Thoughts on the Decathlon

Decathletes are generally considered fantastic all-around athletes. They can run fast, jump high, and throw far and the world record holder, currently the U.S.'s Ashton Eaton, is colloquially known as the greatest athlete in the world. While I think it's awesome that track and field has a combined event competition that tests athletes over the span of athletic areas, I personally would kind of like to see some changes made to this ancient competition.

The events contested in the decathlon are the 100 meters, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 meters, 110 meters hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, and 1500 meters. While it does span much of the athletic spectrum, I think if we really want a multi-event competition that is representative of all of track and field as a whole, it should be changed.

The decathlon is made up of four track and six field events. It makes sense to me that it should equally cover the two sides of athletics and have five of each. Half of the field events in the decathlon are throwing events, and, while they're all different in the object thrown and how these objects are thrown, I think the competition could be made more representative of athletics if one of these three were dropped and replaced with a running event. My choice would would be to drop the discus; shot put and javelin are probably the more iconic throwing events.

In its place, I would put a distance event. While 1500 meters may seem sufficiently long, especially to guys training predominantly for strength and speed, it's only 15% the length of the longest track race. For the world's best all-around athletes to show that they can really live up to that nickname, I would add in either the 3000 meters or even the 5000. If it's the 3k, then I would drop the 1500 down to the 800 because the 3000 could be argued to be middle distance like the 1500 (and 800) and would probably be better paired with a shorter, more different mid-d race. (The 800, while only a lap longer than the already contested 400, is very different from the sprint). If it's the 5k, a fully long distance race, then I'd keep the mid-d 1500.

While I think these changes would make for a decathlon more representative of the athletics spectrum and would prove someone to be more of an all-around athlete, there are some obvious problems with changing it. Officially changing even one of the events would automatically outdate all the scores and records of the current decathlon — it would be starting all over again because the point scales could not be compared with different event(s) being contested.

Not in foreseeable future will the decathlon be altered, but if it ever is, I hope it'll span the whole athletics spectrum and cover a longer distance. I don't think anyone would doubt that great long distance running is a prominent and undeniable form of athleticism.

A Short Complaint About the State of Society

While there are a lot of things about the U.S. and post-industrialized society as a whole to be proud of, there are still things I read about that really disappoint me — things that make me wonder how we let ourselves fall into these situations and mindsets.

A firm called Public Policy Polling ran a poll asking participants whether or not they believed in a variety of different conspiracy theories. A whole 37% of Americans think global warming is a hoax. Twenty-eight percent believe in a "new world order." A fifth believe vaccines actually cause autism and 13% truly think the president is the Antichrist. An estimated 12.5 million believe lizard people control politics. I kid you not. One has to ask oneself, how the hell do so many people come to believe such ridiculous things? We're one of the most advanced nations on Earth yet we have millions and millions of citizens who actually believe things like Barack Obama is the Antichrist and there are lizard people, whatever the hell those are supposed to be, in our government. If that doesn't make you want to hit your head into your desk, I can't imagine what will.

Another sad state of affairs, this one affecting the whole world, is the ownership of our genes. Yes, the ownership of the tiny things inside us that make us who we are. Almost a fifth of our genes are under patents held by various companies, including those genes that are the key to terrible diseases like Alzheimer's. That means that anyone who wants to study, do research or experiments on, legally own, or do any other work with a patented gene has to get explicit permission and direction from the gene's patent holder. Any resulting scientific or medical breakthroughs are owned and controlled by the patent holder. Want to get your genes tested to make sure you don't have something awful like breast cancer? You can go only to the patent holder and pay their likely exorbitant prices. Despite the patent holders' claims that this encourages innovation, I imagine that any person in their right mind would see this as wrong — or at the very least suspicious and unfair. Companies should not have exclusive control over one of the most fundamental components of our bodies.

Again, while there's a lot to be proud of in modern society, bewildering things like Americans' liability for believing preposterous conspiracies and our allowing companies to patent and completely control anything to do with our genes can only make one wonder what is wrong with us.
 

A Dream Movie Probably Wouldn't Be That Cool In Reality

A frustrating thing I sometimes experience in the morning after I wake up is my inability to immediately remember a dream I just had — often one that I somehow know deep down was cool, fun, or vivid. Eventually it'll come back to me, sometimes being randomly prompted by a thought, a sight, or a sound, and I can go through in my mind what happened. It would be so much easier (and cooler) if I could just record what played through my mind during the night and watch the film the next day. Even though the feelings I experienced during the dream would be lost and probably only partially recovered by my mind's reaction to reviewing the sights and sounds I had experienced, having a retrievable library of my subconscious' adventures would be an interesting way to possibly further connect with and learn about myself.

As far-fetched as this science fiction-esque library seems, it is something that will likely become a reality in the coming decades. There are computers now that can quickly observe and learn a person's brain activity and then roughly reconstruct a simple image or word a person is shown based on how their mind's eye sees it, as demonstrated in this Through the Wormhole clip. With the incredible pace technology is advancing, I would not at all be surprised if in the next twenty years we have actual videos of dreams.

In the above clip, Morgan Freeman tells us that the scientist performing these experiments believes that "we will be able to record our dreams as full-color, high definition movies." While I'm sure we'll eventually be making full-color movies out of our dreams, I highly doubt they'll be in high definition. During a dream we certainly believe that what we're seeing is reality (unless one is, of course, lucid dreaming) and reality is obviously in high definition experience. But when we recall our dreams and think about the sights we saw they're not really that high-def. At least from my dreaming experience, we more or less are focusing on one small visual at a time, a friend's face, a car moving toward us, the handle of the umbrella we're holding on to so we can fly. Everything else around us that we're not strictly focusing on is fuzzy and often blurs together our surroundings. Places and things around us often have little detail, at least compared to reality, and the details we are aware of are usually fairly vague. Even the the things we are specifically focusing on visually in a dream can sometimes be fuzzy or vague.

So if we were to record a dream and play it back, I doubt it would be super exciting to watch. Between all the fuzziness; jerky, sweeping changes of view; and narrow foci, it could be more of a perplexing and disorienting movie than we might otherwise imagine. It would seem perfectly normal while we're asleep, but very likely would not resemble at all even the most surreal dreams sequences we see in film and television.

Sound, the other important part of a dream that could someday be captured on video, would probably also be as disappointing in a movie as the visuals would be. From my experience, background sound in dreams, if there happens to be any, is not reality's background sound like chirping birds while walking outside or the TV while inside or crunching popcorn while in the movies, but very soft, vague noise that doesn't really signify anything in particular. Meaningful sound in dream, such as words you're speaking or that are being spoken to you, are often spaced out between dreams — in other words, there's a lot of just visuals and maybe soft, vague background noise between sounds you're really paying attention to. This would make a dream movie even stranger as it will mostly be visuals with perhaps some of the soft, vague noise here or there.

Last night I drempt at one point that I was in some apartment trying to maneuver a sleepwalking former track teammate back to his bedroom. He was rather uncooperative and we were having a short, reasonably coherent argument as I tried to shove him back down the hall. I can't remember exactly what we said, but, despite my mind at the time clearly understanding the words and what they meant, it was not as solid and clear a verbal exchange as one would find in real life. Our minds already know what they want to hear from our dreams and their characters and what we actually hear is probably just an audible representation of these ideas; our brains hear from the sounds what it wants to, but an external recording of it could possibly hear only audible gibberish. While many of the things we hear in our dreams, especially words, appear very clear, if they were to be perfectly recorded and played for our conscious ears they would likely sound fuzzy and a little incoherent.

A video of a dream would likely be blurry and vague visually, snapping quickly between scenes. Audibly, it would likely be fuzzy and a little incoherent, hardly giving viewers who didn't have the dream a better idea of what the visuals represent. What we see on the tape could appear much more perplexing and disorienting than how it felt while we were asleep. The actual story going on might be very hard to discern unless you're the person who drempt it and recognizes some of what you see and hear in the video. As great as our memory of reality is, when we don't have actual visual and auditory stimuli, as when we're dreaming, our mind can only simulate an incomplete, blurred movie for our entertainment. Still — if I got the chance to record a dream and then watch it, I totally would.

Placing a Limit on What is Humanly Possible

People love predicting the limits of various phenomena, particularly human limitations — the most advanced technology we can create within a set time, how high we can climb a mountain before needing oxygen to go on, and how much water we can drink in a minute before  flooding our internal organs enough to die, to name a few. While some of these are fairly concrete predictions that always seem to accurately predict how far a human can go when tested, there is a class of predictions for human limitations that has come up short in the past and could very likely continue to come up short in the future: human speed and endurance in regards to running.

It was once thought that it was not humanly possible to run a mile in under four minutes — that no body could keep up a pace of fifteen miles per hour for 5,280 feet. It was kind of like a medical limit, like how a body could only take so high a temperature before keeling over. But on May 6, 1954, the impossible was achieved when Roger Bannister crossed the line in 3:59.4. Part of the reason why his world record became one of the greatest physical achievements in history was because so many people were convinced it was impossible. Today, the record has been lowered to 3:43.13 and thousands of men have broken the barrier; Steve Scott did it a record 136 times, five American high school students have done it, and Kenyan Daniel Komen doubled up on it with a sub-8:00 two mile. A once viable human limit has been completely shattered and proven wrong and called into question some other limits people had ascribed to track and field.

Another well-known race that gets its limits predicted is the men's 100 meter. Before Usain Bolt first became the most electrifying sprinter in the world, statisticians generally thought that  9.45 seconds was the fastest possible time a human could cover that distance in. That's why his second 100 meter world record of 9.69 at the Beijing Olympics was so surprising — while it was only a 0.03 second improvement from his first WR, statisticians believed such a time wouldn't come until nearly 2030. In the following year's World Championships in Berlin he astounded people when he dropped his time by an incredible 0.11 seconds. Many people now, including Bolt, think the records will stop at 9.4.

While that's still 0.18 away and Bolt and his quickly improving teammate Yohan Blake, the two best in the world, are unlikely to drop that much time (in a single race at least), I see no real reason to assume a human will never run under 9.4. Bolt, like Bannister before him, proved that every once and a while an amazing athlete will come around and run an incredible race that forces us to completely rewrite what we think is humanly possible to run. For all we know there could be an eight year old prodigy out there waiting to amaze the world with a 9.35 or a 3:39. Whenever we think we've nailed down limits on our running speed and endurance, someone eventually either breaks them or suddenly comes close enough to show that they should only be taken very lightly.

While a definitive limit like 4:00 or 9.4 can't really be trusted, there are of course some times that (non-genetically modified) humans will never run, such as a 2:00 mile or a five second 100 meter. The less extreme the limits we try to set, though, the less reliable they become.

Unlike 100, 50, or even 25 years ago, we have an incredibly good idea of how an athlete has to train and prepare to get the best times possible. This and the gradually increasing access people around the world have to track and field participation inevitably mean that world records will be achieved at a slower rate as we already know what to do and have most everyone really capable of breaking one with the access they need to do so. Just check out the WR progression for the mile: it was broken quite frequently until the '90s when Hicham El Guerrouj ran his 3:43 in 1999. It hasn't been broken since. Accurate times for this race, however, have only been recorded for about 150 years and, considering that we'll probably be running it far longer into the future than that, we're bound to break it again and for all we know it could come within a short period of time. The chance that the fastest human to ever be born for a specific event having already completed his or her career is unlikely.

The point is that as legit and solid as many of these limits seem, they could be abruptly shattered by one fantastic athlete and quickly reveal to us how wrong we are about our abilities. While 9.4 seconds may appear to border on unnaturally quick, once another Usain Bolt breaks it we will be forced to reevaluate our predictions and what is humanly possible. That's what makes world records so great — they're meant to be broken eventually and trying to set a specific, ultimate record will likely fail at some point in the future. It does, however, provide great motivation for athletes out to prove the naysayers wrong.

If I've learned anything from my time as an athlete it's that this same mentality can be applied to us as individuals, no matter how good a sprinter or distance runner one is. Telling yourself that you can't run faster than a certain mark will make it difficult to ever improve because you never know when everything will go just right and you'll do what you didn't previously think was possible.¹ Rather than limit oneself, one should keep an optimistic open mind and continue to perform as best one can. Limits are always the first obstacles to achieving greatness.

¹ There are obvious exceptions. If you ran a four-flat in college, don't go around when you're 60 years old thinking you could dip down to 3:59 if you really believe in yourself.

Using the Words "Hate" and "Evil"

Two words that get thrown around a lot nowadays are "hate" and "evil." Whether you read them online, hear them on TV, or speak them to your friends, these two words, particularly "hate," are clearly a fairly common part of our vocabulary. While many people don't really regulate their use of these words — they often throw them out there without much thought — I prefer to attach some guidelines to my use of these supposedly potent words.

Dictionary.com defines "hate" as "to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest." Now I'm well aware of the existence of hyperbole and the benefits it has for getting across messages, but I feel like saying "The class is so difficult — I hate Professor Smith" is a bit unnecessary. Call me oversensitive, but using very negative hyperbole like that to describe people probably does not reflect one's true feelings (the hypothetical student very likely does not actually hate Professor Smith). Saying things like "I am totally in love with these shoes/that waitress/the scientific method" is also hyperbole, but it has the potential to introduce more happiness and compassion into the world, rather than contempt (or, in the more-often-than-not case of using "hate" when it doesn't reflect one's actual feelings, the potential for contempt).

Continuing the Professor Smith example, I would instead say "I don't like Professor Smith — he's not a very nice man and he makes the class too hard." I feel as if saying "I hate him" would imply that there is nothing at all about him that could be redeeming or likable and that he is intentionally a malicious person. And it's not just people I hesitate to say I hate, but people's efforts and creations too. For example, I don't like country music, but would never say "I hate Garth Brooks' songs." There's nothing inherently bad about them — I just don't find them at all pleasurable to listen to. I also find it distasteful to use it to describe animals, who do not act out of spite, with words such as "I hate dogs" or "I hate the way dogs always need attention."

When it comes to things that aren't people, organizations, and people's hard (or not so hard) work, I'm fine with using "hate" as hyperbole because it doesn't direct contempt or possible contempt at people and things that very likely don't deserve it. Examples include "I hate it when I bring the wrong notebook to class" or "I hate it when it rains during cross country practice" or "I hate toast." Sure it's more than likely that you don't actually feel extreme aversion or hostility for bringing the wrong notebook, running in the rain, or bread that has been browned due to exposure to heat, but you're not, by using "hate," demeaning anyone or their work.

Wiktionary defines "evil" as "Intending to harm; malevolent." It describes people like Adolf Hitler and
Anders Behring Breivik, people who one can hate without invoking hyperbole. Like "hate," using "evil" as hyperbole introduces unnecessary contempt into the world when the world really doesn't need any more. More often than not, I hear it used to describe politicians. Particularly fringy right-wingers have called President Obama evil (in their defense, many have duped themselves into honestly believing he's out to destroy America and embodies the definition of "evil") and I've heard many times my family members refer to Republican politicians as evil when they hear about them on the news. While politicians often take actions we believe are the opposite of what the country needs, they're taking them because they believe it's what is right (even if it's not), not because they hate the country. Many awful positions are held and acted upon by politicians, but very, very rarely do they cross the line of being evil.

There are certainly people out there, however, who are hateful. Fred Phelps is a great example. He routinely condemns various groups, particularly homosexuals, with vitriolic rhetoric and would not be happier if the people he despises were to disappear from the face of the earth. Mitt Romney, despite statements such as his 47% comment, is not. Sure, you can argue that he didn't care about 47% of the country's vote or that his economic policies were not geared toward helping middle-class families, but he never stated his dislike of the middle-class nor would he have enacted policies specifically meant to hurt them. Saying someone or something is "hateful" should be avoided if it invokes hyperbole, otherwise the inaccurate phrase will only serve to hurt people rather than speak the truth.

So next time your professor, boss, or peer says or does something you don't really like, maybe take a moment to consider how serious a transgression it actually is.