Tools of the Ultrarunning Craft

See my photo over there to the right under About Me.  Notice anything?

Well, you’d have to be brain dead to not notice the running shoes—after all, they’re pretty much the only thing in the picture.

As surely as hammers and screwdrivers and drills are tools, so are our shoes...and our bottle packs and flashlights and reflective gear and high-tech clothing, etc. 

But all of these “improvements” to our leisure pursuit of Ultrarunning are but a few decades old, at best.  Nowhere near 1.76 million years old as is this tool:

Image credit Boing Boing, such a wonderful site if you like science and culture with an eclectic bent.

The fact that these ancestors of ours used tools--sophisticated tools, really--links them to us in a rather primal way.  That, probably, is one of the prime characteristics that makes us human.  Much as we have our favorite running shoes or flashlight, nearly 2 million years ago there was some individual who carefully crafted this stone ax and used it in life-or-death survival.  One can imagine that he or she held and kept it close, deriving comfort and security from its firm heft in the hand....

And I bet those Homo erectus folks could do some mean endurance running as well.

 

Cat Balloon Video

A great (brief) cat video find via Dependable Renegade:



I gotta find me one of these balloons!

Reminds me of an old Gary Larson cartoon captioned "Games you can play with your cat," in which a guy wearing a dog mask is hiding behind a door, waiting for the cat to walk through.

It's good to not let your cat get too complacent.

Heartbeats...and Ultrarunning

Image credit National Geographic.

I ran across this one last week on a Discover Magazine science blog: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time. 

There were a number of physics type entries, but it was the last one that intrigued me:

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it's a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats - about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience "the same amount of time." At least, until we master #9 and become immortal.

I must quibble a bit about the blog post, however.  The author, Sean, states that a "A lifespan is a billion heartbeats" in the header for his para 10, then in the body he says "...about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise."  Also, if you Google "heartbeats in lifetime" you'll see a bunch of results that, without clicking thru, would seem to be mutually exclusive.

That's quite a difference, and I can't speak to the math, and it kinda sounds too much like pop science. That said, let's suspend our disbelief and go with the bigger picture here. Namely, that the notion of an allotted number of heart beats, while not new, does sound rather intriguing.

See, we endurance athletes bank our heartbeats.  Sure, when we do some heart-pounding, leg-quivering ascent and our heartbeats soar to 200 or whatever your personal max is, it seems that you're squandering those precious beats.  Until you consider that your heart rate is only elevated for a few hours for a long run, then it drops back to your fit resting rate of what--40s?  50s?--for the rest of your existence.

That's a good trade off.

What will you do with your billion to 1.5 billion heartbeats?  I think I'll go trail running.

Water Gardening

My water garden was awesome this year! 

Unfortunately, as we move into September here in south central PA, growth will begin to slow and it'll be time to shut things down for the winter.

Specifically, that means I will pull up the pots (all my plants are contained in submerged pots to keep them corralled) and divide the root balls.  I whack at the root ball with a hatchet to reduce the root mass back to about 1/3 of its size, then replant it in the same container.  Then I will add some garden soil to fill up the pot, include a fertilizer tablet or two, and finally cover the top with small stones to cover the mud and to discourage the goldfish and koi from rooting in the pots and stirring things up. 

I cut the green vegetative growth off and sink the pot to the bottom of the pond (my deepest point is about 3').  The pots remain there all winter until spring when I pull them up to higher shelves so they can start next spring's growth.

 

Cats in Art: Children Teaching a Cat to Dance (Steen)

From my continuing weekly Sunday series of cats in art. I'm using some ideas from the coffee table book, The Cat in Art, by Stefano Zuffi.  Last week's post was Steen's painting of Children Teaching a Cat to Read, and when I Googled it I noted numerous hits on another Jan Steen painting, the topic of this post, Children Teaching a Cat to Dance.

Image credit Rijkmuseum, here.  Jan Steen, Children Teaching a Cat to Dance, also known as "The Dancing Lesson," c. 1665-1668, oil on panel, 68 cm x 59 cm, held by Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam.  From the museum's description:

Four children are playing with a cat, making it dance. At the centre, a young boy is holding the cat by its front paws while the girl plays a flute and the other two children watch laughing. The cat screeches, the dog barks and the old man looks out of the window. [Gary note: I don't see any old man?] The scene is mainly painted in beige and brown tones. Only the girl is wearing brightly coloured clothes: the blue of her dress is particularly bright and striking. This painting is a 'typical Jan Steen': an amusing scene in a domestic setting with a sexual undertone to the symbolism.

I'm not sure I get the sexual undertone assertion, but the painting is indeed vibrant and almost sensual.  It is clear that Steen was a big fan of cats (undoubtedly they were his principal muses!), sprinkling them liberally and prominently in his paintings.

As for the cat, it obviously is cataloging the humiliation and will exact proper payback at a later date.

 

Tales from the Perimeter: Knee Surgery

Perimeter meaning the 6 mile patrol road inside the fence of the military installation on which I work, where some half a dozen of us comprise a pool of running “talent” and strive to show up for a noontime run a couple times a week if we can escape our desks. We share a lot and these guys are one of the core pillars of my sanity.

Image credit Amazon.  Book is also available at the OBX Bookstore.

One of our noontime running group, KK, buggered up his knee to the point where he could no longer bend it properly.  It was not a particular incident or accident, but rather a cumulative effect that resulted in a torn meniscus.  So last week he had arthroscopic surgery to fix it.

Once I got the report that KK was doing well, I could not resist combining busting him at home via email, using a children's book that the bride and I had bought for Mister Tristan (the human being, not the blog):

KK,

Glad to hear that the knee surgery went well.

However, if your recovery takes a sudden change for the worse, plus you somehow are transformed into a cat, you still may have a productive career in piracy ahead of you.

Regards/Gary

A Small Effect of the Earthquake

Here are some shots of a tombstone in the Brown’s Mill Cemetery in the village of Kauffman, PA, that I think was toppled by the earthquake last week.  This first shot is of the stone lying down to show the break; in the second (see below) I have propped it up to make it readable.

The break in this tombstone is fresh and clean, and there were no other newly tipped-over stones that might indicate vandalism.

The grave is that of John Zarger, son of Adam (1819-1882) and Matilda Zarger (1827-1864), whose graves are immediately adjacent.  John’s waist-high tombstone, the one that apparently toppled in the quake, is pretty illegible.  I picked it  up and positioned it against another tombstone so that the sun was on edge to it, trying to make shadows be cast into the carved letters to try to read them, but it’s quite worn.  The year of death appears to be 186x; I cannot make out the birth year.  I make out his age as having two digits, the first one being “1” and the second roundish but illegible (perhaps 0, 6, or 8), thus he’d have been 10, 16, or 18.  

Besides the parents, there are two other graves close by in the row, sister Elizabeth (again, birth and death years and age are illegible) and another presumed sibling, whose stone was broken off long ago and contains no readable info.  Thus this was a 5-person family who lived and died in the mid-1800s.

They were as real as you or me, with hopes and dreams and loves and fears, all of it, not some dusty historical family.  There was a mom and a dad, and at least 3 children, of which John seems to have died before reaching age 20.

When the earthquake hit on 23 August 2011, it is kind of strange, even unnerving, to imagine the dead under the ground being shaken.  It's easier to imagine above-the-ground effects: John's tall, relatively thin stone, swaying, breaking, and toppling.

Rest in peace, John Zarger.

NOTE: Brown's Mill Cemetery is in the village of Kauffman, 2 miles south of Marion, PA and 3 miles north of Greencastle, PA.  It's the cemetery adjacent to the Manito School admin building, not the cemetery beside the old one-room historic Brown's Mill School.  To find the grave, imagine a line from the small white maintenance shed in the middle of the cemetery to the southmost exit door of the Manito admin building.  John Zarger's grave is on that line, about 5 or 6 rows north of the maintenance shed.

 

Everlasting Afghanistan

Image credit theBRIGADE.com, here.

Just in case you thought we were going to leave Afghanistan anytime soon, you ought to check out this post on 26 August 2011 from William Rivers Pitt at The Smirking Chimp:

A pair of vitally important news reports were lost recently amid a blizzard of stories about the gyrating stock market and a rogue East Coast earthquake. The first came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who announced that a deal had been struck to keep US forces in Iraq beyond the oft-publicized December 31st withdrawal deadline and into 2012, contrary to Mr. Obama's promises...A few days after this announcement came a report from the UK Telegraph that is nothing short of staggering:

America and Afghanistan are close to signing a strategic pact which would allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.

Both Afghan and American officials said that they hoped to sign the pact before the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December. Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai agreed last week to escalate the negotiations and their national security advisers will meet in Washington in September.

Pitt is dumbfounded, writing:

2024. More than twelve years from now.  Seven congressional elections and three presidential elections from now.

I, too, am struck speechless.  We never are going to leave, are we?