in-noc-u-ous: adjective

1.  not harmful or injurious; harmless: an innocuous home remedy.

2.  not likely to irritate or offend; inoffensive; an innocuous remark.

3.  not interesting, stimulating, or significant; pallid; insipid: an innocuous novel.

Writing for public consumption can be a funny thing.  Sometimes when you write something, you go to great lengths describing details about environment, emotions, developing direction and looking for ways to add a layer of suspense.  

Then you get lazy in the denouement and splash a few drips of extraneous ink on the page to bring your story to a close quickly because it's three in the morning and your eyes are burning.  

And over the course of the next week, you discover that the one thing that really moved your readers was not the carefully crafted story, but the chaff you meant to discard that somehow wound up on the page instead.

When I wrote about the aftermath of the marathon, a post of over 1,500 words, I included the following 12 words in the last paragraph:

"I took a hot shower followed by a glorious three-hour naked nap."

I thought it was a pretty innocuous detail, one that most would just skim over and not think twice about.  Yet here in the comments and elsewhere, that is the single most remarked-upon detail of the whole post.  I don't know why.  I thought more people would be acquainted with the practice.  It has remarkable rejuvenating abilities.  I think if science could talk, it would testify to that fact.  I stumbled upon the knowledge on my own back in high school, but have since learned that four out of five physical therapist agree.  If you consult ancient Confucian healing texts, you'll find it there as well.  The next time you go through a period of intense physical exertion, I recommend you give science a try.  Then tell me I'm wrong.
 

Show Me "Dim Mak"

Seems like the first term here at Thunderbird, they set you on fire and turned you loose on your own to see how you cope.  The work load in terms of deliverables (homework) was out of control.  In the rare free moments between studying, I was either on the treadmill screaming obscenities at hallucinated visions of my stats professor or at the corner gas station binge eating.  You could say that in my first semester of school in seven years, I showed some cracks.

Burger may be larger than it appears

That was so last semester.

This semester, I am feeling much more zen.  I am a slim Buddha with great big fat earlobes.  There's still a lot of work to do, but my vision and planning is much improved.  I have figured out how to arrange my schedule to mitigate the bottlenecks of work that inevitable develop.  I am less stressed out, getting my eating habits under control (sidebar:  you'd be amazed at the things I justified eating because I was training for a marathon.) 

It's as though I can sense all things at the same time, the life force running through all dimensions of creation, and I know what is coming my way.  You can think of being in "The Zone," when you can feel oncoming objects and are able to use the object's energy against it.  Kung fu stuff like that.  I don't think I've quite made it that far, but I'm on my way.

Hopefully by March, I will have achieved that state, because that is when I leave for China.  And I need to be crushing bricks Frank Dux-style by then.  No, I'm not planning to compete in an underground kumate.  More like crushing finance bricks.  I'm really pumped for this opportunity just over the horizon.  Living in China will be something unlike I've ever experienced before.  The more I find out from others, the more I think the trip may be hazardous to my health.  Apparently the air pollution is ridiculously out of control, to the point that many locals wear surgeons masks on the street to avoid breathing the unfiltered air.  Not really the kind of "danger" I look for when considering my next adventure, but it should be fun nonetheless.  Until then, I will continue to harness the energy of the universe around me, preparing to go palm-down on some bricks.

I see you, Accounting.  And I crush you.

 

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