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.

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.

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.


 

400s

Did some 400s yesterday and they felt good.  I'm finally getting some turnover, and they were about 2 sec faster than usual.  The barrier is often coordination/lack of turnover, but since starting to work on the speed and starting to do some of Derek's drills that has changed somewhat.  The barrier yesterday was muscle fatigue.  That is good. 

Check out this video about biking in Manhattan:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

I wonder if biking in big cities is completely a lost cause.  I think it is, at least, I think patching dangerous bike lanes onto busy streets is a half-assed non-solution to the problem of cars in the city.  It's amazing how 100 years ago cities were built with cars in mind as if the energy supply were infinite, and it's amazing how difficult it is to restructure something as overbuilt as a city.  It's also amazing how hostile people are to trains in the US.  I think about O'Hare in Chicago and how the only way to get from the airport to downtown without a car is on the slow-ass blue line.  The airport was built under the presumption of automotive dominance, with easy access to the Kennedy highway that builders thought would be the quickest way into downtown.  Now everyone either suffers in Kennedy traffic, or shakes along on the slow plodding El train into downtown.  They need a high speed train from O'Hare directly into the loop that could get people from point to point in less than twenty minutes.  Or else they could make people bike!

is it cool to like "Hotel California"?

I kind of like the song, but I hear that hipsters make fun of it.  What about the Eagles in general? 

Reasons "Hotel California" is uncool:

• Covered by Gypsy Kings, hairy-chested Mediterranean singing group whose CDs supplied the soundtrack to the nervous third dates of 45-ish divorcees in mid-90s California. 
• Hipsters say so, but then again, the song's an easy target, so maybe it's cool after all.
• Last heard in dental office

Reasons "Hotel California" is cool:

• Don Henley's solo career
• In April 2001, when the Navy spyplane collided over China with a fighter jet, the captured American sailors sang it to their captors (the first foreign policy crisis of Bush administration)
• It makes you think of adult contemporary, mullets, hottubs, divorcees, and fake tans.

an easy week

I haven't been running too much this week, and it's been nice to have an easy week.  I have been focusing this week on a lot more speed stuff, including some sprint drills Derek taught me, and on a 70 minute run yesterday morning I stopped at the track and ran some sprints and 200s.  I'm pretty sore today from all of that.  The exciting thing is, though, that it's racing season, with local 5Ks almost every weekend, and I'm excited to see what I can do at a distance that's not really the one I train for.  Frequent racing is not only fun, but helps get you very fit, fast, and mentally tough.  So we'll see whether this summer will bring a 5K PR. I'd very much like it too.  I don't think I've run under 17:00 since high school.  I wonder if I can.  Last 5K I ran was something like 17:13 (I think) and that was in the middle of marathon training last fall. 

On a totally random note--here's my plug for the PBS series Downton Abbey, an enchanting Edwardian period piece about a fictional family of English aristocrats in the ominous years between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of WWI.  There's a whole lot to say about it, but seriously, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone.  It's absolutely great.

I'm also reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan -- here's a plug for that.  His Age of Reagan begins with Nixon and ends with Obama, and it's the story of the entree of the extreme right into the mainstream of American political life and the eclipse not only of New Deal Liberalism, but moderate conservatism.  Reagan is central to his story, but in the end, he's less important than the extremists--like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan--whom his own un-ideological pragmatism and politic willingness to compromise ultimately leaves disappointed and disaffected.  Wilentz redeems Reagan from right-wing haigiography and left-wing demonizing, and the 40th president who emerges from his portrait is one whose achievements in ending the cold war owe to luck and private idealism rather than to the hard-line stance he often faked in his rhetoric.

training in the heat.

Today was too hot to run.  While I relish the so-called character building aspects of cold weather running, with its Jack London, "To-Build-a-Fire" facing of the elements, I gladly let the heat have its day.  In sub-freezing weather I once ran a marathon PR, but when the temperature jumps over 80 I choose AC over training every time. 

We are in Tammi's hometown now and Tammi's brother is a top-notch, professional physical trainer.  Instead of going for a run today, we let Derek, Tammi's brother, run us through a half hour of sprint and agility drills.  It was a huge neuromuscular challenge, and it opened my body in some new ways. 

hot weather running, if you like sex and the city you hate homeless people

The last two days have been unbearably hot relative to the cool temperatures of May, and morning runs have left me drained.  It takes me a good two weeks or so to get used to warmer temperatures.  I have come to accept this as part of summer running.  It slows my runs, saps my motivation to run, makes me sleepy while reading.  (Of all the pleasures of academia, falling asleep while reading on the couch is the professional hazard I love best!)

This season's Bachelorette is shaping up to be even weirder than the others, mainly because they taken down the fourth wall of reality TV and this season's contestants are as savvy and conscious as ever about the show's cliches, rules, and history.  Contestants refer on-air to previous seasons, to the cliches of saying you're "there for the right reasons," and even, in the figure of Bentley, to the ways in which they're manipulating reality TV for personal gain.  Bentley, of course, is there for all the wrong reasons, but he represents the way the Bachelor/ette series has been able to integrate into its dramatic arcs what was once the story of the post-final episode tabloids: contestants' use of the show to advance their own fame.  If brazen confessions of self-interest once violated the rules and the spirit of the show, the fame calculus now merely introduces another ingredient into the pie, another peril that the bachelor or bachelorette must face.

While Ashley is one of the smarter bachelor/ettes, a savvy political infighter who clawed her way out of the pack to a runner-up spot that's now the de facto conduit to getting your own season, she's about to be outsmarted by Bentley--who creates drama by abandoning any pretense of being there for the right reasons, or even of thinking Ashley's hot.  And the fact is, Allie and Ashley (with their cute little names you might give to a Golden Retriever puppy) aren't half as attractive as the men on the show (though they are about twice as smart).  While they're less threatening than the hottest women on the Bachelor, viewers can identify with the spunky cuteness of someone like Ashley more easily than with the icy beauty of someone like Roslyn, who had the "inappropriate" relationship with the producer two seasons ago.

Now, academics love to tell people why the things they like pose HUGE political or ethical problems, and I'm no different.  I'm as smug as the rest.  So here's one of the many "problematic," as they say, aspects of Sex and the City.  SATC colluded with the Guiliani administration in sanitizing NYC and duplicated the city's efforts to sell a cleaned-up, poverty free, minority-free image of itself to tourists from the Jersey suburbs and the hinterlands beyond.  If you believe SATC, the post-industrial metropolis is a place where only rich while people live, where Big comes by lots of money through financial alchemy which is all too complex for Carrie try to understand anyway (and work is so boring after all!), and where the only minorities are the occasional tall, handsome professional black man who woos Miranda (or maybe a Fleet Week Hispanic sailor for Samantha).  At the same time as Rudy's efforts to make homelessness and poverty disappear from view in Manhattan were taking effect, the show promoted a similar vision, passing off as authentic New Yorkers (as if there were such a thing) what was really a quartet of suburban moms gawking their way to brunch after brunch, cosmo to cosmo.  SJP's high heels could echo safely on the walls of Manhattan's no longer abandoned and scary skyscaper canyons. It's not surprising, then, that we have SATC tourism now, because SATC was tourism all along.

Last thing, I'm fully aware that my argument turns on an implicit opposition between the city and the white suburban mom, and I'll admit that it isn't exactly fair or original to make the white suburban mom the protected, sheltered, phobic antonym to all things supposedly urban.  It's worth dwelling, then, on why we (not just me, lots of people and implicitly, SATC) tend to think of the white suburban mom as the opposite of the city.  There are historical oppositions between the connotations of city as a bad place and of white moms as sheltering and overprotective; we think of suburbs as boring places where sex is for reproduction and cities as exciting places where sex is for fun.  We think of white women in the city as potential crime victims, not as people who exercise control over urban spaces.  (The point of SATC's gentrification of NYC is to undo this cultural canard and give white women power over urban space, and I give it credit for trying to do.)

This enduring opposition between the suburban mom and the city is one reason the white city mom living in a gentrified area proves so fascinating (not least to the legions of mommy bloggers themselves).  Who is this person, we ask.  How is she going to transform the city?  It's generally hipsters who give her the most grief, concerned as they are that strollers will interrupt their "authentic" experience as city people.  Hipsters are a topic for another post.  Why do hipsters bother me so much?