Objectivism

I am, for all intents and purposes, a Poli Sci major. My degree will have all sorts of bells and whistles and qualifiers to my area of study, but in the Spring of 2013 I will have spent the last 4 years of my life immersed in Politics, whether it be domestically or abroad.

Politics is, at its core, a real-time game that plays out clashes in political philosophy. While successes can often be weighed and measured, many solutions and decisions are hard to quantify because we don't have a parallel universe where we know what would have happened if we had not implemented some policy and instead went with another.

Since my Junior year of high school I have known that I will work in the public sector, and with that decision has come studying and mastering the subjective. Internalizing arguments firsthand and creating those of my own.

I have, by choice, gone down a path that will be full of clashes of idealism, often with answers that are inherently circumspect.



And that, I suppose, is one of the main reasons I love running.



In a life of subjectivity and philosophy underlying every decision being made around me, running is one of the only saving graces that I can look at purely objectively.

It is, at ITS base, a measurement of distance and how fast you can traverse it. If you do it one second faster, one half of one percent quicker, you are better. Period.


A workout we do often is a 10 mile hard run.

The first time I broke 1 hour was the week after conference last year, when I ran 58:10ish. Since then, I had only broken an hour once more, running 59:20 during track season.

I ran 57:48 a couple weeks back, totally alone.

Running here, training 70 mile weeks with no real race in sight, totally alone, plays tricks on your training mentality. I FEEL stronger, but I don't have the luxury of constantly testing myself to see if that's true.

But, at its core, running is simply a measurement of distance and how fast you can traverse it.

And this time, I ran 5:48/mile for 10 miles, dipping under 5:50 pace for the first time.

Objectively speaking, I am faster today than I was yesterday.

And that's really calming in the face of a subjective life.