Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

I am a slow runner. When I say this, people often try to reframe this statement with various qualifiers; You're not slow for your age. You are holding yourself to too high a standard. You're faster than I am! I will take the compliments that are probably embedded within these (and other) statements, though in the interest of honesty and full-disclosure, I stand by my first statement - I am a slow runner. I'm bringing this up now, because I recently registered for my first marathon. Over the next six months, I will share photos and blog postings related to training for the Driftless 50 marathon. In the process, I don't want to nurture any mythologies surrounding my running prowess. I am a (very) slow runner. Watching me run is like watching a slow-motion video. While many people are hoping to compete at 8-minute/mile pace, I'm ramping up my training so that I can run this marathon at approximately twice that pace. Seriously - I am shooting to run 13-15

The past two semesters my graduate coursework has largely revolved around statistics. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I am not proving to be a standout statistician, though I am still picking up the essentials. Among the essential ideas of statistics is the notion of regression to the mean. In last week's readings, the textbook cited people's heights as an example of regression to the mean. People come in many different shapes and sizes. More specifically, some people are very tall, some people are very short, though the majority are within a small band of heights around the population average. Regardless of family of origin, genetics or other variables, adult height strongly trends toward the average (mean). I found this interesting, and not solely because I am 6'6" and more than three standard deviations away from the mean. I found it interesting that when very tall people have children, their children are rarely so tall. And after a few generations,

Last month I made a quick trip to Minneapolis to visit my elderly Aunt and Uncle. We had a great visit, made even more enjoyable by a meal at one of my favorite restaurants in the whole world, the  Birchwood Cafe . I began that morning with a long, leisurely run around the University of Minnesota campus. I always like exploring the campus, alternately taking in all the new construction and updates, and fondly remembering my days as an undergrad at the "U." I ended the run at the Birchwood, where I reveled in post-workout bliss over a pot of green tea. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the kitchen staff hurriedly move through the dining area. Immediately the thought flashed into my mind, that's Matt Worthington! (not his real name). Without even seeing his face, I immediately knew the identity of the person through his movements. The Birchwood Cafe While I've known the owner of the Birchwood Cafe for 30+ years, I had not seen or thought of Matt since w

I wonder if the chrysalis has a sense of its prior worm nature, or of its future butterfly nature? Whatever consciousness may or may not look like in other sentient beings, I experience a sense of past-me, hopes for future-me and the essential, embodied, present-case me. While the latter is often in short supply, years of meditation have at least introduced the possibility of an embodied present. Where am I going with all this? As I mentioned in my prior posting, I'm in the midst of a midlife reboot. And a significant part of this reboot involves my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. A cup of espresso seemed the perfect way to celebrate a successful thesis proposal. A couple of months ago I cleared one of my first graduate-school hurdles. In front of my thesis committee, I successfully made the case that my proposed project meets the Masters degree standards at the UW - Madison. Now, before any back-slapping and high-fiving occurs, I think it bear

Naperville, IL (~1974) As a kid, I was never too keen of having my photo taken. Invariably, something interesting was interrupted by the instruction to stand here and smile . As you can see in the adjacent photo, my enthusiasm was muted, to say the least. Oddly enough, I had been running around happily just a few moments before this photo was taken - I can remember that day like it was yesterday. It was the first Spring day that I had worn shorts, and I could hardly contain the joy in running around with bare legs. At that time, it seemed as though Spring was something that happened one day. After months of cold and snow, and then overcast and drizzly, Spring seemed like a switch that was flipped from off to on. As a kid, I did not know that the processes of Spring began the previous Fall, and that that moment was the product of what had been occurring for many months. While I now have a deeper understanding of how seasons slowly morph from one to the other, I am still learn