On the run

Race on Tuesday, March 18 . Race on Friday, March 21 .   Already March 21, always relates the date to the spring equinox, for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, although the equinox was yesterday this year. I started thinking about astronomical cycles and how living beings respond to them. For example, just a few days ago, the Palo Verdes began to flower, and buds are also starting to appear on the desert Cardos. But suddenly a thought occurred to me... HOW THINGS OCCUR TO ME WHEN I'M RUNNING. I mean, it's not unusual that in my daily life, I start wandering, on the terrace of the house, or when I'm in the pool it happens to me, Rebeca laughs at me a lot when she sees me talking to myself. But when I run especially long runs, it doesn't fail. Several reasons come to mind, for starters it may be that the rhythmic nature of running induces a meditative state, allowing the mind to flow. Something also important to me is the variety of landscapes that I pass t...

  Race on Wednesday, March 11 Race on Friday, March 14 Yesterday, Rebecca asked me if I would make a pozole on the weekend. Obviously, I answered without thinking, "YES! I love pozole." So today, when I had a long run again, at some point I started to wander thinking about pozole and that led me to think about corn and its domestication. If we compare any living being that we have domesticated with its closest wild relative we will see many changes, in size, shape, color, amount of fat or protein, docility, many differences. But it is always easy to identify the wild form from which domestication began. Not in corn, for a long time it was a mystery where corn came from, there is no wild plant that looks like it. In Mexico and Central America, there is a type of herbs, called teosinte or teosintle, small bushes, with many branches and some spikes. with very few grains covered by a very hard crust, nothing like corn. It turned out that they were the closest relatives to corn, a...

Tuesday race, March 4 Friday race, March 7 Today I had a long run, the longest of 2025, 16.24 km, geting ready for the Guaymas Half Marathon, at the end of April. So taking a breath, to have enough oxygen to develop physical activity. That's where I started to think, almost no one thinks about it, life survived oxygen. When the first living beings emerged on Earth, the atmosphere was totally different from what it is today. Composed of hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonium, among the main gases, and no oxygen. The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide caused, due to the greenhouse effect, temperatures to remain high and, in addition, the oceans to be acidic, since when carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid. About 2.8 billion years ago, some bugs found how to produce the energy they required from sunlight and carbon dioxide, using a pigment that gave them a blue-green color, producing carbohydrates, rich in energy and free oxygen. The first photosynthe...