I haven’t posted much here in a while. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to write about. I’ve had too much to write about. Now that the stress of the wedding is over, I’m to just focusing on enjoying marriage and writing my thesis. Here’s a list of the major things I’ve done in the last 8 months:
Last sunday my Dad and I ran the Chicago Marathon. It was my first marathon and my dad’s second – he ran Chicago last year when it was brutally hot. I survived but it wasn’t a good race. It was almost as hot as last year. By the time I finished it was ~85 degrees. I ran the first half ok but I think messed up my fluid intake and my stomach got upset. I think I got a little too excited about the lemon-lime gatorade they were handing out at the aid stations. I don’t like it to begin with and it made my stomach more upset. I shouldn’t have drank drank it. I intentionally slowed down a little for the 2nd half, but I crashed around mile 22 and puked all over the place. I was hoping I could hang with the 3:45 or 3:50 pace group, but I lost about 30 minutes walking/shuffling/puking the last few miles. I managed to run the last 1.5 miles and then puked again at the finish line. This graph shows basically what happened. You can also see how ridiculously fast the winner, Evans Cheruiyot, was running:
As you can see from the graph, my dad ran a good race but missed his qualifying time by 1 minute, 11 seconds. If the water stations hadn’t been so congested with walking runners due to the heat, he probably would have made it.
Thankfully no injuries besides expected leg soreness.
This weekend I’m moving out of MIT grad housing to an apartment in Davis Square. I think I would have liked to stay longer in Ashdown House but I’m also becoming disgruntled at the way MIT treats its graduate students. I’m moving out of Ashdown because MIT housing is closing it for renovations and moving all the grad students to a new Ashdown. This way they can pack the old Ashdown full of undergrads and charge the grad students $$$ to live in tiny dorm-sized rooms in the new Ashdown. It’s part of MIT’s larger goal of profiting off grad students as much as possible. Why graduate students want to move to the new building is equally baffling. I’m moving to a much nicer apartment with much lower rent.
Anyway, after I move I’m turning around and leaving on Tuesday to go backpacking in the Sierra-Nevadas for two weeks with Courtney and my family! We’ll try to make blog posts whenever we get the chance. We’re doing a 6 day trip in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, spending a few days in San Francisco, climbing Half Dome in Yosemite, and possibly attempting to climb Mt. Tyndall, one of the 14,000 ft peaks near Mt. Whitney.
I have to shut down my old web server for the move, so I’ve moved this website to my office computer. One downside of living off campus is the lack of high speed internet access.