Thursday, February 24, 2011

what we talk about when we talk about guilt

I'm interested in what we mean when we say we feel "guilty" about not running, or about eating too much ice cream.  Tammi picked up a copy of Women's Health magazine at the grocery store the other day, a publication that simultaneously tells women 1) to eat as much as they want because it's empowering not to capitulate to impossible social norms surrounding the body and 2) to exercise and cut calories in order to conform to impossible social norms.  It's not news that women's magazines are schizoid in this way, of course, but the letter from the editor was particularly illuminating for the way it used the word "guilt" in reference to eating in Europe.  Editor Michelle Promaulayko talks about being "liberated from carb phobia" while in France, but feeling "guilty" about eating so damn much when she returns to New York.  Guilt, she says, is "an icky, discouraging force that rarely does any good," and further, that it "isn't innate, but by product of social conditioning."  OK, readers are probably thinking, leave the editor of this toilet reading alone and get a life--Women's Health is about toned biceps and recipes for whole-grain pancakes.

A few points nonetheless.  Guilt actually does a lot of good, and of course it's not innate, and of course it's a product of social conditioning: it's one of the most sociable emotions we have!  It tells us when we've become alienated from other people and encourages us to get right with them.  But obviously, this is not the sense in which she's (mis)using the word: she means to say, when it comes to exercising, something like anxiety, the stress that missing a workout or overeating can cause, the stress that comes from acting against our own best interest and against the interests of our better selves.  We have no way to describe this feeling since it's unique to an exercise and diet culture that's a historical product of the twentieth century--guilt becomes the metaphor through which we describe a particular type of emotion associated with this particular cultural and historical phenomenon, etc.

Which is to say, we've adapted the word guilt to describe failing at the practice of self-care and self-improvement, and the failure to deny ourselves the brownies of pleasure that are incompatible with self-improvement. 

A few weeks ago, on the occasion of Jack LaLane's death, Frank Bruni nicely summed up the notion of exercise guilt:

"That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul."

He goes on to make the point that the "virtue" of exercise lies in the thinking that one form of self-control begets another.  Good point, Frank Bruni. Is Bruni right?  When we talk about exercise guilt, are we really talking about shame over a failure of self-control?  Why is self-control such an important thing?   

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Childish

Racing weight on diet Coke and Marlboro lights
Easy seven this morning.  Pleasant and sunny.

When is it good to be like a child?  It strikes me that we praise people for being childlike but we say they are "childish" when we want to critize.  What's the difference between these two ways of acting like a child?  What traits of children do we want to imitate, which ones do we want to leave behind?  We want to be childlike in our innocence and guilelessness and ability to love without stint, to give ourselves wholly to affection; but to give ourselves wholly and without embarassment to other desires and impulses is, we say, childish. 
Some traits are ambiguous and fall between.  The phrase "childish curiosity" makes as much sense as the phrase "childlike curiosity."

One of my favorite literary critics has a book on Philip Roth called Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity.  The second half of the colon--and where the scatalogical Roth is concerned, the colon is everything--makes it such a great title.  In the line of Melville and Henry James, immaturity is not childlike but takes effort and art; Philip Roth has made his art from the matter of immaturity.  I find Roth an unsettlingly good novelist.  The reasons for his brilliance evade at least my own powers of critical observation.  What he asks along with Melville and James is what maturity consists in, and whether it's worth attaining. 

The problem with curiosity is that it shuttles uncomfortable between the childlike and the childish in an ambiguity that makes it easy to find academics contemptible, as I often do.  No one ever talks about a "mature curiosity:" that's something of an oxymoron, because of curiosity's immediate kinship with desire, to wit, we say: insatiable lust, insatiable appetite, insatiable curiosity.  The child has no mastery over his desires, and yet the academic, ambiguously an adult, possesses untameable curiosity - and, as a practical matter - must if she is to survive to old age in the profession.

Academia values precociousness, each generation of scholars the bright children of the generation prior.  A profession where intelligence is prized above all does not produce and cultivate adults, for whom intelligence is but one professional and personal virtue, but instead churns out graying, pasty schoolchildren, each still a little shocked that he is not the smartest person in the class. 

The astonishing frumpiness of academics has to do with this childishness, I think, for it also means never having to grow into or truly inhabit your body--for the child's body, or the adolescent's, is something still just over the horizon, yet to arrive.  Hence all the coats and skirts and bad, ill-fitting suits of an academic conference.  Successfull academic dress and decorum is a stylized adolescence: clothes, manners that you don't quite know how to wear or pull off.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Verona Half

Tammi earned a serious half marathon PR at Sunday's Verona half marathon.  Great job!  To preserve our pseudonyms I won't give the time, but it was fantastic. 

The race sent competitors out to the edges of town then wound us back through cobblestone streets and some tight turns during the second half.  In the final half mile we ran through the Roman arena, Italy's third largest.  What makes Tammi's PR even more remarkable is that the Verona course was not one built for speed, with its many turns and uneven surfaces.  Cobblestones and marble may add to the ancient charm of a place, but they make for unforgiving running surfaces--cobblestones fight traction; running on a marble sidewalk is pretty much the same as what running inside a cathedral would be. 

After the race we sat and drank Coke--the best thing after a hard race--in the hotel lobby, reading Italian tabloids (after dutifully trying to slog through some articles about Libya in il Corriere, a tough task; here newspapers are written in forbiddingly literate prose).  By 3:30 we were hungry, but most of the restaurants close between 3pm and 7pm, so all that was left to us were the establishments around the arena.  Fregatura is the Italian word for "ripoff," and though it's in none of the primers it's one the traveler needs to know.

Travel always offers opportunities for cross-cultural learning and understanding, and one opportunity for cross-cultural comparison is running.  Italian runners always run in technical gear, and won't wear shorts until the temperature gets into the upper 50s (which it has here on only one occasion).  When they do wear shorts, Italians tend to wear biker shorts.  They never wear cotton T-shirts.  They often run with their dogs, to which they have very close attachments and sometimes dress in technical gear too.  While I thought the race itself followed a principle of form over function--the trip through the arena was unecessarily theatrical (who wants to be the entertainment in a Roman arena anyhow?  Not this Christian)--there is nothing like the pasta party at an Italian race. 

Big American races generally have a pasta party the night before.  You'll get some salad, chicken, some clammy spaghetti, water bottles aplenty, and brownies and cookies, all in quantity, all in good fun.  At the Verona half, there were two(!) pasta parties, one the night before the race, one the afternoon following.  I've never had pre-race/post-race pasta as delicious as the pasta I had at Verona--perfectly al dente with simple, tart tomato sauce.  Aside from the quality of the food, the other key difference between American and Italian pasta parties is, of course, the quantity of the food, where in Italy you get a single plate of pasta, instead of the gutbuster buffet to which American citizenship entitles us.  I've been ransacking the Italian-English dictionaries for the Italian word for "all-you-can-eat," but it appears the word is not one with which the Italian language will sully itself. 

Saturday, February 19, 2011

long run

Dolomites, seen from running path
I ran 20 yesterday since Tammi and I are leaving for a weekend trip this morning.  I just got back from an easy recovery run.  Yesterday's run was not one for the ages.  I felt fine for the first half but I felt weak and progressively slower on the back half.  What gives?  It was in the mid-50s and sunny when I went out--not hot, but I'm very sensitive to heat, and this was the first day when the sun felt warm.  I've also been training a lot and was only six day out from my last long run instead of the usual seven.  So, fine.  There are always a few times in marathon training when the wheels just come off, when you're burnt out or things just aren't working right--and these times are to be expected.  In the end, the rough patches are just your body's protest against the adjustments you're calling on it to make.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

bad weather track workout

"Run? I'd rather have chocolat and cigarettes!"
It was 45 and rainy yesterday and Tammi and I almost skipped our track workout but didn't.  She did 4 x 1mi, and I did 8 x 400, 1 mi, and 4 x 200.  It was windy and the 400s were slow.

Lance Armstrong retired yesterday, and though doping allegations shadow his cycling career, he remains, for better or for worse, the face of cycling and a figure who looms large in the world of endurance sports. 

Remember when Lance was dating Ashley Olsen, appearing in movies with Owen Wilson, and partying on the beach with Matthew McConaughey?  Me too.  That was awesome.


In any case, you have to admire Floyd Landis for speaking out about doping.   I get the sense that he did so out of conscience.  His career is virtually over, he'll never ride at a high level of competition again, and his reputation is shot.  But I imagine, having come clean, he can sleep well.  Plus, I think he and Kid Rock are lost twins.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Ca' D'Oro

Training, like rhythm, consists of ordered patterns of stress and unstress.  The stressed parts of a running week are: a Tuesday track workout, Wednesday medium-long run, a weekend long run or race.  For whatever reason, most runners do it just this way -- the track workout always falls on Tuesday.  Why?  It's just done that way.  If anyone knows why, please weigh in.  Runners are nothing without our habits and rituals, but I broke rhythm today to follow Tammi into Venice, running 12 this morning and postponing intervals until tomorrow afternoon.  By the way, if anyone has some good tips for strength training for running, please weigh in on that.

While Tammi researched I strolled around Venice and took in the Ca' D'Oro, another erstwhile palazzo converted into a museum.  The Ca' D'Oro is a quintissential Venetian Gothic double-decker: stacked squares divided into eight rooms each, with two balconies that afford magnifient views up and down grand canal.  I'm not competent to say anything about the collection, which consisted mainly of religious subjects and pictures of nobles and clergymen (executed by a lot of Italian Renaissance painters I haven't heard of), but I was again struck by how well palazzos carry the art they exhibit -- and by contrast, how sterile purpose-built museums can sometimes (but not always) seem in comparsion.  There's something about the feeling that you're seeing art in someone's home, that the home furnishes art with an enlivening context.  This may be why many art museums in the US are modelled on palazzos, such as the Fogg and the Gardener Museum.  And although it's not a palazzo, the Barnes collection carries out the palazzo principle even better than these 19c replicas of old Venice, given that it's Barnes's very own house that has all the art.  It's truly sad that they're moving the collection to a new museum plaza in Philly in 2012--you'll have the art, but you won't have the experience of art. 

Next thing:  on the train this morning I read the intro to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma.  Pollan makes me irrationally spiteful for whatever reason, so it's hard for me to be evenhanded when discussing him.  Don't expect what follows to be an exception.  I agree with him 100% on what he says, at least in what I've read of him, but as I read him, even as I agree rationally, I come more and more unhinged.  (Something about his tone, a tone that wants to judge without exhorting, or wants to persuade the reader through the threat of bearing the shame of coming down on the gauche side of a line he draws.)  But I was struck in particular by his conclusion to the intro: "In the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing." 

This rhetorically and intellectually meretricious conclusion panders to the reader (if they're not persuaded already) by aiming the book's argument at their personal pleasure, and then very quickly circumscribes the kinds of pleasures he's talking about to the intellectual.  Now, my uncharitable way of reading him says he's basically excluded a whole bunch of things from the realm of legitimate pleasure, including--anathema to Pollan--eating a whole box of Twinkies.  Really--what does knowing have to do with enjoying eating?  Some people find pleasure in filling the dinner conversation with observations about every spice of the soup and each chocolately floral note of the wine, or about the provenance of the salad, but, alas, I do not.  Though I know people who do, and I can understand why they do.  De gustibus.

What I really think he means, though, is that we enjoy our food better when we know enough about it, when we've learned enough about it we feel good for eating it.  My objection (rational or not): he converts an ethical matter into one of personal (I'll omit "self-congratulatory," "narcissistic," "hedonistic") pleasure.   And it seems to me that part of the whole ecological-epidemiological-ethical cluster of problems surrounding food is this too automatic assocation of food with pleasure.  Obviously, food is a high pleasure, but it doesn't have to be so at every meal, and pleasure shouldn't be the goal everytime we scoop up a spoonful of shredded wheat. 

My sense is that Pollan doesn't consider the value or the nature of pleasure itself--what we mean when we talk about pleasurable eating, when it's a good thing and when it's a bad thing to associate food and pleasure.  Instead, he takes the pleasure of food for granted and makes value judgments about people based on what they eat.  Good people like artisinal ice cream, bad people like Mountain Dew.  What bothers me the most, I think, is that these tastes might in fact be simple socioeconomic facts, not values on which you can make judgments about individuals and their choices. 

Monday, February 14, 2011

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Saturday Long Run

Ran 21 this morning in about 2:20 as the Veneto fog burned off and let the hazy sun shine through.  I felt fine, not great, not terrible, a little tight for the first few miles, as is normal on an early morning run.  With the flat terrain, my hamstrings were fried, so I stretched for a good while afterwards.  The good thing about rolling terrain is that uphills shift the workload to your quads.  Tammi ran early too, and when she finished her run she went into Venice for research.  I took an early afternoon train in to meet her and we spent the day there.  We visited the narrow little island of Giudecca, not more than 150m wide at its widest, where the church of SS Redentore faces S. Marco across the water.  Built to thank God for lifting the plague that ravaged Venice in 1575-76, it was designed by Andrea Palladio, who built a lot of things here in the Veneto.  I am trying to develop an eye for the differences between the many talented Italian Renaissance architects, but I have a hard time keeping all of them straight.  I have a hard time with the differences between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, too.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Transportation You Can Eat

My wife Tammi (nee Riggins) has been reading Peter Singer's The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter and as she describes it, it mounts some well-reasoned and convincing arguments for being more conscientious about eating.

When it comes to mindful eating, it seems the burden of the argument now lies with whomever would eat carelessly.  I used to think that advocates for mindful eating put into the realm of consumerism and consumer choice the solution to an ecological and social problem that by all rights calls for  political engagement and rejuvenation, rather than for "lifestyle" change.  (As if the sovereign consumer of free market ideology weren't the substance of the problem to begin with.)

Singer pretty much demolishes this thinking. But because we're talking about eating, what's persuasive in this case is different than what's persuasive in other debates framed in utilitarian terms.  What's most persuasive is disgust.

Upon settling down to life here in the Veneto, Tammi and I were surprised to learn that the Italians enjoy a particular delicacy called equino.  You can buy as steak, you can buy it ground, you can even get it on pizza.  A little research tells me that the Italians are joined in their taste for equino by the French and the Spanish, the Chinese and the Japanese, the Belgians, the Indonesians, and the residents of Mongolia, Iceland, and my ancestral land of Luxembourg.  A veritable coalition of the willing-to-eat-horsemeat.


"I totally love the scene where Liz Gilbert pigs out on horsemeat!"
 At the grocery store the other day, when I saw equino shrink-wrapped in the meat fridge next to the suino and bovino, it occurred to me that I can't eat meat anymore.  Not if I can't draw a non-arbitrary line between beef and horse, or between pig and any other animal on Old McDonald's bestiary of the appetite.  At least, not if I don't know these animals lived well and died a good death. 

I don't know whether it's healthier to be a vegetarian than not.  Sometimes I think it must be, sometimes I think the opposite.  For now, nevertheless, vegetarianism seems the more mindful option.  As for its effects on running, I guess you don't need as much protein as you think you do.  Kenyan runners get about 10% of their calories from protein, freshly killed chicken mainly.  They eat a very low-fat diet and eat very little (about 2400 calories a day--not much when your daily mileage hits 18-20mi at altitude).  They take a surprising amount of calories from sugar and corn.

Yesterday, Tammi and I went to the track for a nice evening workout.  She did 4 x 800, I did 8 x 400.  This morning, I ran 11.5 and felt pretty good.  We're eating a delicious beet soup for dinner tonight. 

Eat Food.  Mostly Plants.  No horse.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

groceries, strange records

polenta for lunch, with salt & pepper and lemon juice
It shouldn't be hard to go an entire day eating only the groceries you've bought for the house.  But somehow it is for me.

I don't think my parents or mother- and father-in-law have trouble with this, and I know my grandmother certainly doesn't.  But I do.  In an ideal day, I'd make coffee and breakfast at home, pack lunch, dine at home, snack on what's in the house, and brew at home the too copious amounts of coffee I drink throughout the day.  Does anyone else have this a problem (or is this habit not really a problem)?  Is anyone good at eating only their groceries?  I admire people who can do this. 

I ran 10.5 this morning. (Woke up an hour before the alarm, fretting about writing, taking abuse from my inner Amy Chua...as much as I applaud compartmentalizing, sometimes it's a hard thing to do.)  I didn't run yesterday because I had too much work - I have dissertation chunk due in a few days and it was imprudent to leave the desk. Yesterday was the first day off running I've taken in quite a while -- and here's why.  I tend not to take days off during training seasons, though in order to recover and not burn out I don't run hard every day.

Lemons: great!
There are two reasons for taking minimal time off.  First of all, marathoners need the mileage (unless they're injury prone, in which case people cross-train).  Second of all, life tells us often enough when a day off is necessary. My attitude toward running is, to use a saying associated with cigarettes, smoke 'em while you got 'em.  On a daily level, that means running in the opportune times, whenever it's least intrusive on your life and the lives of those around you.  Practically speaking, this often means running first thing in the morning.  If you accumulate miles during the times of your day, or times of your life, that most easily accommodate running, then you'll be able to take a day off when you have to. I want to find out more about Doug Kurtis -- from what little I know, it sounds like he was a husband and father whose  high level of running rarely intruded on family life. 

groceries, including coffee
Speaking of consistency, hats off to Stefaan Engels who ran a marathon a day for 365 days.  I hope he writes a book (did he blog about it?) and turns it into a movie.  (With Meryl Streep and Amy Adams?)  I know on this blog I complain that we irrationally worship the marathon, but I admire what this person accomplished.  (This, on the other hand, seems a little crazy.)  Another runner I admire is DC Metro area star Michael Wardian.  He's a supervisor at a shipping company and he runs maybe a marathon a month (and occasionally does ultras), usually running in the 2:20s and often winning some of the smaller marathons on the east coast.  Interesting fact: he also holds the world record for marathon run pushing a stroller (I believe his son was in it).

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Death of C3PO

My six-year-old (six in people years, that is) computer's dying--I spent much of the day rebooting as I worked on my dissertation chapter. [Hence this post is a day late.] Next computer purchase will be a PC desktop. More computer power than a laptop and much less pricey.

When Dame Technology takes with one hand, however, she gives with the other. I had a great workout Monday using the Garmin to clock 1/2 mi intervals. I ran five miles at medium pace, then ran four miles, the second half of each of which I ran at half-marathon pace. I liked this workout a lot, though it's really just a tech-enhanced version of a bike-path mile-marker fartlek.

The run shook the cobwebs out of a day on which I was strangely fatigued, even though we've been getting eight hours of sleep a night. I'd like to think it's because we're in a foreign country, where the language barrier means you have to work extra hard just to get around, physically, linguistically, cognitively. Anyone ever felt that way when abroad? Or do you think I caught a wasting disease from a train station bathroom?

Sunday, February 6, 2011

The Erosion of Leisure and the Burden of Holistic Living

Straight-from-the-barrel wine for a euro a liter
About the hardcore runner, my favorite running writer Rachel Toor says: "He will not, in fact, admit how much of his time training takes up, afraid he will be seen as less serious about the other things he takes seriously."  On this blog I've talked about how I try to conceal from academic colleagues the full measure of my devotion to this hobby of mine.  Really, I want colleagues to think that all I do is read and write, that I work all the time and will work harder if challenged to do so.  In my professional mind, a hobby is something to conceal, for after all, it has nothing to do with work, and you should make those you work with think you work all the time. 

Because professions and institutions promote those who seem to embody the most perfect distillation of their values, I have to appear to others to be the perfect academic, and perfect academics have abivalent and awkward relationships to their bodies.  They exercise, but only as part of a fuller productive persona.  To me and to many other runners, I think, racing and training have nothing do with work--they're leisure in full, akin to softball or a bowling league.  This is compartmentalizing: we don't run to be better at other things, we run to be better runners, or just to be happy.  Because it's a hobby.  And it's only a hobby.  It's discontinuous with work.  It's not the substance of our lives, but it's a happy addition.

Over the last few months I've noticed a series of articles that suggests the connotations of endurance sports are changing: no long simple leisure pursuits, endurance sports are seen now as an extension of the work persona, a way to display the traits of tenacity and conscientiousness that make one a successful member of the information economy.  Talking about your training, then, no longer means you spend too much time not working--it means you're embodying and perfecting a contemporary work ethos from which leisure and truly personal time have been eliminated.  It is true that this amounts to a holistic life, but in this case holism is oppressive.

Maybe you saw David Brooks' New Yorker article on the so-called Composure Class.  Brooks is hit-or-miss and this isn't a post about his reliability as a pop-sociologist, but in the opening paragraphs endurance sports figure prominently as a characterization device of his new representative man:

"He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David...For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies."

Left at the Grand Canal--then a mile to the finish line!
The thing to note here is the association of high status with running and biking, which we see echoed in a NYT article from October on 40-something triathletes.  (That the article appears in the style section and not the sports section says something, not sure what though.)  It profiles "a generation of athletic, type-A men who are entering middle age and trying to hold on to their youth through triathlons," notes a 51% growth in the sport since 2007, and focuses on the growing market for bikes, shoes, and other gear among the "alpha consumer" triathletes with an average income of $175,000.  Last week, the WSJ ran a story about the plight of the "exercise widow," whose marriage suffers because his or her spouse takes up endurance sports in earnest.  It profiled New Jersey couple Caren and Jordan Waxman.  Jordan's a 46-year-old banker who began doing triathlons, and now their marriage is suffering.

Jordan's defense of himself encapsulates the new connotations of endurance sports and what appears, by these accounts, to be their new association with status: "In his view, his athletic ambition shouldn't have surprised his wife. It arose from the same qualities that drove him to obtain two law degrees, an MBA and his position at Merrill Lynch."  Great job Jordan!  I hope that when he's divorced, if he has time to date, women will at least appreciate his abs.  In any case, what strikes me here is the easy equation of endurance sports with ambition.  A rationalization probably, but to me, it suggests a guy totally consumed with work, who lets a work mentality cannibalize every aspect of life.

The marital problems of the Waxmans aside, the ambition mentality surrounding endurance sports confers prestige based on distance, slighting high performance in the shorter events that, let's be honest, demand more athletic skill.  The marathon begins a continuum that moves through the half-Iron Man to the Iron Man even to climbing Everest, homogenizing each as an accomplishment of determination and time management, as if athleticism were somehow beside the point.  It's not often noted because of our cultural fetishization of the marathon, but in many ways the 5k is the harder race.  In a marathon, you hurt for a while, but not for the whole race.  In a 5k, you hurt from the gun and start to finish it's agony.  In the marathon, the pain comes gradually; in the 5k, it comes suddenly and stays.  But the people who run sub-16 5ks never get the same Monday morning credit as, say, the office Jared Fogle who carries his chafed armpits and bleeding nipples across the finish line of a marathon in over five hours.

In the garden of the Guggenheim palazzo 
But I digress.  If what we're witnessing is the rise of the endurance athlete and the decline of the runner, it's because of a cultural change that has followed in the wake of what economic transformation has come to demand of information age workers like Waxman the banker: devotion, singlemindedness, indefatigability.  Of course, the endurance athlete and the runner are not defined by the kinds of sports they do, but by their attitudes toward them.  Plenty of people do tri's without fitting the Type-A stereotype described by the Times, while I have encountered participants in footraces whose capacity for self-adulation far exceeds their lactate threshold or VO2 max.  

Perhaps a figure for Brooks' composure class, if we accept the notion, the endurance athlete is characterized by intensity, by continuity between work and play.  In contrast, the runner is (or was) a figure of leisure, a hobbyist.  Typifying the runner would be Doug Kurtis, now in his late 50s or early 60s and a fixture on the Detroit running scene.  With a personal best marathon time of 2:13, Kurtis ran 76 marathons under 2:20, all while holding down a job as a manager at GM (before, following his running prime, he became director of the Detroit marathon).  Kurtis ran twice a day for about an hour, once at lunch and once after work.  Running never filled Kurtis' whole day but then again, neither did his 40-hour-a-week job.  (There's a great profile of him in an 80s Runner's World that I cannot seem to find on the Internet.)  

I find the question of how people view endurance sports to be endelessly fascinating, so chime in with what you think.  Is there really a change in the connotations of tri's and marathoning, or is this just a case of a few journalists spotting the same faux-trend?  Also, notably absent from the trend stories I've seen is any discussion of women, who are the real story of the running boom of the past few years.  In 2000, there were 299,000 marathon finishers, 37.5% of whom were women; in 2009, women comprised 40.4% of the 468,000 who finished a 'thon.  So there's a huge increase in participation overall, and more and more of that increase is made up by women.  

The moral of the story is, be suspicious of an integrated, holistic life because it's the same mentality that won't let you get away from your work.  There's something to be gained by living life in fragments and having a separate persona (an authentically integrated spiritual self is another thing altogether) for each one. It's not schizoid; it's the only way to stay sane.  You can't always keep your mind out of your runs, that is, you can't always block everything out, but after a while a run will have a tonic effect that makes you at least feel a little less stressed.

My wife and I did 18 together today!  It was great--she was always in great shape but her fitness is really increasing these days.  She had no trouble on the run and finished the last mile under the average pace for the whole things.  Well done!!

heh heh - un scherzo di un pene? o di un equino?

From Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo garden, a fitting Coda to Jimmy Page's solo:
I know what THAT symbolizes!
Apropos of Zeppelin, a band comprised of volcanic soloists gleefully unashamed of their profound musical abilites, my good-angel academic self wags its finger to remind me of the long association of instrumental virtuosity (let's bracket for now the whole issue of divas) with masculinity (think Liszt, Parker, Coltrane, Buddy Rich).  So, it is hard to not read the Decemberists' eschewal of instrumental chops as a rejection of masculinity, and with this in mind, my good-angel academic conference persona cautions me against hating on the Decemberists and more generally on indie rockers who can't play their instruments.

It's important to remember that in indie rock, the opposite of virtuosity, the opposite of masculinity, is not feminity--no--but androgyny, more specifically the androgyny of childhood, which in the case of the Decemberists and of twee indie rockers more generally, is converted into an aesthetic driven by affects of nostalgia, fantasy, and escape (we're back to the "cinematic" and "storytelling" aspects of the Decemberists or that Scottish band from the late 90s/early 00s, Belle and Sebastian).  In terms of the cultural narrative surrounding virtuosity then--that achieved virtuosity, whatever musical end it's put toward, represents the fulfillment of the musicians' career, the goal of practice, effort, sacrifice, a deal with the devil, a death wish even--the Decembrists and other indie rockers refuse to be musicians and therefore refuse to grow up.

So, part of my loathing of the Decembrists, I have to admit, comes from a resentment of their refusal to inhabit a properly achieved, properly masculine musical role.  But only a small part because I still think that whatever my own biases and issues (clearer to the reader than to me), they are still awful.

On TV we're watching Uncle Buck subtitled in Italian. RIP John Candy.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

The Decemberists: huh? WTF, as they say

This week's New Yorker, what with its gut-busting laugh-out-loud cartoons, has a barfoliciously fawning profile of the Decemberists, in which the precious, angel-faced, hardly-ever-flatuent indie band, which should remind us all of a precocious teenager, displays as much ambivalence about mainstream sucess as they do enthusiasm for eating meat at gastropubs in New York, a city in which they find themself charmingly, naively out of place.  I wonder: Whom does this "Talk of the Town" piece congratulate with more gusto, the Decembrists or us New Yorker readers?  It starts:

"Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Portland-based band the Decemberists, is a wry, witty, well-read, and self-possessed fellow who is rarely at a loss for words."  Readers, if you didn't know who the Decemberists were, I'll tell you in the first sentence in a way that doesn't make you feel dumb or out of the loop while simultaneously cueing you into the fact that because these hipsters are literate, you ought to know who they are.  The rest of the paragraph shows the Decemberists standing around their hotel "genuinely shaken" to learn that their new album will debut at number one, perhaps even announced by Kasey Kasum--quelle horror.  Yet their reaction is charmingly understated, even fey: "Wow. Weird," they say.  It goes on: "Jenny Conlee, who plays accordian and sings harmony, was standing nearby and hadn't woken up properly yet."  Congratulations: you have an accordian player!  How interesting!  Even if you don't have a real ear for music, at least you can impress your friends by anatomizing to death each of their songs.  Is that an accordian?  Wow, it really is!



Jenny Conlee perfected her accordian chops playing American showtunes in the cultural capitals of Europe
 

The article soldiers on:  "Out on the sidewalk before the show were people who had hardly heard of the Decemberists--until now [thanks to you, intrepid New Yorker writer!!!] a willfully obscure art-rock band whose elaborate story songs and quirky arrangements seemed designed to conceal a potentially popular sound underneath--but somehow they knew this was a show not to be missed."  It describes a meal with the band: "Their No. 1 status seemed to hover over the meat-laden table like eagles over Prometheus' liver."  The New Yorker's all-time best--Angell, Updike, A.J. Liebling--had nothing on this guy's infinite capacity for simile.

I don't at all understand the Decemberists.  They have no groove, no grit.  I get that they have a "storytelling" and "cinematic" aesthetic, but a mere aesthetic has never been enough for me to appreciate a band, even if it's enough to make the listener feel smart.  Music does so much more than that and I've always thought feeling smart about music was merely and literally an afterthought of a much fuller experience, which the Decemberists, accordian playing background vocalist notwithstanding, have never furnished.

Into Venice for the day.  There's an exhibit at the Guggenheim on the Vorticists that we may try to catch.  Or else we may just fart around.  I ordered some new shoes which came via UPS from Amazon--even with shipping costs, it's still cheaper to get shoes from the US than from stores here.  With new shoes, ran 15 near the canal.  It was first thing in the morning and I was stiff but it was still a good run.  I was loose about 45 minutes into it. 

And now, just to spite the Decemberists, Led Zeppelin:

Thursday, February 3, 2011

more intervals

Did another interval workout today--it felt good.  Question for readers: what shoes do you wear to track workouts?  Normally, I go to the track in flats but lately I've just been wearing trainers.  I'm working on remedial speed, so the extra second or seconds flats would give are beside the point. 

Every time I think my Italian is getting better I actually have to speak it to an Italian, who proves that I have a lot more to learn.  It's amazing the vocab one doesn't know when one transplants one's hobbies to a foreign country.  The whole vocabulary of running is completely mysterious.  How does one say 400? split? interval? lane one? jog?  Only because it's amusing do I know the word for tracksuit: tutta sportiva.

I will not know how to apologize in public for too short shorts--I won't know the words.  Speaking of short shorts--I had a weird, weird dream last night.  I dreamt I showed up at the important conference in my field wearing all clothes appropriate for a conference--a nice sweater over a dress shirt--and lime green split racing shorts.  I only started to realize this was in appropriate when someone made a comment, then I put on jeans and thought to myself that running shorts make the most comfortable underpants.

A softball for Dr. Freud
Anyway--a topic I want to cover soon is how we think of the relationship between running and work life.  To me, the integration is harder than I think it is for most.  I tend to compartmentalize things and I try hard to keep those compartments sealed off.  I'll say more about this in future posts, and why I think compartmentalizing our lives is underrated.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Where the track is

I finally figured out where the track is around here.  There's no more avoiding the speedwork I know I need to do: 400s and 200s, Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Why would someone who mainly runs marathons need 400s?  Well, because at this point, my lack of natural speed is holding me back.  Let's see if this works. 
If anyone has ever seen Eastbound and Down, they'll be amused by Kenny Powers' take on endurance sports (v. "real sports"):


Distance running forgives a lack of athleticism, but only to a certain extent.  Speed and agility still matter.  You need to be able to "shift gears," so to speak, in races and in workouts, to vary the pace as conditions demand.

I once read an article that described Gebrssalassie as a "classically trained" distance runner, one who moved up in the marathon in his late 20s or early 30s after significant accomplishments at shorter distances on the track: the 1500, the 5k, the 10k.  A classically trained runner increases his or her race distances as age repays in endurance gained what it exacts in speed lost.  Sammy Wanjiru and Patrick Makau, two up-and-coming 2:05 marathoners, 24 and 25 respectively, have broken with tradition, as have a number of Kenyan half marathoners who are making waves as young as 21.  Ryan Hall was 25 when he debuted at London, but the AR holder in the 10k, 26-year-old Chris Solinsky has not spoken publically about a marathon.



The question hanging over the young marathoners is longevity.  Will they burn out?  Perhaps.  But this question ignores the economics of the matter.  There's no money in track, but there's plenty in the marathon, prizes at or over $250,000 in major races.  

There's another aspect of this that we don't really talk about: the fact that the really good runners don't get the American shoe contracts.  Someone like Ryan Hall gets a sweet endorsement deal from Asics.  Pennsylvian Brian Sell, whose 2:10 PR is five minutes off what's becoming the new East African standard, gets to be the face of Brooks. 

So readers, why is it that Americans don't want to see East Africans endorsing their shoes?

Postscript:  My wife and I found the track and we did a short interval workout as the sportivi played a "real sport," soccer, on the infield.  I did 9 x 400, with a minute rest, then 4 x 200 with 200 jog in between.  Not too much, but intense -- haven't done that kind of anaerobic work in a while.