Northbound

Okay, so I’m running out of cool mile markers. Unfortunately, Google Maps hasn’t quite gotten around to Guam, yet, so I can’t show you where this would be, even if I could.  (Never been to Guam, never been farther west than Point Loma, outside of San Diego.)

Okay, so I walked today, and it was much easier than yesterday.  Managed a mile and a quarter in about 32 minutes (we’re not counting fractional miles, so you know).  Partly (I imagine wholly) this is because I was not as stuffed up today as I was yesterday; walking is amazingly easier when you can breathe. 

And — get this — it was momentarily enjoyable.  I don’t mean that I enjoyed myself, mind you, because I didn’t.  But there was a point where I looked over and everyone else that had been on their treadmills had gotten off, and I was alone — I had out-walked them all, at least from my perspective.  (The people who really work out at my gym, and probably yours, use the elliptical trainers.)  And this was nice.  It didn’t mean anything, other than to tell me that I hadn’t given up, at least not quite yet.

Of course, right at the moment when you feel the tiniest bit positive about yourself for walking the extra quarter-mile and not whining about it, you read about the eight year-old girl in China who runs 44 miles a day.  I mean, that’s just how these things go.

I have to admit, this one was a lot harder than I wanted it to be.  There’s not a good way to measure how easy or hard a given bit of exercise is — especially as I am constitutionally unable of thinking of anything exercise-related as easy.  But I know when I’m struggling by the first time I look at the red LED display on the camera.

I can’t look, you see.  I have to have a magazine or something propped up in front of the red LED display.  I don’t want to know how many minutes I’ve walked until I’m done.  I don’t want to keep pace with myself.  I don’t want to be a clockwatcher, grinding down weary minute after weary minute.  I want to read stuff like Byron York’s piece on Mike Huckabee in this fortnight’s National Review and not think about how much I’m sweating and how much I would rather be anywhere else.  (A nice piece, by the way, but I think York focuses too much on side issues:  the parole of a rapist that Huckabee vouched for and sort-of helped get out of jail, only to have him kill his next target – oopsie — and Huckabee’s neener-neener-neener fight with the Club For Growth over tax increases.  York doesn’t address the big question — can Mike Huckabee beat HRC — to which the only sane, logical answer is, “In his dreams.”)

So I read, and sweated, and I moved the magazine over to check the readout.  Fourteen minutes down, half a mile to go.  Bother.  I suffered a bit more.  The readout says .67 miles.  Will this never end?  I checked again, a quarter of a mile left.  I was sweating like Burt Reynolds doing dinner theater.

I stopped halfway through the magazine.  The readout said .91 miles.  I closed the magazine and stared the readout down.  When it said 1.00 miles, I got off.  I had enough.  I’m still getting over my cold, it’s been a long day, and it’s time to go home.

Seven miles down, ninety-three to go.  And I earned this one.

In the New York Times today, a digression on the relative value of psychotherapy over time:

Yet unlike most other medical treatments, psychotherapy can take considerable time. An infection can be cured in days, but remission of severe depression or anxiety disorder usually takes weeks or months, and a personality disorder typically requires years of intensive psychotherapy.

So if the outcome may be months or years away, how can a person tell whether his psychotherapy is any good?

It’s harder than you’d think. For one thing, people commonly equate feeling better with getting good treatment. But since psychiatric disorders fluctuate spontaneously with time, like most illnesses, many patients would get better even if they got no treatment at all. A patient getting bad psychotherapy might flourish, while another patient getting exemplary treatment might suffer terribly.

Suffer.  Terribly.

Now, I’m not saying that this has anything at all to do with exercise necessarily.  Probably it doesn’t.  But you can make the analogy.  Some people, you’d think, can exercise in a bad way and end up feeling good about it.  And some people — heh, heh — can exercise in a personally-appropriate way and end up suffering terribly.

And — you can’t deny this — the part about the “outcome being months or years away” certainly applies to exercise.  Whatever long-term benefit I get out of this project is at least months away; I may never be able to quantify it accurately.  If I complete this project, and on December 31, I don’t look any different or feel any better, I’m not going to be happy.  But I’m not going to be surprised, either.

Six miles down, ninety-four miles to go.

The treadmills don’t know that I’m writing this, but I sense that they are out to get me just the same.  My gym has, I guess, twelve or so treadmills.  Eight of them are new, but there are four older ones.  The newer ones are better, but the older ones have a big advantage; they have a good-sized shelf in front of the display.  (To read a magazine on the newer treadmills, you have to get this little plastic cover that fits over the display.)

Usually, it’s the older ones that are occupied, but today, there wasn’t anybody using any of the treadmills, and I had a bulky ESPN The Magazine, and I’d worn one of the T-shirts without a pocket, and needed a place to put my iPod.  I got on one of the older ones, put my stuff on the shelf, hit the start button, and it started off at the stately but boring pace of one half of a mile per hour.

Even I walk at a faster pace than that.  So I pushed the buttons on the keypad, 2.2 miles per hour.  Nothing.  It kept going at 0.5.  I hit the “plus” key on the keypad.  Nothing.  It kept crawling along.  I got off the treadmill, and it kept going slowly, and it kept being unresponsive.  I put my feet back on the tread.

Whammo!  All of a sudden, it kicked up to three miles an hour.  I tried to keep up, and then about six seconds later, it shut down completely.  Blast, says I, and I step over to the next treadmill, which does the exact same thing, speeds me up to three miles an hour.  I am, however, able to coax this one back down to 2.2 mph, and so I complete my mile.  (I actually walked a mile-and-a-quarter today, but I’m not counting fractions of miles, at least not just yet.)

So I get off, and the blasted treadmill informs me that I’ve walked off a total of 94 calories.

What a gyp.  I mean, what a gyp.  Do you know what a sad, puny amount 94 calories actually is?  I mean, good God, look at the Whataburger nutritional information.  There only actual food item you can order (outside of coffee and diet Cokes) that’s less than 94 calories is the “Garden Salad,” and nobody who isn’t an actual PETA contributor has ever gone into Whataburger and ordered the garden salad.  And that doesn’t even count salad dressing.  A double-meat Whataburger is 840 calories.  A medium chocolate malt is more than that with 1120 calories.  A large order of fries is 530, and the medium onion rings are 420.  That’s a decent-size meal right there, and it’s 2910 calories, just what a growing boy needs.  Divide that by 94, and that’s almost 31 miles on the treadmill — a mile a day for a month to counteract one dinner at Whataburger.  God help you if you get the biscuit and sausage on top of that.

I’m planning to walk a hundred miles by the end of the year, which is roughly the caloric equivalent of four Whataburger meals.  You want to know how many times I’ve eaten in Whataburger in my entire life?  I don’t know, but I bet it’s a bunch.  (Not so much since I moved to Jersey, of course.)  And that’s just Whataburger.

94 calories.  That’s it.  It doesn’t seem fair, somehow.  Still, five miles down, 95 to go.

You know what I think is a big fat lie?  All this stuff you read about endorphins.  The idea is that you exercise, and your body secretes (lovely word, that) these brain chemicals, and then you feel better as a result — the “runner’s high” or whatever you call it.

Well, I say it’s spinach and to heck with it.  All exercise ever does for me is make me tired and sweaty.  It’s never, ever, not even once done anything to make me feel good.  I feel lousy before I exercise, I feel lousy while I’m exercising, and I feel lousy after I’m done exercising.  I’d like to see an endorphin stick his head up after I’m finished on the treadmill.  I’d poke his eye out.  I really would. 

Now, I don’t doubt that other people have a pleasurable response to exercise.  There was a bit I saw on SportsCenter the other day about a guy named Todd Crandell, who used to be a serious drug addict but was able to get off drugs by exercising obsessively — doing triathlons, for example.  He’s at one end of the scale; I’m way off at the other.  Even thinking about a triathlon makes me ill — you want me to do what?  Get on a bicycle and ride for a hundred miles and then do a marathon and then go swimming?  I’d rather stay in bed and watch baseball and read Carl Hiassen novels, thank you very much.

Endorphins.  Phooey.

Four miles down, ninety-six miles to go.

Today was a nice day to walk. There aren’t that many of those.  Most days are too hot, lots of days are too cold.  I’m talking about the walk from my car to the gym, of course.  Even though it’s maybe all of twenty feet, if that.  Hot weather is just a pain (although it never gets that hot in Jersey).  Cold weather, especially with sleet and snow, is an abomination.

But today, well, today was nice.  You wouldn’t want to be out in the weather — mid-sixties and mist — for far too long, but a brief taste of it is nice, just for a few feet, anyway.

Here’s how I look at it.  The hard part of the walk is getting out of the car.  I don’t want to get out of the car.  Mostly, it’s inertia.  Some of it’s laziness.  A lot of it is dread.  Because if I stop the car, if I get out of the car, then I have to walk inside, walk up the one step, open the door, find my ID card in the little box they have, put it in the little tray they have, go change clothes — the whole dreadful shooting match.  Once I’ve done that, the walk itself is easy — all downhill.  Once the entire evolution is completed — Nike Shoks laced up, iPod set to “Shuffle Songs”, then I’m committed.  I have to walk a mile; I can’t just go home at that point.  Walking in and of myself isn’t the cause of my misery; it’s all the ancillary preparation that gets to me.

Three miles down, ninety-seven to go.

Was about a quarter of the way through today’s mile when I realized I was listening to “Lips of an Angel” on the piped-in XM Radio in my gym, and I said to myself, “Holy hand grenades, I left my iPod in my gym bag.”  And I had.  And I couldn’t stop and go get it, because then I would have had to start over, and that would have completely sucked in lots of ways. 

I think what annoys me more than anything else is that I can’t subcontract out my exercise.  Think about it.  I don’t want to get under my car and drain out all the nasty, gunky oil every so often, but I can subcontract that out by paying to get it changed.  If I decide I don’t want to mow my lawn, it’s easy enough to subcontract that out, too.  I am almost certainly too damn fat to get on a ladder and paint my house; that’s going to be subcontracted out.  I eat at restaurants all the time, subcontracting out my cooking responsibilities.  (And I am married to a great and wonderful woman who reads this blog occasionally and who does my laundry, and who is vacuuming as I write this, all of which I am appropriately grateful for, and no, honey, you’re not just a subcontractor.)

It would be awesome if I could subcontract out my need for exercise — say, if I could find a hyperactive six-year-old who thinks running is fun, or a buffed-up fitness freak who would enjoy the challenge of whipping my fat ass into shape, and let them take over my body while my mind reads Deadspin or Wikipedia articles about breakfast cereal.  But I can’t.  I have to walk into the gym myself and change my own sweaty shoes and remember to hook up my own iPod and walk a mile on the filthy, misbegotten treadmill, watching Jim Cramer on the overhead TV run his mouth about some obscure manufacturing stock that I could care less about.  And I can’t subcontract any of this out.  Where’s the fairness in that, I ask you?  Where’s the sense of human dignity?  Where’s the justice, man?

I ask you.

Two miles down, ninety-eight to go.

I did a mile on the treadmill last night, which is no big deal.  Let me say that again; it’s No Big Deal.  In fact, I bet people who work out or run or do lots of exercise are laughing at me.  I did a mile on the treadmill, big stupid special.

Yeah, well, maybe.  And if you get a big humor charge thinking about a big fat guy up on the treadmill, reading the National Review, listening to Lyle Lovett on the iPod, and sweating like Nate Newton at a fried-chicken buffet, go for it.  That’s all right.  See if I care.

It’s not important, but I’m writing about it.  (Like anything I write about is important, anyway.)  I’m writing about it because I haven’t been exercising.  This is not surprising.  I hate exercise and everything about it.  I’ve been lifting weights once a week and that’s it, and I don’t even like doing that.

But — God damn it — I have to do better about stuff like this, and that means committing to exercise, even something so lame as walking on the blasted, motherless treadmill.  So.  My intention is to walk one hundred miles between now and the end of the year.  There are 136 days left in the year, so even at my pitiful, snail-like pace of one mile per day, I ought to be able to do this, even accounting for my near-complete sloth and more-than-complete revulsion about exercise.  So, counting yesterday, that’s one mile down, ninety-nine to go.

Of course, for something like this to work, for it to really make a difference, I have to let people know that I’m doing it, and be accountable to you by writing about it.  And not only that, but write about that to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.  (Except football, of course.)

Which means that, for the next four months or so, it’s going to suck to be you, the Northbound reader.  But that’s all right.  See if I care.

Will baseball ever again have another three-hundred game winner?

Well, I don’t know.  But here’s what I did to analyze the question.  I took the careers of the three players who currently have three hundred wins — Glavine, Maddux, and Clemens.  I broke down their wins as a function of age, and averaged them.  I came up with this table that explains (more or less) how many wins you’d have to have, by age, to get to 300 before you hit 40:

Okay, on that basis, let’s take the current win leaders and figure out who is on pace, and how far behind they are.  (I took everybody over 40 off the list; the only one of those folks who has a legitimate shot at it is Randy Johnson, and he’s hurt and might not ever play again.)

Okay. So, the only current pitchers who are ahead of the game (if they continue pitching at a Hall-of-Fame level) are Sabathia, Bonderman, and maybe Willis. And they won’t get there for another fifteen years. That doesn’t mean the end of the 300-game winner, of course, not by a longshot. Mussina could still do it (but he’d have to pitch well into his 40s and get a lot of run support). Buerhle and Zambrano have reasonable chances. But it looks like a long, long drought before there’s another 300-game winner in our futures.

UPDATE:  Baseball Crank has a similar column up – his table, however, looks at all the post-1920 300-winners, which I think skews it a little  — there’s too many outliers like Ryan and Niekro in that calculation, not to mention old-timers like Spahn and Grove.  Still, the tables aren’t that different, and we both identify the same people.