Squealing tires: never something you want to hear as you’re about to step into an intersection. Luckily, in this case, I was still about ten strides away when the white low rider pickup raced around the corner from Sheridan onto 80th Street. “Jerk,” I muttered to myself before I looked down again at the sidewalk to watch for obstacles. My head snapped back up as I heard yet another set of tires taking the corner at speed - a squad car. “Oh hell yes,” I thought, watching the car speed after the pickup.

The driver of an SUV waiting at the light yelled, “Hell yeah! Get that crack dealer!” As I passed them in the crosswalk, I could hear 2 or 3 other guys in the truck cheering. One yelled “GO TREMPER” which totally puzzled me at first. Tremper is the high school for this part of town, and my shirt happened to be the same blue as the Trojan mascot. I couldn’t stop myself from yelling back, “Sorry, Bradford!” Bradford being the north side rival high school that Joy and I went to. “Whatever, it’s all good, whoo!” was the response.

Then I had a total mind flip as a realized that these guys had mistaken me for a high school student. My ten year reunion is this June, and I still can’t pass muster for an alomst-30-year-old in the general public. I thought about this as I ran on; how does 27-year-old me compare to 17-year-old me? Most of the overly philosophical ideas slipped out of my head faster than the sidewalk slipped under my feet, and that was what I focused on.

I ran track and cross country in high school. I wasn’t particularly exceptional at either, but I thought of myself as pretty athletic. For the last year and a half I’ve been training for the eventual BIG RACE and all this time I’ve been comparing myself to what I could do in 1996. Back then I could run a 5K in 19:03. Last fall, I felt a small sense of accomplishment when I ran it in 19:31. But tonight I realized something. There would be no competition between the two Eds. Sure, high school Ed might finish a short race a minute faster, but today Ed would dominate in anything more than three and a half miles.

I was so undisciplined then. If the weather was rainy, or cold, or hot, or no one was watching, my friends and I would run just out of view and then go to someone’s house, or go goof off in the woods. These days, it has to be colder than 15 degrees Farenheit (regardless of wind chill), or raining *and* more than a five mile run. I’m upset when I have to miss a run (though occasionally I relish the small injuries that force a recovery day).

I realize it’s been like forever since I updated my training records, so here goes. I got a new watch a couple weeks ago, so I have times again! Yay!
March 19 (last post):5 / March 20: 3 / March 21: skip / March 24: 12 / Total = 20 miles

March 26: 2 / March 28: skip / March 31: 7 (was suppsed to be 14, but injured) / Total = 9 miles

April 2: 2 / April 5: 6, 49:56 / April 6: 16, 2:25:27 / Total = 24 miles

April 9: 7, 61:58 / April 13: 6, 49:18 (fastest mile so far this year, mile 6 @ 7:29) / April 15: 6 / Total = 19 miles

Okay, so I future posted this weekend’s run. Next Saturday I’m doing 18. AHH

And now, dinosaurs! Remember this article (mostly me talking about how I hate Jack Horner)? Here’s a follow up:

T. rex thigh reveals chicken family ties
POSTED: 5:54 p.m. EDT, April 12, 2007

CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) — Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken.

“It’s the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs,” said John Asara, a Harvard Medical School researcher, whose results were published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Scientists have long suspected that birds evolved from dinosaurs based on a study of dinosaur bones, but until recently, no soft tissue had survived to confirm the link.

That all changed in 2005 when Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University reported finding soft tissue, including blood vessels and cells, in a T. rex bone dug out of sandstone from the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation in Montana.

Schweitzer, in another study appearing in this week’s issue of Science, found that extracts of T. rex bone reacted with antibodies to chicken collagen, further suggesting the presence of birdlike protein in dinosaur bones.

For his study, Asara used a highly sensitive technology called mass spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of bone fragments provided by Schweitzer and her team.

He first had to purify the bone extract, which came in the form of a gritty brown powder that remained after minerals were extracted. Asara then broke it down into peptide fragments, little bits of proteins, isolated into the amino acid sequences that make them up.

“It was very tough to get anything,” he said in a telephone interview. He wound up with seven separate strands of amino acid, five of which were a particular class of collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.

Next, Asara had to interpret the sequences. He compared his results to collagen data from living animals. Most matched collagen from chickens, while others matched a newt and frog.

“Based on all of the genomic information we have available today, it appears these sequences are closer to birds or chickens than anything else,” Asara said.

Ultimately, scientists had hoped to find genetic material that was unique to the T. rex. That was not possible with the tiny T. rex sample.

“We never found unique T. rex tags,” he said.

In a similar study of mastodon bones supplied by Schweitzer, Asara had more luck.

He compared the samples to a database of existing amino acid sequences and against a theoretical set of mastodon sequences and found a total of 78 peptides, including four unique sequences.

Still, Asara said the T. rex protein sequence was useful in providing clues about the evolution of the species.

The researchers said the results may change the way that people think about fossil preservation.

“The fact that we are getting proteins is very exciting,” said paleontologist Jack Horner, who dug up the T. rex in 2003 and is co-author of the paper with Schweitzer.

Horner said paleontologists will need to dig deeper for specimens that have not been corrupted by ground water and bacteria.

“I think we are going to find that many specimens are like it. It will be a matter of paleontologists getting into sites that are not necessarily easy,” he told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The news is still reporting that they found “soft tissue,” but they really just found fossilized residue, for lack of a better description. Still cool that they were able to do some protein analysis. I got a giggle out of the “highly sensitive technology called mass spectrometry” comment. OOOH, a mass spectrometer!

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