Updated running PRs

I have run so many races in the last nine days that I have updated my page of running PRs. Interested? See Diana's running PRs. I have PRs for 15 distances from 400m to marathon. I have raced other distances -- 4 miles, 5 miles, and "fun runs" -- but I didn't put those in because they were from before high school, and even I don't need to go back that far. I decided that instead of erasing my high school PRs in favor of my college PRs, I would preserve both. Then I will have to reorganize it when I graduate from college, because 10 columns is too many.

Today's race. A good time was had by all.

Six days, four PRs

Friday night: 10k at Div III New Englands at Springfield. I run the first 5k in 21:17, exactly half of the time I ran 10k in the previous week. With one mile to go, I'd have to run a 6:15 last mile to get under 42 minutes. Impossible, I think, and proceed to run two laps just under 100 seconds. That means I'd have to run the last 800 in three minutes. Impossible, I think, and run another 98. Then I have to run the last 400 in 80 seconds. Clearly impossible. I turn on the speed and fly past the few remaining competitors on the track. As I kick in the final meters, I realize that the clock says 21:56, 21:57, ... so I sprint even faster. When I finish I shout to my coach, "did I do it?" He puts the thumbs up. 41:59.

On Saturday afternoon I run the 4x800. I wanted to break my PR of 2:38 at the Williams Relays, but I ran an abysmal 2:42. I split 2:36 in this race, and think I could have run 2:35.

Today we had the Slowboy Invite at Williams. I wanted to do the steeplechase, as did a few others, so our compliant coaches set up the hurdles. They had us run a 2k steeplechase, though, rather than 3k. This turned out to be a good idea. My splits for the various laps were something like 90, 98, 102, 111, 108. Kind of pathetic. I jumped over the hurdles, instead of hurdling them. Some of them I just stepped over. And despite my best efforts, I still jumped into the water jump instead of over it. So it goes. Apparently I will make the all-time list for the 2k steeple, since it is run so rarely. Time: 8:33.

Then we ran the 4x400. The teams were mixed gender, and they made them as even as possible. I was anchoring our team, and I knew that while I would get the baton with a significant lead, the other team's anchor leg was much faster than me. So I took the baton with fear in my heart and ran as fast as I could, considering that it was a 400-meter race. With 200 to go I went on my toes and went for it as fast as I could. I could hear her getting closer, and the teams were cheering for both of us simultaneously -- a bad sign. Just a few meters from the finish line, she came up behind me, and passed me -- but just slightly! I accelerated as much as I could, and we both leaned over the line. Too close to call! What an exciting race for the Slowboy Invite. Most exciting part: I broke 70 seconds for the first time (and in wet socks and shoes!), splitting 68.9.

My first published article

I (and my coauthors) have now had a paper published in an academic journal, the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal. This is a paper we wrote during SMALL. Here is the journal, with ours the first article listed.

Isoperimetric Regions in Gauss Sectors

We consider the free boundary isoperimetric problem in sectors of the Gauss plane. The solution is not always a circular arc as in sectors of the Euclidean plane. We prove that the solution is sometimes a ray and we conjecture that the solution is sometimes a "rounded n-gon" which we discovered computationally using Mathematica.

There is also another paper that should be published sometime soon in a different journal.

My first 10k

I ran my first 10k race on Saturday, on the track at Union. My teammate and I wanted to be sure to run under 44:00 to qualify for Div IIIs, so we ran the first four miles at just under 7:00/mile pace (43:30 would be the total time). We traded off leading each mile. For the fifth and sixth miles I sped up a lot, despite my right foot falling asleep and then going completely numb. This took almost a minute off of our conservative time plan, and I finished in 42:35.

Union reports:

Williams College swept the men’s and women’s 10000m run, with Ryan Ford (Middlefield, CT) winning the men’s side with a time of 35:45.79 and Diana Davis (Deer Island, ME) taking the women’s side at 42:34.90.

I have no idea how they found my hometown, or why they would have changed it from Isle to Island. Anyway, the last time I won a race was in senior year of high school in winter track, so that's nice.

Full results:

Mixed 10000 Meter Run
=========================================================================
    Name                    Year School                  Seed     Finals 
=========================================================================
  1 Ford, Ryan                SO Williams            35:25.00   35:45.79  
  2 Davis, Diana              SR Williams            42:00.00   42:34.90  
  3 Katzelnick, Leah          FR Williams            42:00.00   43:01.30  
  4 Plasse, Erin              SO Union               43:45.00   43:09.92 

Qualifying for Div IIIs means that I will run the 10k again this coming weekend, hopefully going under 42:30 and possibly even 42:00 depending on if the weather cooperates.