Runner's Heights: The Civil Monkey and the Engineer

I must have stumbled upon a realization that is probably conventional wisdom among runners who habitually pound concrete pavement. I believe that if you primarily run on concrete pavements and you wear more rigid shoes for motion stability, you are probably putting more stress on your ankles and knees due to reduced cushioning. Bizarre as this may sound, you might be better off with an all-terrain shoe, like the New Balance 803. As I have said before, I am partial to New Balance because they are more easily available in E, EE, and EEE extra width sizes. So, I switched from my New Balance 766, which is an excellent running shoe, to 803's and it has made a significant difference to my day-after-run recovery. Now the 803 is slightly heavier than the 766 due to the shoe materials but when I am locked on to my Walkman and my endorphin high, I don't feel the difference in weight at all. Besides, the cushioning on the 803 puts less stress on my legs and I am able to go further.

There is an ongoing debate in India over the origins of a coral reef formation abutting the land masses of southern India and northern Sri Lanka. There are lobbies that are interested in dredging the reef, known as Ram Setu (bridge of Lord Ram) or Adam's Link, to make it a deeper passageway for ships. There were scant studies done on the environmental impact on the corals or on the marine life that thrives on this shallow waters. But a different kind of protest surfaced, spurred on by India's Hindu religious right, that claims that this reef was a bridge built by Lord Ram, a time-honored deity and one of the avatars of Vishnu. The Archaelogical Society of India, probably the only rational body so far that had time to investigate this, debunked the idea that any Lord Ram built this bridge and went so far as to question whether an individual in the person of Lord Ram even existed. Another classic science vs. religious-myth encounter and once again, science is takin' a whuppin'. If the exponents of the Ramayana are correct, then Lord Ram was the first to outsource the bridge-building to a batallion of rhesus monkeys. While Jan Goodall was busy studying the chimps of Gombe eat ants-on-a-stick, she should have just read the Ramayana to know that monkeys are deft at extremely high-level tasks, such as, ocean-quality bridge building. Never mind that it takes a diligent IIT-an four years to learn this trade, but a monkey, with some providential instructions, can be taught this trade. And the religious right might also propound the theory that, going by the fact that the bridge has endured over so many centuries, even survived a tsunami or two, simians make the best civil engineers. There was no monkeying around when that bridge was erected and that the six-simian quality process is the pre-cursor to six-sigma. Therefore, outsourcing, as we know it, started in India, and there's no questioning it. Now, that water's under the bridge.

Razr Pics South-East LA sky, 7:15 pm