Beware of god

As I was running this morning I was struck by the thought: A religion is like a monarchy — there are no checks and balances in either. You can’t argue with the word of god any more than you can argue with a king. But at least with a king it is possible to verify that the king did indeed say that.

The proponents of monarchy point out that there have been good kings. I grew up with the romantic notion of Good Queen Bess (not the current one, the one 4 centuries ago) — but as I grew older I learned she had a really nasty spy network and secret police.

My mother likes to point out all the good religions have done, the hospitals started, the educational institutions endowed. I tend to see all the harm, the wars started, the restrictions on thought.

But however good a religion may seem yesterday it can change. My mother is an Episcopalian/Anglican. A religion currently undergoing a civil war as one side supports homosexual rights and another (stronger) side does not. Once again those supporting human liberties are being attacked from overseas. It is hard to believe in the “goodness” of religion as I watch. There are no checks and balances. How can anyone argue with the word of god? How can you argue with the bible?

Of course it is easy to see that modern religions are works of fiction. The Book of Mormon is based on a fantasy short-story published in the early 1800s. The sacred books of the Scientologists are science fiction novels.

Perhaps the bible is different? Yet when you look at the Gospels you find downright lies. Herod didn’t massacre the innocents. Jesus’s family didn’t go to Egypt to escape him (that one always bothered me — they were poor — where would they find the money to move?). There isn’t a Jewish prophecy saying that the mother of the Messiah would be a virgin. For that matter, Jesus was not named “Emanuel”. There wasn’t an earthquake or a darkness when Jesus died. The list just goes on. The bible looks as unbelievable as the other religious sources I’m aware of.

The “Gospel Truth” is an oxymoron, a fallacy.

My statements above are easily verified by comparing one Gospel with another. People have been doing that at least since the Enlightenment. And the Jews have been complaining about misusing their prophesies for millennia. Yet because the bible is the word of god no bible has been issued with a list of errata.

This is dangerous. It shows a willful desire to reject objective truth.

For a long time, I didn’t think it mattered. After all “God died at Auschwitz”, eventually that would sink in. Eventually people would accept evolution and stop the assault on our education system. But then 11/9/01 happened and the US went on a crusade against “bad” muslims. And suddenly the dangers of religion became all too visible.

A madman in Afganistan points out that the Koran has passages which advocate (and therefore God desires) holy war. An idiot in Washington tells us God has told him to attach Iraq.

How can anyone else verify what god wants?

There are no checks.

We’ve slowly been doing away with kings.

Give me Atheism, or give me death!

Times

Jenna asked me how long I thought it would take to run White River.

I’d really no idea. I told her so.

Then I made a guess. Let’s see the closest I’ve come to a 50 mile trail run is the Catalina trail marathon. Which had about half the distance and half the elevation. So let’s double that, and add an hour ~ hour and a half and round off to a nice number. Let’s guess 8 hours. About.

Then I got home and looked up the results.

In 2005, Mike Swan ran the course in 8 and a half hours.

Mike is faster than I am. And an experienced trail runner. 8 hours is out of the question. Perhaps 10?

We shall see.

Confidence

So many of the accounts in Running through the Wall talk about how ultra-running has given them new confidence in themselves.

I don’t believe it.

Or, I don’t believe it will have that effect on me.

Oh, I’m sure it does for some people. And I expect it is the kind of story that editors like to collect. But could it affect me that way?

I certainly lack confidence. But I don’t lack confidence in my ability to push myself. I lack confidence in my ability to deal with others. I have absolutely no idea how to start a conversation — oh I can lecture, but that’s not a conversation. A blog is perfect for me, a nice monologue where I can’t see when people get bored and stop reading. I used to go out with a woman who would laugh at me whenever I attempted to make small talk — so now I don’t go out with anyone and no one laughs.

I just can’t see how running could help that. All that time out on the trails alone.

Of course, I don’t know that I’ll be able to run 50 miles. I expect I can. I hope I can. It will be interesting to try. (And rather embarrassing if I can’t because my parents say they’ll come watch). But I don’t really expect it will build significant confidence.

I know I can push myself through 6 miles of steadily increasing misery when I hit the wall at mile 20 of Cal International Marathon. I know I can write the best open source font editing program in the world. If I run 50 miles, I expect that to be just more of the same.

But I don’t think it will help me talk to you.

What have I got myself into?

My friend, Jim Sloan, gave me a book for my birthday: Running through the wall — Personal Encounters with the Ultramarathon.

• blisters the size of silver dollars
• torrential downpour
• blizzard
• we didn’t have to worry about the copperheads, rattlesnakes and water moccasins. They would all be hibernating. … the alligators should be dormant
• hallucinations
• my knee!
• hypothermia
• like most trail runs you might miss these markers and get some “extra running”.
• dehydration
• … my second sunrise on this run. Most ultrarunners dread dawn — the hours between 4am and 6am

Well I’m planning on running only 50 miles, so a second sunrise seems unlikely (unless I really screw up — even a walking pace covers 50 miles in less than 24 hours).

I’ve been worried about nutrition (the wall), and that hardly gets mentioned.

The human body can run hard for about 20 miles, and then it runs out of easily used fuel. You can play tricks with the body and make it store a bit more fuel by depletion and carboloading — thus one can (with luck) finish a hard marathon without hitting the wall. But you can’t carboload enough for 50 miles. You’ve got to eat significantly on the course (more than just gel packs).

Naifly I had assumed this was going to be the major difference between an ultra and a marathon. In anything under a marathon the wall is irrelevant. The marathon is right on the edge, where you must worry about the wall but can (with luck) avoid it. You can’t avoid it in a real ultra. I assume there is no point to carbo-loading.

One thing that has worried me is that on my 200mile bike rides my stomach tended to rebel after about 10 hours, and I couldn’t eat real food beyond that (only gel packs, which become nasty after a while). Well, I should complete 50 miles in under 10 hours. But it’s harder to digest when running than when biking. Perhaps the limit will come earlier when running?

I guess I haven’t really done a run that truly pushed my endurance. I’ve only hit the wall once in a race. But the two 200mile bike rides I did were certainly endurance races. I need to think in terms of them.

Race	Length	elevation			Time
		gain	loss	max
Pier to Peak	13.1	4000ft	~50ft	3900	1:47
Catalina	26.2	4000ft	4000ft	~3000ft	3:22
Cal International	26.2	?	200ft	300ft	3:07
half Nine Trails	17	????	???	~3000ft	3:37
Malibu Grand Tour	206	6000	6000	~2000	bike 12:59
Solvang Autumn	202	11000	11000	~2000	bike 15:07
White River	50	8700	8700	~6900	???

What about elevation. I’ve never run at altitude. At the top of Pier to Peak (roughly 4000ft) altitude doesn’t seem a problem. But when I visited La Paz Bolivia (roughly 10,000ft) simply climbing stairs was a challenge. What will ~7000ft be like? Dianna suggested that I visit Lake Tahoe beforehand to acclimate.

Weather. Is always chancy. Still high summer is the dry season. On the other hand perhaps it gets hot? The website doesn’t provide standard temperatures.

Ah, but Dave Webster points me at a link. Highs in the mid-60, lows in the mid-40s. That, at least, doesn’t seem a problem.

But there is always my body. Will it break?

Pre Race Jitters

I threw my back out night before last. In my sleep. Few people have mastered the art of injuring themselves in bed, but I am learning.

I haven’t run well since last September, when I ran myself into overtraining.

I wasn’t able to run the marathon I planned in October.

Then I did the half marathon in November and was almost a minute slower than the year before. Exactly the decline the age-graded tables predicted. Obviously I would only run more slowly from now on.

When I did a marathon in Dec I had to scale my goal way back — and then I failed to make even that.

In January I tore my glut after running the resolution races at a moderate pace.

I couldn’t even run for a month.

Then I got achilles tendinitis.

I didn’t run Orchard to Ocean well.

My easy runs were very slow. My track and tempo workouts were also slow compared to what I used to do.

Everyone else seems to be doing so well. All kinds of people passed me at Orchard to Ocean; people whom I have, in the past, been in front of.

A week ago I noticed that my easy runs had become faster. Naturally. Was I starting to feel better? But the tempo run was still slow and that’s what matters.

The 10 miler is tomorrow. I should be sleeping. Instead I’m writing this and worrying. Can I run 10 miles at the pace I had trouble running 4 last week-end?

I’m done now. I hope I’m done feeling sorry for myself and done with apprehention too. Maybe that will help me sleep. Good-night.

New moon?

… The moon is nothing
But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
Into a rising birth-rate

The Lady’s not for Burning
Christopher Fry

The moon was new last night, which meant there was a chance of seeing a very slim crescent moon in the first few minutes after sunset — and possibly seeing the rest of the moon, the part the sun can’t reach, faintly lit by earthlight. Only a chance, the moon sets 5~10 minutes after the sun today, and being such a thin crescent it will be very dim and easily obscured.

So I went for a beach walk at sunset.

Well… The moon is an excuse really, I go out to watch the sunset most Sundays.

And to watch the ocean, and the birds.

Usually the sand on the beach migrates away for the winter and returns in the spring, and today the sand is still sparse and the beach quite steep. There seems to be a fair amount of surf which gives the waves a chance to show off and break impressively against the rocks uncovered by the winter storms.

And the light is nice right before sunset.

The sanderlings are out today, doing their little dance with the water — chasing the wave as it recedes, probing hurriedly into the wet sand, and then running from the next wave in a futile effort to keep their feet dry. Silly little things. Their legs move so fast… (I wish I had their turnover

The sun is burning a path into the sand for me to follow (the moon is yet invisible), and follow it I do.

Everyone else seems to have the same idea and we all walk into the setting sun.

The evening is hazy. I fear the moon will not show her face. But a hazy evening with occasional clouds gives more color to the sunset even while it obscures the moonset. So not all is lost.

I watch a little longer, but there is no sign of a moon.

Three months ago, the sun set well out to sea. Now it is setting over UCSB, and in a few more months it will be behind the mountains and out of sight. As close as Santa Barbara comes to seasons.

Then I head back home. Along with everyone else on the beach.

The quality of light has changed now, the world no longer glows, but if I look behind there is an ember in the west.

The sanderlings are still playing their eternal game with the waves, and a pair of plovers have joined in, but without the same zest — the legs of the sanderlings move so rapidly — the plovers look clumsy in comparison.

Ahead the trees on the wilcox bluffs are fading into the evening’s mist.

I pass a man with his head down talking into his cell-phone. How can he deaden himself that way? Here he is, surrounded by fading beauty and his attention is fixed on a small piece of plastic. The crashing of the waves, the calling of the birds are just annoyances to him, they mean he can’t hear the phone.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Surrounded by beauty we chose to focus on something ugly.

Yuck.

I think this is the same reaction I have to iPods and such. I live in Santa Barbara. It is a beautiful place, why would I want to drown out all the natural world, why avoid all the beauty? Why run with an iPod?

Now if I went for a walk, or a run, in downtown Los Angeles, that might be a different matter, I might be glad to stifle the sounds of the cars, and obscure the grime of that smoggy city. But I live somewhere beautiful, I walk in beautiful places, I run into beauty. I want to enjoy it.

I find it sad, a sign of sickness in our culture, that so many of us will huddle over our cell-phone and not look behind to see the sunset.

Categories

Jim has categorized us. Maggie and Melissa are fit. Maggie is also sexy. And I — am thoughtful.

The implication being, I suppose, that I am neither fit nor sexy.

Rats.

Perhaps if I borrowed Maggie’s skirt?

Rats…

For once I’m not going to talk about my running difficulties. I want to talk about my socks.

(OK, they are running socks)

My socks are vanishing. Now I come to think of it I’ve probably lost 4 pairs in the last week or so. I wasn’t really paying attention.

But I know I left my socks stuffed in my shoes after yesterday’s run, and they aren’t there now. Most peculiar.

Well, I got out some new, clean socks and went running. …and as I was cooking dinner just now, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something streak across the floor. Ah, ha! I’ve got a rat.

I wonder… do rats build nests out of socks?

I’ve already put out some traps, but I didn’t bait them with cheese, or peanut butter — I’ve baited them with sweaty running socks!

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Sigh. Unfortunately the rat did not take the bait. It seems to have given up on socks — last night it took my bathing suit.

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(Still, if anyone could lend me a spare cat for a day or two, I would appreciate it.)

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Around midnight there was a snap! Got it! Vanilla and Peanut butter seems to have done the trick — unless there’s another…

There is a second rat. The evening after I captured the first, this second seems to have gone nuts. It’s running all over the room, showing itself to me four times. I was sitting reading the newspaper and it ran right up beside me — I was so startled I didn’t even strike at it that time.

Time to clean out and reset the traps.

---

Got it too. I really hope there isn’t a third.

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Drat, there is a third.I don’t believe that. There must be a hole somewhere. No have-a-heart traps this time. Something with jaws.I do not like killing things. But I don’t feel I have a choice.

In an old, unused door to my kitchen I see a hole that is too small for a rat. But, I guess rats can squish down to a very small cross section. So I block it up.

The trap goes snap not long after I set it. One rat down — but there’s another scuttling around somewhere. This one is trickier — it takes me two days to trap it. This second rat seems to have a penchant for high tech — no socks for it — instead it destroys two ethernet cables, two phone cables, and (somehow) my ethernet switch, it made a start on one of my power cables, but (un)fortunately gave up before any sparks flew.

And I still can’t find my socks.

Rats.

Unfortunately…

I will not be able to run the Twin Cities marathon.

I figured today (2 weeks before the race) was my last chance and if I didn’t improve significantly I would have to give up.

Well I didn’t.

I did improve, but oh so slightly. I’m still really bad.

Each week there has been a tiny improvement, and I need six times that to be ready to race.

It’s frightening. With an injury you have tangible proof that something is wrong and know that you just have to wait until it heals. With something which might be overtraining? Well who knows? There’s no obvious thing to fix.

Will I ever get back to where I was?

I was expecting this. It isn’t as disappointing as I had feared, not as disappointing as it was.

But a few days ago I was so depressed that I couldn’t sleep and finally I had to get out of bed and write a(n extremely self-indulgent) piece about my despair and how that just exacerbated my other insecurities (mainly my conviction that I’m an terribly dull and no one could possibly want to be my friend). Luckily I had sense enough not to post it — but writing it was cathartic.

‘ “On the Usefulness of Everything”,’ read the Muskrat, ‘But this is the wrong book, the one I had was about the Uselessness of everything.’
But the Hobgoblin only laughed.

Finn Family Moomintroll — Tove Jansson

OK. I can’t run well today, but I am getting better. There are other marathons. I will recover (I think, hope). There’s no rush.

There was a flotilla of tiny little ¿grebes? down by the waterfront this morning. I can’t identify them, but they were cheerful, silly little birds, swimming in tight circles and dipping their bills constantly into the water. And the clouds after the first rain have been beautiful.

In the mean time, I can always make pots. Making something beautiful can be very soothing. I give them away as wedding presents.

Nomen Omen

The second annual “George Williams 5K” is in a month. It takes place in Raleigh, NC about 20 miles from where I grow up. My friend Nirmal noticed it last year, and asked if it were named after me.

But it isn’t mine, nor my father’s, nor any of the 5 George Williamses in my ancestry. Just some random track coach who happened to have the same name.

The thought of running a race with my name is kind of tempting, and the thought of having that on a tee-shirt even more appealing.

I remember, a number of years ago, touring a house built by great-great-grandfather (George Walton Williams the first), though it is now called the Calhoun mansion after his son-in-law. I remember the glee I felt when just before leaving, I signed the guest book “George Walton Williams V”. I don’t know if any of the docents ever noticed, but there was a certain thrill to being part of that house in a way they never could be.

But… I don’t want to fly all the way across the country to do it. And I don’t want to run a 5k.

So I think I shall put it off for another year.

Maybe next year I’ll have recovered and be able to run again.