The Logic of Long Distance

Running as Intimacy

2012-02-21T23:20:00.009-06:00

"Modern man is well aware of the obvious forms of repression and social affliction. Poverty, prejudice, and violence take their daily toll. We are less aware, however, of more subtle forms of dehumanization, namely, those brought on by the erosion of a genuinely human environment in aesthetic terms. ... We refer here not to the world of art but to the drama of our doing, undoing, celebrating, and suffering that comprises the rhythm of everyday ordinary living. Too often this rhythm is submerged in a bland environment, rendering us insensitive to differences, horizons, and crises. In time, we drift through life without variety or intimacy."
--John McDermott, "Feeling as Insight"

I resemble this person.

McDermott wrote these words in 1973, three years before I was born. There are aspects of the expression of his idea that seem dated now. The notion of repression has fallen out of favor. We are perhaps more skeptical now of appeals to the "genuinely human," and it is even hard to imagine what might be meant by "everyday ordinary living." Has a genuinely human environment ever existed? Are we really in decline as a culture--and who gets to make these evaluations? Finally, is the great threat to aesthetic experience blandness--or is it the hyper-stimulation of a culture that is stuck in overdrive?

Beyond these moments of difference between 1973 and today, what interests me about this small paragraph is the distinction McDermott draws between the more easily recognized but more remote problems of political life and more subtle and intimate problems in our personal environments that may go unseen but affect us just as deeply.

These are anxious times, indeed, and our anxieties are pitched at a national, even global level. There's the job market and foreign wars and rising gas prices. There's a presidential horse race that seems intent on dredging up every issue that has divided us over the last umpteen years just to see if it's possible to make every single American the enemy of every single other American. It's true that "poverty, prejudice, and violence take their daily toll," and I imagine that even if you are--like me--somewhat insulated from that toll, the ongoing fucked-upness of life bothers you and nags at you. Each of these issues affects us in some way, but it is hard to grasp exactly how and to what extent these huge and overwhelming problems are related to the smaller problems I have as a person just trying to, well, live.

What is a human being is supposed to do in the face of all this? Most of the time I content myself with the idea that I'm doing enough in life if I've got something to eat and something to do and I'm putting something away for a future day. But there come moments--like this one, I guess--when I start to wonder: is that story what keeps you drifting through life? Isn't there some deeper rhythm that I'm supposed to be grasping now? Have I grown indifferent to possible differences in my own way of living? Should the horizons of my life be shifted? Is there something more to life than eating and crapping and showing up for work and putting money away in retirement accounts? And if so, what the hell is it and how would I know it if I saw it?

There is something in the rhythm of life today--its highly charged, rapidly accelerating, frenetic attention span--that feels simply manic. It's as if we are trying to squeeze every ounce of energy out of our bodies and minds. We get on the internet, and it carries our minds from site to site to site, without ever offering the possibility of arrival at any single place. And so, we glance off of the issues of the day, ever onward: the economy, global warming, presidential politics, Greek debt, Whitney Houston, Jeremy Lin... tweeting and twittering and reading and processing and chattering and arguing without every really touching ground. Is it because if we touch ground, the persistent and kinda horrible questions of the preceding paragraph might rise up and grab us by the throat and demand an answer?

We used to worry that we would be annihilated by someone pushing the button.
Now we annihilate ourselves, slowly, quietly, and much less dramatically through the clicking of a mouse.

Um, maybe. I'll just kinda let that question speak for itself. At any rate, over time, after relentless clicking and moving from site to site, from meme to meme we find ourselves drifting through life without any intimate connection to it. Like the internet, we become everywhere and nowhere, distracted. The media becomes the message: click, click, click, reload. This sort of life is not bland because it is filled with infinite variety and infinite perspective, but the purity of that variety and the pace at which it comes strips it of intimacy. In the same way that a cup of coffee can cure your awareness of your boredom by amplifying your awareness of other things, this sort of life mutes the awareness of life by filling life with awareness of its infinite dimensions.

Perhaps, like all manias that do not end in insanity, this distraction is a transitional stage, a sort of wild release of energy that has been stored up for too long. It's as if we are daring life to come back to us, to make itself known. We want to see if it can still shock us and slap us. Maybe if we get shook down, something better, realer, calmer, more centered will coming down the pike. Let's hope.

Until then, we have to recreate intimacy with life in conscious practices of care. We have to fake it until we make it.

We runners know one of these practices. Our runs have beginnings, middles, and ends. We begin sorta tight and awkward. In the middle we are loose and flowing. By the end, we are tired and headed for home. It's a simple and aesthetically pleasing unity. The rhythms of the run are intimate. We feel them directly in our organs, through our bones. These rhythms gather our attention and hold it during that time, which is what allows us to notice the experience of running as complete and unified.

I can't help but be bothered, though, by one problem. Isn't the relief from distraction that the run offers us simply another distraction? Running offers aesthetic unity, but is the only consequence of that unity the ability to bear a few more hours of the distracted maelstrom of contemporary life?

What do the things I do as a runner have to do with the rest of my life? This is the sort of question that makes me want to browse my favorites, click reload, or, if I have time and energy, head on down the road for another, yes another, run.

Confidence

2012-02-15T23:03:00.004-06:00

Last October, I promised that I would be smarter. Tired of feeling somewhat stagnant in my training and racing, with nothing much to lose since I hadn't been improving much, I decided to move away from the concentration on loads of easy mileage and tempos. You can read the linked post for details, but basically instead of thinking of my training in terms of maximizing work, I decided to think of it in terms of maximizing the right kinds of stimuli.

I also have been working with a coach to get some distance from my own training and basically give me the confidence I needed to trust my training, to back off at times and to push harder at the right moment.

Since then, I've been running less (50-60mpw, no runs longer than 10-12 miles) and doing different sorts of workouts, with an emphasis on practicing fast paces rather than the kind of heavy aerobic tempoing that I'd been doing in the past.

This training has worked well for me. I feel sharper and more race-ready when I get to the line. I spend very little time grinding on tired legs. I've got more energy during the day and more excitement about racing. Sure, I kinda screwed up my first indoor race by freaking out about the intensity of it all. But Friday night, in my second indoor race, I was able to run 15:51 for 5k off of an opening 4:53 mile (I was in a faster heat and came through the mile in last place!) Though I ran 15:49 on an outdoor track in June of 2010, this was at least an equivalent performance. And--this is the good news--unlike in 2010, I don't feel like I am training at the limit, and I am hopeful that I can take more time off this spring.

As you know, the point of this blog is to try to do some meta-cognizing about running and training, and the philosopher in me is tempted to draw general conclusions from this small success. I could make some sort of statement about how intelligent training is better than just training hard. Part of me wants to write a controversial piece about how maybe all of this hoopla about high mileage is overblown. My own pride wants me to think that I've made some real breakthroughs and have actually gotten smarter and know more about the right way to train. Heck, some of these things may even be true.

I don't want to go there, though. I'll leave the training advice to the actual experts for once. I am less interested than ever about being right about training. Or being right at all. I want to talk about something else.

Today I ran the most intense workout I've done in years. It was simple and short: 2 x 2400m cutdown, each 800 slightly faster than the one before. The last 800 of each piece was hard, and it put me in this mental place that I had kinda forgotten about somehow in the grind of training, over the last few years.

I'm not sure I know how to describe this place, so bear with me a bit. Maybe the best way to get at it is to begin where my bad race left off, with the discussion of fear. That fear came back in the middle of my 5000 on Friday, but I reacted differently to it. I was able to acknowledge it, then ignore it, and just keep running. I was indifferent. That's the space I am talking about. I guess the word we have for that indifferent space is "confidence."

I hesitate to even use the concept of confidence because it is a word that is overused and under-analyzed. Confidence is not about ego. It's not cultivated through attention and praise. Its most basic meaning is simply "trust," as in the expression "take someone into your confidence." This indifferent place I went today in the workout, the place I found in the middle of the race on Friday, was a place of trust. Even if it hurt and although the effort was hard, I simply trusted that I could keep going, that I could execute.

These last four months of training and racing have been--more than anything else--about developing this trust, believing not just that I can train harder (anyone can do that), but that I can race faster, that I can be faster. If we want to give birth to new capacities, if we want to make ourselves anew, if we want to become better than we were before, we have to put in the work, that's for sure. But that hard work means nothing without the confidence to reap the results. In fact, the work can even blind us to our own power of trust--we want the work to make us faster, when actually it is something else that shifts things.

Although the elites can make it look easy, running faster is never easier. We get in better shape, sure. But what that shape allows us to do is to reach higher levels of intensity and to sustain them. It's never easier. It's harder, even if you are fitter. But if you want it enough, if you are fit enough, if you are strong enough... if you trust yourself enough to handle all those multiplying ifs, then something happens.

The shift is this: it is harder, but you are tougher. So you take it.

Run hard, turn left.

2012-02-08T18:50:00.001-06:00

Sometimes it's simple.

Running as Romanticism

2012-02-06T18:23:00.004-06:00

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored.

"In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete."

--Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion II

Runners, in general, are romantics.

We value emotion over calculation, aesthetic feeling over controlled inquiry, messiness over clarity, epiphany over argument, transcendence over facts, insight over pragmatism.

Running and racing is a way of leaving the ordinary behind. To speak romantically, we transcend the ordinary by plunging deeper into it, finding out what the limit is through surpassing it. Running and racing gives us a chance to talk about what we think matters: heart and effort, courage and fear, hope, suffering, and determination.

We take to heart Quixote's epitaph: "For if he like a madman lived, / At least he like a wise one died."

We believe in wasted energy, so long as it is energetic. Running in circles is no flaw or fallacy, so long as you do it relentlessly.

We chase mirages.

We believe in "knacks" and "deep sympathetic listening," in unlocking hidden stores of power.

Like Henry Miller, though it is not our forte, we are willing to spend long hours mapping out a plan of procedure, weighing the pros and cons of just about anything, scheming and scheduling and dreaming. Of course, these plans, these "tentative working programs," are hardly ever carried out. They are more like incantations or offerings to the running gods, "visualizing our dreams in a cosmogenic manner." Trying to unlock it. Unlock what?

Peter Snell described it as "running without restraint."

Hunter S. Thompson's metaphysical motorcycle perhaps comes closer:

But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In.

Like Catholics with their rosaries, we go through the motions and the rituals, bead by bead: tempo, interval, long run, easy run. We stay at them, hoping that our piety will be rewarded with a glimpse of what? -- that which cannot be seen or articulated, but can only be felt.

Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment idea that the Age of Reason was upon us. It was an expression of the fear that everything would be worked out, schematized, organized, and implemented like universal health care, say, or democracy in Afghanistan. It resisted the industrialization and mechanization of processes. It was cynical of the whole, the social good, more concerned with flashes of genius and lines of poetry than with peace and goodwill. It was a flight away from the hardness of the world into the softness of imagination. It glorified wonder, horror, loneliness, fear, power, weather, chaos, boredom, animality, joy, and absurdity.

Running allows us access to the romantic mood. It is an escape from the ordinary understood world. But here's the thing. When we are in that flow of the romantic mood, that escape from the world becomes more than an escape. It reveals the world as having worlds-within-worlds, loosely connected realities-within-realities. At least while we run, the escape from reality becomes just as real as the reality escaped. It becomes reality-escaped.

Wallace Stevens was talking about poetry, but if running could write, it would say the same thing:

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.

Hard black road beneath our feet, torn breath, "the poem of pure reality."

"The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life."

Race Recap: My first college track meet in 13 years

2012-01-28T19:27:00.007-06:00

"Runners set!"

The gun fired quicker than I thought it would, and the guys jumped out at the line. I was on the outside edge of the track, hip number 11. Perfect position, I realized, as we rounded the first curve. I stayed out, running free, steering clear of the spikes, feeling the fellows jostling behind me.

Around we moved as a tight mass, settling quickly into a rhythm. As we entered the second lap, a runner moved around me on my right and forced me down into the rail. By the end of the fourth curve, we had ourselves more or less organized, just in time for the quarter split: 72.. 73...

Perfect, I thought. I assumed we were right on 5-flat pace, since everything goes out a bit quicker then settles. I checked my breathing: good, even. The legs felt great. Everything was smooth. Next quarter: 2:27... 2:28...

I had forgotten one thing since the last time I had been in this situation. Perhaps I can be forgiven because some of the kids I was running against were 5 years old the last time that I ran in a race like this. In track, you don't get to do what you want to do. You have to race the pace that is set. More than that: you have to make yourself a part of this barely formed organism that is tightly hurtling itself around this little track. You sit in there, and you lose yourself in the mass. This is the middle of the race. It's the only thing you can do.

I actually did this well at first. I ran instinctively and let the group carry me. It was remarkably easy. We floated through 1200 in 3:43 before I had a thought of my own.

Then, we approached the mile. The meet was indoors at ETSU's oversized track. It's 280 meters, and of course it would be impossible to get splits on your own, but they had a couple of guys who were holding a neon sign and reading out splits every 400m at various stages on the track. As we rounded what must have been about the 10th curve, I saw them coming into view, and I made my first mistake: I thought. I thought, "What if this is too fast?" 4:56... 4:57...

In a road race, you make adjustments off the pace, especially in a podunk road race where there is no such thing as a pack, just a few scattered skinny guys you know and train with all the time. You hear the pace at the mile, and you respond: okay, out too fast, or out too slow. You make choices, and these choices have nothing strategic about them: you simply try to stay calm, relaxed, and running within yourself. You aren't a part of a loosely-bound organism skittering tightly around a 280 meter oval. You are a normal human being, and you think like one.

Thinking, in the middle of a track race, is a HUGE mistake. It only separates you from the organism. [Side note, don't be confused: Thinking is awesome at the end of the race, if you can still muster it, because that's when the organism must be separated--and better that you do the separating.]

I heard that split, and I made my second mistake. I thought: "It doesn't matter if they go, I'll back off a bit and pick up the pieces. 4:57 is a little hot." So, I let the little organism of tightly packed, non thinking, runners running go, and as soon as I did I found myself totally and utterly alone.

There is no lonelier thing than a runner who has just lost contact from the pack. This is why you hear coaches screaming at their runners: "Don't lose contact!!!" They know it is death. So, there I was, alone. I'd been amputated from the organism. Worse: I'd amputated myself.

Almost immediately--immediately, actually--I was useless. A sensation rose up the back of my spine and clutched me between the shoulderblades. It yanked me off kilter, and suddenly instead of the smoothly striking, gently gliding running machine that I had been, I was a hunched and pinched and struggling body. Just up there, easing away, was the organism. It was strength, grace, beauty.

Me, I was left with that sensation--that icy clutch right at the base of my neck, that tightness in my chest. That was fear itself, the primitive sort of emotion that is bred into us by the wolves that chase the pack, looking for stragglers. To be alone, in the chase, is to be eaten.

So, there I was, literally straggling around the track, running not from strength and power, but out of fear and loathing. Over the course of a half a mile, I'd gone from smooth 75s to grinding 80s. I had no peripheral vision, no relaxation. The lap counter swung into view. 10 fucking laps to go.

I dropped out.

Well, I wanted to drop out about as bad as I've wanted anything. I wanted a hole in the middle of the track to open up and swallow me. But no hole opened up. I wanted to drop out SO BAD, but I ran on. Because there are no fucking wolves. Because it's just a goddamn indoor track meet. Because nobody gives a shit about running 75 second quarters except me.

We've all been there--the last half of a bad race. These are its qualities: 1) Shame--cause really I've given up on racing; I'm just running because I'm too proud to quit, and what kind of pride is that? 2) Strangling, staggering fear--we've already touched on this. 3) Disappointment tinged with self-pity--stupid body, stupid mind, why did you betray me? 4) The normal pain of running your balls off--but we are used to that and even sometimes love it.

So, I staggered on. I told myself that I must be running 6 minute miles, but of course that was just the stupid pity talking. Let the record show: mile 2 was 5:20, mile 3 was 5:27ish. Total time was 16:22.

Next Saturday, there's a 3000 at TSU. I just sent an email to the coach to see if I can get in. Yeah, the race today was a shitty race. Yeah, I'm kinda embarrassed about my time. Yeah, it was a waste of a drive and a hotel room and all of that.

But I tasted the FEAR.

And if I can conquer that...

Running as Aesthetic Rebellion

2012-01-23T23:28:00.005-06:00

Schiller was the only handsome philosopher.

"We know that man is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively spirit. Accordingly, beauty, as the consummation of humanity, can be neither exclusively mere life, as has been asserted by sharp-sighted observers, who kept too close to the testimony of experience, and to which the taste of time would gladly degrade it; Nor can beauty be merely form, as has been judged by speculative sophists, who departed too far from experience, and by philosophic artists, who were led too much by the necessity of art explaining beauty; it is rather the common object of both impulses, that is, of the play instinct."
--Schiller, "Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man"

"As in Puritan New England, grace was not blithely attained. A believer--a runner--earned it by losing toenails and training down to bone and muscle, just as the Puritans formed calluses on their knees from praying. No one made a cent from their strenuous efforts. The running life, like the spiritual life, was its own reward."
--John Brandt, The Duel in the Sun

Runners know matter: body, flesh, sweat, gristle, blood, muscle, and bone.

Runners know spirit: will, desire, pain, hope, fear, and joy.

Experience comes, shot at us, a muddled blend of both matter and spirit. Though it is mixed thoroughly in its primary apprehension, if we turn our attention to it, we can trace it back to these two origins, neatly categorize it. Schiller had an idea that the task of education was to keep these two types of experience in play. He called this harmonizing play beauty, and he thought that it was the highest end of human affairs, the fundamental way of evaluating experience.

Positive experiences allow us to harmonize matter and spirit; they are beautiful and educative. Negative experiences create discord and antagonism between matter and spirit; they are ugly and miseducative.

This, for Schiller, is what life is all about: spirit, matter, play, harmony, beauty, education.

At the present moment, 2012, with the economy as it is, politicians and their acolytes yapping at each other, the news stations and the advertisers stirring up our jangled nerves, social media reminding us just how little we have in common with our "friends," thinking of life in terms of harmony and play seems totally out of place. The idea of beauty itself is almost impossible to square with our present condition.

"The purpose of mankind is beauty?" "The harmony of spirit and matter in play?" Please. To paraphrase one of the great philosophers of our day: "How's that spiritey-mattery stuff workin' out for ya?"

It's an ugly moment, socially.

The fact that Schiller's thoughts are so out of whack with our current ways of thinking is why it is important to read him and other philosophers. These untimely and out of place thinkers give us the courage to think against the grain of our current moment, to create something new.

If we follow Schiller's lead, we turn away from the things that we are told are most important. Apart from politics, taxes, money, and power, we find small moments of beauty scattered about. A sparrow in the wind. The smell of a home-cooked meal. An unexpected kiss or glance.

Brandt writes that "the running life, like the spiritual life, is its own reward." He gives us imagery of the harmonious unity that the runner creates out of the material and spiritual selves. The body, trained down to essentials, mirrors and reflects the soul, trained down to essentials.

It sounds odd, at first, to say such things about this constant scampering down the road. But runners know matter and runners know spirit. They know them together: body, will, flesh, desire, sweat, pain, gristle, hope, blood, fear, muscle, joy, and bone.

If that's the case, then in these times you might think of running as a type of civil disobedience, a rebellious practice of education against the dominant forces of mis-education. Running is energy dissipated not for money or power or privilege, but for beauty. Like reading Schiller, it's hard to explain the practical value of running in a world that seems deadset on winners and losers, discord, chaos, and strife. Its practical value is play--the impractical grace of beauty.

Stride by stride, effort by effort, we stitch the two sides of experience together, matter and spirit. We ride, we flow -- that's play; that's grace; that's beauty. Despite the politicians, the economy, the wild and alienated swirl of contemporary life, despite the fact that everyone tells us we ought to be doing something more productive with our lives, we end up making time to play.

We can't help it. It's called being a human.

Ryan Hall, Tim Tebow, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-16T17:23:00.009-06:00

"Men move between extremes. They conceive of themselves as gods, or feign a powerful and cunning god as an ally who bends the world to do their bidding and meet their wishes. Disillusioned, they disown the world that disappoints them; and hugging ideals to themselves as their possession, stand in haughty aloofness apart from the hard course of events that pays so little heed to our hopes and aspirations. But a mind that has opened itself to experience and that has ripened through its discipline knows its own littleness and impotencies; it knows that its wishes and acknowledgments are not final measures of the universe which in knowledge or in conduct, and hence are, in the end, transient. But it also knows that its juvenile assumption of power and achievement is not a dream to be wholly forgotten. It implies a unity with the universe that is to be preserved. This belief, and the effort of thought and struggle which it inspires, are also the doing of the universe, and they in some way, however slight, carry the universe forward. A chastened sense of our importance, apprehension that it is not a yardstick by which we measure the whole, is consistent with the belief that we and our endeavors are significant not only for themselves but in the whole."

--John Dewey, "Existence, Value, and Criticism" from Experience and Nature

Much ink has been spilled lately on the role of religion in sports. The entire country, it seems, has been transfixed by Tim Tebow, as he marched onward in the NFL playoffs. Through his play, demeanor, and public pronouncements of faith, Mr. Tebow has asked us all to consider such strange questions as whether or not God takes sides in football games, whether religious faith can make you a better athlete, what role religion ought to play in public life, and exactly how much credit we should give (or take away) from Tebow for so boldly proclaiming his faith in our increasingly secular and pluralistic culture.

Before Tebow hit the NFL, we few followers of the sport of distance running already had our Tebow. Ryan Hall and Tim Tebow seem to carry themselves similarly. After he finished 2nd in Saturday's marathon trials, he talked about how God was with him for every step of the race. Hall left his coach, Terrence Mahon, and now talks about waking up in the middle of the night inspired by the insights that God has given him into his training.

It's important to remember that there have been a lot of great athletes who have reached the pinnacle of their sports without the same sort of evangelical zeal. History shows that this sort of open faith is unnecessary for athletic success. However, both Hall and Tebow are so convinced that their faith is the key to their performance that it is hard not to take their personal conviction seriously. The question they pose to us is simple, but stunning: "Would I be a better athlete--not to mention a better person--if I had the same sort of religious faith that Hall and Tebow did?" Both Hall and Tebow basically answer in all their words and actions, yes. They see their role as celebrities as a platform given to them by God in order to celebrate him and spread his messages.

Today we also celebrate a man who put his faith into action, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Reflecting a bit on his life, remembering the ends to which he put his religious belief, helps to put the question that Hall and Tebow pose to us in perspective. While both Tebow and Hall contribute to charity and practice good works, King took the lessons of Christianity to heart in a more profound way, focusing not on charity but on social justice. While Tebow and Hall speak eloquently of the power that God gives them in their personal lives and as they practice their professional sports, King preferred to emphasize the duties that God imposed upon him as a believer.

It seems to me that King's connection with God was much less personal and individual than the way Tebow or Hall characterize their connection. For King, God's greatest gift to humanity was the ability to dream of social justice, and to give ourselves in effort to actualize that dream. King was not content to proselytize through celebrity or games; these are essentially conservative social functions. He used his radical vision of religion to push an entire nation to change itself in fundamental ways.

When King was assassinated, he had moved through the issue of race to the issue of poverty, which he thought was a more fundamental concern. The day that he was shot, his approval rating stood at 30%. My grandmother, a Nashville native, spoke to me just last week of how much people hated Dr. King in her community--a fact that she herself had almost forgotten in the 44 years since his death.

In the passage above, John Dewey draws our attention to two psychological extremes, both of which stem from the same weakness. The first extreme is overestimating our own power, believing that we are gods or that a god will bend the world to our own plans. The second extreme is disillusionment with the world: seeing the world as fundamentally broken and withdrawing from it to a dream world of idealism. I see both of these extremes in the internet discussions of the meaning of Tebow and Hall's successes. The "haters" impugn their idealism, calling them crazy. The "lovers" see in Tebow and Hall confirmation of their own personal vision of reality, evidence of the transformative power of Christianity.

Dewey was not a Christian, and neither am I. But he was a clear-eyed examiner of social life and the role of religious sentiment in it. I think he would have found both of these ways of seeing Tebow and Hall lacking.

The mature balance towards which Dewey pushes us, and which I would like to encourage as well, neither puts too much power in faith, nor too little. Athletes like Tebow and Hall can remind us of what Dewey calls "the juvenile assumption of power and achievement." Their naive belief in themselves and in their personal vision of the world is refreshing in a cynical age. But we should not forget that our cynicism and the tolerance that it can give us for other points of view and working through difficulties is also hard won--the product of ripened experience. This is why, for me, King provides a more complete vision of the role of faith in life. His faith focused not only on power and achievement, but turned him steadfastly towards the most difficult of problems: how to create lasting change for the better in this world.

King's democratic faith had an element of the blues in it. Cornel West called this element of faith a capacity for "tragicomic hope" -- the ability to dwell amid suffering, to confront the tragedies of the human condition, and to make a song out of it. Tebow and Hall are young, still. They are great representations of juvenile power, and they ought to inspire us with their power and performance. But King, to my mind, is the greater exemplar of a fully mature human faith. Like the man from whom his religion draws its power, his life is not a reminder of the power of the individual to forge its own destiny or do what he puts his mind to. The lesson is deeper. His life and faith is a reminder of the work that is left to be done on behalf of humanity: the duty of social justice.

King's life and faith preached "a dangerous unselfishness." He taught that the clear-eyed recognition of our duty to humanity is the mark of a belief that fully deserves to call itself religious.

On Resolve

2012-01-08T12:28:00.000-06:00

One of my goals for 2012 is to continue posting weekly on the blog. Of course, it's been three weeks since my last post and more than a week since the beginning of the new year. So, I've already failed. Now that I've gotten that resolution out of the way, I can go ahead and write a post.

* * *

The trend this year in discussing New Year's Resolutions is to downplay the role of willpower in the construction of resolve and to emphasize the more complex aspects of achievement. A few articles (I could have chosen others) are representative of this trend.

"The Fat Trap" by Tara Parker-Pope discusses the physiology behind the difficulty of losing weight, constructing the picture of weight-loss as a complex matter of personal history, epigenetics, hormones, and metabolism rather than a simple question of having the will to stick to a diet.

"Be It Resolved" by science writer John Tierney looks more directly (and a bit more simply) at the actual effectiveness of willpower, its limits and its possibilities. Tierney suggests that the key to resolutionary success is constructing an environment in which the willpower necessary to accomplish our goals is minimized.

Finally, a fascinating piece by the guys from Radiolab entitled "Help!" [one of my resolutions this year is to listen to more of their podcasts] discusses the science behind willpower and the tactics of self-deception that blocked writers, alcoholics, and war generals use to increase their resolve to accomplish their goals.

A common thread behind each of these pieces is a picture of the self as fundamentally interactive and plural. Self-rule requires not straightforward authority, the "Just Do It!" of Nike marketing, but a set of strategy and tactics, often requiring deception, playing parts of the self against other parts, and dependence on other people, objects and tokens from the environment, and pharmacology.

Woodie Guthrie's resolutions from 1943. [click to read]

The resolutionary (thanks to TanyaS for the coining of this excellent word) self of 2012 is less an integrated person governed by a rational will (we are far indeed from Descartes' pure cogito) and more a populated and diverse city governed by a bureaucracy of unreliable and corrupt politicos, who every now and then do what is good for the whole but are more easily directed through manipulation, self-interest, and trickery. The self is not a well-ordered republic ruled by a transcendent and good-oriented soul. It's more like the world we live in--globalized, interactive, warring, plundering, unruly, prone to distraction. Governing it is a dirty affair. No wonder Odysseus is invoked so often in these articles--our subjective lives read much more like epic poems than clean philosophical treatises. Like these poems, our inner lives are complex and divergent. They are not held together by arguments but by adventures, rhythms, and battles with mythological demons.

This is all rather exciting, but such a picture of the self is really at odds with the whole resolutionary impulse. At the beginning of a new year, we look back on a past year or indeed an entire life that is full of events that don't really add up. The tangled web of personal history stares at us somewhat blankly, with no overarching meaning. In the face of that mess and meaninglessness, we seek to impose a bit of order. The future, having not yet happened and therefore unsullied by the complex and haphazard nature of life, tantalizes us with the possibility of getting that mess straightened out. So, we set a goal. The resolutionary impulse is essentially a drive towards cleanliness and order. After a 2011 that feels like a Trojan War, we want some Platonic clarity.

I think that's why at some level I am suspicious of the complex, Homeric picture of resolutionary achievement that is painted by these articles. The point of having a resolution is to rise above the meddling, corrupt, warring, and bureaucratic selves that we've become and actually assert something with some degree of authority. Sure, it's naive to believe that we can get our lives together through a simple act of will. Absolutely, we are setting ourselves up for failure by putting too much faith in the power of our better selves. But we are only doing this because we are currently a mess that has already failed in its messiness! Our hand has been forced--it's naivete or nothing!

So, at the beginning of each year, we stand like Socrates did long ago in front of the Athenian jury proclaiming something simple: that life only requires following the good and the true, that power and tactics and corruption is unnecessary to the good life, and that the individual will has the power to be true to itself. We all know how the story of Socrates ends: in tragedy. He chooses to drink the hemlock, to kill himself before he can reform his corrupt society. This sort of simplicity is not sustainable; it always ends unfulfilled.

The year 2012 will likely end just as 2011 did: after the debauchery and fun of the holiday season, we will come to terms with the mess of corrupted and divergent selves that we have become. As 2013 dawns, however, we might look back to this time, right now, when for a short time we became Socratic selves--full of the resolutionary purity of our mission to be better people.

When that time comes we may find in these moments of early 2012 a few noble accomplishments. The memories of those failed attempts at a purer self might yet sustain us through the dreamy dark and resolutionary winter months of another new year. The martyr spirit of Socrates lives on, after all, not in spite of his tragic ending, but because of it.

Drawing the Arrow, Some Reflections on our Historicity

2011-12-14T21:54:00.004-06:00

"Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest, and leap again; and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, for he is proud of being human and not an animal and yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal, neither bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say--but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent: so man could only wonder."
--F. Nietzsche "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life"

In this lovely passage, which is one of my favorite in all of philosophy, Nietzsche draws the line between the human and the animal in terms of the capacities of melancholy and boredom, linking them with remembering and forgetting. The human is the animal capable of leaving the moment--becoming melancholy, perhaps or bored, perhaps. This capacity of leaving the moment is closely tied to memory, of course, memory being the act of traveling with the mind, breaking the thrall of the moment and entering that dreamy realm of history, yesterday, and today.

When we run, we enter into the animal state--this is one of its allures. It allows us to escape our history and future with their attendant anxieties and enter into the protective thrall of the moment. Racing, particularly, is like this. Perhaps the reason we are able to find extra power in the race situation is that we have become animal for a short time. All of our capacities and powers are released into the present moment, and we are able to accomplish things that simply aren't possible in normal human consciousness--which always has some part of it reaching out of the moment in anticipation or memory.

When we train, however, we do so as humans. We place ourselves in a present that has a past and a future. John L. Parker described it as making yourself into an arrow in Again to Carthage. Animals race--they run down their quarry, they play together, dogs chase a frisbee or their owners. But animals don't train. Training requires a different order of intelligence because it requires memory--and out of that memory, imagination of a possible future. We make ourselves into an arrow that connects, or attempt to connect, the two.

Nietzsche worried that the confusion into which we are thrown by the vast and plural histories that fund our present would no longer allow us to imagine a future for ourselves. We wouldn't be able to intelligently draw an arrow from our multiple and divergent cultural memories to an imagined future. Perhaps this is a problem that plagues our current political process--we either regress to an overly simple view of America with a too-clearly-imagined-future or struggle to define a future because of over-sensitivity to all of the future's possibilities.

This is the disadvantage of memory: it imposes a burden upon you. It makes you draw an arrow. We remember, for example, being young and powerful and we dream of returning to that state. But is this an arrow that is possible to draw? Or is it simply melancholic nostalgia for a past that cannot be recreated. If the past is too powerful, too good, it can make us reject the future and create a melancholic temperament that mourns the loss of that idyllic past.

Of course this very burden of awareness of the past is also an advantage for humanity. It gives us a task, makes the future possible. These ghosts of memory can spur us to try to recreate them in the future. We remember our best races and wonder what it would feel like to run even faster. We think back on our failures and imagine what might have been--and work to bring what might have been into actuality.

The arrow upwards can be equally thrilling or demoralizing.

This idea that we are all arrows pointing from the stories we tell ourselves about who we were towards the stories we tell ourselves about who we might be, this relation to the past and future, is what philosophers call our "historicity." We are, fundamentally, historical beings--this is Nietzsche's point.

Perhaps Nietzsche's most important contribution to philosophy was to look at history not as a series of facts about what happens, but as a collection of stories that creates an arrow that points towards possible futures. Nietzsche urged in all of his work the idea that as human beings it was essential to intelligently recreate these stories on behalf of our lives. In other words, Nietzsche understood the truth of history in terms of its effect on our ability to draw an arrow to a possible future arising out of that history.

This is a remarkable idea. But I think it is one that runners can understand well if they reflect on their own training. We all have goals for the future based on our pasts. Our training is oriented by these arrows. But sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about our running history can limit our future development. After each race, we place that race into the narrative of our lives as a runner. We connect it to other events in a way that makes sense. We historicize it. The question that Nietzsche poses to us is how thoughtfully do we historicize these events? Do the stories we tell about our racing limit us in certain ways? What futures do they create for us? And what futures do these stories prevent?

By giving us these sorts of questions, Nietzsche allows us to make a critical inquiry into who we are as runners. This is something that animals don't do. It takes a lot of energy, and it is not always a productive enterprise. It has its advantages (the possibility of new goals) and disadvantages (melancholy and rumination). People will say that you think too much.

But, Nietzsche reminds us, this sort of engagement with the past--this wondering--is what makes us human. Perhaps if we give ourselves to it completely, we can find in certain moments the animal in the human, the joy in reflection. In these moments, we philosophize with neither melancholy nor boredom, but with something like the thrall of the reflective moment. It's in these rare moments that we find the unique power of human consciousness--the possibility that we can make ourselves anew.

Isn't this the possibility that drives our running and indeed our lives?

Rethinking How to Train, Continued

2011-12-09T14:52:00.006-06:00

"The true romance which the world exists to realize is the transformation of genius to practical power." --R.W. Emerson, "Experience."

One of my fundamental philosophical convictions is that intelligence is primarily about attention. The reason why attention is so important is because we have limited "bandwidth" for processing. Sure, people who score high on the SAT maybe have a bit broader (or more intense) bandwidth than the rest. However, given the amount of information that we all have at our disposal for living, the relative difference in processing power among individual minds pales in comparison to the question of what those minds decide to process. This question of what we decide to devote our minds to is essentially the question of attention. Since this is such an important question, it's important that we turn a bit of our bandwidth to it every now and then.

Yeah, I'm basically talking about thinking outside the box. Or at least in a different box. [A thought to chew on: when we do philosophy, what we are doing is creating new modes of attention.]

Concepts are the means through which we focus our attention, which is why they are so important for analysis. They are basically names for the content our attention takes up. When we argue about the fundamental concepts of training, what we mean by "fundamental" is something like "that which we ought to turn our attention towards most fully." Quality, volume, variation, form, pace, long runs, weekly mileage, aerobic development, speed, interval training, specific fitness, general fitness, strength, VO2max, lactic threshold--each of these concepts turns our attention to some aspect of the training process. The invention of a new concept invites a new mode of attention for intelligence.

In a late October post, I talked about shifting the focus of my training away from the concept of mileage and more towards the concepts of recovery and development. Before this shift, my primary question when planning my week or my day was, "How many miles can I get in?" Sure, I also tried to get in a harder session a week, but this was an afterthought. Even races took a back seat to the mileage. I would "train through" both workouts and races, often doing a double the day before them. This was because I took weekly mileage to be the primary organizing concept of training. It's what I paid attention to: putting in the work.

Since I have turned my attention to recovery and development, the primary question I put to myself every week is something like: "How is my training progressing?" This question puts me in a very different mindset than the prior sort of question. Building on what came before may mean an easy week to absorb some prior work. It may mean pushing my tempo pace down 5 or 10 seconds. It may mean lengthening intervals or reducing recovery between them. But the primary difference between this sort of question and the prior question that oriented my training is that it requires that I position myself squarely in the "present" of my training. Instead of repeating a process mindlessly that could happen at any time to anybody, I have to imagine myself as a runner with a past and a future and ask, simply: "How does the present fit into that past and future in a progressive way?" Instead of looking for the final answer about The Right Way to Train, I ask smaller, melioristic, questions like, how can I get a little faster this week? The latter is a much more intelligent way of framing the attention.

In a recent message board post the Lydiard disciple Nobby Hashizume described training as a kind of wave: "Training and training effect is series of applying stress and your base fitness level going down; and taking recovery and let the base fitness to come up and go beyond. It's the wave of this activity." He's right; training is like riding a wave. You've got to constantly evaluate where you are on the wave, where you are headed, and try to figure out how to take that wave to the crest. Most fundamentally, Nobby reminds us, training is an interaction, a method of call and response.

If we don't attentively frame our training in the right way, we miss this interaction. That's what I called "training like a mule" or "taking shortcuts" in my last post. It's unintelligent training because it sees training as repetition, but ignores difference. Both repetition and difference must be balanced. Otherwise, we are simply applying a stimulus and hoping that it is the correct one, or that the body will respond in equal measure to the stimulus applied. This is stupidity masquerading as toughness, pig-headedness disguised as an iron will.

Since I reframed the basic questions with which I approached my training, I have had some success. I ran 26:53 for 5 miles in our local turkey trot, which is just about equivalent to my best racing at higher mileage levels. Plus, I closed my last mile in 5:04, which bodes well for future racing. Equally importantly, I have more energy for work during the day--as well as more excitement to RACE than I did when I was grinding out the miles. These are no small achievements, especially since running is only part of who I am.

Tomorrow I take a shot at running under 16 minutes on the road for the second time since college. It's going to be tough, and I'm not sure if I am ready for it just yet. But, if I don't make it, I already have in mind a few things I can do to keep riding the wave upwards. If I do run under 16 minutes, then I will find myself in a place I haven't been in quite some time: as fast as I've ever been and with possibilities for getting a little faster.

Each Good Effort

2011-12-01T08:22:00.006-06:00

The following is a guest post by new contributor Nader Abadir. He has his own blog, Sneakers and Books, which reflects on his religion and running. Check it out.

You will enjoy this one.

* * *

I don’t like to admit it, but I started running to lose weight. Worse yet, I got past the initial hurdles because I was captivated by the story of a famous “Ultramarathon Man.” Worst of all, I picked up that book because the dude on the cover was ripped.

I suppose these are “admissions” because I’d feel cooler if a Zenish statement -- like “Runners run.” -- had applied to me all along.

Like many new, middle-aged runners, I was active as a kid. I played organized baseball into my teens. I never hit for power, but was always proud of my speed. Mookie Wilson, Vince Coleman, Tim Raines, Lenny Dykstra, Rickey Henderson; these were the guys that got me excited. I had never heard the names Pre, Kennedy, or Rogers. “Salazar” evoked “Luis.” From about age 14, my afternoons, weekends and nights were consumed with pick-up basketball. At 5’ 6”, I wasn’t mixing it up in the low post (too much). But, I could race up and down the court with anyone.

As with many others, I put on a bunch of weight in college and grad school, mostly to impress a girl whose circle of friends included not a few football players. “You’re skinny,” she once said, poking my ribs. (I got the girl, the muscles and a lot more. Not a bad deal, on balance.)

Determined to return to my former fitness, I started running in my early 30s, first on a track. 1, 2, 7 and 9 miles, round and round. I am largely unaffected by cold (I warm up quickly) or the absence of external stimuli (To be out and moving and in presence of God; there is little sweeter to me.)

Like any other uncool newbie, my first race was the longest local race I could find: a half marathon which I completed in 2 hours and 14 minutes (!), in cotton (!!). My next big goal race was, of course, a marathon which I ran like a special ops mission. (Through the Hamptons. I know, right?)

About three years ago, I found my way to runningahead.com. And, again -- romantic or not -- it was an Internet community that has made all the difference in my running. People on there started talking about running fast as well as far. A runner I admire a great deal, who goes by mikeymike, frequently emphasized training to race. I now realize that all that talk of racing sparked a connection with my first childhood loves: the intertwined joys of running fast and of competing. When we played hoops, we didn’t hate the other guys, but we sure wanted to beat them. We weren’t playing to get in shape or lose weight or “do cardio.” We played hard because, with nothing up for grabs, we wanted so badly to win. And, win or lose, we all went out for pizza afterwards.

Over the last year or so, my race times have really improved, thanks in very large part to Jeff (Yes, this Jeff.) I initially connected with him because, like me, he cares a lot about the relationships among running, spirituality, and philosophy. Under his (free and copious) guidance, I recently brought my half marathon time down to 1:29:51. This year, he admonished me to be more focused in my training and to do workouts in a logical order. I ran hills and drills. I sharpened. I treated races more like races and less like parades.

Nowadays, people ask me “When’s your next marathon?” I never get past “I’m actually trying to get faster at shorter-” before the person, visibly embarrassed for me, looks down and changes the subject. My need for approval (which sometimes feels pathological) notwithstanding, I won’t run a marathon any time soon. I may never run another marathon.

Like many of you, I do not really know why I run. Thankfully, I rarely have to answer that for anyone. I suspect it’s because television, magazines and pop-up ads have given them answers which they think are mine. Or maybe they just don’t care, which is just as well.

No matter what, I am firmly fixed in this thing called Running, which helps me forget at times, the thing in life that kills me most, that I spend most of my hours hunched over a desk, working for a living and not for something meaningful. But on many morning jogs -- snot dripping over my lips as I greet day laborers waiting and hoping to earn something for their families -- I have had time to think that maybe this elusive “meaningful work” is just a nonsensical name for an illusory castle. I have learned on those runs to find meaning in the now, in the presence of God and man.

And, with each good effort, I become a better version of myself. I feel younger, stronger, more secure and more free. I peel away another layer of slowness and weakness. I have reached the fast end of slow and I am grateful for that.

There are mornings I can’t get the legs moving. Then, in a low voice, “Runner’s run.” Yep. And, with a grunt, I am off.

Technological Devices and Focal Practices

2011-11-17T16:27:00.013-06:00

LLD is happy to present a guest post from friend Zach VanderVeen, author of The Garden of Forking Paths blog on database design and philosophy. Zach has written a couple of posts before. Hope you enjoy!

The unity of achievement and enjoyment, of competence and consummation, is just one aspect of a central wholeness to which running restores us. Good running engages mind and body. Here the mind is more than an intelligence that happens to be housed in a body. Rather the mind is the sensitivity and the endurance of the body.
--Albert Borgmann

I recently wrote a post, in which I suggested that the problem with technology is that it can drown out important kinds of reflection. We often focus on how to get things done faster and more efficiently, not why we should do so. We separate the journey from the destination, or the means from the ends. But it's easy to complain about technology without showing how we can free ourselves from the tyranny of efficiency. Even if we were all able to retire to mountain cabins and live off the sweat of our own brow, it's probably not desirable for the majority of us. So how can we develop the right kind of relationship with technology? Borgmann suggests that running can show us the way.

Borgmann's main idea is captured by the distinction he makes between technological devices and what he calls 'focal practices.' Think about the difference between a cast iron stove in 1850's Montana and your modern ceramic induction range. The stove of yore touched upon almost every aspect of life and formed the focal point of a house. It had to be stoked early in the morning and gathered people together as its warmth slowly radiated throughout the house. It required splitting logs and maintaining tinder, and it made the smells of wood and food suffuse the air. It divided work amongst men, women, and children and oriented their daily activities from dawn to dusk.

Compare this with the stove of today, which, if used at all, hardly orients much of our daily lives--at least not for more than an hour or so. It turns on and off with the flick of a switch and is fed by gas or electricity piped in from who knows where. Its temperature is consistent, and any excess heat is whisked away by fans. It bakes cookies that burst from a tube and quickly boils water to reconstitute dehydrated meals.

These two stoves show that there are things that imbue our lives with meaning, because they provide focal points that direct what we do and how we do it. The cast iron stove structures both time and space. Technological devices like the induction range, on the other hand, have the tendency to remove these focal points and, consequently, the meaning that accompanies them. The mark of a good device, like the car or the telephone, is that you can forget about it to worry about more important matters. This isn't always a bad thing, as newer technologies freed people--especially women--from the drudgery of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. But now we have freed up so much time that we have trouble filling it in a meaningful way.

I think this is the reason a lot of people turn to running. Running is a focal practice. It unites sun and rain, spring and fall, the trail and the pavement, health and excess, pleasure and pain, competition and leisure, gadgets and nature, teamwork and isolation, mind and body, reflection and zen-like thoughtlessness. Borgmann says, "Running is simply to move through time and space, step-by-step. But there is splendor in that simplicity." Experiencing your neighborhood at 6 miles an hour is completely different from driving through it at 35. And running doesn't just structure time and space while you're running. Running orients my days and nights, my weeks and weekends, my diet, and my understanding of how places are connected.

Furthermore, focal practices like running help us figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. They provide a baseline by which we can judge what we really need and what we don't, and they show us how to use devices in the right way. iPods in themselves provide our lives with little meaning. It's the runs, the meals, the parties, the drives, and the work that provide an orientation for their use. You need a good place to run, friends to eat with, events to celebrate, destinations to drive to, and meaningful work in order for the iPod to do its work. Don't let the iPod replace those reasons to run.

A Runner's Take on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-11T12:55:00.007-06:00

"Let us then place belief midway between certitude and nihilism. Let us see it characterized by trust, by affection, by a sense of novelty and by hope. Those traditions, especially religious, which have told us through the centuries that we know, for sure, the objects of our belief, have violated not only the character of genuine belief but also the mysterious openness of genuine religious experience. It is a deep tragedy that so much of our energy is expended in explicating and defending caricatures of our once viable traditions. ... [S]elf righteous interpretations of what is fundamentally inexplicable have divided us one from the other and cut us off from the human quest. In sociological terms, belief must cease its relationship to finality; it must turn to the future instead of the past." --John McDermott, The Community of Experience

John McDermott

I do not often write directly about politics on this blog, primarily because philosophy and running are escapes for me from an overwrought and underthought political scene. The connections between these three things--running, politics, and philosophy--are not obvious. They must be actively made, as the subtitle of the blog indicates. Something that is made can be unmade, and can be made poorly or well. Then, even if it is made well, it might be useful for some purposes and not others. At any rate, before beginning a political post, I just thought a sort of disclaimer might be in order--neither running nor philosophy necessarily lead in any logical way to certain political positions. The logical connections are always held and made through our thoughts, actions, temperaments, circumstances, efforts, and reflection. This is the "logic" of politics--the logic of ordinary life.

The above quote by John McDermott holds that belief is a midway sort of state. Running provides excellent examples of this. When we step to the starting line of a race, we have to believe in ourselves, believe that we are capable of running a certain time. This belief is something like a frame of mind that takes effort to hold and construct, and it guides our actions, gives us comfort, provides us hope, and--sometimes--allows us to achieve our goals. McDermott reminds us in this passage that we know beliefs by their function in experience. Their meaning and truth is found in how we hold them, and what they do for us. When we believe that we can run a certain time, we do not know it with certainty. Instead, we hold it with an attitude of trust and faith in our abilities to achieve. The race experience reminds us that the crucial quality of belief is not its having been determined to be true in the past, but the determination it gives us to fight for a possible future.

The beliefs that we hold at the starting lines of races are forged out of experience and effort. They are not arbitrary, and they are more likely to be realistic and serve their purpose of calling forth new capacities if they have been carefully and attentively made. The undertrained marathoner holds his belief in his ability to run a certain time in a very different way than the marathoner who has been through the trials of miles, and rightfully so. While the undertrained marathoner may be more certain of his ability to achieve his goal (depending on his ambitions), the well-trained runner has more faith in his belief--it means more to him; he holds his belief with affection and may call on this affect in times of distress.

As citizens of a democracy, we are asked to carry with us certain beliefs as well. These beliefs are well-known to all of us. We believe in equality, justice, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. We are asked to hold these political beliefs together as a community, with affection. None of these ideals are certain; when we believe in these things, we are asked to do so in order that we bring them into being and hold them in place with our effort.

It is cheesy to suggest it, but the ideals of democracy are similar in form to race goals. They are not certainties that we accept because they have already been achieved. They are, instead, dreams that we will have to work towards with much effort.The important point, here, is that beliefs are not possessed; they possess us and move us. The marathoner proves his belief in his goal by being affected by it in the last miles of the race, by drawing on it to give him strength to continue to fight. So, too, do we prove our belief in democracy.

This is where McDermott's take on religion is helpful as well. We can practice politics as "explicating and defending caricatures of our once viable traditions," and we can give "self-righteous interpretations" of the meaning of democracy, intended to divide us. Or, we can abandon our relationship with finality in politics and offer ourselves up to democratic experience, which like religious experience is vague, indeterminate, and fundamentally open. McDermott's point is that we live into and with our beliefs; they are not made through argument. We can talk politics all we like, but in the end we have to run the race; we have to live together.

The analogy to running is limited, however, because a race is an individual endeavor in an artificial context while democracy is a community endeavor in a real and messy world. One of these things is much harder than the other. When we believe in democracy, we have to form common beliefs. We have to share experience. To create a deeply rooted faith in democratic life, we have to pass through experiences together, and we cannot control these experiences with a watch or break them into intervals. Often times these experiences break us down instead of making us stronger.

However, we can practice democracy. I believe this is the challenge that the Occupy Wall Street protests puts to us. It asks us how well we have been occupying our democratic ideals. As Matt Taibbi puts it in his excellent Rolling Stone article:

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

The idea of occupying our democracy resonates with old American ideas. It reminds us that our beliefs are not precious gems to be fondled and protected or weapons with which we destroy our ideological opponents. Our beliefs are our deliberate ways of living; they are ways of occupying the world. When Thoreau wrote that he went to the woods to live deliberately, he was, in a sense, trying to occupy his life. This is what it means to be a free individual, to occupy your life, to occupy a place, to occupy a community, and to occupy your beliefs. The Wall Street protesters have chosen a different sort of wilderness to test their capacity for deliberation. They are not looking to take control of a single life, but simply asking whether it is possible to live together without fear in very heart of the democratic experiment.

Running provides me a space apart from the chatter and difficulty of contemporary life. It helps me carve out time away from screens and chairs, walls and air-conditioned spaces. It reminds me of my capacity for pleasure and pain. For these reasons, I choose to believe that it is a practice of hope and self-development. But it can be equally argued that running is also a naive escape, a waste of energy, an self-satisfied act of leisure. I could see it this way, and if I did for long, I would stop believing in its transformative potential.

Like running and everything else in life, Occupy Wall Street is not perfect. It is both a challenge to genuine politics and an escape from it. Like running, it can be construed positively or negatively, and that choice will have consequences for its continuation. I make the choice deliberately to believe in it, to advocate and articulate its metaphors and vision, and to see it as a challenge to my own practice of democracy and the choices I make in living it out.

The challenge that Occupy Wall Street poses to us is both simple and extraordinarily difficult. It asks us this question: Can we form a society in which we are able to live together in a dignified, joyful, and deliberate manner?

I don't know the answer to these question with any degree of certainty, but as a runner and a human being I am well practiced in the living form of belief that works outside of the range of the certain.

Richland Creek Loop

2011-11-10T15:01:00.012-06:00

Bridge across Richland Creek

I run the same five miles pretty much every morning.

The beginning of the loop takes me through my neighborhood in West Nashville. Our part of town is half-industrial, half residential. Colonial-style houses from the 1920s mix with warehouses and rebuilt ranches from the late 70s. I start south on the road just west of the busiest street, 52nd Ave. It is straight, and though there are a few stop signs the traffic is light enough for me to keep my rhythm through the intersections.

A half mile ahead, 52nd Ave is cross cut somewhat violently by the mad and throbbing whirl of concrete overpasses that is I-40. I duck left one block, then head under a pigeon shit encrusted overpass. Usually I can cross the next couple of streets without breaking stride, and a quarter mile later I am at the intersection with Charlotte Ave. Here, I stop and wait for the cross lights. By this point the creakiness of early morning has worn off, and I've adjusted to the early morning chill.

When the light changes, I dart across the road, past the Catholic Church on the right, down a slight incline and up a short steep hill. Another 3 or 4 minutes down the road, just past the mile mark, I make a quick right turn onto the bike path that winds around the edge of the public golf course. The first part of this path dives down steeply into a pocket of night air that settles coldly in the small valley carved out by Richland Creek.

It's somewhere in here, maybe 10 minutes into the run, when all of the movements settle into their rhythms and consciousness changes. Running thoughts are somewhat like dreams. They drift in and out of the mind without leaving a deep trace, perhaps something like the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. They are not the sorts of thoughts we argue about on the internet or in the classroom. They don't compose a narrative or story or argument. They certainly do not aspire to the category of truth. Rather, they are on the order of appearance. One feels the mind without using it, like a Gary Snider poem or one of those rambling Dylan songs. Appearance, but not mere appearance.

I cross the creek over a bridge and take care to look at its levels. Lately we haven't had much rain, so the creek is calm, more interested in reflecting fall leaves than moving water. There is a hill after the creek which wakes me back up to the effort of my legs, reminds me to control the pace. Once crested, we wind back down through the woods to cross the creek again on a wooden bridge, my legs, the path, and I.

The second half of the loop takes me up a grade along the train tracks, then up again, and around the front side of the golf course. I nod to the early morning golfers and consider their arcing swings. There are maple trees scattered through the small parking lot, and on fall mornings like this one their leaves burn red and orange. Once past them, I am suddenly into the last two miles of the run. There is a long and gentle section of path that weaves downwards. If I am feeling good, I often remember past races or imagine future ones, and the pace approaches six minutes a mile. Like a horse, I smell the barn.

At four miles, I complete the lollipop section of the loop and cross a section of grass back onto the road. From here, it is a straight shot back to the house, with Charlotte Ave marking a sort of halfway point. It is a net downhill, and on crisp mornings I hope to hit a green light so that I can keep the rhythm going. Usually it doesn't work out, and so I stand at the corner, watching the morning commuters in their steel and plastic, shaking out the electricity in my legs until whatever mechanical timer runs its course and releases me across the street. I dart back under the hum of I-40, make a quick left, and a quick right back onto 52nd Ave.

The last section is literally a home stretch. Home is half a mile straight ahead. The street rolls ever so gently. I play with effort on the uphills and relaxation on the downhills, enjoying these last few moments. When I reach the corner across from my house, I stop. In a few seconds, my breath falls away and my heart returns to its quiet and quotidian rhythm.

This is how my days begin. The same run, every morning.

On Art, Intelligence, and Training

2011-11-02T23:03:00.002-05:00

John Dewey, American philosopher

"In art as experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection. 'Nature,' said Goethe, 'has neither kernel nor shell.' Only in esthetic experience is it also true that nature has neither subjective nor objective being; is neither individual nor universal, sensuous nor rational. The significance of art as experience is, therefore, incomparable for the adventure of philosophic thought."
--John Dewey, Art as Experience

For Dewey and the pragmatists, analytic reflection, however necessary, is insufficient for intelligence because analytic reflection is always dissociative. Analysis always selects from experience, cutting it open by attending to this and not that. It makes progress by fixing certain variables with the attention and ignoring others. This way of slicing the universe up is absolutely essential to growth and progress, but if we confuse the distinctions that analysis makes for the nature of reality itself, then analytic reflection can stifle philosophical thought--the intelligent pursuit of wisdom.

Perhaps this is less of a problem for non-philosophers than it is for philosophers, who because of their commitment to the value of intelligence are uniquely prone to intellectual fallacies. The classic problems in philosophy, Dewey thought, committed a similar intellectual fallacy in the attempt to reduce all of experience to one analytic concept. So, for example, "objectivists" believe that the real world exists completely independent of any mind that would attempt to know it, while "subjectivists" argue that each of us can make our own reality simply by thinking it. The truth, as common sense tells us, is that neither position adequately grasps the relationship between reality and the mind. The history of philosophy has been a long wrangle between varieties of these sorts of reductive claims, neither side ever winning because both of them were essentially committing the same intellectualist error. They attempted to reduce all of experience to a single and one-sided idea that is perfectly useful for analysis, but wrongheaded when it comes to metaphysical speculation.

This is why Dewey wrote that "the significance of art as experience was incomparable for the adventure of philosophic thought." While analysis breaks the world apart, the experience of art is integrative. Art, both as product and as process of production, brings a divided world together. It is the sort of doing and experiencing that attempts to bring us into a more intimate and full relationship with reality. It takes a world that has been parceled out by our reflective capacities into various entities -- corporations, classes, races, nationalities, religions, political persuasions, friends, families, and enemies -- and attempts to bring these things into relation with each other. Art as an experience reminds us that the most essential task in living is not to divide our lives into parts through the understanding, but to learn how to balance in action its separate tasks in harmonious relation.

Here, as always, training provides a useful example. In order to be intelligent in training, we have to learn how to divide it up into its components. General concepts like variety, consistency, volume, periodization, recovery, frequency help us focus on various aspects of the training process. Physiological concepts like aerobic, anaerobic, lactic threshold, heart rate, perceived effort, cadence, etc. also allow us to break the effects of training on the body apart and look at its development from various angles. All of these concepts can help us to understand training.

However, understanding how training works from a variety of angles is very different from having a training philosophy. Producing a philosophy requires not only analytic intelligence, but also creative and synthetic intelligence. After the act of running has been broken apart into its various components, the runner must put the pieces back together in a particular way and create something like a philosophy--or at the very minimum, a plan.

I prefer the term "philosophy" to plan because as every runner knows plans have to be modified according to circumstances. Much more essential to proper training is having a way of approaching your running life that is balanced, flexible, and responsive--in short, living. This is the only form in which intelligence comes, as the only meaning of intelligence is nothing more or less than a way of living life that is in balance and growing and adapting to its environment.

Constructing such a philosophy is not something that happens overnight, but I suppose what Dewey would tell us is that when we are considering how to train well, we ought to extend our research beyond training manuals and old training logs. We also ought to also read novels, listen to music, and watch artists of other endeavors for signs of how to construct our own vision.

There is one trait that all of my best coaches had in common. They were all characters. They were quirky, bright, and different from the rest of the people that I met, each in their own way. I think this is because they realized that the secret to showing people the path to success was much less about understanding and more about deliberate and conscious attention to the unities that experience offers. They practiced coaching as an art.

Perhaps if you pay close attention to experience, you are bound turn out a little strange. That strangeness is a reflection of a simple fact: that one has learned how to extract from the world a secret or two that no one else has learned to see. These coaches were characters because there was something in them that tended to unity. You saw that they had fashioned for themselves a whole person, and even though that wholeness was quirky and couldn't really be understood, it was there, constructed out of a lifetime of attention and art.

This quirky integrity made you do a simple thing: pay attention. Which turned out to be the difference.

Bonus clip, from the Flying Monkey Marathon:

'Think Monkey' from Funky Umbrella on Vimeo.

Rethinking How to Train

2011-10-26T13:17:00.001-05:00

My training philosophy is shifting.

For the last four years, I trained like a mule. I focused on two things: piling up weekly mileage and tempo runs. The virtue of my plan was that it was simple. Run as much as you can and then do some faster stuff on tired legs. Every now and then I would make a half-hearted foray into hills or some mile repeats, but mostly I just piled up easy volume and moderate tempos and fartleks, week after week.

Ain't nothing wrong with a mule.

This approach got me post-collegiate PRs at every distance. I got stronger and faster. It worked, in a way. But a few things began to bother me.

First, my marathon only improved a little over 2 minutes--a mere 4 seconds a mile--over the course of 4 years [if you are doing the math, that is one second per mile per year!], even though I had essentially doubled the volume of running that I was doing. Second, I wasn't making legitimate progress towards the two goals I had when I started this whole project back in 2007: beat my college PRs and run under 2:30 in the marathon. Third, I was dealing with a series of nagging injuries and daily fatigue that was at levels that didn't make me feel great. Fourth and finally, there was the sinking revelation that if I was going to take my marathon PR to another level I would have to do MORE than what I had done before. Yikes!

So, for the first time in way too long, I listened to my body (and mind) and shut it down. I stopped worrying about my weekly volume. I took days off. I stopped thinking so much about my racing goals or fitness and slipped back gently into the steady thirty or so mile per week routine of the runner who runs because, well, he enjoys it.

I stayed there for about 9 months. Then, out of the blue, a couple of months ago, I was invited to race in a cross-country race. Turns out it didn't go great, but it didn't go too badly either for a guy who wasn't really training. More importantly, it ignited once more The Itch.

But this time around, I am going to be smarter. I swear.

Training, like living, is an art and a science, with both quantitative and qualitative dimensions.

A quick word about my dumbness: Like many of you, the internet resources on running were a revelation to me. I got on sites like letsrun.com and runningahead.com and saw what others were doing--elites and normal runners--and it literally blew my mind. I saw that I could be working harder, smarter, better. Doing things differently.

But I also believe that I over-reacted a bit to the prevailing internet wisdom, which was that running volume is the key to success. 100 mile weeks. Or at least I misunderstood what that meant. I read it as a shortcut, which is a sort of strange way to put it because you wouldn't normally think of running 100mpw as a shortcut. It sounds like something that takes a lot of discipline and hard work.

It was a shortcut, though, because what I proceeded to do was throw most of what I had learned in 12-15 years of running out of my mind and just try to get to where I could run 100mpw, mostly in easy mileage, because that was the sum of internet wisdom (or at least how I read it.)

I had some success doing this, but one fact haunted me--the simple fact that I ran quite a bit faster on 60mpw in college. Not just that, but this training felt different than it did when I was making progress as a young runner. I felt tired a lot. I felt slow. I did not feel sharp. I did not want to race frequently. It took me a while (maybe too long because I am a stubborn person and also because I wanted to see the experiment through) to come to the realization that this was a shortcut. That maybe it would take me 5 years of time to get to where I could run 100mpw and feel sharp doing it. That even though I ran in college and was a "good" runner, did not mean that I could just do the 100mpw thing. Even though the key to running fast is aerobic fitness, that the method to becoming aerobically fit meant paying more attention to development than to volume.

Sounds good in the abstract, but what does this mean in the concrete? I am trying a few new things.
1) Short doubles. My easy days are broken into two 5 mile runs. This gets me to a sweet spot in volume for me (70ish mpw) with minimal stress.
2) A regular day off. I am shooting for the 8th day or so. I get in a full "week" of 75miles, then take a day to absorb it.
3) For now, limiting the long run to 10-11 miles.
4) Running two workouts a week. Thus far, these have been aerobically oriented, but one workout does include a hard mile. Workout #1: 6 x mile w/90s easy run (hitting 5:45-5:30). Workout #2: One mile w/u, 5 miles tempo (~HM-MP effort), 1 mile easy, 1 mile hard (under 5:30).

I am about 6 weeks into this training, and I am going to race a 5 miler this weekend, so we will see how it goes. I have been feeling strong on my runs and have noticed a few things that are promising. It takes me almost no time to feel warmed up (I can run 7:00 pace out the door), and my nagging injuries are gone. I feel perfectly healthy for the first time in 4 years. Perhaps most promising, I can begin to feel a little power back in my stride.

It feels good to feel good again, if you know what I mean.

Looking Back

2011-10-22T17:11:00.002-05:00

I've never done one of these sorts of posts, but I've had a chance lately to go back through the logic to think about some of the better pieces I've written over the last couple of years. Since I started writing the blog, I've written 130+ posts--most of them over the last two years--and run over 5000 miles.

Anyhow, here are some of what I consider the highlights:

How it works
This is how it works:

Training is doing your homework. It's not exciting. More often than not it's tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time, and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.

Workouts too become like this. Intervals, tempos, strides, hills. You go to the track, to the bottom of a hill, and your body finds the effort. You do your homework. That's training. Repetition--building deep habits, building a runner's body and a runner's mind. You do your homework, not obsessively, just regularly. Over time you grow to realize that the most important workout that you will do is the easy hour run. That's the run that makes everything else possible. You live like a clock.

After weeks of this, you will have a month of it. After months of it, you will have a year of it.

Then, after you have done this for maybe three or four years, you will wake up one morning in a hotel room at about 4:30am and do the things you have always done. You eat some instant oatmeal. Drink some Gatorade. Put on your shorts, socks, shoes, your watch. This time, though, instead of heading out alone for a solitary hour, you will head towards a big crowd of people. A few of them will be like you: they will have a lean, hungry look around their eyes, wooden legs. You will nod in their direction. Most of the rest will be distracted, talking among their friends, smiling like they are at the mall, unaware of the great and magical event that is about to take place.

You'll find your way to a tiny little space of solitude and wait anxiously, feeling the tang of adrenaline in your legs. You'll stand there and take a deep breath, like it's your last. An anthem will play. A gun will sound.

Then you will run.

Why I Run
I can't speak for anyone else, but at a certain point the experience of running surpassed in value, and by a pretty wide margin, my desire to make sense out of it.

I don't know why I run. I don't know why I race. I don't know why I compete. I don't need to know. Because running means more to me than curiosity. It goes deeper than knowledge. I run. I compete. I move on down the line. I'm a runner.

For us runners, the question of “why” is pretty moot. Not because it may not be interesting, or important, from a certain point of view, but because we’ve left the question of the meaning of running behind. After all the questions have been asked, and all the answers given, in spite of the disagreement on essences, physiology, rationales, training strategies, trail running, road racing, i-pod wearing, mid-foot striking, turnover cadences, arm carriages, Jack Daniels, Arthur Lydiard, 20 miles a week or 100, 5k or the 50k, whether it's really the Miles of Trials or the Trial of Miles, after all the words have been spoken and keyboards have been pounded, meanings given and ideologies subverted... After all this, we runners bend down and tighten the laces, open the door, brace for the cold and are renewed: another godawful, glorious, and meaningless 8 miler.

Lords of the Sidewalk

The Tempo Run as Art

The Sickness of Running
We have the health of endurance, the ability to go on, the strength to not only run for hours, but toenjoy our bodies and the sensations they give us when they are working. We need almost nothing at all to find our happiness: only a few hours, a stretch of road, perhaps a friend, or even better a competitor. We hide in our spindled chests an unusually large and heaving heart--and in our heads a warbled tune, a song, as we move on down the road. Do you know the feeling I know? When your legs have disappeared, and there is only your heart, your lungs, and your eyes skimming disembodied through the air? We are Aristotle's featherless bipeds, we runners. Though we have no wings, we have taught ourselves to fly.

Passion and Discipline

Half-Steppers, etc

Understanding the Body, Becoming a Body

And, one that I did not write--written by Guest Blogger Scout7, which remains uber-popular:
How to Run Like a Stoic

Thanks for reading! And keep running!

Jeff

Staying Motivated

2011-10-17T20:41:00.002-05:00

Something I wrote a while ago on staying motivated on our local message board is being passed around online (just recently on the I <3 to run facebook page.) Thought I would claim it for posterity, though of course like all good thoughts, this is not just mine.

* * *

There are no tricks. Run because you have to. Run because you love it. Run because you want to be fast. Run because you want to be skinny. Run to find some quiet time. Run to sweat. Run to eat. Run to hear your heart pound in your ears. Run because you're a runner. Run because you gotta keep the streak. Run because you don't know why the hell you're running. Run because you fought with your partner. Run because your job is shitty. Run because you got no money. Run for the sunrise. Run for a race. Run because it's impossible. Run because it's easy. Run instead of doing the laundry. Run instead of watching TV. Run because no one else understands. Run because the cool kids do it. Run because you're tired of talking. Run for numbers. Run for feel. Run to prove something. Run because it f***ing hurts. Or don't run. If you got something better to do.

* * *

As for me, right now I am in a groove and can find many reasons to run. Hope you are running well too!

A Good Run.

2011-10-13T20:59:00.000-05:00

Good runs happen when you least expect them, and sometimes when you most need them. Tonight was a good one.

Lately I have been feeling knotted up in my running. My body seems to be working at cross-purposes, the muscles creaking, inflexible, and out of order. I can sense strength beneath all the struggle, but it rarely shows itself. My psyche gets like this, too, its different parts at war with itself. So much energy is wasted on unseen and absurd battles, inchoate and internal strife.

The incredible thing about a great run is that the body simply loosens up and begins to go. The feeling is effortless because there is no internal resistance. These are the moments in which we feel as if we are born to run. What we mean by this is simply that running can be a state in which living is not a chore or a task, but simply a happening. Instead of fighting against life, we are born into it and "borne" by it, floating upon it. Experience responds to effort in harmony, as in a song. Effort is rewarded by speed, life gives back what we put into it, and we capture a glimpse of what it means to be free.

It is tempting in these moments to say: this is why I run.

But I guess I also want to think that these moments are created by the blockages. As we are blocked up, energy is being held in reserve, like water in a reservoir. Suddenly, these dams can break, and we are caught up in the exhilaration of flow. Tonight I could roll because I had been getting out there on weary legs, despite being tired and less full of running. Because of the fight, I was able to be free. I'm not sure how far the analogy can be extended beyond running. Do the difficult moments in life prepare us for happiness? Is joy funded by torment, anger, and despair? Is the faith that we place in life deepened and enriched by our deepest doubts?

In an essay I read this morning, Jonathan Lear describes Socratic irony as a practice of wisdom. He says its function is to reveal the difference between pretense and aspiration. In each activity that we undertake, we carry some sort of pretense. We act as if we are intelligent. We act as if we want justice and truth. We act as if we are happy, strong, and in control. We act as if we love our friends and companions. This is pretense. Of course, we also aspire to these things, and to take up a philosophical attitude is to inquire into whether we really are intelligent, whether we really do want justice and truth, whether we really are happy, strong, and in control. Whether we really are capable of love. Philosophy checks our pretenses against our aspirations: it tries to find the reality beneath appearances, and to release it.

This is difficult. The aspirational attitude of philosophy is difficult to maintain, and it can wear us down in its constant scrutiny of pretense. And even when we uncover our own pretenses, it can be more difficult to change them. Fortunately, the rawness of experience sometimes bubbles through in its glorious and sometimes painful intimacy and reminds us that there is something beyond the difficult and ideal dialectic of pretense and aspiration. The good run shatters the distance between the runner we pretend to be and the runner we aspire to be, and we simply find ourselves as the runner we are.

Afterwards, perhaps, the traces of power that we felt during the gift of the good run can rekindle the spark of aspiration. These traces challenge us to fashion a gift of our own to return to life: a body and mind capable of enjoying more fully the unexpected gifts of experience.

The good run is a blessing. If it could speak, it would say: "May your as ifs turn into really ares."

Running and Two Aspects of the Body

2011-10-06T14:39:00.001-05:00

ESPN recently published its body issue, which has some pretty amazing photos of athletes in the nude. The pictures are a reminder of how the activities that we do form and shape our bodies--and how our bodies also move us to certain activities.

Runners are pretty body-conscious folks. This can be positive and negative. Being more attuned to our bodies means that we are more reflective about what we put into them, how they are resting, whether they are gaining or losing weight, how they look in a mirror, etc. This attentiveness to the body can be healthy. It can also be unhealthy, as the high incidence of eating disorders among competitive runners sadly attests.

Two ways to be a body.

One way to frame this attention to the body is through the concept of control. Distance runners are, in a certain sense, making an effort to control their bodies. Through training we sculpt and shape the body around a very particular purpose: running fast over a long distance. As every runner knows, the body is not always a compliant partner in this task. Like every object, it rebels to a certain extent from our efforts to control it, "liberating" itself from our attempt to dominate it and turn it to our purposes through injury, fatigue, depletion, and weakness.

We cannot dominate our bodies, this is one thing that running teaches. We have to interact with them, perhaps as an artist interacts with a piece of wood. (Incidentally, in this prefab world, this sort of intimate relationship with objects is increasingly rare, and the chance to regain this relation may be one reason we love to run.) Through this interaction, we don't precisely control the body, but perhaps we organize it along certain lines and through certain habits.

Gilles Deleuze helps us think about this notion of bodily organization through his concept of the "body without organs." This concept struck me as totally strange when I first encountered it. What could he possibly mean by a body without organs?

Deleuze is drawing on the Greek etymology of organ, from organon, which means something like "tool" or "instrument." "Organs" and "organization" both derive from this prior root. An organ is essentially an object that has been organized by nature or habit along certain lines for a particular function. The actuality of the body is its present organizational structure; its habits, traits, feelings, and emotions that it normally presents. This is the body with organs, the body as we see and understand it, the normal body with its normal organization.

The body without organs refers to the virtual dimension of the body. This is the part of the body that is the bodies we might become, the things it is possible for us to feel, the not-yet-organized parts of ourselves. It is strange to think of the body along these lines because we are so used to seeing our bodies and the bodies of others as clearly demarcated objects with very particular capacities. Our bodies seem very concrete to us, but Deleuze's concept reminds us that they are in-formation and in-decay at all moments. We have at every instant both an actual body and a virtual body. A body that is organized and a body that is becoming, in movement and in a kind of fertile or dangerous disarray.

Here, perhaps, you can see the body without organs emerge.

In my last post, I wrote about how racing tough requires breaking out of our preconceptions. There is a connection to be drawn here to Deleuze's concept of the body without organs. I think that in the latter stages of a race, we encounter our bodies in just this way: disorganized, dispersive, vague, whirling, and utterly strange. The virtual aspect of the body, the body without organs, overwhelms in a certain way the actual aspect. This is a pretty rare occurrence in everyday life, as normally we monitor the edges of our bodies cautiously so that their smells, movements, and functions do not bother us or other people. The community event of the race is a rare social moment when the task is not to monitor, but to let go of the body, to see if it could be something else, something different than it was before.

To return to the ESPN body images, these strike me as very classical shots. They present the body in various ideal forms and to a large degree present the body as an object that can be controlled and organized along very precise lines. However, these images disguise the virtuality of all of these bodies. We don't see the grimaces, the ice baths, the pain, the pills, the effort that went into the making of these bodies. We don't see the decline that they are bound to pass through. They are bodies that are perfect in their actuality, but invisible in their becoming.

I think this is why I find the pictures quite fragile in their beauty. If we remember the body without organs as we gaze upon these perfectly organized bodies, we become aware of the fact that a strong and able body is actually one of the rarest things in the world. When it is possessed, it is only for moments and instants, in the freeze frame of a camera. The rest is the wild and relentless urge, the body without organs, a teeming and pushing potentiality beneath the frozen frame of the actual.

Toughness as an Act of Imagination

2011-09-26T11:50:00.008-05:00

"When watching for that distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the woods is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception ... is half the perception of the looked-for thing."

--William James, Principles of Psychology

When we talk about being mentally tough in running and racing, it is often unclear exactly what we mean. Most commonly we seem to imagine the tough individual as the one who can endure the most pain. Ascetic philosophers and religious figures through history have seen the encounter with pain as purifying in a certain way. Pain allows us to test the strength of our will by providing an obstacle to it, allowing us to distinguish the actions we choose from what has become ingrained habit. Through this test we learn to what extent we are in control of ourselves, and perhaps these lessons can be extended to other areas of life. This ascetic picture tends to draw a tidy relation between the quantity of pain that one endures and the quantity of willpower that one possesses. The more pain that one can endure, the stronger the will, the tougher the competitor.

Makau on his way to the WR.

However, runners know that the encounter with pain is not so straightforward as this picture assumes. Debilitating pain is, to borrow from the quote above, "the distant clock" that is bound to strike in every racing attempt. The early moments of every race are shaded by the effort that is to come--this is what allows us to pace properly; we anticipate--we preperceive the pain, and it colors our action in the early stages of racing. This is intelligence in racing, and in many ways the precise preperception of pain is what distinguishes experienced racers from new racers, allowing them to "ride the line" that will lead directly to a maximum effort. (The Science of Sport's recent analysis of Patrick Makau's marathon WR does a great job of showing how thin that line can be.)

While the runner must monitor his effort closely and be very attuned to sensation and impending or present pain in the early stages of the race, James helps us understand how attention to pain can be detrimental in the later stages of the race. If, as he writes, "the preperception is half the perception of the looked-for thing," then the runner has to be wary of projecting onto his experience more pain than is actually felt. As pain rises up in the latter part of the race, attending to the pain actually magnifies its quantity, adding to the "actual pain" the image of pain in the mind's eye. The psychology behind this is exactly the same as the psychology of "ripping off a band-aid;" we rip it off quickly before the mind has a chance to pay much attention to the site of pain. Pain that we haven't prepared the mind to perceive is, actually, less pain.

Thinking about the role of attention and preperception in pain allows us to understand more clearly the role that attention plays in toughness. Being mentally tough is less about confronting pain and more about controlling the attention. The toughest racers are those who allow their attention to be "consumed by the race," as a friend recently described it. Being tough, paradoxically, doesn't mean confronting the largest amount of pain. What it demands is literally not feeling the pain at all--keeping the attention absorbed in other things, like controlling the body, competing with rivals, maintaining the rhythms of the running motion. When we achieve a race like this, we usually call it a breakthrough. What has been "broken through" is an old preperception, an old habit of attending to an image of the self or of pain that was supposed to come but didn't.

The attention is the greatest tool of the human mind because it allows us to select from the world the stimuli to which we would like to respond. Intelligence, it seems to me, is a matter of selection; more about tuning things out than opening the mind. The great geniuses of history created a world that made some sense through acts of attention--selecting a single problem so that progress could be made, setting up the world as intelligible when apprehended along very particular lines. Great thinkers help us frame our vision--by telling us what to see or how to see, they also tell us what not to see.

Tunnel vision is at the core of human intelligence.

It is always difficult to quantify the mental aspect of training and racing, and often this aspect is overplayed. However, our preperceptions about the sort of runner that we are, the kinds of paces that we can handle, our strengths and weaknesses as a runner can hold us back and keep us from experiencing our power. They prepare us to pay attention to certain things and not others. A good training plan, then, shouldn't just look to train the heart and legs. It also has to work to train the mind to pay attention to new capacities as they unfold, altering our preperceptions, reimagining ourselves so that we can actually see ourselves more clearly.

Perhaps it is counter-intuitive, but it seems to me that mental toughness is more about imagination than brute willpower. The toughest thing in life is breaking out of old habits of attention. This breaking out requires the imaginative invention of a better self--and the willingness to trust that preperception once imagined.

Interview: Andy Anderson on Breaking the Longs Peak Speed Record

2011-09-16T09:08:00.005-05:00

Andy in the Keyhole on Longs

At some level, it is possible to claim that every race is equally difficult. After all, every race is run to exhaustion. However, imagine that the effort you were about to undertake was an all-out run up and down the highest mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not only that, the race would involve scrambling up 5.4 grade climbing with thousands of feet of direct exposure. Finally, the race would take approximately the same amount of time as a world-class marathon. Such an attempt might make you think that indeed some races are harder than others.

At any rate, this was precisely the situation that Andy Anderson faced as he attempted to match Chris Reveley's 1979 Longs Peak round-trip speed record on August 23rd. Here's a thread from Fastest Known Time that gives the statistics on Andy's record (2:02:54 - 1:18:32 up, 44:22 down) and also tells a little about Chris' Reveley's record and Mike Sullivan's ascent record (which Andy missed by one second!)

Before we get to the interview, you should know that Andy Anderson was my first running partner, and he's such a close friend that I count him practically as a brother. Though our friendship goes far beyond running, it always comes back to it. We ran and raced together in high school in Chattanooga, then ended up on the team together at Williams College as well. We've run in many places: off an interstate on a moonlit night in the middle of Wyoming, on the Hood to Coast relay (Andy took the infamous first leg), up Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts, across both rims of the Grand Canyon, and through the deserts of Southern Utah. I did the hardest workout of my life with him: 10 times up a hill on the trails behind my house in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.

Obviously, this effort was more challenging than those 10 hills. (That Andy claims that they were harder than this speed record tells you a little about Andy.) He has been kind enough to answer a few questions about the race, how to train for something like this, and his general approach towards running in the outdoors. Enjoy!

* * *

LLD: I believe I was with you the first time either of us had seen Longs Peak. We were 14 years old, a couple of Tennessee boys our first time out West with our cross-country coach Larry Hale. Why did you choose Long's Peak for this attempt?

Just before the Epic Snow Battle

AA: If I remember right, our view of Longs was from a hotel room across the valley where we were both lying sick in bed racing each other to the bathroom every so often. We had contracted some sort of godawful stomach bug, and we didn't get to climb Longs Peak that trip; it would have to wait for another day. The second time we tried to climb Longs Peak was four years later, just after our high school graduation in June. It snowed a few feet on the mountain that day. Even though we did not get to climb Longs, we did have the best snowball fight in the history of teenage boys on the top of Twin Sisters, a neighboring peak. Why Longs you ask? I have always liked running through the mountains, and I love combining running and climbing. Since I started working as a climbing ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park four summers ago, I have thought that it would be fun to try to run up the North Face of Longs. I knew the record was from 1979, and I knew some folks who had tried to break it unsuccessfully. It seemed like this summer was a good time to see if I could come close to the '79 record.

LLD: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the speed record on Longs?

AA: Chris Reveley set the previous record of 2:04:30 in 1979. Before him Roger Briggs held the record of 2:09. Each of these gentlemen have a long and storied history with Longs Peak as technical climbers and runners. Chris worked as a climbing ranger on Longs for 4 years before he set the record. The same year he set the speed record he also won the Pikes Peak Marathon. Roger has probably been up Longs by more different routes than any other person, and he pioneered many of the routes on the Diamond. He coached a cross country team in Boulder for many years. Both of these guys still climb and run on Longs.

LLD: I imagine there are many ways to get to the top of the peak. How did you plan your route? Obviously the peak is the turn-around, but where do you start? How many miles is the route? What's the vertical gain?

The North Face of Longs Peak

AA: The Longs Peak Trailhead at 9450 ft is the start. The routes to the top vary from a 3rd class scramble to 5.13 alpine routes on the Diamond. The North Face represents the shortest way to the top. I used this route for my run. The route has about 200 ft of 5.4 climbing on it. This section of the climb hangs on the north edge of the Diamond. Looking out over this wall you get to see down a few thousand feet to Chasm Lake. It feels like you are climbing through the sky. The technical climbing starts at about 13,400 ft. To get there I pieced together old trails below treeline and scree fields above treeline into the straightest, most runnable, route for me. The terrain has so many options that everyone who tries this run choses a different route that plays to their strengths. Both Chris and Roger used different routes than I did. I found my route through experimenting with various ways up to the base of the North Face over the last 4 years. All in all, the route I used gained about 4800 ft over the course of about 4.5 miles one way.

LLD: Did you worry about falling off the mountain?

AA: Someone once told me you can't fall off a mountain.

LLD: For a successful ultrarunner, I know you don't run a ton of miles. What's your training like? Do you have a training philosophy?

AA: Its all about reindeer milk :)

Andy running in the Tetons

For work I hike, climb, and ski up and down big mountains 10 months of the year. While I am working, I feel lucky to get 30-50 miles of running in a week. The added time on my feet climbing, hiking, and skiing seems to keep my endurance intact. Speed – well that's another matter. I can do ok in longer, slower races over challenging terrain. I get worked in the shorter or more even terrain races where speed starts to matter. I tried to change my training this summer to actually get more miles in. I ran five miles to and from work, then ran 15-30 miles on my three days off. This schedule allowed me to get in 45-70 miles a week plus the time spent on my feet at work.

I could say something deep and philosophical about how running rejuvenates my soul, provides me solace in times of need, or how it grants me spiritual enlightenment and allows me to see beauty in the world, but really I run because it is just plain fun. My training philosophy revolves around two central premises:

Train enough to be faster than Jeff.

Train enough to be faster than my little brother John. [Andy's brother John is an established ultra runner on the scene, you can read about him here at the Rock/Creek Race Team website.]

LLD: Did you carry anything or just go? Were you supported in any way?

AA: I carried a handheld waterbottle with a caffeinated Clif Shot dissolved in the water. I did not have any outside support. I did have a deadline to be back at home before 9am so that I could watch my son Huck and my wife Rebecca could get to work.

LLD: Do you think you could beat me in a 50k? 5k? Marathon?

AA: HA! See my training philosophy.

LLD: You've got a pretty nice resume on the trails (Winner of Rucky Chucky 50k, Woodside 50k, Pacifica 50k (CR), Muir Woods Marathon (CR), Timberline Marathon (CR), 13th at Way Too Cool 50k, 6th and 3rd in Stumpjump 50k, 8th and 5th at Zane Grey 50 miler). How did this compare with other really hard efforts you’ve had?

Andy and brother John in the Zane Grey 50m.

AA: Running up Longs Peak doesn't really compare to racing in organized events. No aid stations, no official course, no hordes of cheering fans, no other racers. I could only imagine chasing the others who had tried to get this record or imagine the ghosts of Chris or Roger springing from boulder to boulder just ahead of me. An event like this forces me to stay focused for the entire run. If I get distracted, I slow down or I fall. In other hard races I could “get into a groove” or lock onto someone else or focus on the mole on the back of my brother's leg and keep running a decent pace without having to concentrate on my running. As far as the physical effort, I just as tired after this run as I am after other two hour races.

LLD: How long before someone else comes along and breaks your record?

AA: Tomorrow?

LLD: What's next for you?

I get to be a stay at home Dad till I start work for the avalanche center in November. Hopefully I will get to run a lot this fall and get some speed back. I am planning on running the Stumpjump 50k on October 1st and the California International Marathon this December.

Expertise, Politics, and Problem Solving

2011-09-12T14:01:00.002-05:00

The passage below is an excerpt from Paul Goodman's "Applied Science and Superstition," written in 1951. It is both quaint and prescient. He gets the problem quite right, but sixty years later, the scale of the problem has been incredibly transformed:

In the century-old debate between Science and the Humanities, the humanities are now a weak opponent. They are not sure of what they are and they do not seem to have much of use to offer; whereas science looms in the fullness of success, it has made new advances in theory, and its technological applications have transformed the modern world. Yet sadly, perhaps just because our humanities are so weak, we have been losing the basic humane values of science itself. Having lost our firm credulity about what man 'is' and what society is 'for,' we have become confused about what is relevant, useful, or efficient. Thomas Huxley and Thorstein Veblen were thinking of a 'scientific society' where people were critical and modest, accurate and objective; where they shared in an international community of inquiry; where they lived 'naturally' without superstitions or taboos; and they hoped to make this come to be for every child. Is anybody saying anything like this? With us the idea of a 'scientific society' seems to have degenerated to applying the latest findings of professional experts to solve problems for an ignorant mass, problems often created by the ignorance of the mass, including the scientists. This is neither noble, nor very practical. To give the tone of it (at its worst), let me quote from the pitch of an International Business Machines [IBM] demonstrator:

The demands that will be placed on us [to sell our machines] can be met, for one must never forget that we are the masters. We alone have that great instrument called the human mind. It weighs 2 pounds. It only takes this much space. It can store 15 billion bits of information. It can be fed on less than 1/2 and apple a day. If man were to build this mighty instrument, it would take all the power supplied in the city of Rome and require a space as large as the Palazzo dei Congressi. All of us have such a machine. We are the masters and not the servants. We can keep pace. Yes, and ahead of the pace if we wish.

* * *

IBM's world view and general way of advertising continues to frame social problems as ones that ought to be solved for the mass by a small group of professional (and obviously not 'everyman') experts. Here's one of many "I'm an IBMer" commercials. Note that the solutions that are offered are expressed in ways that are intentionally intellectually obscure and for the "few" not the "many."

This way of thinking seems have also influenced our way of talking about economic problems. Instead of framing them in terms of concepts like power and justice, our economic problems are conceived technically. In order to be taken seriously in an economic debate, it is not enough to talk about the common good, greed, or power-interests. One has to use the Beltway vocabulary of "debt-ceilings" and "stimulus packages." Ordinary folks who don't have the time for a PhD in economics still feel like they should have an opinion on whether Keynes or Friedman had the correct economic theory in order for their voice to be heard. Your man on the street now talks about mortgage-backed securities, capital gains taxes, and studies pie charts on wealth distributions, as if our problems weren't abundantly clear and had to be demonstrated "technically" through a kind of rough and Googled expertise. (I am guilty of just this sort of behavior.)

Education has also fallen prey to this sort of technical view of problem solving, both in terms of its means and ends. Means: more and more we are reliant on the testimony of education professors who study schools to solve the problems of schools, instead of inviting the people who live in schools--students, teachers, and parents--to articulate their concerns. Ends: again and again, we theorize the proper ends of education in terms of creating technical experts in math and science instead of the humane and scientific ideals of Huxley, Veblen, and Goodman. These ideals do not apply science to human problems. They see science as a humane attitude and practical method of working out human problems. The goal is not to create a class of experts, but a community of people who can live together and work on their problems without superstition or taboo.

It seems too simple for our whiz-kid age: The proper end of education is the good life. The proper end of economics is the good life. The proper end of politics is the good life. This was Aristotle's answer 2400 years ago.

It is an ancient and classic view, simply expressed.

We should remind ourselves of this as we enter a new political cycle: simple answers are not always easy to achieve, and complex answers are not always right.

Interview: John Ramsay, King of Beasts

2011-09-08T11:17:00.000-05:00

This interview is the fourth in a series of exchanges with local elite runners. These are the men and women who train hard, take their running seriously, and work to compete--and win--on a local and national level. For all of these folks, running is a hobby. None of them make a living doing it. They continue to represent the best of amateurism, the idea that excellence in athletic endeavor is valuable for many reasons beyond financial compensation.

Most of these folks are friends that I have met during my time as a runner. They have offered me untold amounts of training advice, motivated me to get out the door, whipped my butt in races, and shared many a post-run beverage. Though this sort of runner is not famous at a national level, they are often locally known and help establish and maintain local standards of racing and training.

John Ramsay's race times are very good, but they are not exceptional. He has met the benchmarks that separate out the top local runners from the rest: sub 17 in the 5k, 34 something in the 10k, solidly under 3 hours in the marathon. He recently earned a sub 25 hour belt buckle at Leadville, and he competes regularly in ultramarathons. All of this is notable, in its own right.

However, John is best known around town and beyond for the way he has achieved these times. An admitted "fat kid" in his teens and early 20s, John came to the sport late and has approached it with a peculiar and inspiring intensity. Over the last two years, John has run a stunning volume of miles, regularly stringing together 400 and 500 mile months. His log tells the story pretty plain.

This devotion to training, his relentless drive, and willingness to hurt has earned him the nickname of "King of Beasts." He also happens to be an excellent training partner and a close friend. I had him in mind when I wrote this post. Enjoy the interview!

* * *

LLD: You just got back from a runner's dream--a full summer of training in Leadville, CO. Can you describe your daily routine?

KOB: Wake up at about 7:30-9, walk down to Provin’ Grounds coffee shop, walk back, get a few hours of work done, run, work, run, work, then sleep. Long run [30+ miles] most weekends, if I was not doing a single really long run I would do a triple long run [back-to-back-to-back days] of 21 miles over some good hills. I spent 10 weeks in Leadville and ran just over 1300 miles. [Yes, that’s an average of 130 miles per week on trails at 9,000 feet of altitude.]

LLD: So, yeah, you've run more miles in the last two years than I've thought possible--right at 10,000, averaging something like 96 miles per week. This sort of commitment to running so much seems to me to be about more than training. What keeps you out there running?

John smiles every now and then.

KOB: Most of my running is about the next goal race, or because my friends are running, and sometimes I guess because of the demons. But I’d rather not discuss all that.

LLD: I think that a lot of people relate to you because in a weird way you represent "the everyman's" approach to running. Have you seen this? Why do you think that people are attracted to your style of training and racing?

KOB: That is something I have noticed. I think it’s because I did not run in high school or college, I am not exactly runnerly in build, and I run a bunch. People might be attracted to my style of running because I don’t do many workouts that are worth bragging about - just lots of miles per week / month / year and sometimes I can do well in races.

LLD: For the running geeks: How do you manage to absorb the volume of training that you do? I find that when I try to run sustained mileage, I start breaking down. Any tips on recovery for the masses?

KOB: From experimenting, and we are all an experiment of one, I seem to run well when there is a large disparity between my easy run pace and my workout paces. For example – easy run pace at about 8 mm and run tempos at 6-6:15 and mile repeats at 5:25 – 5:40. That gap and the actually easy pace of my easy runs might help me absorb the workload.

Tips on recovery, nothing new I am afraid, I don’t have any big secrets:

Your blogger and two dudes who run A Lot.

Start your easy runs Very easy, and then settle into your easy pace.
Get lots of sleep.
Eat enough.
Drink enough water.
Get massages by a person who knows their stuff. If you are in Tennessee go see Juliana.
Ice bath after a hard workout.
Hot bath the night of a massage.

LLD: What's your take on the old question of quantity vs. quality in running? Do you worry that the mileage you do comes at the expense of quality?

KOB: I think you need both, quality and quantity. Variety in pace is important. Depending on the person of course I am not sure you can have one without the other and stay healthy in the long term. I think we run the workouts not in spite of the high weekly mileage but because the miles. The easy miles give you the ability to recover and the durability to complete the workouts, and the change in pace and effort give your body a different stimulus than easy running.

So, I don’t worry too much that the quantity of miles I run affects the quality, so long as the day before a workout I run easy. It’s a bad idea to run with the half steppers or hammer heads in your running crew the night before a workout.

LLD: What's the most beautiful spot on the Leadville course?

KOB: The finish line, haha. For real, the downhill inbound section of Hope Pass. From the top of the pass you have about 10 minutes till the aid station and you can see the Llamas, Twin Lakes, and every other running fool that is around you. I also enjoyed the last aid station before the finish line, May Queen, this year. I saw the lights and heard the people cheering, and I was pretty sure I could hold a strong pace the last 13.5 miles.

LLD: You race at distances from the mile to the marathon to the 100 mile, on roads and trails. This sort of variety of racing is really rare. Having some experience at all of these distances, can you give your opinion on the debate about which race is the most difficult?

KOB: In terms of muscle trauma and the odds of ending up in the hospital, the 100 mile is the most difficult. If you are looking for the classic legs filled with lactic acid lungs searing type of running pain the last 2k of a 10k, 5k of a half marathon, and 3 miles of a marathon are pretty special.

Belmont XC Opener

2011-09-05T13:19:00.000-05:00

Ted, Justin, and I got together for a run sometime in mid-August. As we headed out, Ted tossed out the suggestion to form a team and run a series of local college cross-country races. Considering that I'd been running but not really training, I gave him some non-committal answer like, "Sounds cool, I'll think about it." We ran on.

It was a brutally hot day, and we were all struggling a bit. None of us was in great shape, drained physically and psychologically by the Nashville summer. By the end of the run, I was just glad to be done, feeling totally flattened by an easy 6 miler. Afterwards, Ted asked again if I was up for racing. "Maybe," I said.

Ted just sorta looked at me for a few moments, then he said this: "When your college coach told you there was a race coming up, did you tell him that 'maybe' you'd be ready? Hell no, you got on the line and raced."

Put it on the line.

So, this was how I found myself two weeks later dressed in a white singlet and black shorts, sporting a glaringly new pair of XC spikes, standing on a white line in a huge dusty field with a bunch of kids approximately half my age. It was 95 degrees at 6pm.We had cobbled together four friends who regularly train together: me, Ted, Dan, and Ryan. Justin's flight had been delayed, so we scrambled to find a 5th man to round out the team. One of Ryan's former college teammates agreed. I gave him a singlet and a number. He took them, saying "Thank you, sir."

"Sir?" Really? The kid did look pretty young, I guess.

The usual feelings returned standing in the box waiting for the gun. Nervousness, acid in the legs, thoughts about pacing. The starter gave a set of instructions. It would be a two-count start; the old familiar words: "Runners set!" The gun. We were off.

Most everybody took off quicker than I did, although I set out quicker than I usually do, trying to stay in contact. I could smell the bodies as we trampled through the first 600m, across a narrow bridge, around the first turn. It had been forever really, since I had found myself in this situation: in a thick pack of runners. I let myself be carried along, and in an instant we were through the first mile. Somebody yelled out: "5:25!"

The pace felt fast, but I felt good. I concentrated on moving up, since I knew many runners would have gone out too fast in this first race--particularly the new freshmen trying to impress their teammates and coach. Sure enough, I steadily passed people the whole second mile, kept running hard. I was at the back of the middle pack of runners, moving up closer to the middle. The front runners were kicking up the light layer of clay and dirt that covered the summer-baked ground. I was literally eating their dust.

I missed the second mile split, but it didn't matter. Nothing left to do but run hard. The last mile heads downhill and through the crowd. I did what I usually do: faked feeling strong, faked running hard, convincing myself over and over again despite all evidence to the contrary--dust caked throat, burning quads, cramping calves, hollowed vision--that I was feeling great.

A half mile to go.

A quick left turn left us 400m to the finish. I was back with the 800m runners who were just doing XC to stay in shape. A couple of them hurtled past me, kicking outrageously hard. I shoulda kicked harder: the clock turned to 17:00 as it swung into view, 17:01 as I crossed the line. I finished 60th out of 100 runners.

Ted kicking hard.

In the chute, there was the gasping and jostling, the ripping of tags, the whirl of oxygen depletion. We staggered out into the crowd. Ted had finished 30 seconds ago and was still doubled over. My sweet wife brought us cool water. The race was run. It was really fun.

Our team finished 8th out of 11 teams. I was 4th runner. I'm hoping that over the next month or so I can get in shape and close the gap to Ted. That's the story of my first college XC race since 1999.

Love for Gambia

2011-08-31T08:32:00.000-05:00

I just got an email from Erin Poirer, directing me to her blog Love4Gambia. Erin quoted LLD in a couple places, and it was cool for me to see how she could relate to what I was writing. I encourage you to check out her blog, as she is using running to address some simple issues in a country that we rarely consider.

Thanks, Erin! Keep up the good work.

The Gospel of the Useful

2011-08-29T22:37:00.006-05:00

Max Horkheimer

"Even the words that could voice a hope for something besides the fruits of success have been pressed into this service. ... The idea of happiness has been reduced to a banality to coincide with leading the kind of normal life that serious religious thought has often criticized. The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous. Paradoxically, a society that, in the face of starvation in great areas of the world, allows part of its machinery to stand idle, that shelves many important inventions, and that devotes innumerable working hours to moronic advertising and to the production of instruments of destruction--a society in which these luxuries are inherent has made usefulness its gospel."

--Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, "Rise and Decline of the Individual" 1947.

Two experiences confirm the ongoing relevancy of these words, which were written in difficult times.

The first, today, was a chance meeting with a former logic student and senior history major who informed me that he has decided to put these talents to use as a political strategist, advising in the creation of political attack ads. When I told him that despite my efforts to make him a philosopher, he chose sophistry, he laughed. I laughed too. What else can you do?

The second is my wider experience as an academic adviser. The "gospel of the useful" is used straightfowardly and directly to justify self-destruction, narrowness of vision, lack of imagination, and bald power-grasping. In my conversations with advisees and their parents, the meaning of "useful" when it is applied to the value of education is "that which preserves class privilege, that which does not challenge me to change, that which accepts quite blindly the situation as it is, even when that situation directly opposes my own capacities, strengths, passions, and vision as an individual."

Anyone who chooses to see the true meaning of the word "useful" need only look to the fear that the word strikes in the heart of young people. There is no greater threat that can be uttered to a person involved in the arduous task of self-realization than this: "Make yourself useful."

I've said this before, and I will say it again: one of the best reasons to run is its utter uselessness as an activity. Horkheimer makes the meaning of this clearer. The fact that a run has no exchange value on the open market is a mark that it, as an experience, cannot be exchanged. Its value, like that of life itself, is inherent and singular.

On Running and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense

2011-08-28T12:09:00.003-05:00

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.
--Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 121

This moustache is even better than Nietzsche's.

This morning I ran with two friends of mine. We've got a good eclectic group of runners here in Nashville from a variety of backgrounds. Our conversations are always winding and interesting, full of provocations and insights, rarely conclusive of anything. The running mind seems to skim from topic to topic rather than burrow in.

One subject that we skimmed over today was my last blog post. One of my running partners, who happens to have a PhD in physiology, reminded me that I had finally cured my four-year battle with chronic achilles tendinitis by finding the right shoe (in this case, the New Balance 890). So, my last post, which encouraged readers not to worry so dang much about their shoe choice was really in bad faith. Maybe, he said, if I had paid more attention to shoe choice over the last four years I wouldn't have been running in pain for so long.

I had to admit that he has a point.

NB 890, I owe you an apology.

One of the central distinctions in philosophy of knowledge (and it also appears frequently in ordinary conversation) is the distinction between theory and practice. We say things like this: "That's a good idea in theory, but it will never work out in practice." What we mean by this expression is that the arguments and ideas that are attractive to the intellect are not always the most workable ideas. Some thoughts give us pleasure to think, and this is almost their sole function: they calm us, they give us hope, or they assuage doubt. In a certain sense, these ideas still act, but their effects are more or less confined to the realm of feeling rather than the more objective realm of action.

The ideas that actually work out in practice do not always have positive effects in the realm of feeling. The political process is perhaps the best example of this. We call those folks "ideological" exactly those who are more interested in thinking thoughts that please the intellect in particular ways. Those who are more pragmatic or compromising are less psychologically attached to ideas and more willing to forgo the more subjective satisfactions of certainty or ideological purity in favor of more social (and hence more vague) sorts of satisfaction, like agreement or progress, or problem-solving.

So, in theory, yes, it would be nice not to have to worry about shoe choice. We could be the runner that we imagine ourselves to be: durable, immune to forces of marketing, tough as nails, blind to pain, and able to overcome all obstacles with a healthy dose of our powerful will. This is an idea that is pleasing to the intellect (though once written out, it does seem pretty flat and brutal) but also one that simply doesn't work in practice. In fact one of the reasons that this idea is so attractive is precisely because we aren't like this. It's a fantasy, one that we can disappear into in moments of self-satisfaction.

Running is a practice; it's not a theory. The things that work in running are not always things that are pleasing to the intellect. The intelligence, then, that is required to train well is not theoretical, it's practical. Aristotle called this sort of intelligence phronesis, and he opposed it to theoretical intelligence. Phronesis is precisely that sort of real-world intelligence that is skeptical of too-easy answers. To be practically wise, you have to be careful in a strange way of trusting your intellect. The answers that are satisfying to the mind are not always so satisfying to the world.

We here in the U.S. think of ourselves as practical people, and this value in practical living encourages a kind of anti-intellectualism. We are nervous about academia, the ivory tower, the Washington beltway, etc. We worry that the brightest and most attractive ideas might be dangerous. There's a sort of puritanism at work here: those ideas are most dangerous at the moment that they are most pleasing to think. Perhaps this is one reason that philosophy and philosophers have almost no public presence in our contemporary culture. Ours is not a philosophical culture because we refuse to take pleasure in ideas--and philosophy pretty much luxuriates in them.

What's the upshot of all this? I'm not really sure. One thing that philosophy has taught me is that the truth of an idea is only one aspect of it. Ideas can do many things besides turn out to be true. They can encourage us, motivate us, and ennoble us. They can memorialize a prior time or give us hope in the future. Yes, it's important to be honest. It's important to be realistic. It's important to be practical. We ought to seek the truth.

But maybe one thing that we ought also to do is to remember that ideas also have an aesthetic function in a living organism. I don't believe that we can have it both ways: seeking the truth will always be ugly and painful, if sometimes satisfying. Fantasies and myths will always be powerful forms of pleasure, and often repugnant and ignorant. A nostalgic tale that is not quite true may be just the thing to provide us motivation to tackle once more the difficult task of ascertaining the truth.

Then again, it might just be a lie.

Back in the Goodle Days

2011-08-24T18:38:00.000-05:00

Some rambling thoughts in response to this New York Times article on the question of whether we were born to run, trends, fads, and marketing:

As cool as it is to think that our evolutionary history was driven by distance running (and I believe it to be the case--I recommend the account given in Our Kind, which was published back in 1989, long before the argument was applied to barefoot running), giving an account of how the foot developed is very different from giving a justification for how it should be shod in any particular case.

It amazes me sometimes when I think of the miles I have put on these legs, which are still made of flesh and gristle, and how well they have stood up to the asphalt over the years. The vast majority of those miles have been in shoes, though I do have a tender spot for barefoot strides over dewy fields.

These days it's hard to sort out the difference between education and marketing. The marketers educate us. The educators market to us. Harvard and Vibram are mentioned in the same sentence: which is the brand, and which the school?

Seems like before the internet all we had were running shoes. You'd go to the store and try a couple pairs on, and if they felt good, you'd buy them and run in them and basically forget about them until the rubber wore off or the upper ripped or what have you. I remember people talked a little about pronating, underpronating, overpronating, but I never knew what the heck that meant. Still don't, really.

If you got injured, you wouldn't blame your shoes, you'd look to that dumb day when you did too many hills. Or the day that you had to get in the car and drive 8 hours right after a meet, and you stiffened up. Or the day when you tweaked your hamstring playing frisbee. You'd put some ice on it, take a day or two off, rearrange a few workouts, and that would be that.

My freshman year in college, I remember that my feet hurt--I could feel all the tendons in them, just kinda raw. And no wonder: I'd gone from a 40mpw runner to a 95mpw runner in a year. I never once considered changing my shoes. What did I do? I kept running. I used to tell myself: it's running, not football. How bad can I really mess myself up moving down the road?

Fifteen years later, 30,000 miles later, I'm still headed down that same road. Was I born to run? Was my body made to run? Those questions seem less important than the simple fact that I'm still running. I kept running. The thing is, it's hard to wrap that up in a cardboard box and sell it.

William James on Attention: Some questions

2011-08-19T13:16:00.001-05:00

William James, in The Principles of Psychology, on the development of attention:

"Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more so-called permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest. But childhood is characterized by great active energy, and has few organized interests by which to meet new impressions and decide whether they are worthy of notice or not, and the consequence is the extreme motility of the attention with which we are familiar in children, and which makes their first lessons such rough affairs. Any strong sensation whatever produces accommodation of the organs which perceive it, and absolute oblivion, for the time being, of the task in hand. This reflex and passive character of the attention which, as a French writer says, makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which the teacher must overcome. It is never overcome in some people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the interstices of their mind-wandering."

Have the marketers, technology having wildly increased their capacity to create immediately exciting sensorial stimuli, created a culture in which we all belong less to ourselves than the objects which happen to catch our notice?

Is this regression to the child-mind the source of the temper-tantrums that characterize the style of contemporary politics--unable to focus our attention long enough to maturely address problems, we lose ourselves in anger (the most intensely sensorial of emotions)?

If these are real problems, then should we be careful not to let intense sensorial stimuli into our classrooms in order to combat these cultural forces? Does the school have anywhere near enough power to combat the war on attention being waged by branding or marketing?

Or, am I being an old fogey: should we see this quickness with which our attention shifts as the appearance of simply another form of intelligence, not its dissolution?

(By the way, isn't this another argument for more attention being paid to physical education in schools: sports being a way to channel the intensity of sensorial perception into organized social life.)

Pain and Fear: Sport as Ethics Education

2011-08-16T19:55:00.003-05:00

As a sport, long distance running distills excellence as much as possible to the category of human effort. Long distance running requires endurance, by which we mean the ability to suffer. We admire good runners because of their ability to run fast, win competitions, etc. In this sense, running is like other sports: we admire elites because they represent the outer limits of human achievement. When it comes to the specific type of achievement that distance running represents, however, the simplicity of running reduces the skill factor to the minimum. Ours is an endurance sport, and as such the currency of achievement in running is pain.

One thing that is strange about pain, however, is its immediacy. With respect to our own pain, it is difficult to find distance from it in order to take it up reflectively. This is why the experience of pain is always difficult to recall in its full intensity. We look back on a race and say: hey, that wasn't really so bad. But if it wasn't so bad, why didn't I run faster? This phenomenon, by the way, explains why we continue to sign up for marathons--Frank Shorter, I believe, once said that he couldn't race a marathon until he had forgotten completely what it was like. In a way, we can't know our own pain because we can't get intellectual distance from it; we only feel it as present to us in a particular moment.

The pain of others is of course even more difficult to imagine. Pain always has to be expressed indirectly through signs and signals. People scrunch up their faces to demonstrate effort. Their eyes perhaps lose their focus on the outward world, as the pain absorbs all of their attention. We have to read the pain of our competitors or our teammates on their bodies, but the text we read never seems to bring forward the actual object. We imagine some runners to be tougher than others, as they seem to physically exude effort. Others show no outward sign of pain, making the sport look easy. But is the first sort of runner hurting worse, or is he just more demonstrative? We can't know because we don't experience the pain itself, just its signs.

Roger Bannister, breaking the 4:00 barrier also appears to be courageously confronting his capacity for pain.

The difficulty here is that in order to be communicated, pain must be expressed. However, pain by its very nature is immediate--and as soon as it is expressed, it is transformed into something that is not pain--a facial expression, a cry, a failed motion. We have to interpret these marks in order to understand the nature of pain, and we can go wrong.

The upshot of this is that experiencing pain--whether it is your own pain or the pain of another--requires intelligent interpretation of its marks. One thing that is striking when watching a race is the difference between how the leaders of a race and those in the back or middle of a race handle the experience of pain. A runner like Bekele or Gebrselassie shows almost no sign of pain, even though they are not only at the limit of their own performance, but at the limit of human performance. It would be absurd to conclude from this that they are feeling no pain; we should marvel instead at the intelligence with which they respond to the pain they feel--expressing pain would be a waste of energy and a clue to opponents.

When it comes to dealing with the pain of running, we more ordinary folk face the same challenges. The most difficult thing in running is to read our pain: what exactly does it mean? As I go through a training cycle and get in better physical shape, I also seem to begin to be able to identify more clearly the difference between real pain and imagined pain. The pain gets more nuanced and communicative. Familiarity breeds comfort, and though I feel the pain, I get better at controlling my reaction to it.

I think that through the years, I have learned that much of the "hurt" of pain has to do with fear. The sensations that hurt the worst are the newest: we don't know what they mean, we don't know how to respond to them, and we don't know therefore how to mediate them. This lack of knowledge brings fear and lack of control, and the sensations come crashing in on us with all of the immediacy that makes pain so, well, painful. But over time and through familiarity, we learn to adapt to them and to run on in spite of them and through them. Some of the sensations that were at first painful later, oddly, even become pleasures.

There is a larger lesson in here, I think, about the human response to suffering. Distance running teaches us that we have the ability to adapt to it, to ignore it, and even to take pleasure in it. While these are essential responses to our own suffering, it is easy to see how our ability to adapt to the presence of suffering can also be a problem politically and socially. Being ethical requires two opposite attitudes. We ought to be as indifferent as possible with respect to our own pain and suffering, but when it comes to the suffering of others, we ought to notice it and respond to it. As opposite as these reactions are, they are united in the sense that both require courage--an active and fearless relation to our own suffering and the suffering of others. Is a capacity to feel pain, that is, not to ignore it but to treat it, deal with it, encounter it, at the heart of ethics?

Villagers stand by a bombed settlement in Afghanistan.

By creating conditions in which human beings can safely encounter suffering, sport teaches us that the presence of courage distinguishes a noble encounter with suffering from an experience of suffering that diminishes life. We don't run in order to experience pain. We run to practice courage in the face of pain. You might say that a race is a sort of celebration of the possibility of courage in the face of pain. As for whether running and racing teaches us to be more ethical people, I suppose this depends upon our capacity to generalize this courage and to extend it beyond the artificiality of organized sport into the more uncertain spheres of ordinary life.

More than any classroom, sport educates us into how to respond to intensities of feeling, the immediate qualities of experience. It is hard to call this sort of response "knowledge," but it is certainly a type of intelligence, one that is perhaps underrated in this angry 21st century.

Running Beyond the Limits of Language

2011-08-10T20:09:00.004-05:00

In The Blue Book, which was a sort of collection of lecture notes that he compiled in lieu of writing a book for Russell, Wittgenstein writes the following, ruminating on a common theme of his--the perils of communication:

When we look at everything that we know and can say about the world as resting on personal experience, then what we know seems to lose a good deal of its value, reliability, and solidity. We are then inclined to say that it is all "subjective"; and "subjective" is used derogatorily, as when we say that an opinion is merely subjective, as a matter of taste. Now, that this aspect should seem to shake the authority of experience and knowledge points to the fact that here our language is tempting us to draw some misleading analogy. This should remind us of the case when the popular scientist appeared to have shown us that the floor which we stand on is not really solid because it is made up of electrons.

We are up against trouble caused by our way of expression.

It seems we are always up against this trouble--the trouble of language. Language bewitches us, creating mysteries through its metaphors, mixing indiscriminately resonances, meanings, and connotations. Wittgenstein's view of philosophy was that most of the problems that it dealt with were a consequence of pernicious habits of expression rather than deep metaphysical mystery. He taught philosophers not to think quite so deeply and mystically--to look for the answers to their great and enduring questions in habits of expression that were imbedded in speech acts that had no clear consequences. Thus, the way to address many of the lasting philosophical problems was not to penetrate to the mystical core of reality with the mind, but instead to wonder practically and specifically about why we were worrying about these things in the first place. What habits of speaking generated these questions? What forms of life propagated and sustained them?

You might say, then, that Wittgenstein was a sort of anti-philosopher. He painted a picture of philosophers as isolated and largely befuddled men (and they were all men) who wasted their thoughts on questions that hardly made any sense, challenging them (and still us today) to reflect upon the habits and contexts that sustain philosophical reflection and inquire into the actual value of those habits for life.

Of course, almost every great philosopher in history was an anti-philosopher in the sense that philosophy makes progress by waking reflection up to reality, shaking it from its daydreams or its enslavement to corrupting influences and liberating it to the service of the enrichment of life. So, in this sense Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are both a critical investigation into whether philosophy makes any sense at all and a deeply affirmative philosophical investigation into the relevance of our intellectual achievements.

Yes, language bewitches. Our forms of expression, philosophical and otherwise, betray us. Language points, gestures, slips, errs, confuses. But it also is, as Dewey wrote, the "tool of tools," lying at the very heart of human intelligence. The same duality lies at the heart of thinking. Our capacity for reflection can be brought to bear on solving real and pressing problems, or it can be used just as easily to distract ourselves from problems.

The difficulty, of course, is that it is not always easy to distinguish productive thought from distractive thought. Perhaps art demonstrates this tension best: beauty, art, and the artist seem something impractical and perhaps less than necessary while simultaneously coming off as the highest form of human activity. Art doesn't solve any problems--more often it poses them--but on the other hand a world without art, without beauty for its own sake, seems like a world without purpose. Art seems, strangely, both a distraction for life and central to it.

Politics is another example. We are in the middle now of intense political conflict over what to do about the economy. It seems like all of this reflection and debate ought to be productive, right? We have the best minds (all minds, really) focussed on the question of what to do. We are thinking hard and focused directly on the problem. At the same time, many economists argue that the economy is suffering precisely because because of the political debate--the economy is struggling because we take it to be a political problem! What to do about this? Reflect more on the economy? Debate more? Argue more? Will this really help? Here, reflection on a problem seems not only of dubious value, but possible of negative value.

As you can see, we are always "up against trouble caused by our way of expression."

Here is where running comes in. Running is an activity that requires no language. In fact, when pursued at its highest intensities, it makes language impossible. My memories of my best runs and races are always mute, the linguistic part of the brain having been abandoned for different modes of attunement. When we run, we watch the world with an eye that points in two directions. We look out, ahead to the horizon or downwards to the passing terrain. We also look in, feeling our bodies, the rising surges of sensation, the drifting lines of feeling. Most of what we see and feel when we run cannot be put into words but can be experienced with powerful depth.

Technology, the web, the knowledge economy have created a world that feels increasingly virtual and representational. The world itself confuses and bewitches like language. The dream-screens into which we peer bring us thoughts from who knows where. A run is an escape into a different sort of world, one which feels less full of instruments, tools, and signs. The sensations come scrubbed of their representations, and for this reason they are simultaneously more vague and more vivid.

In his recent post, Zach wrote well of running as a practice of positive freedom, a way to grow into one's self. But running has also always been a form of escape, perhaps the first form of escape, before we learned to dream away our lives. As escape, it is a practice of negative freedom, a practice of liberation from the clang and confusion of representation, the persistent demand that life, our actions, and our values make sense.

In this way, perhaps, running is like Wittgenstein's philosophy. It does not offer a coherent plan or life strategy; it doesn't pretend to completeness or offer the secrets to a well-lived life. What it gives us is a way out of the plans and meanings and senses that have begun to seem virtual and hollow. A run gives life no meaning. It simply reminds us that beyond the sense that life makes, there is so much more life.

Searle's Chinese Room and Intelligent Training

2011-08-01T18:57:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't noticed, I've been farming out the blog recently to some of my favorite running-philosophers. This is because I've been traveling all summer, and posting presently from Paraguay. (In 2009, I wrote a series of "dispatches" from Paraguay for those who are interested in what life is like down here. Here's one on running that you might like.) Vacation and travel make it difficult to continue with your regular habits--my writing and running have both been erratic. But it's for this very reason that we need to travel, to break up those old habits and allow some newness to leak in. The tendency is to think that travel and vacation are supplementary to ordinary life, but of course the familiarity of ordinary life would be mere routine without strange and new experiences. In the very same way, I hope that the inclusion of these guest pieces are not merely supplemental, but that they give you a break from my voice and perspective. They certainly are refreshing to me.

This is all a long-winded way of introducing a third excellent piece from Scout7. I'll shut up now and let him have his say. I will be back in the country soon enough and hope to begin posting again on a regular basis.

* * *

Now that things have slowed down with life, I took some time to read through the Philosophy Bro site. In my poking around, I came across his summation of John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment.

Quick overview: take a room with a man, a whole bunch of files, some blank paper and pencils; put them in a closed room with two slots on a wall. One slot is labeled “IN”, the other is labeled “OUT”. Slips of paper with Chinese characters drawn on them enter the room through the IN slot. The man takes the slip, looks up the symbol in the files, and draws a corresponding symbol on a blank piece of paper, which he then shoves through the OUT slot. Effectively, argues Searle, this room simulates how a computer works, and that the man in the room has absolutely no understanding of Chinese; all he is doing is following a set of instructions with no context.

So, what does this have to do with running? I bet you’re thinking I’m about to go on some sort of anti-technology rant. Well, I’m not.

Instead, I’m putting this back on you, dear reader. How many of us have looked at a training plan and said, “Hey, I think I could do this”, and then followed it? Probably quite a few, I’m sure. Now, in that situation, did you ever take the time to understand what the program was telling you? Or did you just follow the instructions without trying to comprehend them? If so, how are you any better than a computer? If the argument is that syntax without semantics does not a sentient being make, then are we exercising our understanding properly when we do nothing more than follow along?

Running is, to me, an opportunity to explore, to experiment, to learn. To do this, you have to be actively engaged in your running; that means you are focusing on your body when you’re out there. Sure, you can drift away when you’re doing an easy jog around the block, but wouldn’t it be better to try to pay attention to that twinge in your right knee, or perhaps how your breathing patterns changed when you crested that last big hill?

I see people asking about whether a training plan is “good” for them. Granted, we all start somewhere, and to paraphrase a wise man, newbies are cursed to be newbies. My question to you is what are you doing to move past that newbie stage?

Now, some people may say it looks like I’m telling people not to ask questions of others; nothing could be further from the truth, I assure you. In fact, I would encourage everyone out there to ask questions of other people, of themselves. Asking questions is how you gather data. Putting a context to that data is how you turn it into information. Figuring out how to apply that information to your situation is wisdom. In other words, you should be asking questions, a lot of questions, and then you should be taking the answers and fitting them into a context that you understand and that works with your framework. And finally, you should be taking that information and experimenting with it.

When it comes down to it, one of the benefits of training is learning about ourselves; we learn what we’re capable of, how our bodies respond to training and stimuli, what works and what doesn’t. It’s an experimental, iterative process. But we take away this benefit if we follow blindly the pathways laid before us, and fail to develop a context and understanding of why there’s a path in the first place.

Running Free

2011-07-24T18:05:00.012-05:00

This is the second post by longtime friend and guest blogger, Zach V. I'm always excited to have different voices and perspectives speak out on philosophy and running. Thanks, Zach!

As soon as the division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. -- Karl Marx

If you’re a runner, you’re probably a Marxist. That’s because--strange as it might sound today--Marx was fundamentally concerned with human freedom. And what is more liberating than running?

When runners are asked why they run, they often say that they want to ‘get away from it all’, to feel ‘self-reliant’, or to simply be ‘free’, as a recent advertising campaign phrases it.

This, however, is a weak notion of freedom, as Marx (and Hegel before him) realized, because it is merely negative. When you’re defined in terms of what you’re not, you’re not really making a meaningful statement about what you are. The Bill of Rights, for example, lays out numerous negative freedoms. You cannot be barred from speaking your mind in America. But this kind of freedom doesn't prevent the quality of what is said today from being very bad.

An attorney, scholar, activist, president of a drinking club, facial hair champion, and ultramarathon runner.

A more positive notion of freedom and a more accurate description of why we run would have to do more than say what we're not. It would have to take into account the creativity inherent in human nature and the reality of what people actually do with their freedom.

It’s for these reasons that Marx thought action was what defined people. It enslaved them or made them free. You are what you do. And, in Marx’s time like today, many people do not harness their full creative powers. Marx saw that those with money just let other people do things for them. Those who had to work in factories became machines themselves, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

The society Marx envisioned wasn’t one ruled by the Inner Party. It was governed by Renaissance men and women who were free to make the lives they wanted to live and become the people they wanted to become. Marx wanted the ideal of the Renaissance to be shared by everyone, not just a privileged few.

Today, many people run when they have absolutely no reason to. Your grandad would have thought you were crazy for running. A lot of people still think we’re crazy. Sure, there is the runner’s high. And it’s a great stress-reliever. But I think something else is going on here.

Maybe we don’t have to run, but we still need to run because we’re complex and creative beings who want to accomplish things--the true definition of freedom. What is more liberating than being able to say, “I ran a 5k” or “I ran a marathon”?

Freedom?

There are, of course, other ways of fashioning ourselves than by running. But since many of us now have desk jobs in air-conditioned office parks, running makes a lot of sense. After exhausting days at the office, we still have the energy to run because it stimulates a whole different set of activities and thoughts.

Running is one part of my quest to improve myself, fulfill my capacities, and continue to be more free. When I think of who I want to be, it’s not a Runner, or a Programmer, or a Partner. It’s all of these things, and more. It’s the man Marx wanted to be--or at least the one he wanted everyone to be able to be.

Understanding the Body, Becoming a Body

2011-07-18T14:29:00.004-05:00

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes of what he calls the "transcendental object," and he refers to it sometimes as the "= x." Das ding an sich--the thing in itself. Kant's point when writing about the transcendental object is that objects are somewhat slippery to the human mind. Kant believes that we never truly apprehend things as they are. We see, instead, a kind of messy blend of sense-impressions and mental concepts. His ultimate point: the thing in itself is unknowable.

Little known fact: Kant won the Koenigsburg Turkey Trot 5k 5 years straight (1750-1755). Two years later an achilles injury led him to hang up the flats and turn his obsessive mind towards becoming a billiards hustler.

Though this sounds a bit like skepticism, Kant's view is different from common-sense skepticism which essentially denies any capacity for knowledge. Though Kant believed we could never apprehend the world as it is, he thought we could apprehend it better. We could refine our mental concepts so that they better mapped onto the world. We could also improve our capacity for sensation--we could learn to sense the world better so that our intuitions of objects become riper and fuller.

This is the purpose of science, art, and also of education. The experimental method allows us to isolate concepts and test whether or not they match up well with the objects they are meant to represent. Artists experiment as well, teaching us to experience the world in new ways through painting, music, literature, film, etc. They give us new angles on sensation, allow us to feel, see, taste and hear differently. A well-developed mind is able to sense the world richly--and it also has the conceptual apparatus to be able to express and share those sensations. Intelligence, on the Kantian view, doesn't just allow us to manipulate the world better. It gives us the capacity to experience the world more fully, to live in it more deeply, and to share it with others.

This is a great story, and it is mostly true. There is a tension, however, between the conceptual work of intelligence and the aesthetic, sensitive work. We've all experienced the way in which overanalyzing experience can strip it of its vague, sensed peripheries--the "gray areas" that are not merely the excess of a concept but are rich and vital centers of experienced life. The gray areas of life are usually not gray at all. They escape intellectualism through their vibrancy and polyvalence: their inability to be captured by the rigid categories of the mind. We've also been frustrated--on the other hand--by our muteness before some of our most profound experiences. Life is buoyed by intuitions, epiphanies, and moods, most of which we can only gesture towards in language.

In running, too, there is this difficulty. Many of the best endurance athletes are able to externalize their bodies, to treat them as an object, with scientific precision. This is what Alberto Salazar and Galen Rupp have been doing with Rupp's body over the course of the years. They have a 20 year plan for his development. They treat the body of Rupp with almost scientific precision, measuring its adaptation, its biochemical markers, charting a path that is aimed at athletic perfection. Though most of us who take our running more or less seriously are not nearly as relentless (or intelligent) in the scrutiny of our bodies, part of the joy of distance running is in treating one's body as an object: controlling its efforts, its fuel, its recovery, learning how it adapts, etc. In this way, we treat it as if we can truly apprehend it in itself.

One mark of an objectified body is the removal of hair from the legs.

But curiously this objectifying of the body also threatens to alienate us from the body. The other joy of distance running is in living in a body, feeling a body, becoming a body (what Deleuze calls "becoming animal".) In order to run and race well, there has to be a moment when the mind of the runner is overcome by the body. We stop analyzing, stop externalizing, and we race. We annihilate the conceptual half of the mind and let it be overcome by sensation. We get in the flow and we go. In these moments, we do not apprehend the body as an object--the body apprehends us. We do not "know" the body; we become it. If Rupp did not have the ability to do this, to perform this feat of mind-immolation, he perhaps could put up some great statistical performances in the lab, but he would never be able to compete on the world stage. If Rupp knows how to listen to the music, he also knows how to play it.

It strikes me that these are two different forms of discipline, each of which we have to practice in training. On the one hand, we have to learn to externalize ourselves, to see ourselves from the perspective of a coach or another runner. Otherwise, our training lacks coherence and organization. This is where running logs and heart rate monitors and various other instruments of analysis are useful. On the other hand, we also have to practice becoming our bodies, which is something else entirely. This aspect of training has more in common with artistic practice than scientific method. The discipline of becoming the body means practicing being overwhelmed by sensation, moving with it, letting it organize you, repattern your mind and your movements. Otherwise, our training lacks freedom and creativity.

If Rupp symbolizes the externalization of the body taken to the extreme, perhaps Henry Rono is the epitome of the runner who races and trains intuitively. Read this account of Rono racing.

Too often these two modes of discipline are put into opposition, but running teaches us that in experience both elements are essential. The body is two types of object. It is both something other than me, and it is me. The challenge is not to choose one or the other of these relations, but to keep them both living. We feel and analyze, each in its own measure, according to its own discipline.

Perhaps if life could be reduced to the categories of the mind or the categories of sensation, we would know more fully who we are. We could attain some sort of absolute knowledge. The runner would know, through analysis, exactly how fast he could race a marathon. Salazar would know, absolutely, what Rupp can or can't do. We can't know, but this is no cause for skepticism. We can know better. The runner understands this: life is not about the knowing; it is about the trying. What the skeptic sees as a failure of the human mind, the runner sees as a chance to understand better, to become faster, to be different.

Like life, running is an adventure in uncertainty. We follow hunches and intuitions, half blindly. This is what makes intelligent analysis, when we are able to muster it, so valuable. But those moments that analysis cannot reach give us the thrill, the impulse, the doubt, and the desire that wrap us up, consume us, and carry us ever-onward.

A long and self-indulgent post that has very little to do with running and which raises more questions than gives answers, sorry about that.

2011-06-27T21:21:00.002-05:00

I've been working my way at intervals through David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. The book, like much of his writing, is a meditation on the ways in which we keep ourselves from encountering reality, our selves, and each other. DFW's writing is simultaneously penetrating and distancing. He shows us directly the pathos of reflective thought--how it is always reflective, never direct--always skimming over its object. His work sits squarely in the genre of postmodern meta writing because he takes the constant indirection of experience as his direct object of inquiry. But unlike other postmodern authors in which indirection becomes something like a game having stakes only for the art-world, for DFW indirection is a concrete strategy for his characters; it is a learned habit, one that protects them from experience, sheltering them in a state of interiority that is somehow both fecund and infertile.

Click, and it will get bigger.

To read DFW is to realize simultaneously the infinite possibility of thought and the infinite distraction of thought. It's to reflect on the tremendous intellectual achievement of something like the tax code--which of course no single mind could comprehend in all of its complexity and nuance--while simultaneously recognizing that precisely because it is an achievement beyond the comprehension of any mind, its value is incalculable at best and downright stupefying at worse. The book suggests that language itself is like the tax-code: a jumble of meanings through which a few experts can weave more or less intelligent paths, but which in the end adds up to so much sound and fury as a whole, just as likely to signify nothing at all as it is to add meaning to life.

The life of DFW is horrifying. The guy had a tremendous mind. He was intelligent beyond measure. That intelligence was not a total waste; he left us books that will stand the test of time. But he could not use that intelligence to find wisdom. He ended up miserable, depressed, and he killed himself.

It seems to me that his life is representative of the problem of culture in America today. The connection between intelligence and wisdom is tangential at best. Our minds are growing, but their growth is erratic, becoming bureaucratic monstrosities like the tax-code. Who can make the connections between Afghanistan, global warming, rising unemployment, gas prices, radical Islam, immigration, unions, Hugo Chavez, the budget crisis, education reform, obesity....? What mind could process such a set of problems? And yet, we all encounter them, almost daily, as if we have a responsibility to deal with them adequately. Not to mention all of the ordinary problems of daily living like going to work and paying the bills and cooking dinner and cleaning up every now and then. Am I the only one that finds this situation demoralizing?

Reflection doesn't always solve problems.

My sense is that the only intelligent or wise way of dealing with these problems is through the strategy of indirection. As individuals, we can't deal with them, so we have to learn how to distract ourselves from them, or at least from most of them, so that we can tackle the tiny part of maybe one of these problems that we are prepared for. So, we learn not to deal with reality. We put all these screens in place: small screens, big screens, all of these screens that allow us not to deal with reality by substituting high definition for reality. They serve their dream function: just as vivid as reality but fortunately Not Real. The sun being quite too bright to stare at, we climb back down into Plato's cave, thank you very much.

So here we come finally to the grand meta-problem. Reality is one of those things that you can't live with but can't live without. We have to learn to distract ourselves from the problems of life as a mode of protection. But we also cannot bear to live lives of total distraction: that's depression itself. How can we find the right balance between distraction and engagement? How can a mind trained in distraction and self-deception as a mode of the preservation of sanity not destroy itself through those very same operations? How can reflection both protect us from reality through the production of fantasy but also occasionally direct us to reality in order to deal with the problems that face us?

It strikes me that this is a balance that each person has to find for themselves. It also strikes me that such a balance is incredibly difficult and would be very rare to hit without some sort of explicit effort (which I'm not sure how many of us are putting forth). My sense is that we first world middle class whitish Americans tend to err on the side of fantasy and protection from reality. Our politics is a fantasy: Paul Revere? The Gold Standard? Flat Taxes? Global Peace? Hope? Change? When we aren't discussing these fantasies, it's onto the NFL or the latest iPad or how many miles per week did you run or something of that sort.

Yes, running too is deeply involved in fantasy; I love it most because its form of fantasy draws so deeply on reality while remaining fantasy. It's not a daydream; it's a bodily fantasy, with actual feeling, pain, suffering, elation, problems, breakthroughs, effort, determination. All the stuff of life in High Definition.

But don't we want the stuff of life in actual real life, not just as a way of dealing with it?

Half-Steppers, etc.

2011-06-23T13:13:00.004-05:00

I dedicate this blog post to all running buddies, near and far.

Training partners are a special commodity. I've run with hundreds of people in my life. People faster than I am. People slower than I am. People who don't even consider themselves runners. With strangers too. I'm a runner, and so it's just natural that I end up running with other folks.

But out of those hundreds of people there are a handful that I would call running buddies. You runners out there know just how hard it is to find that guy or girl that you just click with. There are so many things that can go wrong, that it's the rarest of things to actually find someone to train with who suits your temperament. Most runners fall into at least one of the following categories, making them more or less unsuitable for that special "running buddy" designation.

[F-bomb alert for sensitive readers.]

1. Half steppers. You know who you are. Or probably, you don't, or you would knock that shit off. There is a special zone, exactly half a step in front of the next runner, that has the magical property of inciting the runner who is a little behind to speed up. If you run half a step in front of me, unconsciously I will pick up the pace so we can run side by side and chat or what have you. But you will, then, unconsciously, match my acceleration so you are exactly half a step in front. Close enough to be running with me, but far enough in front to be ahead. Next thing we know our easy run has dropped to 5:45 pace and we're knocking babies out of strollers and grandmas off their walkers and hurdling dogs on leashes all because you can't freaking stand NOT to be in front. So, yeah, you half-steppers out there. Ever wonder why you're always running alone?

2. Let's talk about me. The conversational equivalent of the half-stepper is the runner that is cognitively unable to talk or think about anything during the run except his or her own running. Runners naturally love to talk about running, and people naturally like to talk about themselves. So, it's understandable from a certain point of view. And even interesting up to a point. But you might be bordering on the unbearable if you mention your placement in the last race more than three times in a single run. If you find yourself giving a blow-by-blow account of yesterday's easy 8 miler following on the heels of a 15 minute spiel on your race preparation, then maybe it's time to ask me how my running's going. Or, Jesus forbid, talk about something that doesn't have anything to do with running. Or anything to do with you. That would be nice. Every now and then.

3. Overly Ingratiating. I'm faster than you. I get it. But yes, I'm still running with you. Why? Because tomorrow I'm running hard. Because I actually like running slow every now and then. Because running with someone else is better than running by myself. So, yes, you are running fast enough. Quit thanking me for slowing down. I'd actually enjoy the easier day and your company if you could just relax and run with me for a little while. 'Prec.

p.s. Maybe you would get a little faster if you'd quit asking me for training advice and just fucking run!

4. Gizmo Dude. Do you have to beep every mile? Do we have to adjust the pace every time you look down at your wrist? Seriously, dude. Get a grip.

5. Alpha Dog. The half-stepper is like a one-year-old golden retriever who has been cooped up in a house all day. His fault is obliviousness. It can even be kinda endearing in the way a dog can be when it jumps all over you and scratches you with its pawnails. However, when Alpha Dog pushes the pace, there is nothing oblivious about it. It's psychological warfare. You know this because last week Alpha Dog was happy to run in the back of the pack, as he'd just had a good race. With nothing to prove, he was even lollygagging a bit back there just to prove that he had nothing to prove. But last weekend Alpha Dog had a bad race. So on today's easy 10 miler he will be looking to re-establish his perceived lack of dominance.

While runs with the half-stepper usually end up progressive, you know Alpha Dog is gonna do his Alpha thing from the gun. Wait! There was no gun, it's a fucking training run. But right off the bat we're clicking 6:30s and everyone on the run is filled with a rising sense of dread. (Except for Alpha Dog, who is filled with joy at the fact that everyone else is feeling dread.) Where do we go from here? 6 flats? 5:30s?

The only way to deal with the Alpha Dog is either a) just let him drop you or b) beat the Alpha Dog at his own game. Of course, I invariably opt for b) because it's at these moments that the psychologically weak Alpha Dog is psychologically weakest. You want 6:30s? I'll give you 6:15s! Want to hammer the hills? Me too! This is fun in a sick way! Fuck you!

6. Chick-ogler. Yes, one of the great pleasures of being a runner is the scenery. Maybe it's the cannabinoids, but running seems to make me more attentive to the fairer members of the human race. So, thank you for drawing my attention if it happens to be wandering. A little sexual innuendo is a key part of running-humor. Yes, we love to run hard (har-har). But there is a line between goofy locker-room humor and creepy stalker-behavior. Not only did you draw that line. You stepped over it. Again. And again. We're not laughing at your jokes, dude. We're laughing because you're making us nervous. Yeah, I know that running loosens up the filter, but could you tighten it back up a bit? How about them Titans?

* * *

If you recognize yourself in one of these categories, don't worry. I'll still run with you, if you want. Plus, every runner who's been a runner has a little of each of these in their psyche. As the great Socrates once said, "Self-knowledge is a bitch."

Oh, and if you readers have anything to add about other annoying runner-habits, I hear there's a comments section below.

Still Running

2011-06-21T16:26:00.000-05:00

I'm a sucker for writing on Roger Federer, and this piece by Brian Phillips on the autumn of Federer's career did not disappoint. Phillips' main theme is the epoch of athletic life that has the quality of "still." He notes that Federer is still great, but the "still" marks a kind of twilight quality to his game, which gives his performance an extra resonance.

I've been running and racing now for 20 years, which is hard for me to believe. As much as I wouldn't like to admit it, I've been using the category of "still" to define my own running for the last couple of years. I ask myself: can I still run as fast as I could? Can I still get even faster? Can I still carve out time, effort, and energy for racing at the level that I would like to race?

This weekend, for instance, I was happy with my race despite the fact that I ran 30 seconds slower than last year and a minute slower than 5 years ago. Why was I happy? Well, I ran down a 19 year old kid over the last four miles. This happiness, however, gives me pause. Why was his age important to me at all? A 34 year old should be able to trounce a 19 year old over a 10 mile course, especially with the heat and the hills. Distance running is a kind sport to those of us in our thirties. What you lose in quickness, you gain in endurance and strength. This is what we tell ourselves: we've still got it.

Still running hard, at the Bell Buckle 10 miler last weekend.

What Phillips writes about the "still" moment is true. Most great athletes hit "still" for a brief moment in time, then vanish into memory. Federer has prolonged the moment now for four or five years--though he is not dominating as he did in 2007, he is still great. And it is a sign of how great he was that he has been able to hold onto it for so long.

Of course, I have achieved nothing resembling greatness in my running career, so the pressures of "still" have much less at stake--and the only person those pressures weigh upon are me. The best way to quiet those thoughts is to train hard, get strong, find that bullet-proof mind that gets honed after weeks of workouts. When you are strong, you're strong. The feeling is immediate and it's unnecessary to relate that strength forward or backwards to other times of life to understand it.

In the end, though, there is a difference between now and then. When I was younger and away from training, I just worried whether I was fit or not. Now, lack of fitness comes with an extra question or two: can I get back to where I was? How much longer can I run this fast?

It's somewhat embarrassing to admit to these thoughts, but it's not like I asked that they come to mind. They just did. Maybe it doesn't matter so much so long as they get me out the door, same as the old questions. The first mile of my run feels different than it did when I was 19, that's for sure. Most days, though, the next few miles feel the same as they always did. Which is to say, pretty damn good.

Still.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance...

2011-06-13T15:59:00.001-05:00

The loneliness of the long distance runner is a metaphor for the loneliness of life as such. Runners or not, we all travel paths that cannot be retraced or fully communicated. The image of the lonely runner speaks to us because it reflects a broader fact of life. Even among friends, spouses, parents, pets, and children, a life is always lived alone, from beginning to end.

William James puts the thought like this in his Principles of Psychology:

It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, not proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together when are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute in nature.

What James writes here is true; the breaches between my thought and your thought, those streaming and ethereal flows which we denote as mine and yours, can never be crossed. I can speak with you; I can write to you; I can walk with you; I could kiss you or hold you; but there is a part of you with which I can have no intimacy, no direct knowledge. I can not experience what you experience, not at all.

This picture strikes me as representative of loneliness.
Each triumph requires a step out and away, even if one is in the center of a crowd.

Human beings are essentially lonely. We can cheat that loneliness by amplifying ourselves--by seeking out new experiences and hoping that the volume of experience that we share with other people will allow us to make connections. But experience is not additive: it is always transformative. Adding an experience to a life does not make it larger; it makes it different. We become alone in our multiplicity, too complicated, too diverse--octopuses who may make contact with one tentacle, but reach out with seven more into empty space.

Or, we can simplify, hoping to ease loneliness through the common currency of human nature. This path looks to ignore the culture heaped on top of the organism. So, instead of tasting our food, we simply eat it. We forgo poetry for prose, dancing for exercise, singing for speaking. We hope in this way to come to know ourselves as part of a deep history of human life, attempting to plunge our personal stream of thought into the general and deep waters of nature. This tactic, however, leads not to connection, but to self-annihilation. Loneliness can not be cured by generalities, but through concreteness. I do not want you to love my general self, but my specific self. And it is not you in your generality that is an object of my curiosity and possible love, but you, that concrete you, the you that is owned by you and not public property.

These thoughts on the unrelenting solitude of living came to me last night. I was thinking about this blog, about facebook, about message boards, about this new way of relating to the world. We take ourselves and our thoughts, and we hurl them out into space quite blindly. Then, we wait to see what sort of impact they make. It occurs to me that this behavior is bat-like, blind and sending out signals, hoping to make out a world by calculating the angles of their rebound. Bats are content not to see directly; they make their way forward, living their entire lives through indirection.

I have been studying the philosopher C.S. Peirce's theory of signs. He believed that each experience, the whole teeming world of thought and object, worked as signs--indirectly. One implication of his theory is that we have no ground, no resting place. Our lives bend and refract in response to experience. The challenge of life is not in knowing or understanding, but in continuing, in enduring. As Wittgenstein says, the most fundamental question that recurs is always: "Where to go from here?" Metaphysical questions like "Who am I?" Or "What is the nature of reality?" take their meaning and direction from the experiences that prompted the questions, and the value of the answers we give to them has to be taken in terms of the directions they send us.

If this is the case, then perhaps the remedy to the irreducible isolation of simply being an individual, is not so much in knowing the other or understanding him or her. This would be looking for a place to rest, for certainty among the flux of life. But certainty is not to be had, life flows on, and thus the task of life is not to share experience. Instead, the difficulty is in finding travelling companions--folks who are willing to travel the same stretch of road for a while, even if they can't or even don't want to peer into your soul. After all, loneliness does not seek knowledge; it just wants companionship.

There is a group of folks that I run with. Each of them is a strange bird. We all have different jobs, different talents, different politics, different senses of humor, different modes of intelligence. I cannot say that I know the inner life of these runners. I do not know them much at all. Come to think of it, I don't really want to know them. What I want from them is that they show up, that they join me for an hour or two a week. I want other people to run with me, beside me, not see through me.

This little squad of runners is not really a political unit. But I think it shows us something about politics. Community and companionship do not require many shared values. The requirement is that we move through our lives for brief moments in a common direction. This movement is made possible by the ability to live indifferently to the fact that you will never know what is happening in the mind of another person. We can do things with each other because we leave each other alone: at some point we are willing to say, "That person makes no sense to me," and run on. Though that person will never understand you, not fully, not completely, perhaps they will choose to accompany you.

In the abstract, our differences are final. We are each singular and irreducible to the other. The breach between my mind and yours is absolute. But in life the question is not how to overcome differences, but to live among them. Loneliness and togetherness is not a matter of knowing other people. It is a matter of living with them. The loneliness of the long distance runner is a condition of experience, and in a strange way, it is the embrace of this loneliness, the willingness not to live too close to others, that gives us the sufficiency of space to live together--and also, sometimes, to live on, despite being apart.

The Juridical and the Dietetic: Reflections on the Ethos of Running

2011-06-08T16:40:00.005-05:00

In Foucault's History of Sexuality, he looks to Greek sexual practices to make a distinction between two forms of ethical discipline. The first thinks of morality and ethics as a matter of interdictions, judgments, and transgressions. This conception of ethics is essentially juridical: a set of laws or rules that organize behavior according to principles that one ought not transgress or that one ought to live in accordance with. To do the good, to live well, is conceived in terms of more or less rigid moral laws that are policed by the appropriate moral authorities: usually a clergy of some sort who has access to the true meaning of a sacred text and uses that text to diagnose pathological or degenerate behaviors. The goal of this sort of ethics is to identify deviations from the good life and to reform those deviations.

The second form of ethical discipline is less interested in transgression and reform and more interested in managing the body to produce health. Foucault calls this way of thinking about ethics "dietetic" instead of "juridical," and he finds this to be the dominant way of thinking about sexuality for the Greeks. It conceives of the work of ethics as a project of integrating the various aspects of the self into a flourishing whole. The example that Foucault treats is sexuality. A dietetic approach to sexual pleasure would take the problem of sexuality as one of how to integrate this pleasure within the rest of the activities of life. A juridical approach to sexual pleasure would take the problem of sexual ethics to be a question of how to diagnose deviant forms of pleasure and reform them according to a transcendental sexual norm.

Obviously, important philosophical issues are at stake.

Foucault finds resources in the Greek dietetic approach to sexuality for rethinking his own relationship to sexual pleasure, transforming the dominant ethical concepts from deviancy, transgression, and reform to concepts like moderation, integration, and health. This is a powerful reimagining. It demonstrates once more that the value of philosophy is less in determining the truth of a particular point of view and more in the discovery of new (or at least forgotten) concepts for analysis of the activities of life. My love of philosophy does not stem from a desire for truth, or a love for getting things right. The attraction of philosophy--the pleasure it gives me--is the chance it gives for seeing the world from new and original angles. The best philosophy books open a range of new intellectual perceptions. Every concept, every distinction, is a chance to encounter the world again.

I think it is easier for runners to understand the dietetic form of ethics that Foucault describes. While we sometimes rely on the notion of rule, law, and transgression in describing intelligent running and training, we more often thematize running and the pleasures, difficulties, and problems it gives us in terms of how to integrate them into a larger life. Running teaches us to look at our bodies and the pleasures and pains they produce in terms of an ethic of self-care. We learn to read our bodies and to think of our training, our running actions, in terms of how they contribute to our psychological and physical health. The good forms of running are the ones that make us faster or happier. The bad forms are the ones that cause us to suffer needlessly or that get us injured or perhaps distract us from more important activities.

We treat running, in short, as an ethical practice, not as a moral code. We don't usually ask whether it is right or wrong to run in a certain way. We ask how we can keep doing it, how we can get better at it, and how it either helps or stymies our other life projects. We treat running, in short, pragmatically--without the stigma of ethical or moral judgment.

Interestingly, there seems to me to be little relationship between practicing a dietetic ethos as a runner and taking up that sort of pragmatic approach to ethics in the rest of life in all of its political, religious, and familial relations. Runners seem to me, actually, more judgmental than the general population, but perhaps this perception comes from the fact that I interact more intimately and directly with runners than with other sorts of folk.

What if we were able to look at the rest of our moral and ethical lives in this way, in pragmatic terms instead of juridical terms? What if the good of religious practices or sexual practices or business practices were understood in terms of their effects on the quality of life instead of in terms of "moral" concepts like greed, evil, perversion, or abnormality? How are we able to attain this sort of relationship to our action in running, but not in relation to other activities? Is it because running doesn't matter that we treat it with an intelligence that is deft, free, and lighthearted? If so, what are the implications of that for confronting more difficult problems?

Finally, is the dietetic approach really as admirable as it seems? Isn't this an approach that is easier to market, to institutionalize, to "gadgetize." Running blogs (like this one), running logs, Garmins, heart rate monitors, training plans, Weight Watchers, massage therapists, sports medicine, and even barefoot or minimalist footwear play to the dietetic ethos. We are always trying to maximize the experience of running in some way--and there are a million different ways to do it, most of them with marketing plan attached. There is no right or wrong way to run--to each his own. But the flip side of this is the proliferation of a multitude of ways to run, complicating the endeavor and multiplying the gadgets that go along with it.

The dog-fanny pack: an accoutrement for every lifestyle.

Most of us are minimalists and maximalists. Hobbyjoggers and dedicated racers. Purists and techno-geeks. This is the way the capitalist system wants us: consumers of every possible lifestyle, followers of every kind of ethos. Non-judgmental, fluid, practical, experimental and on a quest to maximize everything at once, including our lines of credit.

Makes you want to draw the line somewhere--and judge those who cross it.

Sufficient Space

2011-05-29T21:58:00.001-05:00

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space--space even more than time. --Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Ours is a hurried life. We seem never to have any time. This is what we tell ourselves: if only there were more hours in the day, if only I had more time to spend with my family, with my friends, out on the roads. We are quick to blame the anxieties of modern life, the stress we feel, on time. And perhaps it is true, perhaps life is moving too quickly.

If we had two extra hours in the day, what would we do with them? My guess is that we would fill them up as well with projects, use them to get started on things we will never finish, torment ourselves for two more hours a day about what we would finish if only we had 28 hours in a day. Our problem, it seems to me, is not a problem of time. Like Henry Miller says, it's a problem of space.

Einstein taught us that space (and time, for that matter) is opened and closed by the the objects that occupy it. Cars and planes started us down a path of acceleration, but now cell phones, the internet, facebook, and email have taken us to a limit point of travel. Making contact at the speed of light, we no longer cross space.

This elimination of space is precisely what has led to the acceleration of time. All of our friendships, our business contacts, our family responsibilities, our favorite websites, musicians, and television shows are with us at all moments. They pour into our minds all at once, immediately. There is no space. In reaction to this, we bustle about endlessly in search of a refuge from the torrent. We hurry here, hurry there, hoping for a resting point somewhere in sight, some sense of completion. We used to have one TV in the living room, and it was easy enough to escape its hollering and pleading screen. You would just go into the other room. Or turn it off.

Now we carry our screens with us, in our pockets. They are in the corner of every bar and restaurant. The wild world plummeting into every space, closing it up with the latest news from Washington, the latest sports score from Boston. Always, just before we relax and take a look around, there is a new interruption, a new thrill to be had, a new responsibility to be assumed.

Perhaps, then, what we need is not more time, but sufficient space. Seen from too far away, we teem like ants swarming on a spinning globe--moving, but without meaning. From too close, we are a bunch of hucksters and children, relentless in our needs, always peddling our wares, burning each other up with proximity. The fauna and flora of humanity are best appreciated from a proper distance.

The difficulty of life is in finding this sufficiency of space. I've reflected on the nomadic aspect of running before. A run can transform the crowded and angry city into a meandering path. It populates the morning commute with trees and birds, colors the hills with slight but real effort. It locates us in a world, but in its measured movement, it also gives us space. This space slows us down and returns us to a place where we are not measuring life in minutes, tasks, and a multitude of unfinished projects. This space is what we denote when we use the word "experience." We find ourselves here, for once, moving through a qualitative world, attentive and alive.

The hour spent running is a penumbral hour of the day, and the time of running is almost always a sort of stolen, hidden time. We run when others are sleeping, commuting, eating or watching TV. We are always squeezing the run into periods of time that are hidden from howling rush of ordinary life. I have done 15 mile runs that have taken no time at all. This is the thing that boggles the minds of non-runners. They ask: "How can you just run for an hour or two?" "How do you find the time to do it?" The answer is simple: if it did take time, running would be boring. If it took time, it would indeed keep us from our more important tasks. But runners know a secret: running takes no time at all. What it takes is space.

What if the problem of contemporary life were not one of making more time, but of finding sufficient space? That would mean that the solution to the hustle of life is not going faster or doing more. Instead it would be heading out somewhere, traversing terrain, and perhaps finding one's self in a world that is much more finished than one commonly imagines.

Interview: Candice Schneider

2011-05-23T07:27:00.006-05:00

This interview is the third in a series of exchanges with local elite runners. These are the men and women who train hard, take their running seriously, and work to compete--and win--on a local and national level. For all of these folks, running is a hobby. None of them make a living doing it. They continue to represent the best of amateurism, the idea that excellence in athletic endeavor is valuable for many reasons beyond financial compensation.

Most of these folks are friends that I have met during my time as a runner. They have offered me untold amounts of training advice, motivated me to get out the door, whipped my butt in races, and shared many a post-run beverage. Though this sort of runner is not famous at a national level, they are often locally known and help establish and maintain local standards of racing and training.

When I first met Candice Schneider, the only indication that she would become a serious road runner and a threat to win races was that, well, she was running with a bunch of folks she had no business running with. And keeping up. I remember talking with her about her 5k PR at the time and thinking, ummm, aren't we running that pace right now? Should I tell her that?

Since then, Candice has dropped almost an hour off of her marathon PR (yes, that's over two minutes a mile.) I think her answers in the interview below will illuminate the work and the mindset that it takes to accomplish such a feat. Candice also talks about living with another runner, her future goals in racing, and keys to being mentally tough in a marathon. Enjoy! (And check out her blog!)

Candice winning the Rockford Half Marathon, just a week ago!

LLD: Briefly describe your running resume. What are the most important moments in your running career thus far?

CS: I have been running since the summer of 2005, but didn’t start taking it seriously until sometime in mid- 2006. Since 2007 I have run 14 marathons and countless races of other distances shorter than the marathon. My first marathon was a 4:03. I was not prepared after going out at 3:40 pace in an attempt to qualify for Boston. My best marathon so far has been 3:09. I’ve been able to take off almost an hour in the distance, and I hope to take off more. I hope to do it soon.

I have a few important moments in my career thus far that stand out to me. The first was running an almost 19 minute PR at the Boston Marathon in 2009. This took my PR of 3:39:17 down to 3:20:25. I still say that I talked myself into it. For months leading up to that race I woke up every morning looking at the post-it note on my bathroom mirror that read simply “3:20.” I trained harder than I ever had. I logged more miles than I ever had. It was the first time I ran weeks at a time without taking even a day off. It was the first time I ran over 80 miles in a week. My then boyfriend (now husband) Ben coached me, trained with me, and paced me on race day. I ran what the post-it note said. I ran it because I talked myself into it. Because every day that I trained for it, I talked myself into it a little bit more.

Ben and Candice, crossing the line at Boston, sub 3:20.

The biggest moment in my running career came later that year when I knocked 10 more minutes off of my marathon PR at the Chicago Marathon. 3:10:48. When I crossed the finish line, I couldn’t believe it. The feeling I had that day is the feeling that keeps me lacing up my shoes and heading out the door. People always jokingly ask if you’re running toward something, or away from something. I’m running toward that feeling. Chasing it down. When you get it, you only get to hold onto it for a little bit. It escapes you, and you have to run it down again. Sometimes it’s just within your reach and you miss as you grasp for it. This makes the day you get it back all the more special.

Had I talked myself into that 3:10, too? I don’t know. There was no post-it note that time. The plan was just to run 3:10. And so that’s what I ran. I have been able to take about 90 seconds off since then, at Twin Cities in the fall of 2010.

I’ve also been lucky enough to win a few 5ks and a couple of half marathons. My dream is to win a marathon. It’ll have to be a small one without a super elite field, of course… but there are plenty of those out there. The closest I’ve came is Flying Monkey in 2009, where I placed 2nd, And Paavo Nurmi in 2010, where I also placed 2nd. A better performance was this year at St. Louis where I was 7th in a more competitive field. I figure If I’m ever able to win a marathon- it will be one of the most important moments in my running career. I want to break the tape. It doesn’t mean a whole lot, but I bet it feels really good.

LLD: I know you run some pretty serious mileage. What's your general approach to training for a marathon?

CS: The key that unlocked the door to my potential as a runner was finding out that simply the more miles I ran, the faster I became. When I’m not training for a marathon I slack off on the mileage a little bit for the sake of recovery. But when I am training for one, I know that I have to go after it hard. I have to run far, I have to run a lot of miles, I have to run daily- most days twice. I also have to make sure I’m getting in enough quality running. Weekly tempos and intervals are a must to remind the legs of their ability to turn over. It all seems to fall into place pretty well. You do things over and over, repetitiveness becomes your comfort. If you feel comfortable, then you feel prepared. And if you feel prepared going into a marathon, mentally, not much can stand in your way.

LLD: Most of the runners that you are racing and competing against had some sort of formal background in running, either in high school or college. Your path has been different. How did you get into running?

CS: I started running as an added form of fitness to my already well established work-out regime. I was doing a lot of kick-boxing and gym-rat type activities just to stay in shape. I was able to start off running 3 or 4 miles at a time right off the bat. It was never a struggle, running came naturally. I think this was due to my background in other sports (soccer, probably). It was a long time before it ever occurred to me that there was a point in running more than 3 or 4 miles a day. Racing had never crossed my mind. Until the one day that I signed up for one, and never looked back.

I wouldn’t say that the runners that I race and compete against necessarily have an advantage with their formal background. I would say that both types of backgrounds have their pros and cons. I can’t speak for runners who do have the high school/college team background . . . I don’t know what that was like or what they have taken away from that that helped shaped them to be the runners they are today. Personally, I find running to be about self. Nobody suffers if I race poorly. Nobody benefits aside from me if I race well. Self is all that I know. It is me, me, and me out there. Would I be a better runner if I had the same background in running as some of the people I race against? Maybe. Maybe not.

I do sometimes wish that Cross Country had been the “cool” sport at my school so that maybe I would have an answer to that. I do think that something I missed out on was the speed base that it would have given me. The marathon is my self-proclaimed distance. My marathon PR is my best. It predicts much faster times for most of my shorter distances. Times that I have not run. Had I run cross country or track, I highly doubt this would be the case. No doubt I would be faster than I am at the moment at every distance.

Some of the ladies who do have this formal background might be able to hand my ass to me in a 5 or 10k, but I’m faster than a lot of them in the marathon. Would I trade? No. And sometimes, yes.

LLD: Building off of your answer to question #3, how did you make the jump from better-than-average midpack runner to the type of runner that wins races? Did it take a shift in mindset or training, or was it just a matter of staying with training over several years? So many people want to make this jump, but relatively few succeed, especially without that team context. Any secrets that you can share?

CS: I have always heard that many people who lose a significant amount of weight at some point in their life tend to look in the mirror and instead of seeing a skinny person- they see a reflection of their former fat self. I have never been overweight myself but I think the same can be applied toward my success with running. I look in the mirror, I see someone who is not fast enough. Every race time is too slow, every workout wasn’t hard enough and every week there just were not enough miles ran. Every race. Every workout. Every week. This is just how my mind works. What does an overweight person do if they really want to lose the weight? They try like hell. Every day, I try like hell. It is the only thing I know to do. I believe the accumulation of miles ran, workouts done, and race experiences have contributed to the jump I have been able to make to the type of runner you speak of who occasionally wins a race or two.

I have always applied this “nothing is ever good enough” approach to life. I think it comes from the way I grew up, and the personalities of the family members I was close to. I once said to someone “I do not come from a long line of athletes, but I come from a long line of people who would have made excellent athletes.” A long line of stubborn, tough, and competitive people who just didn’t accept mediocrity. People who taught me, sometimes unknowingly, that you work hard for what you want. And if you do, you get it.

There is no real secret to getting better. There is no fast track plan for success. Run less, run more, run fast, run slow… You find what makes you your best and you either stick to it and see it through, or you don’t. This is all that I have done. If you wake up one morning and realize that what you’re doing isn’t working anymore, find a new way that works even better.

If you stop believing that you’re slow, you start believing that you don’t have to be. The problem is that most people don’t take the time. They don’t make the effort. And they’re filled with excuses. Otherwise, in most cases they could at least be a hometown hero. Cherry pick a race or two.

LLD: Your position as a competitive runner but also as the wife of a 2:28 marathoner must give you some unique insights into different challenges that men and women face in racing and training. How does your training differ from Ben's? Are you motivated and driven by the same things? Do you race in the same way?

CS: Ben is a completely different beast than I am. The training load he is able to withstand is beyond me. As is his capacity for food intake. Living with Ben is sort of like owning a horse, and I know, because I’ve owned a horse or two. The man was born to do this. His body accepts, responds, and rarely if ever breaks. His will and his mind are equally strong to his body. Actually living with someone and seeing how consecutive 120+ mile weeks affect them really drives home the statement I previously made. You really want to do something, you try like hell. If he’s ever tired from training, it rarely shows. I think that’s the thing that amazes me about him the most. He never lets on. It doesn’t seem to ever affect his life outside of running. I on the other hand get whiny and complain a lot when my mileage is peaking. The girl comes out a bit. But like me, Ben believes. Similar build to that of Chris Solinsky, it just works for him. Solinsky was quoted once saying “Nobody ever told the bumble bee he couldn’t fly.” I don’t think anyone ever told Ben that either.

Being a much slower runner than Ben I have to train a little differently. It doesn’t make sense for me to log 120 mile weeks. I’m not fast enough and it would be a little too much wear and tear on my body as I’d log more hours than him. Running around ~90 miles per week, I’m putting in a similar amount of time in training as he is when he’s just over ~100, probably also putting in a similar amount of tread on the tires. Obviously I’m smaller, more compact, different skeletal and musculoskeletal system. Built entirely different. My body just has different needs and responds differently.

Ben is my biggest inspiration. Knowing that he got out the door for 1 or 2 runs that day is just another motivator for me to do the same. There are no excuses for not getting a run in in our house. You either run, or you don’t. Most likely, the other person ran twice so you’re going to feel lazy if you didn’t at least run once. We’re both super competitive, and that’s what makes us work. It’s what makes our running work. We need to be somewhere in a couple of hours but we need to get a run in… well that’s why we have a couple of hours, right? I know in some relationships where one person is a runner, and the other is not, the non-runner rarely understands the importance or need to bother with a second run or squeezing a run in when there isn’t much time. Or even, running at all! We get it though, because we both hold our running as a priority. If Ben was not a runner, I would be a lot less successful as one.

I think we are similarly motivated and driven. Both being competitive by nature we seek out to “kill and destroy” when racing. I obviously do not know the thoughts that go through Bens head when he’s racing, but I do know that we make similar comments about how we’re going to approach a race, or how we felt about what it was like to battle with someone. Being a much faster runner than I am, Ben typically places or makes a good showing at even the most competitive of races and I know it is often his motivation to do so. We both like to prove ourselves, if only to ourselves. The Twin Cities are home to many top runners, home to Team USA Minnesota and a very competitive team circuit. The fields of the bigger races around here are just brutal. Absolutely brutal! It reminds me of my place, keeping me grounded. I tend to have to focus more on time at races like this more than anything. Whereas when I’m in a smaller race, I like to focus on placement. Focusing on and actually getting to race a human being instead of a clock is always more fun. It feeds the competitive hunger a little more. Something Ben and I both have a huge appetite for.

LLD: I've always thought that your strength as a runner was your toughness on race day. It was an awesome experience running with you for the first miles of your breakthrough race in Chicago. I remember being uncertain as to whether you would make it--you were running hard in the early miles--then shocked to turn around and find you crossing the finish line just after me. What approach do you take for mentally preparing for the marathon?

CS: I think you would be right in saying that typically race day toughness is my biggest strength. I don’t know what it’s like inside the head of other runners, but for me race day toughness comes from the practice of logging a lot of miles, a lot of excruciating long workouts and a lot of long runs. Just getting out there day after day no matter how terrible you feel, and shutting down mentally because of it. Shutting down is just something that comes naturally to me. Your body knows what to do. It knows how fast it can run and for how long it can run that fast. It knows if it can pick it up, or if it needs to slow it down. It doesn’t need your thoughts clouding its judgment.

My best runs are days where I went out for hours but couldn’t tell you anything that I thought about during the run when I returned. Running is primal. Racing a marathon is the most primal. You don’t need to think about it. As humans, we start to overthink when we’re out there. Have I drunk enough Gatorade? Too much water? Do I need to take another gel? Was that ten seconds too slow? Too fast?? I try to save my overthinking for my easy runs. Those are used for writing my blog entries.

The race you’re talking about, Chicago of ’09 (my breakthrough) stood as my PR until last fall. You were the 3:10 pacer and I fell off the pace group when I had to make a pit stop at a port-a-potty somewhere around mile 10. I think this setback only served to make my race a stronger one. After I returned to the course I set my sights on your pace sign up ahead, and for the rest of the race that was the only thought in my head.

The sign. Track down the sign. I don’t recall what I did, or how fast I ran to make up, I don’t even remember how it felt, if it hurt or if it didn’t. I only remember the overwhelming sense of calm. From the splits of that race, it shows that I slowly increased the pace which eventually closed our gap between each other to about a minute (since you brought the rest of the group in about 3:09:40ish if I recall correctly?) and when that happened, I stayed steady. I remember telling you afterward that I wanted to write about that race. I was never able to, because I didn’t know what to write about. There was nothing to say of any interest aside from “I ran a 3:10:48, and it was my best race ever. A 10 minute PR.” Since then, I ran a 3:09:18 which is my current PR. I don’t really have many memories from that race either.

Candice and yours truly after her Chicago breakthrough.

I always have the most memories from the races that went wrong. The “fails.” Those are the ones where I can tell you how bad my hip hurt, or the exact mile I took a gel, what a spectator yelled out to me, or how many kids I high-fived . After the good races I remember only these things: breath, the lub dub of my heart, the footfalls, the feeling of floating above and outside of my body. I don’t remember thoughts or words. I don’t remember if there was wind, or heat, or cold. If you have been to this place of no thought, you will believe in magic. And as a runner, as a marathoner, you need to believe in magic.

LLD: The runners I have interviewed thus far were at the end of their careers looking back. You are at the beginning of yours, looking forward. I know breaking 3 hours is a big goal of yours. What's it going to take to get there?

CS: Well, I think it’s going to take another shift. I’ve had success for the past two and a half years off of the same kind of training, and a LOT of the same kind of training. In the marathon I have gone from 3:39, to 3:20, to 3:10… to my current PR of 3:09. And now, I’m stuck. It’s time for a change. One of Bens favorite things to say is “Doing what you’ve always done will get you what you’ve always got.”

I recently started working with Luke Humphrey who runs for Brooks-Hanson ODP as my coach for the next 6 months (longer, if it works out) and we’re taking a slightly different approach with my training in hopes of reaching my sub 3 goal. I’m looking at the New York City Marathon this fall for my attempt. Probably not the best choice of courses for a PR, but something I’ve learned about myself through running is that I don’t ever take the easy way out of anything. I set high standards, lofty goals, and I do what I can to get the things I want. That above all else is what keeps me at it. If I were to set more reasonable goals for myself, I can’t imagine it would be half the fun. I enjoy the challenge, the pain that makes you feel alive, the distraught feelings of defeat that come with failure, and the pure joy that comes with success. Running has taught me above all else that anything you set your mind to really is possible. It has also taught me not to fear failure. Inevitably failure will happen over and over on the route to success, and it will happen more often. It is supposed to. It must be expected and learned from.

You asked what it will take for me to get there. Aside from the training approach- just believing and doing what it takes to follow through on that belief.

I will break 3 hours.

Wanjiru and Domestic Violence: the greater tragedy

2011-05-18T10:08:00.007-05:00

A friend of mine just sent me the following email, asking a couple of important questions:

Are people extremely sympathetic about Sammy Wanjiru's death simply because he was an amazing runner, one of the best runners ever? You are such a voice of reason and I respect what you have to say. That's why I read your blog. Where is the sympathy for someone who likely was abused? Nobody has mentioned that he may have been an abuser and may have been trying, yet again, to hurt his wife, maybe even kill her.

If his wife had been beaten in the past, and if he was about to go for another round of beating, isn't she a little better off right now?

My last post was a tribute to Wanjiru, and in that post, I wrapped the violence of his life up with his greatness, preferring to see them together rather than apart. While I mentioned that such a move was dangerous, perhaps glossing over unconscionable acts of spousal abuse and violence, the primary purpose of the post was to lionize Wanjiru, to remember his greatness in spite of his demons.

My friend's email helped me understand that this reaction is insufficient. While the details of what happened that night are still unknown, sadly abuse of women in East Africa and around the world (including here in the US) continues to be a persistent problem. While there are always exceptions to statistics, the statistics show that it is likely that Wanjiru's wife (and perhaps also his multiple lovers) were victims of abuse. The global statistics are staggering. In every country where reliable, large-scale studies have been conducted, between 10 and 69 per cent of women report they have been physically abused by an intimate partner in their lifetime. East Africa, unfortunately, is worse than many other places.

As we mourn Wanjiru's death, then, we ought also to mourn the ongoing violence towards women in Africa and across the globe. His death shows that this is not only problem for feminism, but a problem for marathoning, a problem for all of us.

It is likely that in upcoming weeks, blame for his death with be placed somewhere. Maybe we will find out that he abused his wife and she killed him out of fear for her own. Likely blame will be placed at her feet as well. Although we should not overlook the power that individuals have to control their own destiny and their violent reactions, we should also not forget that this tragedy is reflective of a much greater and sadly persistent social problem: Wanjiru, his wife, and now all of us, have become victims of domestic violence.

Domestic violence and abuse took a beautiful runner from the world last weekend. It damages the lives of countless women and families across the world. It will continue to rob us of our future so as long as this side of the story remains untold and unremembered.

Read more about violence towards women in Kenya here.
Global factsheet on violence against women.

Fortunately, there are tremendous folks like the Somali activist Dekha Ibrahim Abdi working on these problems in Kenya directly. While we should remember Sammy Wanjiru for his athletic accomplishments, we should never forget that athletics is a game that takes place in a larger world with greater heroes.

Wanjiru, Death, the Demons

2011-05-17T09:02:00.016-05:00

"You must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star."
-- F. Nietzsche

"Looking back now, I think I had a lot on my mind and was pretty nervous, but as soon as I started I forgot about it all. The only thing I thought was, 'Who cares, let's go!' I'm not the type of guy who runs behind someone else. I was going to run up front no matter what the pace was."
--Wanjiru on his Olympic record gold medal run in Beijing, fall, 2008 (from Japan Running News)

The running community has been shocked by the death of Sammy Wanjiru. You can read about Wanjiru's accomplishments in this Letsrun obituary; it calls him the greatest marathon ever to live. He was 24 years old, just about to enter his running prime.

The details of his death are still emerging, but Wanjiru had been hanging out with a tough crowd and had recently been arrested and not charged for a domestic disturbance. He was a troubled soul, and his death is sad.

Our sport has an intimate relationship with death. The first marathoner was dead on arrival. When a race goes badly, we say bluntly that we died, and everyone knows exactly what we mean. As early as junior high, I used to describe the best race to myself as one in which I died just as I crossed the line. I would "kill myself" in speed workouts, sometimes take off in races on purpose at a "suicidal" pace. The language of running is the language of death. To run my best, it intuitively seemed to me that the first fear that I needed to overcome was the fear of death.

A friend of mine recently told me that he began rock climbing as a teenager because it was the only thing that seemed real to him. The decisions he made mattered; they literally determined the difference between life and death. Was Wanjiru's brilliance as a runner bound up with a darker death wish? Is this the face of competitive determination and the haunted face of a man seeking death?

Wanjiru during his transcendent Chicago run.

The sad thing is that we will never know. The other greatest marathoner ever, Haile Gebrselassie, runs with what appears to be total joy. Outside of running, he is cheerful, bright, and optimistic. His greatness is light and carefree.

We always try to make sense of tragedies. Some have offered the theory that it was the fame that did Sammy in. I'm not sure that I agree. My guess is that Sammy lived with demons that neither running nor fame could touch. Perhaps it was his battle against those demons, his fight against the chaos within that gave him his tough, bold, and intense spirit as a racer. It's a hypothesis, and the truth is we will never know what motivated Sammy; he probably didn't know either.

I suppose I like this way of making sense of Sammy's death because it makes the dark part of existence inseparable from its most thrilling heights. That's the way it's been for me--running towards death has been the same as living as hard as I could.

Maybe the impulse to romanticize death and the demons is wrong-headed and a way of redeeming the unredeemable--Sammy's drunkenness, his violence, and his womanizing. Perhaps if these were not elements of Wanjiru's character, he would still have been great and would still be with us.

The answers to these question will likely be known to no one. But there is one general truth that Sammy's life shows us: human greatness is not incompatible with human frailty.

All races have the same finish line. Sammy got there first.

Fear & Running

2011-05-09T08:11:00.003-05:00

LLD: The following is another guest post from Scout. His first post, How to Run Like a Stoic, remains one of the most popular on the blog. Here, Scout takes up some of the same themes but looks more explicitly at some common issues in training. I think you will enjoy his straightforward and clear-thinking style and find his advice useful. Without further ado...

I see the same questions come up again and again...

- "What pace should I run my race/training at?"
- "How do I avoid bonking in training/racing?"
- "Am I going to slow/fast/hard/easy?"

It seems to me that a number of people seem to base their racing and training plans on some sort of fear, and this fear stems from a perception of failure. People are afraid of failing in their training and racing. Which makes me wonder, what exactly constitutes this fear of failure in training and racing?

Fear of injury is most obvious; people hold back in training and racing out of a concern of getting injured. They relate injury with a failure to train properly, and I would tend to agree. However, I don’t consider this situation a failure; a mistake, sure, but not a failure, and not necessarily something that can always be avoided.

Fear of not finishing (or not finishing strong) also seems to be a major concern. People are obsessed with bonking, and how to avoid it, almost to the point where I don’t think most people even know what bonking really is. Cramping is more common. Nutrition during the event itself is almost always going to receive the blame for these situations, at least initially. The other root cause would be “running over your head”, which basically means going too hard for your current fitness level.

I have always taken the path of telling people that they need to slow down, train more, and give themselves time. “Run lots, mostly easy, sometimes hard” has been my mantra to new and experienced people alike. It’s simple, it’s pithy, and it encompasses the basic truths of training for pretty much anything. And people hate it for all those reasons, I’m sure. People want concrete answers, without having to think too much about it. Plans are great because they take away the responsibility of coming up with your own training, which is the third fear: fear of not knowing what to do.

At this point, I think I have discovered what the true root cause of these fears really is. It’s not really earth-shattering, but I do believe that it is rather instructive. The root of all these fears is goal-setting.

Fear of failure is essentially a fear of not meeting a goal. The aforementioned fears all relate to not being successful at running a certain time, or hitting a certain mile goal, or not finishing a specific race. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think goals are good; they provide a useful way to keep us motivated and to track progress. However, the goal has to be developed through careful thought. People seem to come up with rather arbitrary goals, that they thought sounded good. This arbitrariness is a recipe for dissatisfaction. If your goal is completely random, then what good is it? How can you chart a course to meeting it if you have no idea why you picked it in the first place?

Along with the arbitrary goal-setting is basing goals on things that you do not exercise full control over. I cannot control who my competitors are, or the weather, or the course (once I have picked a race, that is). What I can control is how I race that day. For example, many people pick a time goal for a race, and plan their race around that now sacrosanct goal. Instead of setting a time goal for a specific race, I plan on putting forth the best effort I can. My plan consists of putting forth my best effort, based on my current knowledge, training, and abilities. If I hit a certain time, it’s a bonus. But if I do not, then I can still be satisfied with how I ran the race. I have not failed, because my goal was completely within my control, and my grasp.

This concept of internally-based goals will seem completely counter-intuitive to many people. It’s nigh impossible to create a race plan with splits when you don’t have a goal based on time. The beauty, however, is the fact that you don’t need splits. You just race. You race by what you know about yourself. And that means that every race, every one, is a learning experience. You learn what effort levels feel like; you learn how well you climb hills or run flats; you learn how to finish strong. And if every race is a learning opportunity, then your day-to-day training provides you a wealth of information. Every time you step out that door, you have a chance to discover something about yourself.

Which leads me to my final point: your training and racing are your education, and you use that education to create realizable, internal goals, and those goals will lead to joy. Focus on setting goals that really matter. Running a certain time feels great, for a while. Then you start focusing on people who are faster or running more or running less, and you get caught up in the chase. Instead, consider focusing on doing your best, on learning something about yourself. If you bonk, so what? You learned something useful for next time. Can’t finish a run? No big deal.

In the end, if you let your fears dictate your goals, achieving your goals will never be truly rewarding.

Running and Social Hope

2011-05-02T21:47:00.006-05:00

To exercise an art one must begin by procuring for oneself the instruments for it; and, to be able to employ these instruments usefully one has to make them strong enough to resist wear. To learn to think, therefore, it is necessary to exercise our limbs, our senses, our organs, which are the instruments of our intelligence. And, to get the greatest possible advantage from these instruments, the body which provides them must be strong and healthy. Thus, far from man's true reason being formed independently of body, it is the body's good constitution which makes the mind's operation easy and sure.
J.J. Rousseau

These words were written two and a half centuries ago. They are taken from Rousseau's great treatise on education, Emile. Rousseau wrote the book as an attempt to imagine a free education; it was a thought experiment on what it would take in order to educate a human being to flourish in all of its capacities.

Rousseau was thinking about these things because he was concerned with a social scene that he thought was essentially miseducative. Everywhere he looked, he saw stunted human beings: people whose minds were divorced from their bodies, whose emotions were unhinged from a capacity to reason, whose fears were unconnected with the capacity for courage, whose imaginations had no relation to the realities in which they lived. He saw society as essentially sick, the human attempt to build a world within the world having produced an environment that was hostile to human happiness.

Rousseau's radical and utopian thought was that we could build a world that was amenable to human life, a civilization that did not depend on the sacrifice of human capacities for its maintenance, but was constructed in accord with the development of those capacities.

This utopia was based in Rousseau's faith; he begins Emile with the idea that the world is the product of a divine creation and thus has at least the potential to be perfect. So we therefore have a divine duty to carry this perfection out. This faith comes off as hollow--or even dangerous--to contemporary ears. We have been chastened by the utopian projects of the 20th century.

Rousseau's Emile or 'On Education'

Communism, fascism, and American democracy have been stained by totalitarianism, racism, and imperialism. Religious faith has turned out in many instances to be hostile to intelligence, tolerance, and peace. Technology has led to consumerism, environmental degradation, and hollow entertainment as much as it has enriched human life and enhanced our powers. We are as likely to be moved to cynicism by the idea that the world could be made more amenable to human life as we are to hope and melioristic action.

Now, when we look around and we see human beings who have been stunted by their miseducations, or when we peer into the stunted forms of our own selves, it is hard to know what to do. It's hard to summon the attitude that we could be better, that things might be different. And when we do summon it, we have to do it critically--make sure it is not simply the totalitarian or the fascist or the imperialist within us who is excited about that idea.

Well, by the time we've gone through all these processes of reflection, whatever duty or drive to improve the self or improve society is a pale image of itself. So it goes--we can add one more way in which contemporary life stunts us; it stunts our faith in the human capacity to make the world a better place.

What does any of this have to do with running? Well, I guess the idea is that running (or practices like it) can renew our hope and faith in ourselves, help us become a little less stunted. It shows us how to do this. We don't get better at running by clinging on to a dogmatic idea about our potential. We don't get faster by proclaiming the truth of a particular training philosophy. We do it by heading out the door, every day, with a small purpose in mind. We want to get a little better at something. Or at least not fall back. We don't have to know ahead of time where it's all headed. But along the way, if we stay at it, if we trust that small efforts over time add up, we find ourselves a little stronger at the end of the day. A little more capable of heading out the door the next day. More capable of putting effort towards good things.

That's the mystery of this activity: it appears that we are working on the body, on making this machine of sinew, veins, bone and heart faster. We appear to be engaged in merely polishing our bodies. But we stay at it because making the instrument better actually ends up making the soul a little better. We make the body a little more amenable to the life that lives in it.

Buoyed by small victories we end up capable, perhaps, of seeing things differently. It is possible to see the two centuries or so since Rousseau wrote as a relatively short time in the grand scheme of human history. Perhaps the 20th century didn't exhaust the experiment into better forms of social organization. Maybe we can allow ourselves to be a little more utopian, a little more positive about the possibility of human progress. After all, running shows one point that Rousseau made to be as true today as it was then: "it is the body's good constitution which makes the mind's operation easy and sure."

Maybe hope is a kind of endurance sport; maybe it, too, operates according to the logic of long distance.

Teaching and Training

2011-04-26T12:24:00.009-05:00

It's the end of the semester, and it's time to reflect on the work that one does as a teacher. My running has suffered a bit this spring, but it's because I've been working a lot on my other passion, which is philosophy.

Though I know that most of the folks who read this blog are runners, I thought that some reflections on teaching wouldn't be inappropriate, as connections can be drawn between the sort of intelligence that it takes to train well and the sort of intelligence it takes to teach well. Both are difficult and vague tasks, they require listening as much or more than knowing. Both also take a sort of faith that things really are working. The material that the teacher works with is much like the body--dark, resistant to intelligent control, possessed of wild and diverse instincts. Just like students, our bodies have minds of their own, our relationship with them has to be as receptive and open as it is controlling and directive, and the best training depends on developing a partnership with this essentially unknowable quantity.

The rewards, however, are sweet, and they show themselves towards the end of a process that is often messy. In the end it is not a straightforward quantity that is produced, not a direct and measurable outcome, but a set of capacities. In running, these capacities are demonstrated in a race, in a performance that pays the capital that training accrues forward in inspiration. When we run well, we inspire others, sure. But perhaps more importantly, we inspire ourselves, and we can carry that moment of inspiration with us like a secret lantern that lights us up from within and illuminates a way into the messy project of renewing the self once more.

Steve Prefontaine doing his work.

In teaching, success holds to a similar pattern. As teachers, we find our inspiration towards the end of the semester, when our students begin giving back to us the questions we gave to them. If we are lucky, we find ourselves challenged and inspired and renewed because we have created a community of folks who can speak to our own worries, who help us think through our most difficult questions in different and exciting ways.

Cornel West doing his work.

In this way, we demonstrate the continuing power of the ideas we have picked up through our own education to animate the minds of further generations of people. If we are lucky and things more or less work out, we get to see the power of our own intelligence reflected back, just as a well-run race can reflect the power of our bodies. This moment of insight is not best understood as satisfying narcissism or neediness (though these are real dangers for teachers), but as a moment of gratitude for the small things that we can offer to the world--and relief, in many ways, that the world will accept our offerings.

So much of what we are rewarded for in professional philosophy has very little to do with a genuine practice of philosophy. Just as running so often seems a waste of human energy, so too can philosophy seem a waste of human intellect. The value of each of these practices is indirect, difficult to measure, and can even appear absurd. So, we do the next best thing and measure journal articles published or compare PRs. Of course, those of us who chose the path of philosophy had already decided that we were not driven by external rewards (no matter how much we regret this decision at times!) but by the distinct pleasures of thinking new thoughts--and by the idea that keeping the moments of inspiration that philosophy gave us alive for ourselves and for others is a meaningful way of putting ourselves to use.
That's teaching, the work of philosophy.

"Both/And": the science and soul of running

2011-04-21T11:08:00.004-05:00

I was inspired by the tremendous running by friends, elites, and virtual training buddies in Monday's Boston Marathon. The event was a perfect storm of marathon geekery, as Americans Desi Davila and Ryan Hall ran well, a world's best was run, and there was that wonderful tailwind that added a little twist to everything.

The tailwind has been analyzed now for a few days. Two accounts of the effect of the tailwind stand out for their excellence. They each capture a side of the sport--its "double barreled" nature as William James would have put it.

The first is from the always reliable Science of Sport blog. I encourage you to read it. They argue that the wind gave the top runners a 3-4 minute advantage. In particular, the scientists there do an excellent job of talking about their method of analysis, which is actually historical, rather than "empirical." Philosophers, take note!

The second analysis I will copy here below. It was written by the anonymous poster "kudzurunner" on the letsrun boards.

Great discussion! Real wisdom from the elders. Thanks Hodgie-san and Tom D. Thanks, too, Malmo, for the deep drill-down in your statistical analysis. A little more patience with the idiots, as you're (immensely) fond of calling them, might be a good thing. But you're good with the numbers, and this is a great thread.

Meta-analysis?
1) The tailwind played a large and undeniable role in the results. As someone once said to the whore in an old locker-room joke, "We've already established that. We're just arguing over the price." (A man asked a woman if he'd sleep with her for a million dollars. She smiled and said "Sure, baby." He then asked if she'd sleep with him for $25. She sneered and said, "What do you think I am, a whore?")

1a) But the precise advantage conferred by the tailwind--3:40? 2:30? "somewhere between three and four minutes"--is and will always be a matter of debate. (The idiots will always be wrong, of course.) And Mutai and Hall, among others, are clearly invested--as brilliant creative artists often are--in minimizing the effects of the environment (in this case, the tailwind-help) and focusing on individual initiative and achievement. Forgive them. There's a method in their madness. God help you if you just don't get this point. Somebody in the next town who gets it is having a good damned time--and running faster times than you, too.

2) Boston has proved itself, over many decades, to be a slower-than-average course, despite the net altitude drop. This is why very few WRs have been set there. The hills are part of this--or have traditionally been assumed to be a part of this.

3) This year's results on the "slower-than-average course," which include a world-best (but not WR) and American-best (but not AR) create a huge interpretive mess: the perfect storm for professional marathon kibbitzers. This one will be argued for the next hundred years.

4) 90%+ of those making arguments for one interpretation or another tend to work from either/or rather than both/and logics. Nobody, for example, has suggested that the tailwind--the knowledge on the part of Hall and the other front-runners that the tailwind would be with them the whole time--might have contributed to a throw-caution-to-the-wind strategy that enabled better-than-average results. (Malmo's statistical regressions, for example, fail to allow for such an effect.) In other words, it might be a good idea to remember that the word "inspire" derives from the Latin root "to breathe." Great runners aren't just aided physically by the presence of a tailwind; they're inspired by that wind. They're goaded--as Hall was--into taking risks; into trying for more than they've ever tried for.
Both/and. Allow it. It feels good.

And of course the full moon occured at 4:44 AM on Boston Marathon Monday. A perfect storm, indeed.

Thanks to all the Boston runners for their inspired--and inspiring--performances on Monday!

Gilmore and Squires

2011-04-09T20:38:00.002-05:00

Peter Gilmore is retiring.

For some reason, he always struck me as the runner's runner.

Here's the link to his blog. It's got the nice line:"My running heroes have always been the soul runners, who love running for nothing more than the feeling of the wind in their face. Guys like Bill Rodgers and Dick Beardsley who still run every chance they get."

Bill Rodgers and Dick Beardsley were both coached by Bill Squires. There was a nice article on Coach Squires in the recent Running Times. I read it with interest, as I used his book Speed With Endurance to prepare for my last marathon, and I ran a PR. It's worth a look.

Some horses back in Squires' day.

I've never met Squires, but from what I've heard he was in a certain sense the anti-Salazar. He wasn't obsessive or concerned with the latest gizmo. His athletes had a hard time even understanding what his workouts were. I guess this was because he knew that true distance runners are a flighty bunch. You could tell them what to do or not tell them what to do. They were going to do it their own way anyhow. So, maybe what made Squires a great coach was his unwillingness to control his athletes. Saddle-breaking a horse takes control and domination. But a distance runner is not a pack horse; at his best he is wild and instinctual. How do you train that?

You don't really. Maybe what Squires knew was this: looking at the problem of coaching as a problem of training was looking at it the wrong way. It's not popular to say it, but true runners are born, not trained. Once you find one with spark, the main problem is keeping the spark lit, the runner happy and out on the road. In this simplest of sports, coaching is a simple (but not easy) challenge: create an atmosphere in which the native wildness of the runner can thrive. Get some horses, and get them to run.

Musings on a Competitive Culture

2011-04-05T19:09:00.012-05:00

From a local message board, the common criticism of participation medals:

"Everyone's a winner... we are raising a nation of mediocrity."

While a "nation of mediocrity" may be the result of our intentions, I think that the message culture sends to individuals and especially young folks is loud and clear. If there is a cultural dogma today that everyone believes, it is they must achieve at the very highest levels in order to be a successful member of society. In my practice as an academic adviser, it has become clear to me that young people today hear adults talk about competitiveness and winning ad nauseam, and they are afraid that they won't be strong enough to survive. See, for example, the trailer for the movie "Race to Nowhere."

The effect of dogma, all too often, is contrary to the intentions that motivate it. The young person, upon hearing this lesson, rationally and intelligently surveys his abilities. When these abilities turn out to be more or less like everyone else's, the young person makes a rational decision according to the dominant cultural tale. He accepts mediocrity. Obviously, logically, everyone can't be a winner. And in this way, we learn to accept our compensatory and banal participation medal, and just hope for the best. Thus the paradox is explained: although no society in human history has ever extolled to such a high extent the value of the competitive spirit and individual effort, no society has ever been so filled with human beings that seem unable to give any effort at all.

Perhaps that's because winning is a complex human practice that requires the long development of a variety of virtues. It also requires dependence on other people, on friends, coaches, families, and sometimes an entire community of support. This fact is obvious to anyone who has ever won anything. But, for some strange cultural reason, a victory is almost always seen as an individual achievement and sold to the next generation as the effect of a single variable: the competitive individual will.

Of course adults--sane adults--know that success in life has as much to do with compassion as it does competitiveness. They know that a competitive spirit that is not balanced, friendly, full of good humor, and able to lose well will be unhappy with himself and won't be able to achieve his own goals. They also know that the value of winning is measured by the strength of the relationships formed in the effort, not in the glory that may redound after the fact to the winning individual.

If the worry is social mediocrity, perhaps it would be better to assess the mediocre goal that our own society has set for itself: the private accumulation of money. Somewhere along the way, the American ideal of freedom to live as your please, the implementation of democratic ideals of social opportunity, rich experience, and self re-creation got repackaged and sold as the dream of making enough money to not to have to worry about social problems. The American ideal of individuals taking responsibility for the social outcomes and opportunities in their communities got replaced by the flat ideal of individuals taking responsibility for their own private financial health.

What does winning mean today? Why don't people put forward the effort to win? Why do they lack competitive spirit? Perhaps the cause of mediocre efforts is the unworthiness of the goals that are most commonly offered as the outcomes of those efforts. After all, the value of any effort or will can only be taken in terms of the actual results that the will accomplishes. Maybe the reason people are lazy has very little to do with the innate character of individuals and more to do with a social structure that is unable to show the relation between an individual drive and the social soil out of which that drive rises and to which it must return.

The dirty little secret of champion distance runners? They love to run. They love their training partners. They love their coaches. They follow the history of running, and they participate in the community. Their running is a rich social practice that develops the whole individual, not just lungs and hearts, but mind and spirit. Sure, they are competitive sons (and daughters) of bitches. Absolutely they have individual talent. Yes, they are willing to sacrifice certain elements of themselves to the desire to win. But the real challenge that they were able to meet was the the refinement of the desire to win into a practice that leads to joy, meaning, and individual human flourishing. The only way that the desire to win can be maintained is by connecting it to moments of compassion, by weaving it through moments of genuine friendship, and by opening one's self up to the aid of others.

That's the promise of democracy: it is built on the insight that social concern and individual achievement are intertwined concepts. The great irony of the distance race is that it takes the efforts of hundreds of people to create even the possibility of a winner of the race. Streets have to be cordoned off. Timers have to be set. Awards announced. A race is a social construct precisely designed to bring out the best in human beings, to inspire them out of their laziness, and to allow them to discover their own wills. It is an organization crafted to bring out great and noble extremes of human effort. This fact is too easy to forget these days, but if we forget it, we end up with neither social organization nor individual achievement. Only lazy wealth, hopeless poverty, and mediocre attempts to bridge the gap.

Not the Best Run, Not the Worst

2011-03-21T22:48:00.005-05:00

Why do I do this? (My feet hurt.) Why? Well, it's the need, I guess, for some sort of authentic experience. (My hip joint hurts.) As opposed to the merely synthetic experience of books, movies, TV, regular urban living. (My neck hurts.) To meet my God, my Maker, once again, face to face, beneath my feet, beyond my arms, above my head. (Will there be water at Cabeza Tank?)

--Ed Abbey, Beyond the Wall

Mr. Abbey, saint of lost causes, and his automobile.

Another godawful eight miles in the books.

The questions recur, or at least they should. They are old ones that we chew on, the cud of experience. What the hell is this all about, this onwards, this forwards, this march to who knows where?

I barely got out the door after a day at work chasing my tail around. There are always good reasons, rational reasons, hella good arguments for just staying put. Like: I ran too hard last week and my legs are tired. Like: The grass really needs to be mowed. Like: Isn't this supposed to be fun? Like: What's another eight miles in the grand scheme of things?

When you carve a life up into the little bits that we actually feel and see, it's hard to figure the meaning. Only rarely does a vision appear of how the whole fits together. Most of the time it's just keep your head down and trust that it will all work out. The other option is to drive yourself crazy with questions, and there's even less point to that. The best argument for God's existence: there must be a higher power because I sure as hell don't know much.

After about 10 too many minutes of indulging these sorts of thoughts, you realize that shit if you are gonna sit around and wonder about the meaning of life, you might as well be getting those eight miles in. So, you head to the door not expecting much at all but at least you've got your shoes on now and turns out it's not even raining.

Down the front steps and you begin a sideways trot. The familiar sequence: the stiff achilles, the stumbling gait for the first mile. Up the first hill still not warmed up. Onwards you go, through the quiet city, past the strolling couples and the goofy dogs. There's even a pink sunset. The stiffness dissipates and the stumble gathers itself into something like a flow, the mind clears, and you've got something approximating authentic experience.

And even if it's not, at least it's another godawful eight miles in the books.

How It Works

2011-03-11T09:39:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the hiatus. I needed a mental break. Lately I've been easing back into things. I ran my first workout in quite a while last night, and the increased blood flow to the brain ignited those same old dreams.

This is how it works:

Training is doing your homework. It's not exciting. More often than not it's tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time, and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.

Workouts too become like this. Intervals, tempos, strides, hills. You go to the track, to the bottom of a hill, and your body finds the effort. You do your homework. That's training. Repetition--building deep habits, building a runner's body and a runner's mind. You do your homework, not obsessively, just regularly. Over time you grow to realize that the most important workout that you will do is the easy hour run. That's the run that makes everything else possible. You live like a clock.

After weeks of this, you will have a month of it. After months of it, you will have a year of it.

Then, after you have done this for maybe three or four years, you will wake up one morning in a hotel room at about 4:30am and do the things you have always done. You eat some instant oatmeal. Drink some Gatorade. Put on your shorts, socks, shoes, your watch. This time, though, instead of heading out alone for a solitary hour, you will head towards a big crowd of people. A few of them will be like you: they will have a lean, hungry look around their eyes, wooden legs. You will nod in their direction. Most of the rest will be distracted, talking among their friends, smiling like they are at the mall, unaware of the great and magical event that is about to take place.

You'll find your way to a tiny little space of solitude and wait anxiously, feeling the tang of adrenaline in your legs. You'll stand there and take a deep breath, like it's your last. An anthem will play. A gun will sound.

Then you will run.

Effort as an Organ of Perception

2011-01-24T13:24:00.003-06:00

Running is a simple thing. In some ways the simplicity of running--its very emptiness and absurdity as a task that literally ends where it begins--is what makes it fascinating. Running is like an empty page, a kind of tabula rasa, upon which we etch our daily mark.

It is strange to think that all the libraries of the world were once white pages, but inside each book sits a florid and turgid world, a reservoir of meaning carved out of emptiness. Just as the whiteness of the page provides a stimulus to the meaning-making power of the human mind, so too does the simplicity of running call forth a multiplicity of interpretations. Running is many things exactly because it is so simple.

I think I can expand on what I mean by this by referring to the metaphysics of John Dewey. Dewey had a name for the basic character of all experience. The word he used was interaction. He saw that our lives were essentially built out of a multiplicity of interactions. We leave our marks on the world through the exertion of our forces. The world, in return, acts upon us. The basic challenge of every living organism is to maintain a state of equilibrium in its interactions, and through these interactions to grow and develop. At the beginning of his greatest work Democracy and Education Dewey describes the living organism as one that literally makes its life through the interaction with forces:

The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into little bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so in order to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into a means of its further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.

This is a very profound paragraph, it seems to me. It takes us to the heart of why a simple task like running can come to mean so many simple things. The reason is that meaning of the activity of running taken in isolation is indeterminate--it only gains meaning as an interaction. When we go out to run, we engage with forces that reflect back upon ourselves. Like bats sending out sound waves in order to dodge stalactites, we use our running to make out the contours of ourselves. The meanings of the run are found in these reflections.

The difference between us and bats is that the cave in which we fly is internal as much as external. When it comes to knowing ourselves, we are blind as bats. Our eyes look outward, not inward. Like bats, however, we can gain self knowledge indirectly, by reading ourselves through the interactions we make with the world. The better we are at this task, the more we can learn from the signals that bounce back. Out of the interplay of forces, if we pay attention, we can read a kind of topography of self.

Good picture, but not only do knowledge and action take place with a world outside,
but we also must learn repeat these same interactions with our selves.

Through the different intensities of training, through a variety of races, the failed workouts, the runs with friends, the daily grind, the hundred mile weeks, the first steps out the door after a long layoff--through each of these acts we send inwards a kind of radar-signal. This signal is what we mean by the vague term "effort." We watch how this effort bounces, how deep it runs, and we react and learn about ourselves through the forces of resistance that this effort encounters. Effort is the name we give to internal vision; it is vaguer and less precise than the vision our eyes give us--perhaps it is not healthy to know ourselves as well as we know the world around us--but effort is still an organ of perception. Racing, running, and training require reading what we find about ourselves through our efforts accurately and reacting to this information intelligently.

I began this post with the thought of a run as a kind of unblemished canvas, a spur to multiple free creations. My thoughts have drifted now to running as a type of uncovering of a pre-existing self through the organ of effort. How free are we to create the runners that we are? Which of our capacities are predetermined, which are the ones we have created? These are not easy questions. The the space of the interaction lies between these two extremes--our selves, like the world, are concrete and open, not empty or decided.

Each run thus stands before us, and we before it. We do not know what insights it will yield. It appears blank, not unlike a canvas before the artist applies his brush strokes. But we fire up the interaction, first jogging, laying down broad streaks of effort, then the rest of the run follows. We are often surprised by, often familiar with, the selves we find--or is it create?--through the play and perception of the subtle and vague palate of effort. In this way, as living organisms, we maintain ourselves by renewal.

Interview: Jamey Gifford

2011-01-19T13:18:00.004-06:00

This interview is the second in a series of exchanges with local elite runners. These are the guys and women who train hard, take their running seriously, and work to compete--and win--on a local and national level. For all of these folks, running is a hobby. None of them make a living doing it. They continue to represent the best of amateurism, the idea that excellence in athletic endeavor is valuable for many reasons beyond financial compensation.

Jamey Gifford and I trained together every day back in the "glory days" at Baylor High School in Chattanooga, TN. We were a part of back to back state championships. Jamey is one of the greatest high school runners in state history, and he made his mark on the national level. My memories of Jamey, though, have less to do with racing and more to do with the daily hammerfests around the Baylor campus during which we each honed our competitive spirits. Coach Hale gave up on trying to hold us back and just let us go. Before we knew what a "progressive tempo run" was, we executed them day in and day out, half as a training exercise, and half just because neither of us wanted to give an inch. And those were our "easy" days! It occurs to me now that those easy days were probably easier for Jamey than for me!

At any rate, I asked Jamey to write this interview because years later I realize that I learned a great deal about how to run out there, hammering away as a teenager. Those lessons were mute, but Jamey does a great job of putting his take on running into words here, giving his thoughts on what it takes to win an individual state championship, how to break through in racing, what it's like to train with Olympians, and how his religion informs his running. Enjoy!

LLD: What are some of your "career highlights" and performances you are most proud of?

JG: Back in high school at the Baylor School in Chattanooga, I won 5 state championships (2 in cross country, 3 in track), had two Footlocker National XC top 10 finishes (8th in 1995, 10th in 1996), and ranked in the top 10 nationally in the 1600 (4:09) and 3200 (9:04). I went on to Stanford to run collegiately, where I experienced a lot of ups and downs. I rebounded from a tumultuous freshman year to run on Stanford’s NCAA XC nationals squad my sophomore and junior year with a best finish of 62nd. My junior year I ran my PRs of 3:50 & 14:35 for 1500 & 5000 meters. Then at the end of my junior year, a string of injuries derailed my college career as I never regained a fitness level close to where I was before.

After college I hung up the spikes for several years. Then just before I turned 30, I started running consistently again, which turned into actual training, and now I’m racing fairly frequently.

When I think back at my best performances, the ones that stick out may not be the best performances in absolute terms, but rather those where I competed at a higher level than I realized I was capable of:

The first would be the Footlocker National XC meet my junior year. My goal had been just to qualify (I was the 7th out of 8 qualifiers from the South regional). At nationals I was literally nervous that the whole field would run away from me. When that didn’t happen and I found myself in the middle of the pack by the mile mark, I just worked on moving my way up over the 2nd half. After a mad kick I finished 8th.

Then the first year I ran at the NCAA XC championships as a sophomore (actually a redshirt freshman), I came in as our #7 runner, and really had no high expectations. I was hanging just inside of the top 100 for the first half of the race, when I saw our number 5 runner falling back in the pack. I knew right then that we needed someone to step up. I threw all caution to the wind, and just started passing as many people as I could. With a mile to go, I was so excited that I couldn’t even tell how tired I was. I finally started to tie up in the last 100 meters of the race, but I had moved up to 62nd place, which helped Stanford finish 2nd that year. My only regret is that nobody had our splits – I’d really like to know how fast that last mile was!

More recently, I was pretty thrilled with the Humboldt Half Marathon in October 2009. I had been struggling with both longer distance races and workouts. I wanted to run a good half marathon, but just didn’t have the pieces in place. Toward the end of the summer, I increased my mileage, and then added some longer tempos to my training. On the race day, I finally had the confidence that I could run 5:20 – 5:30 splits, and had the strength to hold it all the way to a 1:11:08 finish.

LLD: You were a tremendous runner in high school. What do you think separated you from your peers back in the day?

JG: First of all I really appreciate the complement. I was lucky to start my career in a very ideal situation. My parents were always very nurturing of my running without added additional pressure to perform. I was part of our Baylor team that was really on the rise, which included great coaches and teammates. As an 8th grader and freshman, I had you (Jeff) and the Anderson brothers to chase in practice and races, as we worked toward back-to-back team state titles. Even after the older runners graduated and I took over as the top runner, I always had people willing to help push me through workouts. Beyond that I really think a lot of luck was involved – I never got injured or had any serious setbacks. I enjoyed the training, which made working hard and staying focused feel very natural.

Jamey in his accustomed position, out front.

LLD: Do you have any advice for young runners who have the goal of becoming a state champion or get to Footlocker nationals?

JG: I think goal setting is a very important aspect of a runner’s progression. I always had a couple of sets of goals – short term & longer term. A short term goal should be something that you are capable of achieving sometime between the next race and the end of the current season. They can be time based goals, or competition based – such as beating a rival for the first time or finishing in the top 10 of a league cross country meet. After you achieve one of these short term goals, think ahead to what your next goal is.

Equally important are your longer term goals. These goals should be your reach goals – goals that will likely take a year or longer to accomplish. Entering my freshman year of high school I had already set winning the state cross country meet by my senior year as a long term goal. Since I was only our team’s number 3 or 4 runner for most the season, I was clearly a long way from achieving it. But having these long term goals to dream about while you knock off shorter term objectives can be extremely motivating. They’ll also help you avoid turning short term goals into mental barriers.

The other key aspect is training – obviously. Anybody who’s ever worn a whistle around their neck will tell you that you need to work hard. A lot of times elite runners are asked about a key workout prior to a breakthrough performance. What is lost in that question is what you did in the months and years prior to that key workout. As you progress as a runner, your body is continuously adapting to handle the intensity and volume. So for most people to reach a high level, they have to train all year round. I would take two weeks off after cross country and another two after track, but I would train 11 months a year, 6-7 days a week. At times, I had to make sacrifices, but I used to joke that running was brushing my teeth – it was just part of my day. I do want to note that this wasn’t 11 months of high intensity training – sometimes you do need recovery – but there’s no other way to teach your body to be a runner, than to be running almost every day.

LLD: When it comes to training, you seem to thrive on high intensity running. Where do you come down on the quantity/quality debate in training?

JG: I’ve gone back and forth on this so many times over the years, and if I had the perfect answer I’d be a much better runner than I am right now. What I’ve become convinced of over the past couple of years is that variety & balance is the best approach. An “ah ha” moment for me was watching Kara Goucher run 4:33 to win the Millrose Mile in 2009 less than 3 months before finishing third at the Boston Marathon. I’m not a marathoner, but I had never heard people say that higher-end speedwork should be a key part of marathon training. Here you had Goucher running a world class mile just months before nearly pulling off the win at Boston.

In my own running I’ve always liked running fast intervals – it’s something that comes pretty naturally to me. I never liked race pace training, I prefer faster intervals, so that race pace will feel easy. As I’ve gotten a little older, I’m finding that I can’t rely on interval training like I used to. Now the long runs and quality tempo runs are more important so that I’ll have the strength toward the end of races.

My opinion is that all else being equal, runners should run as much mileage as possible. But that all else being equal part is how much volume should I run without getting injured, being frequently run down, and having the energy to handle quality workouts.

LLD: From the very beginning of your competitive career, you've been a great racer. What are some of the things you think about when you race in order to run well? What advice would you give folks to improve their racing ability?

JG: I’ve had times throughout my career where I raced very well, and frankly times when I raced very poorly relative to my fitness. I’ve often thought back and tried to remember what I was doing when I raced at my best. I’ve always been a very analytical type, but in a race, my brain can be my biggest enemy. That’s not to say I shouldn’t think about my pace, position in the race, and realistically how I’m feeling, but I think every bad race I’ve ever run, had one thing in common – excessive mid-race analysis. Racing is tough and painful, so I know the more I think about what’s going on, the more likely feelings of fear, doubt, and anxiety can hijack my performance. My best races are the ones where I can turn that internal monologue off and maintain a hyper-focus on running at that very moment of the race. Sometimes I have to tell myself – shut up and just run!

LLD: What was it like running collegiately at a top notch program like Stanford? You were able to spend some time with some of the very best runners in the country. Were there any common denominators among those folks? Have any Gabe Jennings stories?

JG: It was amazing running at Stanford during that era. It could be very tough at times individually because if I had a bad race or workout, I could see 10 teammates blow past me, but I wouldn’t trade the whole experience for anything. The cool thing about being teammates with all those guys is that there was no mystery to what it takes to be an All-American, NCAA champion, or an Olympian. I saw what it took every single day. From my freshman through senior year I was teammates with 7 distance runners who ultimately went to the Olympics – and that’s not even counting the women’s team, field events, and a coach. All of their stories were a little different, but I’d say the common denominator was their long term focus to achieving their goals. Jonathon Riley (2004 Olympian at 5000 meters) & I were roommates for two years. Jonathon never felt like he had to be a hero in any particular workout, but he trained so consistently hard. What I really remember about him, was how strongly he believed he was going to be one of the best – even if he was injured or struggling at the time. I honestly don’t think his brain was willing to compute anything else. I remember the day before a big 5000 meters on the track he told me “I’m nervous about the race – this is going to hurt really bad.” He ran right around 13:30 that day, second to Bernard Legat.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about Gabe Jennings. The two of us were polar opposites, but we were good friends all through college. I think a lot of exaggerations were written about him – he did in fact have running water growing up – but he was one of a kind. He’s probably the most passionate individual I’ve ever known, and certainly the most passionate runner. When I saw him win the Olympic Trials 1500 meter race in 2000, I jumped up and down on my broken foot without realizing it. The race was that awesome. Stories? I’m sure I could think of a quite a few… I remember one year he was trying to save money – or maybe be more in touch with nature – by living off campus. His idea of living off campus got pretty creative. One morning on I was on a run and saw Gabe walking in the foothills near campus. I said “Gabe what are you doing?” “Oh I’m uh, going for a walk.” Turns out he was camping out in a poison oak patch. Oops.

LLD: Sometimes I think that it is hard for folks who have had success at the highest level of the sport, especially earlier in their careers, to continue running and competing. What keeps you out on the roads? Have your reasons for running changed through the years?

JG: When I graduated from college, I was pretty burned out and ready to call it a career. Over the following years, I would still go for occasional runs – particularly when the weather was nice, but nothing I would call training. Just before I turned 30, I randomly met a guy who ran for a club in San Francisco. I thought it would be fun to go for a workout. It happened slowly, but I enjoyed the group I was training with, and embraced the challenge of getting back in shape. After a while I decided to start jumping into races, and I was hooked again.

In high school and college, I felt like running was my life. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was a professional runner. Now there’s a lot more balance. I have my job, which I have worked hard at, and I’m married and look forward to starting a family down the road. Often now running takes a backseat to other priorities in my life – something that wouldn’t have happened before, but that's OK with me. I’ve really found the joy in running again, and made so many new friends through the running community in the San Francisco Bay Area. But don’t get me wrong, I still want to run fast!

Jamey's still gettin' it done.

LLD: Since this is a philosophy blog, there is a requisite philosophy question: I know you are a deeply religious person. What connections, if any, do you make between religion and your running?

JG: That’s a great question – thanks for asking! Growing up in the church, people would talk about their walk with Christ. For me, I liked to think about my run with Christ. Having faith should be more than just going to church and trying to be a good person, it is about growing in your relationship with God. I think every religious person goes through periods of doubt and stagnation. Faith in God means believing in something that you can’t see and that at times feels very real, but other times does not at all. True faith is an ongoing journey to be closer to God, and to be a part of His work on earth – my run with Christ.

I think a runner’s journey can be very similar. There are times when training feels great and races are going well. But every runner knows there are times when little seems to go well – you get tired, sick, injured, or just generally stuck in a rut. These times are as important as ever to find ways to press on, and not lose sight of your running goals.

The times when I’ve felt faith in God, have given my run a higher purpose, and have given me a peace when I’m out on the trails and roads pounding out the miles.

I always felt like this verse was written just for me:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” -Hebrews 12:1

How to Run Like a Stoic

2011-01-11T10:08:00.004-06:00

The following piece is a guest post by "Scout7," a sporadic but long time poster on the Running Ahead message boards. I asked Scout to do this piece for two reasons. First, he is not a philosopher by training, but I have always found his insights on running to be philosophical--mindful of the place of running within the larger ethical task of living life well. Second, his posts on training and running on Running Ahead have helped me think more intelligently about how to train and have influenced my own running philosophy. I believe both of these reasons will be evident in what he has written below. Enjoy!

"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. "

-- Epictetus

Epictetus was a slave. His philosophy, not ironically, was a practice of freedom.

Jeff asked me if I would mind writing a guest post for his blog, and of course I agreed. I mean, why not? How hard could it be? I write all kinds of drivel in various online forums, so this won’t be difficult at all.

Lemme tell ya, I was wrong. I struggled for a week or so, and threw out several variants. It didn’t help that I really had no starting point. Unfortunately for me, I need something more concrete than “write about running.” Who knew?

A couple weeks ago, a common topic popped up online: Recommend some good running-related books to read. Of course the usual selections were given: Dr. Daniels’ book, Pfitzinger, Once a Runner, yadda yadda yadda. I cannot deny that those are good books for running (mostly because I haven’t read most of them). My recommendations were Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Enchiridion by Epictetus. For those who have not read either book, neither mentions running specifically.

So why the recommendations? At first, I was doing it to be obtuse; I do take a perverse pleasure in throwing something out to see what sort of conversation gets generated without providing a full reason behind the initial statement.

But really, there was more to it, and I had to really think about what I was trying to accomplish--especially since no one even acknowledged my recommendations, the Philistines!! After some soul-searching and contemplation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the general idea behind those books is at the core of how I approach training.

The books are based on the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. Most people have heard the term “stoic” before and take it to mean suffering through without displaying emotion. Unfortunately, that misses the real heart of Stoicism. It’s not that there is no emotion; it’s that you understand the nature and purpose of things. The goal of the ancient Stoics was to live a life free from the undue influence of externals. This goal was accomplished by recognizing that we are responsible solely for ourselves, and when we get upset, or jealous, or anything else, we are letting others control our emotions and our actions.

(Note, I am not a professional philosopher, so this is my take on things. Don’t agree? Deal with it.)

What does that have to do with running and training?

Once we get past all the numbers, the break down of cycles, the daily workout schedules, etc., what is left? There are a few core principles that I think are relevant to any runner, no matter age or ability. First, everything you do should have purpose. If your goal is to stay fit and healthy, then all of your training should be directed towards that goal. Every session has a reason for being, and you need to understand, accept, and follow that purpose. Ignoring the purpose of a workout leads to problems in training. The idea that most people go too easy on hard days and too hard on easy days highlights nicely the idea of purpose.

Second, no one else is you, and you need to spend time examining and understanding yourself. To me, this is one of the greatest benefits of running, particularly running alone. You get a chance to get inside your head, to spend some quality time with yourself. You need this time to improve both your training and the other aspects of your life. I have worked through more issues while out on the roads than in any other single place. By spending this quality time, you get to the heart of your motivations. Understanding these motivations is the key to determining purpose. Additionally, it gives you a chance to see how you respond to different things. Do you do better with more volume, or less? How many intervals are too many? All of the questions you see being asked on message boards are probably better answered by oneself, not by a bunch of random people who happened to read your question that day. The answers you receive give you a starting place, but you need to do the work and evaluate your response to it.

Marcus Aurelius was an emperor and a soldier. This was no ivory-tower theoretician, but a man whose need to think came directly out of his living responsibilities.

Third, you need patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your body. You have to give yourself time. Having goals is a fundamental aspect of this point. With the right goals, you can always go back to them to understand why you are running easy today or why you shouldn’t do that really great-sounding marathon next week. Goals lend themselves to tempering your responses, and that’s what patience is. You need to realize that you have to take time to step back, evaluate, and understand.

Finally, and this point is probably hardest to grasp, you are responsible for you. Not your shoes, not your watch, not anything else. Those are tools, to be used with the requisite understanding, but they do not take away your responsibility to yourself. You cannot blame shoes when you don’t pay attention to your body. You cannot abdicate your race performance to a watch. None of these things assures or prevents success. The only factor in all of this is you, the individual. You have to take responsibility for determining your goals, for examining your motivations, for listening to your body, and for having the patience to make it all come together.

Ultimately, the thing that makes you a better runner has nothing to do with the types of workouts, the number of miles, or the method you use to monitor effort. The answer is much simpler than that. You have to align your training with your goals, understand the motivation behind the goals, build your training in a fashion that matches those goals and yourself, give yourself time, and take responsibility for your training. You need to be honest about the purpose of your training and whether you’ve been true to that purpose or not.

In the end, the real message is that we have to be true to ourselves. Don’t get caught up in all the little things, missing the forest for the trees. Find a purpose to your training, and use that purpose to make yourself a better runner, if not a better person.