Spare thoughts

Lately at work I find myself enjoying the too-rare rare opportunity of just coding. With nothing and nobody in my way, I have a straightforward release goal that's feasible and interesting. The feasibility part I figured out last week by making sure that everything that needs to be done can be done. Now what's left is the part I find most interesting: organizing my thoughts into something clear and concise and creating something elegant. This is what draws many software developers to our jobs: the joy of getting paid to solve fun problems. For me and my current, two-week project, it feels like seeing a finish line off in the distance and having the fresh legs to sprint ahead for a strong finish.

Hopefully this weekend's “real life” activities will go similarly well. Laura and I will be running in the Tucson Half Marathon, so we'll be doing our camp + race out-of-town routine. For Laura, this is her “comeback” half after dealing with a prolonged set of various over-training injuries most of the year. For me, this will be my second half and the first for which I'm at least semi-prepared. Unlike for my previous half marathon, for which I ran no farther than five or six miles on any training run and no more than about thirty miles in all, this time I've trained somewhat respectably, with a long run each weekend. On Thanksgiving Morning I ran a flat ten-mile race with tired legs and managed a 6:48/mile pace. This puts me at a faster clip than my minimum goal to break 1:30 for the half but not by much. The race course is downhill almost the whole way, and a better pre-race prep should help. On the other hand, I haven't found any information on which starting wave I'll be in, so I'm worried I won't be up at the front with runners my own speed and might have to work through the mid-pace masses. We'll see…

With all the “pure” running training I've been doing lately, I've become interested in trying out a lighter shoe, like the Vibram Five Fingers. Apparently, a lifetime (or partial lifetime) of walking and running in shoes that support and cushion our feet cause our feet—surprise!—to weaken. I was talking about this with my dad while home this Thanksgiving break (later, after the race), and he mentioned how he recently discovered that his arches have flattened out after six decades of use while his frequently barefooted brother-in-law a decade his senior still has well arched feet. On the other hand, still-in-his-twenties Coworker Shafik has recently caused himself knee problems by running in Five Fingers because his foot was absorbing shock in a suboptimal way and the minimalist shoe wasn't compensating, thus leading to an overstressed knee.

So what to do? Wear over-supporting shoes and lose my arches slowly or force my feet to toughen up and possibly cause damage faster? This raises an interesting point that arises in a multitude of scenarios: there's hardly a technology out there that doesn't involve a trade-off. No free lunch. (And if you don't perceive a trade-off, then it's likely that you're not looking hard enough.) If nothing else, the use-it-or-lose-it factor too often creates a serious downside to technologies that otherwise would make our lives go better in all cases.

Now that I'm a little older, I try to keep the perspective that the goal is to get the most out of the body by whatever means possible. Just as some people say that it's best to die just after having spent one's last dollar, I think the ideal is to die just before the body breaks down and begins having serious problems from a lifetime of overuse. Or, to put this a different way, if supposing you were to live forever, then wearing over-supporting shoes would be a bad idea; doing so makes one dependent on an infinite supply of a specific set of shoe technologies. Rather, the optimal solution would be to wear as little foot support as possible, bear the short-term pains of the transition, and develop and maintain tough feet indefinitely. However, you won't live forever, and so in some ways it makes sense to manage the slow decline of flattening arches and avoid catastrophic damage.

I don't have a solution to this problem, though I suspect the most practical solution is a balance between support and toughening up. It's worth keeping in mind, though, wherever this trade-off presents itself, that the distinction between helping and hurting is not always so clearly cut.