Running with the Pack Podcast

Last week, I was talking to Andrew about lectures and I made the comment “lectures are dead”, thinking about some of the bad ones from my own educational experience — where someone is quacking at the front of the classroom with no interaction with students. Then Andrew told me that he was about to do a guest lecture and explained me what he had in mind.

Essentially, he picked some YouTube videos that are related to HIV prevention in some manner and then used them to break the ice with his class and have discussions about the content and the cultural context of the message. If this is how digital natives interpret “lecture”, then they are anything but dead.

[These are explicit - you've been warned. Legality is also a question of course -- but they're hosted on YouTube. I'll let the Google lawyers work that out.]

In 1994, I ran my first and only half-marathon race. Amazingly, the results are available online. So when I was 24, I ran the 13.something miles at about a 8:18/mile pace. I haven’t run that long since then — maybe 16-18 miles in 1995, but I slacked off after that. In any case, it’s encouraging that my 14 mile run today was at a 8:41 pace. Not quite as fast as my half-marathon time, but I also didn’t have the race adrenaline going. If I run it this year, it would be nice to match or beat my old time.

While I was looking for this information, I ran across the race results for my cousin Dave (who is about 20 years older than me). If I remember correctly, he has run a marathon before and he’s still doing a bunch of runs every year. That’s encouraging for my long-term prospects. I haven’t talked to him in a while (he’s in Michigan)…I should give him a call.