Wednesday, December 11, 2019

The Last Half Mile

This is my profile on the running app I've been using recently. They mildly celebrate milestones (depending on who is coaching and whether the runner mentions it ahead of time), and I am sooooooo close to 100 miles that if it would just stop raining, I'd be there.

Running app profile with total distance of 99.52 miles circled


There's probably a metaphor here about life, and how the last half mile might take just as long as the previous ten. I guess that's valid. Mostly what I take from it is that milestones based on arbitrary numbers are kind of silly. Why is 100 special? Base ten isn't the greatest thing ever. Why not celebrate 64 or 132? The only birthday party I've had as an adult was for my 32nd birthday, and I invited everyone to my 100,000th birthday (which it is, if you are using base 2 -- that's 1x25 for everyone who didn't take programming classes back in the dark ages. Do they still teach binary and hexadecimal? Seems like it's still useful for bit masking, but who knows).

Okay, I went off on a bit of a tangent there (and do they still teach trigonometry in school or has that gone the way of typing classes?), but my point is that nothing has any meaning at all and it's never going to stop raining so I should just be happy I made it to 99.52 miles.

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