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On Running

OK, I’ve been keeping this a small secret for some time. Since high school have I been much into running. Most of the time adult running consists of running distances over a mile, like 5K, 10K, half marathon or a full marathon (26 miles!). Now, there are triathlons and even 50 mile and 100 mile races! However, for me this is a problem because as I teenager I was a sprinter and had a body built for short fast bursts of speed.

However, I did have some endurance in me and competed at distances such as 200m or 400m. So, doing anything close to a mile was challenging, much less to be able to run 2 miles or more. I did get my times for the cross country mile+ course in junior high and the 12-minute test in high school down to reasonable ranges, I pretty much lost any endurance beyond that level. Funny, because looking back I think that had I continued to compete in college, it might have been a good idea for me to attempt to compete at the 800m distance.

Thinking this over obviously was the fact that I do not have a great amount of endurance, but this, like working out in the gym can be improved upon by conditioning and training. When it comes to walking or even hiking I have no problem with going as far as necessary. For me, the walk wasn’t even taxing enough on my body to break a sweat. Therefore, this has become my most recent goal is to speed up my pace and push myself as far as possible to build up my endurance level that is so lacking.

As I’ve been running, one thing that I’ve noticed while pushing myself is how different my body is built from the average distance runner that I know. Obviously, I have a few extra pounds that I need to shed that I put on in my post-HS and post-college years and the lighter weight on my frame would help me be able to push myself further and faster. Beyond that fact is that much of my body (especially my legs) are bulky and muscular — weighing even more than fat. My body was built (naturally and through training) for traveling very short distances as fast as possible and for the physical “combat” of football.

Because of this, one of the first and most debilitating pains that I experienced when I first started to run was tightness in my right calf. When I ran track I developed shin splints early and my senior year even developed them on only my inside left shin due to running so many curves at top speed (200’s, 300’s and 400’s). So, pain in my legs was nothing new — but this pain was different and difficult to deal with.

I found several things that could be contributing factors. First was my shoes (strange that it would only develop in one leg and not both) which were over a year old and ready to be replaced (I have since replaced them). The other thing is again the size of my calves, built for sprinting not distance running. Sprinters usually run on the balls of their feet and therefore the tendency of a sprinter when running is to run this way as well. Try it some time. It will kill your calves. So I have had to force myself to run a little further back on my feet to force them to run more flat and avoid this pain. Finally, since I’m right handed and tend to do most things heavily on my right side, I think that perhaps just like when I developed shin splints in only my left leg because of pounding my my inside leg harder when I would lean into the curve, maybe I am leading too hard on my right leg.

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Are we on the edge of another Great Depression?

I will have to admit that I get very tired of politicians and news media making such a big deal of our small and relatively minor recessions. I remember hearing in 1992 that our economy was the worst since the great depression, which amazingly we heard again last year. It seems that this is a convenient way for them to state that the current administration has not been doing enough. The greatest hero of the great depression has been Franklin D. Roosevelt, who got this country through the depression and into World War II, which actually ended the depression.

However, economists and historians are now re-thinking this line of thought and beginning to believe that Roosevelt’s constant “tweaking” of our country’s economy and his policies did more to extend the great depression than if he had done nothing. Many in his administration were Stalin sympathizers and hoped to be able to set in place some of the same command economy systems that the Russians had designed and were extremely antagonistic to the free market. They were anything but laissez-faire. Unfortunately, however, what this did was to stifle an already struggling economy and make it not only struggle against the market forces which caused the collapse, but also against the government that claimed to be looking out for the “little guy”.

Last year I thought that all this talk about another depression was comical, just a bunch of Chicken-Little politicians trying to stir up things to get elected. Had things stayed the way they were, perhaps we would be climbing out of that recession by now. However, with almost a year of “tweaking” of his own and attacking the market as a bunch of greedy old men, our current President is doing a good job of walking down the same path that FDR took that very well could lead us to another great depression.

Amity Shays writes an interesting and updated view of the great depression in her book “The Forgotten Man“.

Which makes this debate in the Wall Street Journal very interesting. Could we be on the edge of another depression? Until recently I would’ve said absolutely not. Now, however, I’m not sure.

Eighty Years After the Great Crash — ‘Is It the ’30s Again?’ (Wall Street Journal)