Archive: August 2008

I’ve been trucking my way through Couch to 5K with the calm sense of accomplishment I can only derive from having a strictly delineated itinerary. At first, I could barely jog for two minutes without huffing and puffing, but over the weekend, I pushed through a twenty-minute stretch and, lo, I did not die. Hooray! Sure, my face was beet-red, sweat was streaming down my face, and I would have promised my hypothetical first-born child to the inventor of a full-body deodorant, but I did it. I ran for a longer stretch than I ever had before, and I even managed to sprint for the last minute. My “sprint” was more like hauling my sorry carcass up that last hill with every ounce of strength I had, pumping my arms as fast as they possibly could go, but I say that counts. I covered 2.5 miles between my five-minute warm-up walk and the twenty-minute jog! The wobbly legs and Lamaze breathing I sported on the way home were a small price to pay for the glowing satisfaction.

With my schedule of repeating each week’s workouts for two weeks, I calculated that I’d finish around the end of October. I could take advantage of fall weather with half-hour jogs every other day while I researched treadmill workouts for the winter. No problem. Good for me, right? Yes. Here’s a pat on the back, self!

We received a flier in the mail for the annual Mushroom Festival, and JG informed me that there would be a 5K run/walk during the event, you know, in case I was interested. My brain immediately threw itself a whirlwind. What if I was awful? What if I was the only obvious amateur? What if people got annoyed at my belabored breathing after one mile? What if the walkers overtook me? Besides, that race was on September 7, way before I was scheduled to have the requisite endurance. This race was not on the itinerary!

Oh, but it was only fifteen bucks to register, and there was a free t-shirt in the deal. What the heck? I sent in my registration, wincing all the way.

As if I couldn’t get any more nervous, my parents confirmed that they are coming down that weekend to go to the festival, and by extension, witness my first 5K. I figured that they’d join JG in the cheering section, and my dad would take pictures of me looking terrible and sweaty at the finish line. Uh, right. My dad, the half-marathon-training, Runner’s World-receiving, sneaker-collecting distance runner was going to simply observe? No way, man.

I received a e-mail this morning in my dad’s brief style:

RA - I am interested in the 5K. What pace are you planning to run?

DAD

I responded:

HA. I believe the technical term is “as slowly as possible so that I can run the whole time.” If I don’t stop to walk, I’ll be happy, so don’t feel the need to run with me!

That is, please don’t run with me! So help me, I am running a 5K at a festival for fungi in less than two weeks with my dad for a free t-shirt. Unbelievable.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I am losing my touch. I’m not sure what sort of writerly expertise I expect out of myself, but the last few weeks have been too rife with exposition, italics, and extreme punctuation for my taste. When I re-read the posts, I’m not sure who it is who wrote them, and I’m even less sure that I want it to have been me.

Although I make a conscious effort not to obsess over the numbers — my minimum comment threshold for self-validation is pretty low — the realization that I did not particularly like what I was publishing made its initial dent in my brain at the end of July. I was skimming the previous month’s posts to pick out the ones I would categorize as favorites. There’s no metric for what makes me add that tag; it’s just a sense of personal affection for a certain piece that makes me sigh and think wistfully, “Yeah, that was a pretty good one.” During that most recent review, I only really liked one post. Upon further examination, the most recent one before that was a whole two months earlier. I was rather stunned. In three months, I had produced a scant two posts that rang true to me.

I scanned the posts that make up my favorites category. It seemed as though a lot of the pieces that are the most genuine to me were borne of desperation, fatigue, and stress. Writing was cathartic in those situations, and the mere practice of finding the right way to articulate what was a difficult situation made it seem less daunting. Oddly enough, the source of my furrowed brow is that I have a strange sensation that my relatively even-keeled life is bereft of material for anxiety-ridden essays. My job is fine, the car is running, Ted is getting into a routine, I’m halfway through my running program, and there has been no major drama of which to speak. So, what’s the problem?

I contemplated this existential question while I sat outside with Ted last evening. JG was at a volleyball league meeting, and I decided to put the invisible fence collar on Ted so that he could amble around on his own. I sat on a beach chair on the deck with a citronella candle burning pungently at my feet and the makings of a volleyball scarf in my lap. The air was unseasonably crisp for this time of year, and I thrilled at being comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. A raucous bird scolded me from a nearby tree, and Ted sat up pertly to watch something out of my line of sight. Between rows of blue and white yarn, I thought about bringing down a laptop to fulfill my vague need to check my e-mail and type away on a keyboard, but I thought better of it. What did I need to type, exactly? How I am displeased with being even remotely content because it makes for boring blog posts? How I should stir up some controversy in my life so I have something to gripe about later? How I should be grateful that I have a quiet night at home with the dog, who was happily rolling around in the yard, and I should be so easily satisfied?

I put down my knitting and got up to run around with Ted. Maybe I wasn’t plumbing the depths of human emotion, but there’s something to be said for chasing a little white dog in the grass.

A few weeks ago, I was trying to narrow down a recipe for this week’s Whip It Up theme of salads, and JG and I struck up a conversation on the way home from the gym about the definition of this particular course. See, I have a hard time with salads that consist of something like slices of grapefruit, slivered red onion, and balsamic vinegar. That’s it? That’s a salad? I know it’s trendy, but what is up with a wedge salad? I do not understand the appeal of a hard, nutrition-free quadrant of pale iceberg lettuce. Maybe a salad was simply a mixture of things, we posited. Ever the mathematician, JG proposed a casserole as a counterexample, and I suggested that a salad was maybe a cold mixture. What about a buffalo chicken salad? What distinguished a “dressing” from a “sauce”? And on and on it went. Ultimately, we did not come to a satisfactory definition, much to our collective chagrin, and I am still nettled by it. Terms that can mean anything to anyone do not sit well with me. I strive for precision of language! Where are my defined boundaries? When will the madness end?!

Okay, deep breath.

I mostly chose this recipe for a Greek pasta salad because this is a busy week in the evenings, and JG and I decided to use the “component” strategy, where we have lots of mix-and-match items in the fridge that can accommodate whatever meals we need. Also, I had never tried anything by Robin Miller. Her show is all about revamping leftovers, cooking in bulk in advance, and basically planning up the wazoo. Unsurprisingly, I love it. As an added bonus, I found out from the quarterly alumni newsletter that Robin is a fellow Blue Hen!

Method
Like any non-fussy pasta salad worth its salt, this recipe was easy to follow in terms of procedure. Chop, mix, toss, serve! Done! However, I did not manage to do this within the optimistic time estimate of 18 minutes. Where do they get that? It takes me 18 minutes to chop a bell pepper and mint leaves, dice chicken, and mince garlic! Maybe I am just the slow boat of food preparation, but I still think that estimate is ridiculous. Plus, I was lucky enough to have a resident spouse who was willing to cook the chicken ahead of time for me (phew), so I didn’t have to deal with that at all. That said, cooking the chicken while everything else is going on is definitely feasible, but it will add to the overall timeframe and the dirty dish quotient.

I made the following tweaks to this recipe:

• I used gemelli instead of ditalini.
• I had to use plain yellow mustard because we were out of Dijon, but it hadn’t been replaced yet.
• I added kalamata olives at the end because the idea of Greek food without olives was absurd to me.
• I cut back on the mint because recipe reviewers claimed that it tended to be overwhelming; I used about 3 tablespoons, chopped.

Taste
The salad chilled in the fridge while I waited for JG to come home from his first scrimmage with this year’s volleyball team, but once he got home, he was starving. I was a little concerned that this dinner would not be satisfying for him, but I resolutely stirred in feta cheese and olives, and dished up bowls of the rookie dinner. It was very tasty! The mixture of fresh mint and dried herbs was pleasing, and the dish was light, but still filling. The pasta twists soaked up all of the flavor from the dressing, even though there were moments of potent raw garlic. “This is so good,” JG said repeatedly, as he scraped his bowl and got up for more.

Repeat appearance
I wish I had tried this salad earlier! This recipe is a nice one to have on hand because it can be a simple side dish for a crowd, but it turns into its own meal with the chicken. It is a fairly blank canvas for adding other ingredients like artichoke hearts or roasted red peppers, but I like what I did this time, and I wouldn’t make any significant changes for us. I’m glad that I followed my instinct in toning down the mint because that flavor only grew stronger as the flavors melded in the fridge. JG has requested black olives for next time, but I’m sure I’ll get a few kalamata ones for me. Now, to hunt down more Robin Miller recipes to try!

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I’ve been waxing poetic about my glory days as an acrobatic tween, but the time has come to get down to business, that is, the judging. Based on the number of friends to whom I’ve offered an amateur explanation of the updated judging system, it appears to be a source of mystery, so I’m here to shed some light. I hope.

The most significant adjustment for viewers is the lack of the perfect 10. Now, there are three numbers to track, and how do you know what is right or wrong or how they compare to each other? Here is the breakdown:

• The first number on the left is what I call the difficulty score, and what the official people obscurely call “Score A.” Gymnastic skills have specific values that increase with difficulty, and that first number consists of the ten hardest skills in a routine (with the exception of the vault, which has single, inherent difficulty score). Gymnasts may earn bonus points by performing these ten skills in combination, which is why we’re seeing a lot more connected tumbling passes.
• The second number is what I call the execution score, or what is officially known as “Score B.” The execution score starts with ten points, and judges deduct for mistakes like steps on landings, missed handstands on the bars, or bent legs. This element of scoring most closely resembles the perfect 10 that we remember.
• The sum of the difficulty and execution scores makes up the final score. For example, if a gymnast’s difficulty score was a 5.8, the maximum score she can receive (or, her start value) is a 15.8. Because each gymnast may have a different difficulty score, there is no set upper boundary, and the scale slides depending on what the gymnast chooses to perform.

There are some obvious down sides to this system. First, it is anti-intuitive that a gymnast who falls can still get a high score, even after the mandatory eight-tenths deduction; however, if that gymnast has a 17.7-point start value, that deduction won’t hurt as much, compared to our gymnast with the 15.8 start value. Then, there is the sentimental attachment the viewing public has to the perfect 10. Visions of Nadia and Mary Lou are steeped into cultural memory, and the phrase “perfect 10″ has transcended beyond the sport.

But, hang on, I say.

From the perspective of a former gymnast, I appreciate this new scoring system, and I wish it had been around when I was competing. To me, the subjectivity of judging goes from 100% to around 70%, and each gymnast has control over that difficulty aspect of the routine.

Even more importantly, I hope this new system helps to curb the endless revisions to the code of points, or the almighty rulebook on what the hardest skills are. Every year that I competed, the code of points would change, and we’d retool my routines to take advantage of the most difficult skills I could do. Essentially, the harder skills would become more commonplace, and therefore not as hard, relatively speaking. With the updated system, when new skills inevitably develop, they can simply attain higher point values, and the whole scale won’t need to be recalibrated.

That said, a new system of scoring does not take out the human error of subjective judging, and the Olympics have been anything but immune to the pitfalls therein.

• I was incredibly displeased with what I perceived to be blatantly inconsistent judging during the women’s all-around competition, even though I was fine with the ultimate outcome.
• For whatever reason, gymnasts who qualify for event finals are not seeded according to qualifying score, and the competition order is determined by random draw. It’s hard luck that someone has to go first and get that too-low score, because judges will leave room for what may come next. In this respect, I think competition order made the difference in Shawn Johnson’s silver medal on the floor exercise.
• In my mind, Nastia Liukin’s silver medal on the uneven bars final was a fluke, merely a result of bureaucratic decision-making. Unlike other Olympic events, IOC does not allow ties in gymnastics, and I can not imagine why. The tie-breaking policy is to eliminate the highest and lowest scores from the judges’ panel (which composed the execution score), and then compare the remaining numbers. This practice is completely unfair to me, since the entire point of having a group of judges is to remove the influence of an individual. It also makes little sense to resolve a tie by returning to the scores that created that tie. Why not use their qualifying scores? Sure, I’m biased because Nastia got a 16.9 (the highest score so far in gymnastic competition), and He Kexin received something like a 15.7, but wouldn’t that have at least made sense? Even assuming that the judging was competent and consistent, I see no problem with awarding both girls gold medals. The judges placed them both on the top step of the podium; there is no place for a computer program to knock one of them off.

Ultimately, part of being a gymnast is accepting the scores the judges hand down. You put together your strongest routine, perform it to the best of your ability, and wait for the verdict. Judging is as part of the game as rain is in a soccer match: you just deal with it.

But, man, I really want Shawn Johnson to take home a gold medal.