Hey everyone,
I’ve got my first race coming up next weekend at Mineral Wells and I’m really looking forward to driving and spending the weekend there with my teammates. I originally planned to race in support of my teammate Said, who got a top-6 result in an early race, but due to some registration issues he couldn’t make it, so it looks like I’ll have to race alone in my category (EDIT: Said was finally able to register, so I plan to ride in support.). While I feel stronger than I did at the beginning of last year, I didn’t prepare as well as I should have so I don’t have any intention of winning, but I have to get myself racing in order to test the waters and gauge my level of fitness. I just weighed myself yesterday and, to my surprise, I gained 13 pounds over the off-season! I currently weigh 141 pounds compared to 128 pounds in November. Some of that gain came from muscle mass as I’ve consistently weight trained since then and set some new personal records:
Squat: 210 lb. 5×5
Bench: 135 lb. 5×5
Deadlift: 190 lb. 1×5
Overhead: 95 lb. 5×5
Barbell Row: 115 lb. 5×5
Power Clean: 115 lb. 3×5
Unfortunately, a lot of that weight gain came from an improper diet, as during exam time I would get so busy and order fast food to give myself more time to study. I didn’t kick the habit over the winter months and it looks like I’ve paid the price. I’d like to lose around 6 pounds and 135 would be an ideal weight. I want to go on a diet, but on the other hand I have a lot of races coming up so I need enough fuel to perform well. First – I need to stop eating fast food. Second – the races will help me shed some weight but if that doesn’t happen I’ll start counting calories. So far I’ve only reached 7 hours of weekly riding and I plan to push it to 9 or 10 hours/week, and I’m currently going for 8 this week. Hopefully this will do the trick. We’ll see.
Last week I said I wanted to set up an organized schedule for the study of mathematics. I want to learn so many things but I’ve come to realize that I definitely won’t live long enough to learn everything I want to learn. I contemplated following this guide which I think sets out a solid course of study for the foundations of mathematics and seems like something I can finish before I die. Back in the 1920’s you could actually learn all of mathematics in about 80 books – something certainly doable back in the day. However, the field of mathematics has exploded and branched out in all sorts of different directions and you really have to just pick a specialty and stick with it. So far I’ve decided to master these books:
1. College Algebra
2. Geometry
3. Trigonometry
4. Calculus
5. Linear Algebra
6. Discrete Mathematics
7. Calculus
before heading into the guide full-steam. However, I also have to continue my actuarial studies, and I’ve found it hard to balance these two goals simultaneously. Last fall, I wound up falling behind in both these areas because I didn’t have a structured course of study. In a panic, I ditched all the algebra and put all my efforts into MLC, and thankfully passed. Since then, I’ve only intermittently studied algebra and each time I go back to it, I get the same feeling I get when I’d take a week off from viola – extreme rustiness. Over the 10 years I spent playing viola and the 2 years I’ve spent cycling, I’ve realized that the most important thing you need to get good is to have a clear goal in mind and to stay consistent. With consistency, you can overcome some of the flaws in your preparation – as no method is perfect for everyone – if we knew of one, it’d be so easy, right? For example, if you watch videos of your favorite musicians or athletes, you’ll see that many of them perform phenomenally well despite their lack of “proper” technique (for example, Soler’s riding form, Heifetz’s bow hold, Reggie Miller’s shot). It’s evident that no one way works for everyone, and that there are many ways to reach a goal. You have to stay persistent, try several avenues, learn from failure, and see what works.
This year really marks the first year that I’m taking math as seriously as I did viola. I think if I can finally put in some consistency I’ll learn some really neat things. Although I said there’s more than one way to reach a goal, there are a lot of wrong ways you can take while trying to get there and that’s why I’ve contemplated hiring a mentor to help guide my studies. Teachers can’t tell you everything but experienced ones are quick to identify your mistakes, and that can expedite the learning process. In my experience, the best ones won’t tell you exactly what’s wrong, but they’ll give you hints or ask you questions as to why you took the approach you did (for example, when trying to solve a problem), and when you try to answer you realize you did something wrong and that you should have done it some other way, and that other way often turns out to be right way. In this way, they teach you to think independently.
When I learned math in school, I really just did enough to get good grades and not much more. I enjoyed it in elementary school but in intermediate school something really killed my interest. I don’t want to blame my teachers but I didn’t get one that actually majored in math until my junior year of high school. She was pretty good, but I think she sensed the general apathy in her students, and may have been worn out after years and years of dealing with both that and the administration. Most of the teachers seem to have only learned enough math to pass their certification exams which doesn’t say much at all about their ability. I feel like it would be extremely advantageous to have someone who took abstract algebra, or maybe even just discrete math to teach teenagers their first course dealing with symbolic mathematics. It wasn’t until college when I took a very challenging first-year calculus course that I became interested again, and not until my third year when I started to learn what mathematicians actually did, and how they made conjectures and proofs. I think if kids these days (or most primary and secondary math teachers, for that matter) actually knew what mathematicians did for a living they’d be a lot more interested in learning mathematics.
My goal for now is to read 10 pages a day for actuarial work, and then do one section a week for algebra. I plan to go faster later on, but I haven’t even reached this level of consistency so I have to at least get that down before I get more ambitious. For this week, it’s simple. Read 70 pages of actuarial work and do 1 section of algebra, and then report back here next week to see if I’m successful.
I’d like to close my post with a simple spreadsheet I created to keep track of my tasks. When I devote a lot of time to study, I tend to slack off on my “maintenance” tasks and things get so messy around here it’s hard to walk around without bumping into something. This spreadsheet lists various chores I need to do, and after I complete each task, I write down the date and it automatically calculates when I need to do it again. It also automatically changes color to green, yellow, or red to indicate if something has been recently done, needs to be done soon, or has been overdue.
A Simple Planner Spreadsheet.
You can see that there’s a lot of red – not good.