Morning Run on the Veneto

I left for my morning run along a canal in Padova at about 6:40 this morning, after passing a short night. My body, it seems, is still adjusting to the time change. The sun doesn't rise until between quarter to eight and eight and it was cloudy and misty this morning and the run was covered in a darkness that was broken, thankfully, by the lights along one of Padova's well-maintained bike paths. I met few people on the first half of this out-and-back, encountered a few more (on bikes, on foot, with dogs) on the way back. Padova's on a coastal plain and is extremely flat.

The rest of the day was spent writing a dissertation chapter, the evening watching youtube clips of the Bachelor, season 15, featuring second-time contestant Brad Womack. The Bachelor resonated in a few strange ways with my dissertation reading. A little background: Womack is infamous for being the only bachelor ever to turn down each of the bachelorettes. He walked away from his season mateless. Now three years later he's back on the show, after undergoing intense therapy. His first season on the show, we're told, was symptomatic of an inability to commit, which was symptomatic of trust issues, etc. He's worked it all out in therapy.

What's so interesting is how the storyline of the show now relies on a redemption narrative made possible by turning Brad's failure to find in any single one of those usually vacuous bachelorettes a soulmate, or even a suitable partner. My question is whether Brad really wants to be treated for an inability commit--that's a psychological problem?--or whether he just didn't connect with any of the people on the show, and is (like we all are) a stranger to his own desires. The really sad part of the show is not that he broke those women's hearts three years ago, but that this season we watching a man's life be normalized to the standards of a TV show hosted by Chris Harrison.

Padova running group

We are living near a running store owned by a world class marathoner. Naturally, I'm excited about the possibility of training with him. We'll see if I can make it happen. We happened upon the store on a walk yesterday--it's a little store next to a laudromat a few blocks from the Prato. We saw posters of the guy on the wall and the clerk told us he was the boss. She also mentioned there was a running group that left from the storeTuesdays and Saturdays. My wife and I were hoping we would discover such a group in Padova. I ran with the group this morning and it was a disappointment. The olympian wasn't there.

first run in Italy

I'm an enthusiastic tourist, but I find traveling to be comparatively difficult. Tourism means going someplace without really leaving yourself and your habits behind--your comforts, your pleasures, your dislikes, even your curiosities. The other day my sister in law ask what I needed to pack to feel ready for Italy. My response, di corsa, was running shoes. I like to run in a new place and get to know its topography in the efficient way only running allows, and being ready to go somewhere means being ready to run. I'm never really ready, though, for travel per se but as I define it or simply idealize it, it's something you can never really be ready for -- travel visits you, leaves its mark on you in the form of surprises and shocks, good and bad. It's worth remembering that so many romance language words having to do with travel (hostel, hotel, host) come from the Latin hostis which means stranger but also enemy.

As I was running through Padua this morning I saw road signs point to Venice and Bologna; I wondered,for a moment, how easily I could run to either city and thought too how hard and difficult and dangerous getting to place to place must have been in the Middle Ages. Travel left people exposed and vulnerable. Papal agents arrested heretical intellectuals on the road to Padua.

Friendly tourism, and tourist friendly destinations, remove the hostility from the experience of being away from home, while tourists like myself find ourselves, upon reflection, taking measures to protect oursleves from inimical experience. Which is not always to be celebrated, and which is not the same thing as having a closed mind. The small ways in which Italy can baffle count among the ways in which it can prove hostile; its innumerable glories are often the friendliest and most well paved places on the planet.

If there's one arena of experience where travel and tourism converge it's in the most touristy place of all, the museum. I always find Giotto a shock, an artist who unsettles me almost completely in the religions expressions of his figures.

Today's Run, Emily Dickinson, Tammy Wynette

Today's run was an easy 11 in the late afternoon, with the Emily Dickinson slant light you get this time of year. It's pleasant and calming to run in this dull afternoon light, not opressive like like the heft of cathedral tunes. What the hell are cathedral tunes anyway? Probably not the protestant hymns whose meter all her poems employ.

Speaking of church music. Tammy Wynette's songs, and many country songs for that matter, leap up and down in intervals that sound to me a lot like hymns. My wife would know better than I. Anyway, there's something about a Tammy catharsis that suggests a singalong, so maybe this is where the church music hunch comes from. She's probably less well-regarded than Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn for the very reason she's such an excellent performer, her unabashed, self-negating displays of vulnerability and sadness. Dolly's glitz and crystalline vocal tone, Lynn's sass and self-assertion overshadow the retiring Tammy, who lands the corny punchlines that make up the wit and soul of country music with absolutely withering pathos. Listen to her second best-known hit, D-I-V-O-R-C-E for a taste of what I mean.

Impact through Insight

We grad students receive periodic recruiting solicitations from the big consulting companies: Bain, BCG, McKinsey. As an undergrad at the turn of the millenium I received solicitations from this same lineup of firms, and what sticks out most in my mind from that time is the fatuousness of dot-com era business-speak ("out of the box," "envisioneering") and the vacuousness of consulting firms' slogans: the one I remember is "Impact through Insight," which basically tries to reassure clients that they're hiring smart people (that is, after all, part of the peace of mind they're paying for) and to reassure us insecure, anxious smart people that our intelligence can make a difference.

The PhDs on the McKinsey site are all in the sciences. They must think that we "right brained" humanities folks are too dumb to have real insight, too feckless to have impactful impact. This is probably true, and thank goodness. I would not want to fail in the labyrinthine analysis--probably full of mathy formulas I don't get--required to deliver to the Arkansas plastics manufacturer, in whose noble town I'd be living in for weeks on end, the insightful insight that they can save 2% on the sourcing costs by purchasing industrial emoluments from a plant in India rather than Brazil.

Chrissie Wellington, best at exercising

Check out this profile of Chrissie Wellington, the current record holder in the Ironman. Most interesting to me is that in her youth she wasn't really athletic. She ran a marathon in her 20s, but got hit by a car and began to ride and swim for cross training. Now she's world champ. She trains in Boulder with her husband, and her training has caused her to put a career in development economics on hold.

Jim Fixx

Dare make the fixation pun? Yes.

A few years ago, I can't remember where, I found a copy of Jim Fixx's The Complete Book of Running, a 1977 guide to the sport aimed at novices caught up in the running boom. It states its aim as nothing less than to change the readers life, promising to set the reader on a path to complete mental and physical transformation, to weight loss, increased energy, even renewed sexual potency. As much as he is known for this best selling book, Fixx is remembered for the cruel irony of the fatal heart attack he suffered while on an easy jog in Vermont at age 52. To read the book today is, as one would expect, to see how little the basics of training have changed in 34 years. But it is also to notice the durability of a narrative genre--the running transformation story. Like a conversion narrative, it begins with an old, failing self that becomes a new, improved, and more authentic self, a self more in line with who we believe we really ought to be. Through neglect and bad habits--in Fixx, these are cigarettes and alcohol (to me more fun than the villain of today's narrative, junk food, though I love junk food too, not being much of a drinker any more)--one loses touch with one's best self; one recovers that self, in more confident form, when one becomes a runner.

In the first chapters, Fixx trumpets the physical and mental benefits of running, while later chapters cover logistics: what to wear (nylon shorts with a split up the side), how to slim down by calculating calories in and out, training advice on interval work, advice on fitting runs into a busy day, and suggestions for marathon training. The chapters back these tips testimony from runners who have transformed their lives.

Fixx's story is the common one, and I'll blog more about it in future posts. I am intensely interested in fitness transformation stories, of which Fixx's is an early example, for their happy endings (you rarely hear then stories of fitness failure, and I'd be happy to hear about conversions to detraining and unfitness, how people lost the running habit - this seems common only among erstwhile college athletes) and for the intriguing note of pathos or anxiety that always touches even the happiest. This is the convert's fear of regression.

A lesson from Fixx: A habit we attribute as the source of our transformation easily becomes a fetish or token in which we lodge everything we doubt to have taken root internally. It's a magical fixation, running, this object that so much is credited with.

excess

Last post I started thinking about how a hobby is always excessive to the outside observer. Being a leisure activity, it's pointless. It thus seems an extravagant expenditure of time. The question about distance running is not whether it's a form of excess, but what kind of excess it is, and what its excesses mean. To endure means to continue in spite of adversity and discomfort. The virtue of endurance lies its exceeding ease, being in excess of what we normal do, in excess of quitting, capitulating, giving up. Distance races exist because they fascinate us in their excessive character: in the excessiveness of the strength and stamina they call on, in the expenditure of pain they exact.

Distance races display and demand excess, but whether distance running, the daily running habit we have, is a form of excess of the more banal kind: a compulsion or addiction, an obsessional neurosis, that's a symptom of or a compensation for a frustrated desire. Runners, we know, rarely stop running. Marti Liquori no long runs because of an illness, but plenty of other retired greats who have achieved all they could in the sport still try. Joan Benoit Samuelson, for example, was recently trying to make the cut for the U.S. women's Olympic trials. Obviously, running presents itself as textbook compulsion, something infinitely, excessively, psycho-analyzable. (N.B. The runner-analysand probably won't be found on a couch.) So it's one of the least interesting, though often true and apt, ways to talk about runners and running. Anyone can be analyzed. Its interpretive interminability leaves all the power with the analyst; even this here resistance to analysis can itself be analyzed, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Resistance to analysis aside, or my reluctance to confront the latent content of my so obvious symptoms, I've been reading a great book by psychoanalyst and literary intellectual Adam Philips called On Balance. Why do we think balance is such a good thing?, he asks. What can we learn from our attitude toward excess, and toward the excesses of others? I just started it but so far it's an excellent read; his essays wind between lucid interpretations of Freud and Lacan and suggestive meditations on the problem stated in its title. I'll probably blog more about it as I try to untangle the problem of running and excess.