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My son Jed observes his freshly-minted sister Rebecca in the Seibo Byoin Hospital in Tokyo where she was born. |
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My sisters Lisa (left) and Carla (right) and me (middle) at Aunt Treen's house in Waco, TX. |
| My friend Peter Ballin took this picture of me and Jed as we were climbing Black Tusk in Garibaldi Park, BC. |
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Here's Peter (on the left), my wife Pat Sparkes and me attempting to make music. Peter's wife Shirley is taking the picture (in their kitchen). |
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Here I am in one of my finest moments: beating the great Willy Betts (he's the one on the right) in the 180 yard Low Hurdles at the 1963 Central Michigan University Relays to set a new Cranbrook School record of 19.5 s, which stands to this day (and will forever, since no one runs the 180 yard Low Hurdles anymore). |
Masters T&F: It's hard to beat the thrill of Track & Field competition, which is why I still do it today. Since 1993 I have given up long distance running and returned to my event, the 400 m Intermediate Hurdles.
1995: in July I ran the 400mH in the WAVA (World Association of Veteran Athletes) World T&F Championships in Buffalo, NY. I placed 6th for M45 with a 62.45 (62.40 in the prelims, but I had a bad cold and lost steam in the last 100m of the finals). Besides (whine, snivel) the other guys were all 47 or under....
1996: just like Michael Johnson, double gold at the 1996 Canadian Masters T&F Championships in Victoria, BC! In my case, both hurdles: 15.98 in M50 100mH and 62.90 in M50 400mH. Two weeks later (Aug 22-23) at the North American/Central American/Caribbean WAVA Championships in Eugene, OR, I took silver in the M50 100mH with 15.84 and gold in the M50 400mH with a PB of 60.72! (That's the equivalent of 51.39 for a 20-year-old, according to the Age-Graded Tables.) OK, so maybe MJ has a bit more to be proud of; but I'm not getting an $0.5M appearance fee!
1997: a bad year spent recovering very slowly from an aggravated left Achilles (and/or the bursa between it and the calcaneous - the doctors never were able to make a firm diagnosis) acquired when my foot slipped running up wet steps in October 1996. One useful observation: recovering from an injury is a process with a second-order phase transition - if running hard enough and frequently enough to maintain conditioning causes the injury to be aggravated more during workouts than it can recover between workouts, either the injury gets steadily worse or you get out of shape; but when it can recover enough between workouts to do it again, you start getting steadily better. The difference is mathematically smooth but psychologically discontinuous! I made that transition around the end of 1997 after over a year of frustration and "pool running" (ugh!).
1998: things are looking up again, thanks to the privilege of running with New York's Central Park Track Club during my sabbatical leave (1997-98) at Columbia Univ. Not only did I get whipped into shape chasing such greats as Sid Howard, but I got to run relays with them. I love relays. The high point was winning the M50+ 4x100 (and breaking the old American record in the M50+ 4x400, although it was only good for 3rd place) at the Penn Relays in April (23-25). Actually I didn't win; William Overby, Ron Johnson and Ken Brinker did - I just ran a leadoff leg that was not too slow for them to make up, at least in the 4x100.
1999: the first few months of 1999 were hampered by a thrombosis (medical jargon for a big blood clot) in my calf, for which I had to take Coumadin (a blood thinner containing warfarin) for 4 months; but as of June I am once again training hard for the WAVA World Championships in Gateshead, England. Gulp.
Age-Graded Tables: But, hey, you probably didn't click on this item to see me brag about my athletic exploits; so let me offer something that might actually be useful to someone: my (under construction) Age-Graded Table Lookup utility, which so far has only the men's HH, IH, 200m and 400m. (Sorry, this is all I have had time to type in. Also they are the events I usually run.... Maybe you would like to type in the data for your favourite events and send me the resultant file? Eventually it will all be there.) Just enter your event, your age and your performance and the AGT utility will calculate the equivalent performance for a 20-30 year old (for all of whom the factor is set to unity).
If you like graphs, have a look at the PostScript file showing plots (and second-order polynomial fits) of the Age-Graded Tables for the Men's Intermediate Hurdles.
More MT&F: Masters T&F enthusiasts will certainly want to visit Ken Stone's Masters T&F Web Site and may want to check out my little auxillary Masters T&F Database site where you can look up MT&F people or put your name into the database if you so desire. One of these days Ken and I will conspire to set up a fancier Web site where you can type in your age, event and time [and optionally your name, the date, the meet, the conditions and some comments if you want a record kept of your performances - this has interesting possibilities as a statistics-gathering tool...]. Shouldn't be hard, but I have to get back to work now.
In Spring 1997 I also put parts of Physics 455 (Statistical Mechanics for Engineering Physics) on WebCT. As for PHYS 200, there is also a public P455 Home Page if you're interested.
In 1998-99 I helped teach Science 1, a course that was created at UBC in 1993 to combine Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology into one integrated First-Year University Science curriculum. Wow! What an eye-opener! I hope to learn as much as I can about education in the remaining 2 years before I get recycled back into "mean stream" teaching. (Faculty members lucky enough to be selected for this privilege are restricted to 3-year tours of duty; after that they have to stand down and let someone else have a chance.) One big project we have started is the Science 1 HyperTextBook, which see.
If you are fond of elementary particle physics, you may also want to peek at my diagrams of Pion Decay and P-violation or maybe Muon Decay. Enjoy.
- Last updated 26 May 1997 -