Zero-Gravity Cats...and Ultrarunning

From the always entertaining Dependable Renegade, a link to YouTube and cats floating in zero-gravity.  And the question: Why were they training kitties to become astronauts?

The video from YouTube:



Oh, and the link to Ultrarunning?  Every once in awhile--doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's magical--you have a run when your feet merely skim the trail, you literally scamper over rocks and roots as though you were weightless.  It all suddenly becomes as easy as a bird in flight.  Seeing these weightless kitties makes me think of that type of magical running.

See a previous Mister Tristan post here, complete with pictures.

Cats in Art: Cat and Bird

My continuing series of Cats in Art.

Image and text credit here.  [1939, Pablo Picasso, Cat and Bird, oil]

During the period of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso created surrealistic paintings and etchings which served as propaganda against the Franco government. His painting entitled Cat and Bird symbolizes the cruelty of the laws governing nature.

Sometimes you just get rolled by a cat.

 

Contact Comfort...and Ultrarunning

I recently cleaned off my desk at work, removing various items I had taped or pinned up in my cube over the years. 

I removed 3 anniversary cards I had received from the bride, and was struck by the fact that all involved contact comfort and animals.  I sense a recurring theme here:

(photo by Gary)

Once in awhile, you meet someone you like.  Once in a great while, you meet someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.  I am indeed a lucky man.

Oh...and the connection to Ultrarunning?  Only that it strikes me as odd that I have gravitated to such a "loner" sport that involves many hours by myself, running in the woods.  Yet I crave contact comfort and a like-thinking partner, as evidenced by these cards.

Actually, maybe it's not odd at all, just two sides of the same coin.

Jack London...and Ultrarunning

May as well make it two posts in a row from the Writer's Almanac.  Jack London was featured last week on his 12 Jan birthday, in 1876.  Most people know of him from his novels about the north, such as Call of the Wild.

London had a school of hard knocks childhood, then headed up north for the Klondike Gold Rush.

When he came back, he started writing, setting many of his stories in the Klondike. He worked as hard at writing as he did at everything else — he stuck to a writing regimen of 1,000 words every morning. And his work paid off — he published The Call of the Wild (1903) when he was just 27 years old, and it made him famous. Between 1900 and 1916, he wrote more than 50 books. But he died in 1916 at the age of 40 from an overdose of morphine, which he was using to treat his uremia.

But it was his grasp of the raw essentials of existence--that have real parallels with the experiences we deliberately (and in a sense artificially) create for ourselves when we run ultras--that snapped me to attention.  London got it right:

In The Call of the Wild, he wrote: "There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight."

And so this ecstasy comes to the ultrarunner as well.

Being Worn Out...and Ultrarunning

From the always good Writer's Almanac, this one from month ago.  I'm feeling a bit worn out by various externalities that are inexorably nibbling away at me and my mental energy.  I'm feeling that there always is something I should be doing. 

Nothing life-threatening going on, just a momentary lull here in the mid-winter.  I'm ready for a good dose of spring.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was worn down to a much greater extent, desperately so, and I am not equating his resignation with my much milder flatness.  But he sure could articulate that feeling of just being done in much better than I can:

After huge critical and commercial success in his 20s, Fitzgerald found himself in his mid-30s deep in debt and feeling depleted. He said: "A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me. … I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip." He said, "One blow after another and finally something snapped."

--SNIP--

He wrote: "I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt." He'd "cracked like an old plate." He said: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside— the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.

There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed."

Now, this gonna sound hokey.  But when life is grinding you down, you go for a run.  Not just any run, but the run, the one that's special to you, the trail or course that always puts a smile on your face, the one that always pleases, the one you reserve for special times.

Yesterday a buddy and I ran on the C + O Canal in MD, of JFK 50 miler fame.  This is one of my rejuvination spots.

We started at daybreak and were alone on the trail.  No critters such as wild turkeys or deer--the snow remnants were too crunchy and noisy--but we spotted a raft of waterfowl at various spots in the Potomac River, and a couple of Great Blue Herons.

They seemed happy doing their bird things.  And suddenly I found a smile on my face too.

 

Pot Vs. Kettle

This for all the world sounds like some lefty in the early 2000s, railing against President Bush.:

His overall approach to expanding the size of government, expanding the deficit, and giving more and more authority and power to the government over the private sector,” xxxxx said in an interview with Jamie Gangel for NBC News. “Those are all weaknesses, as I look at yyyyy. And I think he’ll be a one term President.

Nope, it was former Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking of President Obama, just a couple of days ago.

These guys have such a limited sense of self-awareness.  Insert whatever cliche works for you: physician, heal thyself; take the log out of your own eye; pot vs. kettle comment; etc.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Misappropriated by DOD

My head still hurts from reading this yesterday on the U.S. Department of Defense news site:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2011 – If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

I call BS.  Dr. King preached non-violence, and would not have succumbed to the fear-mongering that resulted in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that still are ongoing today.

My post from a year ago on Dr. King, which in my humble opinion, gets it right.

My visits to Atlanta, wherein I made it a priority to visit the National Park Service site dedicated to Dr. King, are among the most poignant and important things I have ever done.  I can't wait until Mister Tristan (the human being, not the blog) and his two cousins are old enough to understand. 

Then we make a road trip to Atlanta, like a pilgrimage.

 

Luck...and Ultrarunning

Via Refdesk, my home page when I fire up the Internet, and drilling down to Thought of the Day for 10 Jan 2011:

"People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have." - Anne Tyler

This is along the same lines as reaping what you sow, or fortune smiles on the prepared.  In Ultrarunning, that means to be prepared mentally and physically for all your races.  You do your homework, you train, you crosstrain, you get your head into the course.

Then when race day comes, in the immortal words of Dr. George Sheehan, you "...look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight."