Children of Academe

Tuna casserole makes excellent running food, and it's super easy (and super cheap - you can get all the ingredients for under $5).  Boil some egg noodles and preheat oven to 375.  Strain them.  Run cold water over them.  Mix the noodles with two cans of cream of mushroom soup, one soupcan of milk, two or three cans of tuna, a can of peas/carrots, and maybe some diced onions if you're inclined.  Spread the mixture into an 8"x11" pan, and bake for about 40 minutes.  Then, cover with slices of American cheese, and put back in the oven for about 10 minutes, til the cheese is melted.  You can't beat this dish.  It was my Lenten Friday pre-long run meal.  If you're worried about the high fat content of the cheese slices, try the fat free kind.  Personally, I go for the 2%.

I love tuna casserole for another reason though, one that has to as much to do with its connotations as with its hearty goodness.  There's refuge in a can of cream of mushroom soup.  The gelatinous unpronounceability of its ingredients in all their sublime chemistry reminds one, paradoxically, of the simplicity of eating.  It induces one into the comfort of again taking for granted--rather than being astonished by or critical of--the convenience of the grocery store and the scale and efficiency of the modern food economy, however excescent and diabolical.  We can leave the Michael Pollans of the world to their scolding and their kale.  The casserole is ready.

Casserole abides.  My attachment to casserole feels traditional, as if it were a regional dish passed through generations of grandmothers -- though I realize, of course, that tuna casserole, like my invented food tradition, is manufactured, the invention of 1950s recipe books that helped Americans adjust to the stunning abundance of postwar life, with its aisles and aisles of packaged convience foods to store in the pantry or the bomb shelter.  How much harder it is to cook from scratch.  How much harder it is, as well, to cook dishes other than what you were raised on.  The heavy casserole pulls with the gravity of the familiar past.  It pleads its rightness against ways of eating ungoverned by its gentle precepts of economy, convenience, taste, and the presumption of sharing.  A casserole is rarely eaten alone.

Another Europhilic humanities scholar with pretentious jet ski

Despite their radical politics and extravagant readings of lierature, despite their uncut hair, despite the clothes sometimes too fashion forward for their age, despite their choice to earn a small fraction of the money commanded by similarly educated members of their age cohort, despite their often very genuine indifference to money--humanities academics are extremely conservative in their habits and values, most especially their valuing of education and intelligence above all.  Academia, unlike everywhere else, has clearly defined steps for advancement and markers of merit, for achieving all of which the criteria are usually fairly clear.  And while luck plays no small role in who lands academic jobs, academia is as much a meritocracy as anywhere, at least as much as I imagine the military to be.  On a more psychic, less institutional level, academia replicates at every stage the child-parent, child-teacher relationship, such that every academic, this one included, strives in his heart of hearts to be a good schoolboy, the smartest in the gradeschool class, the precocious tot who makes the teacher beam.

Maybe at one time in my life I considered myself unconventional for ten days or so, but I've always known, and over the last few years been able to admit, how thoroughly conventional I am.  I have whiled away hours in a chair or on a couch reading Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Judith Butler, and a host of lesser psychoanalytic lights on the conditioned nature of our desires, on the supposed conflict between what society tells us we think we want and what we really want, on our epistemological alienation from the desires that drive us, while I know I have at the same time been striving for what everyone else wants, and what I see as my true desire: helping others, being respected and loved, having a fulfilling job, getting paid enough to stand tall in the world.  Perhaps I have no non-traditional desires.  So be it.  Perhaps this is because I lack imagination.  But there are worse qualities to lack.  Imagination only multiplies the complexity of what an honest look at the existing world presents on its face.  Do I have any deviant desires?  I lack the intellect to dream them up.  So be it.  Creativity isn't everything.  Imitatio.

The great theme of Philip Roth is the cost of having what we want when our desires break with tradition. Desire in Roth never solely liberates, following it out rarely leads to uncomplicated happiness, pursuing it is not uncomplicated and merely heroic.  Roth is famous for all the sex in his books, but the sex is a red herring.  His characters don't want liberation from stultifying sex mores but instead want liberation from stultifying tradition.  the problem, though, is that the traditions they consider narrow and ignorant have provided them with comfort and unstinting love. 

In the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth's alter-ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, has achieved literary fame and financial success with a novel that satirizes the narrowness of his own family and the mores of the neighborhood in Newark where he grew up.  His family and community feel betrayed, and prominent critics and intellectuals accuse him of ethnic self-hatred.  Zuckerman is baffled at first, wondering why people cannot see fiction as fiction.  His father calls him a bastard on his deathbed, and his brother, a dentist in Newark, accuses him of speeding their father's death with his scandalous novel.  In The Anatomy Lesson, the one I just finished, Zuckerman is forty and suffering from a mysterious pain in his upper back; he decides to quit writing and go to medical school.  There's more to say but I won't spoil it. 

What makes Roth so wonderful is he comes down squarely neither on the side of the autonomous liberated artist unfettered by family and tradition, nor on the side of family and tradition. Were the Zuckerman trilogy merely another bildungsroman of heroic artist, it wouldn't be half as compelling; it isn't about the trials of fashioning novels but about the trials of fashioning a self.  Autonomy trades flight for a loss of balast; the cost of stability is inertia and restlessness.  We're always simultaneously children and adults, we like childhood because it's easy and adulthood because we think we can have what we want.  The good parent provides comfort to the child by denying it its desires; the child rages against the "no" but craves it just the same for the feeling of protection it provides and for the boundaries it sets; Roth's adult goes to bed as late as he wants (and with whomever he wants) and ends up a little sadder inside but more completely human for having risked the satisfaction of pursuing his own ambitions past the bounds set by his past.  Having a self, Roth knows, will involve losses, entail risks, and bring inevitable pain.  It is a yoke, as Zuckerman's neck pain in The Anatomy Lesson suggests.

Saturday AM: dropped a double deuce

Our for 22 on a lovely Saturday AM.  Left around 7:15, when the temp read 40.  I waffled about how to dress for this one.  Shorts and a T-shirt, but also hat and gloves?  I decided in favor of hat and gloves.  It got warmer through the run and I started to get hot, so I threw them away in a garbage can I passed.

Spring and fall are seasons of ambiguous temps - and they call for cheap hats and gloves that you can throw out without feeling bad about it.  I have a nice pair of winter gloves my sister in law gave me for Christmas, but on days like today I wear $1 dollar gardening gloves and a $3 wal-mart hat.  No sense in going all technical for long runs where you might need to adjust your clothing needs.

I'm also a believer in clothing the extremities and wearing stocking caps.  I often run in shorts and a T-shirt and a hat and gloves, putting tights on only when it's below 35.  I go back and forth on long sleeves: depends.



Bill Rodgers with stocking cap, victory in hand



The Psychology of Effort

I've argued previously against the idea that our runs have somehow to be intellectual or personally productive, or even a supplementary restorative to leisure--a Derridean dangerous supplement with a salt crusted face and Bodyglide protected thighs if there ever was one.  That is to say, leisure has to be about leisure.  As restoration, it's still bedevilled by, still dwelling in the shadow of, the work it's trying to escape, the work it ultimately aims to make more productive.  Granted, I prattle on about all this as a man without a real job and with the flexible schedule of a PhD student.  If there's such thing as flex time in PhD world, it's measured not in days or weeks or even months but years and years, such that a PhD program sometimes has a Ruplestilksin or Castaway-starring-Tom-Hanks-type vibe about it: You settle into a corner of the library, gleefully piling up the books beside you, then step out into the light solidly in your 30s with creeping crows' feet and sprouting ear hairs and realize that they have since invented Facebook and iPads and that the juniors were born the year Nevermind was released and view themselves with far less irony than the obsolete sensibility of their natal decade would advise. 

But I digress, divagate, essay.  Indeed, I understand as well as anyone how running can be productive for thought and in my life it often is.  Not for the precise kinds of thinking that academic writing demands, but for letting large ideas bubble up in the brain, for unfettering yourself from the inhibitions that sometimes keep us from our best thoughts.  A run is the only hour or so in the waking day when I'm not dealing with written language of some kind, it's the time when I come to be most present to myself, mediated only by myself and myself alone.  Sadly, it may be the only time in the day when I'm not trying to multitask, not distracted but rather fully attentive.  Wordsworth composed walking in the woods, images of walking about in Heidegger's writings, and the more I run the more I take his talk about pathways literally.  Though has rhythm and motion.  And if poets were always attuned to the kinetic character of thought, late 19c psychologists began to try to understand what it was. 

In "The Psychology of Effort," one of the earlier essays of his long career, Dewey tries to settle the question of how easy perceptions, like reading a billboard, differ from perceptions that require effort (like wading through Dewey's prose).  What exactly, he asks, is the sensation of effort?  Dewey says that the sensation of effort is frustrated movement.  We go through much of our lives automatically, pulled along by habit, but then, situations arise for which we're unprepared, novelties arise to which we have to adapt and adjust.  Our everyday activities, even thought, involve physical movement--furrowing the brow when we read, shifting in our chairs when we write email.  (Dewey never lets his readers forget that the mind and body are not separate entities but instead are one, that though is indeed embodied, and that in a real sense one thinks through the body.)  The sense of effort comes when the physical movement of thought becomes inadequate its task.  Effort, he writes, is "tension between means and ends in action" and the sense of effort is awareness of this tension.  "Sensations of the bodily state report to us this conflict and readjustment."

The essay pertains to endurance sports in two ways.  First, Dewey gives as an example of conflict and readjustment learning to ride a bike.  "Take the alternation of ridiculous excess of effort, with total collapse of effort in learning to ride a bicycle.  Before one mounts one has perhaps a pretty definite visual image of himself in balance and in motion.  This image persists as a desirability.  On the other hand, there comes into play at once the consciousness of the familiar motor adjustments,--for the most part, related to walking.  The two sets of sensations refuse to coincide, and the result is an amount of stress and strain relevant to the most serious problems of the universe."

Another has to do with repetitive activity--which can be applied to running: "If a monotonous physical movement be indefinitely repeated, it will generally be found that as long as 'activity' is put forth, and accomplishes something objectively...there is little sense of effort.  Let the effort be exhausted and action practically cease, then the sense of effort will be at its maximum."  Yup -- I agree.  The end of a race, when effort is almost exhausted, is definitely the hardest part.  Running is a repetitive, habitual motion -- but the body's own depleting resources eventually mount an obstacle to that motion, an obstacle to which we adapt through training and adjust to through effort.

Speaking of fatigue, I've been waking up about before my alarm clock for the last ten days and have been getting about six and a half hours of sleep to my usual seven or seven and a half.  It's been nice for running, because instead of getting up at six like usually I've been up at quarter to six or even 5:30 and out the door.  The days are getting longer and it's lighter earlier and it's great to be on the road as the sun rises.  I woke up at around 5:10 this morning, tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't so I got out of bed at 5:25 and was out the door twenty minutes later, and back at 7:02 -- about 11 mi, 7min pace.

McRunner

This is pretty great: http://mcrunner.com/

One Joe D'Amico has been eating nothing but McDonald's in the 30 days leading up to the LA Marathon.  That is exciting.  I am taking suggestions for how to get famous through a blog gimmick - pass your ideas along.  Ideas that have come to mind include:


• Peepng into a neighbor's window at 10pm each night just to see what they're doing; I'll take a picture, post it to the blog, and write up my observations.  After 365 days, I'll have a ready-to-go book: I Know You Wear Ratty Tighty Whiteys, And Now You Know I Know
• Furtively dropping into my local fair-trade coffee shop, pooping, wiping, flushing, leaving without ordering anything at all.  Then blogging.  Documentary evidence in this case crosses the line of good taste.  Book Title: I Left You Something Locally Grown.  Or howabout this: Clogging and Blogging.  Or even: Put the LOG into Blog!
• To move from the locally grown to the opposite end of the food spectrum: poop in Long John Silver's (any restaurant; doesn't have to be the same franchise, but probably better if it is) for 365 days straight.  Wear same pirate hat to do so and photograph self.  Call book: Captain's Log.  This title gets at the too easily forgotten etymology of "blog," which is "web-log."  But the real beauty is that like the others, it punningly refers to the log-like shapes into which turds arrange themselves in the course of passing through the small intestine, out the anus, and into any number of possible toilets in your community--the range and variety of which is limited only by your budget, your location, and your imagination. 

Julie considers the lobster

Joan Benoit Samuelson

A less forgiving, less inviting face

At a book drive the other day I paid a dollar for a used copy of Joan Benoit Samuelson's Running for Women (1995).  Now, I love reading old training guides, not so much for the advice they give (which is enduringly the same) but for the differences in attitude and values that they evince.  The difference in attitude has to do, mainly, with how manuals treat the more unseemly and ascetic aspects of running, like staying as light as possible, that make runners seem a bit unbalanced to outside observers.

Here's what Samuelson says about another seemingly crazy part of the running life, running during pregnancy:

"For athletically inclined women, being told not to exercise during pregnancy can be more stressful than the exercise itself.  In the seventh month of my second pregnancy, I was ordered to stop running because of low amniotic fluid...I didn't run a step for four days until I saw a specialist in high-risk pregnancies...who reassured me that everything appeared fine.  For those four days out of my routine, though, I was so stressed that I'm sure my blood pressure rose."

She goes to relate how she ran the day she gave birth.  I'll never let a wet rainy day stop me again. 

With a 2:21 PR, a time that beats the winning times of most major marathons today, Samuelson was best female runner the US ever produced until Deena Kastor came along.  Despite Samuelson's victories, despite Kastor's astonishing 2:19 London victory in 2006, the pretty face of women's running today is Kara Goucher, a better runner than I'll ever be but in the scheme of things, no Joan Benoit, no Deena Kastor.  We thus have to wonder what it means for running that Goucher has become such a celebrity. 



Kara Goucher and Paula Radcliffe

Admittedly, she's the best around, the best American marathoner running today.  Fair enough.  Shalane Flanagan is hot on her heels but Goucher still has the best PR.  Goucher, though, represents something different than Samuelson, namely, the central role of women in the second running boom.  Goucher is an icon for a new type of fitness enthusiast runner, a woman for whom running fits as a piece in a pie that includes yoga, diet, maybe meditation, plus work and motherhood--a striving after autonomy.

She is a commercial sensation as well.  Her Nike handlers have created a Goucher-persona (see video) that's got an every-woman kind of appeal, effectively downplaying her superhuman athleticism.  Goucher's one of us, terrestrial and grounded, down-to-earth, unlike the more famous Nike incarnation, Michael Jordan, whose appeal consisted in his distance and difference from the consumer, as the brand "Flight" would indicate. 

I am not surprised she was so public with her pregnancy -- what could be a better branding tool for women's running than a pregnant elite runner?  What I am saying is that the body of the female runner, as exemplified by Kara Goucher, has become an object of identification.  That identification is cultivated by Nike in particular and serves as a successful means through which to market various running gear.  The money in running now is in women.  Men go out in shorts, shoes, and a cotton T-shirt (if that).  Women simply need more gear.

On a concluding note, one of the more inspiring things I've ever witnessed as a runner was seeing Joanie run at the 2008 women's Olympic trials, held in Boston the day before the marathon.  Kastor won, but the then 50-year-old Joanie turned in a 2:49:08, beating many in a field consisting of women half her age.  She ran the 2010 Chicago Marathon in 2:47.  Flinty and indomitable, Joanie has a worn face and short iron-grey that hair do not endear her to many, for her heroic, inhuman prowess deflects easy identification.  At least, it transcends the indentification that can easily be commodified.





on the road



American distance running needs better facial hair

 Been traveling a lot this week but able to get in a decent week of training, mainly by running as early in the morning as I can.  Friday morning, I ran for two hours, and ran twelve miles yesterday and about ten this morning.  Tammi's in the thick of marathon training and has also been putting in high mileage.  There's a great podcast with '83 Boston Marathon winner Greg Meyer here.  He talks about the buildup training to his victory and argues that we all need to race more, even when we're tired from training.  One thing he says is, if you love to run, you probably want to race, and I guess that's true.  It's taken me a long time to get over the need to PR every time I race. 

When you first start running, the PRs come easy and in succession because you're getting in better and better shape, but eventually, you reach a sort of a plateau -- a plateau that's physical but that also has to do with the constraints of daily life and how much you're willing to give to the sport.  You can gain a lot of fitness by upping your mileage, but eventually, you top out the number of miles you can reasonably run in a given week; you can add intervals for intensity, too, and get in better shape that way.  But though the PRs still come, you have to work harder for them; and if you're to enjoy racing, you have to get over the need to PR and race, even when you're not tapered, even when you're not trained.  This has been hard for me to do but something I've been improving at over the last two years or so -- just racing as much as I can and enjoying it.

I have to admit to another thing here: I haven't exactly kept to my vegetarian pledge - it was too hard.  I was feeling crappy on my runs, especially on long runs which are marathon training bread and butter, and very tired overall, so I had some beef and began feeling better.  My training's going great now.  It's wrong not to eat mindfully, but how wrong is it?  That's the question I'm asking myself.  It's very selfish to put running ahead of the welfare of sentient creatures.  It's also impossible to act in the world without being complicit in some way with something you can't morally sign on to, and we have to choose our battles. 

Watched some of Weeds last night -- great show.  It's amazing how durable the genre of suburban anomie is, and how many directions it can go in.  Also, why did TV get so good in the 00s?  

Tammi's 20

Tammi ran 20 yesterday in preparation for her marathon.  Great job!  We're both in Cambridge, MA for research so she did it in unfamiliar territory, which makes it all the more of an accomplishment.  The first step of a 20-miler is always an intimidating one, all the more so in a place you don't know well. It was cold and windy.

I went 90 minutes yesterday morning before heading to library for research; this morning I ran a little over ten along the Charles. 

self-compassion

Good article in today's NYT about self compassion.  Scientists say go easy on yourself about your imperfections.  Not bad advice.  What's striking about this article is that the examples of imperfections are failures to diet and exercise.  People castigate who themselves "for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising" would do well to ease up on the self-flagellating.  Apropos of the last post here, we have another example of exercise turned into, if not a moral issue, at least another category of behaviors to chastise ourselves about.  What gives?

Anyhow--check this out.  An ameteur runner, government worker Yuki Kawauchi, took third at the Tokyo marathon, running 2:08.  He passed out after crossing the finish line, which according to him was the fifth time he's ended up in the medical tent after a marathon.  In a race, there's always a little more to give.  Amazingly, he did it by himself.  The Japanese running scene is dominated by corporate teams (like company softball teams, but for serious runners), but he didn't join one.