Update on sprint experiment

Exactly four weeks ago I mentioned I had hit an aerobic plateau, with the plan to change up the workout routine and try again afterwards. So today I tried the same intervals workout on the treadmill that I wasn't able to complete two other times, and the result was ... still couldn't finish it =(. On a positive note, I got farther this time than I have in the past. I think there are a few interesting things here. First, I didn't lose any aerobic fitness during my two-week vacation, and perhaps even gained some, which is great. Next, the bike sprints didn't translate over to running aerobic capacity quite as dramatically as I would have liked. I did three treadmill workouts over those four weeks, and the rest on the bike. Anyway, in retrospect, it seems that I simply bit off more than I could chew. When I went from my previous completable interval workout to this one, I took about 9.16% off the mile pace for the sprints. Apparently that was way too aggressive. I should probably jump in increments of 1% or 2%, rather than 9% all at once.

Edit: This week (a week after I wrote this post), I went halfway (yes, enginerds, I'm binary searching for my maximum). My previous completed workout was at X mph sprints, and I was failing at X+1 mph, so I went at X+0.5mph today. I made it through and got a stitch right after my eighth sprint, which I cranked up to X+1 mph. It feels good to complete a workout. Next time is X+0.7 or X+0.8.

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영어가 모국어인 사람들은 왜 한국어를 배우기가 어려운 이유

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10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

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"Gangnam Style" English Translation

I finally got around to looking up the lyrics to Psy's "Gangnam Style" last night. I couldn't find any English translations that I liked, so I decided to make my own. Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean. It's not my first language. It's not even my second or third language. But I did used to live in Gangnam, and the Internets abound with dictionaries, so I decided to give it a go. Incidentally, this is also my first foray into Korean-English translation. The translators out there will know - translation is as much art as science. If you translate directly, you end up with overly awkward constructions. But if you vary too much from the direct translation, you risk losing the original intent. So, in some places below, I've taken some poetic license to make the translation sound better. For example, "놀 땐 노는 여자" literally means "a girl who plays when it's time to play", but I changed it to "a girl who knows how to get down"...

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