Dinhternet

Read this arti­cle recently about the old­est “bar­gu­ment” (a fun, pas­sion­ate debate over utterly triv­ial ques­tion that is entirely a mat­ter of opin­ion), what makes a sport a sport.

(Is Calvin Ball a sport?)

He claims that the three fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of sports are:

1. Peo­ple com­pete at it,
2. Com­put­ers can’t do it, and
3. Aes­thet­ics don’t count.

This is the rea­son­ing he uses to claim that cheer­lead­ing is not a sport while cro­quet is.

Per­son­ally, I think defin­ing sport is like defin­ing art. Peo­ple are both quite set in their ways and usu­ally unable to fully artic­u­late them, so no one is ever moved away from their gut feel­ing about whether some­thing is, in fact, sport and/or art. That said, although I’m more inclined than not to agree with this author, I imme­di­ately tried to think of sports that break one or more of those con­di­tions. I still haven’t thought of a good one yet.

If you read the com­ments on the orig­i­nal arti­cle, some of the more inter­est­ing things that are thrown in for con­sid­er­a­tion are golf (seems to fit the require­ments but many peo­ple say it isn’t), debate (com­menter claims that it fits the require­ments, but I feel that rhetoric is quite sub­jec­tive, so it fails check #3), and robots (whether they count as “com­put­ers,” and if they would inval­i­date exist­ing sports as robot­ics got more advanced).

I guess sim­i­lar to the robots ques­tion is that of video games. Tech­ni­cally, #2 applies, since peo­ple can play against AIs, but you could make the argu­ment that AIs are poor sub­sti­tutes for a human oppo­nent and are only for train­ing pur­poses, sim­i­lar to a ten­nis player hit­ting a wall or a base­ball player in the bat­ting cages.

Per­haps we can add a fourth check, or mod­ify the sec­ond one to say that the endeavor must be human-powered? Then the computer/robotics aspect is severely lim­ited, if not com­pletely moot. Also, it would elim­i­nate car rac­ing, which I don’t think of as a sport. (Unless it was Flint­stones car rac­ing, which would be awesome!)

Also, the ques­tion of aes­thet­ics is hazy, as demon­strated by the ques­tion of debate above. If you think about it, there is a cer­tain amount of aes­thet­ics in all sports with human ref­er­ees or judges. Look at all the ques­tion­able calls dur­ing the World Cup, or those NBA play­ers who have a rep­u­ta­tion of flop­ping. Think about box­ing or MMA matches that go to judges’ deci­sion. All of these are sub­jec­tive and can be gamed.

Any­way, can you think of any excep­tions to the orig­i­nal three checks? And what do you think of my sug­gested change?

(Is bad­minton a sport?)

So I was read­ing ran­dom arti­cles on the inter­net today when I came across this post. Funny stuff, reminds me of the old “Look at these fuck­ing pep­pers!” pic­tures.

Then I noticed that one of the links is to a pic­ture of a savory Jell-O salad. That’s right. I can’t tell what exactly is in it, but looks like at least olives, cel­ery, and yel­low bell peppers/cheese slices. Eddie C thinks that the cel­ery is shrimp. This mon­stros­ity could likely be one or more of the lay­ers of the Eric­son Fam­ily salad. Who knows?

Any­way, appar­ently fine Amer­i­can cui­sine went through a phase where every­thing was jel­li­fied. Gelatin sal­ads and aspic meats. They used to have cel­ery, mixed veg­etable, tomato, and Ital­ian fla­vored Jell-O.

I was ini­tially put off, but I have to admit a cer­tain (mor­bid?) curios­ity about the whole idea. Eddie C says he’s down to try it. I guess I’m going to try to re-create this for his birth­day trip down in Pismo. (Fair warn­ing to every­one else going… you may want to make back-up din­ner plans.) I looked around a found a cou­ple of inter­est­ing recipes. Maybe I’ll try to pair with a good meat Jell-O recipe, too.

The last time I made any­thing Jello while on vaca­tion was TAK Retreat, when we tried to make Jello shots with Ever­clear and it wouldn’t set, so we a thin Jello cap over a Dixie cup full of rub­bing alco­hol. This has got to be bet­ter than that, right?

Oh, and accord­ing to this web­site, (not Wikipedia, though) Jell-O used to make an offi­cial whisky fla­vor! How did I miss out on the best era ever?!

This past Sun­day, I did the first half of the San Fran­cisco Marathon with Aaron L. (Andrew M, Eric G, Ian R, and Stacey F did the full marathon.) Look­ing back, I’m still pretty amazed that I fin­ished, let alone at a decent time. My offi­cial time was 2:39:13, or a 12:09/mile pace! (If you want to see me at the fin­ish line, go here and search my bib num­ber, 62,423. Sorry I couldn’t find a way to rip the video and make it more convenient.)

The title of the post comes from this quote:

“I love dead­lines. I like the whoosh­ing sound they make as they fly by.” — Dou­glas Adams.

And that’s pretty much the approach I took to my training.

You see, the idea to sign up for this crazy thing started back at the begin­ning of the year, when Joe M and Sang D were still liv­ing in the same house as me, and the three of us would go on runs every night. I got up to about 6 mile runs at around a 10:00/mile pace, and was pretty excited about it. Aaron L had been run­ning in Davis and then back at home in Santa Cruz, so we chal­lenged our­selves to do a half marathon. SF was close for both of us and scenic, so we signed up for that. We were both pretty excited. Aaron L seemed more excited about his bar-hopping plans imme­di­ately after the race, though.

Like it often does, though, life got in the way of plans. Sophia Chew (and her ten­ants, Joe M, Sang D, and me) moved to a new place, and the neigh­bor­hood wasn’t as nice, and Joe M and Sang D moved away, and I got busy with work and APhiO and lost moti­va­tion. Aaron L had to deal with per­pet­ual sick­ness and study­ing for the New York Bar.

Two weeks before the race, I took time off to go to Min­nesota and visit my fam­ily. I brought my run­ning shoes and told myself I would train every morn­ing up there. The first day there, though, I went out to the play­ground to play with my cousins and hurt my knee. Com­pletely slacked the rest of the first week. The sec­ond week, I did runs of 2, 4, and 8 miles, then went back to 2 miles for the rest of the week to let my feet recover from some blis­ters that had formed. I started at around 12:45 and moved into the 13:30/mile pac­ing dur­ing my practice.

I came back to Cal­i­for­nia and drove out to SF on Sat­ur­day, pretty damn ner­vous about my lack of train­ing. Did the math, and I real­ized I would need to keep a 15:00/mile pace to keep ahead of course clo­sure. (I was in Wave 6, and Wave 8, which started 20 min­utes after me, had 3 hours to fin­ish or else the course would be closed in front of them, and they would have to move to the side­walk to fin­ish.) I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it, since my prac­tices never went past 8 miles, and I didn’t know how my endurance would hold up. I also didn’t know how I would han­dle the hills.

Talked it over with Aaron L, and he shared my con­cerns about a lack of prac­tice and we agreed that we would just do as much as we could, and if noth­ing else, we could enjoy a nice break­fast on North Beach.

Sun­day morn­ing came around, and we wan­dered out to the Embar­cadero to start. Eas­ily made it all the way around Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach. Aaron L real­ized we were run­ning at a 9:00/mile pace, so we decided to walk all the uphills, which was a good deci­sion on the big one lead­ing up to the Golden Gate Bridge. On the bridge itself, I strug­gled a lit­tle at first, but caught a sec­ond wind and really enjoyed a sweet spot, although that came at the expense of tun­nel vision and get­ting sep­a­rated from Aaron L. I had some more trou­ble on the hills right after the bridge, but stuck to our solid strat­egy of walk­ing up the hills. Around mile 11 or so, after the last water sta­tion, I was really hav­ing some trou­ble. My legs felt like they were under­wa­ter, and it was get­ting hard to lift them and keep my strides up. Switched back and forth between jog­ging and power-walking, but I even­tu­ally made it to the fin­ish line, where Dong Ha and Aaron L were wait­ing for me.

When I stopped after­wards and downed a whole bot­tle of water that was handed to me, I real­ized that my lower body was wooden and heavy, and my upper body was numb and tin­gling. Even my tongue tin­gled as I drank the water! Had some hot tea and a banana, which helped a lot. Stretched (but not nearly enough, because I was too sore to move for a solid day) as we waited for the shut­tles to take us back to the start­ing line.

Now Aaron L and I are talk­ing about doing a full marathon next year. Maybe I’ll even train prop­erly this time!