Today I ran 12 miles without stopping, and it took me 2.5 hours. That is the farthest I've run to date. Yesterday I did Zumba, which made me sore for today's run, but I ran anyway. I was momentarily jazzed because my time today means I am definitely going to run a sub-3 hour half-marathon next month. Which isn't great by super-athlete runner standards, but it is fucking amazing by mine.
Tonight I checked my RSS feeds. The woman who writes the stupid running blog I read just ran her first post-baby half-marathon, and she did it in fucking 2h7m, and has the nerve to complain that she's "out of shape," that it wasn't her best, blah blah freakin' blah. Even my super-in shape husband didn't run his 12 miles today in the time that she ran her half-marathon! What is this bitch complaining about?
The thing is, running is the kind of activity where you really only compete with yourself, in the end. You compete with your previous personal records, and battle your own personal demons every time you hit the pavement. But sometimes you can't help but compare yourself to how others perform. It made me feel like shit to read this woman's post about her tragic half-marathon time, just like it made me feel like shit when a 77-year old Japanese woman beat me (by mere minutes) last year at the Stockade-a-Thon. This Japanese woman and I crossed paths at a few races last year. Surely I can outpace the shuffling grandma, I thought. And most times, I did, but that one time, at my first 15K, she outpaced me. I have since learned that where you start relative to others in a race does matter. No more starting in the very back for me. She won't outpace me again.
I know I shouldn't care about these things, but they do bother me. I aways seem eager to piss on my own achievements--why is that? It also doesn't help that someone made an off-hand comment to me yesterday about a 1-hour Zumba aerobics class being harder than running. Said by a non-runner, of course. The class was tough, but I completed it, and I don't think it's harder or easier than running, I think the two activities just aren't comparable. I wish I had shot back, 'well YOU try running 12 miles and see if you can do that, then get back to me.' Stuff like this shouldn't bother me, it should roll right off, because I am focused, and I have been training hard, and I'm proud of how far I've come. And yet it haunts me.
Here I am, at the end of week 7 of my self-imposed half-marathon training, and instead of feeling on top of the world, I feel like utter shit tonight. Maybe I just need to have a good cry and go to bed.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Some Pig
Stephen Hawking has announced that God did not create the universe, that the existence of gravity makes spontaneous creation inevitable. Why not just come out and say 'there is no God,' Stephen Hawking? I know why--imagine the zealots who would plot to kill the poor bastard. Not that I care about God (with a capital g)--I don't believe in a divine clockmaker who looks down on us humans, shaking his head in bemusement at our foibles. I'm not sure I ever believed that.
I don't know why we humans think there must be a god out there somewhere, a divine creator--I'm just fine acknowledging that it's the cold, deep heart of space that stares back at us, and it's that same void that will envelop us in the end. Knowing that space and planets and stars exist while we slowly rotate around the sun is enough to humble me. After space, belief in an omniscient, gendered being seems superfluous and ridiculous when you get right down to it.
But I get why people need religion. I do. Really. My understanding of religion is that it serves a very important, repressive social function. I've been reading about sexual repression in the fictionalized account of Alfred Kinsey's team and work, The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle. Kinsey and his (male) team wanted to eradicate sexual repression, and therefore eliminate feelings of guilt and criminality associated with certain sexual acts, in order to open up humans to the sexual panoply that is theirs for the taking. Problem is, you can't have people going around fucking any and everything and everyone all the time, or the world would look like an Hieronymus Bosch painting. One grave factor that Kinsey didn't seem to consider important was that someone realizing their sexual potential might at times infringe on the free will of another person, that is, might rape them and stunt their development. (I also think Kinsey himself probably was probably on the autism spectrum, or was at very least, a single-minded sociopath.) It is no exaggeration that women would lose in this kind of open, libidinous, pan-sexual scenario. This is why animals fight each other to mate with females, and why extreme puritanical restrictions have been placed on female sexuality since the dawn of time. Such an eradication of boundaries can only lead us back to the chaos from whence we came. This, in a nutshell, is why religion and social law exist. Anyone who argues to the contrary in favor of plural or open marriage forgets the obvious fact that they too were born into and live within the context of an ordered world, and that their behavior is the exception to the rule.
At some point, atavistic urges must be contained, restrained, and retrained if a species is to progress; hell, if a species is to survive into successive generations at all. When we were cavemen, I'm sure there were cave orgies every night, with cave people murdering and fucking and eating each other left and right. We were animals, pure and simple, guilt-free and unconscious; monkeys for whom behavior had no consequences. Sure, life's a party, but that shit can't last! Then the Monolith arrived and we became conscious of other things to do with our time, and the possibilities of what we might become began to emerge out of the darkness.
What is religion if not an agent of control, a "right and clear path" established in a world of free will and entropy? "Do unto others" is the golden rule, and we have laws in place to reinforce good behavior and punish bad. As I have learned from watching one too many shows about demons, vampires, and supernatural entities (and maybe from CCD), being evil is easy, the path of least resistance; being good and principled is the thornier path to take in life. Have you ever tried turning the other cheek? It ain't easy. Much more satisfying to slash and burn to make your point. What would Jesus do indeed.
I know I certainly prefer living in an ordered world, with police, electricity, plumbing, the internet, movies, garbage collection, house plants, deferred gratification. At this point in time, humans have mostly mastered the art of impulse control. Mostly. (Some might argue that we have replaced sexual urges with food, but that's a different topic for another time.)
There are no gods or demons out to get us; these are just metaphors we humans have created in an effort to help us understand ourselves, and life in general. We are self-conscious, self-loathing, dirty, pathetic, insecure, ingenious, comedic, poetic creatures. Try as we might to control our world, order it to our liking, things in our nature will always bubble up to the surface, just as in "The Tempest," despite all of Prospero's careful planning, Miranda will always see Ferdinand and exclaim:
"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!"
It's up to us, what we see in the stars.
I don't know why we humans think there must be a god out there somewhere, a divine creator--I'm just fine acknowledging that it's the cold, deep heart of space that stares back at us, and it's that same void that will envelop us in the end. Knowing that space and planets and stars exist while we slowly rotate around the sun is enough to humble me. After space, belief in an omniscient, gendered being seems superfluous and ridiculous when you get right down to it.
But I get why people need religion. I do. Really. My understanding of religion is that it serves a very important, repressive social function. I've been reading about sexual repression in the fictionalized account of Alfred Kinsey's team and work, The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle. Kinsey and his (male) team wanted to eradicate sexual repression, and therefore eliminate feelings of guilt and criminality associated with certain sexual acts, in order to open up humans to the sexual panoply that is theirs for the taking. Problem is, you can't have people going around fucking any and everything and everyone all the time, or the world would look like an Hieronymus Bosch painting. One grave factor that Kinsey didn't seem to consider important was that someone realizing their sexual potential might at times infringe on the free will of another person, that is, might rape them and stunt their development. (I also think Kinsey himself probably was probably on the autism spectrum, or was at very least, a single-minded sociopath.) It is no exaggeration that women would lose in this kind of open, libidinous, pan-sexual scenario. This is why animals fight each other to mate with females, and why extreme puritanical restrictions have been placed on female sexuality since the dawn of time. Such an eradication of boundaries can only lead us back to the chaos from whence we came. This, in a nutshell, is why religion and social law exist. Anyone who argues to the contrary in favor of plural or open marriage forgets the obvious fact that they too were born into and live within the context of an ordered world, and that their behavior is the exception to the rule.
At some point, atavistic urges must be contained, restrained, and retrained if a species is to progress; hell, if a species is to survive into successive generations at all. When we were cavemen, I'm sure there were cave orgies every night, with cave people murdering and fucking and eating each other left and right. We were animals, pure and simple, guilt-free and unconscious; monkeys for whom behavior had no consequences. Sure, life's a party, but that shit can't last! Then the Monolith arrived and we became conscious of other things to do with our time, and the possibilities of what we might become began to emerge out of the darkness.
What is religion if not an agent of control, a "right and clear path" established in a world of free will and entropy? "Do unto others" is the golden rule, and we have laws in place to reinforce good behavior and punish bad. As I have learned from watching one too many shows about demons, vampires, and supernatural entities (and maybe from CCD), being evil is easy, the path of least resistance; being good and principled is the thornier path to take in life. Have you ever tried turning the other cheek? It ain't easy. Much more satisfying to slash and burn to make your point. What would Jesus do indeed.
I know I certainly prefer living in an ordered world, with police, electricity, plumbing, the internet, movies, garbage collection, house plants, deferred gratification. At this point in time, humans have mostly mastered the art of impulse control. Mostly. (Some might argue that we have replaced sexual urges with food, but that's a different topic for another time.)
There are no gods or demons out to get us; these are just metaphors we humans have created in an effort to help us understand ourselves, and life in general. We are self-conscious, self-loathing, dirty, pathetic, insecure, ingenious, comedic, poetic creatures. Try as we might to control our world, order it to our liking, things in our nature will always bubble up to the surface, just as in "The Tempest," despite all of Prospero's careful planning, Miranda will always see Ferdinand and exclaim:
"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!"
It's up to us, what we see in the stars.
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