8/6/07 - 8/12/07 Your Mother Squeezed Too Hard When She Birthed You (405 minutes)

8/12/07 (no run)
The last few days have seen me saying goodbye to new friends and greeting old ones. I still believe that life is essentially solitary, but with a few true friends, at least we can sit and be alone together.

8/11/07 (60 minutes)
Eerily, the lounge of Theta, where I've lived and taught the past seven weeks, encases me now, dark, quiet and vacant. In the time I've been here, I've learned and played many games in this lounge, from Gongi (Korean jacks) to nerd jousting, but my favorite is a contest of my own invention, necessarily a game of solitude and self-inspection. It is, I think, as much a meditation as a competition.

A motion sensor controls the lights here. If I sit still enough for long enough while alone, the room will declare itself to be empty, and turn off the lights. The challenge is simple. When the lights turn themselves out, I attempt to leave the room without triggering them back on.
I begin with a hand. My right, creeping, centimeters a second, towards a better position to grasp my book. Slowly along the top of my leg, turning a space of half a foot into a voyage of focused intensity. Ten seconds later, the book begins a deliberate migration across the expanse of my lap. At last reaching the end, it must descend, with calculated lethargy, to the floor.
The typical direct assault on the act of standing up would be suicide here. The roles of momentum and action are replaced by balance and caution. The motion must be so perfectly smooth it cannot be observed in an instant. Only over a long period of integration will the displacement show.

If I manage, against the odds, to uncross my legs, then it remains before me to scoot my mass carefully to the edge of my chair, to bring up my arms individually to advantageous perches on the armrests, to plant my feet firmly in the carpet, and, at last, in a triumphant moment, half a minute objectively, but a flash in comparison, to straighten my body, inch by inch, up to a standing position.
That is the first step - there remains an entire, unfathomable room to be traversed.

The game is wonderful in its simplicity and difficulty. The best I accomplished was to stand and waddle a few measly feet across the floor. But the real reason I like the game is that it is incredibly alien. All sense of scale, spatial and temporal, is thrown away. I can feel the instability of a standing position - every slight sway of my torso, normally completely unnoticed, becomes a terrible error. The difference between standing up normally versus when you're playing the game is like the difference between hammering down boards on your deck and screwing in the casing on an atomic bomb.

The difference between sitting in this lounge the day before camp training and sitting in it now, with fifty goodbyes and summer behind me, is just as great.

8/10/07 (60 minutes)
Took it easy again, battling the inevitable chafing resulting from too few pairs of shorts and too little laundry getting done.

8/9/07 (90 minutes)
J.R. sent me an email asking if I wanted to go race at the local all-comers meets. I ran a few of these meets last year, mostly just for fun. But here, it felt like something different. It was an opportunity for a last chance at being a collegiate. If I ran a fast time I would have that final shot at moving my name up on the all-time lists just a bit higher.
But the achilles is still questionable, and my training hasn't put me in race shape. More than that, though, I think it's time to close the door on the previous chapter. It's over and done. There's no need to keep hanging on to what was. At every moment, I live and run in just that moment. So I told J.R. to go on ahead of me, invited him over to watch movies the next evening, put on the shoes and went out the door to train.

8/8/07 (45 minutes )
I felt like I was swimming in a giant pool of jello, that was being shaken at the sides and heated to melting from below. Accordingly, I cut it short.

8/7/07 (60 minutes)
Felt fine, took the pace easy. Recently it seems like even if I take a dump immediately before running, I still need another one half an hour later. I guess my digestive tract is just that efficient.

Previously unmentioned at the NYC Half:
Macharia Yuot runs 1:06:56 ----> Not as fast as CFree
Abdi Abdirahman states, "I'm a lean mean machine. That's why I call myself the black cactus."

Cactus Power

hot calves

8/6/07 (90 minutes)
I ran around the trail back and forth a lot, and then I read about the New York Half, where Haile killed everybody with the effervescence of his infectious bubbling demeanor.

How can you NOT like Haile?


Haile Gebrselassie is the world's greatest concert ukulelist. When he retires he will instantly be elected Supreme Tribal Warlord of the entire African country (minus Morocco and Detroit). Also of the Universe. He will disband all the nuclear warheads and turn them into twirling ballerina robots with nuclear eyes that glow in the dark. He will give one to every child and invalid. If the invalids don't want them he will give the invalid to a child and give the child to a pack of wild hyenas and give the hyenas to another child and commend that child to the hands of God, which is Himself.

Haile Gebrselassie could defeat Chuck Norris in kickboxing, but he is too busy saving baby seagulls from oil slicks and holding the antenna to get perfect reception on channel eight. He is just that good of a guy.

In Ethiopia they have a prayer to Haile Gebrselassie, and it goes like this:
Great
Emperor,
Bring
Rain
So
Every
Lentil
Accretes
Succulentness.
Save
Implacable
Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, they pray in English.

I want to see a Haile Gebrselassie nipple slip. This is the official vehicle from the NYC Half:


This is Catherine Ndereba coming out of the spot-a-pot:

This is Catherine Ndereba picking her nose:

This is Catherine Ndereba barfing like my dog Pansy after we gave her medicine from the veterinarian man in the wooden shed.

It is not actually Catherine Ndereba. It is Susan Chepkemei, but I bet you can't tell the difference.

Catherine Ndereba is the second-fastest marathoner All-time for women but she is disgusting. Haile Gebrselassie does not throw up and he does not pick his nose and he recycles his poo because Haile Gebrselassie loves the Earth.