Runaway Future

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the definite. Actions that can’t be undone. Words that can’t be taken back.

For good and bad, I’ve often avoided many of these situations, because the absolute is a scary spot. It’s live or die, it’s black or white. The fear makes it too easy to not accept the risk.

But more and more, the world around me seems to be encouraging taking a stand, making a step, marking a line and going for it. The things that you can’t go back on.

Some of it is unfortunate, facing the music as a result of my own stupidity, like a speeding ticket that used up $300 dollars I certainly would have loved to use elsewhere.

Some of it is going to be positive, like going ahead with the plan to make the Cartoon Curling Challenge happen this season.

Some of it is making me nervous, like decisions on the future, those calls that could change the whole course of a life.

It’s a paradigm shift and it’s easy to choose to stay safe, ensconce yourself in a productive and satisfactory lifestyle, never putting yourself out there, never testing your own limits and challenging yourself further.

But that’s not much fun. Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It’s the most important aspect of my life that I hate. The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large. I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact  and – on balance – the exponential upsurge of technology’s social import has been detrimental to the human experience. Obviously and paradoxically, I’m writing these sentiments on a laptop computer.

Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

1. Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.
2. Music that skews inauthentic is almost always more popular in the present tense. Music that skews toward authenticity has more potential to be popular over time, but also has a greater likelihood of being unheard completely.
3. In general, the best balance seems to come from artists who are (kind of) fake as people, but who make music that’s (mostly) real. This would be people like Bob Dylan. The worst music comes from the opposite situation, such as songs by TV on the Radio that aren’t about wolves. If the singer is fake and the music is fake (Scott Weiland, Madonna, Bing Crosby), everything works out okay.
4. Normal people don’t see any of this as a particularly pressing problem. They do not care. A few critics do, but that’s about it.
5. The most telling moment for any celebrity is when he or she attempts to be inauthentic on purpose, and particularly when that attempt fails.

Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

1. If you change any detail about the past, you might accidentally destroy everything in present-day existence.
2. If you went back in time to accomplish a specific goal (and you succeeded at this goal), there would be no reason for you to have travelled back in time in the first place.
3. A loop in time eliminates the origin of things that already exist.
4. You’d possibly kill everybody by sneezing.
5. You already exist in the recent past.
6. Before you attempted to travel back in time, you’d already know if it worked.
7. Unless all of time is happening simultaneously within multiple realities, memories and artifacts would mysteriously change.
8. The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.

Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

As dedicated fans of the blog (*snicker*) may remember, back in the spring, I complained about MapMyRun sending me an email the day after I went out for a run, encouraging me to get off the couch and run more often. Here’s the post.

Anyway, the post was commented on by a Community Manager from MapMyRun and then we traded a handful of amusing emails back and forth.

So over the past few weeks, I’ve only been periodically running. I play dodgeball on Mondays, curling on Wednesdays and thus haven’t had as many opportunities to go out running as I’d like to. Therefore, I’ve gotten another email, only this one has changed dramatically:

Hi friend,
You haven’t been back in ten days and your workout log is dying to get updated!

Your last workout was logged on 2011-10-21. Don’t lose miles, calories or reps. You can log your past workouts and keep your training on track. You can also sync up directly with devices like Garmin, Polar, Nike+, and more…

Log Your Workouts

Do you find logging workouts hard?
If you’re like a lot of us, it can be really hard … That’s why we make it really easy! With the simple my home quick-add log and our start-stop mobile tracking technology it can be quick and fun!

Have you checked out our Challenges to be eligible for prizes for all your hard work?

Did you need some help logging your workouts? Check out some of our tutorials.

While You Were Away…
This may sound like a guilt trip but the MapMyRUN Community has been busy since your last workout:
- Total Miles: 2, 943, 104
- Total Workouts Logged 256, 878
- Total Calories Burned: 97, 273, 671
- Total Routes: 334, 797

It’s not too late to get back on track!

Stay fit,
The MapMyRUN Team

Now I’m not going to say that I was the catalyst of change, but the refinement of the message (hell just merely saying “This may sound like a guilt trip…”) is pretty much exactly what I was joking about before.

MapMyRun definitely gets it.