Menus Without Labels

Once upon a time, when a gentleman would take a lady to a restaurant, the lady would get a menu without prices. The idea is clear, the lady should enjoy her meal without worrying about the price. Today, almost all menus are printed without labeling the calories of the meal. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has a campaign to change this.

There are 3500 calories in a pound, and 365 days in a year. Eating an extra 9.6 calories a day, puts a pound on you every year, which is the average amount of weight gain in a recent study. So, if your diet calls for about 2000 calories, you have to be accurate to about 0.5% in your caloric estimates to only gain about 1 pound a year. Unfortunately, people underestimate the calories of meals, and are particular bad at estimating the calories of big meals. Further, only 11% of consumers could identify which choices had the most calories at McDonalds or Denny’s and 9 out of 10 underestimate the number of calories of less-healthy choices by an average of more than 600 calories. You can try your hand at it: take the online quiz! (I got 2/5 correct).

Let’s look at this thing from the other direction. Why not pass a lady’s menu to everyone? You guess the calories and the cost. Clearly steak is more expensive than chicken! They don’t need to tell you that do they? To make it even easier for the restaurant, they don’t even tell you the price at the end. You just give them your credit card/checking account number and they take the money. At the end of the year, you get a report on how much you owe for food. This might help with obesity. At the end of a few years, when you overeat, you’re not only obese, you’re bankrupt. Maybe that will improve the consumer’s powers of estimation.

I don’t think the obesity problem is a lost cause. I do think the secret is pretty simple:don’t eat too many calories. Here are some simple tips: don’t drink sugar sodas. Don’t eat mega-calorie desserts like Dairy Queen Blizzards (1000), Cheesecake Factory Cheesecakes (1050), or Chick-fil-a milkshakes (790). Never ever ever eat an Awesome Blossom (2710 calories!). If you want dessert, try a cup of strawberries (77 calories) or other fruits. Fruit has carbs (gasp!) but it also has a lot of fiber and water and is very filling. On the other hand, chocolate is not very filling and it’s pretty easy to eat 1000 calories of it. If you are out to eat and must order dessert, try the mini-desserts some restaurants offer. These weigh in at 200-300 calories. WebMD has some tips on cutting calories.

I hope my state of Florida follows San Francisco and New York City to require menu calorie labeling. Here are some examples of menu labels including pictures from NYC Starbucks.

Not yet a sub-5 minute miler.

Not wanting to fall into the trap of only reporting success and never failure, I thought I should report that I failed to run one mile in less than 5 minutes at the track meet.  You can find the results at the FTC website. I did 5:11 for the mile, and then I did a “cool down” 2 miler (which was more of a tempo pace) at 12:25.

I want to thank Brian Menaker. He’s much faster than me, but he paced me for the race. I didn’t make my goal, but I really appreciate his help in my attempt.

My plan is to try again about once a month until I hit it. I’m going to try a new training method: run 6 x 1000m repeats at 5:00/mile pace. Any training or racing suggestions would be appreciated.

Breaking a Barrier: 5K in 18:06

On June 14th I ran a 5K in 18:06, which meant I finally broke a goal I had for most of the year of breaking 18:10. Below you see a picture of Jake Logan and myself after the race:

This race was the 2008 Run for the Pies in Jacksonville, FL. I had tried several times this year to break 18:10 and failed. I did 18:23, 18:31, 18:49, 19:01. I was getting slower and starting to worry I would not ever make the goal. I was probably racing too much.

When I was doing the Run for the Pies, I felt good. I was very optimistic that I could make the goal. About 2/3rd the way through the race I started to have my doubts, but I was able to quickly let go of them and just run. I remember turning the last corner, maybe 1/10th of a mile from the finish and running hard. I could barely see the LED clock in the distance and it read 17:30 or so. I knew if I pushed hard I could make it, so I gave it everything I had. When I went through the chute, as goofy as it sounds, I put up my arms like I had won the race. It was the first time I was ever completely satisfied with a run. I knew how hard I had worked, and how many times I had failed to run 18:10. Breaking 18:10 put everything right with the world. On top of that, since I ran less than 20 minutes, I won a delicious apple pie (my favorite!) and I came in 4th (out of 69) in Men’s 30-34, 22nd overall Men’s (out of more than 600).

Of course, such satisfaction is short lived. We must go on to other goals. In my case, I have two: on 8/1/08 I’m going to run a mile in 4:59 or less at a track meet in Gainesville; on 12/6/08 I’m going to run the St. Jude’s Marathon in 2:59:59 or less.

Goodbye Gökçen

I learned Tuesday that my friend Gökçen Yýldýrým died. Since I assume most that will read this are Americans, I’ll spell her name the way she did when she had to use only ascii characters: Gokcen Yildirim.

I met Gokcen in the summer of 2002 in Haifa, Israel. I had just finished my PhD and was visiting a colleague at the Technion. Gokcen was a Turkish radiation oncologist doing a research program with some oncologists at the Technion. We both happened to be staying at a Technion housing facility and I was assigned the room right next to hers. We were the only two people on the floor, and the rest of the occupants were Israelis, so we got to know each other. In Haifa, Gokcen and I did some sightseeing together. When I returned to the US, we kept in touch.

In the Fall of 2006 Gokcen was working at M.D. Anderson in Houston and I went to visit her. When I asked her where she lived, I remember the way she said Kirby Drive with such enthusiasm. I’m sorry I can’t share that memory of a sound, but it always stuck in my head. We visited some of her friends from work at a beautiful house on a lake in Austin. She showed me around Houston. We played darts at a bar. The last time I saw her was at the IAH airport. It was a Monday morning.

Gokcen loved to travel. She worked hard and then she enjoyed herself. She was brave. Often very intelligent people are thought of as boring or uptight, but not Gokcen. She was at once both incredibly intelligent and also joyous and childlike. She was just so vibrant, so positive, so kind, and not in a trite way. Gokcen was genuine.

I remember asking her about her job, specifically if it was hard seeing patients die. She said, it was, but it reminded you how precious life is, and that you have to live each moment to the fullest. She did that as much as anyone I’ve ever known.

Last Sunday, Goken had a heart attack while playing tennis. There were a lot of things I should have said to Gokcen, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I thought we would always be friends. She will be missed.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him

On April 9, I went to the UF Sports Performance Center to do a 3-D analysis of my running. You can see a picture above of me on the treadmill. What we did was have me run at an easy pace and record my running, then I did 8 intervals of 2 minutes at 5:30/mile followed by 2 minutes at 8:00/mile. They took one measurement of me at the 5:30 pace. Then, after I was nice and tired, they took another measurement at an easy pace to see how my form degraded with fatigue. The white dots in the above photo are the balls they glued to me so the cameras could capture my movement. There is a photo of the software screen below (click on it to see a slightly better image):

The point of all this was to see if there was something in my form causing the intermittent knee and piriformis pain I’ve been feeling lately. They turned up something interesting on the first analysis. When I toe-off on the right, I twist my right foot out, almost completely parallel to the ground. This motion activates my piriformis and puts a torque on the knee, and it is almost certainly wasted energy. You can see a bit of it in the following two pictures:

I’ve been practicing that motion and focusing on keeping my foot straight. It seems to be helping. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they learn when they look at all the angles my body makes as I run. Hopefully this will suggest some areas I need to strengthen or make more flexible. Additionally, there might be some specific exercises or drills I can do to improve my form.

Recent Race Report

I haven’t blogged about any races recently, mostly because I haven’t had any personal records set recently.  But every performance can’t be my best yet.  So, here’s a quick rundown:

Five Points of Life 5K, 2/23/2008

I did 19:11, 10th place overall, 1st place 30-34.  The full results are online.  Richard Ritari took several pictures: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,7,8].

Gate River Run 15K, Jacksonville, FL, 3/8/2008

This race was the 15K championship.  It was a very exciting race.  There were 12,087 finishers, 818 in men in my age group.  The wind was insane that day, there were gusts of up to 30 mph (I heard).  I came in 282nd overall (out of 12,087), and 37th in my age group (out of 818) with a time of 64:22.  Unfortunately, I ran a little injured that day and I had to stop to walk three times.  Since then, I’ve limited my mileage and I finally think I’m recovering properly.  The full results are online. Interestingly, I was the only runner with the last name Boykin. You can see some pictures of me by clicking here.

Trigator 2008 Sprint Triathlon (250 m swim, 8 mile bike, 2 mile run) 3/30/08

This was my first triathlon.  It was fun.  It was the furthest I’d ever swam without stopping, the third time I was on a road bike, and the first time I used clip-in pedals.  My time was 34:02. Triathlons are really different from a running race because of the transitions. Switching from one sport to another is just strange. Your brain switches gears. You have to put on shoes, grab a bike, take of helmets, put on a race number, all sorts of little things. It’s frenetic.

Equal Access Clinic 5K Run, 4/5/2008

This race was unfortunately a bit messed up.  First of all, while in second place, I saw the first place runner directed the wrong way, or so I thought.  When I got to that point, I went the way I thought was correct, but I was not 100% sure.  In any case, I was taking a different course so already the race was messed up.  Later in the race, due to my GPS, I was pretty sure the course was short, and that must have meant I went the wrong way.  Finally, it turned out that I went the right way and the race official had misdirected the lead runner (Julio Palma), but the course was maybe 0.15 miles short.  Since I thought I had messed up, and didn’t want to appear to have cheated, I first would not cross the line.  After talking for a few seconds, I eventually did go through the finish.  Julio Palma deserved to win the race.  I’m sorry if I was a part of any of the confusion.  According to the FTC time, I finished at 18:13 in second place, but the race time is pretty meaningless.  I speant the last quarter mile worried I was cheating and I stopped running about 40 feet short of the finish to explain the problem.  Lastly, even if I had run all the way, the course was short so the time wouldn’t be meaningful.

Welcome to the Personal Blog

I’ve maintained a combined work and personal blog for a while.  I’ve decided to separate the work from personal stuff.  Mostly because I often think of things I’d like to write, but since my web page is used for students and collaborators to find contact information for me, my work web page might not be the most appropriate place for it.

The fact is, I’m a goofy human being with hopes and fears like anyone.  Sometimes I win, often I lose.  However, a work web page has to come off more like a resume, and resumes are about selling yourself.  This blog is not about selling myself, to the degree that anything someone says about themselves can not be selling.  It is about sharing information that might be interesting to personal friends and family.  There will probably be a lot of stuff about races, random emotionalism about music, stories about my dogs, politics, etc.

Such is the burden of the Internet: you get a bunch of know-it-alls spouting off at the mouth.