perfect run

This morning's satisfying, memorable workout reminded me of why I love pre-dawn long runs.  Out the door by 5:45, I followed a course that more or less draws a square with four ~five-mile sides, north to east to south to west.  The college town where I live sits at the base of the pre-foothills of the Appalachian Range--to the South and East is a coastal plane; run just a mile North and the roads begin to undulate; five miles north, you gain about 300 ft. of elevation.

Forty minutes into my run I was northbound on a rolling rural road that wound through woodsy tree cover before, at the top of a high hill, splilling out into the middle of a broad meadow.  The sun was shining bright over distant hills and coloring everything verdant.  The long shadow of my stride fell on late April grass, marking the contrast with the intense green, and the spreading sky was as big as I've ever seen it here.

I generally hate to wax sentimental about running and unity with nature but today I can't resist; the dawn, the view, the perfect damp cool--almost transcendental.  The workout itself was a hard 21 with lots of hills.  My legs are fried, but afterwards I went to Whole Foods and treated myself to three of their breakfast burritos: uno bacon, and dos huevos rancheros.  Indeed, I do love the Whole Foods weigh-and-pay-buffet--the latent white-trashiness ot it (pardon the classist phrase) kind of warms my heart, as it is essentially a bourgie McDonalds: fast food for the Prius set.

But back to running and nature.  I've been getting out the door by 5:40 lately, not because I'm especially ambitious but because I've been jetlagged and numbingly tired by 8:30.  Dawn in springtime energizes you, and it allows you to see the full spectrum of light that a day can bring, and even to observe how different light can be, and how different the most familiar of places, the most familiar running routes, appear depending on time and the seasons.  Two days ago I felt like I was in a Disney cartoon about the first Thanksgiving.  Every mile or so I seemed to startle a different group of deer; the sparrows were out in force; and a pair of wild turkeys, puffed out with their multicolored tails spread, fiercely warned me off as they fed on someone's lawn.  Wild turkeys are big, fast, and agressive, and I can see why Ben Franklin wanted them to be the national symbol.

Theodore Roosevelt and inspirational quotes

Sports comes equipped with handy, inspiration sayings and motivational cliches, usually dismissed by the students aware enough to pay attention to them and altogether ignored by the rest.  Because they're cliches that all more or less reinforce variations on a lesson about the value of effort over the ultimate result, and because they're directed at an age group prone to scoffing at nostrums, an injunction like "leave it all on the course" raises a perenniel issue: what do we do with received wisdom?  Ignoring it usually brings some combination of liberating joy and unforeseen loss (which can easily be viewed as a punishment).  The consequences of ignoring wisdom to follow one's bliss: this is Philip Roth's great theme.  To hew close to wisdom keeps you out of trouble and enables you to reproduce your traditions with all their good and all their bad.  You know intellectually why you do what you do, but the lessons land in the heart only when you're old enough to be the coach.

It's not strange how much our culture invests in the figure of the coach--especially the high school coach, on whom the expectations of character building that implicitly weigh on all high school teachers fall hardest.  The best coaches assume that responsibility (which is all about teaching the value of responsibility) and understand their role in the formation of students.  Friday Night Lights captures perfectly the dynamics of coaches, community, and character formation, responsibility for which places the Taylor family at the nexus of Dillon's many conflicts, which all converge on the high-gravity space of the football field.

TR said that, versus the mollycoddle critic, the doer of deeds is someone "who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."  The reasons why it's better to try and fail (and then, knowing you tried, own that failure as possibly personal lack--though you are advived always to try, try again) than not to try at all aren't that clear upon examination.  What does defeat bring you except genuine diminishment and the cold comfort of self-knowledge?  TR's consolatory "at least you suited up" mentality doesn't go far enough to countenance the genuine pain of losing. 

More later...and more pictures later--there are some good ones coming very soon!     

delivery

My training has been going pretty well this week, and I'm anxious to do some races this spring, especially some of the cross country series in our town.  I finished a 22-mile run on Sunday strong and I ran ten yesterday morning and this morning and those runs went well.

Last night Tammi and I had a nice sunset walk around central Padua and then came home and ordered pizza.  The pizza delivery, on scooter, is lightning quick and usually arrives within 15 minutes of ordering.

Here's a running blog that I like:  http://www.runblogger.com/

He does shoe reviews, and maybe someday I'll try to do that too, if I can get them from the shoe companies for free.

Random thought: I very much dislike when people think their mere suggestions qualify as directions or orders.  (A colleague of mine has suddenly taken on a lot of work based on the fact that "Prof. Frappenflaffen suggested so-and-so," therefore she's doing so-and-so with all haste and dispatch, as if the Prince had insuinated his desire for the arrest and imprisonment of a rival.)  I also dislike indirection; a good counterstrategy to it is refusing to interpret, or simply taking things at face value.  Though excessive literalism can be a form of passive-aggressive indirection too, as it's a dodge of the situation too; nevertheless, it can work in situations where frankness would call attention to itself and nothing infuriates insinuators like literalness and hermeneutic refusal.

Trope of Venice as Museum

In 1882, long before The Wings of the Dove, Henry James praises Venice as basically a wonderfully enchanting outdoor museum.  "All the splendour of light and colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the genius of the masters, all the images and visions they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sunbeams and dance upon the clouds."  It's true, and this is the enduring appeal of the place.  And a place is really what you have to call it.  Venice isn't a city, not in the sense of Paris or New York or London or Rome, where a dynamic present menaces the traces of the past.  It isn't really an island in the traditional sense, though it's surrounded by water.  It is merely an artificial land mass.  You can't even run there, and I am sure the native Venetians, whoever they are, have high BMIs and are slack and underexercised even if they are cultured.  Venice invented allegorical painting of civic history, not gym class, lacrosse, or football.  But Henry James was pretty out shape too.  I don't fault him for that--it's critically passe to evaluate authors based on their physical fitness.  My advisors frown upon it.

What I love about doughy Uncle Henry's description is that Venice's museal qualities endear him.  The idea of the museum, I think, has all sorts of bad connotations: artifice, artificiality, false disctinctions between art and life, snobbery, boredom, canonization, death, Woody Allen, interpretation, bathrooms, coatrooms, tearooms, fatigue, curation, incoherent placards, stealthy and anonymous farts, conspicuous and concussive farts that add a soundtrack to the viewing, or an olfactory supplement to a Dutch master or a Pollock.  Tammi guessed that the word has to do with the muses, and the OED confirmed her etymological sense.  "In the ancient Hellenic world: a building connected with or dedicated to the Muses or the arts inspired by them; a university building, esp. that established at Alexandria by Ptolemy."  Then it is no wonder that Venice produces so much wonderful writing, that people return to this museum for sustenence.

Training and mental focus

Libidinous dirtbag watercolorist Charles Walter Stetson,
first husband of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lately I've had plenty of time to run--it's not like there are a ton of daily interruptions and emergencies in, say, Henry James studies--but my mind has just not been in it.  I've been doing all the workouts, feeling pretty good, and at least my speed fitness is improving some.  But, at least until I watched the inspirational performances at London and Boston--both Mutais in London and Boston, Lel's come-from-behind second place sprint at London, Davila's gutsy second at Boston--running had lost its glory for me, its late nadir a pathetic half-marathon slog trudging through a painful cobblestone-riddled 21st kilometer here in Padua.  In all, it wasn't such a bad race--I went out to win it, but I lost.  After covering the first 5k in 17:18, and the second 5k in 18:00 flat, things blew up, I lost the pack and sank further and further behind.  It does lead me to question my fitness, though, and I can't blame the race entirely on reckless tactics. 

Before every breakthrough race I've had I have found myself equipped with an amazingly keen mental focus, a highly functional obsession where all the slack in my life--in every aspect of life from writing to diet--pulls taught; for a period of a month or so the race rearranges my mental furniture, dusts it off, puts it in order; it brings everything into my life in an efficient whole, which for a short happy time until race day, exceeds the sum of its parts.  Not this time.  I bagged Milan because I wasn't ready, and I'm not even sure which Spring marathon I'm going to run.  So much for compartmentalizing everything in my life, or trying to. 



The debaucher of nude models some years later,
youth and looks eclipsed by years.  He and Gilman
divorced in 1894, and critics justly attribute
the biographical origin
of "The Yellow Wallpaper"
to his failures as a husband. 



hot hot hot

Damn!  Got up to 86 today.  Weather.com didn't predict that -- and my long run was a aestival slog.  Did 2:23, call it 20.  Read an article in the New Yorker (purportedly a book review, but it didn't do much reviewing) about Italy's ungovernability and ingrown resistance to national, rather than local or international, purpose.  But hell, given the narrowly averted catastrophic U.S. budget impasse, we could've stayed in America for that.

corri per padova

Bodies in motion

To our delight, Padua has an electrically alive running scene.  It hosts a thriving professional track club with world class runners, devotes a weekend in April to a marathon, and even has a weekly series of Thursday night fun runs.  Called the Corri per Padova series, these fun runs of four or five miles begin at a different part of the city each week and bring out hundreds of runners and walkers of all levels.  Tammi and I missed the sign-up deadline for last night's run by five minutes, but what we saw presented quite a spectacle: runners gathered under the inflatable start gate and clad in the reflective vest that comes with cheap five-euro sign-up fee, an MC who introduced two major Italian running figures, Ruggerio Pertile (2008 olympian and Padovan local who trains in Kenya most of the year) and Orlando Pizzolato, the last Italian winner of the NYC marathon ('84 and '85).  Tammi and I joined the tail end of the walkers and strolled for about half a mile before the group got away from us.

there they go

Lately I have been training more by feel and time than by mileage and rigid workout schedules, and I think it's getting me fitter.  If I feel like going farther and longer I will, and I've been trying to go to the track more and just get used to running faster.  I think it's improving my biomechanics and opening up my stride and my body.  On my ten-miler this morning I felt a lot looser, my range of motion greater, for having done the 800s yesterday.  Instead of the usual route, I took a detour to the track this morning and added a mile of 200m sprints followed by 200m jog (4x200 fast total).  I've made friends with the track this spring and I hope it results in some faster race times. As legendary coach Billy Squires said to Bill Rodgers once, they don't give the medal to the runner who can run all day but the runner who gets there first.  (See an excellent profile of Squires here.)

Still, I am four to five pounds overweight right now and I lack the discipline to do anything about it.  I'm very good at the running part of training, doing the miles and intervals and all that--but there's a non running component where I completely fall short.  This component involves stretching, core strength, and diet, all supplementary but hardly inessential.  If you don't stretch your stride lacks its fullest range of motion; with a weak core you waste energy stablizing yourself; if you don't watch what you eat you carry around a few extra pounds of mass that at a cost of about a second per mile per pound (where this figure comes from I'm not sure--it's so convenient and round that I'm skeptical of it but it's obviously true that it's better to weigh less), an extra pound of fat could over the course of a marathon make a difference of a minute or two.  As one whose marathon PR is tantalizingly close to 2:30, this matters to me.  So every time I eat a pastry I feel like I'm betraying myself and my training and I wonder what it is in me that can't sacrifice suguary, flaky, chocolately-delicious immediate gratification for what I know would be a lifetime of satisfaction from a new PR. 

People sign up for marathons thinking they'll feel invincible when they're done, but they inevitably come away humbled and painfully aware of their physical, even psychological, limits.  My inability to master my desire for sweets has given me empathy for the obese and their struggles and has administered another one of life's lessons about the limits of will power and reason.

food essays

spring evening at the Prato

I have had a solid training week so far.  Yesterday morning I went for 1:40, running for an hour on the canal before stopping off at the track for four miles at 5:51, 5:45, 5:43, and 5:43 and then running the two miles home.  Today, I ran eight 800s at the track with two minutes rest in between.  The workout didn't go as planned, but I finished it and felt great.  I wanted to do all eight in under 2:40.  The first three clocked in at 2:40 flat but the remaining 800s started to drag ass like a poor man's Lars von Trier film.  Fine.  Yesterday tired me out.  And so much of running is pushing through races or workouts that aren't going as planned.  Or muddling through when your eating habits go to hell, as mine have lately.  I've tried to cut down on the gelato and pastries, but last night I was starving and ordered a pizza for delivery and tonight, after a stroll in the Prato, I had a small cup of gelato.  To eat here on a regular basis is to encounter more high-quality junk food than one could enslave one's palate with in the U.S.  But high quality though it is, it is junk food nonetheless, abstaining from which will exact nothing from one's store of future memories of Italy.

For some people food is incredibly mnemonic, for others, not so much, and whether or not food works on your memory has nothing to do with your sensitivity or your intelligence.  Proust, obviously, invented this connection between food and memory and probably determined thereby a whole Western way of traveling through the palate.  Food is absent from the travelogues of Henry James, however.  For some travelers opening up taste and smell adds to the sensorial arsenal with which they metaphorically conquer a place.  (Forgive the imperial metaphor, but I'd love to meet someone who didn't travel with mastery in mind; or maybe my own desire for mastery means I never have, and never will, travel.)  For other travelers, taste and smell shut down the other senses, and a place reduces like some savory sauce to the mere quality of its food.  A saving grace of Venice, you should know, is uniformly bad food, which forces you pay attention to the visual scene.

Grad students love to talk about food, and they have a strange fondness for cooking, and for talking about cooking as a respite from work. They also strangely enjoy emphasizing how they enjoy fatty meat dishes such as pork and bacon.  (This is truly weird, and I don't know where this love for trumpeting one's taste for lipids comes from.  But you decide which sounds better:  "I just love pancetta, and I save all the grease so I can make gravy" v. "I only eat fat free Snackwells -- Devil's Foodcake is the best!!)  There's a strange relationship to domesticity in all this that I can't figure out, but I think it has to do with academics' inherent personal conservatism.  See this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which pretty much encapsulates this tendency to talk about loving to cook and using cooking to relax.  Notice how it's written in the breezy, somewhat cheery, stilted, precious, personal-and-yet-not-too-personal style of the university public communique, or of the grant application essay or teaching statement, one of the intellectual autobiographies that we academics write from time to time when we want an institution to give us money.

The other thing that interests me about this essay is how she refers to keeping her sanity, as if she were under the polar icecap on a submarine or D-Day plus 15 on Iwo Jima.  There's nothing to go insane about in graduate school, but when PhD students talk about insanity (a cliche in grad school) they're really talking about the phenomenon ofaltogether losing that salutary perspective in which these intellectual pursuits (for which myopia is actually a thrill) appear merely as a job.  Not useless or silly, but simply a part of a multifaceted life.

Hell with it, though--if this person can write that essay about cooking, maybe I'll do it with running, and go on and on about how after the library on rambles on country roads, past the horsefarms in the crepuscular light of late afternoon in the first days of November, I let brilliance effervesce and ideas stew, like the beef stroganouf I would cook later that evening after a rejuvenating shower.

Trader Joe's

Zany, unrelated, and 90 degrees off

Sometimes I wonder whether my advisors think of me as the Trader Joe's of academia -- you never know what you get, sometime's it'll be good, sometime's crap; you may be pleasantly surprised, but maybe you won't be able to find what you need.

East African masters runners

At Tammi's marathon last week there were a number of very fit Italian runners who looked to be well into their late 40s/early50s and beyond.  At the 20 mile mark where I watched impressed with their fitness and hopeful about the future of my own running, many were on pace to run in the 2:40s/2:50s.

With all the prominence of the region's distance champions, we rarely hear about East African masters runners, the Kenyan and Ethiopian equivalents of the men and women in their late-40s and up who grace weekend morning road races with lissome bodies and, often, intimidatingly fast times.  So I was surprised to come accross this article (linked at letsrun.com) from a Kenyan newspaper.  At 54, Francis Kimeli Kimei is aiming to run a 1:15 half marathon.

It seems pretty clear why masters running might be a first-world phenomenon.  The current life expectancy for a Kenyan male is about 59 years, and most people in the country work in agriculture.  By most accounts, running provides a way out of poverty for young people and there is an "up-or-out" mentality in the sport.  Either you make it to a level where you can win significant prize money for yourself, or quit. 

It's this mentality, I believe, that is part of the reason behind Kenyan dominance.  The poverty of the place means that it's foolish to think of your running career as lasting longer than ten years tops (Kenyan running is like the NFL in that regard, and the way the Kenyans train, just as punishing physically).  Mere hobby running is a laughable idea when you have to do hard agricultural labor just to survive.  For whatever reasons (more likely historical and cultural than genetic), the Kenyans have a long tradition of excelling in distance running, and because they're not so strong in other sports like soccer, this tradition means that running attracts the best athletic talent, unlike in the U.S. where people like this blogger who were too slow or too uncoordinated or not sports-minded enough to play real sports like football, basketball, and baseball bring our gangly knees and elbows to a spot on the cross-country team. 

Imagine what U.S. distance running would be if track were the prestige sport, if you had all the talented athletes going out for cross-country rather than football and basketball--or, nowadays, soccer.  In about ten years or so, we'll see that the mainstreaming of soccer will have been a boon for American distance running.  Among mainstream sports that lots of kids play, including the talented ones, soccer is the closest to running.  It builds endurance and gets kids used to running a lot, but on top of that, it  demands and builds those supplementary athletic skills that distance runners lack: agility, speed, and strength.  Middle distance star Andrew Wheating, who played soccer until his junior year of high school when he switched to cross country, represents the vanguard of what I predict will be a trend in the makeup of runners' athletic resumes.

Of course, the problem is that even as soccer expands the pool of potential distance runners to include actual talented athlets, it does not expand the pool enough.  Soccer in the U.S., one suspects, is a suburban sport that draws mainly (though not exclusively) on affluent whites.  The same city kids who fall prey to the obesity epidemic will for some of the same reasons never be runners.  There's not enough space in the inner city, at least not enough space that one can move safely through.  For a huge part of the American population, there are structural barriers to participation in running, and this is to the detriment of the sport.  Running simply does not attract the best talent.