#runnerpost

[somerunner]

In my high school, all you needed to get a varsity letter in cross country was, I think, to get under 19 minutes on a 5K. Most of the varsity letter requirements for other sports were similarly easy to meet. Our school wasn't known for athletics.

My first race was a little under 22 minutes long, and every year I struggled to get my time lower than 19:50.

My senior year, I had hit puberty, so I had more strength and cardiovascular fitness than before. I figured I would make it this time, and I trained as optimally as I could. I followed the coaches' directions more closely (my brother and I were once told that, given our fitness, we should never run slower than 9 minutes a mile for an easy run; it took until senior year for me to actually follow that advice). I ate well, slept...probably poorly, and I felt pretty fit compared to previous years. My dad bought me and my brothers Garmin Forerunners, which are GPS watches that can tell you your pace in the middle of a race. He came to as many of our races as he could all throughout high school, and our mom did too (she came to our middle school races in addition to high school ones -- it was no fault of our dad's, not to come to our middle school races; I find it impressive and touching that he made it to almost all of my high school ones. In middle school it was always some random distance so we never really had a consistent distance to truly compete against ourselves with. High school had bigger teams and each race always right around five kilometers, with one notable exception).

The watches helped a lot. (I still have mine from back then, but it struggles to hold a charge for a full run unless you've kept it in the charger until the minute you go running. I don't use it quite as much; I've misplaced my charger too often, and I don't want to look for it a day in advance just so my watch can tell me my strides per minute (arguably important, but I digress). I can't pace myself any better than in high school, but I don't need to because there's no exact season or race I'm training for -- though for something big, like a marathon, I will actually use the watch. My phone can record my pace for less-important runs.)

Anyway. Back to the point. I hadn't broken 19 minutes my whole senior year, and we were down to one last race. I was anxious the whole last week. The last three days, I could practically feel adrenaline seeping into every capillary like I was a sponge. It felt good, unsurprisingly to me (though that may be surprising to you). I felt ready.

The last meet was big, full of schools. I'd just learned from my dad (either that day, or just before some other race in the past week or two) that the "strides," or short almost-sprints you do a few minutes before a race, are actually important -- they prime your body for that first 100-meter dash where you stake your position for the next mile. If you don't do your strides, you'll dip into anaerobic metabolism early, and your legs might be locked up halfway through the race, and that's bye-bye sub-19:00.

I felt like I weighed like nothing. My entire body was a spring. Side note: if you've never put on racing flats/spikes, I encourage you to borrow a pair for a short run (and I mean short! Like 100 meters if you don't run, and a mile or two if you do run). It feels like there's a weightless force field on your foot, with how light it is compared to a normal shoe. It's a surreal feeling.

When we started the race, I felt a touch desperate. I ran only a little slower than my best; you're supposed to hold yourself back for the first mile. I knew that, but I glanced at my watch to see that I was averaging a 5:00/mile pace. That was WAY beyond my target pace, and I barely even noticed. That was heartening to see, but I obviously dialed the pace way, way back to 5:45/mile or something. I needed this record-breaking adrenaline to last me for three miles, not half of one.

Frankly, all I remember of that race was that first 200-meter dash and the disconnect between what I felt and what I saw on my watch. I always have that disconnect during a race, but it was especially pronounced during this race.

The next two miles were hard but good, and I broke 19. I got a massive personal record (PR) to end my high school career with; I think it was more than a minute of improved time. Which is rather insane. Improvement tends to be more incremental than that, but things like this do happen pretty often in running, especially at the relatively slow paces I ran at.

My brother broke 19 and 18 in the same race. Just skipped right over the whole 18-minutes-something-seconds window. I was over the moon for him, of course. We'd both made it past the lettering-qualification by the skin of our teeth, and at the same time, by a huge margin.

He's kept up with consistent running more than I have. He's also gotten me back into running after I semi-gave up on it, and our older brother's gotten back into running too. We, along with our dad, decided to run a marathon/half-marathon together this summer. I'd say we all did well, though I didn't train as much for it as I should have.

I've only ran one marathon so far, and it was recent, but now I'm feeling the itch. I want to run another one, I want to absolutely demolish my time. Admittedly, this is partially because I didn't practice as much as I should have, and I've seen my brothers' times, so I know how much farther I can go.

If you've come close to your (previous) best at something, you might have realized too that it was only a false summit. Could be a project within your hobby, could be a physical accomplishment, it could be anything that requires some level of effort large or small. But I hope, when you realized you could do even better than you just did, that it felt inspiring.

It's kind of a rush.

[somerunner]

Ooooohhhh I’m liking this talk (mainly because it talks about humility and repentance without sounding like a veiled reference to queerness and doubt)

Feels like this talk is directly talking to me about my self-destructive tendencies and telling me “you gotta recognize your faults before you can fix them. This (i.e. scrolling for hours, ignoring others’ needs, etc.) isn’t haha funny, this is actually a bad thing. Now work on it.”

[somerunner]

Fanfic ask game: 15, something you learned this year

Oog. Um, I learned a lot of things that I used to know and then forgot; the first things that came to mind were several lessons about productivity and mental health, and after that were a few things from my classes.

Something short and fun…

I learned about spin-casting, a method of creating some circular object by rotating liquid in a drum until it cures. That was cool. I watched it in a video of a guy creating model rockets (the channel was “BPS.space”)

There were probably several things I learned here on Tumblr about the arts, but I’ve probably forgotten them along with the many many STEM-things I’ve also learned here. I suppose in a roundabout way I’ve learned that I should take paper notes on things I find interesting.

Long story short, I’ve learned and forgotten a lot.

[somerunner]

I follow some variant on the Golden Rule with regards to personal posts. If I post something personal I expect someone to like and un-like it to indicate they’ve seen it. Since I have almost 18,000 likes, I just like personal posts and never un-like them.

The issue is that I don’t know if this is rude or intrusive to the people whose posts I like. So idk. There was one post in particular, a month or more ago, where someone posted a disturbing personal anecdote, so I just tossed a reblog in my drafts so I could remember it. Instead of tossing the like into my likes folder, which will never realistically see the light of day.

Poll time! Most of my mutuals won’t see this but I might as well make a poll for it.

[somerunner]

what's the deal with hydrogen

I like pipe-dream technology ideas, especially ones about cheap energy. I’m more aware now of how infeasible hydrogen fusion is, but I’ve always had a passing interest in it.

In freshman year of college, I decided to create a science-communication YouTube channel, where I’d briefly touch on a science topic. Like, one to eight minutes. And my first video would be on hydrogen fusion.

I never made more than half a video, but I still want to make all those videos I had wanted to make five years ago.

Anyway, posting about hydrogen is like an itty-bitty token step towards working on my fusion video. So I’m making a lot of hydrogenposts.

Oh, and I like doing numbers and it seems like an untapped niche. (Science communication and getting mildly famous are two of my favorite things, not that I’ve ever done either)

[somerunner]

I don't have a very popular blog -- roughly 60 followers not counting bots, and about ten of those are ones I actually see in my Activity feed. So I check my Activity feed compulsively, and occasionally I see that one of my older (well, one-year-old) posts has been reblogged.

And you know, I always wonder how people find my older posts. If you click the header (the area around the OP/reblogger’s icon) an old post, then ones from just before it also show up, as if you’ve teleported through their dash to that date.

Sometimes my recently-reblogged older posts have a tag, so I imagine that whoever reblogged it just found a tagged post they were interested by and started trawling all of my posts with that same tag. But on occasion, they reblog an old post with *no* tags. I can only imagine they were trawling one of my tags and took a detour. Clicking one of the specific posts, then letting the same-time posts fill the screen to resume scrolling on (speaking of that, I need to tag all my posts so they’re easier to trawl through). Or maybe it just showed up in the For You page.

I've posted at least one other post about page-trawling, but I don't know if I'll find it, so I'm posting this separately. I think lurking/archive-trawling should be easy to privately do without getting any comments about it, especially since I lurk and trawl too, but it's (i.e. old-post reblogs) happened a few times recently and I guess I just wanted an excuse to remark about it.

Carry on lurking as usual.

[somerunner]

I'm doing a reading for a class that I withdrew from. It's an excerpt from a book about teaching, and the excerpt itself is about the refusal to learn. The author goes into detail about the difference between refusal to learn and failure to learn, and about why refusal to learn is a concept with its own merit. The price of refusal and its reward are pretty intertwined - you don't get to participate as fully with people who do learn, which can be a wanted or unwanted thing; you are set apart in status from those who learn, which again can be wanted/unwanted; you don't have your mindset changed, etc. etc.

I found it a very fascinating excerpt, though I haven't finished it yet.

[somerunner]

One of my favorite tropes is when characters have traits or mannerisms that reflect their parents. Even if these traits are bad, or their parents are generally bad, for some reason it just makes me smile to see the similarities between characters and their parents. Maybe it’s because it gives me hope I can live up to my own parents; maybe it’s because it indicates that everyone rubs off on each other over time, leaving a legacy behind in how they influence each other; maybe it’s some other reason.

Anyway, the main examples that come to mind here are Kaladin’s curmudgeonly attitude and mostly-inflexible code of honor (both inherited from Lirin, and the second partially also inherited from Hesina), Miles Morales thinking of his parents‘ and uncle’s words at critical moments in the Spiderverse movies (and also him and his dad walking down stairs instead of taking risky parkour jumps), and Yerin’s whole manner of speaking (inherited from the Sword Sage, a father figure).

Funnily enough the thing that brought this thought up was Varic Vallenar and his father Benri having a pettiness/oneupmanship contest every time they talk. It’s just funny and endearing to see them both act so calm while inwardly seething, and both care about their charges so much (Varic’s charge being “the safety of the galaxy” and Benri’s charge being “the financial state of the corporation, and guaranteed cooperation from his son”)

[somerunner]

I have barely worked on my research for a few hours in the past few weeks and one of my research professors is calmly telling me that it’d be good for me to wrap up the current segment, because he wants me to move on to something else I can put on my thesis. He’s calm, but a little frustrated, and I completely understand his frustration. I want to be working too but I just can’t get myself to get off Tumblr/Discord/Youtube/etc. and work.

Anyway, we both have Strava accounts and follow each other. And we keep liking each other’s posts. I think it’d be funny if he ever calls me out, like “I know you have the time to work, you did an hour-long run the other day!” But he probably won’t, because he also runs and knows it’s kind of a necessity (running is a big sanity inducer).

Since we’re about the same pace, I might ask him if he wants to run together and discuss research then. Having more “meeting time” during the week would get me in the mindset that, you know, I need to work. But he might be the opposite and use running to think about non-work stuff, because he actually does work full-time and doesn’t waste the day away like I do.

[somerunner]

I am constantly surprised when I receive praise from an authority figure or get reblogged by an S-tier poster. Like, my parents do it because they're my parents, but someone who doesn't have a personal connection to me? There's no way I measure up enough to be considered your peer

I then justify the praise by thinking "maybe I have a good idea 10% of the time and they're like 'oh yeah That Guy has a good idea. Good job guy! Anyway,' and it's not a big deal. Meanwhile they have good ideas 50-90% of the time. All is right with the world." My preconception that I could never be their equal is still true, which means my other preconceptions about the world are also true.

This phenomenon of "wrangling my definitions and conceptions about 'How Things Work' until they fit new data, but are still largely the same" actually applies to a lot of things in my life.

[somerunner]

These two songs are actually real good though.

[runnercomics]

Day 3 - Jig

[loverboy-ish]

loneliness of the long-distance runner shadow come closer so i'll run on further

[somerunner]

[Image ID: An Adobe Stock image of Cairo at night, labeled 71897150. It is an industrialized city with apartment and office buildings, parking lots, and a bridge over the Nile river with electric boats docked to the side.]

[Image ID: A picture book drawing of a desert with an oasis containing an alligator and ducks, and the Egyptian pyramids in the background. At the oasis some kids are filling ceramic water jugs from within straw canoes, wearing the white skirt common in depictions of Egypt (called a shendyt, I think)]

[Image ID: The “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” meme where a character says, “That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.”]

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

[somerunner]

I keep forgetting that I’m best fueled by spiteful compliance. Not malicious compliance, no sabotage-by-the-rules, but just…powering my work ethic with resentment.

My class just had a lecture on using generative AI to create illustrations in the classroom. Also known as something that you can do with stock images and clip art, which have both existed for decades.

EDIT: I forgot to explain why the above two paragraphs are related. Anyway, I’m struggling to care about my classes and do work for them, but by being fueled by anger at this lecture, I think I’ll actually get assignments done on time this week.

[runnercomics]

Day 2 - reaction image (doubt)

I put this in drafts on accident. Day 3 is also done, each took about 1 minute (I refuse to zoom in while drawing just to get passable eyes, hence why it didn’t take 10 seconds)