Double Blind

Calgary Grit has been thoroughly covering this, including his last article, The Big Ten. Unless if Paul Martin or Jean Chretien come back from the dead and decide to run for the leadership (which isn’t going to happen), there isn’t a candidate that can come in this stage and shake up the equilibrium enough to make a difference – anybody of significance (e.g. McKenna, Rock, etc.) has already declined to run.

Since there isn’t a futures market that trades on who will win the Liberal leadership convention, I will say it here first that if there were such a market, I would be picking up bets on Ken Dryden. I’m guessing that if there were such a market, he would be trading at about 20:1 and in reality I think he’s got a 2:1 shot of taking it.

There is a site called LiberalLeadershipOdds, but this is a blog about the chances of individual candidates, without any element of money. Shame.

After many ballots, it should come down to Kennedy, Dion and Dryden, and Ken Dryden should win and become the next leader of the Liberal party of Canada.

Of course we haven’t heard much with respect to differentiation between the candidates and the policies they plan on pushing through if elected as leader, but I somehow doubt if Ignatieff has a chance mainly because he’s about as right winged as your average Conservative party politician, and I figure the Liberal delegates won’t go for that.

I went to the library a couple days ago and picked up three books. I still have in mind the books that some of you recommended a while ago and I will get to them. This particular trip to the library was strictly impulse book borrowing based off of what I could find on the shelf.

On a complete side note, the enhancements to the main branch of the Richmond Public Library are complete and the second floor looks modernized, consistent with the redesign of the first floor. There appears to be more open area for silent study and I’ll get used to the red-and-yellow colour scheme. The fact that there seems to be more open floor space is a huge plus, as there are now many more study spaces where people can read and do their work (these spaces were usually taken up in the library before the enhancement).

One major complaint of mine, however, has to deal with the computer terminals on the top shelf – the keyboards are placed so low relative to the monitors that it makes it ergonomically impossible to type on the keyboard if your height is anything above 5 feet tall! The computers on the bottom floor have half of them designed for midgets, while the other half are for men of average height, while the computers on the top floor are all made for midgets!

Anyhow, one of the books I found was Pyongyang : A Journey in North Korea, written by Guy Delisle. As the book is 100% cartoons, written in pencil and black-and-white, it took me a couple hours to get through the book. It was an excellent read, and if you see it on the shelves of your library, I would highly recommend it. Maybe I just have an affinity for books with pictures in them.

Not to give away the plot, but the author is an animator for a French company that was doing some subcontracting in North Korea. The book is a story of his experiences in the country. The book is not overly political, nor is it overly serious either. It’s a well done book, and it certainly saves me the trouble from ever having to experience North Korea (in its present condition) for myself.

When trying to download some MP3 files through my web browser, I noticed that instead of asking me where I would like to save the files, Apple Quicktime came up and tried streaming the file on my browser, which isn’t what I wanted. I rarely have the need to view .MOV files and I absolutely hate it when applications interrupt what I am attempting to do.

The solution is apparently QuickTime Alternative, which allows you to play .MOV files through Windows Media Player. Good riddance to Quicktime.

Now that the Sun Run is over, it’s time to continue with the agenda I set for myself last December. I will likely continue my physical regimen, but I will probably alternate running sessions with other activities (such as swimming or biking). I’m also sure that my upper body strength will continue to be neglected!

The most physically straining task remaining on the task list for this year is going to be reaching the confluence point of 51 North, 124 West. I have written about it on a special page on this weblog including some of the challenges that will have to be faced.

Every red square and triangle are confluence points that have been successfully visited by other people. Some of the confluence points are in very difficult locations to reach, such as on glaciers and mountains, while some are relatively easy to reach. The closest confluence point to Vancouver that seems do-able is 51N124W (circled blue in the map above). It’s approximately 110km away from Williams Lake, or about 210km away from Vancouver. The only trick is that the coast mountain range is between us and the confluence – you would have to hike in from the north side and not the south.

I’m not even sure whether the plan is feasible or not, but I will find out. Assuming the transportation logistics turn out OK (particularly the procurement of a boat that can get us to the southernmost point of Chilko Lake and back), the possibility of giving this a legitimate attempt in August is alluring.

The Bank of Canada is virtually certain to increase short term interest rates on April 25 from 3.75% to 4.00%. Effectively this means that financial institutions will have the costs of their short term capital requirements increase. They respond by increasing their prime lending rate, which gets passed onto the customers.

The most visible example is the lending rate banks use for mortgages – before today, the rate on a variable rate mortgage is 4.7% at ING Direct. Tomorrow, the rate will increase to 4.95%. This means anybody with a variable rate mortgage borrowing $100 will pay 25 cents more per year. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but since most mortgages are typically in the 6-digit range, they are paying a lot more than they were paying a year ago, when that variable rate was just 3.45%.

For example, if you wanted to borrow $200,000 one year ago, the interest bill would have cost you $6900/year or $575/month. After tomorrow, that same interest bill would cost you $9900 or $825/month. The reason why higher interest rates tend to slow down the economy is because that extra $250/month that otherwise would have went into buying other stuff goes to the banks to cover the bank’s increased cost of borrowing.

Of course, people paying a fixed rate (right now the 5-year fixed rate is 5.25%) won’t feel the effects of this interest rate increase, but when it comes time to renew that mortgage, increased short term rates have a tendency to increase the long term rates as well. Right now, the market is in an unusual state where the difference between the short term and long term rates are relatively close. It’s very difficult to tell whether this will continue to be the case in the future, but time will tell.

Although I don’t tend to have too many problems shaving with regular shaving cream, I do know of some people that have extreme skin irritation. This article about the perils of using shaving cream I found to be rather innovative, considering that from day one men are taught how to shave with shaving cream.

Official result: 57 minutes, 17 seconds. There were 2277 people in the males aged 25-29 category that finished. 50th percentile was ranked 1138th or 58 minutes and 54 seconds! So a time of 57 minutes and 17 seconds would be equivalent to a rank of 1033th or 54th percentile!

At the start and finish sections are two long orange pads that you can step on, and I suspect this holds the mechanism to interrogate the chips that runners stick on their shoes for timing purposes. I had myself clocked at 57 minutes and 16 seconds on my stopwatch, so this mechanism was pretty accurate!

The map of the 2006 Sun Run course can be found here (750k .pdf file). I studied this before race day and it generally paid off since I had a good idea of where to make sure I take corners as tightly as possible, probably saving about 50 meters of excess running. This was offset by the fact that I had to do some serious weaving across the street at times to avoid people since nobody followed the “runners stay on the left, walkers on the right” convention.

I had my stopwatch set to 59 minutes and counting down. My goal was to make it within 60 minutes and I set 59 minutes because I wanted a one minute reserve. Unfortunately, when filling out my application, I chose the category of people that would expect to finish the race in 1:10-1:29 (the purple group) which put me behind many, many, many other people. When I filled it out in late February I still didn’t have good information on how fast I could finish the race and I thought I would be able to do it in 70 minutes.

I got to the race start about an hour in advance of when the purple group would actually start running (the schedule said 9:30-9:45, but I actually crossed the start line around 10:00). I wasn’t exactly as hydrated as I wanted to be and standing around there for an hour and watching all the people run down Georgia street stopped being exciting in five minutes. Also, they had a serious electrical glitch on the speaker that was blaring static to everybody waiting in the purple area which made things somewhat painful.

In terms of preparation of racing tactics, from talking with other people with respect to the crowd conditions, I thought that the best strategy would be to conserve energy until you reach 4th avenue. After 6th avenue (which is completely flat and wide), I would then expend as much energy as possible to get to Cambie street, and then take it easy until you’ve reached the top of the bridge and then sprint to the finish. The plan was mostly successful and it was rather motivating to be blazing past people on 6th avenue – fighting through the crowd and finding open spaces probably gave my mind something to think about other than the fact that “I’m seriously out of oxygen right now!”.

In the first two kilometers the crowd was so densely packed that it was difficult to run a natural pace – there was a lot of weaving in and out of people that apparently couldn’t read the huge signs saying “walkers to the right”. The most brutal part in terms of the crowd slowing you down was around Robson Street, where there was a point that I couldn’t run – only walk through the crowd. Thankfully this condition only lasted about half a minute, but it really kills any biological momentum you have in trying to establish a consistent running pace.

My right calf felt a little tender at this time for no particular reason, but this subsided during the race. There weren’t any other injury concerns other than that there was some minor abrasion on my left pinky toe, but this didn’t affect my performance.

I remember timing my first kilometer – 5 minutes flat. This wasn’t good since in my previous training I know that running 5 minute kilometers was going to burn me out. After the 4th kilometer, I remember my stopwatch showing me that I had been running for 23 minutes – fairly respectable but it was showing that I was slowly down significantly. It was at this point that I was truly worried that I wouldn’t be able to make 60 minutes, let alone 59. If you do the math, my rate between kilometers 1 and 4 showed I was running 6 minute kilometers, which means that I had to continue running 6 minute kilometers for the rest of the race in order to finish in exactly 59 minutes. Since I knew that I would burn out later on, I was concerned. Turns out that my concerns weren’t warranted, and my pace actually picked up after the 4th kilometer.

The most difficult part of the race was climbing the hill to get onto the Burrard Street Bridge. It was around this time that I decided to take a breather and walk half-way up the hill and then once I got up the hill, half-way up the Burrard Street Bridge. Once I reached the top of the bridge and the elevation started to slope down, I started running again.

Between the 6th and 9th kilometer, I had my fastest pace in the race, much faster than in the first five kilometers. I did clock the difference between the 6th and 8th kilometer at being approximately 10 minutes, which convinced me that I could complete the course in less than 60 minutes. I noticed when we approached the 8km sign, one father to his son said “We’re 80% there son!”, which made me think that “this guy is an engineer” but also when looking at my watch that I spent a lot of energy sprinting down 6th avenue. Since I had a huge time reserve, I took a 45 second walking break before continuing to sprint past other people again.

When reaching the on-ramp to the Cambie street bridge I slowed down somewhat (being uphill, but not nearly as badly as the Burrard Street upramp). After getting on the bridge deck I ran at full blast, and when reaching the off-ramp to the finish line I was sprinting so fast that I got dizzy when I finally reached the finish line.

During the entire race I clocked my amount of walking time in proportion to running time, and I walked for about 6 minutes during this race, which was close to my 1:10 ratio that was my goal. I also drank a little water at the water stations for the race which I believe helped slightly – I never got any cramps or anything.

I’m really happy with my performance considering that before January of this year, I’ve never run more than 200 meters continuously in my life. I am hoping that this new trend of physical fitness continues and I’ll have to come up with some reasonable physical milestones to try and achieve.

With respect to my Sun Run registration, apparently I had a sex change since I’m registered in the 25-29 year old female category. Way to go for the data entry clerks at the Vancouver Sun! I was told I can change this by going to BC Place, but I couldn’t be bothered.

I did my last Sun Run practice today. 3 10 minute runs with one minute walks between them. I ran the 1km loop and recorded the following times:

1km – 5:30
2km – 11:30 (note: one minute walking included)
5km – 28:00 (note: two minutes walking included)
5.8km – 32:00 (this is after 30 minutes running, two minutes walking.. at this speed I could complete 10km in 55:10 – I don’t think I have a chance in hell of doing this in the actual race).

I felt a bit exhausted after this run, but was otherwise happy that I could do it. I was even happier when it started raining after I got out of the shower.

So how am I going to do in the race? Well, to make things a little interesting, I will make a market on my Sun Run performance. I did some thinking about this while running and think I can make 58:30. Accordingly, I will set the following odds on myself:

Sacha to complete the Sun Run in…

… 1:00:00 or less: 70%

… 59:00 or less: 50%

… 58:00 or less: 30%

… 57:00 or less: 5%

… 56:00 or less: 1%

… 55:00 or less: Priceless

Here are some negative risk factors for your consideration:

Some other positive factors to consider:

So, are there any takers? I will put $7 on your $3 that I can do it in an hour or better, and $5 on your $5 that I can do it in 59 minutes or better. Obviously I won’t be betting against myself (a mild conflict of interest there). So if I know you, first comments to take the bet gets their bets locked in…

I haven’t been in a writing mood lately, which is a shame since I’ve still got five partially written drafts up in WordPress. Perhaps it’s the spring allergies kicking in, although I’m thankful that it seems to be over (for now).

I haven’t been very productive lately on any fronts, although last Easter (long) weekend was spent on the Sunshine Coast (northwest of Sechelt) with good company and it was a very relaxing trip. Ate quite a bit of good stuff, played quite a few games, and slept.

I’m also lining up my vacation schedule for the spring and summer, I’ll have a heavy agenda for 2006.