That Ship Has Sailed

With greater frequency I am forced to add another item to the list of physical activities I can no longer do.  Swimming 100 yards under a minute, running a mile under five minutes and dunking a basketball come to mind.  There is an even longer list of things I could do, but choose not to due to modesty, decency or because they are just plain stupid.

One such item came to mind as I was doing a Google search for “the running of the green in Denver”.  Somehow I ended up in a small town in the Basque region of Spain. 

Google feeds my short attention span.  Like chasing rabbits, I start down one train of thought and end up in some chat room and I’ve forgotten what I was looking for to begin with.  I was trying to determine a good place to park downtown; a spot close enough for me to gimp back after the race, but not too close so I could avoid traffic.  Given those parameters, I found the perfect spot on Lawrence and 17^th Street. 

I started typing “running of the’ and Google thoughtfully gave me the option of “Running of the Bulls”.  The most infamous “Running of the Bulls” occurs in Pamplona, Spain and is an annual ritual which involves many cervezas and the risk of death.  Just the things I was into – when I was 22.  Now, as I stand at the threshold and peer into the abyss of my 50s, running a 7 kilometer race in Downtown Denver is about as dangerous an activity as I can handle.  

What took me down that rabbit hole was the recollection that two guys I used to pal around with actually survived The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.  There is a bit of alright and I remind them of my unqualified awe at that accomplishment.  I can say with certainty that they ran faster with the bulls than I did at today’s Running of the Green.  They had to.  Their lives depended on it.  

For the record, I finished the 7 kilometer course in 26:16 (~6:03 / mile) - 52^nd overall – 6^th in my age group.  It was great to see so many red singlets from my fellow mates on the Runners Roost Race Team in front of me.  The weather was perfect for the 26^th Running of the Green.  While the temperature was 26 degrees when I awoke, by race time it had risen to about 50 degrees.  There was barely a whisper of a wind.  There is something really cool about racing through city streets.  

Rounding

The struggle bus makes many stops in my neighborhood; all of them self-induced and emotional in nature.  I recognize the source of my internal conflict.  Maybe my capacity to embrace dissidence has atrophied as I’ve gotten older, but I like symmetry. 

From the visual appeal of Greek architecture.

 

To the recurring motifs of Bach’s Two Part Inventions.

 

To the predictability of the Pythagorean Theorem.

I’m the same way with mileage and yardage.  There is something unsettling about finishing a run at some fraction of a mile, or adding up the yardage from a swim workout only to find out I’ve swum 4,950 yards.  It just feels unresolved, like a hanging chad.

As I’ve noted before, distances are arbitrary.  Between miles, kilometers and time surely I could find some metric that would be whole.  I drive myself crazy being yard wise and hour foolish.  It is good to remind myself of the core reasons I stomp by woods on snowy mornings. 

Garmin brings out the OCD in all of us.  Here’s a simple question – If you complete a run at, say, 7.89 miles, do you call it ‘good’ or do you run around in circles to square it up to 8 miles?  Or, if you run, say, 8.11 miles on Tuesday, do you add that .11 mile onto your next run?  Am I the only one who thinks like this?  Do I need to check into a small, padded room? 

There is also some noise.  A few years ago after running the Boulder Backroads Marathon, four finishers were comparing mileage from our Garmins.  There was a .4 mile spread.  That’s a 1.5 % difference – a catastrophe if we were attempting a lunar landing, but a rounding error if we worked for Enron.  A training log isn’t like a check book.  Mileage doesn’t need to be balanced. 

 

Some tension is good. 

Bach wrote the book on resolving the dominant 7^th chord. 

There is something comforting about the asymmetry of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater  

There is elegance in plotting a graph that approaches, but does not reach, a Limit.

Maybe I could just run as much as I felt and it wouldn’t matter how many miles I ran.  Maybe I could find other people who felt the same way.  Maybe there’s a place where there are no hills and you always have a tail wind; where they play Yanni 24x7 and no one gets cramps or blisters.

Maybe it’s in Utah.