7/30/07 - 8/5/07 Neither financier seized either weird species of leisure. (400 minutes)

8/5/07 (no run)
Glancing back through this week's log, I saw I've already run far more this week than last. Prudence suggests a rest day. I did take the kids on a hike to the Dish. Also, they were having a contest to see who could jump and touch the ceiling. I secured my spot of the top of the food chain by touching the ceiling without even jumping. Not that I'm that tall, but i grabbed a doorframe, did a pullup, and slapped the ceiling with one hand before I could fall down. Showed those little buggers who's boss.

8/4/07 (70 minutes)
I woke up and decided to go running. This was about 2:30 in the afternoon, so I peed a toilet bowl to a delightfully-lemon coloring and swallowed a bagel before committing myself to a hot afternoon sun.

Last time I went for a daytime run my shoulders peeled and every time someone tried to run their hand through my buzzed hair my scalp rewarded them with a fistful of dandruff. I'm no sissy though, so screw sunscreen. I went to "The Grove" (a 1200m woodchip trail around the eucalyptus grove). I wondered whether you will get burned worse by being out in the sun for two hours, spending half your time in the sun and half in the shade, but alternating between them, or by just staying out in the sun for an hour.

Empirically, I'm fairly sure the answer is one straight hour in the sun is much worse. Which suggests the mechanism of sunburn is something accumulated with time, and which can "cool off" in brief periods of shade. So, is sunburn caused because you skin absorbs UV radiation, but it takes a certain energy density to begin whatever molecular process is involved in burning? Or, is the burning a biological response? Maybe a single photon-molecule interaction causes some sort of conformal change, but this only serves as a signal to a more complicated biological pathway? Then, maybe after a few seconds the molecule can go back to its unexcited state, so the conditions for sunburn would be both sufficiently-intense light AND sufficient duration of exposure, to build up the requisite density of UV-excited molecules to act as signals.

My strategy of the running the partially-shaded grove worked, by all appearances, and I returned to the house at 69:59 on the watch. Originally, I intended to run for 90 minutes, but I was feeling dehydrated already, and I'm not used to running in the heat because most of my runs are at midnight. I came back to the house and celebrated my general coolness with further bagels.

8/3/07 (60 minutes)
The last ten minutes were a good, strong pace, because at 49 minutes on the watch I decided to see if I could get back to the house before the run was an hour long. Normally it would have been thirteen minutes of running (the fact that I know the number with such accuracy is testament to the routine nature of my daily runs), but I got back to the house in 59:15. Afterwards, I chatted with three other camp counselors returning from a night of "clubbing". I don't know what they were clubbing, but there was remarkably little blood left on their clothes. They could have changed, though.

Anyway, we decided that my personal superpower is the ability to see through windows. Also, because dolphins live in the water and I am made of small packets of water, there may be millions of microscopic dolphins swimming their way through me right now, which I think is a beautiful possibility.

I am a 12-year old girl.

You have to appreciate beauty in the world wherever you find it. Like this afternoon, I took a shower just at the time that the sun could shine in through the window. Suddenly, amidst the choatically-splashing water and the resonant sound cavity of the shower's walls, I realized, "Wow, I'm a beautiful human being."

But more than that, with the sun and the drops of water I could see rainbows. Small rainbows, subtending a few degrees of arc, dictated by how far back I drew the shower curtain. There were clearly both first and second order bows, both doubled due to their proximity and my binocular vision. Best of all, by appropriate contortions and manipulations, I was able to peek over my own shoulder at a bright, distinct rainbow blasting its way directly out of my anus. Sometimes the glory of the natural world is so overwhelming I can't help but shed a few tears. These were instantly washed away into the rainbows and pipes full of fecal matter and undigested corn nuts below.

8/2/07 (80 minutes)
I ran by the eucalyptus. The entire run felt very quiet. It was how I would expect it to feel if everyone in your party were hushing each other, because you're all hunting blind baby koala bears, and you don't want to startle them.

8/1/07 (70 minutes)
I kept it slow today, the better to ruminate. It was my older sister's birthday - she's 26, now married, living in a real house, and pregnant. It never occurred to me, back when we constructed cities that sprawled aimlessly across the sandbox, limited by the size of our imaginations and the length of a summer afternoon, that someday we would, without any conscious effort, morph into beings resembling human adults.
Megumi's question about the different motivations behind running has hovered in my mind for the past week, and in various forms for years. So I decided to do something about it.
First, I looked up who skeletor is. He looks like this:


So, skeletor is more along the lines of
than
I'm not sure if that's exactly what she had in mind.

But Megumi's question, "So then... why exactly DO you run?" is not one that I can answer directly. The thing I am most closely convinced of about running, is simply that I do not understand it. I've tried several times to write about why I run, what running is, etc. But it's difficult enough for me to describe what the experiences of running are like: what it's like to feel your shoes beating the asphalt and cold raindrops beating your eyes, alone in a world of windshield wipers and faces hidden under umbrellas; what it's like to hammer intervals on the track, playing mind games with yourself as a slow countdown to the last repeat marches on; what it's like to see sweat flying from the tips of your fingers in the summer, and your breath burst out in white puffs when you stop at a light in the winter. Once the experience is over, what remains in my mind is some sort of parody. The only way to go back to the real thing is to lace them up and do it again. Even that doesn't work, because when I return there I'm no longer the same runner, no longer the same person, and the experience is inevitably, and wonderfully, something new.

If I can barely understand what running is like, how can I pretend to understand what it's for? I feel like I have no choice but to come to terms with running, now, at least at some modest level. Without a team to represent or clear competitive goals laid out for me, my personal role as leader of this endeavor is made all the more apparent. It's time for me to decide what I want running to be - time for me to decide what I want ME to be.

I know that I can't explain why I do it. I'd like to believe in David's quote from Thoreau, that running is a means of self-elevation. A forward drive is a basic human psychological need. We want to feel like we're actually doing something, like somewhere amidst the conflicted notions of ourselves that bash through our heads and buffet our Brownian thoughts about every conceivable direction, there's something unifying thread running through, which we hold to be unquestionably good.

My own drives and desires may not be so lofty as I would like to imagine them. I wouldn't claim that running is about my ego, but I wouldn't be able to deny it, either. And ego is not something I admire, which calls the entire endeavor into question.

There were a few days this past month when the hour rolled over, uninvited, to running o'clock, and looking down at dirty shoes, running seemed like some sort of ridiculous backward ritual. On those days, I did something new. I skipped.

Skipping running, for me, confirmed it. The fact that the next day I ran, and knew that I was running out of something other than guilt, proved running is no obligation, and never should be.
I do not believe I will ever discover the meaning of life on a run, or discover the meaning of running in life. The implication of such a thing - that meaning is "out there" waiting to be found, is a bit insulting. It's fatalistic. Running isn't an Easter Egg hunt. I'm not out running the trails searching for beautiful little snippets of life to weave into some great tapestry.

Even writing about running and meaning scares me, because when writing, it's so much easier to write something pretty than to write the truth. Flowers can be ugly, too, you know, but I've never seen a poem about it, and wouldn't want to read one if it existed. It would probably suck, if it were honest. There are thousands of gorgeous personal essays about the meaning of running. They fill books, journals, and message boards across the world. But I think it's too easy to smother yourself so deeply behind an impenetrable facade of pretty words that nothing of the truth underneath can ever crawl out, if it even lives there at all anymore.

We take a million breaths in our lives. The deepest come when running. How many spent are worthwhile, and how many wasted in vacuous automation? How many are spent searching for meaning, and how many are spent creating it?

7/31/07 (60 minutes, easy surges)
I ran my now-routine route, throwing in a few untimed surges to the next stoplight during the middle 15-20 minutes of the run. I felt good today. Afterwards, I stole all the cold whirpools from Stanford's training rooms, but had to return everything but the green dipshits.

7/30/07 (60 minutes)
I ran in shoes on the dirt trail around campus. My achilles seem to be doing pretty well, but now my knees were bothering me a bit. It's a sign of having done far too much quantum mechanics recently that I briefly considered this an example of complementarity.

7/23/07 - 7/29/07 Pedestrian Peregrinations (260 minutes)

Sunday, July 29 (45 minutes)
Spent the afternoon attempting to Fourier-analyze my daily mileage since 2004. I imported the data to Excel, and after a bit of work I had a Fourier series, but it showed nothing but noise.
Eventually, I realized what the problems were, one by one, and finally decided just to try to look at periods between 2 and 14 days. After some effort, I got this:



I was expecting a strong spike at 7 days, indicating a weekly long run on the weekend, but the signal there is no stronger than the (seemingly) random noise at 5 days.

For comparison, I used data from Stuart Calderwood, an extremely consistent runner I know from thrunninglog. His came out like this:



The highest peak is at 7 days, but it's still not very telling. Originally, my hope was that this analysis would tell me things like whether I follow a hard-easy pattern (2 day period) or a hard-hard-easy pattern, or a weekly pattern, or a biannual pattern, or a two-month pattern (estimated time between injuries). But it turned out to be pretty useless. So the lesson for today is NEVER ATTEMPT A FOURIER DECOMPOSITION OF YOUR TRAINING LOG. It will simply waste an entire afternoon.

Saturday, July 28 (no run)
Wanted to run, but I couldn't leave until after the kids went to bed at midnight, and I was tired, so I just went to sleep instead.

Friday, July 27 (45 minutes)
Kept my shoes on and ran back and forth on the trail around campus edge.

Thursday, July 26 (30 minutes)
I took a few of my campers to the gym, because they haven't been able to lift for the week and a half they've been here. When I got there, the front desk guy demanded five dollars to use the gym. I thought this was preposterous, and so abandoned the kids and went running.
Yesterday, I had been thinking about forgoing the barefoot running for a while. It may be good for many things, but my guess is that it's tough on the achilles. Kangway then posted exactly the same advice. So I went for a short run on the trails circling campus.
My chief worry wasn't my achilles, which felt fine, but that I would burn the top of my head badly enough to start it peeling.
I shaved my head last week on a whim, but when I went for a 90 minute run on Saturday afternoon I burned the tops of my shoulders and the top of my head. It's been fine so far, but I've been shying away from the sun like a true Techer for the past few days.
Also, here is a video of the achilles tendinitis rehab exercise I've been doing:




Wednesday, July 25 (no running)
I took the day off in deference to the complaints of my left achilles. I don't like having to skip a day, but I can't say it bugged me all that much, either. Habitually running at 11:30PM is becoming annoying, and so instead of running I played (and horribly lost) poker with the other camp counselors.
Just a single day seems to have made an impact, though, because today (Thursday) I didn't notice the clicking in there.

Tuesday, July 24 (75 minutes)
Lately I've been feeling just close enough to the border of injury that I appreciate far more keenly the fact I am able to run. My achilles tendons seem to be holding up, but they don't quite feel 100%. A month ago I started doing "eccentric calf lowering" [plan to insert video here] in hopes of rehabilitating them. I found marked improvement in the first two weeks, but I seem to be at a sort of steady state now.
I read about these exercises various places on the internet, including here. (oops, can't find the one i was thinking of. the link is somewhat similar) The article basically said, "here is an exercise that worked great in a study, but you should do our different, special exercise instead because it's better. the reason it's better is we say so." So I've been doing the exercise from the study.
Today, my left achilles tendon, the one that had been the good one, started doing something funny I can't quite describe. When I stretch my calf, there's a certain angle at which something moves in or next to my achilles tendon. It's not painful, but extremely disconcerting. I also think that sometimes when I move my foot past that angle, my ankle cracks right just there.
My ankles will crack under all sorts of different circumstances. There are spots on the sides of my knees that visibly jump back and forth when I bend my leg. The top of my foot will spontaneously become sore for the first few steps when I stand up, then something in my foot gives a crack, and the soreness goes away. My neck, upper and lower back, wrists, elbows, fingers, toes, and knees all crack when I move them.
Normally it's satisfying right when it happens. But it bothers me that I'm put together so precariously, and that at any time nearly any part of my body could give out. Injury prevention is both vital and obscure. There are certain things that can be understood fairly well. IT band syndrome disappeared when I did side-lying leg raises and stayed off crowned roads. Forget the mechanism - the bottom line is what I'm after. And the bottom line was I got rid of ITBS. But others, like the two tendon injuries I've had this year, come from unexplained causes with unknown (effective) cures. This is seriously disturbing, and I don't have much to do about it.

Monday, July 23 (65 minutes)
Moon hovered, bloated, aside Hoover Tower's flat form. Pale-glowing clouds crept across the sky to smother the stars, save a few loners piercing gaps. The air retained its damp warmth, but grass underfoot was wet and cool. Cars drove backwards the wrong way, and turned around when I changed directions. In a single lap the moon vanished; the tower remained. Nothing ever turns black, just grays out and hazes over. My stomach was too full and my head too warm. The worlds wouldn't gel and my thoughts blurred between them. Until eventually I returned, and all the remained were footsteps.

People blog not to explain themselves to the world, but to try to understand themselves better. For me a blog about running is artificial, because running cannot be extricated. It is impossible to visualize and understand the shape of a 4-dimensional hypercube all at once. But it can be projected into three dimensions, and if we look at it from enough points of view, we start to get some picture of the true form.
A blog about running is a projection of myself onto "running space", but a blogs about my schoolwork, or the books I read, or the way I brush my teeth (with my left hand, even though I'm right-handed) would serve as well. Running does not hold a privileged spot for me, does not define who I am. Instead (obviously) who I am defines how I run.
In all my endeavors, I define the scope and meaning of the task. I choose which books to read and which classes to take, and give them whatever level of attention I want. I choose which hobbies to pursue, and how avidly. I choose where to go and what to do, what job to pursue and what to have for dinner. I choose who to be friends with, who to avoid, and finally, who to love. Everything is tailored to my taste, until this last.
When I fell in love with Soyoung, I didn't realize the fundamental difference that would separate a romantic relationship from everything else in life. Even my closest friendships (which I have often felt, perhaps incorrectly but without displeasure, are not as close as most people's) have evolved organically, without conscious effort. But love, when it passes beyond its initial intoxication, is something created.
At first, all I knew was the persistent vision of how her eyes looked when she smiled and memories of the rhythms of her voice. Infatuation was not new, but the knowledge that we were thinking of each other was both novel and sometimes overwhelming.
Megumi's post on dating athletes forced me to think about the evolution of our relationship since then, and the way we've been learning to integrate each other into our lives. The salient feature has been that it is not something for me to do, but something for us to do. It's a new, unfamiliar, and fascinating mindset.
When working on a team, my attitude isn't to "be part of a team", but to make my contribution to it. My basic thinking is still in terms of myself. Love hasn't been a complete departure from that - a journey into selflessness. It's been a journey into an interpersonal synergy. It's a situation where my contribution simply doesn't exist by itself. One person in love has no meaning.
Years ago there was a dichotomy in my life between running and everything else. I wouldn't have refuted the statement that running defined me. But my outlook evolved. My sense of self, bolstered by some innate desire for self-sufficiency, developed a more unified outlook, until I thought that all aspects of life, athletic, intellectual, social, personal, were being controlled by some master ME that lay underneath, and pointed things in remorselessly selfish way. But now there is something new there, forcing me to consider the world in new ways.
I don't think runners need to date runners. I think the a runner stating that non-athletes can't understand is more a reflection on the runner than it is on the non-athlete.
I'm glad my girlfriend isn't a runner. It would be confusing. That feeling I had today, at the beginning of the run, that nothing looks quite so clear as it ought, is maybe the surest sign that life has all manner of unknowns available, waiting for me, or us, to uncover them.

7/19/07 - 7/22/07 Pleasant Summer Trots

Sunday, 7/22/07 (80 minutes)
As usual, I ran night-time laps on the field north of the rugby field. I'd have called up DeMar, but I was on duty and couldn't leave during the day. The unsolved mystery of my foaming armpit led me to ruminate on other unsolved mysteries. For example:

Why Do So Many People Choose Blue As Their Favorite Color?
It doesn't make sense to me. Blue is a fine color, but green is superior. Green is the color of Mr. Spock's blood. It is the color of tomatoes. It is the color of jealousy. It is the color of Denise Richard's eyes. She is tasty. (So I imagine.) Green is also Jared Diamond's favorite color, and he speaks twelve languages. He knows a lot of words for green and is an expert on everything, including veterinary medicine and weed, both of which are green.
The ocean is not blue. It is green. Blue whales are grey, which isn't a real color, the way cauliflower is not a real food. When they die (the whales) they get moldy and turn green. Then they explode and the Ewoks feast and the ozone layer shrinks.
If everything you saw as green, I saw as blue and vice-versa, we would never be able to tell. Except that I could tell, because then I would like blue because it would be green, but I don't, so that is settled.
If you don't like green more than blue I don't know how to talk to you. It's like we don't speak the same language. Which, in fact, we probably don't, because I only speak English, but most people on Earth speak Asian. You might be saying that "Asian" is not a language. You are wrong. Asians, as you know, will make an odd series of clicking and tonal when placed in proximity to each other. Originally believed to be used for echolocation, recent analysis of the patterns in Asians' noises indicates that they may in fact be capable of using them as a system for aural communication, as a sort of ancient prototype to true language, like we humans have. In fact, genetic analysis indicates that Asians and humans share 99% of their genome. Macabre experimenters have even taken the proposition of human-asian offspring out of the world of Jules Vernes' imagination and given it serious theoretical speculation. Perhaps that will be sobering enough to make you reconsider your position.

Saturday, 7/21/07 (90 minutes)
A frothy foam formed from my left armpit as I made long loops around my favorite football field. This not a new phenomena, by now I've found my armpit fizzing four or five afternoons. I don't know what causes it. My first guest would be residual soap left over from showering, but as far as I know, my soap doesn't foam. Also, it all the instances of this occurring, the foam has only formed under my left armpit.

I take this to be the key hint. In order to find the cause of the foam, I must find some asymmetry between my left and right armpits. It's possible that my showering habits are asymmetrical, but I would guess that the asymmetry in the treatment I give my armpits from shower to shower varies somewhat depending on the location and thoroughness of the shower, whether my feet have any stress fractures in them, etc. So if the foam comes from unrinsed suds, I'd think it would pop up on the right armpit at least once in a while.

On the other hand, there are significant differences between my armpits simply built into the structure of my body. I am right handed. This means that on a daily basis I use my right arm differently than my left, and also my right arm is stronger. Possibly, I swing them differently while running. My heart is on my left hand side, and there are probably other various differences between right and left that I either don't know about or can't think of right now. So I think the foam is probably, in some way, connected to the specific way I use my arms - for example my left arm rubs against my body more and incites this foam. This doesn't preclude shower residuals from contributing to the process, but means they can't be the only cause.

The only other clue I have is that the appearance of the foam is correlated with the temperature and time of day I run. I have only seen it on hot days when I run in the afternoon. My armpit has no idea whether it's light or dark, being pretty much insensitive to light as far as I know, so my next guess is that temperature plays an important role here. When it's hot, I sweat. In fact, as I run on a hot day I see little balls of sweat flying off my hands as I go. I'm essentially hurling small chunks of myself off onto the ground to mark my path. This profuse sweating could be somehow related to the foam, but again can't be the whole story, because there are many times when I sweat without forming armpit foam.

Finally, I remember that Keith Blumenfeld foams at the mouth like a rabid Mr. Clean during every race, so maybe my armpit is actually Keith Blumenfeld's mouth.


Thursday, 7/19/07 (80 minutes)
I lament the death of my old track server, running.caltech.edu, and with this blog post admit finally that what was once my pet project has been relegated to that impenetrable scrap heap of junk on my "back burner", which is at best a tired hot plate and more realistically an ice block.

But after seeing the new team central, I decided I had to get in on that hot action,my daily log being insufficient for entries containing more than 255 characters.


I ran on the athletic fields at the edge of campus after dinner. A nighttime soccer game commanded the next field over, lit by rows of floodlights. I felt energized as I wove back and forth between the dark recesses of my personal, empty field's far corner and the incidentally-lit front half, where spectators and players stood focusing all their attention on a single ball. I was disappearing from the world and zooming back in over and over again, once every 90 seconds, for an hour on end.
At the end I did six striders, one down the long dark straightaway, then a short jog, and another, faster and prettier than before, a short quick burst through the light and back into darkness again.
Afterwards I stretched out well and rewarded my efforts with a series of eccentric calf lowers (to continue fighting off achilles tendinitis) and a few bags of corn nuts and two-week old chicken. Some people thought the chicken was a bit questionable, but I figure it was probably around for two years before being slaughtered, so a couple of extra weeks sitting in the fridge shouldn't matter all that much.