Training Week Two or Why I Married My Wife

Before we get started I should tell you that my lawyers are mad at me for the title. They feel it is misleading. I agree but, if I called it "Training Week Two or Math" people would have been scared away. I want people to read my blog and donate money. My lawyers made me post the following warning:

*Warning* Today's blog contains math. Punching the computer or throwing your phone across the room will not make the math go away. This blogger can not be held responsible for any damages that occur as a result of the math. Nor will he be held responsible for any swear words your children learn while listening to you try to figure out the math problems. To exit to a happier place click here.


I hate math.

Okay, I don't actually hate math, but if I saw it walking down the street I'd cross to the other side, buy a gun, and shoot it in the leg.

I can't remember if I've always hated math. Maybe my preschool encounters were okay or maybe I've suppressed the horrors -- I don't know. I still have panic inducing flash backs of my third grade timed tests. My wife has often come home to find me on the kitchen floor in a fetal position muttering "Two times two is four; two times three is six." In high school I had reoccurring nightmares involving the letters x and y and graph paper. We won't even talk about how I got kicked out of the SAT's because I started screaming and stabbing the test booklet with my No. 2 pencil because it kept asking me to find the cosign of x. (I would probably hate the letter x if it wasn't used in Scifi so much ).

The worse memories, though, are of word problems.

When I first encountered a word problem I thought it was a happy surprise. "Oh boy! A story break from all this math!" I happily started reading about our intrepid heroine Jane. She was traveling on a train. It was going 60 kilometers per hour. She was eating a pear every half hour. Another train was approaching. It was going 75 kilometers per hour. The evil Todd was on that train. He was eating prunes. Are the trains going to crash? Will Todd sabotage Jane's train? The suspense was killing me. I read on. If Jane's train takes five hours to reach her station how many pears will she eat? How many prunes will Todd eat? Show your work below. ... What!? This isn't a story! It's a math problem! I dropped the book in horror. That is when I first realized there was a devil; who else could devise something so purely evil? To this day I can't stand pears and I refuse to read Murder on the Orient Express because it might just be an elaborate math problem in disguise.

Through shrewdness and careful planning I have avoided math for most of my life. As soon as I was allowed to stop taking math classes in high school I did. I did not take any math classes in college because my college lumped math and science together in one requirement. (I took the non-mathy sciences like Biology). But my greatest achievement in math avoidance came at the end of my college career when I asked my girlfriend to marry me. She is good at math. I knew if she said yes I would most likely never have to do math again. (She said yes -- hooray!) I settled down into a happy mathless life. I thought I was safe. I was a fool.

No one warned me about the strangle hold math has on the sport of running. I probably should have suspected something. Everyone I know who likes running also likes math. They have binary clocks, carry sudoku puzzles with them everywhere, know all the known numbers of pi, and work or have worked at places like NASA, JPL, and other math themed acronym places. The signs were all there, but I ignored them until it was too late.

I realized the dire situation I was in when I remembered that I have six and a half hours to complete the Chicago marathon. The memory came to me suddenly when I was running around the track, desperately trying to keep a septuagenarian from lapping me. I started thinking: 

I have no idea if I can do this. Pant! How is this old guy so fast? Pant! How long would running a marathon take me? I guess I should try to figure it out. Pant! So let's see, if it takes me ten minutes to complete one lap Pant! and if each lap is 1/6th of a mile, is he lapping me again? then to run a mile it takes me  . . . .*  Pant I divide that number into 26.2 miles  Pant adding 10 minutes for a quick lunch and a half hour for bathroom breaks times the … wait a minute! This is a word problem!

I stopped. Not because I was out of breath, but because I was numb with disbelief. A cold chill ran up my spine. Running was a cult. Not a friendly, "Here we made you some Kool-Aid.," kind of cult, but a math cult. What would they do to me if I tried to get out. Would they let me go after the marathon? Am I doomed to spend my life figuring out how many pears a train full of marathon runners can eat? How can I survive this? My only hope is you, dear reader.

If one day you should happen to see me and you notice that I am working on a sudoku, please, snatch it from me and force a crossword puzzle into my hands.



*So you noticed how I didn't actually calculate anything. It's because I wanted to let you do it. Enter the amount you came up with here.