8 x 400

I did 8 x 400 this afternoon, not too much but just enough, down from 85 seconds at the start to 75 to finish the last two.  What's really helping my speed lately is to finish each run with exercises like side-to-side shuffles and karaokes that work my hip flexors, in addition to doing leg-lift-type ab exercises: I hang from a tree branch and raise my knees to my chest, in lieu of a gym.  I use nature's gym instead.
Here's a great video of Fugazi performing in 1991.  What a great thrash band, what a captivating performance.  I love the way this video captures the intimacy of the performance and underscores the energy of college rock with the inadvertent campus buildings in the mise-en-scene.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzC0RNkBXM0&feature=related

Now, the great unanswered question of this blog remains: is running a psychic pathology?  It's unbelievable how when you're deep into something, be it a hobby or an academic subject, you forget that not everyone in the world shares your passions, which happen to be--let's confess it--those for which moderation is actually a hinderance.  Academics moderate in their reading habits and measured in their writing are ignorant and unproductive; runners too habitually moderate in their training (as determined by the standards of a world that sees running as exercise and a means to an end) don't improve.

life writing

I've taken tentative steps toward beginning a 34-week long online retreat based on S. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises.  A day into it, I'm struck by how convenient and well-structured, how much like exercise, it actually is.  One thing I dislike intensely about Mass about is the length of it, the flatulent hymns with Wesleylan lyrics hooked to clunky Germanic tunes that stretch a liturgy to 70 minutes or so, about a half hour beyond its most suitable tautness.  Like a good coat, Mass shouldn't be baggy.  But I digress, and I hear the still voice inside saying I run 70 minutes or so nearly every day so why can't I just give 70 minutes for God and so on--nonetheless after 40 minutes Mass becomes performance and I find it humiliating to sit through any performance, to be forced against my will to watch and indulge.  Monks in high school said Mass with an intensity and brevity that were reassuring; there was nothing recherche or otherworldly like a musical about it, just spirituality immanent. 

The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises have a happy precision and system to them that befits S. Ignatius' soldierly bearing.  I like them because they introduce a sytematic way to interpret yourself; reflecting on myself I feel like I'm leading a class through a text with a specific set of questions that opens it up in a logical and productive, though never exhaustive, way. The first exercise is deceptively simple: think of your first memory.  This should be easy, should, we expect, bring forth a welter of vague sensory images and affects, visual mainly; maybe confusion between what we've been told and seen in pictures and what we actually experience.  Fine.  I don't know what my first memory is - I don't know whether it's something I saw in a home movie or something I experienced, just vague images of a street and a tree, no associations to place it chronologically.  It is, I nevertheless know, a good memory. 

And here's where the Exercises surprise you, opening up huge hermeneutic problems with a simple question. If the first memory is good, why is it that?  who made it so?  What does that say about the accidents of my birth, or those to whom it's been my good fortune to have been born?  What are my first unpleasant memories, and what feelings, precisely, are they composed of? Are those feelings familiar and persistant, running through channels in my personality that I should be aware of?

The exercise aspects of the Exercises endear them to me, requiring as they do deliberateness, devotion, doggedness, digging down spadeful by spadeful to tap wellsprings of an improved relationship with God and with others and with yourself.  Inspiration is achieved.