Threading The Needle

As mentioned in an earlier post, my aerobic activity of choice is running, and, more specifically, running on a treadmill. In fact, I purchased a treadmill 5 years ago, and have managed to use it fairly faithfully in the half-decade since. I generally run a set distance. For the past year, that has been 2 miles.

At a certain point, I realized that due to the fact that while I was running I was constantly looking at the dashboard, the result was that I was running in a slightly hunched over stance, which I felt was not fantastic for my posture. So I decided that I would run in an upright position.

Of course, this meant that I was not looking at the dashboard, so at any given moment, I did not know how far I had run, and how much remained to complete my set distance. So every once in a while, I would briefly look down, to see how far I had run.

But the result was that I would glance down quite frequently, since I wanted to make sure that I had not gone past my daily distance. I wanted to minimize the number of times I would look down, so that I wouldn't be constantly bending down to check the dashboard. So I decided to make a game out of it, and each day, I would see if could go through the distance and glance at the dashboard fewer times than I had the previous day. But part of the game was that I couldn't go past the set distance -- otherwise, it would have been an easy matter to win the "game", by simply not glancing at the dashboard altogether.

Back in the 7th grade, a game which was very popular with my classmates and I (ha! just kidding, of course -- I realize it's "my classmates and me") was a game called quarter football. Three items were required for this game: (a) a quarter; (b) a desk; (c) an absent teacher.

When it was your turn, you would begin with the quarter on your side of the desk, with part of the quarter on the desk and part of it behind the desk. The idea was to hit the quarter along the desk a few times, until the quarter was now partly on the desk and partly on the other side of the desk.

The catch was that you had only 3 "hits", so if you had hit the quarter 3 times and it was still entirely on the desk, it was then your opponent's turn. Of course, if you hit the quarter too hard, and it fell off the desk, it would also become your opponent's turn. So the trick of the game was to hit the quarter hard enough to move it along the desk in 3 hits to a position just at the far edge of the desk -- no more and no less. If you managed to accomplish this feat -- touchdown! 6 points. (And if you managed to do it in one hit -- 25 points -- which was a very rare feat indeed.)

Perhaps you can already guess why I have recounted these two seemingly utterly unrelated stories: one evening while I was on the treadmill playing my invented game of minimizing the number of times I looked down at the dashboard, the memory of "quarter football" --  a game that I hadn't thought about, much less played, in decades -- suddenly flashed through my mind.

I marveled at how the human mind stores information: in quarter football, the challenge is to control your hits of the quarter over the distance of the length of the desk, and therefore you want to hit the quarter neither too hard nor too soft. In my treadmill game, the challenge was to control how often I glanced down at the dashboard over the distance of my daily run, and therefore I wanted to look down neither too frequently nor too infrequently. And this completely abstract connection between the two activities had caused the one to trigger in my mind the decades-old memory of the other.

I find that one of life's greatest pleasures is finding interesting and amusing commonalities between otherwise completely unrelated things.