At 11:01am Sunday morning, in 90-degree heat, I crossed the finish line in Central Park and completed my year-long goal of finishing the New York City Triathlon. I was exhausted and frustrated (more on that later), but at that moment, as soon as I stopped running and realized I was done, I was overcome with a profound visceral joy.

I’ve been actively training for the triathlon for a little less than a year, but it’s been an idle dream of mine for several years. Since way back in my teenage years I’ve been an sometime runner and cyclist. But last August I did a run/bike duathlon that was more than a little thrilling, and then, in September, I began training as a swimmer, a step that for all intents and purposes was the first step on the road to my first triathlon.

For those of you unfamiliar with triathlon (it is conventional to leave out the definite article), it is a race of various lengths consisting of swim, bike, and run stages, in that order. Between each stage, competitors are required to “transition” from the mindset and the equipment from one sport to those of the next sport as fast as they can. Triathlon lengths range from “sprint” distances (approx .5mi/12mi/3mi) to the classic “Ironman” length (2.4mi, 112mi ,26mi). The New York Triathlon is “Olympic distance”: approximately 1-mile swim, 25-mile bike, and 6-mile run.

For me this is a sort of fulfillment of a family tradition: My father is a runner and a high-school cross-country team captain, my brother and several aunts and uncles are long distance runners and certified marathoners, my stepfather is a cyclist who biked from coast to coast, my mother swims and bikes, her father (my grandfather) is a living family legend of long-distance running (completing many marathons at an age when most men play shuffleboard), and his wife, my grandmother, has been a competitive diver, swimmer, racewalker… and, yes, a triathlete. My effort was at some level dedicated to and inspired by them all, especially my grandmother. Thank you, family!

Ready!

The preparation for any triathlon, especially in the days leading up to the event itself, is elaborate to say the least. I’ve included a photo here of all the stuff I needed to pack for the race, from bike helmet and gloves, three different pairs of shoes, goggles and extra goggles, extra contact lenses, body lubricant (yep), water bottles with water and energy drinks of various sorts, and countless other little things — and this doesn’t even include the full-body wetsuit!

(In the lower left corner you will see the Field Notes notebook I dedicated exclusively to planning for the race.)

The triathlon is really a weekend-long event, with a check-in and briefing about the race on Friday, dropping off the bike and taking a tour of the transition area on Saturday, and waking up at 2:30am on Sunday to eat breakfast before heading over to the race site. During the week leading up to the event, it was increasingly hard to think about anything else. Every meal was carefully planned, every bedtime strictly enforced. The development of a sore throat Friday morning worried me far more than it normally would have. I don’t think I’ve ever been so conscious of how my body was working.

Set!

My car service got me to the start area at 4:30. The 3 hours between the time I laid out my gear in front of my bike to the time my age group (men 34-39) jumped in the water went by as if it were only a few minutes. During these twilight hours I was Twittering and uploading photographs to help distract me from the nervousness under the surface (you can check out my live Tweetlog here).

Next thing I knew I was in my wetsuit and walking down the gangplank with a hundred other men in their late 30s, listening to a megaphone telling us that we would start in 30 seconds.

Go!

I got in the water, heard the siren blare, and started swimming.

Before this, I had reconned the conditions in the water. The waves didn’t seem bad. The current seemed strong, but I knew it was slowing down. I didn’t see any garbage in the river along our race course, but I did see some nasty looking jellyfish along the shoreline. My summers in Cape Cod have innoculated me against the fear of most varieties of small icky marine wildlife, so I was pretty confident about what would be my first open water long distance swim.

Even the initial mayhem of the swim, with arms and legs kicking about like crazy (I was even kicked in the face and almost lost my goggles), I felt like things were under control.

But after only a hundred meters, things changed dramatically for me. I was suddenly and precipitously exhausted. I couldn’t hold up the pace I was accustomed to — I’d swam a mile or more in the pool dozens of times before and never tired like this. I was so winded I had to stop swimming and simply drift on my back for a few moments. In fact, this cycle characterized my whole swim — crawl stroke for a few minutes, followed by a few minutes of aimless drifting. The current that the earlier starting athletes enjoyed had by this time come to a standstill, so when I drifted it wasn’t even necessarily in the right direction.

In short, things were going pretty badly from the outset.

I didn’t figure it out it at the time, but later on, after the race, I realized that the sore throat I’d been wishing away had, moving southwards, matured into an acute bronchitis, constricting my breath as if someone were sitting on my chest. The rest of the triathlon would be shaped by this biological fact, but for me in the heat of competition I could only think to myself “What the hell is wrong with me? Try harder! Breathe harder!” It’s funny how quickly and easily we can blame our problems on our characters instead of our bodies.

Somehow, I finished the swim and staggered ashore. I learned later that others were not so fortunate: one man actually died during the swim. It’s unclear how it happened, but I am glad I played it safe and floated gently on my back (with wetsuit buoyancy assistance) whenever I thought anything didn’t feel right.

I knew I was falling well short of my target pace, but I didn’t know by how much. I later learned I completed the swim in almost double the time I targeted, but during the race I simply knew the bike stage was my chance to catch up. Still, I felt faint and winded as I climbed into the saddle.

Biking up the Henry Hudson Parkway, however, was a joy. I had fallen so far behind that, as a relatively strong cyclist, I was able to pass a great many people during the 25 miles, and managed to keep a pace very close to my objective, despite my shortness of breath. And cycling on a closed highway, with only a small number of riders around you, is a thrill that’s hard to describe.

In the final run, I again found myself in the same condition as I felt in the river: each burst of even low-level exertion would be quickly followed by gasps for air. As with the swim, I again found myself coasting — walking — for a great deal of the running stage.

Finishing!

Along the way, there were thousands of spectators and officials cheering the triathletes on. Most of the time I loved the “great jobs” and “doing greats”, but when I was drifting down the river on my back to catch my breath, or gasping for air and walking through Central Park, it was a little frustrating to be urged to a level of achievement I felt I just didn’t have in me. In the big picture, however, the sting of even these bittersweet encouragements kept me focused on the primary objective: to finish the whole thing, to try my hardest, and to never give up.

Similarly, the pre-race best-wishes from friends in the real world and via the Internet drove me on. The best part was seeing my family and a few friends staked out along the way. Some were following my performance via a SMS text-messaging service announcing my times as I completed each stage — pretty cool. But the best part was seeing my family with a home-made sign with my name on it.

When I finally crossed the finish line, I was surrounded by congratulations from the race staff. I was given a nifty medal, had my photo taken (all along the course, photographers from Brightroom.com took photos of athletes, many of which I’ve included on my Flickr set for the triathlon), and was given an endless supply of branded sports drinks.

Repeat!

Knowing that my performance Sunday was impaired by my health, I am totally psyched to do this again, and soon, to see what I can really do. I’m not waiting until next year. I’m looking for the next triathlon now. I’m hooked.

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I am going to be speaking today, June 17th, at the OMMA Publish conference here in New York City, on a panel entitled “Optimizing for Performance: Adding Value to Your Site”. OMMA is focused on online media marketing and advertising, publishing several trade magazines and sponsoring several conferences each year in these areas.

My panel will discuss the seemingly straightforward topic of making media sites more engaging and (critically) more profitable. The session will cover the spectrum from tactical solutions — new features that increase stickiness and page views — to strategic solutions that fundamentally change what your media web site can be for the audience and users.

And then, of course, there is the middle ground between tactics and strategy, the recognition that all of the little things we do to improve the user experience and to delight the user actually add up to a strong overall brand experience.

This is my first conference in which I am not speaking to an audience composed almost exclusively of design professionals. While there will certainly be peers and colleauges in this conference, many of the attendees will be members of that elite, special class of individual I call potential clients. I’m usually a pretty good pitch man, so I think this will be fun.

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UX Social is Olga Howard’s new initiative to investigate connections between user experience design and public policy. Recently Olga has been interviewing information architects about their views about IA in the public sector. She interviewed quite a few of us at last month’s IA Summit in sunny Miami.

Her interview with me is now posted for your enjoyment. While I’ve done no real professional work in the public sector (unless you count the Smithsonian), I did have some ideas, namely: The government is something we interact with inwardly and outwardly. We expect to receive some kinds of information from the government (I discuss New York’s awesome 311 service) and we we give other kinds of information to the government (such as census data).

On a personal note, listening to myself speak — much less viewing my own smirking face — isn’t always easy for me to bear. My “ums-per-minute” drops significantly after the first few minutes, thankfully. I hope you enjoy it!

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I am currently training for my first triathlon, the New York Triathlon on July 20.

(Holy crap, that’s only 9 weeks away!)

Anyway, last weekend I competed in the Prospect Park Mother’s Day Duathlon right here in Brooklyn. This was my second duathlon (I ran my first one last August), and this time I did a lot better: I came in 23rd out of over 120 competitors. I came in 6th place in my 24-39 age group, too. If you’re my parents or if you are thinking about racing against me someday, you can see the complete results here.

A photographer, Len Lopate, was on site taking pictures during the race (the top pic is his). Check out his site to see his other shots, including me at the start and on the bike.

Most happily (and most surprisingly) at the end of the race I discovered that the race organizers had free WiFi set up around the finish area, and as people finished the race the staff was updating their web site with the results in real time. Those of us with web-enabled devices were able to check our own times and everyone else’s as we waited for the rest of the athletes to finish the race. Pretty cool.

I’m pretty nervous about July’s triathlon, but these duathlons have helped me a lot. They help me actually get some idea about what switching from biking to running in rapid succession really feels like, and in a competitive environment, too. I’ve been able to meet other multisport athletes, too, although it would be more accurate to say I got a chance to scope them out but not really meet them. I still feel like an outsider in a fairly exclusive club.

Other lessons learned:

• Transitions: I need to figure out how to get my bike gear on more quickly. I could have come in the top 20 if I hadn’t been so leisurely about my first transition.
• Nutrition: The duathlon is probably half as long as the triathlon in sheer time, which means I need twice as much stored up energy. I’m going to need to pay closer attention to my diet on race day. I began to feel a little weak towards the end of the race, but moments after finishing I was shocked to find myself getting dizzy and then vomiting in the bushes. Must remember to avoid acidy fruit drinks for breakfast!
• Pacing: I’m going to have to figure out my final pace. I intended to take the bike part pretty easy, but I think I pushed myself pretty hard in the end and lost some energy for the final run.

I’m not sure if I will have a chance to compete again between now and July 20 — maybe I can find a 10k to join or something — but I really enjoy this and look forward to more.

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My wife is tinydiva. She is a musician. Her band is called Masolit. They are awesome. Seriously. And you should see them play their world debut performance live this Saturday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Timing:
Saturday, March 22, 2008
7:00 pm: The Creationists
8:00 pm: Masolit

Location:
MTAA
60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC
(L train to Bedford Avenue, 3 Blocks west on North 6th, just shy of Kent St.)

Visit the Masolit web site or myspace page to get a taste of the rocking that will ensue this Saturday night.

This FREE performance is part of the Over the Opening series of art events sponsored by the artists known as MTAA.

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It’s hard to understate the pride I felt on behalf of my colleagues at Behavior when I read these words in Friday’s New York Times:

The Museum of Modern Art’s elegantly plain exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings begins with an unexpectedly extraordinary moment of computerized art viewing. Seurat’s four surviving notebooks have been converted to electronic versions that — with a touch of a finger — visitors can flip through, page by digital page, from cover to dog-eared cover. (The real notebooks can also be seen under glass nearby.)

Facsimiles they may be, but they instantly communicate the show’s intent, which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat’s impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active, socially aware engagement with the world that registered most fully in his drawings.

If you haven’t guessed already, the touch-screen interfaces in question were designed and built by my studio mates at Behavior, both as kiosk installations in the MoMA exhibition gallery and viewable on the web as a gorgeous online exhibition.

Roberta Smith of the Times is one of the the most important art critics around. So when the opening sentence of Smith’s review of Georges Seurat: The Drawings focuses so enthusiastically on the interactive kiosk that my colleagues put together these past few months, it’s more than just praise for Georges Seurat and for the great curation and leadership by the team at MoMA. It’s also praise for Behavior.

Touch Screens in the Age of the iPhone

Most of the Behavior folks attended the exhibition’s lavish opening festivities last week, and we all got a chance to watch dozens of very fancy people interacting with the twin touch-screen kiosks. It was such a joy to watch the gallery-goers flip through the pages with looks of, I swear, genuine delight on their faces. No lie: I definitely heard “ooohs” and “aaahs”.

As with any usability test situation, of course, there were also the occasional moments where a user would try to do something we didn’t think of. Of particular interest was the fairly common attempt by users to treat the traditional touch screens as if they were iPhone-style multi-touch screens. People expected to be able to smoothly zoom in by spreading two fingers apart as they can on the iPhone. As with so much of what Apple does, the bar has apparently been raised in unexpected new places in the interactive landscape.

What About the Art?

Oh, and the show is absolutely luminous. I hope you check out the web site, of course, but if you enjoy art at all you must see the show in person. The sketchbooks are just a tiny piece of the exhibit. The rest of the show, and the online exhibition, includes drawings and paintings, historical conservation information, and of course the sketchbooks.

The exhibition is getting rave reviews from many other sources as well, and deservedly so. We’ve all seen Seurat’s famous pointillist paintings, especially the revolutionary A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. But Seurat’s drawings reveal the intense thinking and talent that went into his painterly work.

The drawings excel in two areas simultaneously: Form and light. In a vivid metaphorical image conjured up by my wife Peggy (seen above), some drawings suggest that 19th century Paris would be transparent or even invisible if not for the industrial-era soot filling the air and collecting on any and all solid objects and forms. The charcoal on the page reflects the density of the matter in the space.

And yet other drawings emphasize light itself, with the space articulated only by where the light exists and where it does not — where traditional drawing marks like contour lines are banished. The relationship between this thinking and the daguerrotype photography of the time is hard to dispute.

The best works attack form and light at the same time, and it’s easy to see how Seurat’s eschewing of contour and lines — and embrace of volume and light — leads directly to La Grande Jatte, even without the extraordinary discoveries in color he is most famous for.

La Grande Jatte was painted when Seurat was just 26. He would die five years later, at 31. It’s staggering to imagine what he would have gone on to accomplish had he lived into the age of Matisse (born the same year as Seurat), Kandinsky, and Picasso.

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Photo from A Typical Joe of some Georgia roadside signage. Why don’t I ever see anything like this in New York City?

The opening sentence in today’s Times Magazine cover story (about the state of political confusion in America’s Christian Right) depicts a phenomenon I’ve long wondered about:

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war.

Indeed, whenever I travel in Bible Belt country or in so-called “red states”, I am often struck by the absolute depravity and crass exploitation that I see all around me — in places where, as conventional wisdom would have it, the people are supposed to be the most morally upstanding Americans, especially when compared to people like me, an amoral atheist New Yorker.

New York City has its seedy side, of course, but what you see in the red states is way different. If you drive along the main highways of West Virginia, rural Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana — almost anywhere, it seems — you are bound to pass long stretches of seedy strip clubs, quasi-legal gambling venues, drug and alcohol addiction centers, DUI lawyers, and corrupt check cashing places for miles and miles. You’ll even see billboards for abortion clinics.

But among these you will also find a seemingly equal number of churches and religious groups whose primary mission is to save local people from the very businesses that operate next door. Driving down the highway it’s a moral checkerboard: church, strip club, church, slot machines, church, payday loans, etc. These two opposing forces are literally positioned right next to each other, like opposing armies in WWI, entrenched a hundred feet apart. You get a distinct feeling that there is a war going on from door to door in thousands of American communities.

Maybe I just don’t notice it, but I can’t think of any part of New York City, or anywhere in New England, where you can find this kind of Sodom & Gomorrah right out in the open where families have to see it every single day. Which is why I’m often more than a little startled when I see gigantic billboards of ecstatic naked porn stars in exactly those parts of the country which are, by conventional wisdom, supposed to be the most righteous and moral places on Earth.

Can it really be that I have a puritanical streak in me? I personally don’t find the sex businesses offensive, exactly– at best they’re sad and stupid, and that’s enough for me to not really want to look at them — but IMHO the casinos and rip-off lenders are downright evil and thoroughly destructive to society.

All told, you can hardly blame red staters for thinking that America is in a culture war when their highways are already raging moral battlefields. But the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states, where husbands are fighting wives, parents are fighting children, and neighbors are fighting neighbors.

Red staters, in turn, cannot blame New York and LA for their addictions to gambling, pornography, crystal meth, or easy credit. They should look to their own governments, Democrat and Republican, and into their own souls.

One might be tempted to attribute this phenomenon to simple moral hypocrisy, concluding that that the most religious people are, in fact, the most depraved (as seen in recent GOP scandals). But that’s just too simple. I think that people are driven to embrace religion, and then to back religious political movements, because of the moral corruption they feel directly threatens them and their families. But that meanwhile the broader culture, unanchored, confusedly drifts from one extreme to the other, from righteousness to sin, in the same town, the same family, and even in individual people.

The problem, I suspect, is that most of the leadership of the religious right is obsessed with political objectives that do not even attempt to address the real problems that people face and fear — poverty, addiction, teen pregnancy, ignorance — and instead they attack problems that have nothing to do with real-world core moral and social challenges. They want to lower taxes for the wealthy, make gay marriage illegal, prevent discussions of sex and contraception in school, roll back or oppose civil rights for immigrants, women, religious minorities. These issues are powerful for getting political backing and electoral popularity, but they do not help in the real battlefield where people’s lives are ruined by ignorance and addiction.

Until the religious right realizes that New York City is not Mordor projecting a beam of evil at them and tearing their families apart, and that the real problem is right in their own backyard, they, and we, will never be at peace.

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The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the people who run the subways) have done a test installation of a new feature to help riders orient themselves as they exit our often-labyrinthine subway stations. They’re placing sidewalk-level signage to tell riders which way is north and indicating which direction the nearest streets and avenues can be found. The Times has the full story today, and I’ve copied their photo here.

I think these are great. Despite what many New Yorkers will claim, we all get disoriented when we exit subway stations in neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with, and often it takes a minute or two to figure out exactly which way is north. (This has, by the way, gotten a lot harder since we lost the World Trade Center as a landmark).

I like two things about these orientation medallions:

1. They make a relatively high estimation of people’s knowledge of New York City geography. I don’t have any data to back this up, but based on the truly abysmal performance by Americans in general at reading maps, I’m not confident that many people, even in New York, are cartographically literate enough to even know north from west. Such people would certainly find these medallions somewhat hard to use. Designers and urban planners commonly design for the lowest common denominator of their user base, or at best they aim for features that are understood by and useful for a solid majority of their users, and as a result they don’t build features for the slightly-more advanced users of their systems. So cheers to the MTA for trying something that will clearly help those riders who already have a good general understanding of New York’s lay of the land. Who knows, the medallions may even have the happy side effect of educating the commuters who don’t quite get it.
2. I really dig the nice touch of deliberately making the compass a little bit inaccurate in order to conform with the average New Yorker’s mental model of the city. You see, the long slender island of Manhattan is not actually oriented directly north to south. The island and its avenues actually run a little more north-north-easterly, rotated slightly away from the true N-S axis. But most people think of uptown as due north, so that’s how the MTA oriented the compass directions and the street IDs. No hobgoblins of foolish consistency here.

Also, it’s delightfully surprising to me that this idea was originally proposed by a regular New Yorker, and the city somehow made it happen. Nice job.

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This is the least humiliating frame from my whole clip.

I’ve recently started a swimming training program so I can competently complete my weakest part of the trifecta: Running, biking, and swimming. Hopefully by next summer I will be ready for my goal, to compete in the New York City Triathlon.

An interesting aspect of this swim class is the use of technology. In our very first meeting, the coach shot underwater videos of each student crossing the pool, capturing all of our flailing arms and gasping breaths. He then wrote up a critique of each student’s swimming technique and gave a CD with all of the videos and critiques to each of us, giving us all a powerful insight into what we are doing right and wrong in the water. It’s astonishing how many things I can instantly see that I need to improve, especially when I watch my own video next to that of, say, Olympian Ian Thorpe.

What’s great about this is how incredibly low-fi and accessible the whole deal was. You would think that underwater cameras as a training tool would be reserved only for competitive swimmers at the top of their game. But there I am! The video camera looked like a regular consumer model attached to a long pole with some kind of jerry-rigged periscope involved, and immersed in the water. The coach shot by simply walking along the edge of the pool and following each of us as we swam across. And because it’s digital, it was easy for him to bring 20 copies of the videos on CD-ROM to the next class a week later.

He’ll be recording us a few more times over the 12-week course, so we can track our improvement. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the next taping. I swear, I dream about swimming now.

This blog post has been brought to you by “Our Swimmer”, by Wire:

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The New York Times is ending their TimesSelect “service” as of tomorrow, September 19th. Despite my deep resentment of the whole TimesSelect idea in the first place, I applaud the Times’ decision to end it and to finally align themselves with the way the web’s culture of thought actually works.

During the 2004 election cycle, Times columnists like Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and the rest of the Op-Ed talking heads would regularly be part of my daily readings, and they were an important part of the national political dialogue. Countless blogs would link to them, quote them, and respond to their influential voices. But then when the Times instituted the TimesSelect paywall, all of these thought-provoking voices were silenced, almost overnight. They became invisible to me and literally millions of other regular and loyal readers.

Sure many of the Times’ paper subscribers (who get TimesSelect memberships as part of their subscription price) continued to read these columnists. But the rest of us, those who read the Times online only, pretty much lost contact with them completely. Bloggers ceased linking to them, and eventually they ceased even talking about them. They lost relevance, influence, and credibility. And, as a result, the Times did, too.

As I’ve said before, I have no idea if TimesSelect was a good business decision in 2005 or not. My gut tells me that, ultimately, it was not. It probably didn’t drive many additional subscriptions (people who want a paper delivered to their homes will subscribe anyway, regardless of online add-ons), and it’s hard to imagine that there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are willing to pay the annual fee for just web access to the TimesSelect content.

I’d guess that the total number of people who actually paid the annual fee was tiny in comparison to the number of people who simply stopped reading the Times as much as they used to. The lost revenue from advertising impressions and page views may have been comparable to the revenue gained from the small number of subscriptions and online memberships they gained.

But more importantly, the Times lost some of their their momentum in being an influential force in the blogosphere, and thus in the emerging zeitgeist of the political and cultural dialogues that occur increasingly online. They stopped investing in their own reputation and positioning in today’s networked conversations. And unfortunately, damage like this is hard to repair — it’s like spending two years without contributing to your 401k plan, missing out on two years of accrued credit and growth.

They’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I for one will glady jump right back in. Welcome back to the interweb, Op-Ed columnists!

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