First-world problems

I thought I will get started again, but then, there should probably be a reason :). Perhaps something has changed, perhaps not! But in any case, before I go to think of Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, let me disabuse you (the reader) that I only think of profound neighborliness. Here is an anecdotal display of fortitude! 

------------- 

I am not big on competitive sports, even though I track and follow pretty much every worthwhile sport out there. 

The reason being: Victory is too over-rated and defeat is too sullying and degrading. One of the least analyzed aspects of life is defeat. We all get defeated, often enough to write tomes on it. Yet, we do not and also, defeat (that is not complete) does not stop us from living life. Such defeats themselves are never a major real problem even though they are made spectacular than what they are. In fact, defeat is the overarching theme of human civilization and evolution. A defeat that does not kill makes one strong (assuming that someone is a rational person and takes the implications of the event rationally) and has the tendency to teach us a lot about ourselves, what we are made of, and what wrongs we make. In fact, even in the case of an irrational being or entity (such as Pakistan), a defeat that does not kill makes it strong because it has survived to fight another day despite the enormity of the bets against it notwithstanding the sillyness of being beaten black and blue. 

And a victory usually does not teach us that much. Victories lead to lethargy and mistakes that lead to defeats. 

Despite all this, I am a big believer in competition against oneself, against one's reluctance (self-imposed or otherwise), against one's innate ability to assume that something is not possible, and so on. And I am also a big believer in competition against time, that nemesis we all face and yet cannot stand to put our fingers to it as the nemesis of life. 

I competed today against myself and I learned a few things. I found those lessons too profound (at least personally) and to have a bearing on my outlook on life. Which is why, I decided I will write this out. Even if it is a bit embarrassing to write this ... 

I started a run at 6:16 PM and the gym was expected to close at 7:00 PM. I typically do far longer than 45 minutes and the gym always sharply closes at 7:00 PM on Saturdays and Sundays. I am not a high speed runner trying to outmarathon a big armada in 3-4 hours flat nor am I an endurance freak. I just care about my health, period, without screwing up my legs and knees. So dont ask me about pace, dont ask me about weightscales, etc. Running is for the heck of it, for no good reason in itself! 

Given this, I typically run at anywhere from 10-12 minutes a mile, with a 6-7 minute warm up of walking where I cover perhaps 0.3-0.4 miles, which would have placed me at somewhere 3.3-3.9 miles covered in this time (6:16-7:00) depending on which side of the coin I faced while I pursued this. The scenario here does not count for any running breaks or cooling down breaks in the middle which could be a 2-3 minute cut that could bring down the numbers further. I was quite reasonable in terms of expectations and did not plan for anything extraordinary. 

The first 15-20 minutes went uneventfully with me being around the 1+ mile mark. Somewhere along the way, a bright light shone before my head (does not happen often!) that asked me if I could get to 4 miles in the time I had. That would typically mean racing away to glory in a hifalutin fashion, but given the limited time I had for the gym to close, it was not impossible. At least, it did not sound impossible. This is the T20 of running, slam bam thank you mam! So I accelerated, slowly in steps of 0.1 mph speed increase every 2 1/2 minutes to the point I left the "comfort zone" of sub-6 mph and left to pushing the aerobic thresholds (which I usually do not tend to unless really necessary). That jump increased to 0.1 every 1:15 making it even harder on the body. Initially, I thought I would coast along till the 3 mile mark and then speed up in a T20 fashion. However, that rarely, if ever happens since it gets too close for comfort and one usually gives up in their objectives at that close stretch. So at the 2.5 mile mark, I decided to go for broke and start the T20 anyway. 

Slowly I was at the 7 mph mark increasingly huffing and puffing beyond my comfort zone. I reached the 3 mile mark with around 7-8 minutes left and for the gym to close. Somehow I mentally calculated that if I could be steady at 7 mph for a good 8 minutes, then I could somehow easily reach the 4 mile mark at 7:00. My mental calculation was 7*8 = 56 which should allow me to somehow make it. Lo, the blasphemy!!  

Lesson 0: When you are in time trouble, even simple math is hard! It takes close to 8.5-9 minutes to get to a mile at 7 mph (60/7) and not 7*8 :). 

As I progressed at the 7-7.2 mph mark, I see the clock ticking by, but only 3.2-3.3 miles covered. That is when panic sets in and I realize something is off. So I speed up more, because this is T20 after all and what point it is to do a Ravi Shastri in Australia. I up the speed by 0.2 mph every time I cross a 0.1 mile threshold. There you go. If you need a lesson in how to tire yourself out, here it is. The better strategy may have been to up yourself a 0.3 mph step for a fixed/finite time allowing your muscles to learn the pain before you jump the hoops. 

Lesson 1: Bad strategies are easy to come up with, good strategies need experience and thinking. There is no way one can come up with the best strategies at the get-go especially when one is new to something! 

As anyone who is a slow runner can vouch, the moment you give it a fight, the body fights harder! At the 3.5 mile mark, I am in a big amount of pain to decide to call it quits in my quest and slow down my speed to 4.1 mph to recover! And quit, I kinda did. I slowed down to 4.1 mph for 30-40 seconds losing precious time and almost irreversibly getting defeated. 

Lesson 2: Fundamental difficulties have a good way at getting back to you, no matter what! Perhaps knowing one's limitations can reasonably set expectations?! 

In those 30-40 seconds, I think of South Africa in cricket. I recall the choking article by Malcolm Gladwell (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-art-of-failure), sadly behind a paywall now. I think I have epitomized past experiences and I know what it feels to be South Africa. And then comes the morbid thinking which is hard to explain. You know you have suffered, mentally and physically. Physical pain is easy to recover, but mental agony is harder. You have attempted to get at something personally, even though it is against a faceless nameless enemy (like time or yourself). And you know you have been defeated in your quest. The sadness of that feeling is hard to explain. It feels disgusting, it feels debilitating, it feels excruciating.

You wonder at lightning speed, if it was due to bad calculations, or whether nature conspired against you, or whether you are just not good enough. At least South Africa can name and shame someone (a villain of sorts, may be rain, may be butterfingers, may be West Indies, may be ... AB MIA). I can name and shame no one but myself, I am the villain, I am the victim. What blasphemy is this illogical exercise in idiocy! 

Lesson 3: It is normal to feel angst and pain as you go through reverses. It is normal to feel like the world has ganged up against you, even though the world does not care about you at all! People have better jobs in life than to conspire against you. It is just an illusion and the dash of irrationality that makes one think the way they do. 

As my muscles recovered, I decide to give it a go again. After all, what point is a silent defeat? Somehow I accrue one more burst of energy to get to 8.5 mph (now that time is really ticking) to see what can be done. I may not get to 4 miles, but even a 3.8 is fine and respectable. It may not be a PVC, but it is perhaps a Mentions in Dispatches. That is my only thinking. So I go for bust and I run down time at 8.5 mph. I think I have run long enough, only to be halted by a repeat of the lactic acid induced slowdown. A look at the distance and no more than 3.65. There you go, 0.12 miles at a high speed for basically nothing. Even the MiD looks far now. So I slow down yet again to blow another 30-40 seconds. 

Lesson 4: Dont count your chickens till they hatch. It is always easy to talk long and hard in terms of strategy when the hard work is done by someone else (here the legs)! That may be a lesson in management, but then what good is it when we have psychopaths around us? 

Another recovery prompts to turn on the adrenaline to a higher level. So this time I go to 9.5 mph even if it is only for perhaps the same time as before. Somehow magically I am at 3.8 and may be I should actually call it quits. In any case, that is what my knees tell. That is what my legs scream. In any case, the clock is ticking and the 7:00 mark is a minute (if not seconds) away. You have fallen short, but at least can go home with some reasonable fame (even if it is the stupid-est attempt at vanity). 

Lesson 5: Whether it is 8.5 or 9.5, the effective suffering is the same. So you might as well push yourself to the limits, if at all you choose to push it. 

It is at this point greed kicks in. As the Wall Street aficionados say, greed is good. Minus greed, half (or more of) the things we have today in this world will not have existed. I decide to go on till the "get the hell out of the gym" buzzer sets off at 7:00. May be it is a 3.9 and I fall short only by 0.1. May be only 0.15. I want to know how much more I can kick in. So I continue... in this first-world problem of mine. And the buzzer does not come in at all. And I cross 4.00. I check the time and it is 7:01. Just a minute (or so) longer than I wanted to do it in, ah, not so bad. 

Lesson 6: Every minute and every second counts. I am not talking in the sense of trying to maximize the utility of every second in a day. I am just talking in terms of the differences between getting something done on time and not. There is usually no more than a minute or a few minutes of difference between the two. That in itself should not be surprising for anyone taking the NJT here. There is usually a minute or two difference between catching a train and waiting for the next one 15-20 minutes later. 

Now that the deed is done, and I decide to stop right away! On a normal day, if I have set myself an x mile mark, I tend to push myself to x + 0.2 or some obsessive compulsive claptrap target that is beyond x. But today, it was a firm no ... 

Lesson 7: Whatever it is, when you are done after many odds, you are done. You just quit quite quick. There is a difference between enjoyment of a journey and a journey completed because you had to for whatever reason. The latter happens a lot (ask the PhDs around to begin with), so that explains the difference between the quitting and the returning. 

At this point, I am still stuck on the treadmill hoping to make a winner's pose, but with no one to give a rat's behind for! The buzzer is still not on, which of course is odd. I check around and people are streaming out one by one, on their own. I cannot but wonder: May be someone at the gym had a bigger vanity problem than me. May be the world actually did stop and threw him alone off course. May be someone saw the irritating me in action and decided to throw in a piece of pity rolled into a sliver of sympathy. May be I should feel gratitude for this guy?! May be I should declare myself the oppressed who did see the sun out at the end of the day?! After all, is it not always fashionable to cast the world as a fight between the good and the bad, the subalterns and the superior beings, the mainstream vs. the Others? 

Lesson 8: Reality has nothing to do with oppression and suppression. Things are often far simpler than any complicated conspiracy. (In this case, perhaps someone got stuck with something random and they could not come down on time at 7:00 to ring people out.) That does not mean that there are no Bilderbergs or Freemasons or the Eye of Providence or the Dajjal. It just means that Occam's Razor is still a good yardstick for many things in this world. 

As I march out of the gym, one sordid reality hit me. I could have quit at 3.50 or 3.80, but I did persist with unclear outcomes till the very end. Even when the buzzer was supposed to have rung and thrown me out. This is life. Sometimes, we are lucky. Sometimes, randomness kicks in and we end up unlucky. Sometimes, there are no good reasons. Sometimes, we are the reason, perhaps the only one out there. Sure, not every event is as prestigious as finishing a 4.00 miler in 45 minutes (take that, you sub-4 minute milers, eat humblepie now, can you?). 

Lesson 9: But that is that ... Or as a non-fan of Hegel, this is what aufhebung probably is. Victories and defeats are self-contradictory. There is always a time-scale at which a (not-so Pyrrhic) victory looks like a defeat and another time-scale at which it looks like a masterstroke! How one deals with that is why we have such a wide latitude in terms of interpretation of the past (something that is clear and well laid out).