Redding Marathon Race Report

Quick Stats:

Redding Marathon website Full results Official race photos

Date: Sunday, January 16, 2011
Time: 3:37:32
Pace: 8:19/mile
Place: overall 25/178; female 4/88 (?); age group 2/15
Pre-marathon meal: Spaghetti with an olive oil anchovy sauce (sounds kinda gross but it was delicious)
Post-marathon beer: Black Butte Porter, Deschutes Brewery

Pictures: View my photo album on Picasa

The view of the Shasta Dam from the start - it's huge!

Summary: I ran this race as a “training run” for the 50K trail run (my first ever) I’m doing next month (Psycho Wyco Trail Run in Kansas, on Feb. 12 -- wish me luck!). I didn’t decide until about a week before that I was for sure going to do it. I was hoping to find someone to run one leg of the three-leg relay with me, but couldn’t. That said, my goals were a) take it easy, b) have fun. I accomplished both of those...sort of. My first 5K was basically race pace (ouch), because it was downhill (oops). For me, having fun meant going as hard as I could on the downhills, which I love love love, so it was worth the tired quads later on. I think of it as kind of an unconventional 10K speed workout followed by a 20 mile long run.


The Redding Marathon is the most beautiful course I’ve ever run...really really! (And I’m lucky enough to have run several gorgeous marathons.) It starts on Shasta Lake (yes, reservoirs are man-made, but they truly can be stunning - both the lake and the dam were huge and awesome), runs over the Shasta Dam, then down into the Sacramento River Valley. There were mountains on all sides. I was never bored because I was staring at the beauty of the valley the whole time. Almost entire course is on a rails-to-trails bike path, which was flat and smooth. The first five miles are downhill, with the first three being extreme downhill (read: you will go way too fast if you don’t consciously focus on slowing your pace). There are some nasty hills (at least, they felt nasty by that point) around miles 15-17, which (thankfully) give way to a nice downhill mile that was much appreciated at that point in the race. The course ends by crossing the Sundial Bridge and taking you into a riverside park.


The spectators and other runners in the field were sparse, so I was running alone for almost the entire time. Most of the people around me were relay runners, which can be a bit disheartening when you are struggling and they are on fresh legs. The course loops back on itself for the last few miles, so some of the slower runners on the course gave me some targets to focus on. There is this horrible out and back in mile 26: Just when you are in sight of the Sundial Bridge, they make you turn around and do a quarter-mile on gravel. I am sure the race organizers didn’t realize what a cruel trick that wa when they were designing the course, though. :)


We got lucky with perfect weather: It was in the low 50s, cloudy for most of the race and sunny for the last six miles. Oh, and the post race food was awesome. Sweet potato chili and pie = just what I needed!


Prologue, part 1: Before I even got to Redding, I spent nearly two weeks driving up and down the Pacific coast. My friend Sarah, as astronomy PhD student, and I drove from Berkeley to Vancouver, BC, and back stopping in the Redwoods, Portland and Seattle. On our road trip, we listened to countless episodes of This American Life, drove along cliffs and rocky coastlines, camped next to what was most likely a pile of bear scat, drank gloriously sour beer, ate peanut butter and jelly french fries at one of Portland’s late-night food trucks, went running along beaches and through coastal bogs in Vancouver, got snowed on, attended an astronomy conference in Seattle (Sarah as a student; me as a member of the press corps), watched the Ducks barely lose the BCS championship, drank away the sorrow of the loss, got snowed on again, watched some spontaneous glass blowing, enjoyed the work of Pablo Picasso, and played (not enough!) Kinect Dance Central. Phew! It was totally worth having most of my high-altitude advantage wear off before the race.


Prologue, part 2: We stayed in Redding, Calif., on Friday and Saturday nights, in the budget Stardust Motel (~$40/night for three people). The accommodations were almost as glamorous as the name. Our first night, we were welcomed by dumpster divers in the motel parking lot. I was fascinated by their activities, and camped out by the window intermittently peeping out at them through the blinds. On Saturday, we picked up my race-number and then headed out for a hike in - wait for it - Whiskeytown! Well, it was actually the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, which was free because it was MLK weekend...bonus! The area used to be a mining community, and we drove through a ghost town on the way. The actual settlement of Whiskeytown is now at the bottom of a lake (well, reservoir). We did a loop up to Brandy Creek Falls, which was gorgeous.


That night, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had so many identical waiters running around it felt like we were in a musical and they were about to break into a song and dance number. We returned to the cozy Stardust Motel, watched The Neverending Story. (From this movie I relearned two key lessons that would help me the next day during my marathon: You can’t let yourself be overcome by the sadness; if you are positive, a luck dragon will find you. Ok, I lied. Neither of these lessons turned out to be helpful, and the movie doesn’t really hold up when you watch it as an adult. But it did help me get to sleep.)


Race start: I was really just blown away with how pretty the race start was. We were surrounded by mountains, overlooking a lake...it was perfect. I took a couple of pictures with my phone (which don’t do the scenery justice at all) before handing in my gear bag and warming up. The start was calm and casual, no timing chips, no gun. It felt like a fun-run 5K, which helped me relax. However, I wasn’t relaxed enough to not go out too fast (like I always do).


The downhill: My first mile was about 6:50 (oh noes!), then the second mile flattened out a bit as we went over the dam (maybe 7:00-ish), then the third mile was my fastest, a 6:40. I knew I was going way fast, but it was fun, gorgeous, I felt good, and I didn’t care because at that point it felt amazing. As the grade smoothed out, I ran 7:30s for a while. (Note: I slowed down to an average of about 8:45s for the last 16 miles. Not the most even marathon I’ve run, to say the least.) For the first few miles, there were some other runners around me (mostly relay runners), which was nice. I was wearing my Canadian Death Race shirt (btw, I love that shirt), and another runner asked me about it. (Sidenote: I got a massage after the race, and I left perfect sweaty impression of the CDR logo on the massage table. It was kind of amazingly gross.)


The course went through a railroad tunnel, which was a lot dark and a little spooky and a yurtload of awesome.  


Then it got flat and reality set in: Did I mention before that the course was ridiculously pretty? From miles 10 to 15 I just kind of settled in and relaxed. The first relay runners finished at I think 10.9 miles, so running through the exchange was fun. It was the first time I really saw any spectators. Sarah walked back along the course from the exchange to meet me and run with me for a mile - very much appreciated! She has a knee injury, so the fact that she ran with me means a lot.


I tried to eat calories early and often in this race, to prepare myself for all the eating I’ll need to be doing in next month’s 50K. Well, that plan worked well, but it was foiled by the fact that water stations were sparse. It felt like they were every 5 miles or so, although in reality they were probably closer together than that. Nonetheless, even in the cloudy, cool weather I felt like I wasn’t able to get enough water. Sarah ran with me again at mile 14.5 or so (I think?) and brought me a bottle of water, which was really great. She left me right as I started to climb those vicious hills.


And up and up...: The hills covered about two miles, rolled a bit, but mostly just climbed and climbed. This was the loneliest part of the course for me. I couldn’t see any runners in front of me, so it was hard to motivate. The course did remain gorgeous, though, winding around the sides of the hills as it went up. One I reached the top, I had a much-needed downhill mile to an aid station (also much needed...seriously, where was the water on this course? I was running next to a river the whole time, which probably just made me extra thirsty).


And then I kind of zoned out: I don’t remember the last eight or so miles of the course. This is where it looped back on itself and the sun came out (yay!). The only other runners I saw were either relayers (who were passing me), or slower runners still on their first loop. It would have been nice to have some people going my pace I could try to catch. But, alas, such is the nature of a small marathon. Sarah ran with me a third time during this last bit, and I really really needed the company.  The course crossed the Sacramento River four times over three different bridges (if I’m counting right...), which was kind of rad. The final two miles were through a heavily used park, so there were little kids on bikes with training wheels and skateboarders to dodge - not exactly what I was in the mood for, at that point, but at least it was a little less lonely.


The finish: In the final mile, I could see the Sundial Bridge up ahead. Salvation! But, as I mentioned before, right when I got to the base of it they made me take this quarter-mile gravel loop. I actually said to the people directing traffic, “Are you serious? That’s so evil!” They just kind of laughed at me. The one good thing about the loop was that I could see that there were a few groups of women a couple of minutes behind me. There was no way I was going to let them catch me at the end, so that gave me the extra motivation I needed to finish.


I came in at 3:37:32 - pretty good for a “training run” (although it was slower than the 20-miler I did when I was home in Portland over the holidays...oh well). Sarah and our friend Libby (who was along for the last few days of the road trip) met me at the finish line with a beer - Black Butte Porter, yummy even when slightly warm!

The aftermath: My recovery from the marathon went very smoothly (I was able to do a 90 min. run in the snow by Thursday), until I decided to do a really hard mountain run the next Saturday. It was great fun, until I realized that it probably set my recovery back by at least a week. [Lesson: Running a marathon a month before a 50K is probably ok, but you have to give yourself time to recover. Doing an icy eight mile trail run that has nearly 3,000 ft. of climbing does not constitute recovery. Doh!]

Where does astronomy news come from?

How does science turn into news? Maybe, like me, you wonder about this a lot. Maybe you don't. The truth is, before I went to journalism school, I didn't really think about things like how news gets to be news, or why some things are considered news and others aren't. Now I think about these questions constantly.

The process of some thing - an event, a person, a scientific journal article - turning into news is simultaneously arbitrary and systematic. Some things are obviously newsworthy: They just have that "thing," you know it when you see it, etc. Most breaking news would fall in this category. Burning buildings are kinda hard to ignore. But most things are more ambiguous.

There are lots of players in the game of news-making at AAS: reporters, editors, press officers and scientists are the main ones.

Here is roughly how things work here at the AAS meeting. There is a press office at the conference. It's right next door to a room where press conferences take place, on a separate floor from the rest of the AAS meeting. There is also a "quiet room" journalists can reserve to do broadcast (TV, radio, podcast) interviews. The press area is basically disconnected from the sessions, plenary talks, and exhibit halls full of posters. In fact, you could just hang out in the press office and the press conference room and you wouldn't even realize that there are thousands upon thousands of astronomers upstairs giving talks and standing by posters and drinking coffee and shmoozing. I'm guessing most journalists venture upstairs at some point, though. I bet the best ones have astronomer buddies they hang out with.

When I checked in and got my press credentials, I got a conference program (just like all the conference attendees get) that lists all the talks and posters - there are hundreds of those.* In addition, I got a "press kit." This is basically just a printed out schedule of press conferences and talks/posters that the AAS press office (they have their own public information people) thinks journalists might find interesting.

The press office is a room with three king-size-bed shaped tabled lined up. The tables are covered with white tablecloths. On top of the tables are bowls of hard-candies, bottles of water, conference programs, notepads, surge-protectors and ethernet cables. When I walked into the press office at 9:45 on Monday morning, 15 minutes before the first press conference started, the room was packed. There was barely an open seat at the big white table. Everyone was sitting at their computers, mostly Apples.

I feel really awkward in the press office because there are people here from TIME magazine, MSNBC, the New York Times, National Geographic News, Science News, Scientific American and other big-deal publications.

The press office has a table with coffee in the back. It also has a coat-rack. The schedule of press conferences and all of the press-releases that have come out are pegged to the back wall. Each registered member of the press has a mailbox where we get hard-copies of the press releases as they come out.

I guess I should tell you a little bit about press-releases. I signed up for an AAS press e-mail list right before the conference. Because I am on that list, I get 5 to 10 press releases every day from various organizations like NASA and big research universities. Those organizations send them to AAS's press officer who forwards them on to us. Some press releases come with an embargo. This means that, although I can read them as soon as I get them, I can't write about anything in them until a specified date and time - often the embargo date will be an imminent press conference or when an accepted paper will go up on a journal's website. For some announcements, we don't actually receive the press release until during the press conference. I found this a bit weird, but maybe this is just the way things work.

What is the difference between a press-release an popular media article on a scientific finding? Not really that much. Press-releases are written by public information officers at universities and research centers, whereas popular media articles are written by professional "independent" journalists. A lot of former journalists have no gotten jobs as public information officers, though, so the distinction is kinda fuzzy. (I might piss off a lot of people by saying that, though.)

Is there really much difference between the abstract at the front of the journal article, the press-release, and the article that ends up in a mainstream media outlet? There might not be much of a difference in content, but that as you go through that progression from academic journal to press release to mainstream press, things get funneled down. For all the things that get published in scientific journals, only some of them get press releases. And for all the press releases science journalists get, only some of those actually end up as mainstream articles.

Anyway, back to what is actually happening here at the AAS meeting.

Press conferences are weirdly fascinating. There are three each day of the AAS meeting and they are staggered (i.e., one at 10 am, one at 12:45 pm, one at 2:30 pm). It seems like they are set up like concerts, where there is a line-up of scientists whose announcements go chronologically in order from the "opening act" to the "big deal." Each scientist speaks for roughly 10 minutes. Sometimes, there are also people who are there just to comment on whatever was announced and drop memorable quotes.

Most of the scientists in the press conferences are really good about giving context to their findings. They  do a great job of saying "this is why you should care" and "this is how we figured this out." Some of them also are clearly focusing on story-telling and are good at presenting a narrative arc, a compelling image/metaphor or a memorable quote. This makes things a little bit for exciting for someone like me who has almost no knowledge of astronomy. Many of these talks are jargon-toned-down versions of talks and posters happening in the "real conference" upstairs.

At the end of all the presentations, the floor is opened to questions. First, people int he room get to ask questions, then people who are watching a live feed of the conference online. Generally, it is the same three or four people who ask questions at every press conference. And generally, they sit in the front of the room. After about 10 minutes of questions, the scientists stick around and journalists can go up and talk to them one-on-one.

And that's about it. But not all news comes from press officers, press-releases and press conferences. Compared to a lot of other types of journalism, covering a conference like the AAS meeting feels like being spoon-fed processed food. Only the food is news. It's kind of a weird feeling. But maybe other conferences operate differently - honestly, I have no idea.

The most interesting stories, I think, come from journalists who stumble across things and make their own connections and find interesting scientists to talk to. This AAS meeting is probably a really good place to do that, especially since the astronomers I know who are here say that it's really not all about the talks or the posters, it's about astronomers getting to hang out with each other and party and network and whatnot.

*This conference is HUGE. It has several thousand attendees. Each day there are hundreds of talks, and a lot of them are going on simultaneously. There is a giant exhibition hall filled with posters, and the posters change each day. It is a general conference, so for ALL types of astronomy which includes dozens of sub-fields, everything from cosmology (origins of the universe) to astronomy education.

Psyche!

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/ASU/J. Hester

I went to a press conference at the AAS meeting this morning. I thought it was going to be boring, and honestly, I only went because I felt like I should be making better use of my press pass. But then it turned out to be really rad - a great example of how science actually happens (as opposed to the cartoon version) and how tenuous knowledge actually is.


The subject of the press conference was "Not-So-Standard Candles." Before 10 am this morning, I didn't know what a standard candle was, let alone a non-standard one. (Ok, this isn't strictly true: Sarah tried to explain to me what a standard candle was a few days ago, but I didn't listen very closely. Sorry, Sarah!) But what a candle is isn't so important as the purpose it serves. It's something astronomers use to measure how far away things are: a cosmic yardstick.


If astronomers know how intense something is, they can tell how far away it is. Astronomers use "standard candles" - classes of stars called cepheids - to calibrate their instruments. They use cepheids not because those stars have intensities that are reliable and unvarying, but because their intensities vary in a predictable way. 


Or, at least, that's what everyone thought. At this morning's press conference,

• Massimo Marengo of Iowa State described a star, identified as a standard candle, that is losing mass due to a strong solar wind. Basically, it's a standard candle that is shrinking over time.
• Scott Engle of Villanova described a standard candle, identified in 1926 as a cepheid, that just stopped being one all of a sudden. Over the past 80 years, it stopped varying in that useful predictable way.
• Marco Tavani of the University of Rome and Colleen Wilson-Hodge of NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center spoke about the way the Crab Nebula - a standard candle so commonly used it has a unit of measurement, the milli-Crab, named after it - fluctuates in not-so-standard short-term and long-term ways. It has short-term gamma-ray flares, and since 2008 it has decreased in intensity 7% which, as Wilson-Hodge put it in nice metaphoric terms, is like "X-ray astronomy's 'meter stick' is shorter by 7 centimeters." For more, check out the NASA press release. (They also have a really slick video.)

There's an impulse, when we hear news like this, to exclaim that nothing is certain, everything science has ever done is in question, etc., etc. Science is all a lie! But the ground is not figuratively falling out from beneath our feet. Sarah explained to me that astronomy works with such huge scales, from the very small to the very large, so that an in-joke is that if something is within an order of magnitude of what you expect it to be, then it's accurate. A 7% disparity, she said, is actually really tiny. So it's not like this will make a huge difference in terms of things people are measuring.


What's interesting about this morning's announcement is that astronomers found this disparity - flickering candles - as they were trying to calibrate and use their standard instruments. And they kept getting "weird" results, and at first they thought, "Uh oh, we're doing something wrong here." So they explored that "weird" result, and are now finding interesting things.


This is something you've probably heard before, but it's something that you can never hear too many times: Science is never finished or definitive. And that's ok. That's not some problem with science or the scientific process. It's actually the strength of the scientific process.


There have been a lot of interesting articles recently that examine the way science actually happens - see Jonah Lehrer's New Yorker piece from a few weeks ago and Benedict Carey's piece from the New York Times yesterday on the use of statistics. I love this type of analysis and self-reflexiveness, and I hope we'll only see more. It's important to realize that examinations and explorations of the scientific process aren't attacks on science. They are just the opposite.

Art museums are dangerous places

Yesterday I went to the Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibit disappears (well, migrates, I presume) after Monday, so everyone is going crazy this week trying to get some last minute art viewing.

Picasso is one of my favorite painters (granted, I have limited knowledge of art and art history), so it's a moot point that I enjoyed the exhibit. But, instead of writing at length about the awesome paintings, drawings and sculptures I saw, there are some anthropological oddities I want to share.

I arrived at SAM around 11 and found a massive line snaking through the lobby and around the corner. You know how sometimes when there are wild weather patterns or huge traffic jams and strangers are stuck in awkward situations together and form a kind of impromptu camaraderie? Well it was sort of like that. We built a fire in a trash can and told ghost stories and elected a leader who we then mutinied against. Ok, that last part didn't happen. After nearly an hour - and one tense incident where a man in line yelled at an elderly woman for cutting in line, when really she was just trying to connect with her friend - I made it to the front of the line.

Lots of museums have started using audio tours. You've probably seen them: Some sort of box you hang around your neck with headphones attached that's loaded with pre-recorded information and analysis. This exhibit used those, only they look like cellphones. You hold them up to your hear, just like you are listening to a phone. It's a pretty cool design, because it avoids sharing ear-wax with the thousands of other people who have used the audio device before you. But it is also inadvertently hilarious because everyone in the packed exhibit halls (and they were Tokyo-subway-at-rush-hour packed) looks like they are talking on the phone. I would have taken a picture - because it really was hilarious! - but photography was not allowed.

The guards/bouncers in the exhibit were on point. One of them came up to me and told me I had to wear my messenger bag at my side instead of at my back to avoid bumping things/people. (Weird, I know.) He also spotted a water bottle poking out of my bag and warned me that if tried to drink it I'd be very, very sorry. I actually had forgotten I even had water with me, so I really wasn't planning on it. I promise. Later, as I was taking notes on one of the pieces, a different bouncer came up to me and said pens aren't allowed in the exhibit halls. Oh no! But wait, it's ok. He handed me a golf pencil and said that every guard has loads of them in case I wear this one out.

I was very impressed that, with the streams of people, the museum-bouncers were so good at honing in on my "suspicious behavior." What exactly did they fear might happen? Here are some doomsday scenarios that came to mind:

• A small child (for an exhibit so blatantly about sex, there sure were a lot of kids there - witness a Picasso quote on the wall: "Art is never chaste") bumps into my bag, causing me to stumble, trip on a bench, launch the water bottle out of my bag so that it explodes and splashes all over a painting.
• I get really, really annoyed with the herds of cell-phone-device shufflers and decide to take my frustration out on a painting with my pen.

Feel free to come up with your own permutations of these situations. Lucky, nothing of the sort happened. But be careful, folks, museums are dangerous places.

Oh, I couldn't take photos of the Picasso exhibit, but I did take a photo of the exploding/flying car installation in the SAM lobby:

How do we talk about planets that rock?

Ever wonder about where journalists get the pithy and cleverish (and often cliche) images and metaphors they use to explain new scientific discoveries? Well, I do. And because I'm not really here working - and I don't have to worry about being clear or informative or thorough or pithy or cleverish - I can let my mind wander to cynical questions like this. Sorry, sorry, sorry for those of you that disapprove of cynicism.

This morning, as I attended the first press conference of the week, Exoplanets and their Host Stars, I realized that sometimes scientists try really hard to plant them.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, there were some truly cool things announced at the press conference about exoplanets, or planets that are outside of our solar system:

• Edward Guinan of Villanova announced that big planets orbiting super close to stars can actually give away some of their angular momentum to the star, causing old stars to rotate faster than scientists previously thought they did. (This one is taking a while for me to wrap my head around.)
• Adam Kowalski of University of Washington has found that small stars (much smaller than the sun) in places where astronomers are looking for exoplanets can actually make really big, intense flares. That doesn't look good for the possibility of life on potential exoplanets there.
• (Hint, hint) This is the big discovery that we are all supposed to get excited about: Natalie Batalha of San Jose State announced that NASA's Kepler mission - which is looking for Earth-like exoplanets - has found it's first "unquestionably rocky planet." (There are other planets out there that are "questionably rocky," it seems.) (Here's the press release.)

I enjoyed the press conference because each speaker focused on the scientific process underlying each discovery. They talked about the problems they were trying to solve and the logic behind what kind of data they collected and some of the weird/confusing things they found along the way. It's something I wish showed up more in popular science stories: Don't just tell us what the we now knows (or, now think we know), but tell us why and how we got to that knowledge. So, good job on that one, scientists!

I am sure other science writers out there will describe the science for you better than I can, so back to what I enjoy most: analyzing the narrative/communication techniques of the press conference and the images that will serve to represent these findings in popular media. 

During Batalha's presentation, she called the rocky planet, Kepler-10b, "our Vulcan." This is an extended metaphor that harks back to one of the first telescopes designed specifically to search for exoplanets. It was named, yup, Vulcan. The namesake comes from a planet that early astronomers thought might be between Mercury and the sun. Turns out, Vulcan didn't exist - not in our solar system, at least. But if it did, it might look a lot like Kepler-10b, which is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. This makes Kepler-10b very hot (2500 degrees F, so almost as hot as some of the colder stars), near the melting point of iron.

The other narrative imagery Batalha used to inspire us about Kepler-10b was to focus on the fact that its star is 560 light years away. That means that when we look at Kepler-10b's star today, we are observing light from the year 1450. During 1450, Europeans were beginning to attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean and were on the brink of discovering the new world. And searching for planets with the Kepler mission is our 21st century exploration. A Euro-centric metaphor, sure, but it makes a nice story.

After the three speakers finished their presentations, Geoffrey Marcy from Berkeley, an "indepdenent commentator" and exoplanet big-wig, shared his reactions. As far as I could tell, the reason he was there was so that people could use a pre-packaged "other source" in their stories. (I already apologized for my cynicism...why do I feel I need to keep apologizing?) Anyway, he basically told us that the discovery of Kepler-10b is really awesome and important (just in case we didn't realize that). He told us that we need to remember Kepler-10b, because it will end up in all the astronomy text books (I felt that was a bit condescending...), and then, here it comes...

He called Kepler-10b a "planetary missing link." And this, my friends, is where I cringed.

Missing link is one of the biggest, baddest, most persistent science cliches. Bigger and badder, even, than "key to understanding" or "holy grail." The Knight Science Journalism Tracker derided science writers for leaping on the missing link train in anthropology, but the metaphor has an amazing ability to cross into completely non-related fields.

So, people like to make fun of science journalists (and rightly so) for relying heavily on cliches and tired metaphors.  Science journalists even like to make fun of themselves for it.

But, I just wanted point out that although journalists are guilty of being too lazy to find new (and probably more appropriate ways) to describe things, so are scientists. True, it's worse if a journalist falls back on a tired cliche, because it is a journalist's JOB to communicate. But, this may explain where some of it comes from. Journalists are taught to use the voices of their sources - instead of their own voice - as much as possible.

Anyway, I'll stop before this turns into an outright tirade - because it's not. Maybe I'll do a follow up post where I go back and count the number of cliches I used here...after all, pointing out that something is cliche is maybe the second-biggest cliche of all time. I am just poking around at some of the reasons accurate, interesting communication can be so hard.

AAS 217: How did I end up here?

Hello from the 217th meeting* of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. What am I doing here? Well...

I finished up my coursework for my master's in journalism at CU a few weeks ago (phew!), and as I embarked on the bumpy search for work, I decided I might as well blend my metaphorical trip with a real one. My friend Sarah, a graduate student in astronomy at Berkeley, asked me to be her co-pilot on a road trip. And where do graduate students in astronomy go for vacation? Why, the AAS meeting, of course!

I lied. That's not strictly true. We aren't just attending the AAS meeting. We've already spent a night under the stars (and mist) in California's redwoods, had an accidental pit-stop at a Christian coffee shop in Coos Bay, Oregon, tasted some deliciously sour beer in Portland, and skipped rocks on the beach in Vancouver, B.C. By the end of the trip one of us (I'll let you guess which one) may even run a marathon.

So while I'm in Seattle and under-employed, I decided I might as well do a little astronomy blogging.

Disclaimer the first: I know very little about astronomy. 

Disclaimer the second: "Very little" is actually an overstatement.

Disclaimer the third: I also know very little about how journalists operate at science conferences like this. Is the action even at the press conferences or poster sessions or invited talks? Or is it elsewhere? My gut feeling would be that the action is at whichever bar the most awesome scientists go to at the end of the day…but what do I know?

Disclaimer the fourth: Disclaimers are totally lame! I am just going to dive in...

*Am I the only one who hears that this is the 217th meeting of the AAS and wonders what the first, second, third and on and on meetings were like? Was it three guys sitting in a pub playing darts and talking about the size of their telescopes? I really hope so. I'll try to find out and let you know.