Sunday, 9/2/07 (45 minutes)
I had a cramp so it's probably my period or something. Seriously I need to update this log more often and not run just 45 minutes like a little bitch.
Saturday, 9/1/07 (no run)
It was really hot, and the clicking in my knee was very disturbing. I think all the roads I've been doing are getting at it.
Friday, 8/31/07 (2 x 2 mile tempo, reps)
Used the new Asics DS Trainers for a tempo on the track. I missed team practice after being completely unable to face the prospect of getting myself up on 4 hours of sleep to run repeats on an asphalt hill. My legs simply wouldn't have accepted it. Turned out to be a good decision, since later that day I felt great.
2 x 3200m, 10:33, 10:27. 3 min lap jog in between. I felt controlled, and just focused on relaxation, trying to take as few splits as possible (just first lap, mile, and final time). The new shoes felt great, although my feet felt hot a couple of times. I did 4x200 untimed afterwards, just to get the feeling of cruising along.
That friendly old guy who comes to some of our meets was there, and told me that Matt and I were running too fast. Oh No!
Thursday, 8/30/07 (85 minutes, reps)
Full arroyo in the morning, went ahead by myself because I didn't feel like running Matt's pace. I felt like crap that morning. I haven't gotten the right sleeping schedule down, waking up on a few hours of sleep for practice, then inevitably sleeping during the day, so that again I can't fall asleep when I want to the next night, and the process repeats.
Afternoon I got new shoes and did a very short warm up, 4x200 in 34, 32, 32, 30, and cool down. The goal of the reps is to keep a tiny bit of stimulus there for the fast twitch fibers, so that when I need them to run serious intervals later, they'll be there.
Wednesday, 8/29/07 (45 minutes, strides)
Ran the traditional first-day Huntington with the team, about as easy as possible.
As you know, he's half-ass.
Tuesday, 8/28/07 (45 minute tempo)
5xarroyo tempo 8:55, 8:55, 8:59, 8:59, 9:00
Riding my bike up to the gym, I remembered that Kenenisa Bekele, the fastest distance runner ever, does not conform to the "skinny runner" stereotype. The reliability of internet data is questionable, and different sites list Bekele as anywhere between 160 and 174 cm. But the predominant stat is 160 cm, 54kg (5'3", 119 lbs for you idiot Americans). So Bekele's BMI (weight/height^2) is 21.1 (technically, kg/m^2, but by convention the units are suppressed).
I spent some time this afternoon avoiding studying by mining for more runners' stats. I didn't find a jackpot reserve of many elite runners with heights/weights all listed right there for me, but I found a few sources, especially the USATF athlete bios page. Here it is:athlete height (cm) mass (kg) distance BMI alan culpepper 185.4 59.0 42000 17.2 yvonne murray 170.2 50.3 3000 17.4 greta waitz 168.9 49.9 42000 17.5 sebastian coe 175.3 54.0 800 17.6 sileshi sihine 165.0 48.0 10000 17.6 gebremariam 178.0 56.0 10000 17.7 dathan ritzenhein 172.7 53.1 10000 17.8 deena kastor 162.6 47.2 10000 17.9 sara slattery 170.2 52.2 5000 18.0 paula radcliffe 173.0 54.0 42000 18.0 abdi abdirahman 180.3 59.0 10000 18.1 hazel clark 177.2 58.1 800 18.5 wendy sly 166.4 51.3 3000 18.5 lauren fleshman 172.7 55.3 5000 18.6 jen rhines 160.0 47.6 5000 18.6 ryan hall 177.8 59.0 21000 18.7 hicham el guerrouj 179.0 58.0 1500 18.7 paul tergat 182.0 62.0 42000 18.7 anthony famiglietti 175.3 57.6 5000 18.8 kara goucher 170.2 54.4 10000 18.8 shalane flanagan 165.1 51.3 5000 18.8 matt tegenkamp 185.4 65.8 5000 19.1 tatyana kazankina 161.3 49.9 1500 19.2 galen rupp 180.3 62.6 10000 19.2 chris lukezic 172.7 59.0 1500 19.8 adam goucher 177.8 62.6 5000 19.8 treniere clement 160.0 50.8 1500 19.8 meb keflezighi 170.2 57.6 42000 19.9 steve cram 186.7 69.4 1500 19.9 dan lincoln 190.5 72.6 5000 20.0 sally gunnell 167.6 56.2 400 20.0 brian sell 177.8 63.5 42000 20.1 ingrid kristiansen 168.9 58.1 42000 20.4 bernard lagat 172.7 60.8 1500 20.4 haile gebrselassie 164.0 55.0 10000 20.4 craig mottram 188.0 73.0 5000 20.7 herb elliot 179.1 66.7 1500 20.8 khalid khannouchi 165.1 56.7 42000 20.8 leonel manzano 165.1 56.7 1500 20.8 steve slattery 177.8 65.8 5000 20.8 liu xiang 188.0 74.0 100 20.9 wilson wipketer 172.0 62.0 800 21.0 jeremy wariner 182.9 70.3 400 21.0 kenenisa bekele 160.0 54.0 10000 21.1 mbarak hussein 172.7 63.5 42000 21.3 alan webb 175.3 65.8 1500 21.4 dan brown 175.3 65.8 42000 21.4 linford christe 189.2 77.1 100 21.5 kip keino 175.3 66.2 1500 21.6 david krummenacker 188.0 77.1 800 21.8 sam burley 175.3 68.0 800 22.2 steve prefontaine 175.3 68.9 5000 22.4 jorge torres 170.2 65.8 10000 22.7 jonathan johnson 175.3 70.3 800 22.9 shawn crawford 180.3 74.8 200 23.0 emil zatopek 174.0 69.9 10000 23.1 andrew rock 185.4 79.4 400 23.1 lashawn merritt 188.0 82.6 400 23.4 kerron clement 188.0 83.5 400 23.6 nick symmonds 177.8 74.8 800 23.7 brian clay 180.3 83.9 0 25.8 breaux greer 189.2 104.3 0 29.1 christian cantwell 195.6 136.1 0 35.6 akebono 203.2 234.5 0 56.8
Matt's and Katherine's recent posts about runners' weights had me thinking about the question of whether it makes sense to diet for cross country. My gut reaction was, "don't worry about your weight, put the scale away, eat healthily and it will take care of itself." In fact, looking at the list, Bekele, Prefontaine, Torres, and Webb are all accomplished cross country runners (to different degrees). Many of the mile/800 runners (Symmonds, Webb, Krummenacker) are on the heavier side of that list as well.
Basic conclusion: if your BMI is 22 or below, you don't necessarily have to lose weight to be a world-class performer. (Mine, at 181cm and 69 kg, is the same as Bekele's to within the margin of error of the measurement.) It's doubtful that losing weight would help Bekele, for example, because it is very likely that the best runner in the world is already running at near his optimum of just about everything. Running talent is, as Garrett pointed out, highly multifactorial and follows a bell curve. Barring super-mutant heroes, it's unlikely that anyone is far far more talented than the rest of the world, so even if you have the most talented guy out there training well but with a major error (for example, weighing too much), be probably won't be the fastest, because there are plenty of other guys nearly as talented right behind him, and someone else won't make that same error, and will therefor move up and beat him. So I conclude that Bekele is already running at very close to his optimal weight, or else he wouldn't be the world-beater he is. And so I conclude it's at least possible for your optimal weight to come at a BMI in the range of 21-22, or even 23.
For reference here are some heights/weights and BMI's, in the format of a chart I ripped off some random website or other:
Alternatively, use a calculator.
But I have a few more words about BMI. BMI is a dirty fucking lie. The objections to BMI are well-known and common. For example, by strict BMI computation, Bryan Clay and Roman Sebrle, arguably the two fittest human beings alive, are both "obese". The problem isn't that BMI is "bad", just that it's not good enough. It's a one-dimensional number trying to describe a human, which is inherently a multidimensional thing (in most cases, anyway). Other single-number measures of the human body, like body fat percent or hip-to-waist ratio, have their own problems. My main objection to BMI is that it doesn't scale correctly.
A priori, one would think that the BMI calculation should be weight/height^3, since humans are three-dimensional (different use of "dimension" than my previous one), and so make some 10% taller, you also make them 10% wider and 10% thicker.
Not true. If you look at a picture of a person standing alone against a featureless backdrop, you can still get an idea of how tall they are. Tall people just look tall and short people look short, even when you can't compare them to anything. That's evidence that people don't scale evenly in all dimensions. Make someone 10% taller, they get wider and thicker, but not by 10%. So the exponent of height in BMI should be less than 3. But why 2? In other words, why 2.00000000000000? Wouldn't 2.2 or 1.9 probably be closer to the truth?
In order to answer the question, you'd have to do quite a bit of statistics, in order to define what makes a statistic "good". You could, for example, let the exponent float, then optimize BMI's ability to predict certain weight-related medical problems as a function of the exponent. But this procedure, or any other like it, would have its own problems (tall people might have a propensity for diabetes regardless of body composition, for example). You could also try to find an exponent such that BMI and height have no correlation (currently short people have lower BMI's, meaning the exponent is too low.)
So let's say we do that, and find the exponent really ought to be 2.3, but was just made 2 for convenience (BMI is not accurate enough for more than one decimal place in the exponent to be meaningful). Does that make a difference? If I set it up so the exponent is 2.3 and a 170-cm person has the same BMI as the old system, the new BMI formula is BMI = weight/(1.1726*height^2.3). The new "2.3 power" BMI gives a 5% deviation from the old BMI at the heights of 200cm or 143 cm, which encompasses the vast majority of the human population. Final conclusion about BMI: the exponent of 2.000000, while wrong, isn't so bad as long as it's ballpark. However, BMI is still a poor measure of appropriate body composition for a runner, as it can vary widely even at the highest levels of competition, and most likely varies far more widely at lower levels of competition. If you want to race faster, don't force yourself to an unusually-low weight, just train to be faster. That doesn't mean carrying around giant bags of cellulose won't slow you down, but it does mean that Ethiopians aren't winning races just because their country has no food.
One more point - the fact that BMI correlates to height (and it shouldn't) led me to wonder about another catch-all physiological variable runners like to talk about - VO2 max. VO2 max is oxygen consumption/unit body mass. Supposedly, runners with the same VO2 max are equally physically fit, at least in the oxygen uptake system. But that may not be true. If tall runners or short runners are innately more efficient, as measured by speed at a set intake of oxygen per kilogram, then VO2 max really ought to be calibrated to height, which it isn't. Total body weight is another variable we should test in correlation with VO2 max. It total body weight is correlated with VO2 max, then really there ought to be an exponent other than 1 in the formula. There's no way I'm going to find the data easily for that one, though.
Monday, 8/27/07 (no run)
I decided to skip running and get some work done instead. I'm giving some consideration to running 4-5 days a week until I've got my academic situation taken care of. Also, I'll likely be tutoring from 4-6PM many days, so it's unsure how frequently I'll be able to train with the team.
8/27/07 - 9/2/07 Like A Chicken With Its Legs Cut Off (270 minutes, 1 tempo run, 1 steady state)
8/20/07 - 8/26/07 Lost in Invariance Under Translation (310 minutes, 1 tempo run)
Sunday, 8/26/07 (60 minutes)
Pleasant N. field laps with Kiesz and Ian.
Saturday, 8/25/07 (70 minutes)
Darkness disquiets more fully when incomplete. In pitch black, you're too blind to be scared. In the semi-glow of a moonless night or the murk of a basement cellar, shapes, deprived by darkness of definite form, distort themselves freely, drown out of proportion by disturbed imagination. A coat rack becomes a man, tall and thin, standing to the side in spooky silence. Only on the closest inspect do supernaturally-long fingers resolve into a tree branch, or a deep, empty pit into a darker patch of clover. Shadows, cast out like silver nets from their sources, slinking back and forth, crossing over each other in a ceaselessly-stirring mosaic, assume every possible sinister shape and stature. When the lights are dim, every coil of rope becomes a snake.
Something similar happens when I run by myself. The feedback I get from my body is poor. Most of the time, most parts of our bodies are in "total darkness" - we aren't even consciously aware of, say the area just below the skin above the knuckle of the second toe of our right foot. A sharp pain in your side when you get a cramp or the burning on the roof of your mouth when the pizza is too hot are then "spotlights", temporarily brilliantly illuminating a small bit of yourself for the sake of instant action.
Without belaboring the analogy, what then are the vague twinges and intimations of sensation that I feel when running? On the horizon, silhouetted at sundown, Pancho Villa can see there is SOMETHING standing there, but is it a solitary cactus or scout of the federal army? Running my laps on the North Field, I can catch hints there there is SOMETHING happening in my right achilles, the area above my left knee, the ball of my hips, but they are too distant and too faint to tell what they mean. So I go on for a while, watching carefully, cutting the run 20 minutes short, stopping to stretch, and constantly wondering what fate has in store for me next.
Friday, 8/24/07 (20 minutes)
Kiesz and I decided it would be a profoundly good idea to drive around randomly, stop by the side of the road somewhere, and, crossing our fingers tightly behind our backs and spinning around in circles with our eyes shut tight, hope that we would miraculously stumble upon an interesting trail to follow. After about eight attempts of this game and some serious damage to our respective genitalia, we returned to Tech for burritos and live coverage of the high jump of the heptathlon.
Thursday, 8/23/07 (3 x arroyo tempo)
3 arroyo tempo loop laps of 8:40, 8:34, 8:42 = 25:56
The start was not propitious. I overslept, and didn't have time for the six laps I was planning. Consequently, before the run I was annoyed at everything. I was annoyed at the sun for setting too early, at the stoplights on California for delaying my progress, at the clothes I forgot to dry for being wet, at horses, dogs, and old people on the trail for existing, at the dirt for slipping under my feet, at my knees for clicking with every stride, and pretty much at anything I could moderately anthropomorphize, for in some form getting in the way of my run.
But, magically, the times reading off my watch were fast, and so when I finished the run, I didn't care any more. I didn't care that I was assaulted by some sort of crazed Zamboni driver inexplicably patrolling the Arroyo Seco trail, kicking up a rather-belligerent dust storm in the process. I didn't care that I had a long uphill bike to get out of the arroyo, or that archers were shooting at their targets across the trail I was using. Simply because I was pleased with the numerical result of my run, my entire attitude changed.
This is a bit disturbing to me. What I'm like shouldn't be so closely linked to the small details of just what's happening right at the moment. I'd like to think I can go with the flow a bit. At times when the majority of the physical world seems to grate against my psyche, I ought to be able to step back for a second, chill out, and realize how pointless such an attitude is. It shouldn't take a random lucky occurence to bring me back to the state of a human being fit for interaction in a gregarious society. Apparently, though, what I can't do for myself, a good run can do for me.
Wednesday, 8/22/07 (60 minutes)
There were softball players on my field. Also, the South field was closed. Normally that isn't a deterrent, but I was feeling a little ornery so I used the North field anyway and just dodged around people whenever there was a fly ball to the outfield.
Tuesday, 8/21/07 (no run)
I seriously doubt I ran this day. It was a long time ago, though, and I don't remember exactly. I think there was something about sleeping in the library, eating the last few packages of Mentos from O'Doms, and possibly drinking from sprinklers, but I'm not sure. When did I win Olive Walk Darts? Not sure. I think it was last week though.
Monday, 8/20/07 (60 minutes)
After three weeks of building, I'll try be intelligent and take a down week here, and maybe go to the gym. I haven't been much because it always seems to be closed or closing. Also, it's too fucking hot. One or two days is fine, but weeks of it is just inexcusable. Oh capricious god of daily temperature highs, please stop being such a little bitch. Maybe you don't know how bad the heat has been around here, but I was babysitting the other day, and I left the thing outside for just one hour, and wound up looking like this:
8/13/07 - 8/19/07 The Origin of Feces (425 minutes, 1 tempo run)
Sunday 8/19/07 (60 minutes)
Certain elements have requested that today's entry discuss the origin of feces. Feces, as you well know, is colored brown because it contains the remnants of broken-down hemoglobin. Babies have green feces because they lack a bacteria crucial to this hemoglobin decomposition process.
Guinea pigs eat each others' feces. This is said to be because they are trying to get some of the nutrients other guinea pigs have have excreted. Incorrect. It is actually because guinea pigs are really dumb. This feces-eating behavior is also observed in rats, hamsters, lumberjacks, and my cousin Peter.
What do all these things have in common (besides fitting comfortably inside your mom's vagina?) That's right - nothing.
Conclusion - the only logical origin of feces-eating is your mother's vagina. Logic wins again.
Saturday 8/18/07 (30 minute tempo, strides)
Everything began with auspicious turtles. Twenty of them roiled madly around a corner of Throop pond as I exited SFL after a drawn-out, air-conditioned nap. They were, as I discovered upon the requisite examination, devouring the remains of a half-eaten fish. What was best was, over on the other side of the pond, a five year old kid kept calling to his dad, "Dad, look I found a baby one. A baby one dad. It's a baby one. Dad look, a baby one. A baby one dad, a baby one!" Distracted by the strident calls of his offspring, the man abandoned my corner of the pond and the spectacle of the feasting turtles was MINE ALL MINE!!!
Eventually, I went to the field, only to discover that the turtles had made me miss the 7:30 closing of the gym, so I instead just crapped in a sewer and started running. It had cooled off a bit, the sun was setting, I was on the north field illegally, the ground was soft under my bare feet, and I had to entire field to myself. It was completely badass.
After 30 minutes I pushed it up to a strong pace, and did a 30-minute threshold run that felt easy and smooth. My legs were churning underneath me, lean and fast, surging a bit with excitement whenever my thoughts got ahead of me.
I finished with five minutes of jogging, five long diagonal striders, and five minutes of cooldown before celebrating at Parkwood with pork sandwiches, beer, and some sort of reddish alcoholic beverage that I didn't understand very much but I think it's for grownups or old people like Arjun.
Friday 8/17/07 (50 minutes mountain)
Dumbo the elephant could fly like a motherfucker, but first he had to learn to believe in himself. But I get ahead of myself. Ian, Garrett, Matt and I rode up to Chantry Flats before pushing our way up the trail beyond the helipad. Normally I hate mountain runs because they hurt for a long fucking time, but this one was surprisingly okay. I let Ian lead, and if we'd gone much faster it'd have hurt, but as it was I even glanced out at the wide, smoggy vistas of almost the whole of the greater East Los Angeles area. When we got to the top we met a crazy old vedic mystic. His beard, six feet long if an inch, curled around itself in intricate knots, symbolizing the unity of life, and his staff changed with the angle of the sun from a mere stick of wood to a great serpent to an enormous dildo, I think. His feet never quite touched the ground, and he glowed with an aura that might have been the setting sun, if it weren't for the way it seemed to shimmer and dance circles around his frail, ancient figure. Afterwards I got happily intoxicated, scaled several buildings, walked myself home and watched some Dumbo.
Thursday 8/16/07 (30 minutes, strides)
Old friends and I reacquainted ourselves today - I held a little reunion for myself and my fast twitch muscle fibers. I jogged thirty minutes on the south field with a few easy accelerations tossed in. At first, the legs, sore from two days of abuse, complained about the unusual demands of sub-5:00 pace, but by the end of the run our dialog had become quite amicable, and I even opened up the floodgates all the way for a good forty meters.
Wednesday 8/15/07 (75 minutes)
Kiesz and I ran an unevenly-paced full arroyo, including too-aggressive start, too slow middle, and much-too-fast mad sweat-spraying, baby-frightening, car-dodging, light-hopping, fart-loosing, insane, inexcusable, incontinent return through Pasadena.
Tuesday 8/14/07 (5 mile tempo)
Saw Kiesz just heading out to the arroyo, but neglected to join him because at the moment I was toting 20 pounds of milk on my back. This led me to realize how much easier it would be if Pavilions would just install a pipeline to deliver milk and other pipelinable food items (juice, round fruits, live hamsters, cottage cheese) when I want it. They could have a flowmeter at the end, and every month you'd get a milk bill, just like that one company does with the electricities.
Later, did 10 laps at Lacy in 28:30. Originally I planned 16, but by 7:30PM it had only cooled from criminally hot at two down to worrisomely hot. I decided to cut down the miles for my first timed tempo run in a while.
During the run I had the feeling of being a bit out of shape, both physically and mentally. It takes time to learn to focus in on workouts again after a layoff. I tried very hard not to compare this run to others I've done at Lacy, because I know that 1) it's not as fast 2) it will push me to train too hard. But I couldn't help it. On 8/21/06 I ran 6x2laps with one minute rest, averaging 5:17 (compared to 5:42 today). On 5/26/06 I did 10 laps in 28:25, went to the bathroom, and did another ten in 28:13.
Of course it was my first tempo of the year, and hot, and loops today were a bit longer than those old ones, but still, it's clear I'm not in top shape yet after the injury.
But on the other hand, I probably ran close to a full five miles in 28:30, which is faster than most of my cross country races so far, and I was not yet at full effort. I had a small unfair advantage in that Garrett was gracing the park with his svelte self and cheering me on, so I wanted to show off for him.
Monday 8/13/07 (75 minutes)
I was planning 90 minutes, but my back was a bit sore, so I stopped early. I went to the weight room for the first time in a while, and just did the core exercises that I think are essential to my general fitness, but which I've been neglecting.
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."
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.
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
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.