Stepping on Tiny Objects and Running Supercomputers

When I'm tooling along, I sometimes get lost in the incredible, mind-bending realization that my mind is making these incredible calculations about where my foot is going to land next. There's a tree root eight feet yonder. No worries. My I'm landing five inches shy of it. And I do. Wow. How did I know that? Supercomputer at work, I'm telling you.

But sometimes my lil' noggin goes to work turning calculations purely for entertainment purposes. Sometimes when I'm walking along the sidewalk, I try to time my steps so the toe of my shoes hit exactly on the edge of the crack (thereby protecting my mother's back while generating a little suspense at the same time). I really do it just to see if I can, and it's not easy to get it exactly right, but I can get within four or five inches every time.

Another odd little thing I do is step on tiny objects I see on the trail. Sometimes I do it to see if I can, but other times it's just to see what will happen. I was really curious about what kind of noise a bottle cap I saw on the trail this morning would make if I clipped the edge of it. I did, and it made the exact sound I predicted in my head. It was kind of eerie. How did I know all that. Supercomputer.

One thing my Deep Blue of a brain can't do, however, is make myself go much faster when I start to crash. There seems to be some kind of automatic slow mode it makes my body go into when I start to go into distress, which happens all the time, as going into distress is the very purpose and nature of running! Physiologists say we can milk a lot more performance out of our bodies than our brain lets us milk. Then again, it can hit get my foot to clip the exact edge of a 3/4-inch bottle cap at 11 miles per hour on a gravel trail. Maybe it knows something about max performance we haven't figured out yet.