Not My Best Event

My gym is considering sponsoring an Arnold Classic style 5K, a "Pump and Run". Essentially, you bench a certain percentage of your body weight (based on your age and gender), and then run a 5K. The 5K is what it is, but for every rep you get on the bench (up to a maximum of 30 reps), 30 seconds are subtracted from your time.

Today, I, uh, practiced, in order to see just how humiliated I would be, should I attempt such a race/public shaming.

Since I am a young male, I would have to bench 100% of my body weight, which is presently 140 lbs. I managed 5 reps before my arms quivered and I racked it. Sadly, my fellow gym goers, who see me far too often, were quite surprised I managed that many. They confessed anticipating a decapitation by barbell.

While it's always pleasant to avoid dropping a relatively large amount of weight on one's neck, that's not quite a large enough victory to make this (as yet hypothetical) race sufficiently tempting.

If only I developed a "thyroid condition"...

The Workout That Was About Everything Else

Today while running I thought about strawberries a little and honeydew quite a bit which is odd because usually I don't care for it all that much, tending instead to prefer crisp fruit to soft, apples to oranges, if you will, or even if you won't.

I decided after the 8th repeat that I was going to indulge this odd craving and also drink water, a bit of water, not too much but probably more than usual, since it was hot, oh so very hot, the noxious blend of obscene midwestern heat and humidity that inspires you to forget you're sweating because the air feels like it's moist enough for everyone until you cross your arbitrarily marked finish line to the bemused silence of the imagined audience that really should be more impressed because it's my imagination, right, but hey at least they have high standards. 

I thought about cadence and arm carriage and pace and shoes and that two of those things at least can be improved without spending money, and probably help a lot more anyway. 

There was a child, a very young one but I'm terrible at guessing ages, walking with his parents, who would sprint after me every time I passed. He would maybe make it 20 meters or so and then he would sit and catch his breath and after a little while he took to waiting for me to come back around so that he would be fully rested. His parents tried to get him to stop but I said it was cool because kids should be fucking hyper.

He and I were the only ones there that seemed to have the slightest inclination for running, which is not to say that the track was empty, as it was in fact quite full, merely of walkers, and not one single other runner. I thought they looked miserable and they thought I looked miserable and should probably put on some pants. I thought that not wearing real pants in public was way better than wearing waist high jeans with a CD player clipped to the belt, which, I mean, still? 

But it's all good. Deity of choice bless you, middle and old aged track walkers. We will never understand each other but we nonetheless have an understanding. We're just two undulates bipedaling around the safari, trying not to get eaten by a lion, or something like that. 

But really, if I could pick, I would totally be a mountain goat. 

I Read Philosophy Stuff Today. Can You Tell?

Perfection is the enemy of the good, too often. We find ourselves focused on shortcomings, on what could have been or should have been, if things had only been just so, just this little bit different in this one tiny way, then, then there would be utopia.

This is an idea with roots in many philosophies, but this specific phrasing invokes Voltaire, noted French enlightenment thinker, and purported drinker of immense quantities of coffee. Cool guy, probably.

But, you think, if I aim for perfection, then I will be at least good, if not a little better. If I aim merely for good, and fall short, then what? Aim for the moon, land amongst the stars, right?

Astrological falsehoods aside, no, typically that's not how it works. People who aim for "perfect", when they perceive that they have failed, tend to embellish that failure, to indulge in it fully and wholly. Often, having "failed", they quit altogether, abandoning their pursuit for something else, or worse, nothing at all.

This is, of course, counterproductive. Perfection, such as it is, is a destination, a place at the end of a long and usually impossible journey. You can never be there without taking the necessary steps to arrive, and so the focus should be on those steps, on that progress. Be present in what you do every day, do it well, do it consistently, do it consistently well. That is the ideal.

In work, and in running, this is a valuable notion to internalize. And I try and do so. But of course, it's axiomatically true that, if perfection is the enemy of the good, then one ought not be perfect in avoiding perfection, or at least the pursuit thereof, lest they become too complacent. Right? Right. Maybe.

So... I don't know. Voltaire was not a life coach and certainly not a running coach. He wrote a lot of things and drank a lot of coffee and wore a giant fucking powdered wig, because why not, I guess, but he did not run fast, probably not even at all.

Still, I think it is relevant. Do your best and give approximately zero shits about the gap between "best" and "perfect". Do that and good gets to be pretty damn good.

If I got a yearbook for being not quite middle aged but not really young anymore either that would probably be my quote. That or "Potatoes!"

Chasing Uncertain Outcomes

I ran a race last night, which tells you already that it was not typical, inasmuch as races are usually held in the morning, in the cradle of the dawn's coolness, eyes still tasting sleep, mind murky, legs uncertain of the task at hand.

But that's not so different, really, apart from the difference in time, which is quite measurably different, and the dark, which adds an extra element that you think could gravely injure you if things go wrong, which you hope they do not, but the thin stream of light bounces as the lamp does on your head, and the rocks are slick and the ground is muddy and your feet and mind each lack purchase.

It was also a 10K, which requires a degree of turnover I don't have on my best days, which this night wasn't too far from, really, but still, I got fourth, with which I was pleased.

Fitness is progressing nicely and that, that is what I care about. That marathon on September 14 is getting rather close, close enough that fitness can't be well and truly built so much as honed, close enough that the anxiety of "have I done enough?" can no longer be answered with "well then I'll simply do more".

Close. Close and I can feel the pace, the turnover, the dull, omnicorporeal pain of holding that pace at mile 22, 23, only a 5K to go but fuck, fuck it hurts, and fuck it's close. Just finish. Just slow down and no one would know, would ever know. No one would blame you. Back off and inhale and feel that air. It is September and it is lovely, isn't it? This is a long run and there will be more, more in the future, always in the future. You can hurt then but feel good now, because now is all you ever feel.

There will be bliss and pain and doubts and euphoria and I don't know how I will answer that above when everything screams that this is stupid, this doesn't matter, never again, and why even now? I would like to tell you something about running like hell or pain only hurting and what the hell this is what I signed up for, what I love, fucking push the pace until everything screams and feast on the acid.

I would like to pretend that I will not hurt and that if I do I will not slow but I can't because I don't know, can't know, can't know until I know.

And that sensation is the best of all possible sensations. Chasing ghosts into a maelstrom of uncertainty, a void from which will emerge the perfect truth of what occurred on the dirt that morning.

Can't wait.

Explosion

There is a great deal of debate in both the philosophy and physics communities about whether our perception of time as a linear construct is accurate. To imagine that it is anything but is somewhere between trippy and impossible; to accept that reality could be anything other than how we perceive it is simply difficult.

But we're already there.

For instance: Something that appears red - a rose, say - appears that way because of the wavelengths that reach our eyes, and our ability to perceive and interpret them. But look at it through glasses with blue lenses (you have those, right?), and the rose is red no longer. Our perception of it has changed, and yet we remain confident that it remains truly red, despite the fact that our eyes now tell us differently.

Tangent aside, perception is malleable, and not wholly accurate. We trust it because we have nothing else to trust, really, and to cast too much doubt upon it would send us into an abyss of Cartesian depths.

So let's not go there.

Kids These Days

Walking down a jagged brick sidewalk with a good coffee while three young skater kids glare at me, I think, this is it, right?, this is being an adult? 

I had thought that perhaps my ascension to adulthood would be signified or codified by something I did or earned, rather than angry glances and violent whispers from adolescents. 

But I guess that's the way things work.

You spend all of pre-adulthood insisting that you're not really a kid, or at least shouldn't be treated like one.

Then you get older and everyone tells you you're an adult now, treats you like one, and you think, fuck, really? 

You never feel like what everyone else insists you are; maybe we're always the last to know.

I've managed to draw breath for 25 years, and found myself wearing khakis and drinking coffee and walking by the kids who are not in school because it's the summer but still sit just outside it, boards propped up on their legs. There is a fiend skull on a backpack and man, The Misfits broke up years before I was born, kid, do you really even know what that is? 

I think that judging what they should or should not like (or present to like) is an embodiment of everything negative they expect from adults, and nearly laugh as I catch myself. 

Even my crooked smile prompts a too aggressive What? from one of the kids. As I pass I shake my head and tell him it's all good, man, and it is. 

I am the old man walking to an office job in his khakis, and I don't want to live in a world where kids aren't instinctively, abstractly, and reactively pissed off. 

Treadmill Nirvana

Life at 40 heartbeats per minute is very different from life at 140 (and higher); and both are better, I think, than life in between.

I wrote a lot of things that basically approximate an English grad's attempt at science words but deleted them because ultimately this is not a science-grounded observation I am trying to make.

It occurs to me during nearly every run - and especially so during harder efforts - that there is a greater sense of place and lucidity which is difficult to put into words. It is the sort of thing that you can only communicate to others who know, those who do not need to be told - except, perhaps, to validate our shared insanity.

I wrote some pop psychology stuff here but deleted it too. Words are tools and I am hammering my fingers trying to use them.

If you've ever read any literature on the theory or practice of meditation I would simply say that it is like that. You are privy, as often as you choose, to a glimpse of something that feels like true experience. Better, even, is the sense of peace and lack of anxiety that permeates through the day's other waking moments.

And while I deleted all my attempts at garbling the scientific mechanisms behind these phenomena, they are both measurable and real.

Someone gave me a banana today and I was fucking stoked.