CCM Diary: Born to Run

Now I’m just waiting.  And checking the weather (mostly cloudy, highs in the upper 50s and lows in the low 50s, 89% humidity, 11MPH winds).

Google’s Ngram Viewer is another way to kill time.  Google has scanned in about 20 million books, and the Ngram Viewer lets you see how often a phrase shows up in the database.  A phrase like “marathon running” for example:

Or “lactate threshold”:

Then there’s “why do people run”:

If you spend much time running, enough people will ask you why to force you to give the question some thought, even if you’re not inclined to introspection.  Joe Posnanski has a gift for presenting the human side of pro sports, or of whatever else he happens to feel like writing about.  He posted this today:

“When I was a kid, I had no idea that I wanted to be a sportswriter.
…
“What I really wanted, I think, was to feel alive.  When you’re a kid, you see how adults act.  You watch in ways that you cannot even express.  You see how teachers teach, how waiters serve, how neighbors walk out of their cars after a hard day’s work.  You notice that many people simply go through the motions.  I did not want to be drowned by boredom.  I did not want to be numbed by the every day.  I saw that in people all around me, up and down my little street in Cleveland, all around the apartment complex where we lived in Charlotte, I saw those people beaten down and I feel sure I was scared.  Boredom scared me thoroughly.
…
“I had this unspoken fear, I think, that I would lose my sense of feeling, that good jokes would no longer make me laugh as hard, that brilliant moments would no longer elicit goosebumps, that great songs would no longer move me, that sports would not matter so much to me, that that I would find myself stuck in an everlasting math test, and all the awesome things in life would brush past, like strangers in an airport.

“And so, when I see Jeremy Affeldt pitch, I think about how lucky I am.  I became a sportswriter.”

When I’m waiting at the start on Sunday, I won’t know exactly how I’m going to feel over the next three and a half hours (more or less), but I do know this.  I’m going to feel alive.

(strength)