Concrete is Evil

As a runner, I notice certain facts of life that I didn't before. Take water for instance. If you're sitting in an air-conditioned office all day, you can get away without much hydration. It won't affect you a terrible lot. Now say you're running a three-hour marathon. Big difference. Don't drink your H₂O and you're guaranteed to see (and run into) many strange things, including but not limited to: pink elephants, water buffaloes, and zombies (the latter are actually your fellow runners, but they appear malicious and hungry when viewed through the dehydration reality field, DRF for short).

But I'm not writing about water today. Topic? Paving surfaces. If you're driving in a car, you probably don't really care if the State decided to use concrete, asphalt, gravel, or dirt. It just doesn't affect your life in a personal way. Ditto with shoulder width. Hey, as long as you've got a 12-foot wide lane to drive in, you could care less about the space between the white line and the edge. Besides, most municipalites are thoughtful enough to provide pedestrians with a thick slab of concrete to walk on. The uninformed refer to this as a sidewalk. This term is too innocuous for me.

Let me reiterate. Many roads don't supply a shoulder, so the only safe place for a runner is the... thick slab of concrete. This is very important. Remember: sidewalk = thick slab of concrete.

See, concrete is evil. It doesn't matter how hard you pound the stuff, it won't budge, dent, or collapse in any way. It also lasts forever, which is probably why it's such a popular building material for bridges, skyscrapers, bomb shelters, and other structures you want to stay around for a long time.

Here's the catch though: the law of conservation of energy. For example, when you push on a wall, the wall pushes back on you with equal force. See how that works? Energy is conserved. Same with sitting in a chair. Gravity pushes you into the chair, and the chair pushes you up with equal force. Nobody moves, nobody wins (unless the chair breaks).

Okay, with the rudimentaries out of the way, let's look at what happens when you run on grass. Sure, some of the downward energy is reflected back upwards (which is good, otherwise you'd fall through the ground), but a lot is absorbed and diffracted by the grass and (presumably) soft dirt underneath. Your leg joints and muscles (read "shock absorbers") like this, as there's less energy that they have to absorb after each footstrike.

You know what's coming next. Concrete, that evil paving-surface-from-the-abyss. When you run on concrete, just about all the energy hitting the ground gets reflected back to you. Don't get me wrong, at first it's a pleasant experience. Properly poured concrete is a very stable, grippy surface that makes running easy. Too easy. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience, but certain runners take this stable surface and start running faster, harder, and effectively grind their legs into dust without noticing. Energy isn't the only thing that's conserved. Pain is too. Not that I have anything against Newton, but think he should have annotated his findings with notes on the physiological impacts of his laws.

So yeah, I'm sitting here in pain. My feet hate me, my calf muscles too. I got 12 miles into the run before my body's self-flagellation protection mechanism forced me to slow to a walk. I'm going to need aqua-jogging therapy for a month. Oh well, some lessons are harder than others. Zing!