Machu Picchu, Peru

June 30, 2012

‘Crap, we totally screwed up Machu Picchu.’

I was lazing on the bed post-breakfast at the Casa Andina Hotel in Cusco, Peru.

‘We should never have gone there at this age; we should have waited until we were old people, like eighty or something.’

Aaron was only half-listening, but I continued my explanation, ‘I mean, we’ve ruined travel for life now.  How is anything going to live up to Machu Picchu?  Where are you going to have such amazing ancient culture situated perfectly within such sweeping, lush mountain scenery?  We’ll be in the Himalayas and be like Sure these are awesome mountains, but where’s the cool Inca stuff?  Then we’ll be in Giza at the pyramids and be like Impressive, but kind of a boring, arid desert don’t you think?’

I paused.  ‘Aaron, this is where you say Martha, you’re thinking too much.’

He rolled in bed. “I think you had too much Coca tea.’

‘No, I just had a little.’  But altitude made caffeine and alcohol go straight to your head (Cusco was at 3,300 meters), and my head wouldn’t stop flittering: ‘Do you think Sean would like Machu Picchu?’

We concluded that every WUS would be blown away by Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is so famous and so hyped, you go in almost certain that there will be letdown.  For instance, the Great Wall of China was very cool, but so crawling with tourists and entire packs of schoolchildren that it kind of lost its allure.  

But I have no reservations about over-hyping Machu Picchu – it not possible to.  Pictures can’t convey the aura of the place; no adjective (‘majesty’, ‘grandeur’) does it justice.  No, I would not describe Machu Picchu as a life-changing experience.  There were lots of people there meditating and pursuing deep spiritual experiences.  The only small change for me is that there is now a drip of sadness I can’t shake, knowing that the amazing Inca civilization, so beautifully aligned with its natural environment, was crushed and dismembered and ultimately enslaved by a small band of Spanish thugs led by Pizarro in the 1500s, who eventually melted down all the golden statues of Sun Gods from the Inca temples and shipped it in gold bricks back to Spain.  To what end?  Pizarro was eventually murdered by his own men.

~                                    ~                                    ~

Martha’s Tips for Enjoying Machu Picchu

1. There is no shame in tours. Part of Machu Picchu’s charm is how remote and inaccessible it is and how tightly the Peruvians control the number of tourists per day. I’m a seasoned traveler but I was almost brought to my knees trying to make online reservations and all the bus and train bookings needed to get there. 

2. Get a window seat on the left side of the plane (not over the wing) from Lima to Cusco (sit on the right side of the plane flying back to Lima).  Peruvian Airlines is the cheaper option compared to LAN but we had no problems.

 

3. If the person who is not picking you up at the Cusco Airport is not there immediately, don’t panic, just wait there.  Most likely, as in our case, she mistakenly picked up a different person named ‘Marta’ from the flight and didn’t realize her mistake until she had brought the wrong Marta back to her home (we can’t imagine how that conversation went….).  But don’t worry, she’ll come back and rescue you and give you delicious fruits and tea at her home.

 

4. If Malu’s friendly neighbor Sam offers to drive you to Ollantaytambo for a modest sum, definitely do that instead of taking the bus, definitely take him up on that.  There are beautiful places to stop along the way.  It is a breathtaking drive through the mountains with many places to stop, including a neat little shop where we could watch women make yarn from alpaca.

5. Hit the restaurant in Ollantaytambo that is inside the train station

6.  See Machu Picchu at sunrise.

7. Do the hike up Huaynapicchu, but know what you’re getting into, as footing can be tricky and the climb very steep.  There were loads of tourists who clearly had not known what they were getting into and were vocally not enjoying themselves.

8. Enjoy the view from the top

 

9. Climbing up is tough, but don’t underestimate the climb down

 

10. Make friends with the alpacas

11. Wear layers

12. As the day wears on, sitting is the way to go.

13.  Bring music for the train ride home, unless you like listening to the same jingle-jangly acoustic version of some Paul Simon song that is played EVERYWHERE in Cusco.

14.  There is so much more to this region than Machu Picchu. We’ll definitely be back to explore more of the beautiful region around Cusco, as we just got a quick taste this go round.

15. Stock up on coca (but only in forms like coca chocolate that won’t be detected by the many drug-sniffing dogs in Peruvian airports)

16. Travel with fun people 🙂

Brian Greeley

Highland Sky 40

June 16, 2012

 

 

I tried to get Brian to let us videotape him rapping this in the sweater vest he won so we could post that, but he respectfully declined:

 

Here’s a little story I got to tell

About a bearded man you may know so well

June 16th is when this race went down

A forty miler in a West Virginia town

 

The race begins nice and early

The weather is cool and my hair is curly

Down a gravel road we all trot

Running from the starting point: a scenic parking lot

 

A sharp left turn puts the runners in grass

Past the first aid station, get some water for your butt

We gradually climb, going up and up

Through the muddy patches and thistles clumps

 

As a group of five, we reach the top

The pace is comfortable but then there’s a stop

All of the sudden Aaron loses his shoe

A common casualty to the muddy glue

 

Now here’s the thing about these long trail races

A lot of things happen, but I forget the traces

I’m going to fast-forward near mile twenty

It’s the aid station and the road is long and plenty

 

Hard packed gravel comprises this road

Surely not an ideal transportation mode

Ahead, fellow runners tackle mounds oh so high

They curse the beautiful section, ‘The road across the sky’

 

Back on the trail things feel surprisingly good

This unique section of the sods has no overhanging wood

From rock to rock on tired legs I hop

My water is gone, now I beg to stop

 

The last true trail section eagerly awaits

And with Martha in tow the pain finally abates

On we run past bikers and horses

Down gnarly steep hills and up sheer ski courses

 

It felt like time stood still as we ran on the road

Frankly it was terrible but I bore the load

Many expletives did make their way out

Save at aid stations where someone might have clout

 

Onward to the finish did we push

At this juncture my legs were simply mush

But alas there it is, the finish line ahead

It’s over, and to my surprise I didn’t drop dead

 

A lot of things must happen behind the scenes

To make a race go smoothly and keep everything clean

I must thank the volunteers, Martha, Aaron, Dan, & Kerry

Without everyone’s help this race would be quite hairy,

 

So thank you all, indeed it was a lovely trot!

Next year when I’m in Michigan, I’ll sure miss you a lot.

 

Highland Sky 40 miler

June 16, 2012

Davis, WV

Pretty much everything you need to know about Highland Sky is written in this picture: Ragan rocked it, setting a new CR in 7:03; Aaron pulled out a remarkable 11th place having run less mileage this spring than he typically covers in the first two weeks of January, but undeniably suffered for it; and Brian snagged the last top-5 spot in his HS rookie debut.  I paced Brian from mile 32 (finishing the course from where I dropped out last year), and then swung around again to run the last mile or so with Aaron.  The last 4 miles of HS are on some long, lonely, sun-exposed roads, and I was happy to be able to cheer up that otherwise miserable section of the race.   As Aaron and I were running, Aaron mentioned that he’d been running earlier in the race with a guy who recounted a story about last year at HS how there was an escape horse on the trail early in the climb and how a girl had asked him if it was his pony.  Aaron admitted that yes, he knew that girl.  I later reunited with the guy at the finish line and admitted that I was the pony line girl.  Anyway, I’ll leave these champions to tell their own stories.  Aaron has promised us a perfect sonnet.

 

 

Tuesday was my first WUS back in a long time — being injured is so isolating and lonely — and after my recent work travails a good dose of WUS was exactly what the doctor ordered.

WUSsies were popping up like daisies after a spring rain: we had Justine post-baby, and Ryon post-concussion and face-splitting (25 stitches, was it?), and Vishal post-shoulder dislocating Glover Park steps tumble; we had Sophie from Charlottesville and a new guy from Colorado — we nearly expected Amy to swoop in from Portland;  Sabrina is back for a couple summer months; Tracy made a rare appearance with Keith; and I don’t even have space to list the whole boatload of WUS regulars that showed.  Good luck to the other CPBGers trying to catch the NBA finals on the television — the roof deck was ours.

So good to catch up on all the crazy WUSsie news.  We got weddings galore and babies born and getting ready for their world debut (Neal & Gaby’s boy is gunning for October).  And what’s this with BOBBY GILL getting hitched?  Wasn’t it was just a year ago he was drooling over my Italianos?  Maybe we’ll have to have a Beer Mile just to lure him out to confirm the rumors.

WUSsies been tearing it up.  This is the best picture I’ve seen in a while.  You just gotta love Joe Clapper.

On this blog I’ve made numerous indirect references to my job (e.g., postings my work trips to China, Istanbul, and Kathmandu; NIH 5k runs; and of course the famous colleagues from Italy, Alice & Isabella).  But I haven’t written much about what I actually do for my job, mainly because it never related much to running except for taking me to cool new places to run.  But this this weekend was different, on Saturday my work and running worlds fully collided.  I was entirely planning to run a 4-mile PR Twilight Race in Ashburn at 7:30pm on Saturday night.  But work was making me, as my Jewish mom would say, meshugana (meshugana is yiddish for crazy person; my mom tends to use it more to mean a temporary crazy spell).  And to explain why I’d gone meshugana I have to relate a little about what I actually do for a living besides constantly travel to exotic countries.

Most people know that I’m a biologist who studies viruses at the NIH.  Some can elaborate that I don’t do ‘wet lab’ (ie anything that involves a pipet or rubber gloves) but do computer analysis of the genetic sequences of rapidly evolving RNA viruses like influenza.  Those who get extra big cookies can say that studying the evolution of influenza viruses is important for several reasons: (a) the virus evolves so quickly that the influenza vaccine must be updated annually with new strains, and predicting new strains remains a major public health challenge, and (b) there is a lot about the seasonality and spatial spread of influenza that we still don’t understand, and you can use genetic data to study spatial and epidemiological patterns in very fine detail.  Since the 2009 swine-origin influenza pandemic, I’ve been studying influenza increasingly in pigs.

I love so many aspects of my job — I have a lot of freedom to follow my curiosity and pick my own projects, and to work in various locations — home, West Virginia, with my PhD adviser at Penn State, or in my lovely little office in an old mansion on the NIH campus, I have really wonderful colleagues (Alice and Isabella as cases in point), and I get to travel to very cool places to collaborate on work projects.  But there is one part of my job that drives me nutty, hair-pulling nutty, and that is Bayesian analysis.

The crux of my work involving inferring phylogenetic trees from hundreds of viral sequences to visualize the evolutionary history of the viruses and how viruses collected at different times and in difference geographical places are related. [For the very, very few of you interested in more detail, a nice review of the applications of evolutionary analysis of influenza to uncover basic viral characteristics like seasonality, spatial spread, and drug resistance is available: nelson-holmes-evolution-epidemic-influenza-NRG-07].  Phylogenetic trees (such as the classic one showing the genetic relatedness of humans, chimps, gorillas, and other apes) are central to the concept of evolution and even Darwin sketched a loose vision of a phylogenetic tree in his notebooks to explain the notion of common ancestry among organisms.

There are many different computational methods for inferring a phylogenetic tree, with the general trade-off being that slower, more computationally intensive methods generally more accurate trees, while quick-and-dirty methods are faster but make more assumptions.  Currently in vogue are Bayesian trees that incorporate prior assumptions (based on empirical evidence) and that produce not a single tree but an entire distribution of trees (generally 10,000 or so) with different probabilities of being the ‘real’ tree.  The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a nifty, commonly used algorithm that searches through ‘tree space’ to assess the probability of different trees.  There are various convergence statistics that determine whether the chain has been run long enough (anywhere from 5 million – 100 million or more iterations) to reach convergence.  You can endlessly fiddle with various parameters of your model to try to improve the rate of convergence, you can use different sized data sets, you can practice all kinds of black wizardry, or you can act like a toddler and mope, cry, tantrum, despair, and refuse to run 4-mile races.  I generally opt for the latter.

I am not a technically savvy person.  If Aaron adjusts all the settings on the camera, I’ll point and click it.  I never even bought a home printer because I was convinced I would never get it to work.  You all know I don’t use GPS or heart monitors or even watches.  I’m a shameless luddite.  So how did someone as technically Stone Age as I end up in a job that primarily involves extremely complicated computational analysis?  I ask myself that on a regular basis.  What was I thinking??  Why didn’t I choose something I was marginally competent at for a career?   The problem is that I’m obsessed with the fascinating underlying scientific questions.  Viral evolution is remarkable — the different strategies viruses have for successfully transmitting, infecting, and replicating in various different species of host.  The speed at which viruses adapt to different selective pressures, and the constraints on evolution and trade-offs.  These miniscule packets of genetic information (influenza virus has a ~12kbp genome encoding for 11 genes, while the average genome of tiny bacteria is ~5,000 Kbp) that are able to thrive in so many species.  Rabies is the most amazing — the way the virus actually induces dramatic neurological changes in the host (rampages of biting) to perpetuate the virus’s own transmission.  And now modern sequencing technology continues to advance each year allows for unprecedented study of how these tiny genomes evolve, and how the evolution is being driven by changes in ecology, agricultural practices, and human demography and behavior.  And not only does understanding the evolutionary dynamics of viruses have major implications for human health, but also reveals basic evolutionary processes of natural selection and random genetic drift that are far easier to study at these restricted scales than in humans or even bacteria and is our best weapon against the anti-evolution radical Christian factions.

I think I would be able to tolerate being bad at a job that I love conceptually while being technically incompetent (or sub-par, whatever) if I weren’t….well, me.  I’ve always had a hard time swallowing the feeling of disappointing others — something I thought I would shed over time, like one of those teenage pimples you thought you were done with at 16 but that still erupts at 30.  It manifests in running, too.  I’m still stupidly sensitive to the sinking feeling of being a disappointment.  I don’t understand how I can still feel the same way I did at age 30 as I did as a child, hanging my head after a soccer game lost.  When do we get over these things?  And when do we stop going for our own jugulars at the slightest whiff of failure?  It’s funny, when I race my little silent self pep talk is one simple request to my head to just please stay out of the way, to just be quiet, to not fire its fusillade of negative thoughts that I’ll have to spend a good part of the race just trying to stamp out.  Well, we’ll save a detailed discussion of what my brain tries to do to me while racing for another day — there’s a lot of backstory there.  Heck, I think Brian Greeley could fill a neuroscience thesis on the places my head goes when the gun goes off.