A few worlds apart

The pursuit for testing the limits of my 150 pounds of meat, bones, cartilages and neurons, often results in me reading pieces like these (and often no ensuing test of limits)

Somewhere, there’s a guy who did it in half the time it took you.  He suffered.  Plasma forced its way into his lungs, causing him to hack on repeat.  He choked down bile halfway through, and ended on his back, pupils dilated to the size of dimes. While you were walking around, telling your friends how hardcore your workout was, Guy Number Two was still collapsed, the prospect of driving home as daunting as climbing K2 during a snowstorm. When he finally stood up, he didn’t say a word. (.. againfaster.com )

or the famous Sydney Olympics ads which celebrated humanity

too many inspiring lines .. for instance the "To be a giant" , "you can't me courage" , "you'll smile, I'll smile" or to best it all the "you're my adversary..." one ..

or the lines of Boorstin

We are.. in search of our limits. We start with a single step, but, none of us stops there. With determination, a step becomes a stride, and a stride becomes a leap. With discipline and desire, we push ourselves to new heights. When we rise to the challenge we discover new strengths, our muscles grow stronger, our minds more agile. The body responds performing its marvelous inner dance of life.  We share a design so magnificient, we can delight in movement itself. To find joy in the struggle to be our best - this is the adventure that defines the human spirit that drives us to the limit. (...)

It always strikes me as to how different a world they portray compared to the world of Sahir and Ghalib and Frost and Sakhi or for that matter how all these worlds are so far apart from the ones of Landau and Euler. Who says we have only one life and one world to live it in.

Moreover, in some sense there is such a sense of physical apodicticity , for lack of a better term,when it comes to all our endeavours physical. Something which is in strange ways analogous to the purity in Ghalib's verses or the palpable realism in Micarelli's Music from a Farther Room or Remy Zero's Somebody Save Me, or the elegance of the Lagrangian or the profundity of the Hamilton's principle.

What better proof is needed to realize how much Human spirit is in effect just a ramification of our guts and blood and bones.

Being moved and titillated by something has the often (unexpressed but definitely not ineffable) side-effect of a subtly noticeable derisive view towards things which appear evidently facile and banal to a purist. I for one, while not even a remote Crossfit purist and  who could not claim to have pushed my limits more than any average guy, find such pursuits as hypertrophy, "gymming", jogging, dieting, other associated efforts to maintain an appearance or a healthy weight ( i am referring to average people like me ..say 15-40 years old?) etc.. somehow very.. well childish to say the least. Of course only as childish as breast implants, "hall tempo", devout priests and authors who write content-less thick volumes.

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Narcissistic miscellany follows (er. i mean other than the obvious exposition above)

I started swimming again, not to mention an ecstatic 45 m dynamic apnea without fins ( read horizontal swim under water for us laymen) -- though a pittance compared to the world record (AIDA) of 213 metres ; see a 200m(with fins) video  or this one ( without fins 25m pool), though ofcourse with a static apnea ( holding your breath) of more than 10 minutes, AIDA records would freak anybody even a bit uncommon -- along with improving my breaststroke and freestyle technique and thereby times. I am obviously way too bad a swimmer. Tom Sietas, you are the Fred Rouhling and Yang Wei of water.

Even though I have run sporadically since April, I realized today to my great relief that my aerobic capacity and lactic acid tolerance seem to have not been affected much.

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1. just now, caught a house fly ( Musca domestica) with my thumb and fingers.. Must have been a drunk one..
2. re-visited facebook after more than 2 years. seems like sticking around for more than 2 weeks is unlikely.