Chaos cliches for runners

A butterfly flaps its wings in London, and thousands of miles away, a tornado sweeps through a Texan trailer park. Coincidence or chaos?

Neither, when was the last time you saw a butterfly in London? That particular example is actually a simple matter of supply and demand. If you want to see squirrels, leave nuts. If you want to see whirling maelstroms of destruction and terror, leave trailers.

But the butterfly wing is an interesting icon as far as cod-chaos theorists are concerned. The most common interpretation of this hyperthetical scenario is that any action, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can produce a benign chain of events, which increases in magnitude to become a malevolent disaster. However, an alternative, and more abstract idea works on the premise that the surface area of a butterfly wing is almost infinitely vast.

It is this premise which relates to tonight's run.

The principle goes as follows: if you were to measure round the edge of a butterfly wing with a tape measure, you would get a measurement, probably no more than a few centimetres. But if you looked through a microscope, you'd see the wing edge isn't as smooth as you thought, but actually much more wiggly. Hence, if you measured it again, but using a microscopically small tape measure, once you added all the ins and outs, the answer would be many times greater than your original. The closer you look, and the smaller your tape measure, the longer the edge becomes, until an almost infinitely tiny tape measure produces a wing edge almost infinitely long. With its outer edge almost infinitely long, it stands to some reason that the surface of the wing contained within the edge would be almost infinitely large.

Now, back to running (bear with me). How many times have you done "that" loop. Down the road, turn left, past the post office, left again past Maggie's house, left at the lights, and home. Maybe two miles, maybe six, but it's a bunch of lines that form a fairly obvious circuit. Well imagine that smooth loop is the edge of your butterfly wing.

Now, how long do you think you could you make that run, staying within the original loop, but just taking a few deliberate wrong turns here and there to make it a bit more wiggly? How much difference would it make to run into that cul-de-sac before the post office, and run all the way round the pavement until you came back out again? Could you double the distance without ever leaving the confines of the original? Without crossing your own path?

If you're trying to increase your mileage, either for fitness, or preparing for your first 10k, or marathon, then this technique works like a charm.

And when you've finally exhausted all the options within the loop, you can start adding a couple of wiggles onto the outside, and be amazed at the difference that can  make.

Victorian headtorch

I ran one of these tonight. I was tired, it was late. I was short on sleep, and long on things to do.

So after an early start, a long day, and a really nice dinner in the company of my wife, and my mother (thanks mum), I came home, put the shoes on, and went out the door, to see if I could randomly "butterfly" an hour's run into something nearer two.

I was quite pleased with the results, and true to my Janathon plan I ran some completely fresh pavements, and even found a few sneaky cut throughs, which I'll have to consider for other ventures.

It didn't end up looking like a butterfly wing, or the Norwegian coastline, a prehistoric fern, or anything remotely fractal or nerdy. But I'm fairly confident that no Texans were harmed in the process.


Summary:
Today: 12.2 miles, 1:46 hrs, 1711 cals
January: 178.1 miles, 26:38 hrs, 23820 cals