So you've probably heard the rumor that running on pavement was bad for your knees. Well, I never believed it (our ancestors didn't exactly run on a rubber ground) -- until now. I'm training for a half-marathon in 10 days and the past few weekends have been running double digit milers. And my knees hurt; or, at least they did. The first couple weeks were difficult, but my legs seemed to have adjusted. But, let this be a warning to anyone who wants to start long-distance running and doesn't have a nice stretch of beach to use: have some ice packs at the ready.
The marathon is in Boston on the 12th. Anybody reading this who lives in Beantown (or the suburbs thereof) is welcome to a celebration lunch that day. Exact time and location TBD. For the curious, I'm a pretty slow runner: my goal is to run 11-11:15 minute miles on race day. I've always been a sprinter (hence playing goalie for my entire youth soccer career), but I'm trying to branch out.
News since I last blogged: I'm co-authoring a paper with a professor, Kosuke Imai, and yesterday we submitted the work to the annual political methodology conference. It's on ecological inference; which basically means deriving individual behaviour from aggregate data. Not an easy problem, but we think we've made a decent contribution to the literature.
Events I attended: The Vagina Monologues at Princeton. A decent performance, with huge props to the two Woody Woos who created and preformed their own, original monologues. One had half the auditorium in tears. Waiting for Godot, done by Princeton seniors: an impressive production, one where the audience experienced the waiting first hand. Fuzzy Dice, the Princeton Improv group: where Kate and I learned that Princeton undergrads don't know big words (ebullient) but love Harry Potter references.
The kids. Played a big game of cricket with them and learned a great life lesson: While many sports (soccer, football, etc) lend themselves to being fixed (i.e., ensuring the outcome between the teams is a tie), cricket is not one of them. The team I wasn't on batted first and scored 11 runs. Then the two girls on my team scored 7 before being out, and I was left to score the final four. Well, scoring the four runs was not difficult, but then getting put out proved difficult. First I tried swinging and missing, but the ball absolutely refused to hit the wicket. Next, I popped up several times in a row, but the fielders proved incapable of catching the ball on the fly. I finally, reluctantly, hit a simple grounder and made a run for the other wicket. The throw from the fielder beat me by a good two steps but failed to hit the pile of clothes that represented the wicket, and my team won. Ah, well, maybe next time...
Tomorrow I start community service in Trenton. We (a group of Princeton students) are going to be teaching basic geography to the daylight-twilight high school. I'll let you know how it goes.
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