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.