Ice Breaker Triathlon

Did my first triathlon. What an adventure!

On the Sunday of the race, Henry and I made out way to the race area by 7:45, and in the parking lot it was already pretty obvious that we were n00bs. Other triathletes in the lot had fancy bike racks with super sleek bikes designed specially for triathlons, hadouken-shaped helmets of questionable aerodynamic benefit, triathlon suits, and really hard bodies. We collected our race packets, staked out our areas in the transition area, and took a warmup jog before we put on our wetsuits. Have you ever put on a full-sleeved wetsuit? They are so much trouble and it took us so long that by the time we walked down the beach to the swim start area, it was 8:59:30. Since men under age 29 started at 9, we basically came very close to missing the start of our race! From my perspective, that’s where the hilarity started.

.5 mile Swim:
We were n00bs, so we barely knew what to expect, and 30 seconds is not long enough to mentally prepare for the long race we had ahead. The horn went off almost immediately, and everyone started rushing forward into the lake. I thought: “OK, I guess I’ll rush forward into the water.” Then people starting swimming even though I was only 2 feet deep, so “OK, I guess I’ll go horizontal.”

Couldn’t see a thing! I had 2 feet of visibility, just enough to avoid getting kicked in the face. I had no idea what a clusterfuck a triathlon start is, bumping into other swimmers left and right. And since there are no guider lines like in a pool, I kept veering hard right since I breathed on my right. The organizers had posted posted a boat on each side of the triangle we swam around, and at one point I pulled my head out of the water and this organizer dude in a boat told me, “You’re going the wrong way.” I swear I zigzagged so much that I ended up swimming 1000m instead than 800m. I was one of the last swimmers out of the water, but I feel just fine about that considering how I’m sure I would have drowned if I had raced in January.

Actually, I’m really glad I didn’t panic. I’ve heard that many n00b triathletes panic their first time in open water because they can’t see and there’s no wall.

13 mile bike:
The course was closed to vehicles that morning and it took us through a lot of pretty scenery. That didn’t stop the fastest bikers from going, it seemed, twice as fast as I was. The routine was that I would hear a “Passing on your left!” and then a *whoosh*. Sometimes there would be three *whooshes* if they were bunched up.

4 mile run:
As I was lacing up my running shoes, I thought to myself, “Time for my sport, time to catch Henry.” But when I started along the run course, I was in for a really rude shock. By this time, I was incredibly tired and could barely jog, so I revised my goal to “I just want to finish (please).” I was so exhausted that I couldn’t manage more than jog pace for most of the race. My legs didn’t loosen up until the last mile when I picked up my pace through to the finish. Overall, it was a very well-organized triathlon and I always felt really safe, and I was impressed when the announcer at the finish line even said, “Here comes William Chan running it in!” Henry was already there, having come in a few minutes ahead of my time at 1:42. For reference, the top time was 1:13 and probably from some world-class ironman.

Reflections:
In hindsight, my strategy for the race was completely wrong. Who knew, but wikipedia actually has lots of good tips. For example, regarding swimming, “A modified stroke allows the triathlete to lift the head above water to sight without interrupting the swim or wasting energy”… I really had no idea.

Or this, “At the end of the bike segment, triathletes also often cycle with a higher “cadence” (revolutions per minute), which serves in part to keep the muscles loose and flexible for running”… yup, definitely did not conserve energy for my transition to running.

And again, yup, I was definitely shocked by how tired I was on the run. According to wikipedia, “first-time triathletes are often astonished at the bizarre, sometimes painful sensation in their thighs a few hundred yards into the run, and discover that they run at a much slower pace than they are accustomed to in training.” I laughed out loud at this one.

I am incredibly impressed with the triathlete community. I consider myself in fairly good shape. By training for this triathlon, I have noticeably lost fat and gained muscle and got into the best overall shape I’ve been in since quitting banking, yet I found it a struggle just to finish. This “sprint” triathlon was definitely harder than either of the two half-marathons I’ve run.

The lowest bar for even finishing one of these races is pretty high. It takes a lot of fitness and time to prepare all three sports (not to mention money to register and travel and be equipped for a race), and I could tell that the triathlon community is very tight-knit and serious and they all enter in the same races (I heard the word “Wildflower” about a dozen times on Sunday, which is this upcoming triathlon). These endurance freaks are my kind of people.

Pictures Here

Results overall, Results by division

Procrastination

Instead of working on the speech I’ll give at my brother’s wedding this weekend (= procrastination), I’m going through the posters at despair.com and picking out my favorites. These take your typical boring corporate motivational poster words like “leadership” and “teamwork” and “ambition”… and try to knock your self-esteem out from under you.

My favorites include:

• Achievement: ROTFLOL - definitely provides new perspective on “world wonders,” doesn’t it? And also some large companies.
• Ambition: The companion to an old Chinese proverb.
• Consulting: “I’m not a consultant, I’m just a playa that… prolongs the problem real good.” (I had recently seen a shirt that said “I’m not a consultant, I’m just a playa that consults real good.”)
• Effort: uh-hurhurhur.
• Mediocrity: Honestly, how can this be such a famous tourist attraction? I’m pretty sure there is nothing 800 years old and as flagrantly poorly built in China.

I’m Dumping my Mac

Mac has this little window that pops up for you to send helpful info to Apple whenever an application unexpected closes (”Your report will help Apple improve this software”). Here is the report I just sent to Apple:

I was reading something in Firefox and it just shut down. Actually, Firefox stalls or quits on me on a daily basis. I have almost never successfully shut Firefox down because it stalls.

I have decided to switch back to PC and give my Macbook away. I was hesitating on the decision at the Dell website, then Firefox crashed. That sealed the deal. (I restarted Firefox and then ) I quickly made the purchase.

For more more reasons why I hate Mac, click here.

links for 12/2/07

• Good and lengthy discussion on how we arrived at the current environment including comments on how commercial paper fits into the subprime story. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
• Unseen China - a documentary about the losers of China’s new economy. Almost an hour in length, with the first half focusing on the laid off workers of a former state-owned factory in Zhengzhou. Some of the stories, such as the police hiring thugs to punish protest organizers are so reminiscent of the early days of protest organization in the US. Some parts were just so pathetic that it felt very uncomfortable to watch. And the second half features Beijing families evicted from their homes to make way for Olympics-related construction. One such man took their case to court and was told by the judge even though his case was legally correct, the judge’s superior had ordered all such cases to be ruled against the little guy. What corruption!

Lust, Caution

I found the new Ang Lee movie, “Lust, Caution” an engrossing movie. It’s a Chinese WWII spy movie in which a traitorous Chinese collaborator is the main enemy rather than a Japanese. It is plenty sad, particularly the ending, and powerful in a good Ang Lee way. I realized afterwards that while many other movies portray the sadness of this era by showing Chinese getting killed or tortured or mistreated somehow by Japanese, there was not a single violent gunshot in this film.

In one camera angle of a Shanghai street, pedestrians walked while avoiding a man laying down. It’s only when the camera pans closer that you see a puddle of blood near his head. In another scene in which good Chinese patriots are about to be shot by a cliff, the camera pans to the cliff and the river below, jerking my heart all around, and all without any gunshot sound FX.

One thing I like about this movie has nothing to do with the movie itself but rather the fact that it is based on a short story by Chang Ailing, a Chinese writer and hero to the Chinese people. (Chinese are always eager to worship another hero.) I promise there are no spoilers here, but she based her short story on her relationship with her first husband, a Japanese collaborator who was married to another woman when she first met her. That husband eventually left her for another woman, and she left China in 1955, never to return. She settled here in the States and died in Los Angeles  in the 90s after a life of writing literature. She never felt very successful about her life, though many Chinese, my parents included, believe that if any Chinese were awarded a Noble Prize for literature, that it should belong to Chang Ailing.

How We Lost Our Mobile Edge

I first realized in 2004 that Asian mobile networks and services were leaps and bounds ahead of our own, especially in Korea and Japan. Even in China, where I was, it was incredibly simple to switch between mobile providers. A friend of mine recently returned to California from Korea and felt that she was in a third-world country because she couldn’t watch TV on her American cellphone. I’ve heard before the explanation that it is easier for cellular companies to profitably deliver high-speed cellular service in areas of extremely high population density like Tokyo or Seoul, but that argument should not matter in places like NYC, which is as dense and rich as anywhere else, or in Silicon Valley, the laboratory for many communications advances.

Walt Mossberg’s Free My Phone article has gone a long way in answering for me the longstanding question of why the U.S. is “the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.” This writeup falls into the category of articles that everyone is glad someone wrote because it successfully provides a unifying theory of why something is the way it is. The heart of why America has third-world cellular service is that the mobile carriers control the entire ecosystem of services and products. Verizon and AT&T and Sprint et al control what sort of phone you can use, how often you can change to a competing service, and how much you have to pay for almost every service you use on your phone - all of that on top of the only REAL service they provide, which is access to their voice and data networks.

Imagine if your internet provider also controlled what kind of CPU you could use, what kind of OS, network card, keyboard, mouse. They would effectively control everything “downstream” and, assuming there are three big ISPs, they could collude to spend less on improving the speed of their networks and focus on squeezing the maximum ROI out of their existing infrastructures. That’s essentially what cellular providers do, and that explains why we pay a lot of money for slow cellular networks with a minimal set of services. Crap!

The Wired writer who wrote 10 Reasons to Hate Cellphone Carriers must have read Mossberg’s article. All of his serious points fit into why these carriers constrain the cellular ecosystem, and he casts a few additional stones, such as the fact that carriers lock their locks and cripple their handsets to restrict what users can do with their phones. Verizon or Sprint or AT&T will actually take a RAZR manufactured by Motorola and lock out pieces of functionality. Again, can you imagine your ISP taking a screwdriver to your personal computer to constrain what you do on their internet network, or your state modding your car once you cross a state border? Our PC industry continues to fulfill Moore’s Law because it is a market driven by entrepreneurial capitalism of the kind that the mobile industry lacks.

This kind of top-down market control also hurts the development of mobile applications. Most mobile applications startups I’m aware of rely on deals with carriers. These app providers need to ingratiate themselves to this small pond of mobile carriers, who then call the shots on how much to charge for each application download, and even then these application providers gain access to only a percentage of the mobile consumer market (since each carrier effectively “owns” its customers).

It will be interesting to watch Sprint in the coming years with them developing a WiMax network and unlocking their phones. Assuming they implement successfully, guts should be rewarded.

links for 11/3/07

• 11 Useful Stem Cell Traits - Pretty good rundown of what makes a good stem cell and what the technological hurdles are.
• 5 Tips to Spot a Hot (or Not) IPO - I particularly appreciate tips #2, #4, and #5 since they are ways to “read between the lines” when reading IPO prospectuses. Many a Wall Street white-collar is highly paid to hide things between those lines.
• Red Flags at Terra Nostra Resources - The lack of scrutiny in the Chinese stock market is just wild. This is a pretty good writeup of one stock that is “a paper mill masquerading as a metal mill. The dilution is out of control, run by a family with serious history of securities fraud run out of a Bahamian holding company.” I always love a good drama!

Why is Jude Shao still in Chinese Prison?

It was my sophomore year when I first learned of Jude Shao, a naturalized American citizen and Stanford business school graduate who had been imprisoned by China for refusing to pay a bribe while running his business. I still remember his quote from the Stanford Daily:

Shao refused to pay what he interpreted as a bribe…. “I had set up the company’s policy not to bribe any government officials in China. I am a Stanford MBA. I wasn’t interested in unethical business practice.”

I just love the pride of his words. “I am a Stanford MBA.” I am above this unethical crap.

I also remember sharing bitter jokes with a friend, also an Chinese-American. We both saw Jude Shao’s story as something that could happen to us. While it is common knowledge that the Chinese government will have its way with its own citizens, and while (we assumed) that Washington DC would (and should) raise a stink if a white American were wrongfully imprisoned by China, Jude Shao’s imprisonment is showing that Americans of Chinese descent are the grey area.

I randomly decided today to google “Jude Shao” today and found the Free Jude Shao website:

He was detained on April 6, 1998, officially arrested on May 8, 1998 and has now been unjustly imprisoned for 9 years. He has 7 years remaining on his 16-year sentence.

Why the hell is he still a prisoner of the PRC?! I imagine the news analysis explanation has something to do with the fact that our country is holding tons of foreigners in Guantanamo without charge and that it would be hypocritical for this government to criticize the PRC of wrongfully imprisoning one of theirs, but damnit that man is one of ours and his country needs to stand up for him and be willing to escalate this Jude Shao debacle to bilateral controversy status.

Nike Women’s (Half) Marathon

Yesterday I ran the half marathon in the Nike’s Women Marathon. Best idea I’ve ever had! I was completely surrounded by fit, beautiful women in every direction. I think the registration stats came out to 20,000 runners of which only 500 were men.

Some of my favorite moments were when the rising sun cast our 20-foot shadows on Crissy Field (a reward, I suppose for waking up at 5:30) and how the view from Seacliff opened up after climbing that cursed hill onto 5 miles of Ocean Beach. I wish I had a camera with me. It looked something like this, or this, or this, except more beautiful with a clear blue 8AM sky.

There were some funny moments too, like at around mile 6 when I passed by an oxygen bar, whatever those are for, or when at mile 12 I reached for water and they tried to give me Ghirardelli chocolate! ‘Twas definitely a WTF moment for me at a time when I only wanted to focus on my last mile. Nike and these other corporations have taken this marathon and made a total carnival for those who want that, though when I noticed that nobody running at my pace or faster were reaching for chocolate or stopping for the oxygen bar (including the two “Moms in Motion” with whom I was running the entire time!).

My friend made a good point: Why in the world did they set a cap on registration? Apparently, registration filled up on the very first day, so everyone knows that demand was much higher than the available supply. Since this raised money for charity (leukemia and lymphoma), the effect is that they have turned down donations for charity and reinforced the image that nonprofits are run like garbage. Considering that they raised $18.6M, couldn’t they have easily raised $37.2M if they accepted unlimited registrations?

Tax Fairness, and Who’s an Entrepreneur?

In past months, there has been a ridiculous congressional controversy brewing around the taxation of private equity salaries, particularly in how private equity managers are taxed capital gains for their take-home portion of the gains (instead of at the higher income tax rate that the rest of us pay). I have heard about hedge funds and buyout firms (what my friends usually refer to as “PE”) rising up in arms, and now venture capital are jumping into this circus too.

Throughout this all, I have frankly never heard any good reason why they deserve this advantageous tax rate. Among those reasons are:

1. Excuse: Because PE firms actually have negative years and that not every year is a profitable one, increasing the tax rate would make it harder for them to be profitable over business cycles. My rebuttal: that actually sounds like every other company in the world economy, which should not earn any special sympathy for one of the most lucrative industries in human history.
2. Excuse: PE/HF/VCs deserve special tax treatment because they provide amazing benefits to society, and that higher tax rates would discourage them from working so hard at what they do. Rebuttal: that’s explains why we tax teachers and law enforcement at normal income rates, right?
3. Excuse: Higher taxes would drive the PE industry would move overseas. Rebuttal: US-based VC and LBO will not move offshore, away from the companies they invest in, and as for US-based hedge funds… I somehow can’t imagine sophisticated hedge fund professionals moving from New York to some sparse island country.

One of the new tricks being used by the VC contingent is to call themselves entrepreneurs and to imply that taxing them would hamper the dynamism of the startup economy. One of the founding executives of my company has written a great response to a NYTimes piece that equated VCs with entrepreneurs. It’s a pretty thoughtful writeup and, actually, it also expresses how proud I am to have ended up doing what I’m currently doing.