A.M. Lots of training partners this morning. Ran with Ted and James the first 7 miles in 54:17. Then 3 more just with Ted in 21:01. Joined James in his kick, and caught Ted after a VPB stop, that gave me some marathon pace running. Ran some more afterwards. Was originally planning on adding 3.11 so I would be at half-marathon distance for my morning run, but then I saw my old friend and training partner Matt Anderson, and added a bit with him. Matt and I have run a lot of miles together. He has been out and about getting a lot of education, and now is back, teaching math at BYU, 400 and 500 level classes. He is 31, and still single. He has been running the entire time, though, and looks like a teenager. I teased him that if he showed up at a high school dance, he could have some success as the girls would have no idea about his age. Maybe that's the problem - the girls that are old enough to marry think that he is too young to date them. When I told Matt that I ran 2:23 in St. George, he responded correctly to it right away without being prompted - bummer! I guess reaching any goal is similar to writing a program. At first it does not compile with a lot of error message. Then you fix some and try again. Get even more error messages. Then you finally fix them all, it compiles. You are ready to celebrate, but you know better if you are a programmer with experience. You try to run it, it dumps core on a trivial test. You fix that. Then it produces terribly incorrect output on a trivial test case. Fix that. Then incorrect output on a less trivial test case. Then it finally works correctly on all of your test cases. Then you give it to the users. They start reporting bugs. Finally you think you've fixed them all. Then a month later you get an ugly bug report. So on and so forth. It is incremental progress with frequent failures, but you are becoming better and better one step at a time.
We ran to my house, finished 13.3 in 1:38:20. Then Matt gave Benjamin some math problems, Benjamin solved all of them except this one - what is the limit of sin(1/x) as x approaches 0? This one challenged me as well, although it should not have, but I was too lazy to think and asked Matt the answer. This turned out to be a trick question - the limit does not exist, the sine function diverges as the argument approaches infinity. I also asked Matt about the equation on my shirt. I understand the front part, which says, "and God said", then Maxwell's electromagnetic equations, then "and there was light". The back part says, What part of - some ugly looking partial differential equation - do you not understand? Turned out to be something from the quantum mechanics, which is what I thought it was. The discussion, however, stirred up Benjamin's interest in math, which is very good.
I'll keep bugging Matt about Fast Running Blog until he joins. P.M. 1.05 with Julia in 10:33 in the early afternoon. Later, 2 miles with Benjamin, Jenny ran the first 1.5, then rode in the stroller. Jenny's time was 14:14. Benjamin finished 2 miles in 17:47. He put some hot pepper on my plate with the last quarter in 1:38. With Jenny in the stroller I had to move my legs to keep up, this was almost marathon race pace effort. Ran 2 miles afterwards with Jacob and Joseph in the stroller in 14:38.
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