Where’s the peanut butter?!

Today is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s.

From an article in Sunday’s New York Times about Chinese protesters in Seoul during the procession to the Olympics:

The South Korean police and Chinese students also overpowered at least two other protesters who tried to impede the run along a 15-mile route through Seoul. The route was kept secret until the last minute and was guarded by more than 8,300 police officers.

That’s an officer every nine and a half feet!

Here’s the next installment of hydration and running - this time covering the types of paraphernalia available while running. Outside of getting hydration along your run (from drinking fountains or support on a race course) you basically have to carry your drink. Henceforth, I’ll refer to this as “water” but secretly of course I really mean “your carbohydrate and electrolyte replenishing sports drink,” mm-kay? There are three basic options for this: carry it in your hand (bottle), have it around your waist (belt), or bring it on your back (camelback). I’ve used all three and each have their pro’s and con’s that I’ll discuss.

• Bottle: You could just buy a bottled drink but there are a couple hand held bottles on the market that I think are preferable. One is made by NathanNathan and the other is made by NathanAmphipod. Both (usually) come with a strap which can make carrying them significantly easier (regular bottles tend to feel very cumbersome, IMO), and there tends to be an integrated small pouch, which can be handy for carrying money, extra gels or, ahem, other things. The strap/pouch convenience is one reason I think these are preferable over drinks you’d buy in a convenience store, but the other reasons are that they tend to have a better drinking spout and you get to mix your own drink. You can mix in and shake up a gel, nuun, concentrated Gatorade or whatever you want. Basically, you get more flexibility over what you drink. The major drawback I feel that bottles have is that 16 fluid ounces of water is 16 ounces. My understanding is that if you start running with this, it will eventually feel like an extension of your regular routine but I’ve never gotten past that hump and so the bottle always feels uncomfortably heavy for me to carry until it’s about down to about 8oz. Until then, I’m changing hands and basically distracted by carrying it.
• Belt: There are a bunch of variations of these on the market - some hold a water bottle, some hold multiple little gel flasks, and there is also a single gel flask option. The only one I have experience with is gel flask and this is what I use for my long runs, half marathons, and what I expect I’ll use for future marathons. It’s small enough to only slightly impact my running and it can accommodate about 1-4 gels (with varying amounts of water mixed in). The downside is that you obviously can’t rely on this alone for hydration for a run of any considerable distance, but if you can combine it with water along the way, you can get everything you need in one convenient, concentrated device. The other belt options are probably pretty similar to the backpack, which I’ll describe next, however I don’t really like the idea of a giant belt of water sloshing around my waist. Ymmv.
• Backpack: Finally, you could choose a backpack. These tend to be way more expensive than the above options (bottles and the flask run $10-20, a camelback will be at least $30) but they can be (IMO) very comfortable, the reservoir volume can be a huge plus, and they usually have (relatively speaking) tons of storage space for snacks, first aid, or whatever else you need. When I was doing longer runs in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska or when I’ve been on trail runs, I’ve relied on a Camelback and been very happy with the results. The only thing I’ve needed to watch out for with a backpack is ensuring that the shirt I wear it over has a snug enough collar so that the shoulder straps don’t rub my neck once I have the backpack at a comfortable adjustment such that movement is minimized. I’ve worn my Camelback with some shirts that did not have a high enouch collar and it earned me another stamp in my Passport of Running Related Chafed Body Parts. Finally, compared with the water bottle, you have both your hands free, which is nice if you’re doing trail running and need to brace in a fall, grab a tree, or swing from a vine. They do get hotter than a bottle, but when adjusted properly it will flop around a little (mitigating the negative impact) and is sufficiently more convenient than carrying a bottle that I like this option.

So those are my opinions on the available options. In a nutshell, for supported races I’ll almost definitely always go with the gel flask. If there were ever a moderately long race where I need some, but not a ton of hydration and I couldn’t get it on the course I might take a half-filled hand bottle, but generally I’d choose a camelback.

Lastly - I mentioned to a friend that I planned to write about running hydration paraphernalia and I should mention that I don’t know enough to weigh in on the pros and cons about bringing bongwater.

How do I make Excel do value ranking among cells of a similarly typed value? For instance - I want a function which generates the values in the “Team Rank” column for the following sheet based on the score of people on a team:

In other words, I want the ref in RANK(number, ref, [order]) to be a lookup over the range “Team” and only compare the current row’s Score against those other scores of people from the same Team.

It feels like it’s been ages since I wrote a long post about running. Wouldn’t you agree? Mom, of course, I’m talking to you. Anyway - Rolando from my running club is signed up for an ultra next month (a 50K in the North Face Endurance Challenge) and we’ve been talking about hydration options on a remote course, which is something I’ve wanted to write about for a while. In this post I’ll describe hydration in general and discuss water vs. sports drinks and electrolyte replacement.

Hydration is obviously important in running and it turns out to be a little complex. If you calculate your perspiration rate, you’d probably be amazed to find out how much water you lose while running (I’m especially gifted but I lose about four pounds an hour when running), so if you can drink while you’re on the go, this helps. You probably won’t be able to consume fluids at the rate that you’re losing them so you need to drink as part of recovery, too, but if you can drink while you’re out there, your body will be a lot happier.

But you probably don’t want to simply drink water, either. You might be able to, and depending on how far you’re going that might be just fine, but usually a sports drink will be much more beneficial. There are a bunch of reasons for this but the two that I think are usually adequate to make the case for a sports drink over plain water are:

• sports drinks contain carbohydrates (usually just some sugars), which your body synthesizes into glycogen, which is the available energy source that it uses to keep you going. This is also what runners get from the various “gels” which are on the market (Gu, Shot Blocks, Clif Shots, etc.). You’re much better off having rested before running because your body can’t immediately synthesize glycogen from the carbohydrates that you take in while running, but it still definitely helps (go run for 2 hours with and without taking some kind of carbohydrates in half way through the run and you’ll see this is true).
• sports drinks contain electrolytes. Blood isn’t just water and neither is your sweat - it’s a combination of water and four chief minerals: sodium, potassium, magnesium, and another one that I can never remember. Sports drinks tend to have a chemical composition which is a closer to your normal body’s balance of those minerals which a) means you’re more clearly replacing what has been lost than if you just drank water and b) is more readily absorbed by your body than straight water.

Another quick note about sports drinks and electrolyte replacement: a word that has unfortunately come up related to this is hyponatremia. This is a condition that is pretty rare under normal circumstances but can afflict long distance runners and basically occurs when the sodium (latin: natrium) levels in your body get very low (latin: hypo-). This can kill a person.

How much should you hydrate while running? With sports drinks or a combination of gels and water? This is all pretty much up to the individual and hard to give much advice on except to suggest “do it” and “practice.” I don’t really think I *need* a gel for all of my weekend long runs, but when I’m training for something I try to be in the habit of eating one because I know I’ll be eating them in a race and I want my body to be used to this. One last note: I don’t know if I think anyone needs to hydrate for a race as short as a 5K. People do, but they always look like dorks. However I also know from personal experience that it’s possible to overhead in a race as short as a 12K. Which comes back to “practice.”

In the next exciting installment: hydration paraphernalia!

I was rickroll’d into navigating to a page on Oprah.com (don’t ask…) and was greeted with this:

Oprah.com is currently being preempted to accomodate our live Web event.

When did the internet become TV? Should I start twisting around the bunny ears on my monitor to get a faster connection to the net?

Easynews is the company I pay for usenet access. They have a pretty low cost ($10/month for 20GB of download with rollover) service and an incredibly useful web interface to newsgroups. They also run a “loyalty program” which (if I understand it correctly) gives you an extra GB download quota for every year you’ve been a member - so after being a member for a year you get 21GB/month and after 2 years it’s 22GB/month, etc.

Something in my account recently expired (probably some part of my credit card billing) and my auto-billing just failed so they automatically closed my account. This was a little upsetting because with the GB spillover I’d accumulated about a 65GB buffer of unused download capacity that I wanted to retain. So I contacted their support who replied in 6 minutes informing me that I just needed to sign up again with exactly the same username and my quota would be restored and my status in the loyalty program would also stay intact.

This is the great combination of a great service and support system that makes for a happy consumer. Their service is basically up all the time, priced reasonably, has great incentives to become and stay a member (quota rollover and the loyalty program), and the support is fast, competent, and simple.

Yesterday I got into an uncomfortable discussion with a co-worker and a stranger at lunch about the economy. The situation is clearly not cheery with the housing market downturn and junk mortgages cindering but it’s also hard to identify “we are in a recession” because the measures of recession really aren’t popularly agreed upon. Two quarters of economic downturn, and all, but if you look at BEA’s numbers we haven’t had a single quarter of downturn and there is a wide sense among the laity that we know better whether a recession is in effect and that because of the way economic indicators are assessed (like the exclusion of people who are not looking for work from the unemployment rate), the formal definition of a recession misses the reality of our economic well-being. So conversations like this frequently wind up feeling somewhat like bitch-sessions and anecdotal stories making a case one way or another.

So I’m talking with my coworker when someone at our shared table asked whether we’d heard about the landfill status and how landfill rates (meaning, he said, trash) had reduced to 95% of their regular levels. He seemed quite convinced this was an (unmeasured) strong indicator of recession. So I said, “hold on - that sounds like an interesting indicator but Seattle also introduced an initiative within past year about forcing people to recycle more and couldn’t that account for this change?” “No - of course not - not 5%” I was reprimanded by both people. So I left it with my insistence that I didn’t know how much recycling rates would influence the landfill rates but I was positive this would have an impact (and my coworker offered that trash volume isn’t a very precise measure of economic volume).

Next comes my mail yesterday. Just a couple hours after having this conversation I opened my mail and found a Seattle Public Utilities’ newsletter stating that over the last 5 years recycling rates have increased from 38% to 47% - meaning (it appears) that 9% of what we used to throw in the trash goes to recycling. I don’t know when the trends were greatest with that change and this doesn’t talk specifically to last year, but that’s a 15% reduction in trash that would go to a landfill, which would definitely affect the indicator we were discussing.

The summary is that this is exactly why I don’t like getting into political discussions with strangers and frequently why I don’t like having the conversations any more at all. You get people together who have (frequently incomplete) information and agendas and you get past the baseline of “here’s some information and the conclusions from my agenda that follow” and it’s just too hard to have a remotely meaningful conversation after that because you need more good information about the specific topic at hand to have a worthwhile conversation. Disclaimer: I can certainly be guilty of this, too.

Has Lost started again yet??