Big Sur

About Mile 14, looking north.

About Mile 10, looking north.

The start (taken Saturday before the infrastructure was in place).

Big Sur is really a marvelous event.  Ted will attest that my pictures do not do the scenery justice, and except for the start these were taken basically at random -- whenever I felt like stopping to jog a short stretch of the course to get a feel for it.

It is a grueling race.  The elevation profile (below) about does it justice.  The Hurricane Point climb in the middle is more or less four Heartbreak Hills in a row.  The climbs in the second half are easy by comparison but brutal in their own right.  You learn quickly to fear rounding bends in the road because around every other one a gale is blowing down some cleft in the mountain or off some ocean inlet.

But once aspirations of exceeding yourself are gone, sometime around Mile 6, the greatest hazard is the crick in your neck from craning to see some new sight or to hear some new sound.  

Spectators are few -- the highway is closed to all but official race traffic -- so in the first miles descending the mountain to the coast you have a symphony of feet on the tarmac uninterrupted by the usual race-day noise.  The event is large and includes several sub-categories, timed such that the marathoners, 21-milers, 10-milers, and 9-milers all can finish in the same 6 hours and permit the road to be re-opened by 1.  

So you never break free of a crowd, which is annoying early on when you are feeling good and want that magical stretch of road to yourself, but is wonderful later when the walkers cheer the runners and the runners cheer the walkers and everybody pulls together to surmount that last hill you can see at Mile 25, which is every bit as much of a slap in the face as you might imagine its being.

Ted asks in an earlier comment what is the excuse for running in Big Sur 13 days after Boston.  The answer is that there is no excuse.  The reason last year was something like this (confession following):  I would guess that in part I run marathons (rather than simply running on my own or with my co-bloggers) to be badder than the next Joe, and if you want to be badder than the next marathoner you have to run many marathons.  The reason this year was that Boston is Boston and Big Sur is magic and I could not say no to either of them.

Tourist running

Ted is the king of running marathons because they are there and so is he (Hamptons 2011).  The runningprofs, in particular our founders Philip and Spencer, have made combining running with work in cool cities an art form.  And I like to think I'm able to find myself in as wild an event as anybody.  Tomorrow is the Big Sur marathon.  I've run it once before and occasional contributor Jessie has two finishes under his belt.  Hills, views, _wind_, and about 5 distinct weather systems combine with runner-hippie counterculture to make an incomparable weekend here in Carmel.  Report on tomorrow's race forthcoming.  Below, if the attachment took, the view from Hurricane Point at about mile 12.

The long and winding road

Cool but sunny afternoon led me to leave work a bit early.  After a thoroughly delightful nap, I hit the streets for a 5 mile 47 minute run.  It was the first time I have run at this pace since the fall.  Probably have to take a day off to deal with the soreness, but things are definitely improving.  Plus cross-training always a good thing.  As a result of this long recuperation, definitely have more sympathy for Derek Rose who has been long cleared by the doctors but who still doesn't feel 100%.  Appreciating the combination of the physical and psychological aspects of recovery.  Rome and lakefront run with Max definitely good for the psyche.

NIMBY meets Transportation Alternatives

Well, this is something I never thought I'd see.  One block from our apartment, the new bike share program has planted a forest of bike racks. Actually this is true both to the north and to the south.  No bikes yet, but how cool is that?  I haven't quite figured out the pricing yet, but apparently, I'm going to be able to walk out of the door, hop on a bike, ride for about 10 minutes to just about any place in brownstone Brooklyn or 15 minutes to lower Manhattan, and then drop the bike in a waiting rack. No muss, no fuss, no carbon emissions.

Could anything be bad about this? This is New York City, of course folks are up in arms.  This will make parking tougher.  The Citibank advertisements on the kiosks don't belong on landmarked blocks.  It will block traffic.  Restaurants won't have any place to put their trash.  Our quiet neighborhood will be overrun by Dutch tourists smelling of beer and herring. . .   Okay, I made up the last one, but give me a break.

I do think there are a few legitimate concerns.  First, helmets are BYO and not required.  Fair enough.  Folks should wear helmets.  But for those who would rather risk brain damage rather than experience hat head, I place my faith in Darwinian selection.  Second, there are a few places where bike congestion may be a problem, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, which is already a pedestrian nightmare at peak hours.  Third, a few of my treasured running routes may be overrun by the cyclists at certain times.  Fourth, the current bike lanes are not sufficiently robust to accommodate the increased traffic.

These all seem acceptable to me.  It might actually be a good thing for cyclists to reach critical mass as a transportation method.  Can protected lanes be far behind??

UPDATE: With typical North Brooklyn irony, this post demonstrates that bike lanes might actually be safer if there were more bikes in them.

Tech Support

This weekend and yesterday, I took the new tri-bike out for short rides in Prospect Park.  The bike is amazing.  It adds something between 1 and 2 miles per hour to my pace.  Yesterday, I found myself time-trialing past pace lines, which was a very odd feeling (given that it violates the laws of physics).

My problem is much more mundane.  I haven't put a cycling computer on the new bike yet, so I've been using MapMyRide on my phone to get data about the workout.  It works pretty well, giving me distance, 5 mile splits and average speed.  The problem is that the default setting seems to be to post everything I do to Facebook.  So, each time I finish a workout, I have to go to my Facebook page and delete the ride (and the friendly supportive comments) from my timeline.  I know, you say, just change the privacy settings. Well, I have.  I keep setting them to just me, and with each new ride, they seem to reset to "friends."  I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, and I'll figure it out, but for the moment, I'll just have to apologize to everyone for what must appear to be even greater than usual exercise exhibitionism. . . .

Urinetown: The State Action Section 2 Musical

"Who know that a greedy monopolizing corporation could also be such a force for social good?"  This line from the Loyola University Chicago drama department production of Urinetown: The Musical elicited a much louder laugh from our section of the audience in the brand new Newhart (Yes, Bob Newhart) Family theater on the main campus.  On April 13th, I put together an Antitrust Institute field trip of students, faculty, and staff to see a student production directed by Mark Lococo, an award winning Chicago director and head of the Loyola musical theater department. 

Urinetown is the story of a long drought that leads to the eventual privatization and monopolization of all toilets (to recapture and recycle all moisture).  If you can't pay for the ever increasing "Privilege to Pee" (an actual song title) you will sent to Urinteown, which may or may not be a metaphor.  Along the way many antitrust concepts are explored and numerous Broadway musicals from Les Liz to Big River are mocked.  Because the director is a college friend of my wife from Northwestern, our students also got a brief post-show visit from the director, who was somewhat baffled but pleased with our academic, as well as aesthetic, interest in the show.  Urinetown concludes its sell out run this evening. 



 

Urinetown was a Tony award winning musicial a few years, back but not the only show on the Great White Way to explore competition law.  If you are more interested in musical explorations of Section One (the Supreme evil of antitrust according to Scalia), I would recommend Tovarich, the 1960s musical starring Vivian Leigh in her only Broadway appearance, and its snappy little number "A Small Cartel" where Russian emigres in Paris after the Communist Revolution plot the cornering of the world oil market.


















   
Finally, if you need to lure your students into a closer study of Section 7 of Clayton Act, I would suggest the movie or off Broadway drama (sorry no singing) of Other People's Money, an exploration of hostile takeover in the halcyon days of the 1980s.  Sadly Louis Brandeis does not make an appearance, but Danny DeVito does.

 

So I guess the real question is, how come there is no great theater on Article 101-102, public restraints, state aids, or the merger regulation in the EU? 

Promontory Point, Hyde Park

Spencer gave a nice account of our Saturday run.  This isn't from that day, but somebody took a shot up north along the lake-shore to the Chicago skyline a few years back.  The light was better for us yesterday morning, I think.