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