When we ran the donut run around this time last year, some of you recall the piggy paraphernalia I brought back from Minnesota — I hope Neal is still enjoying his boar juice bucket.  I was reminded of wussies again during last week’s pig visit to USDA in Iowa.  Des Moines had the best airport gift shop I’ve ever been to:

A t-shirt that read ‘In case of emergency please feed me bacon’ immediately invoked the spirit of Bobby Gill.

A t-shirt with the words ‘I like PIG butts and I cannot lie’ recalled Neal Gorman, when inebriated at Doug & Kerry’s wedding.

And another shirt with ‘You had me at “BACON”‘ — again, Bobby Gill.

As I arrived in Iowa, there were two major news stories about pigs hitting the newsstands.  The ‘bacon scare’ story concerned the effect of the drought on the lowered production of corn and pig feed this summer and the prospects for pork product storages and higher prices this year.   The second story was more disturbing: a 60-year old pig farmer had just been discovered devoured by his hogs.  The pig experts in Iowa confirmed that hogs can weigh upwards of 500 pounds and are aggressive, inquisitive, voraciously hungry animals.  While it was unlikely that the hogs would attack unprovoked, if the man fell or had a heart attack, the enormous hogs could certainly have taken advantage of him in a prone state.  In a grisly story from 2007 a pig farmer serial killer from Canada murdered at least 25 prostitutes and female drug addicts and fed their remains to his pigs.

When Amy from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) asked me if I had any specific requests for my visit to their center in Ames, Iowa, I asked if I could tour a pig farm.  The production process for swine in the United States is actually quite complex, with multiple production stages that involve different kinds of pens and facilities and transport of pigs, and I wanted to learn more about how the process might affect influenza virus transmission dynamics.    But after discovering the vicious side of the little piggy, I was relieved when Amy informed me that I would have to settle for an indoor Pork Production 101 powerpoint presentation by the pig guru Butch Baker.  I know some day I will bite the dust, but I’d rather it not involve being devoured by 500-pound hogs.

For those of you who still have your semen collection cups and pig insemination tubes from last year’s pig visit to Minneapolis, I can now answer some of your burning questions about pig production:

-Today, more than 90% of sows are bred via artificial insemination.

-Pigs can grow from 3 lbs to 300 lbs in 9 months, making them one of the most efficient animals for production of meat.

-China is the Pig King of the World, producing ~600 million pigs per year, compared with the US, a distant second place at ~115 million pigs per year.

-The number of US pig farms has reduced dramatically from over 1 million in the 1960s to less than 50,000 today, as the industry has greatly consolidated and a few major producers now strongly dominate the industry.

-The US swine industry estimates it lost ~$50 BILLION from the 2009 ‘swine flu’ virus, even though not a single US pig was infected with the virus at the time (humans have since introduced the virus into the US pig population).  The biggest hits were exports (countries like China cut off US swine exports, even though no US pigs were infected) and to the drop in domestic pork consumption due to misinformed consumer fears.  Such economic fallout has made the pig producers extremely wary of the media and very secretive about disease information among their swine herds, making my job of studying influenza virus dynamics among US swine populations exponentially more difficult.

-You all know how human influenza vaccines are regularly updated with the most currently circulating strains, as identified through a well-organized global WHO surveillance network (why you have to get your flu shot every year).  To facilitate this process, vaccine manufacturers are not required by FDA to re-license their updated vaccine every year.  In contrast, the USDA regulatory hurdles for updating the influenza vaccine used in swine are substantial, equivalent to licensing a new vaccine, and the swine influenza vaccine has not been updated in recent years despite the continued evolution of the influenza virus in swine and the vaccine’s limited efficacy.  We all find it a bit twisted that the regulatory hurdles for a vaccine for pigs is so much more stringent than for humans.  So instead of using the outdated commercial vaccines, pig farmers are increasingly resorting to unlicensed autogenous vaccines (up to 60% of vaccines now are autogenous), essentially the ‘snake oil’ of the swine vaccine world.

-Iowa is the corn capital of the world.  Since corn is used as pig feed, the bulk of the swine industry is located in Iowa and neighboring Midwest states (hence all the bacon-themed shirts in the Des Moines airport gift shop).  In the 1990s, newer swine production facilities were built in North Carolina and Oklahoma.   However, since it’s cheaper to transport the piglets than the corn required to feed them (piggies eat a lot of corn to grow 300 lbs in 9 months!), many of these piglets are trucked to Iowa and other Midwestern states to be fattened up prior to slaughter.  We’ve been studying how these long-distance trucking practices spread pathogens like influenza around the US and particularly into Iowa and the Midwest.

 

Rt 48 through West Virginia

September 30, 2011

 

I snapped a few photos of a full arc double rainbow we saw driving back to DC from Canaan Valley.  Absolutely the most stunningly clear rainbow I’ve ever seen.  I wish I had better photos than these I took with Aaron’s iPhone camera while driving in the Jeep.

ps – you NEED to see the youtube double rainbow dude

 

Nat’s game

September 22, 2012

Washington, DC

‘Aaron, look!!’  I waved the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine in front of him, opened to the cartoon above.  ‘This!  This is my childhood!’  Aaron, who had spent a good hour of our last Friday evening listening to my father’s heated explanation of why Nats catcher Jesus Flores, who earlier that evening had let a 9th inning pitch get away that resulted in the Nationals squandering their 2-1 lead, would certainly not be deserving any chocolate-chip cookie that night. Aaron had to agree that the cartoon perfectly captured my father’s approach to athletics.  ‘Maybe you should frame it for his birthday,’ he suggested.  I’ve refused to buy my father a birthday present after I asked him on Saturday to see the book I gave him for Christmas last year, and he brought around his laptop and re-ordered the book on Amazon for me because ‘it wasn’t worth the 20 minutes it would take to find it.’  My father has never been big into presents.  The only present I’ve gotten in the last years is a tennis racquet that I had to hound him for months about before he finally got it.  The most memorable Christmas present of all time is the 8×12 black-and-white headshot of himself looking scholarly.  He gave one to everyone in the family, wrapped in a box.  It was an especially weird Christmas.

 

Reston, Virginia

September 22, 2010

Results

 

With 9 minutes until gun time, I whispered in Aaron’s ear, ‘Do you think I can go pee in those bushes over there?’  After two straight weeks of trail racing, where the world is my bathroom, I wasn’t so sure what the rules were for a neighborhood road race.  But Cameraman Aaron, his hat on backwards, his lenses bulging in his cargo pants pockets (at least I think that was a lens…..), and his camera slung around his neck, made no effort to dissuade my pursuit of bladder relief.  Smart man.  My bladder was suffering on two fronts: for one, my period had exploded that morning and whatever fireworks were going on in there were pushing the bladder into several organs with which the bladder is not usually acquainted; secondly, in order to keep the uterine explosions from doubling me over in pain, I’d resorted to my 800mg ibuprofen prescription horse pill, and to make sure my kidneys wouldn’t be negatively affected by the racing/drugging combo, I’d gulped down loads of water.

So, in my perfect bladder storm, I dashed off to some bushes off a bike path some 40 meters away.  As I was coming out of the bushes I was startled to see another guy coming down the bike path.  ‘Is this where we go?’ he asked.  He looked strangely familiar, but I didn’t realize it was Alan Webb until he was announced a few minutes later at the race start.  ‘Yup,’ I chirped.  And that was the beginning of a long beautiful friendship…..Just kidding.  Aaron did completely mortify me by making me take my picture with Alan after the race.  He KNOWS I don’t do those things.  Alan was very nice about it, if not a little goofy about joking about how he wears a bright yellow shirt so that NASA can track him from outer space.

But anyway, back to the race.  I was running this particular 8k because Aaron had agreed to take pictures for his friend Lindsay who was the race director (props to Lindsay, the race was a stunning demonstration that Reston, Virginia can throw down a road race).  This race has been run for five or so years now as a fundraiser for brain aneurysm research in honor of Tim Susco, a student at Reston’s South Lakes High School who died tragically of a brain aneurysm (hence the South Lakes connection with Alan Webb).  After two weeks of long, tough racing at the Women’s Half Marathon and the Dam Half, I was looking forward to a low-key small-time road race that would be short, flat, and simple, with no Stairways to Heaven, no need to find course for yourself, and ideally, no competition.  I mean, who goes to Reston??

But Alan Webb wasn’t the only speedster there.  Alan ran away with the men’s field in 24:19, finishing 2 minutes ahead of the second place Ethiopean-looking guy.  But the competition for the top female spots was fierce, and the top 3 women edged out everyone in the field except the top 3 men.  A girl named Kristin Anderson who was outfitted and behaved like a college runner (ie, itty bitty clothes, lots of pre-race jumping and flexing) won the women’s race in 29:06.  She described herself as a track runner who was taking a break and doing some road races for fun.  Elena Orlova was second in 29:34, and I finished 7 seconds back in 29:41.  With third in the bag and second out of reach, my objective of the last mile became to pass the Fexy guy, who finished 4th male behind me in 29:53.  Yikes, I put 12 second on him in the final mile.  I could tell that of all the nice groups at the race (there were many charity organized teams), the Fexy people were particularly annoying, and I was glad to hear Aaron confirm my gut instinct that the Fexy (a play on Iron (Fe) Man (XY)) were notoriously evil even among triathletes.  Check out team Fexy’s website to become acquainted with the anti-WUS.

For whatever reasons — two previous weekends of tough trail racing, the travails of my monthly visitor — my legs felt dead heavy and the race was a bit of a slog for me.  But it was good to be able to break 6-minute pace on an off day.  My legs are tired and ready for a taper leading up to Baltimore Marathon on October 13th.  This is the first time I’ve trained for a marathon with someone who knows his stuff (ie, Aaron) actually witnessing how I train.  And I really had no idea I was such an unorthodox trainer (or non-trainer) until I had Aaron serving as a mirror.  I feel like I’ve trained a lot, but I realize now my ~50 miles or so a week is still just a fraction of what top runners do.  [Note Aaron and I have run our long runs together, plus Aaron has done some extras.  Aaron’s response: This is the WORST I’ve ever trained for a marathon.  My response: Golly, this is the BEST I’ve ever trained for a marathon.]

 

Dam Half Marathon

RJ Winter State Park, PA

September 17, 2012

 

Anyone who has run Alisa Springman’s Holy Cowans Gap 50k in May knows that Pennsylvania trail running is a breed of its own.  Pennyslvanians don’t seem to take much stock in switchbacks.  The Dam Half at RJ Winter State Park near Lewisburg, PA more than lived up to its billing — although that scratchy cotton longsleeve may soon be finding its way to Goodwill:

The elevation gains will surely leave legs screaming for mercy. Afterwards, contestants will bask in the camaraderie around the pavilion, complete with a warm fire and delicious food. This race is open to all levels of athletes who share a common love for the adventurous outdoors. Other namesakes to this outstanding event are the attractive long sleeve t-shirts, awesome top-finisher awards, abundant door prizes, and overflowing goody bags.  Earn a Marathoner’s finishing medal at this year’s inaugural Dam Full. 

First, I have to rave about the food.  Chicken BBQ, hot pizza, SHEETZ TRUCK…..what more could a hungry runner ask for?  A lovely sunny picnic table by a lake ?  Well, the Dam Half’s got that covered too.

Next, I have to rave about the course.  I went in pretty blind.  I knew it was tough, and I knew there was some horrid climb with a mile to go called Stairway to Heaven.  But LORDY it was technical.  I hadn’t seen vertical climbs comprised of boulder fields since….well heck, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen climbs like that.  I was in such a rock-focused trance dancing along on the Mid-state trail that around mile 5 I completely missed a right turn.  Now the Dam Half is one of the best-marked races I’ve ever run.  There were so many orange streamers in our faces that they actually started to get kind of annoying.  So I was still in the middle of my rock-trance when I recalled vaguely that some time ago I had been running, staring at my feet, and that an orange ribbon had flashed by.  Somehow that orange ribbon didn’t register in my brain until I was a long ways further down the Mid-state trail.  But when it did, and I realized that there was no one ahead of me and no one behind me.  CRAPPERS!   I ran back, only to see George Lesieuture making the correct turn.  George provided me with some indication of how many minutes I lost during my little foray down the MST (I finished 10 minutes ahead of George).  Lordy, I cursed up a storm.  Not only would I have to make up loads to regain my lead, but I was now stuck behind a train of slower runners with no room to pass.  Oh, I was pissed at myself.  How do you leap over an orange piece of tape and only have it register 5 minutes later that you probably shouldn’t have done that??  My only consolation is that the MST in one gnarly trail.  I know that because Sean at one point wanted me to run the whole thing with him.  And I know that if Sean wants to spend several days on a trail, it can only be because it’s totally gnarly.

Stuck behind that line of runners, there was no way I was going to make up ground, and I begrudgingly accepted that in my idiocy I had lost the race.  But suddenly the trail emptied into an open grassy road and bingo!  I flew up the road, down the road, onto a wide trail, right past my friend Meira, who thought I was way ahead and was entirely perplexed to hear female breathing behind her, and to the finish.  I’m not sure why or how women breathe differently than men, but it’s totally true, you can tell the difference between guy breath and girl breath.  Anyway, I have to admit I didn’t quite ‘fly’ up the Stairway to Heaven, I kind of heaved my begrudging ass up that interminable climb.  But the road gave me a chance to redeem my rookie mistake, and I was thankful for it.  Honestly, I’ve never been so happy to see a road.