My First Half Marathon
Intro
At the time of writing this post, my first half marathon is the only half marathon I've ever done, and is the only official race I've ever participated in.
How'd This Happen?
Let's rewind. I hadn't actually planned to run this half at all. Having only started running three months prior, beginning from the worst physical shape of my life, I wanted to run something a little shorter. A 5k or 10k seemed appropriate. The problem was there weren't any 5k or 10k races in the near future; so I decided to run in the Orca Half in Seattle, WA. I set my expectations real low. My goal was to finish, but admittedly I had a desire in the back of my mind the finish with nothing slower than an 11 minute mile pace, though I was also totally ok with not being able to finish at all.
The Race
It was a bit of a weird start to the race. The start line was actually about 3/4 of a mile from the nearest road, which I knew, but, there wasn't a well marked path to actually get to the start of line and this resulted in me running through the woods towards the announcers voice to get to the start line in time. I kind of view it as a decent but unnecessary warm up to the race since I started out slow anyway. Halfway through the race I was feeling really good, I had picked my pace up from about a 10.5 minute-ish average mile pace to about 8 minutes. My muscles felt good and my cardio seemed fine. By the end of the race I had slowed back down to 10.5 minute-ish average mile pace and my joints were absolutely roasted. My body was not used to sustained impact for this long and I probably needed to build up some stabilizer muscles before actually doing this.
Side Note
I think if you differenced all my mile times from my fastest mile time and histogram'd it, it'd look pretty Gaussian. If I get bored I'll do this.
Results and Final Thoughts
Overall, I averaged a 10 minute and 11 second mile pace and felt really good about the whole thing. Probably not the smartest thing to do no training, but I don't think the consequences were that bad especially since this was a one off thing. Here's some data and course info from Strava.
Procrastination
To be written...
Westport, WA...
Probably the strangest place I've ever been to. Donald Trump surf town? Fishing community? Resort? The beginning of a murder novel? All of thee above. Being here was like waiting for nothing to happen with a tinge of murder in the air. The place just seemed kind of lacking a soul. It's honestly hard to write about...
Running and Building Muscle
My Situation
I want to be able to run far and fast, but I also want to build muscle. I don't want a crazy amount of muscle, but enough to be strong and look fit. How should I do this and what's the rationale for doing it this way?
Running to Build Other MusclesI think in general people tend to decouple running and building muscle from one another in very polar type of way because they're such different activities. When people do couple running and muscle building together I think it's mainly from the direction of building muscle to help improve running. But can running help you build muscle? I think so, to a certain extent at least. When you run, you're using some very large muscles and in doing so you end up releasing a larger amount of muscle growing hormones (e.g., testosterone and growth hormone) in the process than you would working out smaller muscles. So here's the idea, if you're gonna be running anyway, and you have some fuel left in the tank after your run, you may as well hit a muscle building workout at the end to capture that hormone boost from running.
Let's See How This Goes
After talking with some friends, I've recently decided that I'm going to start increasing my run length, but decrease my overall effort during the run. Lately, I've been running anywhere between 1 to 3 miles and while times vary, generally I've wanted to run them faster and faster. However, I have some goals of doing some longer distance runs, so naturally I need to run longer distances. Basically, I need to get my miles up. Evidently, this can help speed too, but I haven't quite unpacked that yet. With this in mind, I feel like while I'm running farther, it's possible that I'll be putting actually less strain on my body and have a little left over energy I can use for muscle building workouts. So, I'm going to test out using that post running boost to build up some other muscles. Might update with a post later.
Comments From A Friend In This Field: Food for Thought
"Interesting!! So what I can tell you is that running = endurance and that’s not the same as strength. When you work on endurance (more reps for more time) you use slow twitch fibers while with strength and power moves you use fast twitch muscle fibers. These react differently to specific stimuli. Also, when you work for longer periods, your body uses specific energy systems. With endurance you use the aerobic energy system and with fast weight lifting motions you use mainly the phosphocreatine system but depending how many reps you do it can lead to the anaerobic system. So basically with training with endurance or strength there’s specific factors for both but there’s no harm in training for both. Running won’t specifically help with lifting heavy and lifting heavy won’t improve your running ability. BUTTTTT weight lifting does add that stress to the bones to help build them stronger which can further improve the joints ability to be able to withstand the repetitive stress with running...Overall you’ll benefit from doing both lol".
Olympic National Park, WA, Backpacking
Day 0: A Surprising Phone Call
Friday, July 29th, I wake up to a phone call from my friend, Tiffany. I answer and hear, "Bruh, I'm going backing in Washington and you live in Washington!". It turns out Tiffany, her husband Zach, and sisters Olivia and Michelle were going backpacking in Olympic National Park, a couple hours drive from my new home Kirkland WA. This was surprising since the last time I saw any of these people was in CO at Tiffany and Zach's wedding and I had no idea they were even aware I was in WA. The trip was going to run a total of six days, Friday - Wednesday, and I agreed to join them for three, Friday - Sunday. I picked up a new stove and food from REI, packed my bag, and I was on my way!
Day 1: Car Camping, Bad Sleep, and No Fish
The first night we actually didn't do any hiking because we were all getting in later in the evening so we camped at Big Creek Campground, about a 20 minute drive from our trail head right near Staircase Ranger Station. We chatted, went on a late night walk, and everyone headed to bed so that we could get an early start the next morning. Everyone seemed to sleep pretty good except for myself, I went to bed a 1am listening to an audiobook and woke up a 4am. I laid in my hammock till there was enough light for me to see well enough to tie up some fishing gear, this probably happened a little after 5am, and I took off to a nearby stream. Two hours later and no fish I was back at camp. Breakfast was made, things were packed, and we headed to the trail.
Day 2: Big Log, Heat, Swimming, and Some Fish
This day we were headed to Big Log from Staircase Ranger Station. It was hot, a little over 90 degrees, Olivia and Michelle were carrying extra food for others that'd by joining them on the trail Sunday, so their bags were extremely heavy. Olivia's had to be about half of her bodyweight, which was insane, but she rallied and we made it up in good time. Playing Contact on the way up helped take our mind off of the pain. Upon arrival, we basically bolted down to the Skokomish river and took a dip. It was ice cold, but great. Later in the evening we went fishing, chatted, some had some whiskey, and eventually we turned in.
Day 3: My Exit
Sleep was better for me this night. I actually ended up getting about six hours. I woke up at about 5am and decided to go fishing for a couple hours. I caught two more, making for a total of about a half dozen. After that, we all had breakfast and prepared to head out. I was hiking out alone and the rest of the crew was headed further into the forest to meet with two other friends. I basically just turned and burned out of there trying to beat the heat and get a bit of a workout in. Here's some recovery and hike out data:
Kauai Trip
Say Less
How this trip came about is rather interesting. I had just finished grad school at the beginning of May 2022 and I had been exploring the idea of taking a fun trip with my friend John. We talked about going to places like Spain, Japan, and Thailand. No planning for any of these places was ever done though and I think it was primarily because the conversations we had about going we did quite passively amongst other topics. Then, one day, I get a call from John about a trip it almost seemed like he'd excluded as an option, but suddenly was reminded that it would actually be a really good and low effort option. John had a work trip to Kauai, HI. It was perfect, the trip was already planned and all I had to do was buy some tickets, which I did 4 days before the trip date, and be ready to have fun. Surprisingly, the tickets were very cheap at only $318 round trip. I felt like I had gotten away with something; I was going to Kauai on a whim for really cheap with one of my best friends. I was all for it.
Day to Day
John and I's day to day were a bit different since he'd have to go to work in the morning. If he was going in later morning we'd start the day off by swimming, snorkeling, surfing, or some combination of those three. If John did have to go to work earlier I'd usually first cook breakfast first, stretch out, and then swim, snorkel, run, surf, or some combination of those four. When John got off of work I'd usually meet he and his coworkers for dinner and drinks then we'd hit the beach for a couple hours and did more of the same activities. We basically swam, hiked, snorkeled, and surfed the entire time.
Highlights
I really enjoyed the hike John and I Awa'awapuhi Trail. It overlooks the Nepali coast, a more remote part of Kauai where there aren't any roads. I think the most special part was that we had the main lookout all to ourselves. We also saw some cool bird species and some wild pigs so that was awesome. Here's some of the hike data:
Another thing I really enjoyed is actually a specific moment. John and I were surfing at Shipwrecks and I was on my way in when I got caught in some shore break and ended up going head first over the falls. Now this part wasn't particularly enjoyable because I did think I was going to hit my head on the reef, but John happened to be on the tail end of the wave and was able to watch the entire thing go down. I popped up out of the water and he was just laughing hysterically, it was a funny moment.
Transport Theorem and The Inertia Tensor
Transport Theorem with Vectors
Many people have heard of the transport theorem from their undergraduate dynamics course. It's most useful, and well known, for describing the rate of change of a vector whose basis is time varying with respect to another frame of interest. It concisely captures the contributions of the rate of change of the vector in its own frame and also the rate of change of the basis vectors that vectors component are defined in. Here's an example:
The above can be read as: the time rate of change of the vector r, with respect to the N frame is equal to the rate of change of the vector r in the B frame plus the rate of change due to the B frame being time varying with respect to the N frame. Here, the tilde operator is being used to indicate use of the cross product matrix. If the vector r is defined in B frame components, the above expression is a very convenient way to describe its time rate of change. Say it was easier to define the r vector in a frame E, all you would have to do is swap the B's with E's in the above expression and bam, you're home free!
Transport Theorem with Inertia Tensors
Something known by less people is the ability to use the transport theorem on the inertia tensor. Let's say we have the tensor, [J], defined in the B frame, and we want to know the time rate of change with respect to the N frame, just like how we wanted to know how the r vector was varying with respect to the N frame. Using the transport theorem we can write this out as follows, without derivation:
I have yet to really put this expression into use, but I've done multi-body dynamics derivations without this and it can be a total pain. This should be a way to simplify multi-body dynamics problem when approaching it from an eulerian mechanics standpoint
Oahu "Layover"
There's something about Hawaii... and I think it's called Aloha. It has many many meanings and uses, but at it's core I think it's a way of life