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 7th 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.
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