Yesterday I completed a relay race across the mid-Alantic state where Tammi and I live. The race had a staggered, handicapped start, with slower teams (based on 5K PB) starting at six, and increasingly faster teams starting every few minutes or so until 10:30. Less challenging than distance itself--divvied up between seven runners, into legs of no more than nine miles--can be the heat and the logistics, carrying runners, in two cars, from one leg to the next, leaving one car to provide water and support to the runner on the course. When we started it was about 82, my first leg began about 11:45 and carried me over a beautfiful country road, through open farmland under a cloudless sky. The natural beauty of my surroundings did little to cool me off, though. With the sun directly overhead, the road was mercilessly shadeless, but I was able to power through the heat without too much trouble, thanks in part to being well acclimated after a few weeks of high temps here. My last let started around six pm, and was significantly shorter and cooler. It ended at the beach, too, and it's a great sensation to end a race with a dip in the cool Atlantic along with the other runners who were happily bobbing in the waves. (NB: I took off my wedding ring before the swim on the advice of a friend who once lost his swimming in a lake. Anyone else take that precaution?)
By the middle of the race, about 40-50 miles in, our team started passing the teams who had started earlier, and many of the runners we caught up to seemed to be suffering in the heat (as we were), runners of all shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities trudging over hot blacktop under a midafternoon sun, soaked in sweat but persevering nonetheless, sun-baked moving statues of determination. As one of my teammates marvelled, "If this hurts for us, think about how much it hurts for them!" -- "Us" being a group of serious and experienced runners, "them" being the folks who came out to relay because of a sense of adventure, a desire to take up a challenge, to prove something to themselves, because of the durable novelty of covering great distances on foot.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
le joggeur
This is cool--Sascha Goldberger, a French photographer, took pictures of people just after a run, and then called them in later to duplicate the pose after cleaning up:
See them at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/before-and-after-shots-of-jogg. "I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society," Goldberger is quoted as saying. "The difference was very surprising." Surprising how? In that there isn't much of a difference? Anyhow--it's funny, I would never have read his photos that way, and frankly, I think this guy's a bad reader of his own work. The difference between nature and culture...Self-presentation...Really? Is that all the intellect it takes to be a French artist these days? Come on. That's why we in the English biz have something called the intentional fallacy. Just because the artist says he meant something, doesn't mean that his art means what he thinks it means. Besides the implicit Gallic fascination with, and singling out and shaming of, the exercising body, what strikes me about these photos is just how un-brute like all these fleece-swaddled city are anyway, how much a part of their culture the clothing and the gazes of these joggers makes them appear, just how very posed the off-the-shoulder-jacket of the girl above seems.
To show that I am even more pretentious than a French artist, I will one up him by quoting a bona fide rogue French intellectual on running. Here is one of my favorite passages of former rugby player Pierre Bourdieu:
"[A]ll the strictly health-oriented practices such as walking and jogging are also linked in other ways to teh dispositions of the culturally richest fractions of the middle classes and the dominant class...It is therefore understandable that they should find satisfaction in effort itself and to take the deferred gratifications of their present sacrifice at face value. But also, because they can be performed in solitude, at times and in places beyond the reach of the many, off the beaten track, and so exclude all competition (this is one of the differences between running and jogging), they have a natural place among the ethical and aesthetic choices which define the aristocratic asceticism of the dominated fractions of the dominant class" (Distinction, 214).
Upward mobility, effort for its own sake, asceticism: Bourdieu nails the entwinement of some of the main cultural values of endurance sports.
See them at http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/before-and-after-shots-of-jogg. "I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society," Goldberger is quoted as saying. "The difference was very surprising." Surprising how? In that there isn't much of a difference? Anyhow--it's funny, I would never have read his photos that way, and frankly, I think this guy's a bad reader of his own work. The difference between nature and culture...Self-presentation...Really? Is that all the intellect it takes to be a French artist these days? Come on. That's why we in the English biz have something called the intentional fallacy. Just because the artist says he meant something, doesn't mean that his art means what he thinks it means. Besides the implicit Gallic fascination with, and singling out and shaming of, the exercising body, what strikes me about these photos is just how un-brute like all these fleece-swaddled city are anyway, how much a part of their culture the clothing and the gazes of these joggers makes them appear, just how very posed the off-the-shoulder-jacket of the girl above seems.
To show that I am even more pretentious than a French artist, I will one up him by quoting a bona fide rogue French intellectual on running. Here is one of my favorite passages of former rugby player Pierre Bourdieu:
"[A]ll the strictly health-oriented practices such as walking and jogging are also linked in other ways to teh dispositions of the culturally richest fractions of the middle classes and the dominant class...It is therefore understandable that they should find satisfaction in effort itself and to take the deferred gratifications of their present sacrifice at face value. But also, because they can be performed in solitude, at times and in places beyond the reach of the many, off the beaten track, and so exclude all competition (this is one of the differences between running and jogging), they have a natural place among the ethical and aesthetic choices which define the aristocratic asceticism of the dominated fractions of the dominant class" (Distinction, 214).
Upward mobility, effort for its own sake, asceticism: Bourdieu nails the entwinement of some of the main cultural values of endurance sports.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
heat waved
Define irony, Winona Rider commanded Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites: The mismatch between intended meaning and literal meaning, or between what we think and what's actually there. When I left for a 20 miler this morning at 6.20, it was about 80 degrees, and the sun was coming up bright and strong, and clutching a chilled water bottle, I was fully prepared to call the run if it got too hot, and the route I had planned was a series of shady roads looped around local drinking fountains.
The heat wasn't intolerable, but neither did it go unnoticed. I drank the 16oz bottle between miles eight and ten, and then stopped at a drinking fountain at mile 16, and then again at 18, and when I finished the sun was bright and high and as when I began leaves, some of which had dried and gathered in the street, were still. But as I write it's cooling off, getting cloudy and breezy, and the hoped-for storm just might be imminent.
Here's a good article arguing for a junk-food tax:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
While it's hard to believe such a salutary measure would past muster with the anti-government fanatics who decide on such things, Mark Bittman makes a decent case for the health-care cost savings, for the distorted incentives that subsidies provide, and for the revenues it would generate that could be put into further public health measures.
But the fuck-em-let-em-die, they-made-their-own-choices side of the argument believes that the government has no role to play in correcting or reducing any of the negative externalities of the free market, so they'll never be convinced by any of these arguments, least of all healthcare cost savings argument. This is because they think we shouldn't be giving anyone anything for free--the government doesn't owe anyone anything.
You always hope that this libertarian conservatism is like a heatwave in the political weather, something that's feverish, uncomfortable, and temporary, but I'm afraid it's the new normal, and now politics has to countenance all sorts of argument that twenty years ago would would have seemed absurd. What's disappeared from politics is any notion of the social--why it's a good thing, why we have obligations to it. We're soon to have an object lesson in these arguments when the anti-social folks take over.
The heat wasn't intolerable, but neither did it go unnoticed. I drank the 16oz bottle between miles eight and ten, and then stopped at a drinking fountain at mile 16, and then again at 18, and when I finished the sun was bright and high and as when I began leaves, some of which had dried and gathered in the street, were still. But as I write it's cooling off, getting cloudy and breezy, and the hoped-for storm just might be imminent.
Here's a good article arguing for a junk-food tax:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
While it's hard to believe such a salutary measure would past muster with the anti-government fanatics who decide on such things, Mark Bittman makes a decent case for the health-care cost savings, for the distorted incentives that subsidies provide, and for the revenues it would generate that could be put into further public health measures.
But the fuck-em-let-em-die, they-made-their-own-choices side of the argument believes that the government has no role to play in correcting or reducing any of the negative externalities of the free market, so they'll never be convinced by any of these arguments, least of all healthcare cost savings argument. This is because they think we shouldn't be giving anyone anything for free--the government doesn't owe anyone anything.
You always hope that this libertarian conservatism is like a heatwave in the political weather, something that's feverish, uncomfortable, and temporary, but I'm afraid it's the new normal, and now politics has to countenance all sorts of argument that twenty years ago would would have seemed absurd. What's disappeared from politics is any notion of the social--why it's a good thing, why we have obligations to it. We're soon to have an object lesson in these arguments when the anti-social folks take over.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
heat wave
The heat makes everything seem like the post-apocalypse, we're all wary of going outside, it's so uncomfortable...Yesterday I ran well before 7 am and it was still extremely slow and uncomfortable.
I'm not going to run today, but that's OK, extreme weather forces a day off. I started training for the Chicago marathon on July first, and I have a few good weeks, and now one down/recovery week, in the log. Some races and workouts have told me I'm getting fitter--so I have to keep the pressure up. This time around, I'm focusing on more of the little things I hate to do: stretching, diet, speedwork. I'm also trying to extend weekday morning non-workout runs into the 11-12mi/80 minute range. Looking back on my training, runs in this range, which tend to get me out of the rut of a blah-blah 10mi run comfort zone, have preceded PRs. I'm also going to focus this time on running a greater percentage of miles at marathon pace--picking a pace and training at it. It's what Italian coach Renato Cavato calls specific endurance.
What else. Because of the extreme weather I had the kid I tutor in English read Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which I think of every time I decide not to risk the heat:
"He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends."
In Man v. Nature plots, Nature wins, so don't tempt the elements. The version most of us read in high school is a 1908 revision of an original story from 1902 which more explicitly lays out the contrast that works in the above passage between precept and experience--the protagonist decides to chuck precept and learns the hard way that precept was right all along.
Unlike Klondike exploration, however, training is individualized to physiology, and one's cannot discount one's own experience as an adequate preceptor. So my precept about experience: take the tips, but listen to your own experience.
I'm not going to run today, but that's OK, extreme weather forces a day off. I started training for the Chicago marathon on July first, and I have a few good weeks, and now one down/recovery week, in the log. Some races and workouts have told me I'm getting fitter--so I have to keep the pressure up. This time around, I'm focusing on more of the little things I hate to do: stretching, diet, speedwork. I'm also trying to extend weekday morning non-workout runs into the 11-12mi/80 minute range. Looking back on my training, runs in this range, which tend to get me out of the rut of a blah-blah 10mi run comfort zone, have preceded PRs. I'm also going to focus this time on running a greater percentage of miles at marathon pace--picking a pace and training at it. It's what Italian coach Renato Cavato calls specific endurance.
What else. Because of the extreme weather I had the kid I tutor in English read Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which I think of every time I decide not to risk the heat:
"He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends."
In Man v. Nature plots, Nature wins, so don't tempt the elements. The version most of us read in high school is a 1908 revision of an original story from 1902 which more explicitly lays out the contrast that works in the above passage between precept and experience--the protagonist decides to chuck precept and learns the hard way that precept was right all along.
Unlike Klondike exploration, however, training is individualized to physiology, and one's cannot discount one's own experience as an adequate preceptor. So my precept about experience: take the tips, but listen to your own experience.
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