Running, Math, and Memory

On Saturday I was tired of running at the gym, so I decided to try out the BYU track. Brian came with me and we ran the first few miles together. I had only been to the track once since returning to Provo two and a half years ago, and the moment I walked in the doors I found that the smell of the rubber on the track was one of those smells that has become powerfully tied to memory for me, and it was almost overwhelming. It's not that they were bad memories. In fact, the smell of the track came loaded with all sots of positive student memories. But it all felt strange and anachronistic, and it sort of turned me off of trying to run at the track again.

The sensation was not nearly as strong this time. Maybe it's because my working-adult-at-BYU life has lasted long enough to establish itself against my student-at-BYU life. I feel like my inability to separate the two made the first year back in Provo more difficult than it should have been. Provo was where I'd been a student, and I'd loved being a student at BYU, but it was hard to come back and try to be an adult in the same setting, when I felt like I needed to have moved on. Now I have moved on. My adult life is my adult life, and I can live my adult life even in the place I spent so much time as a student. For much the same reason, I've recently found myself back (occasionally) at the Macy's grocery store I avoided for my first two years because it was my student grocery store. I can do it now, and I don't feel like it's reverting.

But back to the track. One thing I realized while running is that the other reason I haven't revisited the track since that first time is that I don't particularly enjoy running on a track. I actually find it more boring than the treadmill, because even though I just run in place on a treadmill, I can play around with speeds and inclines. Tracks are just endless circles.

When I first started running on the BYU track, way back as a freshman, I felt much the same way, and in those days I didn't even have an iPod to run with. So I never ran very far on the track, and I spent most of my running time thinking about how many laps I had left to run.

After just a few runs at the track, I settled into a routine of running exactly 12 laps. This was partly because 12 laps was just under 2 1/2 miles, and that seemed like a reasonable distance to me. But it was mostly because of fractions. If I ran 13 laps (just over 2 1/2 miles), I was always some-thirteenth of the way through my run: 1/13 of the way through after the first lap, 2/13 after the second lap. 10 and 15 were a little better, but 12 was the best because it had more denominators than any other number between 2 and 3 miles. After the first lap I was 1/12 of the way through, but after the second I was 1/6, and then 1/4, and then 1/3, and two laps later I was halfway done, and could climb back up through more thirds and fourths and sixths.

I didn't think of myself as a math person at that time. I never really had. But still I found something very aesthetically pleasing in the divisibility of the number 12, and if I really think about it, this wasn't inconsistent. I have always counted steps as I climb them, and arranged M&Ms in patterns, and set television volumes to multiples of five because the numbers are just nicer. I think that if I had not believed that being a math person was antithetical to being a creative person (and I always considered myself more creative than mathematical), I might have realized much sooner that there was a lot of beauty in number and mathematics, and that creativity could spring from mathematics just as easily as from music or color or motion.

Today I took my elementary education students to the elementary school across the street to interview second graders about their thinking about multiplication and division problems. When we showed up to the classroom and I asked, "Are all of you excited to do math interviews?" there was much jumping up and down and big smiles and waving hands. There were too many 2nd graders in the class for every pair of students to interview, and so I wound up taking a group of four little boys off to the side by myself, and it was so much fun to watch the four of them clamoring over each other to answer questions. They wanted to show off that they knew how to "do thousands" and I hoped my college students were seeing this too, seeing that math does not start out inherently distasteful to most kids, and that they have the opportunity to cultivate it, rather than quash it.