Enlightenment - 26.2 Miles Ahead

In 490 B.C., the Greeks fought a grueling encounter with the Persians at the Battle of Marathon.  Legend tells of a messenger, Pheidippides, sent from the battle field to declare the victory in Athens.  He ran the entire way, the exclamation, "We are victorious!" escaping his exhausted lungs moments before he dropped dead. 

"We are victorious!" said the most hairless Greek you've ever seen.

Today, tens of thousands of people enter the roughly 500 marathons worldwide to test themselves against this progenitor of endurance running, apparently finding his fate to be more heroically poetic than cautionary.  Each person has their own motivation for entering a marathon for the first time.  A personal test, a charitable cause, loss of a friend or family member.  For me, it was mostly the first of those.

I've wanted to run a marathon for a couple years now, since I started running.  On January 16, 2011, I realized that goal.  I spent the last year or two entering shorter races, and I feel like it was a pretty natural progression to this.  That's not to say it was a smooth road getting there.  Mother Nature and the holidays conspired to trip me up in my training by sending snow storms that I couldn't run in and feeding me with pies and ice cream for my final month.  Nonetheless, I had set my sights and was not to be stopped.

Yet on the day before the race, I experienced something I hadn't experienced in any of my previous races:  anxiety.  The number 26.2 started to get into my head.  You see, once I started running distances over 10 miles, I had the realization of just how mental an activity running is.  If you let the number get in your head, it can bully you.  The first time I ran 10, I remember thinking afterward, "Is that all?"  If you've devoted the time to building up distances over weeks and months of training, the next big number shouldn't be too bad.  Every other race I've done, I just wake up and go run as though I am on my home turf doing another training run.  But the night before this race, I started letting the number into my psychological prep.  I began to doubt the sufficiency of my training and diet.  I minimized this by closing my eyes and focusing on the starting line, thinking about the sights and smells of race day.  It helps to mentally put myself in place and block out the distractions.

For dinner the night before, I met up with my aunt and two of my cousins for some pasta.  My cousins were in town to run the race as well, and they are both seasoned veterans.  I picked up some good pointers from them, including the suggestion that I restrain myself a bit for the first 10 miles in order to conserve energy for the later miles.  Had I charged out the gates the way I had planned, I'm not sure I would have finished.  If I did, I would have been walking the last five miles.

The anxiety carried through to the morning, and I wandered around the starting line area with knots in my stomach.  But once I got into my starting corral and began to go through my focusing exercises, I felt good.  Confident, even.  Despite feeling like I was holding myself back for the first ten miles, I still passed 10 miles at the 1:15 mark, which is a pretty good pace for me.  I kept that pace for about another seven miles.  At mile 17, you began to see runners pulling over to the side of the road to stretch calves and quads.  By mile 18, my hips really started to tighten up, and I pulled over to stretch them.

Runners are generally trying for a certain finishing pace, say they want to finish in 3:20 or 3:50.  Race officials put experienced runners on the course carrying signs bearing those numbers so that as you are running, you can pace your race with that person if that is the time you are aiming for.  As I was stretching at mile 18, I saw the 3:20 pacer pass me, and I felt good about the race I was running.  Even though my body was tightening up, I was in control both physically and mentally. 

That was soon to change.  I remember getting to mile 20 and being excited by the thought, "Only six more miles to go!  I could run six miles without breaking a sweat."  But there was a voice in the back of my mind doing calculations, my subconscious chopping away at the oblivious overconfidence of my fore brain:  "In a rested state, starting fresh, six miles with a drill sergeant buggy-whipping you to keep pace would still take you 40 minutes to complete.  You're realistically closer to 50 minutes right now.  That's nearly an hour of running left."

I managed to ignore the thought for one more mile.  Then, at 21 miles, I stumbled into a twilight zone where distances and time began to warp.  Every mile felt like five, and I swear it took me two hours to run from 23 to 24.  People I had been pacing began to pull away.  People I had never seen because they had been running behind me now began to pass me as well.  Normally I have a mechanism in my brain that takes great offense at such affronts to my manhood.  It would ordinarily WILL me to pick up my feet and catch up.  This was the point at which my body stopped responding to such stimuli.  I tried playing psychological tricks on my mind to keep going, to break through the mental barriers like I discussed earlier.  "Four is only a number.  Don't let it in your head.  Ignore the pain.  It's not that bad."  This got me through about a half a mile until the time warp dropped on me like a ton of bricks.  I had been thinking those thoughts for at least three hours and I still hadn't passed the next mile marker.

It was right in between 23 and 24 that I encountered the largest hill on a very flat course.  Of course that would appear right there, right at the moment I first dared think the thought, "I may not finish."  I know that sounds absurd.  Typing it a day later, it sounds absurd even to me.  To run 24 miles and consider not finishing?  Remember how I said that running is a very mental activity?  This is where the mental fatigue began to catch up to the physical fatigue.  The only motivation I had at that point was the ache in my knee.  I had to keep moving no matter what, because if I stopped, my knee would throb so bad that I wouldn't be able to get started again.

Finally, at 25.2 miles, there was a man on a P.A. system yelling words of encouragement, letting all the runners know that there was "JUST ONE MILE LEFT!"  As I passed this man, the pacer with the 3:30 placard passed me.  3:30 had been my very optimistic goal when I started the race.  I attempted one last time to stoke the rage within me, barking like a drill sergeant:  "There goes your goal!  Get it together!  LIGHT THE FIRE!"

The response from my body:  "Sorry sir.  No fire.  Just smoke and ashes."  I would have expected some sort of emotion at this point, but my body hadn't lied.  There was nothing but smoke and ashes, and the mental void was filled with exhaustion.  So I watched the pacer stride away as the sense of powerlessness sank in.  I might not make that goal, but I would keep my legs running as long as they would respond.  My one last thrust of pride was to not walk across the finish line.  At about 200 yards out, a face drifted to me through the crowd, my cousin Angie, who had run the half marathon and finished about an hour before.  She was there cheering me on, lifting me out of the fog of fatigue.  I finally managed to lengthen my stride just a little, and stomped across the finish line, exclaiming "I am victorious!"

And although I didn't die immediately afterward, I must have looked close.  One of the medical staff wandering the finish area approached and asked if I needed help.  I told him if he had any pointers on how to discreetly soil one's britches in front of thousands of people, I'm all ears.  Otherwise, I'd be fine.  Chatting with my cousins after that encounter, I did experience some odd physical effects.  I was seeing stars for a couple minutes.  That was accompanied by powerful tingling in my face and arms, as well as light-headedness.

I drove home in a state resembling shock.  I took a hot shower followed by a glorious three-hour naked nap.  When I awoke, my mind was in a much better state, but my body was still in revolt.  I couldn't bend my knee all night, nor could I sit or stand or climb stairs on it.  It has gotten progressively better through the day today.  Hopefully tomorrow I won't even be limping.  Time heals all wounds, right?

For those of us who are "results oriented,"  here are my results:

Finishing time:  3:30:22 (8:02 minutes/mile)
Place in Age Group (31-34):  78/457
Place in Male Group:  484/2874
Place in Total Group:  590/5062

Humungus Ponders Post-Apocalypse Sports, Gets Lost in Classical Music

Dear Bloodlust,

The existence of leisure time for sport in the apocalypse depends on what sort of events lead to the apocalypse.  Many envision the end of civilization coming as the result of nuclear powers losing their minds and launching enough warheads to bring about nuclear winter.  Others envision some sort of calamitous event such as a meteor strike, which would have a similar effect.  The unspoken assumption of your question indicates you anticipate a somewhat more peaceful dissolution of civilization as a result of geopolitical failure and/or man's inability to sustain the systems we currently depend on for power, transportation, communication, food, etc. 

Only under a scenario where mankind returns to a more agrarian existence, but can also count on fertile soil and an uninterrupted ecosystem could sport still be a consideration.  It may be a bit rosier vision than Humungus believes in, but I enjoy sports as well, so I'll indulge your whims here.

The Mesoamerican ballgame to which you refer is one of the oldest known team sports, dating back over three thousand years, and the outcome of the game was critical, since, as you mentioned, the losing team would often be put to death.  As much as I like those stakes, I have a hard time believing that man would return to such a game when so many others have developed in the ensuing millennia that would be easier to carry forward into the new reality.  In truth, I think most of the games that exist now have the potential to carry forward, albeit in variously altered states.  Except hockey.  Hockey fans are screwed.  But for the loss, the trade-off is that we never have to watch ice dancing or figure skating again.  Not exactly a fair trade, but fair doesn't exist in the apocalypse.  There may be some competitions that develop around the new survival skills man will be required to develop, such as spear fishing competitions or a resurgence of wrestling.  On the whole, though, I don't think much will develop that man hasn't already thought of, either in current times or times past.   

I think the biggest change will be in the players themselves and how the public will consume their sports.  There will be no national league of overfed, roided-up, prima donnas with a gaggle of assistants and physicians and personal chefs to make sure they can get from home to practice by 10:00 o'clock in the morning.  No national press corp to pick over every word that falls from their mouths like pigeons on a crumb of bread.  Nobody calling them "heroes" simply for playing a game.  In this fairytale of ours, I look forward to the return of the warriors of old.  For them, as I hope it will be for the new, the game was a diversion.  They play in their down time after planting the harvest or after a successful hunt.  They play in between wars with neighboring clans.  But these new athletes are warriors first.  Their people love them for their sporting prowess, but they are never simply adored for being good at playing a game.  They are contributors and protectors of the well-being of the clan.

And for the love of Ra, they never send cellphone pictures of their manhood to women, as everybody's favorite gunslinger quarterback did before retiring this season.  This is a development I absolutely don't understand.  What is the purpose of doing so?  I assume that when a guy does this, he thinks it will flip the Hot Sweaty Vixen switch in the woman's brain and she will be unable to resist such a tempting appendage.  She will drop whatever she is doing and come flying to your door on a rocket so that the sexxy time may commence before the image on her phone self-destructs. 

This is not a phenomenon restricted to athletes of course.  They just get to be in the news when they do.  Men of all classes seem to reach this same flawed conclusion.  Cellphone + My Gear + Unlimited Data Messaging = Sex 4 Me 2nite!  Dammit, this is why China is beating our pants off in producing engineers.  We can't even do the sexxy math right.  These guys aren't even using the right variables.  I mean, I've never been a woman (hallelujah!), so I can't speak as an authority here, but there is nothing about a picture of mangear that is beautiful or arousing.  Its purpose(s) are obvious enough to surmise, but it is a rather odd-looking appendage, especially out of context.  Perhaps an illustration will help drive the point home.

Take this violin bow, for example:

You look at the picture, and you know what it does immediately.  But the sight of it doesn't make you automatically think of playing Vivaldi's Grosso Mogul Concerto.  In fact, you may be thinking what a weird tool that is to make such beautiful music. 

Now imagine that the woman you're sending the picture to is at the grocery store, studiously considering loofahs when she opens her phone to see your mangear staring back.  How strange must it look?   Obvious in purpose, yes.  But not inspiring her to make beautiful music.  Context matters, fellas.

Perhaps some of the confusion in these guys' hetero-textual overtures derives from something more deeply psychological and linked to the strongly visual orientation of the male brain.  As mentioned earlier, mangear leaves no questions as to function.  Ladygear, however, is veiled in mystery, much like the creatures themselves.  If a man raised by wolves in the wilderness were to stumble upon a set of ladygear, he'd have no idea how to operate it.  But he'd be awfully excited about learning.  It's as though every woman comes equipped with her own variation of the Rubik's Cube.  Were a man to receive a cellphone pic of random ladygear,  I imagine it would, as Confederate Railroad described it, "get [him] excited, leave [him] feeling confused."

Could it be this confusion with the female of the species that triggers these men to make their intentions known right up front?  Are they making an attempt at primitive bartering?  (You want dis?  I gots dis.  You trade for Rubik's Cube?  I likes Rubik's Cube.  Uh oh.  How do I work dis?)  And could it be that men and women are both looking for an approach from the opposite sex that bears a little more resemblance to their respective gear?  Women seem to get really revved up by mystery, nuance, passing glances and raised eyebrows, texts on Tuesdays, but phone calls on Thursdays, sharing his feelings but not hogging the conversation. 

And men get excited about a little more straightforward, explicit communication from women.  They're not asking that women throw themselves at the men.  They don't want a woman to walk up and say, "I want to grab your [blank] and [blank] your [blank] on the front steps of the [blank] until your [blankety blank] makes that [blanking] sound and the [blank] burns the tops of our [blanks] and then I'm gonna [blank] your [blankety blank] like it's the [blank]." (Feel free to Mad-lib that at home.) 

There's no need to be extreme.  However, I for one am tired of standing before The Sphinx every time I have a conversation with a potential paramour.  

I don't know how we got here, Bloodlust.  Something about sports in the apocalypse.  I totally broke character for this. 

I dunno, uh, no sexting in the apocalypse.  Write it down under "Positive aspects of the downfall of civilization."

Yup.  I'm on vacation, alright.       

Twenty Ten: Fin.

In blogging terms, Humungus finished 2010 like a bottle of wine in the cellar.  Silent but fermenting.  I've been brewing thoughts even though I haven't posted them to the interwebz.  I see that I haven't written anything since the beginning of November.  Most of you probably don't care all that much, but that news makes me grumpy.  So let's pop a cork and let this baby breath.

"Best Of" lists are very popular this time of year.  Well, popular about a week ago, if I'm being precise, but being so tardy only makes me more grumpy, so forget precise.  Stick to Best Of.  Best TV Show of 2010.  Best Sporting Event of 2010.  Et cetera.  I'm not much in the mood for a Best Of today.  I'm gonna roll with a Worst Of 2010 list for y'all.

1.  Worst Sports Fans (as experienced by me firsthand):  New York Mets.  I don't understand how this could possibly happen with such a great stadium providing a spectacular atmosphere for a baseball game.  I loved the venue.  But from the time I got off the train in Queens until the final pitch, I didn't encounter a single person that exuded one shred of positive energy.  Men, women, children, they all sucked.  Rude.  Yelling obscenities at the opposing team or opposing fans, and they weren't even playing the Phillies or Yankees.  It's not that they made me angry or hate them.  I just wish sucky people like that didn't exist. 

2.  Worst Music Occurrence, "Male":  Justin Beiber.  The hair.  The voice.  The fans.  Grown women singing along, straining to make their voices go that high.  Teenage Hearthrobs happen all the time.  I can't hate on some prettyboy with a nice voice who's maybe just a little too sweet for me.  Someone evidently likes that sort of stuff.  But this kid is like pouring battery acid in my ear canal.  How much worse can the music industry get?

3.  Worst Music Occurrence, Female:  Ke$ha.  When did they start a Special Olympics for singing?  They must have plucked her right out of her finger painting class and handed her a mic.  Bully for her.  She won the retard lottery without being nearly as loveable as actual retards.  It would be nice if someone would cut her tongue out.  It may actually improve her diction.  Boys want to touch your junk?  News flash Ke$ha:  boys want to touch any girl's junk that is on offer.  Slob. 

4.  Worst Movie (again, as experienced by me firsthand):  The Last Airbender.  Heaven knows there were plenty of others BEGGING to be chosen for this.  Salt.  The American.  Morning Glory (saved by Rachel McAdams' cuteness).  Plenty movies that I didn't see that had the potential to knock Airbender off the winners block.  Clash of The Titans.  Karate Kid.  Jonah Hex.  And that's not including movies where they weren't even really trying for "good."  Furry Vengance.  The Last Song.  Sex and the City II.  Marmaduke, for heaven's sake.  No, The Last Airbender takes home the hardware because of the combination of failures across the board.  Actors that can't act.  A director who very obviously shot his wad on his first movie, Sixth Sense.  Special effects that are outdone by Star Wars (yeah, the one filmed in 1978.)  Plot/dialogue written by a 15-year old.  Romantic subplots written by a 14-year old.  Do Not see this movie unless you are one of those masochistic connoisseurs of bad cinema.  This means you, Dirty Harry.

5.  Worst Federal Agency:  Federal B.I.  They love you, they hate you.  They want you, they spurn you.  They wait until you've packed your car to move on to the next city and next opportunity and then, as a sick joke, call you up two hours out of town to invite you back for the final round of testing.  A week after classes start, they inform you that they'd like to make you a contingent offer of employment.  Sorry Federal B.I.  It's your turn to wait.

6.  Worst Person in Sports:  Lebron James.  The man has a right to manage his career any way he sees fit.  Professionally, I agree with pretty much every reason he gave for moving to Miami.  Build a great team with a definite shot at winning the title.  Sacrifice the bigger paycheck to go somewhere where you can play with friends, with people and an organization that you enjoy.  Go to a city where you can get all of the most amazing looking women on the planet on a nightly basis (not a reason that he gave, but c'mon.  Miami?)  But don't leave the entire sporting press chasing the story all summer long in an attempt to bend the universe to revolve around you.  Don't schedule a one hour television special and title it The Decision just to announce where you're going to sign your next contract.  How much more self-absorbed can you be?  In the process he treated his home town fans like Clark Griswold's dog, dragging them behind his car all summer while they held out hope that he would return for another run at the title.  And then for his climactic insult, he held a televised party in his own honor in which he doused Cleveland's heart in kerosene and set it on fire in front of the sporting universe.  Take any of the biggest egos in sports history.  Michael Jordan.  Terrell Owens.  Barry Bonds.  None of them would have made such a supremely dickish move.  So there you go, Lebronica.  You've won some sort of title already.  Most Dickish Athlete.

7.  Worst Roommate Breakup Ever of 2010:  Me and Muzungu.  I don't know if I've ever had a roommate that I got along so well with.  Not sure if Muzungu would offer the same assessment, but the three years we spent as roommates were some of the best memories of my life.  Then he took a job in Africa and I went to school in Phoenix.  To split up a harmonious bromance such as that for something as trivial as "careers" is almost criminal.

8.  Worst Statistics Professor:  Housseini.  Yes, I had more than one, as I took two statistics classes in 2010.  The first was with Stark at the community college back in Virginia.  He wasn't good.  His pronunciation drove me crazy (like when 'both' became 'boaf' or 'strength' became 'stremf' or 'one' became 'wunt'.  You get the idea.)  I was never sure if he understood what he was teaching us or not, but when a student asked a question, he would spend the entire class huffing and puffing in an attempt to answer it, whether he was succeeding or not.  Housseini, on the other hand, expected us to teach ourselves.  Once I started grad school, the effort on the part of the professor to help students understand the material was negligable.  He had a set amount of material to present in his thick Iranian accent and there was very little time to stop and anwer questions for clarification.  There were times when he actually said something like, "I have to get through this lecture.  You'll have to figure that out on your own or come to my office hours."  When you came to office hours, he worked as hard as he could to shuffle you out of his office.  I was one of the lucky ones that had Thunder Lips in my class.  Thunder Lips had been an actuary before he came to Thunderbird, so he knew the material better than the T.A.s did, and he held regular teaching sessions. 

9.  Worst Overused word:  Epic.  This word was kinda cute when it first started showing up in decidedly un-epic stories.  It had an air of hyperbole, and as the regulars here may remember, I'm a huge fan of hyperbole.  But like so many good words, overusage by the masses has robbed it of its magic.  I don't understand what made this word so big this year.  One reason could be that people are getting dumber and have no idea how to use it properly.  However, I don't think this is the correct reason since its out-of-context usage has been part of its success.  Here's what I think is more likely:  people understand that its meaning conveys something heroic or extraordinarily impressive and recognize that the string of events that make up their lives are anything but.  In order to make their stories seem more extraordinary, they sex it up with words like epic to make it seem more important than it is.  Eating 12 tacos from Taco Bell in one sitting was not epic, Randy.  Just disgusting.  Runner up word:  Fail.

10.  Worst Celebrity Infidelity:  Jesse James.  So Lord Bangkok definitely provided depth and range with his infidelity.  But what Heir James did to Sandra B was...I don't know how to describe it.  The size of the anvil he dropped on her was gasp-inducing.  She is at the zenith of her career.  Nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.  Riding high on good publicity.  The week before the Oscars ceremony, she sits down for an interview with Barbera Walters in which she gushes about how happy she is with her life and how wonderful Heir James is and how they are just a perfect fit and guess what, we're adopting a baby together.  Two days later, just before the Oscars (where she would go on to win), the press breaks the story about Heir James and his dealings with some vampire stripper or some such nasty details.  Then come the pics of him marching around in Nazi regalia giving the 'sieg heil' salute.  How much of himself did he keep secret so that she could find out about it in the press?  When she should have been riding the good pub from her Oscar win for the rest of the year.  Instead, her life became a gossip rag staple for the better part of 2010.  Sometimes there is no justice.

I think I may have burned all my coal with that one, folks.  What additional worsts would you add for 2010?