The Apocalypse in Retrospect

So I ran the 800 against John on Saturday evening. I won the race, but I'm not sure if I imparted to anyone just how unique the 800m is through the whole ordeal. I remain convinced it is a very special distance worthy of study by psychologists, physiotherapists and moral philosophers.

Furthermore, now that it is all over I can appreciate how truly strange this whole process has been. I thought I'd elaborate a final time.

Uncertainty Squared

In hindsight I can't help but compare our race to Musashi vs. Ganryu, because I'm a massive loser. John is tall like Ganryu and he had to wait for me to turn up like Ganryu, and he had all the spectators like Ganryu and it was in hindsight all over before it began, just like Musashi vs. Ganryu.

But I didn't feel any of the certainty Musashi was said to have had when he declared himself the victor before the duel began. So I am Dan Quayle to Musashi's John F Kennedy. I was late because I stupidly bashed my knee and the toilet roll covers in QV bathrooms changing and didn't want to cycle up and risk aggrevating the injury. So it wasn't exactly planned (nor was I going to let on I'd bashed my knee putting pants on to John before the race).

Saturday was one of the least pleasant experiences I had all year, I spent the day anticipating the race, trying to make a concerted effort not to anticipate the race. it's been a long time since I cared about winning anything, It's been a long time since I've actively cared about myself. So it was a strange place for me to be in.

When you care about something, and that something is uncertain then you get anticipatory stress. Win or lose, you can move on with your life, but until then you hang in limbo.

As it turned out, John's brave stance that he was fit enough to beat me in the 800 without training was stupid. Brave, but stupid. But let me say this, if John and I had both put in say 3 months of dedicated training and he was running 2.18 and I was running 2.20 regularly the uncertainty of the outcome would not decay.

Because this is what makes the 800m unique. On top of the uncertainty that accompanies any win-lose situation you DO NOT KNOW HOW THE FUCKING 800M will go DOWN. If John was running 2.18 regularly, and I was running 2.20 you couldn't say who would win when we raced eachother.

If I run 2.20 by going out hard and running a fairly consistent but slower second lap, this could totally fuck up John's cruisy 1.15 first lap and 1.03 second lap. Similarly if I were to relax my hard pace and just tail John, who's to say I couldn't stick with him the entire second lap? Or burn out and only run 2.40, or John burns out on the first and DNF's?

That is, you can train but as Napolean or Eisenhower or somebody said 'Plans are nothing but planning is everything.' You can have a gameplan, but then you need a gameplan for when that gameplan falls apart. John and my race was somewhat luxurious because it was a field of 2. Even so, the sheer uniqueness of the distance doubles the stress (for me at least).

I thus spent the day combating two things, the first of which was the temptation to formulate a strategy or game plan. I had to exert the mental discipline to go in and 'see' what happened. Make my decisions from there. The key thing was to listen to my body. Any effort I exerted as to whether I should run fast first or fast last was wasted effort, because to me John was a complete unknown. The 800m is a complete unknown. It is unknowable.

Why did I talk about Samurai's? Well in retrospect I can kind of see how addictive the 'life or death' uncertainty of conflict is. It is an all together different mental space... which brings me to the second thing I had to exert mental discipline over.

Loser Talk

In the past month and a bit I have shrugged off 7kgs, I'm the fittest I've been since highschool (excluding when I cycled Europe where I was fit, and malnourished) and the preparation of the mental and physical game has taught me self-discipline and humility.

Win or lose the 800m training has been a good experience for me.

Sound familiar - it's loser-talk. 'I'll just go out and do my best, if I do that I can hold my head high!' etc. The great temptation of loser-talk is to downplay the risk of losing, and furthermore all loser-talk is usually true and valid. There is more to be learned from istakes than successes, there are benefits to just showing up and competing etc.

I believe everything in the first paragraph of this section and would stand by it. The 800m is a naturally humiliating event, with or without spectators. One can easily feel ashamed of yourself in a field alone. Even I discovered in the non-judgemental presence of a Golden Labrador. Such humble pie is invaluable to me.

But we are talking about winning and losing here. I was surprised at how mentally taxing it is to accept the possibility of defeat, and show a respectful fear for it, without succumbing to internal (or external) loser-talk. When you diminish the risks you diminish your sheer survivalist drive for losing not to occur.

but projecting is hard, and it's a razor fine line in the 800m because there are so many opportunities to lose. Run like a mother-fucker and your legs simply give out. Run to slow and find you can't reel the leader back in. Mistime your break and get overtaken in the last 20m. Anybody, nomatter how the fitness cards are stacked in their favor can fuck up an 800m.

Thus it makes sense to do a little-pre consoling, to be forgiving to yourself and look for the silver lining.

I had to crush and strangle these thoughts and just focus, focus on getting to the starting line and then having the presence of mind to see what happens.

Don't Jump off a tall building

When I was I don't know, 14 a recieved some sage advice from one of my 14 year old peers that you don't commit suicide by jumping off the empire state building. The reason: the decision has been made and it's final, but you have time to contemplate your fate.

In the post match dinner, with John and his housemates we briefly talked about other athletic distances, 100m, 200m, 400m etc. In all those races there are no decisions to be made. There's no time, you just run as hard as you fucking can. Thus the uncertainty is uncertainty squared.

When I actually ran this 800m, I was struck by having the time to think. It was creepy to say the least. For the first bend I was unconscious, coming out onto the first straight I only thought 'I'm in front' (not typically an advantageous place to be), on the 3rd straight (the second last) it occured to me I was in a race and I had to make a bunch of decisions.

My only info on John was sound, I could hear his footfalls and his breathing. I remember judging him to be about 4 meters behind me by the footfalls and then listening to his breathing for hints that he was uncomfortable.

At that time (500m mark) I knew if John stuck with me till the 600m I was in trouble, I listened to my own breathing and decided it was regular and decided to break. John simply dissappeared from my auditory register but that strange space was something akin I feel (resembling, not copying) the sensation of plummeting to your death. It is very rare for me to have a window of consciousness in a footrace. A subjective experience of it.

In shorter events as I have stated, you simply run as fast as your body will carry you and you don't think at all. In longer races I find I generally get distracted with either a song in my head or thoughts of sexual frustration. (did I just write that?).

But in the 800m, you get to contemplate your own race like you contemplate your life (I imagine) plunging to your death*. You can reflect briefly whether you've had a good race or a poor race. You can be tortured by self doubt, or you can just accept the run for what it is and carry on through to the inevitable conclusion. But short of your calf muscle tearing in half or hamstring tearing off your thighbone, when you start an 800m you are going to finish it. Unlike a 3km run where if you realise you have lost you may just quit the field.

*I have one friend who is in the fairly fortuitous and unique position of having jumped off the West-gate bridge and lived spinal-damage-free to tell the tale. The way he tells it I got the impression he just watched the whole way down and didn't contemplate his fate at all.

There is no soundtrack to the 800m

It remains a strange mental space, running the 800m, and I don't think my obsession with this evetn will diminish based on my recent experience. I posted a facebook status in the week leading up to the race to the effect of 'I cannot find music that is explosive enough to go with my new found explosiveness. NIN Broken... no good. Sepultura Chaos AD... no dice. Somebody help me please.'

What many fail to realise is that this was serious. I attribute it to the 800m and the strange space-time distortion of the event.

I have come to the conclusion that the 800m cannot be explained, it must be experienced, which would invalidate this post and all labelled 800m on the blog.

There are explosive songs, like 'Refuse-resist' by Sepultura, 'Wish' by Nine Inch Nails, 'Around the Fur' by Deftones. Some of the bands recommended by friends in response to my post like Testament, American Nightmare, Parkway Drive and McClusky were indeed explosive. But they are not explosive enough.

I ended up thinking that if you combined Deftones and Sepultura you might get to the explosiveness required by the 800m and then remembered Headup on Around the Fur featured Max Cavalera then of Soulfly formally of Sepultura. This song was explosive enough to work as a stop-gap, but honestly in any other period of my life these songs are too much for me to listen to for prolonged periods.

I often think of them as overdone to the point of being quite dull. I prefer the subtle nuances of Prince Paul producing or Faith No More for sheer style. They certainly have their place, but such explosive music is OTT. But whilst I was in prep mode for the 800m, they were way, way under.

I offer this as a wayward explanation of how special/unnatural the 800m is. Even in Thrash Metal or Hardcore punk, you can have a pretty hard hitting song running 2.40 which is fairly short song wise, but within the song you will have on and off moments. The thrash riff is 'on' for up to 12 seconds at a time. Chino only screams for max 40% of the song length. The 800m demands a track that screams for 100% of 2 minutes 40. Such songs do not exist, yet I craved them and contemplated trying to mix my own out of Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, White Zombie and Sepultura.

It also felt like a genuine affliction/addiction. Today thankfully I am calm enough to listen to Stevie Wonders greatest hits and enjoy them because it's a Stevie Wonder kind of day, but last week I couldn't scratch my itch and it was driving me insane. 'Headup' was a woefully inadequate drop of methodone when I needed the hardcore junk. Like an entirely sprinted 800m though, I don't think a soundtrack to the 800m is even physically possible.

Weight Off My Mind/We Define the Context of Our Own Existence

Had I been certain I could simply outlast John by controlling the pace on the first lap, I probably wouldn't have had my breakdown in the last fortnight. But such certainty is not the province of a race. Just like there would be no vindication if I beat a morbidly obese 40 year old in the 800m when they previously could not walk 300m without going into cardiac arrest. I don't wish to compare John unfavorably to an obese 40 year old, (even though he compared me unfavorably to Morley), but rather a race is not a race without uncertainty.

John remarked how 'basketball fitness' for lack of a better word, even 'soccer fitness' or 'ultimate frisbee' fitness doesn't translate to an 800m run. In soccer for example (John's example) a 60m run would be considered huge and out of the ordinary. Basketballers and Soccer Players, AFL players and Ultimate Frisbee Players may cover 10km or more in a typical game, but it's stop start.

What's this got to do with anything? Not much but I thought I'd share it anyway, anyway, basketball players. You watch them on tv and they make it look so easy. So easy you don't appreciate how easy it is.

You have people sprinting down the lane and doing a two-handed overhead dunk and you are like 'woah' that guy must be fit. Which is a stupid thing to say, we are so used to people running up and down court though that it isn't until you try a full court game of basketball yourself that you get truly impressed.

Fact is, it takes an abnormal level of fitness to be even able to raise your arms after 20 minutes of running up and down a basketball court. A basketball is pretty light, it has to be for people to lob in three pointers. But after enough time it becomes incredibly heavy. It is superhuman to be able to keep lifting that lightweight ball and send it gracefully arcing towards the rim.

Similarly the mental burden of uncertainty-squared that is the knowledge you have to run an 800m is seemingly light weight but infact mentally taxing. The day after the race I was struck by how empty and lightweight my head was, sure I'm a fucking clown and what not, but I am capable of injecting meaning into almost anything and taking it seriously. Otherwise I wouldn't have lost the 7kgs that has been hanging around for most of the last preceding years.

But this small inconsequential thing became quite heavy to me. I suspect my experience again is akin (if not actually the same) as to what brought tears to Michael Jordans eyes when he embraced the cold lump of metal that is a championship NBA trophy for the first time.

Perhaps (in fact definitely) I will never be a world class 800m runner, and this isn't my calling. But I cared because I chose to care and I can do that for anything I wish to apply myself to. I draw hope from this, so I'm raising myself up a notch, because I've run through some barrier and taken myself to a higher plane. I don't think it can be taken away either. This weight I've shed recently wasn't a dead weight, but some mental resistence training weight. I carried it around and now I'm stronger for it.