Wussies

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Run for the Birds

1-mile, 2-mile, 5-mile, and 7-mile options

Shepherdstown, WV

 

 

‘Sean, you’re running this?’  The incredulous volunteer apparently did not consider the 11th annual Shepherdstown Run for the Birds to be a race befitting the likes of the Great Sean Andrish.

I retorted that the Run for the Birds was the premier event of the spring, a claim that Aaron and Sean understood by the end of the day to not be the least hyperbolic.  RFB is a little gem of a race, with 5- and 8-mile trail race options that wind along the roads, fields, and woodlands of the US Fish & Wildlife Service conservation training grounds in Shepherdstown, WV.  It’s a low-key family friendly affair, with a 2-mile fun run that my dad did, as well as a 1-mile kiddie run that Selena’s three boys ran, following a lengthy warmup of calisthenics (see little Emmett demoing his killer yoga moves).

I was originally signed up for the 8-mile trail race, but I had been limping all week since the Boston Marathon, with a lot of pain in my IT band and the outside of my left knee.  I had found that skipping and cantering did not cause it pain, so I changed to the 5-mile race and was prepared to skip my way through the five miles if I had to.  Sean signed up for the 8-mile; the last time he could recall doing a short-distance race was 2005.  And Aaron was psyched to skip and prance the 5-mile version with me.

 

But I have curious legs.  They griped at the beginning of the race while I was running cautiously, but they got much happier as the pace picked up and by the last mile I my knee was pretty much pain-free.  Although poor Aaron was robbed of what was supposed to be an easy frolic through the fields and instead had to sprint through the woods with me.  I didn’t want to run fast, but my knee demanded pace, so I complied.

The course is a series of different loops of small rolling hills along a road, then through fields that feel a lot like a XC course, and then along a wide dirt path that twists through the woods.  There is one big hill, that ends with unnecessary cruelty through some tall grass.  We always have an internal competition to see who can spot the most birds along the course.  No one else was looking so I won that.  I also won the 5-mile race, as did Aaron (we finished together 1-2), and Sean won the 8-mile handily, leading start to finish.  WUSsie domination.

 

While I love a lot of things about the RFB — the fun course, the low-key atmosphere, the good cause (Potomac Audubon Society), the 4 difference races to accommodate all ages and kinds of runners, the plethora of friendly volunteers — the perennial weakness of the race is the awards ceremony.  It takes them hours to compile the results — the race started and 9am and we didn’t get out of there until noon, and awards were still being handed out when we left.  I guess it’s part of the charm of the race.  The prizes are also pretty ghetto: a slip of paper for free entry to next year’s RFB.  (Although I guess that’s better than the Fire on the Mountain prize — Aaron and I actually ran into the FOTM RD at race registration, and he sheepishly admitted to still being ‘backlogged’.  It’s been 6 months, buddy.)  But I had 16 guests arriving at 1pm for a post-race birthday lobster party that I had done zero preparation for……

 

Except fortunately we had gone to Wegmans the night before (there is a Wegmans in Frederick, MD), and Wegmans has everything a girl could possibly want for a birthday party, including a frog piñata.  When my friends arrived I was still madly cooking and still in my sweating running clothes, but there wasn’t much point showering when the day would be spent playing tennis, romping in the woods (we had to have the traditional Birthday Bug hunt — yes, that is exactly what it sounds like: here’s your jar, go get your bugs!! — Leo won this year with a pretty awesome grasshopper), smacking the piñata, and cracking open and eating lobsters — which, at least the way I do it, is a pretty messy affair.

The weather held for us to enjoy our lobsters in the sun.  It was a rollicking good birthday.  Sean and Cori even cracked their own lobsters this year.  The kiddies were all good sports: Lily and Aidan even helped Sean pick out all the rubber bands out of the pounds of lobster shells so we could throw them in the compost out back.  In addition to what have become the lobster party regulars — Cecile, Bernard, Cori, Jess, Josh, Tany, Bing, and Sean — we had Selena and her family, Wladimir and Cynthia from Brazil, Cori’s niece and nephew, my uncle Jon, and my boss Mark, who actually owns a property in Shepherdstown that with all his jetsetting he hasn’t had a chance to visit yet.  But maybe after seeing the charms of this quiet riverside West Virginia countryside he’ll go check it out some day.

 

Bull Run Run

April 14, 2012

 

Normally Aaron is photographer extraordinaire.  But this year he was going into Boston untrained on account of his Achilles and didn’t want to stand around all day.  And he had a whiny girlfriend who moans about rising before 6.  Plus, this year we had Bobby ‘So you got a new dog?’ Gill to fill in.  (Yes, that was my not-so-subtle way of inquiring who his new lady friend holding the leash at his side was, as Bobby had allowed 30 minutes to lapse without any sign of an introduction.)  Aaron and I were happy to simply be photo back-up, sleeping in til good ole 6:30am and just camping out the whole day at the Marina.  Compared to working the whole night at Visitors Center at MMT (my only other volunteering experience), shooting pics at BRR was easy peasy.  And fun.  By mile 77 at MMT I see a WUSsie come through every couple hours.  At Bull Run it was rapid fire — Neal, JLD, Sean, Keith, Mario, New Guy Mike, Michele, Doug, Kerry, Joe, Boots, Kirstin, in something like that order.  And unlike MMT, these runners looked HAPPY.  And it was SUNNY.  Ooh, I think I found my new volunteer calling.  I actually won’t be able to volunteer at MMT this year because I’ll be flying to London for work.  I will miss it — that is certainly a unique experience up there, the closest you get to feeling like a nurse on the Civil War battlefield.  But not only do I like sitting all day in the sun (I found a perfect log to plop on), it turns out that I really like to take pictures.  (The rest of our pictures are here).

 

 

 

 

116th Boston Marathon

April 16, 2012

 

In the months leading up to Boston, it became clear that Aaron and I had divergent visions of what ‘running the Boston Marathon’ meant, mine involving a complex web of social engagements and traditions, Aaron’s involving the most minimalist path to Hopkinton and back.  Aaron’s way was to fly in the night before, plop all his belongings in his drop bag, trot through Framingham, Wellesley, and Brookline, grab his stuff from the bus in Copley Square, dash through the secret shower, and hop on a plane back to Reston.  If Aaron had a kitty, he’d be back before it even woke from its long kitty nap.

But for me Boston is a major social event, the planning for which begins some time in, say, January.  I run as part of the Center Volunteers in Medicine (CVIM) charity team based in State College, PA (although great lengths are gone to in order to ensure that we are never mistaken for the kind of charity runners that don’t have to run a Boston qualifying time).  CVIM provides medical services for employed adults in State College who lack health insurance via doctors that volunteer a couple hours every month.  I run for CVIM every year, I love supporting the team, but I am an absolutely horrific fundraiser (Me: ‘CVIM is such a great cause.’ Friend/family member: ‘So do you want me to contribute money?’  Me: ‘Oh, no, I think you donated a couple years ago, you don’t have to donate every year.  I’m not even running hard this year.’)

The actual race is probably the least important part of the Boston Marathon experience for me.  It’s about the road trip with the State Collegians, popping into Dunmore for pizza and more of the Cali clan, about seeing Boston friends like Peter Bacon and Sarah Schwertner, about seeing my Grandma, who used to watch her uncle Lauri run the Boston Marathon as a girl in the 1920s and 1930s and hand him oranges, just like the kids still do today.  (Lauri was apparently a perfectly fine name for a Finnish man in the 1920s).  It’s about the post-race party.  It’s about all the adventures and mishaps that inevitably arise when a large group of 20+ runners and their family are herded through the long, complex itinerary of events that have been planned for the weekend, the least of which is the actual race starting from Hopkinton.  The wrench in the tire.  The Newton-Wellesley Hospital and the Housewives of Orange Country.  Anything that involves Peter Bacon.

But relationships are all about compromise, right?  [Back in June I was running with Sean and he asked me whether Aaron really knew me yet – it was early in the relationship and he wanted to make sure Mr Schwartzbard had an inkling of what he was getting into.  I told him that Aaron described our relationship as like a United Nations meeting where I got the votes of the US, China, Russia, France, and Germany and he got the vote of Ghana.  Sean quickly grasped that his concerns were unfounded.]

Taking Ghana’s soft voice into consideration, the Marthon Security Council ruled that the compromise would work as follows: we would fly up Sunday afternoon and fly back Monday after the race, in complete adherence with the Schwartzbard Boston tradition.  But crammed into those 30 hours I would be allowed as much social activity as I could squeeze in and possibly still run a marathon.

So after grabbing our race bibs at the expo (and some snazzy new headgear), we had our first social engagement: a wine and cheese with the Weingers, family friends who have a lovely house in Newton and graciously hosted Aaron and me and my parents, who had driven in from Vermont after visiting my brother and his two baby girls, Summer and Savannah.  Ron Weinger went to Brandeis with my father, where my non-Jewish father achieved his premier athletic accomplishment as an intramural football champion.  However, I think it’s more remarkable that my father was immersed in Jewish humor for four years at a Jewish university and still can’t understand what Seinfeld is about.

The next social engagement was dinner at Appetito in Newton with the Weingers, my parents, and the State College gang.  Of course Tom’s group was 45 minutes late, but at least it was for a good cause this time, buying orange ribbon for us to pin on our singlets on race day.  The ribbons were to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting.  Five years ago, our CVIM teammate Jen Herbstritt spoke to her brother Jeremy on the phone before the race so he could wish her luck; by the time she finished he had been shot and killed in the Virginia Tech classroom.  I get goose bumps just writing that sentence.

We reconvened with the State College crew Monday morning at Hopkinton State Park, where John Domico demonstrated comprehensive lube application so that we could all leave massive greasy butt marks on the seats of the cheese bus that took us to the Athlete’s Village at Hopkinton.  It was a three-ring circus keeping our unwieldy large group together.  We waited for 20 minutes by the port-o-potties because we thought that Mike Weyendt was having trouble dropping his Hershey kisses (Mike had long ago finished his business and gone off to drop his stuff while we kept the port-o-potties company).

 

I dropped back to Corral 6 to run with John Domico and Jim Moore.  I was absolutely determined to run easy and have fun and not destroy my legs before the Promise Land 50k two weeks later.   I even wore my ‘fun skirt’ to remind myself of my mission should my legs start getting too forward, and carried a disposable camera to keep myself entertained.  I was actually glad that it was near record-high temperatures because that was even more reason to take it slow and easy.  And the heat actually made it more fun, getting splashed with sprinklers and hoses by kids along the way.  The fans seemed to sense that on this hot day we needed them even more, and were clutch in handing out extra water and cold popsicles.  You couldn’t go 100m without something being offered.  We took pictures, we jumped on trampolines, and our CVIM group kept expanding as we caught Tom and Andrew around mile 8 or 9 and later Mike and Meira.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things got a bit chaotic in Wellesley because everyone (particularly Tom) was stopping for kisses.  I tried to get a picture of the big red lipstick mark on John’s cheek, but the picture didn’t come out.  I got a kiss, but unlike the Katie Perry song, I didn’t much like it.  It was much more fun to watch Tom getting his 40 or so kisses, just ambling down the line of girls, soaking it up.  Happy boy.

Coming out of Wellesley our group had been splintered by the siren calls of the Wellesley femme fatales.  Out of nowhere Mike Weyendt appeared.  Running with Mike, I was reminded of my Achilles heel.  No, not literally – that little tendon is Aaron’s Achilles heel.  My Achilles heel is running slowly.  It kills me.  Every time I try to rein in my pace so that I can run with other runners at a slower pace I get some nasty injury.   In August I was limping after Cascade Crest more than Aaron after pacing him through a slogging final 30 miles.  Even just a fun little run with a co-worker in Lima in November left me limping for months because of another inflamed tendon on the side of my foot.  So not unexpectedly, after running a half marathon socially with my friends, coming into Newton my left hip was screaming.  And the scream traveled down my left IT band into the outside of my left knee.

I had only one option: speed up.  I had to drop Mike, I had to run on my own, or I didn’t have a prayer of finishing this run.  Running hard up the hills helped a lot, helped shake things out.  The quicker miles shook out some of the pain, and by the time I saw my parents at the top of Heartbreak Hill, I was more confident that I would be able to finish.  I took some pictures with my parents, stretched out my hip a little, and headed for the finish.  I didn’t want to run hard, I wanted to stop in Boston College for beer, I wanted to slap kids hands, I wanted to swerve to run through sprinklers.  But in pain all you can do is look forward and take heart that every step is getting you closer.  I felt badly about abandoning my friends; I wished they knew that if it weren’t for the pain that I would still be back there with them.

Aaron was amazingly waiting for me at my drop bag bus, and he and I met my grandmother and aunt at the Marriott after the race, as well as my parents.  I word it that way because even though the six of us were all sitting together in the restaurant, there was a huge invisible gulf between my parents and my aunt.  There are two kinds of family problems: those that revolve around money and those that don’t.   The last thing you want to do after you run 26 hot miles with killer knee pain is hang out in a cloud of family financial tension.

.

But I wanted to see my grandma.  She’s 93.  I’m terrified that one of these days she’s not going to know who I am.  She brightened up when we talked about her uncle Lauri and she recounted the story of how she used to stand out on the street and hand him oranges.  And how Lauri stopped running the marathon when his brother Onni (my great-grandfather) died of tuberculosis.  Onni was a short-distance runner, a miler.  I have some of the silver award pieces he won that my grandma has given to me over the years.  My grandma also gave me the diamond engagement ring that Lauri gave to his wife.  I can’t recall his wife’s name but she was horrid, I’m told.  But her ring is amazing.  I didn’t have any diamonds to give my grandma, but I draped my finishers medal around her neck.

My knee still kills, a reminder of how I’m always punished when I try to ease my pace to run socially with friends.  Still, it was fun while it lasted.   One of these days I’ll master the Boston Fun Run — maybe in 2015, given that I run Boston on a three-year cycle.  Every time I run towards that never-nearing Citgo sign in those final miles, I swear that it will be my last Boston.  But let’s be serious, I know I’ll be back.