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.