Government Executive - Authors - Matt Nelson

Ten Years Later, a Marathon Runner

Matt Nelson, SHFWire — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:06:00 -0400

If you're going to run in Minnesota, do it in the summer. In fact, if you're going to do anything in Minnesota, do it in the summer.

Except for ice fishing. You might drown.

You can run in spring, too. Just wait for that glorious first day when the temperature jumps above 40 and the sun is shining. That's what the weather was like the first day I went running.

I was quite the racer. Picture a fat kid with glasses lugging a backpack. He's decided to run in khaki pants and tennis shoes. He knows that isn't proper running attire, but he isn't sure what is, and in 2003, all he's got is dial-up Internet.

But this kid has an ace up his sleeve — he lives on a dirt road outside of town. He's confident no one can see him. He thinks about going up to the farmhouse to drop off his backpack (and maybe change into shorts), but he's afraid that he won't work up the determination to come back to the end of the driveway. If this first run is going to happen, it has to happen now.

At the end of the dirt road, he sees a stop sign. It is a half-mile away. He's never gone that far, but when he goes to high school in six months, he'll have to run twice that. That's why he's left his backpack at the side of the road and is awkwardly stretching his legs by the mailbox. He's afraid.

He takes a few breaths, throws out his arms — and begins to run!

Ten years later, that kid has become me — a three-time marathon runner who recently nailed a personal best of 3 hours and 41 minutes in the D.C. Rock 'N Roll Marathon.

But that first day, I ran about 200 feet. My heart was pounding so hard I had to sit at the side of the road (my khaki pants got dirty). The horses lined up behind the fence to watch me. They had judging eyes. Their whinnies mocked my wheezes. I gazed down the road at the stop sign, so small. So far away.

I've been asked what it feels like to run a marathon. I assume people want to hear about the sense of accomplishment, rather than the bleeding, chafing and other things they can learn about through Google. And the truth is, that as as proud as 26.2 miles makes you feel, it's just a cap on a series of victories that have so much more meaning.

Touching the stop sign 10 years ago — that was my first real running triumph. It had taken me the rest of the school year and half of the summer. Every day I ran a bit farther, sometimes as little as a few steps.

There were no crowds at the end of Foss Road pumping their fists to congratulate me, but the mosquitoes seemed excited enough.

It seems so small now, but if I hadn't touched that sign, I would not have run a marathon. That's how I learned that the toughest barriers to running were in my mind, not my muscles. The white letters said STOP, but I thought, why?

So I ran more. I ran my first marathon in 2008. I was OK until mile 25, when I thought about the stop sign. I started choking up. That's how I learned that a weepy, sweaty mess does not make a good finish line picture. Always smile.

I trained consistently and rigorously for the marathon last month. I lost quite a bit along the way, including 30 pounds and two wisdom teeth (I ran a total of 31 miles the weekend I had them taken out — prescription painkillers are great!). But I found a lot of things, too — the friends I made at run club, the wooded Beach Drive going miles into Maryland.

As far as marathons go, the Rock 'N Roll was fine — although I could have done with fewer acoustic Lady Gaga covers from the live bands along the route. I'm happy with my pace, and I've got a plan to keep cutting it down.

Ten years later, and I'm gazing at a starting line, not a stop sign: Boston, 2014. To get there, I'll need to run a minimum qualifying time of 3 hours and 5 minutes. The line is far away, hard to see.

I started on a dirt road by a mailbox. Now I'm at the Washington Monument. I'm stretching my legs, taking a few breaths, getting ready to run. I'm not afraid any more.

Here I come!

Matt Nelson is the multimedia fellow at the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire. He has worked at media outlets in both Minnesota, Iowa and now Washington, D.C. He has worked at the Hibbing Daily Tribune, the Des Moines Register, Patch.com and ABC News. Nelson graduated from Drake University with a degree in journalism and a minor in physics.

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Interactive Graphic: 28 Inauguration Firsts

Matt Nelson, SHFWire — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:12:00 -0500

On Monday, Washington will again bear witness to one of the grandest displays of our democracy in action--the presidential inauguration. It's a ritual that reaches back through time, connecting our past to our present.

Searching through the annals of history, we've discovered that many presidential firsts occur during the inauguration. Some presidents are edgier than others when it comes to their inauguration ceremonies. Every four years, they get the chance to break with tradition — or maybe begin some of their own.

( RELATED : 7 Huge Mistakes of Inaugurations Past)

In this interactive graphic, find out which president was brave enough to shake the status quo by wearing trousers to his swearing in rather than knee breeches, or which president had the guts to recite his 3,000-word inaugural address from memory. From the first president to arrive by train to the first captured on motion picture, the inauguration is always quite literally history in the making.

Learn more by clicking on the names of each president in the graphic below:

( You can also view in fullscreen )

Image via White House Historical Association

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Advanced Technology Reveals the Invisible in Centuries-old Manuscripts

Matt Nelson, SHFWire — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:00:00 -0500

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Meghan Hill knows how to operate a specialized camera that reveals the secrets of ancient manuscripts from Egypt's Sinai desert, but she still has to deal with the occasional photobomb.

"We had a fly," Hill said. "Since it was in the dark room, and we turned off all the exterior lights, it flew to the only source of light it could find. It landed on the document, stayed for the entire imaging, and then flew away right after. So when we were developing all these images, we had these incredible, high resolution images - of a fly."

Hill, a hyperspectral imaging technician at the Library of Congress, had to repeat the photoshoot, this time ensuring the lens was pest-free.

Her efforts are part of a project that is digitally capturing ancient documents from the remote St. Catherine's Monastery, using specialized cameras and lighting conditions to expose text or images invisible to the naked eye. She and others talked about the first scholarly results from researchers’ photography of the Sinai documents Monday at the Library of Congress.

The imaging techniques are handy for studying documents at the remote St. Catherine’s, where it was historically difficult to deliver writing materials. To preserve pages, monks often reused paper by erasing it and writing over the old text. These pages, known as “palimpsests,” contain remnants of the former script hidden between or beneath the lines of newer text. With hyperspectral imaging, researchers are in the midst of exposing invisible or illegible script on nearly 7,500 pages of palimpsests.

Because the cameras capture so much information, it takes three or four minutes to photograph each page multiple times, Hill said. The result is 630,000 high-resolution images, an enormous amount of data.

"If you were to put all these images together, in a full-length movie, and you were to watch it on Netflix, 24 hours a day, it would take you 2½ years to look at all these images," Michael Toth, the program manager of the Sinai Palimpsest Project, said. Toth has helped manage other hyperspectral imaging projects, including theArchimedes Palimpsests, theWaldseemuller 1507 World Map and a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Part of Toth's job is handling logistics, details that are complicated by the remote location of the monastery.

"We have a very long logistics chain," Toth said. "There's no Best Buy, there's no Radio Shack for hundreds of miles."

The monastery's isolation has also caused some to wonder if documents thought lost to history are hidden within the palimpsests. One audience member asked if any manuscripts from the Library of Alexandria could have ended up at St. Catherine's, since monks were living at Sinai when the library existed.

"One would wish that there were," Father Justin Sinaites, the librarian at St. Catherine's, said. "But I can't say with any confidence that there are."

The Library of Congress has used similar imaging tools to examine famous American documents such as the Declaration of Independence. Fenella France, the chief of the preservation research and testing division at the Library of Congress, said the imaging is important because it captures a culture otherwise lost to history.

"We don't know what they did back then," France said. "This tells us the thought process. What were they thinking when they created this document? The palimpsests, the copies, the little inscriptions and changes ... this is a wonderful technique to pull out invisible information."

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What Do You Get The Guy Who Averts Nuclear War?

Matt Nelson, SHFWire — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:49:00 -0400

How does a president thank the advisers who helped him avert a nuclear war?

With fancy paperweights, of course.

President John F. Kennedy commissioned 34 silver and wood paperweights from Tiffany and Company in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The weights depict the calendar month of October, with the 13 days spanning the crisis – Oct. 16 to 28 – embossed in dark black.

One of those celebratory weights is now on display at the National Archives as part of an exhibit that opened last week, "To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis." It will remain on view until Feb. 3.

Laura Diachenko, a public affairs specialist at the National Archives, said the exhibit featured some never-before-displayed items taken from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. These items include personality profiles of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev created by the CIA.

The display includes secret White House recordings made at the height of the crisis, including tense discussions between Kennedy and the executive committee of the National Security Council, whose members can be heard debating the cost of nuclear war.

Stacey Bredhoff, curator at the Kennedy Library, helped assemble the exhibit. She said the taped conversations were some of the most interesting pieces.

“As the discussions progress, it’s really kind of a race against the clock, because minute by minute these missile sites are getting closer to being fully operational,” Bredhoff said. “I think you get a sense of that building tension.”

The conversations reveal the technological hurdles Kennedy and Khrushchev had to overcome when negotiating and how miscommunications brought both countries to the brink of nuclear war.

“The exhibit shows that, even though there were negotiations between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, the events are beginning to slip even out of their control,” Bredhoff said.

Ray Hanson, 65, toured the display on opening day. A retired writer from the Department of the Army in Huntsville, Ala., Hanson was 15 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said the taped conversations among staff members were the most interesting part of the exhibit for him.

"I just enjoy hearing it as it happened," Hanson said. "I think it was probably the first time I'd heard it. Maybe bits before, but not to the extent that I heard it in there."

Hanson's friend Mike Stringfellow, 60, who is a writer at the Department of the Army in Huntsville, said the exhibit helped him see the complexity of the crisis.

"It wasn't simply a series of incidents," Stringfellow said. "It was very complicated negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev. It was very delicate, very complicated."

Stringfellow was 10 years old in October 1962 and only vaguely remembers people talking about the crisis.

"I was more interested in my bicycle than in nuclear war," he said.

Stringfellow does remember the duck-and-cover drills that U.S. schools often practiced at the height of the Cold War, when schoolchildren would be instructed by their teachers to hide under their desks for protection.

"Even then, it didn't seem to me that this tiny wooden desk would provide much cover to our safety," Stringfellow said. "It was kind of strange."

Bredhoff visited the exhibit on opening day to see how visitors would respond.

“What people are saying is that, ‘It really got my heart racing faster,’ or ‘I felt a knot in my stomach,’” Bredhoff said. “They are really getting a sense not just intellectually, but emotionally about how close we actually came to utter destruction.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when Khrushchev agreed to disassemble the missile bases in Cuba if the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba and secretly removed missile bases in Turkey. The crisis also sped the development of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1963. The original signed treaty is also on display.

Nearly 900 people toured "To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis," on its first day, Diachenko said.

Do you remember the days during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

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