The Side Effects of Endorphins

Misused Statistics and Misplaced Metaphors

Or seeing patterns that are not there.

Statistics are like a bikini as what they show is worth noting. what they hide vitally important and there are times a bikini is completely inconsistent for the current situation. I remember a Mad Magazine comic many years ago where a woman walks into a swimming pool showing off her bikini. She is with a group of friends and while perched on the diving board, with pomp and circumstance, she thanks her friend for lending her a bathing suit. Her friend replies that it is not a bathing suit but her underwear.

The girl on the diving board, her face contorts, and she flees to the locker room in total embarrassment.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania on June 23^rd 1972,   the historic flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes, the river reached an unprecedented record high of 31.5 feet. This shattered the previous area record of 26.2 feet that had stood since 1850. The massive crest inundated the main portion of Birdsboro, leaving residents without essential utilities like clean water and sewage systems for days. 

I cannot say Mad Magazine had an enormous influence on my life, but the flood of 72 certainly did. The change in the direction of a weather front was a large detour of my lifes’s direction.

And whatever that direction was it was nine years later that I took up the sport of running. As I write this it completely boggles my mind all that happened in those nine years. Running opened another part of my brain that I never knew existed. It gave me the confidence to move forward with intention and dream a little. And I started running races and I felt like an athlete once again. It is magical, what the human body can do at the age of 24. I ran a marathon a few months later. I didn’t even like driving 26.2 miles. I would eventually run the Boston Marathon running my personal best time of three hours.

And I think back to that river in Birdsboro Pennsylvania whose personal best was 26.2 feet in depth. Hurricane Agnes came along and raised the bar to other floods to 31.5 feet. One day I would make the transition from running marathons to running ultras. The distance change was 26.2 to a little over 31 miles. My long race distance grew in length basically the same proportion of that of hurricane Agnes did.

Do you think that is a mere coincidence.

I certainly do. Certainly, both increased by 12%. That is the length of my long races and the crest of the river that flows through Birdsboro Pennsylvania.

I remember standing in the flood waters of our living room in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, feeling the electricity in the water where we stood. We just wanted to get the hell out of there. And we eventually did on lifeboats.

It never occurred to me as I entered that lifeboat that I would be running a marathon 11 years later.