Life After Grad School

I conquered the mountain!! Okay, so it wasn’t exactly Mt. Everest. And we didn’t go all the way to the top for lack of crampons. And it was a beautiful day with 20 degree temperatures and slight snow flurries (gorgeous snow flakes, by the way). But the whole point was to learn the basics of winter hiking and frankly, I like 73 degrees and sunny. Dealing with extreme temperatures is not on my list of favorite things to do and on Friday morning, when it was 3 degrees in Boston with a -15 wind chill, hiking up a mountain seemed like a fairly stupid way of spending the weekend.

Thankfully it warmed up and 20 degrees all of a sudden felt downright tropical. What was that again? Oh yeah, everything is relative. So anyway, besides figuring out how many layers of clothing I need when hiking in the winter and that one should be eating constantly to replenish calories and stay warm (my favorite part), I also learned how to not get too lost using map and compass while bushwhacking. Super fun! Great people, posh accommodations, excellent food, mountains, trees, great views, snow. What else could one possibly ask for?! I’m hooked. Which can be a good or a bad thing considering the potential for spending way too much money on gear for yet another sport. This invites thinking along the lines of “since the discovery of ever-lasting polyester swim suits is saving me at least $150 a year, I can spend that money on other gear, right?”. And before you know it I’ll have rationalized my way into preferred customer status at REI and EMS.

The weekend was a winter hiking workshop organized by the Boston chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Why it took me so long to become a member is one of life’s unsolved mysteries. May have had something to do with being holed up in my own little grad school world. Or being busy with swim/triathlon training. Better late than never, I suppose!

Today it’s so cold in Boston that moving to Alaska sounds like a fabulous idea:

Boston: low temperature: 3 degrees
Fairbanks: low temperature: 11 degrees

Stay warm!

… the hour swim, that is! Not that it wasn’t painful, particularly when the Z center folks reset the clocks in the middle of our swim. When I thought I was done, I had five minutes left. Longest 5 minutes of my life ..

So, yes, it was long and not the most exciting thing I can imagine doing on a Sunday morning, but we all survived, did well and a big thanks goes out to our good friends, who are such good friends that they sat on the side of the pool and recorded our splits for an hour - quite possibly the one thing that’s more boring than actually swimming for an hour straight. As predicted in a previous post, I did indeed swim just under 2.5miles (4285 yards), which isn’t bad for somebody whose favorite race lasts about 28 seconds. And as expected I didn’t really find any solutions to mind-boggling puzzles. Instead I must have looked at the clock about 150 times, got very inspired every time one fellow swimmer passed me and tried to keep up for about 15 yards, then dropped back to normal pace until coming close to passing the other fellow swimmer. In the end it seemed like a hare and hedgehog game. I also pondered the fact that the distance I covered was roughly equivalent to the first leg of an Ironman triathlon. How anybody can bike 112 miles and run a marathon after swimming 2.4 miles is truly amazing to me.

Later that day I had my piece of cake - or two. I had baked a Kaesekuchen (a German cheesecake) after discovering that Greek yogurt has a similar taste and consistency as the hard to find Quark (no, not the elementary particle). A great discovery, it turns out, the cake was moist, refreshing and delicious and the perfect post hour swim dessert (we had had brunch at the big table at Toscanini’s earlier, where we polished off a delicious fried egg sandwich in no time and enjoyed the fabulous coffee).

In the universe of “Things the world doesn’t need” the reply-all button ranks pretty darn high. It’s not surprising to me that I’m not the only one who feels strongly about not wanting to be spammed with random emails from people whom I generally like and respect and unknown fellow list subscribers alike. The puzzling thing for me is why?? Why do people choose reply-all, if the simple reply button next to it would do? Do they hit reply-all to every single email without thinking? Are they so arrogant that they think what they have to say will be useful to and welcomed by all recipients? And why - after getting reminded (by me, sadly) that discussions should not be held via reply-all email responses but on a designated discussion forum or limited to relevant participants - do people hit reply-all over and over and over again?

This is one of those many moments, albeit in small scale, when I question the ability of human beings to think before acting and to learn from past experiences. All this suggests that the solution is a technical one: let’s eliminate the reply-all function or bury it some place where it cannot easily be found (like the BCC button, for example).

It’s January and that means the dreaded arrival of the USMS One Hour Postal Swim. It’s not that swimming for an hour is the problem, we regularly swim longer than that in practice. The real issue is swimming for an hour straight - with no destination in sight nor any music to help us along - just the sound of our own breathing and the view of the black stripe at the bottom of the pool. This may be a distance swimmer’s dream, but us sprinters only remember the boredom, the agony and pain, caused by our inability to let go and just enjoy an hour of relaxed swimming (ok, so we’re competitive!). To make matters worse, Coach decided to actually prepare us for this event. Not only are we doing this once at the end of the month, but we’re being subjected to long distances in practice. A 20-minute swim on Tuesday, a 30-minute swim on Wednesday … I’m skipping practice for the rest of the week for fear that he might continue on this trajectory (well, really I’m busy, but I’m not sure I could handle a 40-minute practice swim tonight).

I’m collecting ideas on what to ponder during my hour swim. Current candidates include: achieving world peace, stopping climate change or maybe something a little more achievable, such as figuring out how to keep my calendar from filling up weeks in advance. Who knows what amazing solutions can be discovered while swimming 170 lengths of the pool uninterrupted at a speed of about 2.5mph?