Coming into focus
Finally seeing myself as a runner and good engineer
Programmer’s log. Epoch time 1690155600. I woke up at 4:30 am to get ready for the half-marathon. My dog stared at me walking around the house, suspicious as I started flipping on different light switches, clearly unsettled. It was way too early for her humans to be getting up. Border collies are notorious for loving strict schedules and Knuckles is nothing if not your quintessential border collie. She knew it wasn’t normal to be awake this early…
Happy Sunday!
Here are some recent great reads:
Good enough (Studio Shana)
HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad (Washington Post)
A tale of paradise, parking lots, and my mother’s Berkeley backyard (NYT)
Finally, I’m too out of touch to keep up with all these new kinds of viral meals…
This morning I ran a half marathon in SF. It was a particularly meaningful race for me and inspired me to write up some of my thoughts on identity and running. I started writing it as part of this newsletter but it got long enough to become its own blog post. Check it out below!
From the blog…
Coming into focus
Finally seeing myself as a runner and good engineer
This morning, I was one of thousands of runners participating in the 1st half marathon race of the San Francisco Marathon. We started from Crissy Field, ran across the Golden Gate Bridge to Fort Baker, and then looped back across the bridge to finish in Golden Gate Park. It was absolutely perfect day for the run—cool but not too windy, with beautiful sweeping views of the bay.
I am very proud of my results. I finished in 2 hours and 39 minutes (12:11 min/mi average pace), a personal best. I’m not a fast runner and this is only my second official half marathon, so these results are an exciting achievement for me. But perhaps more than the specific race times, I was happy that I ran the entire 13.1 miles through without walking.
I’ve never thought of myself as a runner. I was able to avoid learning the basics of running through all of grade school. I mostly did drama as my extracurricular activity, with a year here and there on the varsity swimming and JV tennis teams. I managed to get out of required P.E. classes through middle and high school because I was in gifted and magnet programs. The Florida education system allows smart kids to skip doing anything physical, apparently. So I only began running only as an adult, here in the Bay Area.
I started running mostly because I love the idea of being a runner. Running is such a primal activity, something humans have been doing ever since we evolved to be upright and bipedal. As a form of exercise, it’s so convenient. You only need your own body, a good pair of running shoes, and the great outdoors. And I think there’s something so charming about running as a form of exploration. You only get a real sense of the character of a city by seeing the different textures and elements of the street landscape. Running allows you to easily create a mental map of a new place when traveling, passing through main thoroughfares and quickly dipping in and out of small side streets and alleyways.
I love the idea of being someone who runs but I’ve never been very good at running. I am slow and don’t do a good job of pushing myself during training to increase my average pace. My form is probably questionable, having never had a coach or experienced runner give me any tips. The Bay Area certainly doesn’t make things easy for runners, with dramatic elevation changes from endless hills.
Despite running for many years now, I have always thought of myself as “someone who runs” (slowly/badly/awkwardly) rather than a “runner”. In my mind, a “runner” is someone who knows what they’re doing when they run. These people know how to train, how to pace themselves, understand their pronation and foot strike type, and usually did cross-country or track in high school. Meanwhile, I got into this later in life. I have no idea if I’m doing the right thing. Even when I signed up for races in the past, I picked random training schedules and had no idea what pace I should be targeting on race day.
Something changed today, though.
…
(Click here to read more.)
That’s all for now! See you later alligator 🐊
Incredible, congrats! Fun to see you articulate the transition from “someone who runs” to "runner". There's probably so many similar things in life. Like people who don't think they're "good at math".