The Curse of Springtime
As a professional philosopher, I am not inclined to believe in curses. However, my experiences over the years have convinced me that I am the victim of what I call the Curse of Springtime. As far as I know, this curse is limited to me and I do not want anyone to have the impression that I regard Springtime Tallahassee in a negative light. Here is the tale of the curse.
For runners, the most important part of Springtime is the Springtime 10K (and now the 5K). Since I moved to Tallahassee in 1993 I have had something bad happen right before or during the race. Some examples: one year I had a horrible sinus infection. Another year I had my first ever muscle pull. Yet another year I was kicking the kickstand of my Yamaha, slipped and fell-thus injuring my back. 2008 saw the most powerful manifestation of the curse.
On the Thursday before the race, my skylight started leaking. So, I (stupidly) went up to fix it. When I was coming down, the ladder shot out from under me. I landed badly and suffered a full quadriceps tendon tear that took me out of running for months. When Springtime rolled around in 2009 I believed that the curse might kill me and I was extra cautious. The curse seemed to have spent most of its energy on that injury, because although the curse did strike, it was minor. But, the curse continued: I would either get sick or injured soon before the race, or suffer and injury during the race. This year, 2017, was no exception. My knees and right foot started bothering me a week before the race and although I rested up and took care of myself, I was unable to run on Thursday. I hobbled through the 10K on Saturday, cursing the curse.
Since I teach critical thinking, I have carefully considered the Curse of Springtime and have found it makes a good example for applying methods of causal reasoning. I started with the obvious, considering that I was falling victim to the classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”). This fallacy occurs when it is uncritically assumed that because B follows A, that A must be the cause of B. To infer just because I always have something bad happen as Springtime arrives that Springtime is causing it would be to fall into this fallacy. To avoid this fallacy, I would need to sort out a possible causal mechanism—mere correlation is not causation.
One thing that might explain some of the injuries and illnesses is the fact that the race occurs at the same time each year. By the time Springtime rolls around, I have been racing hard since January and training hard as well—so it could be that I am always worn out at this time of year. As such, I would be at peak injury and illness vulnerability. On this hypothesis, there is no Curse—I just get worn down at the same time each year because I have the same sort of schedule each year. However, this explanation does not account for all the incidents—as noted above, I have also suffered injuries that had nothing to do with running, such as falls. Also, sometimes I am healthy and injury free before the race, then have something bad happen in the race itself. As such, the challenge is to find an explanation that accounts for all the adverse events.
It is certainly worth considering that while the injuries and illnesses can be explained as noted above, the rest of the incidents are mere coincidences: it just so happens that when I am not otherwise ill or injured, something has happened. While improbable, this is not impossible. That is, it is not beyond the realm of possibility for random things to always happen for the same race year after year.
It is also worth considering that it only seems that there is a curse because I am ignoring the other bad races I have and considering only the bad Springtime races. If I have many bad races each year, it would not be unusual for Springtime to be consistently bad. Fortunately, I have records of all my races and can look at it objectively: while I do have some other bad races, Springtime is unique in that something bad has happened every year. The same is not true of any other races. As such, I do not seem to be falling into a sort of Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy by only considering the Springtime race data and not all my race data.
There is certainly the possibility that the Curse of Springtime is psychological: because I think something bad will happen it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alternatively, it could be that because I expect something bad to happen, I carefully search for bad things and overestimate their badness, thus falling into the mistake of confirmation bias: Springtime seems cursed because I am actively searching for evidence of the curse and interpreting events in a way that support the curse hypothesis. This is certainly a possibility and perhaps any race could appear cursed if one spent enough effort seeking evidence of an alleged curse. That said, there is no such consistent occurrence of unfortunate events for any other race, even those that I have run every year since I moved here. This inclines me to believe that there is some causal mechanism at play here. Or a curse. But, I am aware of the vagaries of chance and it could simply be an unfortunate set of coincidences that every Springtime since 1994 has seemed cursed. But, perhaps in 2018 everything will go well and I can dismiss my belief in the curse as mere superstition. Unless the curse kills me then. You know, because curse.
A Philosopher's Blog 
leave a comment