I have a few updates.

I fell on Saturday

Each Saturday, I drive back down to Clear Lake to ride my bike with the Space City Cycling Club for about 3 hours – about 60 miles. I had mistakenly checked the weather forecast for my own zip code which indicated clear skies but when I arrived in Clear Lake I encountered some mild precipitation. I had the appropriate clothing with me and the rain almost never poses a problem except for thunderstorms as I’ve ridden in the rain dozens of times over the last three years. Unfortunately, about 35 miles into the ride on the way back to Bike Barn, the group approached a series of railroad tracks and I fell while crossing the second set, which lie at roughly a 70 degree angle which makes it difficult for cyclists to cross them perpendicularly – the safest trajectory. The rain causes the oil deposits to rise to the surface, and the combination of oil and slick iron makes for a very slippery crossing. So, I fell over to the right and landed on the side of my torso, which I think is the safest way to land when you fall to the side. What you don’t want to do is stick your arm out to break the fall because that’s an easy way to break your arm or collarbone. Anyway, I didn’t have time to think about what to do as I only realized I had fallen after I had fallen. I slid out a few feet due to the rain which is nice because it mitigates the impact and the scrapes, although I did get a few since my elbow and hip made contact with the pavement. The people in the group were so nice and it was really considerate of them to stop and make sure I was okay. They helped me straighten out my shifters and I was back on the bike after a couple of minutes. Thankfully, I escaped with no broken bones and I really think the weightlifting’s paid off over the last few years in strengthening my muscles and bones, especially the power cleans which I started at the end of last year.

I listened to Rachmaninoff at Jones Hall

After I got home, I read a little bit of European history (as of today I’ve cut the deficit from 50 pages to 25 pages) and ate dinner before I went to see Kirill Gerstein play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 with one of my friends whom I met at state orchestra back in high school, along with some of her friends from Rice. I don’t actually go to see concerts very often and during most of my young life I had been performing them more than listening to them. I really miss playing and if I didn’t hurt my hands I think I would still be practicing 3-4 hours a day, but I decided against surgery a couple years back because the doctor told me that there was a high chance of recurrence and that it wasn’t worth it unless I couldn’t do basic things like hold a spoon or button my shirt. However, I’m fine with not playing anymore and right now I think cycling, math, computers, and studying makes me about has happy as I was when I still played, though relatively I’m not as good at cycling and math as I was at playing – mainly because I haven’t pursued these interests for as long, but I’m sure I’ll reap the benefits over time. Anyway Kirill Gerstein put on a flawless performance and I really enjoyed the concert.

On stuyding

I completed writing down all the theorems I needed to know for exam C/4 – 107 in all, and you can download the pdf from my SkyDrive (file – “temp_mem_bank”). I plan to memorize all the theorems to work on my memory, even though I don’t have to strictly memorize them for the test. I also started a couple of other projects – using a random number generator for studying these theorems, which I mentioned last week, and also another tool for the study of arithmetic. These are still in the early stages so I didn’t include them here, but I’ll talk about them next week. Anyway, I really rushed though this post and even though I say that I’m really short on time for these posts I think that this was especially true this time as I’ve only had about half an hour to write this. The quality of the post is low, has way too many verbs to be, and it doesn’t reflect my best writing. What really took me back today was a stumbling block I ran into while doing some algebra problems – I had trouble finding complex solutions to cubic equations of the following form:

For example, I needed to solve for . I got the first root, -1, but I had trouble finding the complex roots which happened to be . Larson’s book briefly went over complex numbers and I did plenty of exercises that involved quadratic equations with imaginary parts to the solutions, but none involving cubic equations. I looked up how to solve for cubic roots on Wikipedia and the general solutions consist of some unpleasantly gargantuan equations:

General Solutions to Cubic Equations

I think the proof of this is beyond the book and I couldn’t even find these equations anywhere within the text. I shouldn’t have any trouble understanding the proof but I think as far as basic College Algebra goes I can just use the general solution until I move into discrete math, and then abstract algebra. Anyway, looking for how to solve the problems and then solving them set me back a couple hours, but it was worth it skimping out on the quality of this post to get the solutions. Anyway, I’m glad I found the equations and that I managed to complete this post on time.

When I began the actuarial exam process a few years ago, I stumbled upon a personal essay from the SOA archives about Andrew Lin, a brilliant student who became full fellow at the age of 20. Even today, we actuaries and actuarial students consider this an extremely rare feat and an extraordinary display of intelligence. The most talented actuaries tend to achieve fellowship at the age of 25, about three years after college,  so I’d imagine that you could count the number of 24-or-younger FSAs on your left hand. Anyway, when reading the article you shouldn’t focus on how Lin achieved the designation so early – but more on how he, as a non-native speaker of English, motivated himself to learn 25 words of English each night for 9 consecutive months. 25 words doesn’t sound like a lot and you can’t hold an intelligent conversation with such a limited vocabulary. However, over the span of 9 months Lin would learn approximately 6,750 words. Had he continued the ritual for another two years he would have learned over 20,000 words – the size of the average vocabulary of a native English speaker. In addition to vocabulary, he devoted each night to learning non-school related material that he found interesting.

I’d say the article has left a lasting influence on the way I learn. Ever since I started my job in March, I decided, time permitting, to devote each night to reading something I found interesting at a rate of 100 pages per week. I started with the book A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy and then moved on to Hackers by Steven Levy and shortly afterward to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I got to the point where Dagny Taggart started having an affair with Hank Rearden but I later saw the book as dull and intellectually unstimulating (sorry, Ayn Rand fans) so I switched over to Norman Davies’ Europe, A History since I never took European History in high school. I figured that, in a manner similar to that of the preceding paragraph, if I read 100 pages a week I would have read over 5,000 pages after a year. Since I like to read textbooks (I have a Sociology book lined up after Davies), and each textbook is roughly about 1,000 pages, I concluded that I could read a college semester’s worth (or maybe even a year’s worth since college courses rarely cover the entire book) of material each year. This, in addition to the Actuarial curriculum and the projects I learn at work, makes for a very education-heavy lifestyle that I’ve come to enjoy.

I like to alternate between “Heavy” material and “Light” material as I complete each book. “Heavy” material consists of textbooks or academic material whereas “Light” material consists of pleasure reading, like novels. In an effort to speed up my reading (I don’t plan on doing only 100 pages a week forever), after I finish a “heavy” book, reading slowly to absorb the material, I start reading a “light” book and read it as fast as possible. For instance, I consider Davies as heavy material. The next book (a light book), Kingpin, tells the true story of Max Butler, aka “Iceman,” a computer criminal who stole 2 million credit cards and sold them on the black market. Another former criminal, Kevin Poulsen, now a journalist, wrote the book so I think this will present a unique perspective into the cybercriminal underworld. The book consists of about 250 pages, which I plan on reading over the span of a week (so about 2.5 times the speed of heavy material). The easily digestible nature of light material makes it an ideal source for developing my reading speed. After finishing Kingpin, I plan on going back to “Heavy” material, in this case – Sociology by John Macionis (since I never took a sociology course), except at a rate of 105 pages per week. The cycle continues in this manner until I can no longer read the required pages within the allotted amount of time, the point at which I reduce 10%-20% of the required page count and start the cycle again.  Unfortunately, this week marks the first time in 6 weeks that I’ve fallen behind schedule – by about 50 pages. I’ll let you know next week if I’ve caught up.

In addition to all this, I still have my actuarial material to study, along with the math/computer projects I do on the side when I’m not studying for exams. I’m still in the early stage of exam preparation and most of it consists of the rote memory of basic theorems and definitions that serve as the foundation of model construction. I felt inspired by Tesla’s ability to memorize complete books and for a while I wrote down some theorems (see “temp_mem_bank”) in using my RStudio server and tried using a random number generator to generate a theorem or definition number (say, Definition 2.5 from Klugman) and then trying to write down that theorem or definition verbatim, including the punctuation marks. Right now I’ve done this at a rate of 3 theorems a day but I find it really taxing. I feel a slight improvement in my memory but if I find that I haven’t gone anywhere after a month I might have to ditch this method for practical reasons to devote more time to solving problems.

As a side note, my tubulars arrived last week and I rode them last Saturday for a 3 hour training session back in Clear Lake. They feel fantastic. I had them up to 120 psi but it felt like I was riding at the comfort of 90 psi on clinchers. The wheels were extremely fast. They look pretty sweet too.

Cronus Ultimate with HED Stinger 6 Tubulars

I just wanted to make this quick because I need to wake up early tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know that I received a perfect score of 10 on Exam MLC/3L, which I received today to my relief. This is my second perfect score – I got also got a 10 on FM/2 last year. I felt confident that I would pass but today confirmed how well I thought I did after I took the test. A score of 10 doesn’t mean that I answered every single question correctly, which I probably didn’t since I had to guess on a handful of them when I ran out of time towards the end of the test. Rather, the SOA determines an initial pass mark (usually around 18 or 19 of the 30 questions), equates that to a 6, and increments the score equating each previous or subsequent point to 10% of the pass mark. For instance, if they set the pass mark at 19, a score of 6 means you got 19 right on the exam. A score of 7 means you got 21 or 22 right (since 19 + 1.9 = 20.9), a score of 8 means you got 23 or 24 right, and so on.

A score of 10 means I finished somewhere on the right side of the distribution – but since the SOA doesn’t release the distribution of scores I can’t determine my percentile or performance relative to my peers, though they do release the pass rate which usually ends up somewhere between 40%-55% of the candidates. Although I do feel satisfied with the result, I don’t feel happy with the way I studied or prepared for the exam. I skipped the May sitting because I moved to Memorial for my new job, and I had to take care of a lot of “firsts” in life such as apartment rent, savings and retirement accounts, bills, and so on and so forth, which may or may not belong to the set of acceptable excuses for skipping an important professional exam. Furthermore, the SOA introduced significant changes to the MLC syllabus effective in 2012, so skipping the first sitting in 2011 meant that I only had one shot to pass before the exam change. Also, I only started studying in mid-August which gave me about 2.75 months to study (which may seem ideal for others, but short for me). I studied frantically, and I don’t think I paced myself well at all.

Anyway, I can at least put away the anxiety of the hardest preliminary exam, but I’ve made it my goal to not make the same mistakes as I have in the past. The next exam, C/4, from what I hear has easier problems than those in MLC, but the calculations require more steps, which leaves more space for human error so I have to tread carefully. The exam feels more like an older sibling to the first exam, P/1 since you work with probability distributions, but work with more sophisticated modeling techniques and more complicated distributions. I decided to change my method of study to include a lot more rote memory since the exam focuses more on knowledge of methods, rather than insight and creativity (the C/4 questions are more similar to “do this method on this data set” as opposed to the “what can you conclude from this” style questions found on MLC). I’ve already created a Temporary Memory Bank in written form (you can find the file on my sky drive as “temp_mem_bank”), which includes concepts that I’ve committed to memory for this test, but have not, as of now committed to permanent memory as I have in the Permanent Memory Bank.

I’ve set the word count limit for my posts as 500 for the minimum and 1000 for the maximum. I figured, that updating the blog with extremely short posts would not satisfy the requirements of a New Year’s resolution, so I decided that 500 words seemed appropriate since I had to write brief, 500-word essays every week during my English course of my first semester of college (in addition to 3 longer papers ~5 pages and a term paper ~20 pages). This post, at ~750 words, took me less than an hour. I put a limit of 1000 words since these are blog posts, not dissertations, and I feel no need to bore the time-conscious reader.

As a side note – I ordered some new tubulars for the 2012 race season. One of these is mine:

My new set of wheels is in there, somewhere. Photo by Philip Shama

When I said that I’d update this blog once a week, I didn’t realize that I’d have to post five times as many updates as I did last year. Fortunately, I don’t see this as something I can’t do so I decided to make it my new year’s resolution. Today I’ve decided to write about the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)- an online distributed computing project that aims to find Mersenne Primes.  Distributed computing means that several computers on a network work together on a certain task. In the case of the Great Mersenne Prime Search, these computers come from university computer labs, homes, and even video game consoles all across the world. Other distributed computing projects involve protein folding (perhaps the most famous), finding extraterrestrial life, searching for gravitational waves, and so on and so forth. These projects work by utilizing spare processing power from participating computers. All this processing power put together makes for a very powerful network, and these projects have already made important discoveries, such as a protein structure related to HIV. Anyway, after I set up my Linux server, which runs throughout the day, I decided that letting it run idly would waste a lot of processing power, so I decided to install a program from a distributed computing project. I chose GIMPS because I spent some time studying the Mersenne primes in school, so as a math major this project would come naturally to me. I couldn’t find a suitable setup guide for Ubuntu 11.10, however, so I decided to write one here.

About Mersenne Primes

We call numbers of the form Mersenne Numbers. However, only a few of these Mersenne Numbers belong to the set of prime numbers, and as of 2009 we know of only 47 Mersenne Primes. The nature of Mersenne Primes makes them some of the largest known prime numbers out there, and indeed, the largest known prime, , is a Mersenne Prime. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search aims to find additional Mersenne Primes through distributed computing using the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne Primes.

Downloading GIMPS

Go to the GIMPS homepage, and click on the link “Getting Started.” Go to the link called “Register a new user account login” and create your user account. After you create your account, go to the Download Software page and select the package appropriate for your operating system. Since I use 64-bit Ubuntu, I downloaded the 64-bit Linux package. Place the package into the desired directory. For my computer, I created a folder called “GIMPS” in my home folder, and put the package there.

Placing the package into the GIMPS folder and opening it with Archive Manager

Next, click open the package with Archive Manager and then extract the files. Archive Manager will extract the files into the GIMPS folder.

GIMPS folder after extraction

Next, open up the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and change the directory to the GIMPS folder (do this simply by typing “cd GIMPS”). Now, open the mprime folder by typing in the command “./mprime -m”. Remember the space! The program “mprime” is the main program that will do the primality testing.

Use these commands to start mprime

mprime will now ask you if you want to join GIMPS. Select yes. Then, mprime will ask you to create an optional user ID and computer name. Fill these out – for example I entered my name as “gene” and my computer name as “Archimedes.” You can leave the proxy host name blank, just press enter. Then, type “Y” when mprime asks you to accept the above answers.

Initial running of mprime

mprime will then ask you the number of hours per day the program will run, how much memory to let it use, and the number of workers (number of CPUs) that will run. The default answers to these questions are in parentheses (). I selected the defaults for all of them. You do have the option to use more memory to speed up the program, however. mprime will then ask you to set the work priorities for your computer. Go ahead and select all the defaults, this will allow mprime to automatically allocate work to your processors. After accepting the answers, you will see your terminal window fill up with a bunch of text. This text describes which Mersenne Numbers your CPUs are testing, how much progress they’ve made, and the estimated completion dates. Depending on how you set it up, you may have missed the main menu. On my first install I saw the menu right away, but on the second install the program seemed to have skipped over the menu.

Here is a screenshot of the menu:

mprime options menu

Go ahead and select option 3. This will give you a summary of the progress.

mprime at work, showing progress

You can see here that my version of mprime is currently testing Mersenne numbers M55085531, M55091137, M55093139, and M55093327 using the Lucas-Lehmer test. The number after the M is the p in . So as you can see, these are very large numbers. The odds of me finding a Mersenne prime are 1 in 113533 for this current batch of tests!

And that’s it! Press any key to continue, and select option 5 to exit.

Things to do

You can see from the last picture that mprime will cause your computer to constantly use 100% of its processing power, 24 hours a day. This somewhat concerns me when it comes to temperatures, as I don’t want things to overheat while I’m away from the computer or at work. So, I plan on writing a script to have the server save the temperature readings into a text file so I can check on it periodically from a phone or another computer, and in the case of an emergency I can shut it down remotely.

If you think there’s anything missing in this guide, or if you think you have anything useful to add, or if you find any errors, let me know! I’m always open to input from others.

Let me introduce you to a couple of projects that I began working on over the last week – a memory bank written in LaTeX and a Linux server hosting RStudio for my predictive modeling projects. I started working on these tasks in order to give myself challenges that would develop my skills, because I had noticed that after I graduated college, the sudden scarcity of drilling, testing, and intellectually stimulating tasks other than actuarial exams or projects at work led to what I felt was a lack of cognitive development, creative activity, and perhaps even a decline in my working memory. This doesn’t mean that I hadn’t done anything in the meantime, however. Over the past year I’ve continued my studies at a pace of around 14-20 hours per week reading things that I found interesting. For instance, I’ve been reading a book on European History because I never got the chance to take a course on it in high school or college. I think over the past year I may have studied more hours than I had in any year of my life. During exam time, I studied a year’s worth of material on Life Contingencies in a span of 3 months. However, I’ve realized that studying can only get you so far. I’ve heard countless times that you have to put down the books if you want to get good at something – you cannot, for instance, learn to ride a bike by reading a book on riding a bike – you actually have to get yourself on a bicycle, ride, fall down, learn from your mistakes, and try again. Thus, I decided to begin a series of projects in order to actively learn by creating. In this way, I hope to keep myself sharp, motivated, and most importantly, intellectually fulfilled.

Project 1: Eternal Memory Bank

I haven’t forgotten about , the markup language that I set about learning around this time last year, though I have forgotten much of the syntax I need to typeset mathematical notation. Unfortunately, using LaTeX via WordPress, as I had done last year, presents some significant drawbacks due to syntactical differences and the fact that I can’t develop my typesetting skills further if I only use LaTeX within my blog. Thus, I’ve decided to construct a memory bank as a complete LaTeX document that you can print out as a book. I first had to start out by learning all the things I forgot over the last year by reading Kopka and Daly’s Guide to LaTeX, at an extremely slow pace – sometimes as slow as 5 pages per minute – though fortunately, it does has some very good exercises. For instance, the following table took me more than an hour to produce:

An excercise in constructing arrays and adjusting formulas

By means of the following input:

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand{\D}{\displaystyle}
\newcommand{\bm}{\boldmath}
\newcommand{\ba}{\begin{array}}
\newcommand{\ea}{\end{array}}
\begin{document}
\[ \ba{|c|c|c|} \hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\rule[-2mm]{0mm}{6mm}\mbox{Equations for the tangential plane and surface normal}} \\ \hline
\mbox{Equation} & & \\
\mbox{for the} & \mbox{ Tangential plane} & \mbox{Surface normal} \\
\mbox{surface} & & \\ \hline
F(x,y,z)=0 &\ba[t]{r@{{}+{}}l}
\D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial x}}(X-x) & \rule[0mm]{0mm}{8mm} \D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial y}}(Y-y) \\[4mm]
& \D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial z}}(Z-z)=0
\ea & \ba[t]{r@{{}={}}c@{{}={}}l}
\D{\frac{X-x}{\D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial x}}}} & \D{\frac{Y-y}{\D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial y}}}} & \D{\frac{Z-z}{\D{\frac{\partial F}{\partial z}}}}
\ea \\[13mm]
z=f(x,y) & Z-z =p(X-x)+q(Y-y) &\D{\frac{X-x}{p}=\frac{Y-y}{q} = \frac{Z-z}{-1}} \\[4mm]
\ba{c}
x=x(u,v)\\
y=y(u,v)\\
z=z(u,v)\\ \ea &
\left|\ba{ccc}
X-x & Y-y & Z-z\\
\D{\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}} & \D{\frac{\partial y}{\partial u}} & \D{\frac{\partial z}{\partial u}}\\[3mm]
\D{\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}} & \D{\frac{\partial y}{\partial v}} & \D{\frac{\partial z}{\partial v}}\\ \ea \right| = 0 &
\ba{r@{{}={}}l}
\D{\frac{X-x}{\left|\ba{cc}
\frac{\partial y}{\partial z} & \frac{\partial z}{\partial u}\\[1mm]
\frac{\partial y}{\partial v} & \frac{\partial z}{\partial v} \ea \right|}} &
\D{\frac{Y-y}{\left|\ba{cc}
\frac{\partial z}{\partial u} & \frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\\[1mm]
\frac{\partial z}{\partial v} & \frac{\partial x}{\partial v} \ea \right|}}\\[10mm]
& \D{\frac{Z-z}{\left|\ba{cc}
\frac{\partial x}{\partial u} & \frac{\partial y}{\partial u}\\[1mm]
\frac{\partial x}{\partial v} & \frac{\partial y}{\partial v} \\ \ea \right|}} \ea \\[15mm]
\rule[-5mm]{0mm}{0mm}\mbox{\boldmath{$r=r$}}(u,v) & \ba{r@{{}={}}l}
\mbox{\boldmath{$(R-r)(r_1\times r_2)$}} & 0\\
\mbox{or} \hfill \mbox{\boldmath{$(R-r)N$}} & 0\\ \ea & \ba{r@{{}+{}}l}
\mbox{\boldmath{$R=r$}} & \mbox{\boldmath{$\lambda(r_1\times r_2)$}} \\
\mbox{or \boldmath{$R=r$}} & \mbox{\boldmath{$\lambda N$}}\ea \\ \hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\rule[0mm]{0mm}{10mm}\parbox{116mm}{In this table, $x,y,z$ and $\mathbf{r}$ are the coordinates and the radius vector of a fixed point $M$ on the curve; $X,Y,Z,$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are the coordinates and radius vector of a point on the tangential plane or surface normal with reference to $M$; furthermore, $p =\frac{\partial z}{\partial x}, q=\frac{\partial z}{\partial y}$ and $\mathbf{r_1}=\mathbf{\frac{\partial r}{\partial \mathnormal{u}}, r_2=\frac{\partial r}{\partial \mathnormal{v}}}$.}}\\ \hline
\ea \]
\end{document}

As you can see, the code does not look pretty. Fortunately, on another go I believe I can reproduce the above table in about 15 minutes, and perhaps even faster on the third try.

Anyway, I began putting the pieces of my Eternal Memory Bank a couple weeks ago and spent the last couple of weeks putting what little I had together for this post. If you’ve taken a look at my Projects page, you can see that I’ve been learning College Algebra over the last few months – not because I don’t know algebra but because I felt that I needed to fill in a few gaps left behind by my inadequate high school education, and because I’ve forgotten a lot since then and I thought perhaps that I could get some new insight by revisiting an old subject. I decided to extract a few pieces of information that I really ought not to forget – and put them into this memory bank to commit to memory, forever. You can download the pdf from my SkyDrive here and the TeX file here.

An excerpt from the Preface:

“Hey everyone,

I’ve decided to construct an eternal memory bank, within which I’ve placed
select pieces of information that I’ve deemed important enough to commit to
memory, forever. This document serves as a visual representation of these
pieces in written form. I’ve undertaken this seemingly somewhat tedious and
arbitrary project to keep my memory in shape and because I’m sick and tired
of forgetting the formula to (a+b)^3 and having to either work out the expan-
sion every time it shows up (usally once in a blue moon for me) or look it up (I
usually work out the expansion out of pride, or just use the bionomial theorem).
In other words, these things take up precious time and I would much rather be
able to pull them immediately from memory than to rely on something that
may be in another book in some distant library or buried underneath mounds
of links in a website like Wikipedia.

Let me stress that I am not relying on memory for all of my tasks – that would
be ridiculously insane. You cannot solve complex problems on rote memory
alone becuase they require creativity and higher-level analytical skills. On the
other hand, there are some things you absolutely must memorize – for instance
as I write I am pulling out every single word on this page by memory. You can
gure out some words with context clues and associations, but if you have to
do that with every word during a conversation that is also absolutely, insanely
ridiculous.

So, welcome to my Eternal Memory Bank. Everything you see here, including
the fonts, document structure, Table of Contents – I guarantee you I’ve memo-
rized it. So, take a look, give me feedback if you wish, and enjoy.”

Project 2: RStudio via Linux Server

My second project began as a side project to my real job when my boss recommended that I check out Kaggle and sign up for their predictive modeling competitions. For those of you who don’t know, the website Kaggle hosts a series of predictive modelling competitions and awards cash prizes to the winners. The competitors include PhD-level academics, statisticians, mathematicians, hobbyists, and actuaries like me. I think of this as an excellent opportunity to see how the experts operate – the cash prize merely serves as icing on the cake, and I don’t really have the ambition to go for the top prize as of now.

To set up a base for myself and the rest of my team members, I decided to construct a Linux server out of an old computer I had laying around – it has some new components though, like an Athlon II x4 processor and plenty of RAM – 8GB. The server currently operates on ubuntu 11.10 “Oneric Ocelot,”  though I may change my mind and set up an ssh server using Ubuntu Server instead. In addition to the Ubuntu, I set up my Windows machine in a way that lets me control the Ubuntu Server remotely – including shutting down, turning on, logging in etc.

Logging into the server remotely with Tight VNC

After installing the server I downloaded RStudio server, a GUI developed by a group of volunteer programmers that allows people to connect to R remotely through their own Windows machines. In this manner I hope that my teammates and I can collaborate on our projects. I first asked some of my friends to try logging in but they couldn’t do it – so I asked my more technically savvy friends what to do and they suggested that I set up a static IP and forward port 8787 on my router. After doing so, they successfully logged in! Now I, or anyone on my team can access the server anywhere with an internet connection – hotels, coffee shops, etc.

Connecting to the RStudio GUI though Firefox on my Windows machine

Well that’s pretty much it, I have to say I’m happy that I posted this week as promised. I used to have trouble with these things as a kid but I feel that I’ve stayed on task much better as an adult. One study claims that it’s because kids have too much grey matter. My dad once said that “smart people just explain things away” when I tried giving him excuse one time as to why I forgot to replace the window stickers inside my car last year. I had trouble understanding what he meant but I think he meant that when scientists come up with explanations for these phenomena (in this case, why kids can’t stay on task), people use these explanations as excuses for their bad behavior. Thanks, Dad. Stay tuned for next week’s posting!

The Texas Bicycle Racing Association (TXBRA) road season actually ended two months ago in October, but I spent most of my free time studying for exam MLC. I think I spent about 300-400 hours in total, so as you can see the exam represents a more challenging hurdle than your typical college-level test. I took the exam about a month ago in early November and I won’t receive my results until the 6th of January. Overall, I think I did well on the exam – I paced myself correctly and I only struggled with a handful of questions. Then again, you never know how these tests turn out until you get your result, so in the meantime I’ve been focusing on work, study, and cycling to ease the anxiety of waiting.

Anyway, I don’t have to worry about taking another test until May so I’ve decided to update this blog every weekend starting now. I have two and a half months until my first race, so you won’t be getting any more race reports until March – but I’ve decided to devote my time each week to work on a project of my choosing – for example, next week I’ll post about a LaTeX project that I spent the last two weeks setting up. I imagine that most of the updates will focus on Mathematics, Computers, or Statistics, or maybe just whatever happens to excite me at the time. Today’s entry covers the events from the last important road race of the season – the Fort Hood State Championships – along with some minor and major events that occurred between then and now.

I don’t have much to say about Fort Hood – the nasty climb at the beginning of the race, over which I struggled last year, surprisingly didn’t pose much of a problem on the first ascent. Unfortunately, as a category 4 racer this year I would have to ascend the climb twice. After the first climb I still felt fresh, but a series of nasty attacks, accelerations, and a brutal crosswind on top of that left me gasping for breath after an hour of hard racing. I spent the next 10 minutes alone until Doug Baysinger and Tom Warnement caught up with me, and together we closed out the first lap. Doug ended up having a pinched nerve in his neck and had to pull out, and Noe Espinosa, another Shama racer, vanished from the pack after the first climb and had to abandon as well. This left Bill Krause as the only team member in the pack and he finished a respectable 26th. I finished way down, in 78th place. Said Assali, a Shama category 5 racer, finished 8th in his race. Bill Fiser, a category 3 racer, ended his season as the State Champion – and has now upgraded to category 2.

Overall, in terms of results, I had a mediocre season. Last year, I had four top-10 finishes whereas this year I only had one. On the other hand, I view this season as a better one developmentally – as I had bigger improvements in strength and racing knowledge. Sometime after Fort Hood, I upgraded my bike with two important training tools – a heart rate monitor and a Quarq power meter, coupled with a Garmin Edge 500 – which allow me to monitor my data with greater breadth, depth, and precision.

Quarq Power Meter with Rotor Crank

To help me with my training, Ken Day recommended that I read Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan. I also plan to read Friel’s The Cyclist’s Training Bible, which serves as an essential reference to any competitive cyclist.

Profile from Last Thursday

Other than Fort Hood and exam MLC, not much has happened since then, although one event does stick out as something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. After my exam, I hadn’t trained for about a month and lost a lot of my fitness, and since then I’ve gradually built it back up by returning to the early morning group rides. On one particular Friday morning I decided to go out with the group even though I normally don’t ride on Fridays, because these rides tend to be easier than the Tuesday rides. For the first hour everything went smoothly until we hit Eldridge Parkway at Memorial. I remember talking to Trent about a Mac Book Air that he wanted to buy and as we set off after the light we continued for a few hundred yards until we found another Shama rider lying on the ground on the other side of the street. At first I thought we had a typical crash within the group but it seemed strange as there weren’t any typical “crash noises” (tires streaking, yelling, bikes hitting the ground, etc.) that I would have heard ahead of time. When we stopped to assist the rider, it was clear that the accident had occured on the other side of the street, away from the group. On closer inspection we realized the rider was Philip Shama, and after seeing a Mustang with a broken windshield stopped a few meters ahead we knew that Philip was in serious trouble. John Neese called 911 and the others tried to keep Philip still although he kept trying to move around in a state of semi-consciousness, muttering incoherently and wiggling his fingers. The ambulance and fire truck arrived in minutes and got Philip to the hospital.

Early Morning Ride, 30 minutes before we found Philip.

Apparently, the driver, who was moving in the opposite direction to the group, saw all of our lights and became distracted. Philip, who sometimes rides opposite to the group to catch us midway during the ride, rode in front of the driver. The driver failed to see Philip and rear-ended him, shattering the rear triangle of his bike. Philip went over the trunk and broke the windshield of the car, and hit his head. He ended up with a broken leg, arm, and collarbone, and had a severe concussion with some brain bleeding. We were all in a state of shock as we rode back and we didn’t get to hear about his condition until noon. I was very uneasy until then, and after a day or two we realized that he was okay.

It’s times like this that stress the importance of bike safety, especially when riding in the dark. Had it not been for his helmet, Philip would have died that day. Just last week a very promising Texas racer Megan Baab was killed during a training ride. The sport is not without its risks, but we have to take the necessary precautions to be safe if we want to do the things we enjoy. I’m just glad that Philip’s alright. The cycling community wouldn’t be the same without him.

Sometimes I have difficulty expressing my gratitude to people but I assure you that I’m very thankful to have met all the Shama racers and people in the Houston cycling community this year, as you’ve done so much for me, as sometimes I find it hard to make friends with people or find people who like to do the same things I like to do, but you’ve all made the processes easier for me.

I’m very excited for next year. We’ve got some strong guys like Said Assali and Phil Trinder moving up to Category 4 next year and I’ll be happy to help them out. Over all, the last year has been very enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to having a great season in 2012.

After spending some time experimenting with Mathematica, Maxima, and Sage, I’ve finally decided to use Sage as my primary computer algebra system (CAS)!  In short, computer algebra systems act like high-performance calculators, and their primary strength lies in the fact that they can manipulate mathematical expressions in symbolic form. Sage, in particular, has several benefits over Mathematca:

1) Sage is open source software, which means you can freely download, modify and distribute its source code. Mathematica, on the other hand, is proprietary software and a home license costs $300. If you want to use it for work, it’s a whopping $2500 for an individual license – and you can only install it on one machine. With Sage, it’s affordable, you don’t have to pay more for newer versions, and the fact that it’s open source means you can actively participate in the development community.

2) Sage uses Python. Python is a free programming language and it’s very easy to learn. If you already know Python, you won’t be bogged down learning a new language just to use the software.

3) Sage includes Maxima. Sage is actually made out of more than 90 different mathematical packages – one of which is Maxima – all integrated under a single interface with which you can communicate using only Python. For example, Maxima is written in Lisp, so you would have to learn some of it to become proficient with the program. However, if you use Sage, you can utilize Maxima even if you only know Python.

Sage, released in 2005 is relatively new compared to other CAS programs and still has a lot of raw edges. Known bugs and tasks that need to be completed are posted online and users are free to take on these challenges. I picked up a new, much, much, much needed book, the Sage Beginner’s Guide, which should give me a basic working knowledge of the program. I first tried installing Sage on my Linux machine about 3 years ago, and when I tried doing it then it took a lot of effort and a lot of command-line agony to get it to start working. Now I would say that the package has gone a long way, though it still doesn’t work on Windows. If you want to use it on Windows, you must install a Linux virtual machine using either VirtualBox or VMWare. Right now I have 3 cores and about 4 GB of RAM dedicated to a virtual machine set up on Fedora Linux – from there you can run Sage from your browser:

Sage runs on a Fedora Linux machine

Screenshot of the Sage Notebook Interface

Here are some examples of what Sage can do from the book – we plot 2 functions and place labels at their solutions. The following code:

The code defines the functions, finds the solutions, and plots the graph. Parameters can define labels, colors, etc.

Produces the following image:

Image produced from the preceding code

Also, the following code:

Code for plotting a Klein Bottle

Produces a 3D plot of a Klein Bottle:

A Klein Bottle

Sage can also display results in symbolic form:

Partial Fraction Decomposition

Here, Sage instantly calculates the above partial fraction decomposition. Anyone want to try it by hand?

I’m totally hooked. Sage, which is totally free, is extremely powerful – much more powerful than any expensive HP or TI calculator on the market. Right now Mathematica, Matlab, and Maple are more complete software packages that come with professional support, but they come at a cost. However, I think Sage can be the real Mathematica killer, similar to the way that R is currently eating into the market share of SAS – Sage, which is headed by professor William Stein of the University of Washington, is currently under active development by computer programmers and mathematicians all around the world! Check out the Sage website if you want to get involved. The era of extremely high-priced software can only last so long…

Due to time constraints and the fact that both of these races finished similarly, I decided to write a single post for both of them. After racing Gonzales, I felt strong and very confident – the week afterward, during my usual weekend ride with SCCC, I rode aggressively (probably to the ire of my packmates) and I realized that I could drop the group for long stretches at a time. However, by the time I came back to the 5:30 A.M. MPPPL ride I noticed that I had accumulated fatigue over the long, four-month buildup that I had initiated in March and started fading and getting dropped again, even after putting in serious efforts during my training. I felt that perhaps I had to rest, so I spent 2 weeks doing relatively little training and started to build up again after I came back from California. Unfortunately, that derailed plans for a serious aggressive effort at Chappell Hill, though I did make some good progress on my late-season training cycle. I told Philip that I planned on racing Chappell Hill so he let me borrow some deep-profile clinchers for the weekend:

My Cronus Ultimate, equipped with HED Jet 6 clinchers

The deep rims help with the wind, but the type of rim – clinchers, tend to be heavy for racing so I felt concerned that they might hinder me on the rolling terrain at Cotton Patch. I tried out the wheels the day before the race and they felt fantastic – I was able to ride away from my usual group and I easily held a 25mph pace over them over the course of 8 miles or so into a headwind until I slowed down and waited for them to catch up. I got a good amount of sleep before the day of the race since my field started at 11:00 – but that meant that I would have to ride in the scorching 100+ degree heat at midday. When I arrived at the course, one of my Cat 5 teammates, Said Assali told me that he imploded in his race and advised me to conserve as much energy as possible and to not do too much work, if any at all. I agreed with his opinion, since that tactic helped me finish well on last year’s course.

After the start we quickly picked up the pace as the fist leg of the race went downhill, easily reaching speeds of 42 mph+. However, I thought we would slow down as the race settled down but unfortunately that didn’t happen – the race was very fast from the get go and the peloton showed no mercy – I had no chance for any breathers, or points in time at which I could relax, eat, drink, or think of a strategy for my teammates. Attacks frequently flew off the front and each time the group chased them down so they couldn’t get away. After 1.5 hours of hard racing the group put in another acceleration right before the feed zone and I got dropped. I checked my average speed which was 24 mph (I averaged 21.2 mph at last year’s race) on rolling terrain – the fastest I had ever put in over that interval of time over that type of terrain – faster than I had at Gonzales. I decided to finish the race to put in more training, but unfortunately I veered off course and got lost and spent about 30 minutes trying to find my way back and I ended up last out of the finishers. I did find out that 23 of the riders quit the race which made me feel slightly better about sticking it out. I think overall, the aerodynamic profile of the rims compensated for their weight. Bill Krause finished well for Shama – getting 11th.

I continued to train on my usual schedule and I felt pretty good for Cotton Patch coming up the week after in Greenville. I drove there after work and I only managed about 5 hours of sleep since I had to start at 8:10 AM the next day.

Staging for the women's race - photo taken by Team PACC

I talked to Bill at the beginning and he forgot to bring his kit to the race so he had to borrow some clothing from someone else. Anyway, the pace felt pretty easy at the beginning of the race – we had a strong tailwind and we could push 27-30 mph without too much effort. However, when the course moved into the wind attacks started to pick up and the pace was tough just like it was at Chappell Hill. I kept telling myself to stick it out for at least 2 hours but my legs gave in after 1 hour and it was no good. My last point of contact with the pack happened to be at an intersection when the lead motorcycle turned the wrong way and took all but 6-8 riders with it. I was with those 6-8 men and they decided to launch a fierce attack to take advantage of the mishap. I wasn’t able to stay with their acceleration and by the time the pack caught up with me they were all pissed that someone had the nerve to attack like that. However – when you’re racing you have to take advantage of every opportunity you get – though winning in this situation would not be the prettiest way to win a race. By this point the peloton had broken up in pieces and I got 2 guys to work with me to start sweeping up lone riders along the way. After about 10 minutes we saw some bodies sprawled out on the road and realized that there had been a crash in the chaos. As we continued the race, we picked up riders one by one and formed a group of about 10, taking turns doing work into the heavy headwind and crosswind. We eventually caught the Cat 5 group and passed them up. I felt good because this was a sign that I was making progress – last year I struggled in a lot of the Cat 5 races but this time, I was able to easily pass a field of 50 men racing against each other while I was in a smaller paceline of just 8 men (two other racers dropped off by that point). However, the paceline I was in were putting in a brutal effort – with about 14 miles to go, my legs gave up and I dropped back but finished the race, 33rd/45th, which was better than Chappell Hill. Afterward I learned the riders that I had dropped decided to pace themselves back by drafting off the Cat 5 racers – which is illegal and can result in disqualification. I was somewhat angry but since none of us were in contention anyway I let it slide. I checked the average speed before I got dropped which was about 23.7 mph – close to that of Chappell Hill – and much faster than I was riding last year. I’m getting stronger but perhaps the long term endurance isn’t there yet. Bill finished well in 15th place and I’ll probably end up helping him at Fort Hood next weekend – the last race of the season!

Exam MLC actually stands for “Actuarial Models: Life Contingencies,” but more on that later. Despite having an increasing workload for the third quarter, I’ve still managed to maintain my study schedule and have even had free time for books. Each night before I go to sleep I usually spend 30 minutes or so reading for fun, and I’ve recently finished Stephen Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which depicts the history of computing from the early days of MIT’s AI Lab and SAIL at Stanford (if you want to go back further to say, Babbage’s Analytical Engine or Ada Lovelace’s programs – you’ll have to look elsewhere) to Wozniak’s Apple II and the formation of Silicon Valley and its mega-corporations up to 1982. The book begins with an introduction to the origins of the term “hacker”, which originated back to the hacks, or pranks that clever students would perform at MIT (well-known hacks include stealing Caltech’s canon, putting firetrucks and police cars on top of the Great Dome, etc.). The term also refers to how early computer enthusiasts would hack together their personal computers from pieces of scrap at the junkyard and throwaway components from large corporations since they didn’t have the luxury to go buy parts from the computer store in the way we can today. I found the book enjoyable and entertaining, but a little lacking because it didn’t present any information past the mid 1980′s before Microsoft’s dominance, since computers have changed dramatically since then.

After reading Hackers, I picked up a copy of Heath’s 1908 translation of Euclid’s Elements – an ancient book on pure Geometry, which I heard about while studying Math in high school but never got around to reading until well after college. The book doesn’t seem difficult – I’d say that the language feels similar to something in between Kafka and Hemingway or that of any typical writer of the early 20th century – without all the messy political allegories or symbolism, though the book is certainly full of symbols! The work itself consists of propositions or theorems  derived from fundamental postulates and definitions, and demonstrates methods for drawing geometric configurations using only a compass and straightedge. The logic flows easily, and right now the most difficult thing for me involves suppressing what I already know – because you have to learn how to not take things for granted when proving things from first principals.

Anyway, my main focus for the next three months involves studying for MLC, and one of the challenges you have to face while studying requires memorizing vast amounts of information since even the most obscure topics can serve as legitimate exam material. One of the techniques I’ve seen my actuarial professor, Jim Daniel use involves associating a cryptic formula with a meaningful phrase, for instance if you want to recall the quadratic formula you say, “x equals the opposite of b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a,” while singing the tune to “Pop Goes the Weasel” in your head. I’ve seen my medical school friends use this method to great success when memorizing chemical compounds. For some strange reason, people have a much easier time memorizing phrases that carry meaning than memorizing seemingly random strings of numbers and letters. I have no idea how that works but until our nation’s best and brightest minds figure out a way for us to download large books into our minds in a quick and efficient way, I’ll have to stick with these strange, and at times, baffling methods. Anyway, when it came to studying for exams, Dr. Daniel liked to use the phrase “old guys go first” to easily recall formulas for benefit reserves. Today I studied formulas for fractional ages while sitting on a plane en route to Houston from Oakland. These formulas interpolate the distribution of deaths between integer years since the tables themselves only have integral data. For instance, the linear interpolation has the form of (1-t)*s(x)+t*s(x+1), exponential interpolation has the form (1-t)*Log(s(x))+t*Log(s(x+1)), and hyperbolic/Balducci interpolation has the form (1-t)/s(x)+t/s(x+t). Memorizing the shape of each interpolation should not present a problem because the terms linear, exponential, and hyperbolic already give the student hints as to what the symbolic expressions should look like. However, memorizing the exact placement and order of the letters x,t and and symbols +/- will give the student headaches. Thus, I came up with the saying “take from the past and give to the future,” which tells the student to use the multiplicative factor (1-t), with the survival function at time x and use the multiplicative factor t for the survival function at time x+t, a time in the future.

In the midst of studying for exams, I managed to fly over to Oakland this weekend to see one of my friends get married. I’ve known her since I was six as my sister’s godparents’ daughter and both our families would visit each other during vacations and I would play Legos and video games with their son when we weren’t trying to beat each other up. I got to see a lot of people that I haven’t seen in ages and I had a really good time. However, I never thought of marriage as something worth the risk with the 40% divorce rate and all, but once I remember asking my college roommate why he decided to play the lottery and he gave me some ridiculous reason along the lines of “if you don’t play, your odds of winning are zero” despite the fact that he studied math in college (sorry man, just picking on you for a second, you’re a cool guy and all). That did get me thinking though (not enough to start playing the lottery), that you can never reach your goals without taking on risk, and that you have to work hard to achieve anything worthwhile in life. For instance, I study hard despite the 50%-75% failure rate on each exam because I want to succeed as an actuary. Likewise, the newlyweds have decided to take the next step despite knowing that they’ll surely face difficult challenges over the next several decades because they know they’ll be happy if they succeed. For that, I admire their leap of faith and wish them the best.

The pictures of the wedding haven’t arrived yet, so here’s a Double-Double from In-n-Out Burger that I had on the way to the wedding:

I haven’t written a race report in a long time and there are some races that will have to be skipped (Chappell Hill, Fort Hood, Walburg, Pace Bend, Fredericksburg, Acadiana) due to time constraints. For a quick summary, I’ll just say that I had some good results at the end of last season (Chappell Hill, Fort Hood – see race results), and some bad results (Walburg, Pace Bend, Fredericksburg, Acadiana) after I decided to upgrade to a higher rank in amateur cycling. This is known as ‘catting up’ through the 5 categories in USA Cycling. Male riders (women have 4 categories) start at “Category 5″ and move up through the ranks, to Category 4, 3, 2, and 1, from which professional teams recruit talented riders. Once a male rider reaches category 3 he is considered “pretty good” by his peers, whereas the top two categories contain the elite riders and the bottom 2 categories contain the inexperienced riders. Anyway, in order to move from Cat 5 to Cat 4 a rider needs 10 mass starts in road races or criteriums, to move to higher categories after that a rider needs to place high in finishes in order to earn a requisite number of points. I had 10 starts by the time I left college but I was advised not to move up until I became better. After my results at the end of the season I decided that I was ready to move up, so I submitted my application and was approved for the Men’s 4 races for the 2011 season.

Most competitive cyclists consider category 4 to be not much tougher than category 5, and looking back I find this opinion to be mostly true, but at the beginning of the season I struggled and felt like I would never become good enough to compete at the next level – I had the flu in February and I was dropped after 5 minutes at my season opener at Walburg, and subsequently dropped at the very beginning of the next 4 races. I can attribute some of my lack of performance due to looking for employment during that time period, but some of it was also due to pure laziness. However, at the beginning of March, I was able to secure employment and regain focus – I started riding with the Shama Cycles team every Tuesday at 5:30 AM and eventually reached around 8-10 hours of training per week. At first I dropped at the end of each ride but I eventually became strong enough to keep up, or at least catch up to the group after a hard pull or sprint. Philip Shama, owner of the shop and team worked with me to get the correct fit on the bike and recommended some equipment changes including a lower stem, shorter crank arms, and narrower handlebars. I felt strong enough at the beginning of June to try racing again at Fredericksburg but I still dropped early, although I was able to hang on for about an hour at the Sunday race. This was the first indication that I first started improving so I began to do intervals like I did last year – except with a staggered pattern – 8 x 4 minutes, 4 x 8 minutes, 2 x 16 minutes, and 1 x 32 minutes – 4 sessions of 2 hours each over 2 weeks, take the next week easy, and then start the pattern again the week after. I got about halfway through this schedule when my next set of races came up at Louisiana. I noticed a significant improvement in my time trial speed – about 23 mph, which was far faster than any time trial I had ever done (fastest was 18.9 mph). My friend Ken Day averaged 28 mph over the course, so that pretty much blows my time away – although I know I’m moving in the right direction.

A typical 5:30 AM Tuesday Ride. Photo taken by Philip Shama

During dinner Ken and Jon Sanchez gave me advice on my training – one of the things Ken mentioned was that at the end of each hard workout I should feel tired in a way that I don’t want to ride my bike anymore. However, most of the time I feel like I can ride quite a bit more so as time passes I’ll gradually increase my interval time to cover up most of the 2 hour training blocks – probably up until I have enough stamina to do 2 x 32 minute intervals or 3 x 20 minutes. Also worth noting was including maximum efforts and recovery – both of which I haven’t really been paying attention to. For recovery I’ve been making an effort to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep, since in March I was getting about 6 each day. Both of them advised me to also be aggressive while racing. Even though I may get a better result by sitting in the pack and conserving energy, I’ll be gaining better fitness if I attack and be aggressive off the front – even if that means dropping later on. It’s better to learn these things now than to wait until moving to Category 3 to try them and make mistakes. So on the next day’s road race, I tried staying near the front and taking pulls to bring back a breakaway – after about 2 hours I was pretty much spent so I used my last ounce of energy pulling my teammate Doug Baysinger back to the front after Jim Perrin, the eventual winner, attacked the bunch. I dropped off the back after that last pull but hopefully that effort let Doug, whom I knew was stronger, save some energy. If I had stayed near the back I’m pretty sure I would have been able to get a pack finish but I did learn a lot about what goes on in the front – and like Ken said, it definitely is smoother up there.

Alright – so here’s the main race report. After completing a schedule of intervals I felt strong going in to today’s race, Come and Take It at Gonzales Texas. I woke up at 4AM and went out to McDonald’s but found out it was closed, so I ate some caffeinated energy blocks to keep me awake until I reached another McDonald’s about an hour west on I-10, where I loaded up on 2 cups of coffee, a hash brown, and a sausage McMuffin. After I reached the course, I warmed up for about 20 minutes and met up with Doug, but I found out he was racing in the 35+ category so we wouldn’t be racing together. However, when I made my way to the starting line I found another Shama Cycles member, Bill Krause. Before the start, I saw that there were some heavy hitters – James Perrin of Bike Barn – who won Acadiana, and Tak Makino and Jaxson Appel of Texas Pro Health. I had ridden with these three riders each Saturday over the last year and I knew they would be strong. However, I only had one main objective for the race and that was to stay with the bunch until the finish since I hadn’t done that since I moved up to Cat 4. I felt pretty good about the course because it didn’t include most of the things that I’m bad at – such as strong winds, technical turns, or long climbs, but that also meant that the pace would be high when chasing down breakaways so I would have to pay attention to any unexpected surges that might happen. At the start, the pace was tough – around 27mph – 31mph as some people tried moving off the front but Jim, Tak, and Jaxson kept the race under control and no one got very far. About midway through the course Bill attacked off the front so I sat back and let the others do the chasing. Unfortunately he was caught shortly after but managed to stay with the pack. I moved up to the front right before they caught him and I was contemplating a counterattack, but I figured that I needed to focus on my objective so I pulled for a couple of minutes and moved back after a turn.

Tak Makino of Texas Pro Health rounds a corner during the crit on the previous day. Photo credit goes to Propaganda Bike Shop.

For the last 11 miles, attacks were coming quite frequently and every time the bunch chased them down. The hills were also getting steeper so this was when my legs began to hurt and run out of energy. Bill asked me how I was doing and I told him I was okay, but I was worried that I would get dropped. However, it was mostly the rough road vibration that was making me uncomfortable, and in terms of stamina I felt like I had a good amount left. At about 4 miles to go there was a steep hill and I knew this was where the final selection would be made, so I told myself that I was going to give it my all to stay with the pack on this hill – fortunately it was a lot easier than it looked and I felt fine after we went up it, and at this point I knew I had met my objective and that I wouldn’t drop toward the end. About 2 miles to the finish I started planning an attack, and about half a mile later Jim went on an attack – I yelled at the bunch to keep in contact with him as he was dangerous – and we did, and after that more people tried moving off the front and that’s when I decided to attack – however another rider was blocking my position and I kept screaming at him to either move up or move out of the way but he didn’t budge – I don’t know if he did that on purpose or if he was too tired to move. Anyway, I was angry but it was my fault for not being in the front earlier – so I moved all the way around to the other side and moved up front for the bunch sprint. I kicked in at about 200 meters to go but it was a little too early – I passed Jim, but Tak and Jaxson and the eventual winner passed me up and when I reached the line I counted 8 bodies in front of me, so I thought I got 9th or 10th place, but it’s hard to tell when everyone is so close and you’re not sure who passed whom and when. However, as I was packing my things Bill Fiser told me that I had gotten 7th and my first points towards my Cat 3 upgrade! I was pretty happy with the result but I think I had enough energy to take the win had I positioned myself better earlier. The course speed averaged 23.7 mph, so the speed has been steadily creeping up as the year moves on.

The peloton charges up the final hill, riders jockeying for position. Photo by Rouse Bicycles.

Right now everyone is telling me that I must have it easy on the climbs but I actually find that to be a weakness and I get dropped easily on long climbs – it’s hard to discover your strengths at an early stage but I think I’m developing into more of a puncheur – one who is not a pure sprinter with top speed but can accelerate quickly and go on short breakaways- since I’ve done last minute breakaways before and can finish high in the bunch sprint if I don’t get dropped, but I’m not sure yet because I’m still learning. There is something glamorous about being able to hold off a charging bunch after an attack so I’m hoping that’s what I’ll become, although it may very well be that I’m genetically a climber. Anyway I think right now it’s more important to focus on my weaknesses because if I don’t do that I won’t be able to get myself into a position to use my strengths. So, I’ll hold off on max efforts for now and focus on stamina and resisting the wind through my interval schedule, and work on my cornering at Memorial Park. My goals for the next race, Chappell Hill, are to be aggressive and ride at the front – although from my experience it will be hard for a breakaway to succeed, depending on the weather. However, I don’t think I need the validation of being able to stay with the bunch so it will be better for me to attack and risk my placing than to not be aggressive at all. Hats off to Bill Krause for his breakaway effort and Tak and Jaxson for their strong finishes, and thanks to Phil Shama and the rest of the Shama crew for helping me with everything!

The final bunch sprint - Charles Holsen takes the win. Photo by Rouse Bicycles.

UPDATE: Some news since I last posted – I’d like to congratulate Bill Fiser for finishing 5th in the Road Race and earning enough points for his Cat. 2 upgrade!