The Persieds are Coming! Oh yeah? Despite LA’s reputation for all-round sunshine and perfectly clear skies, our little corner of the world has been blanketed in thick marine-layer fog for the last few days. Last night the furnace came on, just to complete the final touches to the gloom and doom!
Tomorrow is the height of the Persied meteor shower. I shall be annoyed if we don’t get to see it. I wonder what the forecast for the November’s Leonids is? Good apparently.
One Saturday in February 1980. I am standing at the top of Snow Hill in Windsor Great park with my friend Glen. We were at a weekend symposium at Cumberland Lodge and, having the afternoon off, had walked over to see the large bronze statue of King George III that sits at the top of the hill.
Wondering what to do next we look around. The vista is bisected by the Long Walk, a three mile avenue that leads down from the hill and the up to the gates of Windsor Castle. I admire the view for a minute or so and then say, apropos of nothing, “race you to the gate”. Glen says nothing, thinks about it for a couple of seconds, and takes off down the hill. I speed after him.
It doesn’t take me long to catch him and we soon fall, shoulder to shoulder, into a steady trot. Neither of us are regular runners at this time and we’re not exactly dressed for the job. Both of us were expecting a leisurely walk on a crisp winter afternoon and are wearing coats, pullovers, and long pants, in my case a pair of drainpipe jeans. We look like an odd pair to the few people who are about: perhaps disheveled crazy students (true!) or prisoners on the run.
It doesn’t take us long to cover the three miles and we sprint up to the castle gates, calling it a draw. We go looking around Windsor for an hour or so, have a cup of tea, return to the gates, and run back to King George.
From an athletic perspective, there was nothing special about that run. Certainly neither of us were going to set any records. It wasn’t particularly long or fast. The return run was a lot slower than the outward leg, but we probably did what you might expect for a couple of twenty-year-olds in OK physical shape to do.
What was special – and memorable – about that run was it was fun. We weren’t doing it for the exercise. We weren’t training. We weren’t really racing. We didn’t plan to do it. We simply took off at a whim and had ourselves a blast. It was simple, spontaneous, fun.
I’ve run a lot since then, mainly to stay fit. I’ve had some very bad runs, some mediocre ones, and some good ones. Very occasionally I’ve had a stunningly good outing where I’ve gone miles further than planned, done it effortlessly, and grinned from ear to ear all of the way. But mainly I would classify my efforts as good, worthy, pavement-pounding. When I’m running regularly I can feel smug in the presence of non-exercisers, but don’t classify myself as a “real” runner when I meet people who do marathons or triathalons.
Like many people on the fringe of something I have a certain curiosity for the hard core. So when I came across this book – Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall – in the library, I had to read it.
It’s a great book, based around the story of setting up a race between a small group of ultra marathoners and reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s copper canyons. The bigger story that the book tells, however, is the one of modern man’s disconnection from running. In our pre-history we were born to run. If we didn’t run we either didn’t eat or we became lion food. Our ability to run over long distances at a steady pace is what gave Homo Sapiens a competitive advantage. Of course we’ve lost this over the course of history. McDougall believes this is a loss, as running is what makes us human, and by the end of the book he’s made a pretty convincing case.
It’s an interesting read as well, covering a wide range of topics including the history of ultra-marathoning, mammalian physiology, the case against modern running shoes, the case for eating like a poor person, vignettes of some of the more colorful characters on the running scene today, and the use of beat poetry as a running aid!
But most of all it is a celebration of running. It’s about throwing all the expectations and goals we have put of the window and just running for the sheer joy of it. No plan. No goals. Just the wind in your hair and that big ear to ear grin of just doing something we were born to do. Just like that day in Windsor Great Park. Exhilarating stuff, and anyone with any soul will want to go out for a run after putting this down.
I did. Just for fun. Just for grins. And had a better outing than I had had in weeks.
No, I am not going to take up marathons, ultra-marathons, or triathlons. But I am going to approach running with a more relaxed, and fun, attitude, and stop thinking of it as pavement-pounding. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn a few verses of Howl and shout them out as I float through these quiet suburban streets!
News broke this week that the Large Hadron Collider is having all sorts of trouble coming on line. The story was covered in several places including the mainstream media such as the New York Times and PRI’s To the Point on public radio.
One interesting aspect of both of these stories is the description of the LHC as a device where protons are accelerated to energies of seven trillion electron volts…with no explanation of what this might mean. I’m impressed that both these august media outlets believe their readers and listeners know what this means, but unsure that most do. But it sounds good, a big number that expresses the size of this Big Science experiment, and one that explains why you need an experiment 17 miles in circumference.
But what is seven trillion electron volts? Well it’s a tiny amount of energy. Tap a ping pong ball with your finger so it rolls across a table top at about 1 foot per second: there, you’ve just imparted about seven trillion electron volts! Not actually very spectacular really!
Of course that’s not the point. Protons are much smaller than ping pong balls, and this energy on a per-proton basis is huge. How huge? Well if you were to imagine something the size of a ping pong ball with the same energy density as our proton, you would be looking at something that weighed as much as the earth traveling at about 150,000 miles per hour! That’s a lot of energy.
Of course these types of comparisons aren’t completely helpful (it’s still difficult to comprehend what such a ping pong ball would be like) and are not scientifically exact. That said, I do think playing around with numbers, and changing scales like this, can start to provide some sense of what this is all really about and why it is so big and so complex.