hobby

What does it mean to say that running is my hobby? Or, is it marathoning, not running, that's my hobby? The word, you probably know, originally referred to kind of pony, then a toy horse, and then in the 19th century, our “favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords.” Hobbies, then, have a deep connection to running animals. Merely for amusement: a running hobby has to be fun, its own goal. It can't be a means: of exercising, of keeping beautiful and trim looking.

The rest of the definition seems to follow logically for the first part, while being particularly applicable to runners: "an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance. " That is to say, if a hobby is, by the first part of the definition, its own end, utterly unimportant for anything but the interest or amusement of the hobbyist it will appear silly to outside observers--as any unimportant pursuit will. Hobbies appear excessive to the observer because of their trivial, unproductive character. To me, your enthusiasm for your particular brand of fun always seems disproportionate, out of balance. Hiking: what's the point? Golf: not just trivial, boring too!

More later--I've got to go to bed. Ran 10 today in some slushy late afternoon sun--winter, slanted sun. I'm not training right now, just doing maintenance mileage, and good thing. It's still fun and amusing to run.

almost skipped today

I dare anyone to name the day: does anyone really know what day it is today, or was yesterday, or whether Christmas was on a Monday or a Saturday or a Wednesday? The order of the days of the week falls out of consciousness after December 23 as we remain in our semi-reluctant holiday stupor until January 2. What day does New Year's fall on? Who knows. It's in these days where the calendar breaks down that my running seems to as well, that I lose the sense of urgency about getting out the door. I almost skipped my run this morning but after coffee and some reading made it out for an easy, very easy, six.

cold day, windy run

I'm on the East Coast in the D.C. area, sitting in a sunny kitchen staring out at a cold and windy but snowless day. Yesterday BWI was shut down on what apparently was fear of snow. I overheard a flight attendent tell her colleauge that she'd gotten word about the shutdown on Christmas day! Odd. Why weren't we all told that we could have cancelled flights and innumerable inconveniences?

Nonetheless I'm glad the snow is north of here--I was able to run for 70 minutes in the cold and wind but it was sunny and the ground was dry, and I had a new pair of running gloves and new shoes so I was fine and happy.

the metropolis and mental life

My wife and I woke up at 6 this morning (our usual time but a time unusual for a holiday)for separate predawn runs, she recovering from last night's 14 and I out for ten at a decent clip. The loop took me around the empty main streets of the neighborhood and briefly into the vacant downtown in ways that always remap the city of birth for me, turning it into a grid of pure geography, mere physical miles of streets over which to lay a morning ten. Places that in thought and memory seem far from home seem, when running, almost inconveniently close, maybe a mere 1/2 mile or mile away. To loop west to the public junior high school, down town, and back across the bridge with the WPA statues measures a mere four miles or so. The neighborhood streets are closely gridded, each block less than .1 miles long. More later. It started snowing toward the end of my run, and the snow continues to fall peacefully. I have to shower now.

avoiding Christmas grumpiness

I get reflexively grumpy at Christmas. I don't know why -- aside from the usual complaints people have about Christmas, I've got nothing to gripe about. This year though I'm feeling the usual Christmas exaustion a little more acutely, and it's almost as if it's not just me but everyone, the whole country, that's overextended and exhausted. Anyhow--my wife's here in the midwest with me and is helping me hide my grumpiness behind a smile.

mid morning 10

This morning my wife and I slept in until 9 because we can, and we tend to do that on Friday's anyhow. For whatever reason, Thursday night begins the academic weekend, which is really no weekend at all. The rate and pace of work just slows. We broke our plans to go to a Christmas party last night and instead stayed home and watched a movie. We were in bed by 11:30.

Usually we get up before dawn. Out of habit now I wake up around six. We all know the pleasure of those mornings when we wake up at the usual time only to realize we can sleep in. I pull my wife close and go back to sleep.

Got up, had two cups of coffee, ran 10 on P. Brook, it cold, and the hills were harder than usual probably because I hadn't eaten much the night before. I've been worried about diabetes lately, ever since reading this article in the NYT. I'm giving up sugary foods, and I plan to be vigilant about my intake of hidden sugars. My wife has warned me that runners eat like fat people, that our organs work as hard as fat peoples' organs to process the outsized amounts of foods we eat, even as our skinny frames belie our crappy food habits. I believe her: kidneys, the liver have to process the crap we eat, even as we have abnormally low body fat percentages.

Last night we watched Dickie Roberts, Child Star, on sale for $5 at Barnes and Noble and better than we thought it would be. (Somehow, this movie choice makes a too telling transition from a paragraph about sugar consumption.) Our choice for tonight was Lars and the Real Girl, an appealing weird movie about a young Wisconsin man's love for a sex mannequin. (I mention the setting because it's important for the setting and costumes--it's a midwestern winter, everyone's wearing beige sweaters, the sky's a monochrome slate, the trees and dead grasses are shades of brown, shots blend the world into a bleak and lifeless earth-tone pallate.) Everyone in Lars's small town goes along with his fantasy that the doll is real. I'll have to think more about how to sum the movie up, but suffice it to say that it sets up more conflicts for the main character than it can resolve. This makes its plotting satisfyingly complex, its ending frustratingly pat. A much more interesting movie than I thought it would be, and I'll have to think about it before I say more about it.

It's almost Christmas. My favorite day of the year is December 23, traditionally a day on which nothing happens.

tech

For about a year I've had a Garmin. Until just recently, I took it on every run except speed workouts: on long runs, daily maintenance mileage, easy recovery runs. Lately though I've gotten tired of it: the incessant beeping, it's mass, the way I look down at it constantly. I've gone back to my old wristwatch, measured loop routes and out-and-backs.

Americans have contradictory attitudes about training and tech. We want it because we think tech unqualifiedly enhances life; yet we think our triumphs should be matters of heart and will. Here's an illustration of what I mean. It's one of the biggest lies of the Cold War:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q57qB6Kwroo&feature=related

winter light midmorning, a cold day

Sometimes I wonder how people lived before thermometers. How did you know what to wear outdoors? Today is in the 20s. I've left this morning's run for this afternoon. I needed a break from the routine. It's very hard to get up early in the winter and run in the dark. The cold doesn't bother me running in the winter, but what does bother me most about December has nothing to do with weather but with the way the year so quickly just peters out. My work is measured in months and years and not days so the turn of the year is significant.

What academics talk about when they talk about running

Murakami!

I haven't read his running book yet, though I keep meaning to. It's essential.

But, to be addressed in a later post: Why do academics always say how productive they are on runs (that is, when bold enough to admit that they do run)? I see it as (usually) a bullshit apology. Bullshit because it's an escape, even if it does open the brain; and an apology because professional people, not just academics, can't admit that they do anything for pure fun. It's all part of some oppressive holistic ethos of achievement.

a start to marathon training

My wife began her marathon training today. We ran 12 as an inaugural long run. She did wonderfully. She's in excellent aerobic shape.

The long run is usually the centerpiece of any marathon training plan, but there are some runners and coaches and groups, such as Brooks Hansons, who build fitness through increased total mileage and limit the long run to 16. This approach makes perfect sense. I can't explain the physiology of it but it seems intuitively true based on my own experience and what I've heard. Eighty miles a week, for example, will get you in more or less the same shape for a marathon whether you run 25% of that mileage on Saturday morning or not. I know a man who ran 2:25 with his longest run being 14 miles. He ran in college. Craig Virgin, I read somewhere, didn't run longer than 18 before he finished second in Boston to Seko. You wonder, though, if he'd have won had he done 22.

Frank Shorter never exceeded 22 in his long runs; his training partner Kenney Moore would go as far as 40 some days. Pro runners in America today top out at 24-25. For two of my marathons I've prepared by doing a long run of 24 miles. The rest, I've done 23. I found in my first few maratons that my body somehow knew the mileage it had trained up to, that it started hurting at the mile marker that was the longest long run I'd done. It was especially marked at my first Boston in 2008. Would this still hold true today? Could I get away with doing more intense long runs of 20-22 and altogether ignore the 23-4 mile run? At Richmond I felt that the race was less an aerobic challenge than a challenge of speed and strength, and that while miles and miles of aerobic pace runs had given me a solid base, I hadn't shaped that base into a fine racing instrument. I'd accumulated a big shapeless mound of miles. So this season, strength and athleticism.

Athleticism is a funny word. It's something I've only heard used in the last few years. I've heard it used in reference to football and basketball players: "He has great athleticism on the field." And it is also in the vocabulary of coaches and trainers as something they can work on with athletes (though put this way it sounds tautological, it is not): they work on the player's speed and agility and coordination, the ability to move well.

What everyone wonders is the extent to which the ability to move well, or "athleticism," is educable. What does it mean that that the human body is at once so plastic and so limited? While it's a very uneven, poorly written movie for the most part, "Without Limits" is the best possible title for a distance running movie, for it describes both the fantasy of distance runners, to be without limits, and the condition which, were the fantasy realized, would make distance running impossible as a pursuit. Distance running, like everything else, needs that limit to be intelligible.

reluctant to run yesterday

Yesterday I almost skipped my run. I had a morning doctors appointment for which I had to fast, and not being one who can run without coffee, skipped the morning run. As the day went on motivation was fading with early winter light. At 3pm I went out for an easy 4.5 and I'm glad I did. I wouldn't want to lose the habit.

We saw the very well-made Sean Penn/Naomi Watts movie last night, Fair Game. It really captures the political passions of the time in scenes where couples at bars and dinner tables are arguing first about profling Muslims immediately after 9/11 and then, 18 months later, about the validity of Saddam/Hitler analogies. Knowing Sean Penn's personal investment in the war opposition helps makes his Joe Wilson, who seeths at cable new screenshots of Bush, Rove, and Scooter Libby, incredibly convincing.

the last homecoming

My wife and I just finished an excellent Cypriot movie called "The Last Homecoming" (2008). Set on Cyprus in 1974 on the eve of the Turkish invasion, it's a story of erotic and political passions that strain family ties and abrade the scars of historical wounds. What happens when your communist brother has sex with your fiance, who has an ambiguous tie to your mother's former lover (for whom your mother still harbors an attraction that grates on her dutiful husband, your father) , who is a partisan of the nationalist Greek junta that staged a coup in 1974 in such a capacity kidnapped and imprisoned the brother who cuckolded you? A lot, especially when it turns out that the girl from whose perspective the whole story has been narrated is a Turk forced to live behind the line established between Turkish and Greek Cyprus that continues to divide the island today. Highly recommended, especially because, though shot in 2008, its colors and cinematography look exactly like movies from the early 70s, the way the colors and light seem so softened and blended, especially in the movie's many gorgeous shots of the Cypriot beach. It's enchantingly historiated, as the word goes.

About running. Why talk about movies when you can say something about running? I read an article about the second place finsiher in this year's Zatopek 10k in Australia. He used to be a 190# party guy, and now he just took second in a world class track event. Well done. Amazing how we can recover from our vices, isn't it?

I ran 10.3 this morning--towpath to a hilly road outside of town, then back. It was cold but I enjoyed the run. Got out at 6:26 and reined in as much of the day as I could. Wrote in the morning, read in the afternoon. It's been a fine day.

Now my wife and I are going to watch the Lars von Trier movie Medea. We think the whole idea of "Jason" and the Argonauts is fucking hilarious. If "Jason" leads the Argonauts, are they all named Brad, Justin, Todd, Kevin, Matt, Brian, and Ryan? What the hell. "Hey Jason, how long till we're there?" "Fucking chill, man. Put on Joshua Tree. The CD's in my bag."

revision frustration

I have been revising this paper for a few days now. Why does writing never get any easier? [Since this is a running blog, insert your trite running metaphor here--for the moment, let's remember that runners of all abilities hurt during races, from elites to new runners. No matter how good you are your best always hurts.] The thing I've learned about revision over the years is not to fear it and to be ruthless. Cut cut cut. Maybe a paragraph pleads with you, "But don't you remember? You felt so smart when you wrote me! I took five hours!" Be steadfast, don't yield.

My wife and I just got back from a mall that was eerily empty for 7pm on a December weeknight. Alas, mall. We mourn thee.

Losing time

This morning I left for my run at 6:30 as it was getting light. I ended at 7:40 in full daylight. I ran ten at an easy aerobic pace looping through neighborhoods. I often forget how much activity there is by 6:30, how many commuters, runners, dog walkers. It's 4:30 now and the sun is already setting on the ten hours of daylight we've had. I haven't even showered yet. I've been revising all day, without much success, racing as I always do against Decemeber and the end of the year, when everything and all the days feel frantic and abbreviated. Part of me wants to get up earlier and earlier and start sooner and sooner, part of me wants to give up, make a beef stew and open a bottle of wine and just relax after sunset. I agree with my wife's thought that our society doesn't accommodate winter moods, this feeling of slowness and loss of control that's sometimes sadness and anxiety and sometimes peace.

Runner's World and dumb product promotion

Why do I continue to read Runner's World when every issue tells you basically the same thing? And why do I continue to read it when I know the magazine has no scruples about liberally mixing advertising into its "reporting?" The Jan. 2011 issue has a feature on running makeovers, one of which outfits a guy who normally runs in sweats in high-tech, expensive winter running gear. What's wrong with sweats? And doesn't anyone wear plain t-shirts anymore?

food

The food part of running always baffles me. I lose 10# to get to 'thon racing weight by eating less in the weeks before and giving up sweets completely, but the rest of the time, my body's a dumpster in which I toss every morsel frowned upon by Michael Pollan and the rest.

Eat food? Would my grandmother recognize it? I guess--after all, it's her green bean casserole, complete with gelatinous canfuls of sodium-filled mushroom soup, that I've come to love each holiday. My earliest memory of her involves sitting at her kitchen table as she sipped her Sanka. Let's admit that grandmothers recognize a lot more as food than we might realize, mostly out of necessity and, then, convenience. Great-grandmothers too, probably.

Mostly plants. Potatoes. Corn syrup is plants.

Not too much. Stop being so prim.

I have noticed though, that when I break my bad habits--too much meat and sugar mostly--I'm more alert and I don't crash in the middle of the afternoon. It's easier to sustain a high training load on a good diet. It doesn't make that much of a difference in the training itself, but it matters for how you feel the rest of the time, for how great a cost you pay in tiredness for each mile you run.

morning ten

I ran ten this morning, and my hamstring felt fine, even if it was a little sore. It was very cold and windy. I was out of bed at 5:20, an hour earlier than my alarm. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep because I was worrying about some things: the progress of my dissertation, mainly, its endlessness and its utter lack of import to the world. I hope it matters to scholars. Mattering is crucial for being happy, and sometimes I wish the work I did mattered on a bigger scale. While I get endless pleasure from my research, curiosity is starting to seem a little too hedonic and self-involved. I wouldn't be an academic unless I thought ideas mattered, that poets were the legislators of the world; I wouldn't be a good academic without the skepticism that leads me to think only some ideas of a very high quality matter; I wouldn't be a typical academic unless I doubted my ability to produce them.

This week, regular running resumes. I'm not training for anything, just doing maintenance mileage, which for me hovers around 70 miles/wk. This will take the form of 8-12 miles each morning. If I have full confidence in my hamstring and full confidence that my body has adapted to the cold, I'll start speed work next week. My goal for the next few months is leg speed, perhaps attained through heavy interval work.

microblog

wouldn't it be great if they had something that allowed you to post really short updates about your life in a format that's like a short blog? That'd be great.

I'm infinitely distractable this evening; my wife's gone to New York for a conference and I'm bored and lonely. And the article I'm writing up isn't going well. Introductions are the hardest thing to write, even after you've written the body. What exactly is it that I've been trying to say this whole time, and why should it be of interest to the reader? The problem of blogging, the problem of scholarship.

Good article in New York Review of Books about Benjamin Heisenberg movie, The Robber: "may be the most eloquent—and disturbing—portrait of the running mind ever made." Whatever that means. If there's a "running mind," it's mine right now--it won't stop and stay put on my paper. Why though is this such a topic of fascination, the question of what drives distance runners (as if there's such thing as a "running mind"?) I love when people presume running is a sympton. It's not always misguided, and it's more interesting than taking running for granted. Everyone's fascinated with fugitivity, no? Running's interesting as soon as it becomes about flight.

bad races

Molly Huddle at Running Times:

"I used to fear the unpredictable off day, but now I realize that grinding is part of racing. On 'feel great' days, it is easy to run fast, but on the other days, you find out what you are really made of."

Yes, grinding is a part of racing and I have never DNF'd because I take what she says as axiomatic. But is this wise advice? I never know. I had a terrible race at Richmond a few weeks ago. From mile 8 on, things just weren't going well. My legs felt heavy and wouldn't turn over. I ate too much too soon before the race. I ate too much the night before. I felt the fluids in my stomach the whole way. I got a massive stitch in my side at mile 19, when I took goo, basically because I hadn't digested all I ate. I think miles 19-21 were about 7-minute pace.

I knew my family would be at mile 10 -- I could tell them there, I thought, that I would run to the half and then bail. I made it to the half and there thought I would quit at mile 17, where my family would be next. I made it to 17, then through the difficult goo cramp, picked it up at 22 and finished the last four miles around 6-minute pace.

I respect myself for not quitting, even though I was very disappointed with my time. The benefit of quitting would be a faster recovery time, not having to take virtually a month of reduced training to recover. I thought because I wasn't running this marathon terribly fast I'd recover more quickly. I think that's been the case--or maybe not. I was able to run a decent 10 mile race last Saturday but have had a nagging left hamstring tweak since.

I ran 7 this morning -- it felt good, no problems on the run but it's been stiff all day. I've been sitting on a baseball to work out what I think is simply a tightly knotted muscle--I feel it up in my piriformis and down through my calf. We'll see how tomorrow goes. I can't wait to race again, but it won't be for a while. I admire what Molly Huddle says because there's a lot of truth in it for everything we do in life: basically, if you work consistently and don't quit, you'll accomplish something, even if not every day's the most successful or productive. I try to put a little something on paper each day, no matter what. But you can't mix running advice with life advice as easily as those who want to talk about the latter in terms of the former; running's more of a metonym for life, not a metaphor. A lot of advice you get about life--"don't quit," for example--is bad advice for running.

anonymity

The diary is a form of self examination, but I intended to keep the bearer of the self so examined concealed for now. A self is simply a self for now, an effect of the first person, and this should suffice, though a character may later emerge to give it coherence.

Last summer while running shirtless on a leafy residential road I was mortified to pass a professor, out for an evening walk, whom I admire for his William Jamesian openmindedness and breadth of intellect. We acknowledged each other as we passed but he turned his eyes away first. I've avoided that loop since.

At races, my uncle likes to observe that behind every bib there's a story. There is, and runners are keen to narrate their conversion to running, often a transformation of a less than adequate before into a more self-possessed, more efficiently oxigenated after. It is a story that usually, though not always, touches on the transformation of the runner's relationship to his or her body. The leaner body weighs lighter on the spirit, the new runner inhabits it deliberately, for the first time.

Runners who are writers often tell these stories in print. Because they are often intellectuals, runners who are writers first express surprise that they have become runners, embarrassed by their sudden attention to and fascination with this non-sexual aspect of their bodies. Sex writer Susie Bright's reaction, expressed in an interview with Slate, is typical:

"It just wasn't for me. I thought: I'm a bookworm, and I will never do that. And that has been proved wrong. I can't believe I'm a runner. I still cannot believe that's me. I never sweated like this in my life. I was 50 when I started becoming athletically active, and it's been quite a shock to me."

Bill Bowerman said once that anyone who has a body is an athlete. Bookworms are skeptical of this, and find the role of runner a hard one to step into, Bowerman's athlete an inconceivable, shameful latency. Rachel Toor's collection of essays, Personal Record, all center around her evolution "from a bookish egghead who ran only to catch a bus to a runner of ultramarathons." Of all running writers, Toor is the best--few practitioners of the genre realize as fully as she does that the running essay cannot interest a reader if it's only about running. Yet even she can't quite get past the sense that bookishness doesn't belong in a running life. I sometimes agree, but usually, I get through the days reading and running, doing fine with both.

I know how running looks from the outside, and so I fear being recognized when I run around the college town where I live. I hope I register to the eyes of others as runners sometimes register to mine, as anonymous bodies in motion, faceless torsos, legs, and heads. Since I've been running since I was a teenager and am always curious to see who shares my passion, runners rarely look this way to me. But sometimes a runner springs into my field of vision when my mind is drifting and in a short interval of half-awareness I have a perfect impression of his body as simply a running body.

The reason I'm so terribly embarrassed to be recognized when running has nothing to do with the short-shorts, or the shirtlessness or anything having to do with the exposure of the body in public. So why? It's partly a sense that if you're a serious runner you're not serious about other things. But there's more to it.

I take heart in knowing that Martha Nussbaum is a runner. I imagine her running along the lakefront below 57th street out away from the institution I always imagine as terribly inimical to running. I like to imagine her interest in luck and fragility as cognate with her running habit. Running is not primarily a quest to realize unrealizable omnipotence, another compensation for our original psychic loss (after all, what isn't?). Every time I get injured and am incapacitated in my running, every time I'm struggling in the final kilometers of a race to turn my legs over faster and find that I simply cannot will them to do, I realize in fact the extent of my impotence, and the meagerness of will.

the beginning

This post marks the beginning of my running blog, which I am starting because I tweaked my hamstring in a 10-mile race the other day and have taken a few days off running to let it heal properly so that I don't have to take too much more time off. I'll spare you musings on the compulsive tendencies that might require a diary essay (etymologically, no one tires of repeating, a wandering) to substitute for a hilly twelve-mile road run in the late November chill, a more satisfying--and in some ways perhaps even more durable--peregrination.

Inury for me has come to meant giving up on substitions, at least when it comes to injuries of the picayune nagging kind that need about three days to heal up. I chucked cross training a long time ago. There's no use in trying to preserve fitness. I get so bored at the gym. I feel so confined, somehow the sweat feels dirty and muggy, like indoor sweat, not running sweat. When injured now, I just take the time. I eat ice cream, drink beer, imagine my a life without running.

It's a dangerous exercise, imagining life as a non-runner. Injury makes you feel like you could easily lose the habit, and at age 32, I don't feel like I have too many more chances to get fat and get in shape again. My fitness now is too precious; losing it, while it wouldn't mean obesity, would mean phsysical and spiritual puffiness. I'd recede into the corporeal average.

The vanity here isn't exactly about looks but about virtue, about the traits I want a chiseled hollow-cheeked face to reflect to the world: self-control, reliability, formidability. A face that's dependable because it conceals nothing.