Adventures in Onionism

The full (25 minute) version of Kyle Dempster's The Road from Karakol is on Youtube. Great scenery, and an amazing adventure, but I think his voice over narration is a little hamfisted.

Lyme disease in next week's New Yorker . I assume it's only a matter of time until I get it. I find a tick on me or George about one for every two or three hours of running.

It will be sunny on race day. None of this unseasonably cool nonsense.

Am I being an elitist adventure snob, or is this year's crop of Outside Adventure Grant finalists a little weak? 4 out of 5 of these won't take longer than a month. The run across Africa seems the toughest, but it bugs me that they hype the vertical climbing as "two and a quarter times that of Everest." Over the course of 3,000+ miles? You know that means your route is essentially flat, right? But I guess they're trying to raise money for a good cause, so I'll stop hating on them.

Silver buckle or vomit a lot trying.

Semi-Rad's shoe review is amazing. Like he says, "You should get a pair. Of shoes." Like my friends at The Trail Show say, "Less gear, more beer."

My friend Ben was posthumously awarded his PhD in economics from UCSD this past weekend. The UCSD economics department has a tribute page that is worth reading here . Also, the department and Ben's friends are raising funds for the Benjamin C. Horne Memorial Prize to further research in Ben's areas of interest: peace, international cooperation, development, and environmental protection. You can read more about that here ; I'd love you if donated. Another good cause only slightly less close to my heart is the CDT. The previous non-profit that partnered with the Forest Service to manage it went belly-up a year or two ago, but there's a new group, the Continental Divide Trail Coalition that is trying to take over; their campaign is here .

Elevation Outdoors article on the race. I've put in for the lottery at least twice so far, and I'll keep doing so every year until I get in.

From their press release : We should mention the improved help-file searching, and Poisson with endogenous covariates, and that Stata now supports FTP and secure HTTP, and fast PDF manual navigation, and seven noncentral-t and noncentral-F functions, and JavaAPI, and ordered probit with Heckman style sample selection, and the new way of estimating ML models without writing an evaluator program, and the new fractional-polynomial prefix command, and intraclass correlations, and that quantile regression can now produce robust estimates of standard errors, and that factor variables now support value labels for labeling output, and the new way to import data from Haver Analytics, and automatic business-calendar creation, and the new import commands that make reading data really easy, and how you can create Word and Excel files from Stata, and how you can solve arbitrary nonlinear systems, and a lot of other things. And Stata 13 contains the most requested feature of all: You can now typ...

  60 miles of running and 60 on the bike. My long runs have been tough lately, but it's been 80 degrees and humid, so I'm not super worried about it. States is two weeks away. I'll probably run 40 this week, and 20 or less the week of the race, then break 24 hours.

Sure, I can go wander around some slot canyons with gf after a decent 100-miler, but I couldn't do this:

Continuing on with this post and this post of mine about politicians being able to understand problems they themselves don't have, here's this dKos post : 20 Democrat reps are trying to live for a week on what SNAP provides, in protests of cuts to the program that Republicans are insisting be in the farm bill. Barbara Lee's actually done it before, for real.

This is my plan B career when academia doesn't work out. The only way to improve it is to tow it by bicycle.

I like them (based on a quick mile around campus). They are quite tight on the inside of the arch, but they should be a nice addition to my rotation.

This adventure film looks fun, and reminds me of a dear friend.

46 total, 39 running. I took Monday and Tuesday off with traveling and resting after Bryce, but then got going again. I found my "long" run on Saturday pretty worrying--I basically felt like garbage and walked a bunch of it, and thought that maybe Bryce recovery was going to take me a lot longer than I expected. However, my run on Sunday was much better: a standard loop in the Wissahickon with a few more miles around Swat in the evening. So I think things are OK. Hopefully this week and next will be 50+, and then I can calm down the week before States.   

Shoes: Recently I bought a couple pairs of Brooks Pure Grits (last year's model), but returned them. Instead I ordered my second pair of Altra Lone Peaks ( last year's model ). I wore them for miles 1-61 of the Bryce 100 and they felt good, but it was nice to switch to something a little beefier for the finish (a pair of Brooks Cascadia 6). I was worried I'd set off something in my knee, but they felt great. So I just ordered another pair of Cascadias, this time model 7 . I also ordered a pair of New Balance MT110 , solely because they were $40, and they have free shipping and free returns if I truly hate them. So for right now, I'm pretty happy with my trail shoe situations. I'll start States in my new-ish Altras, then switch out to the Cascadias about halfway when the pounding is making the dogs bark. Headlamps: I stopped at the Las Vegas REI on the way to Bryce looking for a 200+ lumen headlamp with a rechargeable lithium battery. Nothing fit that bill, but...

This is what I sometimes claim my development economics is all about. But trying to know the objective function I'm trying to (or should be) maximize is difficult. Shouldn't climate change be part of it, especially if life on planet Earth is at stake? Should my own happiness, which really wouldn't be maximized by working on Wall Street? Couldn't you be more effective in the long run by encouraging a bunch of others to do the "best" thing instead of actually doing that "best" thing yourself? Hard to say. h/t for the seriously thought-provoking and interesting article: Blattman .

While I was adventuring all over southern Utah, it seems others were out as well. Here 's a crazy traverse of Zion by Buzz Burrell, Jared Campbell, and Ryan McDermott. I don't know the park well enough to understand the traverse exactly, but the pictures of them setting some sort of climbing rig from an inescapable pothole and rappelling in wesuits tell quite a story. Others crossed the Bob Marshal Wilderness. Oh, and Tony K is starting to put bits of Nolan's 14 together in preparation for a go at the whole thing, but you probably already knew that. I wish I were still out there.

I just got back from an excellent trip to southern Utah for the Bryce 100. Wednesday night I flew to Vegas and stayed with my buddy Nielsen. Thursday I picked up gf at the airport and drove to Dixie National Forest just west of Bryce Canyon National Park, picked up my race packet, ate some delicious pizza (with no cheese) baked by some awesome hippies on a mobile brick oven trailer, and slept. Friday I ran 100 miles. 25 hours and 56 minutes later I finished doing that. I took a nap for a few hours, drank some beer, ate more pizza, and then went and hiked down a slot canyon . Sunday we hiked around Cedar Breaks National Monument and then Fire Canyon in Nevada's Valley of Fire State Park. Took the red-eye home and here we are; you're all caught up. Willis Creek in Grand Staircase Escalante NM Willis Creek--easily accessible non-technical slot outside Cannonville, UT View on the BLM road to Willis Creek Devil's Garden on Hole-in-the-Rock Rd near Escalante, UT ...