May 2024

Ski season is over, summer running goals are coming more into view, and my travel schedule with Calorify is picking up so April’s newsletter became May’s. I was recently in the Boston area and the week before that was in Denver at the Obesity Medicine Association conference. It snowed in Denver, which was wild. Apparently I missed 18 inches of fresh snow at Steamboat. For all the times I’ve flown through DIA I’ve never actually been to Denver. The area around Confluence Park looks pretty happening, if you are there check out the Cherry Creak trail for a run. 

I was able to squeeze in a gorgeous run along the Charles River in Boston, and walked to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Concord is a gorgeous little town and of course steeped in US history. You can visit the site of the North Bridge, where the first shots of the Revolution were fired. And you can find great coffee at Haute Coffee and Nero.

Softrock100 gear & notes: Just ordered the Salomon Bladder, and I’ll use the Sawyer inline filter so I can filter on the trail. It’s likely there will be a lot of water that’s fresh melt and I could drink without filtering but I don’t want to be dependent on that especially since it’s my first visit to the region and I might end up moving slowly. Scored a great deal on the North Face Flight Series jacket at their Renewed website. Jacket retailed at $250, I got it for $100, and can hardly tell it’s ever been worn.  Speaking of which, I was encouraged to bring along Diamox for altitude sickness so I’ll probably bring that along. Will share a few more gear notes next month.

In running training, ITB issues are behind me and I’m working on a special edition of the main things that helped me get through it. I feel like the last 12 months have really taxed and enhanced my ability at training around injuries and issues.  Speaking of which, common head colds were one of my main issues this winter (I was sick at least 2 days every month from November - March), and  colostrum was added to my health stack. N=1 but it seems to be helping and there are quite a few studies on it, including this one on exercise induced immune suppression:

Bovine colostrum supplementation attenuates the decrease of salivary lysozyme and enhances the recovery of neutrophil function after prolonged exercise.

I’ve been using this one from Amazon.

Running shoe rotation – scored a crazy deal through ExpertVoice on Brooks Caldera 6 ($53!) so my current rotation looks like this and I got some neon yellow in the rotation. It’s my first pair of Brooks, I like them well although for technical downhills the forefoot doesn’t seem to lock down quite as well as I might like. Liking the Saucony Ride16 although not as much as the Endorphin Shift 3. Some day I’ll get around to sharing more about Stryd but I will say it’s proving similarly useful to a power meter on a bike in terms of pacing on hills.

Still chipping away slowly at learning LangChain and multi-chain agentic workflows. I learned about this app for implementing RAG on the All-In podcast, which I’ll be checking out in the next few weeks when I find a spare moment (IOW, it’s not that likely).

Some of the reading I’ve been doing recently on body composition measurement technologies. I had no idea the IAEA contributed to the medical field in this way. Calorify’s doubly labeled water test includes deuterium dilution as a component, which is how we deliver body composition data.

Time to get back to running pics. The days are getting noticeably longer, this was taken around 7:30 am in mid-April.