Racing Ballona Creek

When I lived nearer the concrete canal, I ran there late at night.  Training for a marathon meant running 80 miles each week along the uniform banks of Ballona Creek, and sometimes this became monotonous.

Some chill nights a magical event occurred.  Flying and gliding silently on the flicking knotted wood legs of the long distance runner a companion joined me.  Orange street light sprinkled across black water to reveal a long slender wave spanning the canal, and moving upstream.

It’s a phenomenon called a soliton.  John Scott Russell, an English naval engineer from the 19th century, first described the phenomenon.  He described a single wave moving upstream in a calm English canal at 8 or 9 mph.  He chased the wave down on horseback and followed it for a short distance before he lost it.

The upstream waves on Ballona Creek traveled at a rate of 10 or 11 mph.  That’s just a hair faster than the “long slow distance” pace I rolled at.  So I would pick up the pace and race the waves for a few miles, before turning home.

This kind of soliton, a wave of translation,  thrives in an abstract setting.  You won’t find them in babbling mountain streams, the convoluted twists of the Colorado, or the torrential avalanche of water that rushes down Ballona during LA rainstorms.  You can produce them in abstraction of the laboratory, or find them in the laboratory we have impressed on the world where we’ve channelized creeks and straightened rivers.

Racing my abstract companion home, I noted that my life had become an abstraction.  A year ago I trained with my teammates toward the concrete goal of racing 8 kilometers and 800 meters faster.  I usually studied math, but sometimes I studied other topics, and I lived with 3 housemates.  Now I trained alone for abstract improvement.  I lived alone, and I studied pure Mathematics exclusively.

The abstracted concrete of Ballona inspired me to pause the abstract, and restore some of the concrete of my life.  Treating a road, or a path, or a career path – items your mind has abstracted as purely means for ends – as a concrete experience is revolting to the task optimizing brain.

Tell your brain to fuck off.  Concrete is good for you.

Note: I left the above as a comment on Will Campbell’s blog a few months ago.We think of roads and trails differently – one as a means for travel, and the other as an experience.  There is no difference: getting to your job, party, class – getting to your life – is your life.  LA’s concrete is your life, not simply a way to it.

Find your connection with it.