Daily - Running, Guns, and Programming. Identity crises.

I hate running. I’m terrible at it. I have an awkward form that causes my knees and back to hurt after I do it for any considerable time. I wouldn’t say I have a “runner’s body” by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m also pretty slow, something that makes running suck for a person as overtly competitive as I am. Yesterday, I ran my first half marathon. I finished in the top third of all finishers at my race, and averaged 30-45 seconds per mile faster than my training paces. By all accounts, I did a pretty good job, and I certainly did better than all of the people who decided not to run 13.1 miles yesterday morning. So then why, considering the above, do I still struggle to identify myself as “a runner?”

The Army does a poor job of marksmanship training. When I was issued my service pistol, I sat through classes for hours learning the names of all of the component parts. Then I learned how to assemble and disassemble the weapon. Then I saw several illustrations on what a proper sight picture looks like and where my point of aim needed to be. When I finally took my pistol to the range, I had received all of the marksmanship instruction I was going to get.  I fired at my first targets at the full 40m range, just like I was supposed to. To say I hit a third of my shots would be very generous. For the shots that I missed, I had no way of knowing what errors I was making, so I couldn’t correct them. It was like I had been taught to swim by watching a very detailed DVD on swimming, and then I dove from a boat into the middle of a lake and had to swim my way to shore. Eventually, over many months and attempts, I became an expert marksman with my pistol, but not because my taught experience taught me what I need to know. When I taught my wife to shoot, I had her engage targets at 2m, then at 5m, then at 10m. She became familiar with the fundamentals of her shooting, and every bullet hit the target. We were able to correct her deficiencies while still building confidence that she was a “shooter.” Eventually, she was back at the 40m line shooting with me. The difference between her experience and mine is that she never identified herself as a failure- she hit the target most of the times she shot at it, so she kept trying to learn.  

I’m really zeroing in on an idea that ran through the last section of the diSessa reading. On page 64, diSessa says, “We need especially to remind ourselves that simple and easy uses…not just grand accomplishes, accumulate as part of intellectually revolutions such as new literacies.” If we discount all the miles of training runs I completed, and the race times of everyone except the few elite finishers of my half marathon yesterday, simply because they aren’t spectacular, we fail to recognize and capitalize on 2000-plus imposter “non-runners” supporting and growing the running culture. Us “imposters” may soon drop out due to the lack of community support, and the realization that they will never be an elite runner. Similarly, if we only concern ourselves with beautiful, aesthetic projects, and ignore and discard the simple, possibly flawed creations of beginning programmers, many newcomers who realize they will never create the next Facebook or Windows may decide to quit. By ignoring or discounting their contributions, we are doing an injustice- not just to those fledgling new programmers, but to the computing world altogether.