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.