Mountain Quotes

“Mountains are not Stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.”

― Anatoli Boukreev

I suppose we really amounted to nothing more significant than a gang of overgrown children delighting in the conquest of altitude by the force of our own muscles.  Yet to see a companion arrive for the first time on a sunlit crest, his eyes full of happiness, seemed in itself an adequate recompense.  Tomorrow he might return to the valley and be swallowed up by all the mediocrity of life, but for one day at least he had looked full at the sky.

- Lionel Terray (Conquistadors of the Useless)

The thin line between commitment and obsession

“Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days. With this realization we turn the page: a new life begins.

There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.”

Amen, Abbey!

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Time

The time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.  There was time enough for once to do nothing...
                            - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire


Nothing is more rock solid than rock.  "Grounded."  "Foundation."  "Earth."  Of course we mean immovable.  And yet, it must move.  The orogeny that gave us the mountains standing solidly before us are proof that they must move.  Perhaps even more than astronomy, the time scale befuddlement that the geological implications of mountains can have on us is truly profound.

Centimeters a century of movement.  Mountains several kilometers high.  Tally the infinite ledger in your mind and then stand the equivalent ledger of a single lifespan, or even the lifespan of the human race, next to it.  Maybe there is time enough for once to do nothing.

Remember when I took you to the Grand Canyon and showed you the strata?  The strata that marks a time span utterly beyond any real comprehension?  And yet the observable strata that remain in the Canyon's walls are a fraction of earth's history.  The voids and nonconformities dwarf the layers that so inspire us.  Stand next to the Muav limestone.  Realize that it is 500+ million years worth of sea life living and dieing, living and dieing, living and dieing, incrementally adding their shells to the Calcium at the bottom of a shallow sea that will someday become a cliff we can touch.  So what is time?

We yearn for time's structure to yoke our modern lives to.  Time is the only true commodity in a human life and we lament that we don't have enough of it.  But what do we tend to balk when confronted with moment of unscheduled, unstructured time in our life.  The mountains should be proof enough that we don't really understand time.

Math Quotes

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.  (Roger Bacon)

Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the Universe--which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written.  It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.  (Galileo Galilei)

Thus all the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.  (James Clerk Maxwell)

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment....We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.  (Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics)

No knowledge can be certain, if it is not based upon mathematics or upon some other knowledge which is itself based upon the mathematical sciences.  (Leonardo da Vinci)

A Present of Presence

A PRESENT OF PRESENCE

To slip my arms around your waist

         and share the quiet joy of watching

         our babies sleep, so peaceful, so innocent,

         so full of promise… and of our love;

To share with you your dreams

         and help you envision a future that will bare

         fulfillment and satisfaction;

To be more of you, to invest all in the hope of

         becoming more deeply intertwined with you,

         to share the same dreams, joys,

         and breathe the same warm fragrance

         as deep contentment envelopes us;

To stand together—enraptured—awed by the vast scope

         of everything, not burdened by time’s trajectory

         because time passed is time closer;

I commit all this,

         to us first, before all else,

                     and breathe deep, savoring all of

                                 The present of our presence.

Written for Jodee, Christmas '06

Notes on nutrition

After years of trying, I finally ran a PR 2:39 marathon in Houston back in January.  I assess that my marathon performance has never been limited by energy availibility, but rather by muscle damage and central governor regulated muscle fatigue (insert Tim Noakes reference).  However, ultramarathons (both cycling and running) have been limited by my ability to take on calories late in the race.  Thus, I've been experimenting with a very low carbohydrate/ketogenic diet since before the Bull Run Run 50 miler in Apr of 2012.  I had experimented with some fasted long training runs in the fall (as part of fat metabolism adaption for the marathon), but I did not really adopt the very low carb diet until listening to a podcast interview with Dr Peter Attia.

I am your typically lean, long distance runner (5’10”, 140 soaking wet), so I have been experimenting with the very low carbohydrate diet for performance reasons (not weight loss).  In all of the 6 hr+ ultramarathons (both cycling and running) that I’ve done during the last six years, the primary performance limiter has been my ability to take on calories late in the race.  With almost five months of “ketogenic adaption” under my belt, I am pleased with the performance results so far.  I am not any faster (and I’m not any slower either!), but during training runs I have easily completed moderately intense 5-6 hr efforts in the mountains (20-30 miles with 10k ft of elevation gain) fueled only by 2-3 meager packets of almond butter or “cacao bliss” (combination of coconut butter, coconut oil, cocao butter, and agave syrup--5 g carb (4g sugars) per serving).  

My current self experiment is to determine if a very low carbohydrate diet (high fat diet) will improve fat metabolism during long endurance trail running.

Elite athletes openly experimenting with low carb/high fat (LC/HF) diets: Timothy Olson, Devon Crosby-Helms.  In a podcast interview with TalkUltra's Ian Corless, Tim Noakes hinted that he has adopted a low carbohydrate diet as well.  Max King also made similar hints in his interview following his 2012 UROC victory.

Other topics to discuss: calorie restriction, calorie restriction vs carbohydrate restriction, intermittent fasting

Before They're Gone Inspirations

Some good quotes from the Prologue to Michael Lanza's book:

In everyday life, with its distractions and obligations, there exists no corollary for this time with them.  In civilization, we race from one task to the next and fill our "leisure" time with programmed entertainment or the electronics and toys we've amassed.  But in the backcountry, there's no daily planner.  Beyond the needs of setting up camp and preparing food, there's nothing to demand our time except one another and the calmingly unscheduled live theater of nature.  Only out here do I spend hours a day just talking to my wife and kids.

In civilization, it's easy to ignore the changes because we've created insular living environments.  We simply run the air conditioning or lawn sprinklers a little more. But nature is responding in myriad, complex ways that scientists say include bigger storms and wildfires, growing infestations of exotic plants and insects, rising sea levels--and the sixth and fastest mass extinction of life on Earth. We're in the midst of a holocaust that is expected to claim up to 40 percent of plant and animal species worldwide by 2100, including 21 percent of mammals, 37 percent of freshwater fish, and 70 percent of plants.

But life doesn't extend opportunities indefinitely, waiting for us to grab them. In a few years, Alex and Nate will be teenagers, consumed with their own interests. They may be harder to persuade to take long, arduous wilderness journeys with their annoying parents. Many people make a vow to accomplish a goal eventually, only to realize years later that their promise has eluded fulfillment, sacrificed to career, family, inertia. I didn't want to someday have to gnaw on that indigestible kernel of regret.

I've now reached an age, statistically beyond life's midway point, when time seems to be something I'm no longer adding up so much as counting down. Although, with luck, there's plenty of it left, I no longer have the luxury of running down the clock. That realization can inspire a compelling urge to do something right. For most of us, the best possible contribution we can make to the world is raising people who, at the least, don't mess things up more.

Life is a quest for joy...

"Responsibility!  Our first responsibility must surely be to enjoy ourselves.  To have our children see us enjoying ourselves, so they might grow up thinking that, yes, life is a quest for joy, not a set pattern of inhibitions and denials."

Boff Whalley
Run Wild

Welcome

This is a series of open letters to my children.  Anyone that wants insight into my ideas or reflections (which will almost certainly be unoriginal and only marginally inspiring) is welcome to it, but I will not post links or otherwise solicit readers.  You are here at your own invitation.

I have long sought my 'purpose', my unique contribution to the world.  Over the years I have settled upon a variety of different conclusions on how my time be best invested for mankind, the world, science, or the universe (my aspirations have never lacked ambition!): create, create beauty, pursue beauty, savor indulgences, understand as much about the world as possible, chart an unknown realm for science....

My aims are more modest now.  This is due in part to declining hubris, or perhaps to a realization of the wider expanse of everything beyond my sphere of existence.  In any event, I have come to appreciate that the most important contribution I can really make is to teach my children.  Teaching my children is the one endeavour for which the sum of my life experiences and limited wisdom makes me uniquely qualified.  I am probably more interested in the outcome of this endeavour than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of Jodee.

I cannot make my children learn.  There are many things that I do not and will likely never know, and thus cannot teach.  But there are many things that I have learned, insights that I've had, beauty that I've glimpsed, that are worth offering to my children.

So I begin these chautauquas for my children in they hope that they somehow profit from them.  If nothing else, I hope they see that the best we can ever do is to teach those who crave of understanding.