to headquarters and ask headquarters to try to track my path through Mexico to see if I had traveled through malarial regions. After trying, headquarters told him their malarial maps were not working that day. And just for that, he said they would have to defer me for one year from the date I returned from Mexico (pi day '09) though if I called their headquarters and have them trace my route, I might get my name cleared earlier.

So, part of me was sad I did not get to donate blood that day, but another part was ecstatic I did not have to get poked again. Oh, also it was nice to get some free diagnostics, like body temperature (97.6), pulse (76 - perhaps elevated from nervousness), blood pressure (110/60), and iron level (15.9 (whatever that means)). I plan to call the Red Cross soon to try to clear my name.

which I needed because I forgot both a razor and shaving cream. Though I still don't have shaving cream, I could probably borrow someone's or just use soap (as my dad says he sometimes would use on business trips). I also got a technical running shirt

with a list of sponsors on the back

The rest of the stuff in the bag was mainly flyers for upcoming 5Ks and half marathons and some advertisements, including a chiropractor, an Adidas brochure, and a sunglasses order form. Also included was a map of the 5K and 20K courses:

(click to enlarge)

Finally there was a bib with my number and an RFID tag!

The RFID tag, aka the "D" tag -

fits nicely through your shoelaces

and is used to measure your net time - there are mats with RFID detectors at the start and finish lines. I'd never seen this used before so it was all pretty cool to me.

So I had pretty much not ran or trained AT ALL for this race. The last time I did some running was in Hoboken. I haven't been very physically active recently. So I knew I wouldn't be running my XC times in high school, but I thought I could still do sub-22:00.

Monday morning - race day - I woke up around 7:40am, an hour before the race start. I put on a sweater and sweat pants, put water, keys, and wallet into a drawstring bag, and headed downstairs for breakfast. Ate a bowl of cereal and two slices of honey dew. Then I left and jogged to Old Campus, where I met the rest of the Stilesians running in the road race. Did some stretching, put on the D tag, and did a lap around Old Campus.

We hung around a bit longer and then headed to the start line next to the New Haven Green. There were sooo many people! Over 6000 people lined up within a 2-block stretch, facing opposite directions (for the 20K and 5K)! I was excited.

At 8:40, they started the race with a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown (I was expecting a gunshot, but there was none). It was so crowded that after the race started, it took over a minute and a half before I reached the start line. After starting, the first half mile was a lot of weaving inbetween people, jumping from the road to sidewalk, dodging trees and posts and people.

When I got to the one-mile mark, I saw the time was 8:30 and I was in disbelief. I knew I was running much faster. Then I realized it was due to my delayed start. Fortunately I had a stopwatch on me, which I started when I first crossed the start line, so I looked down at that and saw 6:51, which felt a lot more accurate.

From one mile on, the crowds thinned (though there were still tens of people all around me). With a 6:51 first mile, I knew I was on track for a sub-22:00 time, so I pretty much maintained the same place from there on. However, in the final mile stretch down Whitney Avenue, I couldn't keep the pace up. My lack of practice was evident, as my endurance was at its end. Halfway down Whitney, I had to ease up my pace a little, and several people passed me during this time frame.

I kept this slower pace until Whitney forked into Temple Street, at which point I went back to my original pace. When I hit Grove Street and the New Haven Green came into view, I started my final sprint. I had very little left in the tank at this point, and this final sprint was a big exertion. It felt like I was having a heart attack (or what I imagine it to feel like) by the time I crossed the finish.

Pretty winded, slightly dizzy, a little dehydrated. Definitely due to lack of practice. Then I headed over to the free food stand for the runners and got a yogurt and an 18" roll of ciabatta bread. I was eating that 1000 calorie roll of bread all day.

I remember the time on the clock was 23:xx when I crossed the finish, but I knew this wasn't my time due to my delayed start. I also forgot to stop my stopwatch until a short while later. I estimated my time was probably around 22:30. I didn't think I broke 22. But, when the results came out, to my surprise, I got a 21:36 (a 6:57.1 mile pace)! This is very close to my time in my first ever 5K race. In 2005, my sophomore year of HS, after Alex Szajko convinced me to join XC and after a few weeks of summer practices, school started and we had our first race at home, at which I ran a 21:33 (which remained my PR for that whole season). So without any practice, getting a 21:36 is excellent for me. The amount I've grown since 2005 probably helped a lot, though. As another reference, my PR 5K time is 19:43, set on the Whippany Park course my senior year, first race of the season again.

Next year, I'm gonna do more running over the summer and I hope to run the 20K! My preliminary goal is to break 2 hours, which requires a 9:39.4 pace, which seems doable. But right now, I have no idea what it's like to run such distances or for such a long time (the longest I've ever run is maybe 10K once at an XC practice), so maybe it'll turn out averaging under 10 minutes/mile will be tough enough. But anyways, I'm excited about and looking forward to running the New Haven Road Race again next year!

~~~~~

Something I've been thinking and reading a lot about recently is the human foot structure. All of a sudden, the foot, and in particular my relatively flat feet (my slight arch collapses when my foot presses down, as a wet foot test has shown), have become so fascinating to me! It's almost like a fetish.

I've also been thinking about the effect of my old worn shoes, which I ran the race wearing:

If you look at the bottom, you'll notice the black rubber part is missing on the lateral half of each shoe, and you can see the red rubber layer has been worn down to the point the white layer underneath is exposed. It's very evident in this picture of the soles:

Here's another view that shows the unevenness of the shoe sole:

I wonder how much this unevenness affects the roll (pronation) of my foot as I step and its shock absorption. I was reading the Wikipedia article on foot type and wondered what type of pronation I have: whether neutral, over-, or under-. I walked around a lot and focused on what my foot was doing, and I'd guess I'm probably a neutral pronator, though I'm not too sure. The uneven soles of my shoes make it easy for my foot to lean outward (laterally), and I think this has been placing more weight toward the fifth metatarsal (pinky toe) rather than distributing my weight evenly across the five metatarsal bones. The lateral edges of my feet sometimes feel sore, and I think my shoes could be the cause. It's about time for their retirement.

Anyways, I think it would be really cool to get a gait analysis done on a medical treadmill and find out just what my foot strike is like and what the best shoes for me are.

1. I have not played a single SC game at Yale this semester yet, though I did tell Jeffrey Huang (our CSL coordinator) that I would play on our team. I have watched a few pro SC videos for entertainment now and then, but I'm just not as enthusiastic about them as I used to be. They're fun and exciting to watch, but I haven't been practicing at all, so watching the videos doesn't really help me at all. I could be playing instead of watching, but playing takes so much energy and focus, and I barely have any energy/focus left in the tank after academics and managing my schedule.

   In general, I feel like I'm not much into gaming anymore. I think it's mainly because I don't have the time to devote large amounts of time and energy to games, and that's what I want to do when I engage in any activity. It's frustrating to me if I can't give something a significant, earnest effort. I remember when younger, I used to have urges to just rebeat certain games, like Zelda and Mario RPGs. But now, when I think about doing something like that, I just think "Ugh, that would take so much time, and I have so many things I need to do." I kinda yearn for the passion for games I had as a kid, but I feel like the busyness of college and life and getting ready for a working life is squelching the kid inside me.

   I'm glad though I still really enjoy cubing. After getting my V-Cubes 5, 6, and 7, I've been very addicted to big cubing, especially on V-Cubes. I'd say I'm addicted to the V-Cube mechanism. It's so smooth! It's fun spending two hours taking a full average of 12 on the 6x6 or 7x7. There's something relaxing about the mechanical, somewhat mindness solving of big cubes. Continuous minutes of muscle memory pattern recognition and algorithm execution. Especially when I get into a groove and am progressing very smoothly, it's extremely satisfying.

2. My classes for this semester:
   • Intro to Systems Programming and Computer Organization - notoriously the most time consuming class offered in the CS department, but required for the major. First assignment took me 19 hours and the second mini-assignment took me 7, but they've been enjoyable and I definitely feel like I'm a better programmer now and can handle the assignments. Bring it on.
   • Mathematical Tools for Computer Science - basically the CS-department version of Discrete Math. A lot of review in the beginning about logic, rules of inference, and sets - now starting to get into more interesting stuff like modular arithmetic, Euclidean algorithm, Chinese remainder theorem. Will eventually get to graph theory stuff. Professor Joan Feigenbaum is great!
   • Probability and Statistics - a one-semester survey course of probability and statistics. I like this fast-paced class. It's not too rigorous or theoretical, but the teacher explains the concepts well. And he incorporates lots of simulation using the R programming language, which are fun! The problem sets are stimulating, too.
   • Intro to Political Philosophy - Borrowed like 12 books from the library for this class: Plato's Socratic Dialogues, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli's The Prince, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Rousseau's The Social Contract and The Discourses, and a few others. Basically I get to read a whole bunch of classic political philosophy books that I've always wanted to read but never got around to. A pretty interesting topic to ponder.
   • Japan: Culture, Society, Modernity - an anthropology class that I shopped as a possible writing credit, thinking the class and material would be pretty dull, but actually the teacher is very funny and unafraid to make racial jokes and the course materials are pretty interesting and quite varied (newspaper articles, Hollywood films, documentaries, novels, papers). Japanese culture is really interesting to learn and think about and compare to the American culture. Interesting material, but a TON of readings. And the writing assignments require you to synthesize all the readings/films and take a while to do. Unfortunately, I have not budgeted my time well and have not devoted sufficient time to the readings and thinking critically about the course material and so the writing assignments I've done so far have been poor to mediocre quality.

   I really miss the light workload of high school and the huge chunks of time I had. I really miss being able to just spend a whole night focused on some random activity, like trying to beat my Minesweeper score on hi-games.net or working on some random physics problem I stumbled upon on the Internet. I miss just sitting there staring at a problem or stubbornly persisting in trying to beat a record even when I was fatigued. In high school, time wasn't as much of an issue, and I could focus on specific things and spend inordinate amounts of time on them (that's why nights are so good - it's just this huge continuous chunk of time) without worrying about time and being able to complete all my work. It's important to be efficient and manage your time well, but I often enjoy being inefficient, stubborn, and inflexible and sitting there letting things slowly come to me rather than stepping away from a problem and coming back.

3. First home football game (vs. Cornell) and first marching band performance TODAY in less than 12 hours. Call in the band room in less than six hours... Whoot! I'm excited.
4. I'm thinking of making a Megaminx costume for Halloween. It's a weird shape - still trying to visualize how the costume will fit around my body.