It was hot and humid this morning in League City and thus, as always, the Summer Kick-Off 5K turned out to be a very aptly named race. I am not looking forward to the next six months of running. My body just doesn't like it, and I don't either. But alas, running is what a runner does, and I am a runner. So off I went.
I saw a bunch of my buddies from all over as I wandered around trying to find my chip before the start. There were quite a few BARCers (like Joe) in attendance, as well as some of my fellow BAM triathletes. I saw a few coworkers as well, including Ray, who is a volunteer captain in the League City Fire Department. He and some of the other guys did the 3K walk dressed in all their fire-fighting gear, which I thought was pretty cool but dang they must've been hot!
My race went as well as I expected. I've been feeling a little off over the past couple days -- tired from a busy week at work, and my throat has been feeling weird, and I'm a little congested. Whine, whine, whine.
Anyway, I planned to go out comfortably but I guess I got a little caught up in the start, because mile 1 passed in 9:52. (I didn't actually realize this until after the race when I looked at my splits. I didn't look at my watch during the race until I was almost at the end.) I walked for a moment to get some water just past mile 1, and when I started running again I knew I'd have to hold back a little if I wanted to make it to the finish without completely falling apart. I haven't run much in the heat and humidity yet this year, and I could tell that my body temperature was already rising, and fast. I ended up covering the next two miles in just over 11:00 each and crossing the finish line in 33:13. Not very fast, but not completely awful either. I'm happy. If I can run this pace (10:40ish) for the run portion of next weekend's Silverlake Tri, I'll be a happy camper!
Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed astronaut Garrett Reisman, who's currently spending time on the International Space Station. It was a pretty basic interview, but the cool part was how excited Colbert seemed. He was giddy! And Reisman had a great sense of humor about the whole thing -- he was even wearing a Colbert "WristStrong" bracelet.
That's right: NASA appeared -- in a positive way -- on one of today's most popular TV shows. And one that's (gasp) popular with young people! When's the last time that happened? It was fantastic!
I'm at work early today for the STS-124 Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test. I don't actually have a whole lot to do other than monitor numbers and make a few updates, so I've been watching the video feed from Florida, where the crew is going through the motions of an actual mission -- getting suited up in the orange launch and entry suits and getting into the orbiter. I can see Karen Nyberg (a hardcore runner, by the way; I see her all the time on the trails here at work) and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide in the camera view right now. Aki's waving, which makes me laugh, since the only people watching today are NASA folks. No general public like there will be on launch day. (Aki is perhaps my favorite member of this crew. I have never seen him not smiling.)
I like this crew. I feel like they are "my" crew. I'll be working in the control center during their launch on May 31, their rendezvous with the space station on June 2, and their undocking a week after that. (It's my first mission as a rendezvous flight controller! I'm officially certified as of today!) In fact, the only critical phase of flight that I'm not working is their landing. As rendezvous support, I've spent hours editing their rendezvous procedures and making sure their flight data file is in order. I've been to a lot of their training sessions, watched them practice flying the shuttle, and even answered some of their questions. And now, in just a few weeks, I get to watch them go into space!
p.s. After my previous entry, my brother -- a financial consultant in DC -- texted me to let me know that "Sarah, it's your civic duty to spend the stimulus money here and quickly." Hmm. There are a few things I'd consider buying with it, but my rebate was not the entire $600 so it actually won't go that far. But I have been eyeing the Flip.
Brian is such a bad influence. ;)
I noticed that my "economic stimulus" refund from the government showed up in my bank account recently. Instead of running out and spending it right now, I'm going to put it in the savings account I set up for my Japan trip -- and thus spend it out of the country. Ha!
Becca has been working on her instrument license and needs lots of cross-country flying hours -- defined as flying to an airport at least 50 miles from your point of departure. But she doesn't like to do all the flying alone, so she has recruited Jose to share the piloting time. And Jose recruited me as a passenger. So on this beautiful Sunday, we took off towards the tiny town of Eagle Lake, Texas.
Thus far, to go flying with Jose has meant cramming myself into the passenger side of a very tiny Cessna 150, shoulder-to-shoulder. Not much room to stretch out or relax, but it was passable. Today, however, we took one of the Warrior's that the Bay Area Aero Club rents out, and boy was it comfy compared to the Cessna! I had the whole back seat to myself, a cushy seat, and plenty of leg room.
I had a lot of fun just looking out the window and listening to Jose and Becca do their pilot-speak thing. I'm getting better at listening to the radio and understanding the terms, but parts of it still go in one ear and out the other.
As we headed west, we flew right past Twin Lakes. This is a very popular spot with local triathletes since it's the perfect place to get some open water swim practice. It's also popular with scuba divers, since they've got a couple sunken boats and things to explore. I haven't actually ever been there, since it's a good half hour drive or more from Clear Lake, but one day...
Next I saw some cows. The looked like little toys! This made me laugh.
Soon enough, we were approaching Eagle Lake. Becca flew us there and had a very nice landing at the very empty airport.
While searching for a bathroom (which ended up being the bushes behind a hangar, fun), I stopped to read this sign and learned that Eagle Lake is the "Goose Hunting Capital of the World." So if you're into that sort of thing, now you know where to go.
Of course I had to get a photo of my brave and valiant pilots next to their lovely airplane.
The only other planes that were parked on the ramp were these large yellow crop-dusters. Byron later laughed at us for not being up-to-date on our crop-duster knowledge, but come on -- how can I be expected to know that the odd-shaped cockpit is that way because it has a roll cage in case of a crash? Or that crop-dusters crash a lot (a hazard of flying close to the ground). Anyway, Jose liked them a lot, as you can see.
We switched pilots and Jose flew us back over the Texas countryside to Pearland.
I was quite excited by this point because I had now been in a small plane for 3/4 of the trip and had not felt sick at all -- not even once! This is a major accomplishment.
When we got back to the pattern at Pearland, things seemed calm. But then all of a sudden, we noticed 5 Japanese Zeros (or planes dressed up like Japanese Zeros, which is a WWII-era warbird) in formation flying ahead of us! As we paralleled the runway on our downwind leg, the warbirds buzzed straight down the runway.
The warbirds peeled off one by one over the runway to enter the landing pattern behind Jose. However, WWII-era fighters are faster than our little Warrior, and they were gaining on us. As Jose tried to concentrate on landing the plane with 5 Japanese Zeros bearing down on him like some crazy war movie, I craned my neck to see the cool planes. It was like being in a war movie! We were under attack!
Jose had barely cleared the runway when the Zeros came barreling down one by one. It was CRAZY! And AWESOME!
All in all, it was quite the day of flying.
Heavens rejoice! Angels are singing! The semester is over and I survived taking two classes on top of all my other overcommittments -- and I think I may have even managed to earn an A in both classes. (For the first time since taking classes at UHCL, this was in doubt. It's easy to earn an A when I take a single class. It's harder when I double the class workload and add in all the other stuff from this spring!) I had my final test in my digital media studies class last night and as I walked out just before 8:30, hand aching from the four pages of essay questions I had to write, I felt so, so relieved.
(Side note: When did my hand become so wussy? In high school, I used to write pages upon pages of notes by hand. I only remember my hand aching once -- my senior year, towards the end of the week of IB exams. By that point I'd probably hand-written tens of pages of discussion and essay questions. Ugh. I can type much faster than I can write, that's for sure.)
My 3D modeling class finished up last week when we all presented our final projects. The assignment was to create a story and depict it using at least 5 models and 10 frames. Now, I'm not much of a writer so the story part was a little tough, but it was easy to come up with something I wanted to model. Since I'm already starting to think about our November trip to Japan, I decided to model some Japanese things and write a story about a ninja. I'm not going to include the cheesy storyline that goes along with the scene I depicted, but I'll show you the models. I was pretty happy with how the project turned out. Four months ago I had zero knowledge of how to use 3D modeling software, much less make something actually look somewhat realistic. And after four months, I was able to produce this! Pretty cool -- though the learning curve for Maya is so freaking steep that I could continue for another year and still not understand how to do everything I want.
After weeks of discussing the nuances of Guitar Hero 3 in the office after a bunch of my coworkers gave the game to their kids for Christmas, Ray decided it was time for RGPOGH32K8 Playoffs. (That's Rendezvous Guidance and Procedures Guitar Hero 3 2008 Playoffs, in case you were wondering.) There was much trash talking prior to the event, and I actually got a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to live up to my reputation. However, I am proud to report that I am the official RGPOGH32K8 Champion.
Here's a photo of my Guitar Hero glory. Comments are Ray's. He keep muttering some nonsense about how I "ruined" his game by calibrating it, despite the fact that everyone agreed that the timing was off prior to said calibration. :)
Click on the photo if you would like to enlarge the bracket to check out songs, scores, and difficulty.
Yes, Guitar Hero is my TUSP* and I'm not ashamed to say it.
* Totally Useless Superpower
I was excited to read this morning that my TIR teammate Katy has signed up for the Silverlake Tri in three weeks. It will be her first triathlon! I'm so pumped that more people are getting into the sport that I've come to love. There are so many benefits to doing triathlons -- from the challenge to the competition to the crosstraining. You never get bored because you're always doing a different sport, and each has its own quirks and tricks. I challenge everyone out there to try doing a triathlon at some point. You won't regret it!
And hey -- if you're still a runner at heart, trust me when I say there is no better cross-training than cycling. For the past month and a half I've been running twice a week at best, and yet somehow I've maintained my running fitness and speed, as evidenced by my performance at the Bayou Bash. This is completely due to the fact that while I may only be running twice a week, I'm also cycling at least twice a week. After years of having an on-again off-again relationship with my bike, I've finally made peace with it over the last few months and am loving it.
My training is going fairly well. My next races are Silverlake on May 18 and Combat on May 24. I've got "mystery plans" for the night of May 17 (I can't say what they are because it's Jose's birthday present), so I'll probably be pretty tired for Silverlake. I plan to race harder at Combat and, with any luck, beat my time from last year.
On Sunday morning I rode just over 20 miles with the BAM girls. We took it really easy for the first 8 miles, averaging about 13 mph as we rode with one of the group's beginners. She turned around on NASA Parkway just before we hit 146. We sped up after that and covered the rest of the Todville-to-Port Rd-to-Bay Area loop at an average of 17 mph or so. Total time for the 20 miles was 1:26, which included a couple lengthy stops due to stoplights that we weren't heavy enough to trigger! It wasn't the most intense workout, but it was quite an enjoyable ride. While riding into the wind up Todville, we were passed by a huge crowd of roadies heading in the other direction. I can only assume it was the Bike Barn/Space City Cycling group, as I believe I spied Joe among them.
Last night I almost bailed on swimming when I got to my car and realized I'd left my gym bag at home, but fortunately detouring past my apartment is not really that far out of the way. I got to the pool only 15 minutes later than planned and swam 1450 yards -- 500 warmup, 5x100 hard, and 450 cooldown. It was supposed to be 500 cooldown but I lost count of my laps and only realized later that I'd shorted myself by one lap. I finally had a watch with me that I could wear in the water (thanks to being one of the first 300 women to join Trek's new Women Who Ride club!) so I took a look at my 100 yard times. They were decent -- between 1:44 and 1:47 for the "hard" repeats, and 2:00-2:05 for warmup/cooldown -- but I'd like to be a little faster. I feel slow in the water right now, which is a little frustrating. The harder I swim, the slower I seem to go. I think I need to really concentrate on pulling, long strokes, and making the most of my glide. I'm also considering contacting a local swim coach recommended by my tri group to give me a couple lessons to tweak my stroke. Then again, it'd be pretty hard to earn a significant time gain on the swim when sprint races involve such short swim distances!
Tuesday is normally a running day, but I'm stuck in a sim until 9:00 tonight. I'll take the day off and look forward to my first brick of the season tomorrow! There's a large group of Tri on the Run folks, BAM folks, and others who do a bike/run brick every Wednesday on Middlebrook, but class has prevented me from going so far this spring. With the semester over, I can brick again!
Yesterday I ran my first HARRA race of the year -- and it was the last HARRA race of the spring. Oh well. It would be really nice if one of the races in the spring series was in/around Clear Lake. Then again, they are currently all inside the loop, which is really the best way to be fair to suburbanites all over the area. Next year I'll have to make more of an effort, but I'm going through a period right now where I'm far less interested in driving all over the city to get to events than I used to be. The gas prices are a small part of that, but really I just need a break from spending more time in the car to get to the race than it takes me to actually run.
I did want to do the Bayou Bash Relay yesterday, so I signed on with a Bay Area Running Club team. It was my debut as a BARC racer, as in seasons past I have raced for the Striders. (Of course, "raced" is a relative term since I am not a speedster.) I've done this relay a couple times before when it was in Sugar Land, but skipped it last year when it moved way out to Katy. This year it was in another new location on the campus of Rice University. The race is a total of 8 miles, with each person running a 2-mile leg. I liked the course -- except for the handoff, which involved taking the baton and running about 20 feet before immediately having to pull a U-turn to head back out onto the course. Running on the lovely Rice campus was fun.
I met my teammates Alissa, Stacy and Christie after I arrived. I've been a BARC member for a year now but haven't been very active, so I don't know many people in the club. Hopefully I can slowly change that. Alissa went first, I would run second, followed by Christie and Stacy brining up the rear. Veronica did a good job of putting our team together, as we were all pretty evenly matched as far as pace was concerned. Alissa went out strong and got back for the handoff in about 17:30. I took the baton, made the U-turn, and off I went. Joe took a photo of me as I raced out of the starting gate at top speed.
"Top speed" is again a relative term, but on the drive up to the race, I had mentally committed myself to really seeing what I could do with this short 2-mile course. At best, I thought I could do somewhere between 18:00 and 19:00 for my two miles so that was my goal -- and I knew it would take some real work to do it.
I went out hard. The weather wasn't that great for a race -- windy and wet -- but it never rained hard and so it wasn't much of an issue. There were a lot of puddles on the ground that I tried to avoid for a few minutes at the start before I gave up on keeping my feet dry. I hit the half mile marker in 4:32. When I saw the split on my watch, I was both happy and appalled -- because while I was excited to see that I was indeed cooking along, I was already starting to wonder how long I could really keep it up! The next half mile was under the trees at Rice, which helped keep the mist away. Unfortunately, this was also the portion of the race where the first "C" runners (third leg) passed me. This race draws some incredibly fast teams (my team averaged just over 9:30 pace and we were way in the back of the pack) and they flew past me like I was standing still. It was a little discouraging, but also amazing. I love watching the fast guys. They make it look so easy!
The next half mile passed in 4:39, for a first mile of 9:11! That's the fastest mile I've run in a while, so I was pumped. With half the race over for me, I just kept reminding myself that I only had a mile to go. Less than 10 minutes. I could do it. The only people who passed me on this leg of the race were a dozen or so "C" runners -- all of whom went flying by. Not a single "B" runner passed me, and I managed to "chick" two men, so I improved our team's standing by two positions! If there was a 1.5 marker, I never saw it, but I could see the handoff point with a quarter mile to go and starting pushing to get there. I handed the baton to Christie and stopped my watch -- 18:12! My second mile was 9:01. Dang! I was ecstatic. I was also about to fall over from lack of oxygen. It took me a couple minutes of walking before I caught my breath, and right around then was when the first team finished, just under 40 minutes. A sub-5:00 pace. A-freaking-mazing.
Christie ran our team's third leg right around 22:00, and Stacy brought it home with a final leg of something around 19:00. Our total team time was 1:16:xx which I thought was not too shabby!
My Garmin measured only 1.97 miles, so it's possible that the course was just slightly short, but either way I was well under 9:30 pace for my part and pretty pumped about it. Maybe in my next 5K, I should just go all out for the first 2 miles and then try to hang on. :)
It was a fun race, and well worth running. I enjoyed meeting some new BARC folks and seeing a lot of old faces as well.
Today is the Hubble Space Telescope's 18th birthday. It was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. After some growing pains in the first three years, the 1993 repair mission turned the telescope into a fully-functional and very clear-sighted window on the universe. I saw that mission on the launch pad in Florida as a 9th grade student, and that visit to Kennedy Space Center was the single biggest force in driving my future and my decision to become an aerospace engineer.
For more awesome images, visit the Hubble Gallery. Happy Birthday Hubble! Hopefully the final servicing mission later this year will give you many more years of beautiful picture-taking.
On Saturday, a Soyuz landed in Russia carrying three crewmembers home from the International Space Station including two females: Peggy Whitson, the first female ISS commander and new American record-holder for the most time spent in space, and Yi So-yeon, South Korea's first astronaut. This was the first time the number of women onboard any space vehicle has outnumbered the men.
The Soyuz had a guidance problem during entry that resulted in a downmode to the ballistic entry -- a steeper trajectory that resulted in the crew experiencing up to 10 times the force of gravity (much more than the normal 4 g's) and a landing more than 250 miles short of where the Russian Space Agency expected them to come down. It took half an hour to locate the crew (who were all ok), which was much improved from the landing in 2003 where a similar error occured and the crew's whereabouts were unknown for two hours. This time, the crew had a satellite phone which essentially allowed them to call and say "ok, we're back, here we are, come get us!"
This is not the first time this has occured. There have been at least 2-3 ballistic entries in the last 5 years. Obviously there are still a few problems with the Soyuz entry guidance -- although I will fully concede that the Soyuz is perhaps the most reliable of all space vehicles. In the grand scheme of things, it is definitely a good thing that the vehicle has an entry guidance downmode to the steep ballistic re-entry that, while rough on the crew, is still survivable. However, there's certainly no excuse for the quotes in this Associated Press article:
"The most important thing is that the crew is healthy and well,'' Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov told a post-landing news conference. "The landing occurred normally, but according to a back-up plan -- the descent was a ballistic trajectory.''
Perminov said engineers would examine the capsule to determine what caused the glitch, though he blamed the Soyuz crew for not informing Mission Control about the unusual descent.
Later, Perminov was asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz, and referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck.
"You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,'' he said. "Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass'' the number of men.
Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about.''
He did not elaborate.
I usually try to let stuff like this roll off my back, but COME ON. This is a high-up manager in the Russian Space Agency, NASA's #1 international partner. To imply that having multiple women onboard a spacecraft is bad luck, or leads to any kind of strange behavior -- or to even imply that part of the reason the Soyuz landed off-course is due to the two women onboard -- is simply unacceptable.
