The talk I gave for the UXPin Enterprise UX virtual conference on February 15, 2017.

I had lots of fun talking about data and design!

Found this in my notes last night. It’s the list of things that I wanted to remember when I ran Mountain Lakes 100.

Tips I picked up from reading a lot of articles and from reading Jason Koop’s book, Training Essentials for Ultrarunning. I highly recommend that book and if there’s one thing that I took away from it — it’s that you want to show up at the start line as FIT as possible. That means having your engine / Vo2max as high as possible — which means, do a lot of threshold training — which means — run a lot of hill intervals.

The other book that I recommend is by Matt Fitzgerald, How Bad to you Want It?  There was some pseudoscience-y bullshit in there, but for the most part it was inspiring to read anecdotes about the mental side of endurance racing. And running an ultra is 99% mental.

Here’s my list.

• Finish the race (there’s nuance to this one – it’s not, “JUST finish the race” or “TRY to finish the race”, it’s explicit and direct:  “finish the m’fing race”)

• Pacing
  • Easy the first 25 miles. Walk.
  • Refresh at 50 miles at Clackamas
  • Run as far as I can
  • Walk/run, shuffle to get back into running form, then run
  • Slow down when eating, then run when I have energy
  • Maintain a consistent pace (slow and steady)
• Nutrition
  • Eat when my alarm goes off, every 20 minutes after 1.5 hours
  • Eat 200+ calories per hour
  • Try to eat as much real food as I can stomach
• Attitude
  • Take care of problems in a deliberate way, don’t let them go
  • Say please and thank you.
  • Have fun and enjoy the long run! Force the smile.
  • Recognize the pain, sit with it and then let it go
  • Your heart must be large
  • Steer clear of negative energy people

• Accept
• Diagnose
• Analyze
• Plan
• Take Action

• Keep focusing on the positive. No matter how bad things are, it could be worse.
• Keep shuffling, even if it seems just as slow as walking. It’s not.
• You want this BAD.
• This is a meditation exercise
• This is your treat!
• Run the plan, run your race.
• Keep it together. You got this.
• You are an unstoppable force.
• slow is smooth and smooth is fast
• Steady and strong, steady and smart.
• Be patient, no stress. Aid station to aid station.
• If I stop now, I’ll soon be back to where I started. And when I started I was desperately wishing to be where I am now.
• You didn’t come this far only to come this far.
• I’m a tough MF’er.
• Om mani padme hum.
• Just flow
• I don’t stop when I’m tired, I stop when I’m done.
• Absolutely nothing hurts more than quitting would. Barring an injury that physically prevents me from making forward progress, I’m not going to stop until I finish this race.
• I will do all that I can do, and a little more.
• During the first 50 miles don’t be stupid, during the last 50 miles don’t be a wimp.
• Have faith that the low point will not last. Everyone gets out of it eventually.
• Expect a very dark point about every 20 miles, or every 5 – 6 hours. Count the dark points, and make a pact to push through at least 5 of them.
• I CAN do this, I WILL finish
• Clear Your Mind of Can’t

I decided to get organized and stop dropping everything (links, notes, images, ideas) into Evernote (my distributed cognition 2nd brain) so I decided to try Pocket.

I don’t like that I’m locked into Pocket and can only share links with friends through a Pocket url. Super annoying.

https://getpocket.com
With the browser plugin to save articles to Pocket. The thing I found lacking was the absence of a ‘time to read’ estimate.

http://readruler.com/
To provide an estimate for how long an article is going to take to read.

The time to read is key for those limited times throughout the day when I have a few spare minutes to read a short article in my list.

I thought this article was helpful in thinking about how to read all those books in the backlog.

https://medium.com/@kennethn/how-i-read-more-books-13c2357a96a3#.e4vflefwl

Good read following Hooked and The World Beyond your Head. Same topics but dialing in on choice architecture and variable rewards.

How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

The takeaway is to always consider (when presented with a fixed set of choices, options, menu items) what is not in the list and why. This gets to the core of choice architecture … unless of course you’re the one making the list of choices.

Not that I’ve looked very hard, but I haven’t found a good way to get to the highlights I make in the books I read on the Kindle. In Crawford’s book, I took pictures within a note in Evernote and let Evernote handle the OCR scan.  Then I simply exported and cropped the images. A bit too time-consuming.

Well I looked in my Amazon account and found my notes this morning!

Here are some choice highlights from some 2016 books.

From The Art of Grace:

1. 1. Slow down and plan. There’s no way to be graceful when you’re rushing around haphazardly.
2. 2. Practice tolerance and compassion. This goes along with slowing down. Take time to listen and understand.
3. 3. Make room for others—on the sidewalk, at the bus stop, in a coffee shop, during a business meeting, and in your life.
4. 4. Strive to make things easy for people, even in small ways.
5. 5. Make things easy for yourself. Be easily pleased. Accept compliments, take a seat on the bus if someone offers it to you, embrace any kindness that comes your way. This is graciousness, and it is a gift for someone else. You are giving another person the gift of being graceful.
6. 6. Lighten your load. Shed painful shoes, disencumber yourself of heavy purses, backpacks, and briefcases. Let the bad stuff go, physically and emotionally.
7. 7. Take care of your body. The more you move, the better you’ll move. And the better you’ll feel.
8. 8. Practice extreme noticing. Look for grace where you least expect it.
9. 9. Be generous. It’s a lovely thing to anticipate and fulfill someone’s hopes.
10. 10. Enjoy. Raise a glass, as Lionel Barrymore did in the movie Grand Hotel, “to our magnificent, brief, dangerous life—and the courage to live it!”

From When Breathe Becomes Air:

Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.

From Purity: A Novel:

She proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get her to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up. I made this adjustment to my personality—and a hundred others like it in our early months together—and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn’t, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)

From Training Essentials for Ultrarunning:

Successful outcome goals strike a balance between being achievable and offering a challenge. Where you sit on the achievability teeter-totter depends on your individual tolerance for risk. As you set goals that are more challenging and closer to the limits of your capabilities, you must simultaneously accept a higher level of risk associated with those goals. The inverse is also true, but sometimes it’s harder to grasp. Goals beyond your physical capabilities are not well-constructed goals. It is also important to realize that if you have a low tolerance for risk, an extremely challenging goal is just as inappropriate as a goal that is way beyond your physical capabilities.