The Long Run: A Bob Seger Allusion by Way of the Eagles Album of the Same Name, and Also What I Did Today

Around noon I headed out for a two-hour run which ended up clocking in around 2:05.  I'll call it 18 miles.  I ran the second hour pretty hard.  The first long run of my Milan training, this two hours was also the first long run in a while done senza Garmin.  While keeping that touch-bevel hunk of GPS-enabled spedometer-odometer on my wrist would've given fairly accurate info on how fast and how far I ran, complete with mile splits that would help me gauge effort to pace, I've run with it so much that I've learned how easily you can focus all your long runs on mileage and pace at the expense of actually feeling your body, pressing the pace when you feel it, and keeping a sense of a flexibility in the run--a sense that maybe today you'll go longer or shorter than you plan based on how you feel.



Our bathroom comes with an extra sink.

 In the almost four weeks I've been here I've found some loops that take me off the canal and around some of the industrial area in the town just west of Padua called Bassilo, which appears to be a much less glamorous factory town, part of the European ugliness generally edited out of the travelogue, travel-guide, memoirist's idea of Italy.  And why shouldn't it be?  The point of travel is self-cultivation, recreation, and pleasure,not a crash course in the more unsavory aspects of globalization.  Nevertheless, in foreign countries we runners are often the rats that scamper out of the garden fenceposts, forced as we are to confront physical space in its nakedness, to look on it as a brute means to mileage.  There are times when we celebrate the touristic aspects of running as we trot through beautiful landscapes, but at other times, running forces us into the backways of industry and lets us see the centrifugal dynamics of capital that pleasure tourism, with its celebration of the durably local, tends to obscure.

Rehydrating after today's long run.  Never underestimate the importance of post-run hydration.  Even if you're not thirsty, sip six to eight ounces every half hour following a tough workout.

One thing that's been on my mind lately: Why do I have such an urge to listen to Bob Seger?  Every aspect of my being, every fiber of my hypersocialized academic superego tells me this is wrong and in utterly bad taste.  Now, there's no inherent reason it's worse than liking, say, The Decembrists, but although taste is arbitrary there's no escaping its policing force.  In an alternative universe, one where like Benjamin says about the time after the revolution when everything's still the same (that right there, my friends, is a Seger allusion) just slightly different, Seger would occupy the place of Springsteen in the academy.  But, the revolution has not arrived. 

Does Seger write great songs?  No.  Does he have a great voice?  No.  Do his songs have insights into American life that are tacitly felt by millions but never so well expressed as by him?  Maybe.  Seger's strength is tapping into wistfulness, nostalgia, and a sense of American decline.  He even admitted that his medium, rock and roll, was decadent, that he preferred an older, pre-disco, pre-lapsarian version of it. 

This doesn't account for why I love Seger, and it's probably easy to sympotomatize my regard as an over-identification with his wistfulness and the sense of victimhood it implies.  And there's a whole group of white-male movie-makers and rock musicians who read the 60s as not a profound change in gender and racial dynamics at home, not as a reorganization of American foreign policy abroad, but simply as an easily narratable loss of innocence.

So maybe to probe too deeply into my love for Seger is to court acquaintence with some unsavory parts of myself, but then again, maybe not.  I'd never admit a taste for Seger around other academics--after all, it's peer review on which everything in this profession hangs--but it's a taste worth thinking about.