Tuesday, August 2, 2016

What Type of Eyes Do You Have?

Last weekend I got up early (for me) to go for my "sweat-once-a-day" walk before the current heatwave made my day too uncomfortable. Rather than go to a track or a trail or some other  "official" running venue, I decided a better route would be to wander around the few roads of my neighborhood. I left my house at 6am.

Let me describe the geography a bit to put some of this into context. I live on a dead end street. It dead-ends into a county park which focuses on a 1800s era restoration village. They recently added a museum. There are only three streets in my neighborhood with a total of about 30 houses.

This county park was hosting a Tough Mudder last weekend (why a restoration village was hosting a Tough Mudder was fodder for many of the local newspapers so I won't go into that here). There was no athlete parking at the facility, instead the athlete's parked a few miles away with bus transport to the race site. Several enterprising athletes (and their support teams) decided a better option was to park as close as possible to the venue and walk it in. Since the closest place to park was my street, at 6am there was a traffic jam on my block with some athletes trying to park and others heading to the site. I decided to join those athletes and walk to the site as my daily walk.

Surrounded by athletes on their way to the race site, I initially felt a little like a poseur. I looked at the folks walking with me. I noticed and recognized the look in their eyes.

A guy who worked with me once said that people had one of two types of eyes and you can tell a lot about their personality based on which type of eyes they had. The first type of eyes are typical of raptors, they are focused ahead, on prey, and are ready to be aggressive. The animals with these type of eyes are ready to attack. The second type of eyes are the opposite. This second type of eyes is typical of bunny rabbits, large, constantly looking behind them, passive, yet ready to flee. Animals with these eyes are defensive.

Many of the athletes had raptor eyes, A few had bunny eyes. I used to have raptor eyes. Now, I don't know.

This reminded me of Rocky III and the "Eye of the Tiger." Apollo's speech (edited a bit) was:

"You lost your edge. All right, you were all messed up in but the truth is you didn’t look hungry. You had that eye of the tiger, man, the edge. And now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning. You know what I mean?"

I know what he means.

What kind of eyes do you have?