Maverick Philosopher

Against Inordinate Body Work

Running as Equalizer?

Top o' the Stack.

...........................

Malcolm Pollack comments:

I liked your brief post on running-as-equalizer, and how stubbornly our natural inequalities will always dash our hope of sweeping them under the rug. ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.")

 

There's even another natural inequality you didn't touch on, namely the difference between those who have the fiber to get off their asses to go running in the first place, and those who won't - between those who do, and don't, have the will and wisdom to suffer consciously to improve their future selves. 

That, in my (insufficiently) humble opinion, is likely the most important inequality of all.

 

A stimulating comment. Now for some commentary on the comment.

 

A. Life is hierarchical by any measure in all dimensions including physical, mental, moral, and spiritual.  We are not equal as individuals. And the same goes for groups. The 'woke' attempt to enforce 'equity' is bound to fail.  There will never be equality of outcome.  Merit will inevitably find a way of asserting itself.  In the short term, the institutionalized assault on merit will be disastrous for the vast majority while profiting the oligarchic enforcers of 'equity.' In the long term, the enforcers too will suffer. For as Malcolm, points out, "reality doesn't go away." 

 

Not only is the attempt to enforce 'equity' bound to fail, it cannot count as a value in any sound value hierarchy. For 'equity' is unjust.

 

Note also that the enforcement of 'equity' is selective: Is there 'equity' in professional sports? For that matter, are professional sports the home of  'diversity' and 'inclusion'? The questions answer themselves.  In the NBA and the NFL qualifications matter.  Real qualifications, not 'woke qualifications.'  No DEI there! Examples of  'woke qualifications' include being black, being female, and being lesbian as in the case of the current presidential press secretary. The point is not that being black, being female, and being lesbian, whether taken singly or  'intersectionally,'  should disqualify anyone from a government job;  the point is that they cannot count -- to a sane and reasonable person -- as qualifications sans phrase. 

 

Equity' is (or was) a perfectly good word that leftists have hijacked and re-defined to mean equality of outcome/result. Linguistic hijacking has proven to be an effective  leftist tactic. Leftists are subversive of right reason and natural order and the mother of all subversion is the subversion of language. Hence the wokester predilection for Orwellianisms, e.g., "Abortion is health care." 

 

B.  In Malcolm's concluding sentence he alludes to humility and the questions it raises in the present context. He suggests that he himself is insufficiently humble. Is humility then something good? I was put in mind of a couple of lines from a poem by Goethe:

 

This is not easy to translate, but the thought is that only the worthless are modest; the good celebrate the deed.  The good are not humble, but accomplished; they are made happy by and celebrate their accomplishments. The couplet has a Nietzschean, and thus anti-Christian flavor. Here political theology enters the picture.

 

Suppose the Christian God exists. Then we all are equal, and not just in the eyes of the law, or by abstraction from our positions in the various hierarchies mentioned above, or via some such conceit as John Rawls' Original Position behind the Veil of Ignorance.   We are equal not just de jure but de facto. We are equal in fact as sons and daughters of one and the same eternal Father. The fact is not empirical but metaphysical. The equality is a function of the infinite distance between the all-perfect God and mortal man with his manifold imperfections.  The natural hierarchies that so impress us here below are nothing to God: all the empirical differences of physical prowess, IQ, etc. shrink to nothing from the divine point of view.

 

One unavoidable question is whether the political equality of persons can be maintained without a theological foundation. Suppose there is no Judeo-Christian God. What could possibly support the manifestly anti-empirical belief in equality? After all, it is a plain fact that we are not equal in the ways mentioned above.   If reality is exhausted by the natural (space-time and its material contents) and is thus in principle empirically accessible 'all the way down and up,'  then what possible basis could belief in equality of person have?  What would make this belief non-illusory?

 

I would say that if you are not an anti-wokester, if you do not reject the DEI agenda and all the depredatory absurdities that follow in its train, such as the assault on merit, then you are not sane and reasonable.  Does it follow that the anti-wokester who is an atheist and a naturalist must also be a rejector of equality in all its senses? To specify and sharpen the question: Is there any rational justification, on the assumption of atheism and naturalism,  for holding, as I in fact do, that slavery is a grave moral evil?

 

ComBox now open.

A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong

We are spiritual animals in need of spiritual transcendence. It is an illusion of the age to suppose that the transcendence we need can be found by bodily means. 

Distance running has repaid me richly for the hours and years I devoted to it. In my late twenties I got pretty good at it and I experienced those unbelievable highs that, wonderful as they are, are but simulacra of the flights of the spirit.  I had the sense not to seek transcendence in the wrong places. And the sense not to abuse the mortal vehicle. Urinating blood after training runs and trashing my immune system by marathon training convinced me to take it easy on old fratello asino. 

He who pushes too hard invites a premature exit from the wheel of samsara. This from The Wisdom of Running a 2,189 Mile Marathon:

To hear Jurek tell it, forcing himself to the limit is purifying and transformational. “Though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain,” he writes. But listen closely, and bodily transcendence is not exactly grist for motivational posters. Jurek’s pages are haunted by comrades who didn’t make it through the fire unscathed. He was joined for part of the trail by Aron Ralston, the hiker famous for amputating his own arm to free himself from a boulder. Jurek’s friend Dean Potter, a legendary climber and base jumper, died in a wing-suit accident days before Jurek began his trek. “I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels,” Jurek reports. He recalls a runner who fought through debilitating headaches to finish a 100-mile race and then died of a brain aneurysm.

Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers

I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation:

There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers.

Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40, having fallen near Everest.

I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.

I have a better answer. Steck climbed because he was very, very good at it, and we humans love doing what we are good at. Freedom from social commitments can be had in far less perilous ways.  

I am reminded of something the great marathoner Bill Rodgers once said when asked why he ran and won 26.2 mile races at a blistering sub-five-minute-per-mile pace. "I like to be be fit." (I quote from memory) But of course one can be very fit indeed without running such a punishing distance at such a punishing pace.

On This Date 31 Years Ago and 50 Years Ago: Jim Fixx and Bob Dylan

It was 31 years ago today, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.  Now for some 'running' tunes.

Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, The Long Run

Beatles, Run for Your Life

Del Shannon, Runaway.  Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway."  Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".

Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free

Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Johnny Preston, Running Bear

Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue

Roy Orbison, Running Scared

Crystals, They Do Run Run

Bob Dylan

Today, 20 July, is not only the 31th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.  Wikipedia:

 

The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":

 

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "^[66][67]

 

Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."^[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."^[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".^[69]

Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio.  It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys.  It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that?  I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice.  I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records.  The fanaticism faded with the '60s.  But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan, 50 years later.

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With apologies to Bob Dylan, a song: 'How many tests must a child withstand/Before we can kill this scam?'

Sunday, July 25, 1965: Dylan goes electric

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.  Now for some 'running' tunes.

Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, The Long Run

Beatles, Run for Your Life

Del Shannon, Runaway.  Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway."  Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".

Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free

Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Johnny Preston, Running Bear

Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue

Roy Orbison, Running Scared

Crystals, They Do Run Run

Addendum (7/20)

I should have mentioned it last night.  Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.  Wikipedia:

 

The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":

 

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "^[66][67]

 

Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."^[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."^[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".^[69]

Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio.  It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys.  It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that?  I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice.  I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records.  The fanaticism faded with the '60s.  But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

 

Related articles

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'End' Songs

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Nun Run

Some in the habit of running run in a habit.  The Poor Clares are sponsoring their 5th annual Desert Nun Run in Tempe on March 8th.  Might be fun to run with a nun.  And you can vote with your feet against the scumbaggers and bullies of the current administration.

The Poor Clares are the group of sisters who have been targeted by the lawless and corrupt thugs of the Obama administration.  See here.  Here is the Obamacare Anti-Conscience Mandate.

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The Boston Marathon

Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the day of the annual running of the Boston Marathon.  My mind drifts back to 1980 and Rosie Ruiz who 'won' that year.

Boston Billy, I see, has a book out.  Here is a post of mine from four years ago on Rodgers.  It includes a nice inspirational passage from George Sheehan.  Remember him?

UPDATE (4/16)

Bill Rodgers comments on the bombing.

Tony H. e-mails: "I wonder if we can now expect Diane Feinstein to introduce a bill in the Senate to ban pressure cookers."  I wouldn't put it past that idiot.  A typical liberal, for her it is the weapon not the wielder that is the focus of attention.

We ought not not speculate about the identity of the perpetrator or perpetrators.  Let the investigation proceed.

 

It's a Running Argument

Dave Lull points us to  The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again.  Excerpt:

(1) One of the major pieces of evidence the group cites is a study that was presented at a conference over the summer. The WSJ description:

In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.

But here, from the actual abstract, is the part they never mention:

Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.

What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). They're effectively saying, "If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits."

Companion post:  Running: Gain, No Pain

Running: Gain, No Pain

No pain to speak of, leastways.  And I've been at it over 38 years.  Your mileage may vary, as does Malcolm Pollack's who, in his Pain, No Gain, reports:

I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far  —  two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.

Mileage is indeed the key.  Malcolm never ran far enough to experience what running is really about.  He didn't take the first step.  Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):

The first step to enjoying running -- and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step -- is to achieve perfect fitness.  I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing.  I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.

That's one hell of a first step.  But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand
its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week.   I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked.  And then the real run begins.  Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for yourself.

I don't move very fast these days.  I do the old man shuffle.  But I've got staying power.  Completed a marathon at age 60. Enjoyed the hell out of last week's 10 K Turkey Trot.  Surprisingly, the satisfactions of running are the same now as they were in fleeter days.

To avoid injuries, limit your running to two or three days a week and crosstrain on the other days.  I lift weights, ride bikes, use elliptical trainers, hike, swim, and do water aerobics. 

And don't forget: LSD (long slow distance) is better than POT (plenty of tempo).

I Run, Therefore I Think

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of running releases lofty (lüftig) thoughts.  Running along the ground one ascends into the aether.   Curro, ergo cogito.

If Boston is Athens, Hopkinton is Marathon

It is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the day of the 116th running of the Boston Marathon.  It'll be a hot one with a predicted high of 84.  The 26.2 miles exact a terrible toll on the mortal coil.  Remember Pheidippides! who collapsed at the Athenian end of his run.  It may have been Frank Shorter who quipped, at the 20-mile mark, "Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?"

Will Boston Billy be running today?

Don't Say 'Turkey Day'

Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.

With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991.  And now it's 2011.  May the Grim Reaper, the Ultimate Repo Man, impart a spring to my step, and a glide to my stride.  We take it to the limit. One more time.

The Frank Shorter Story

We who were swept up in the running boom of the 1970s for a lifetime of fitness and satisfaction owe a debt of gratitude to the runners and writers who popularized the sport.  The four who stand out most prominently in my memory, 37 summers after I first took to the roads, are the running writers Jim Fixx and George Sheehan, and the world-class competitors Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter. 

Shorter is often credited with being the father of the running boom due to his winning of Olympic gold at Munich in 1972 in the marathon.   October's Runner's World features a lengthy piece on Shorter that tells of his triumphs but also of the physical and psychological abuse that he and his siblings received from their Jekyll-and-Hyde father.

 

 

Fat Ass Runs

That's what they are called, don't blame me.  "FAT ASS is the name given to a series of low key runs that are frequented by experienced runners & walkers and characterised by the phrase 'No Fees, No Awards, No Aid, No Wimps.'"  More here. Want to join me for Gold Canyon Fat Ass #1?

Two Recent Trail Runs

13 K Copper Crawl Hill Climb, Miami, Arizona

Saturday morning April 17 found me toiling up the side of a mountain above the mining town of Miami, Arizona about 40 miles east of here on U. S. 60. The race is part of Miami's annual Boom Town Spree.  A great experience start to finish, from leaving the house at 5:35 AM to arriving safely home again six hours later.  A tough but interesting course mainly over dirt roads up, up, up into the foothills of the Pinal Mountains.  Out and back, with the turnaround point at Warnica Springs in the Tonto National Forest.  The race started from downtown near the corner of Live Oak and Adonis.  Great support, T-shirt, goodie bag, not to mention the  complimentary pancake breakfast and sports massage.

I enjoy the on-the-fly camaraderie of running events.  One has conversations, some of them unforgettable for a lifetime, with people many of whom one will  never see again.

Round Mountain Sunrise Challenge, Globe, Arizona, National Trails Day, 5 June 2010

I left the house at 4 AM, arrived at the trailhead in Globe around 5:15.  Gun went off at 6.  A very challenging 5 K (3.1 mile) rocky course through and over boulders and dry streambeds with plenty of elevation change.  Not even a worldclass trail runner could have negotiated the whole of this sucker at a run.  A delightful course nonetheless with scenic views and a friendly coterie of local diehards.  I took third place in the 60+ category.  (And yes, there were more than three in that category!)  But I had to pour it on at the end to keep from being overtaken by a crusty one-eyed 75 year old. 

What Colin Fletcher says of hiking is equally true of running, especially trail running: It is ". . . a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion." (The Complete Walker III, p. 3)

Walt Stack Remembered

I find myself these days as enthusiastic about running as I was in the mid-'70s when I first took up the noble sport.  It is perhaps the proximity of the Grim Reaper, his sharp scythe glistening in the Arizona sunshine, that has imparted a spring to my step and a glide to my stride.  With the ultimate Repo Man on my tail and on my trail, I am out to grab for all the gusto there is while the sun shines.  I'm fixin' to make like Walt Stack who is gone but not forgotten.  How do you stack up?

The guy was a Commie, but I can forgive him that.  Running covers a multitude of sins.

5 K or Marathon: Which is Harder?

Which is harder, to run 3.1 miles or 26.2?  They are equally hard for the runner who runs right.  The agony and the ecstasy at the end of a race run right is the same whether induced by 42.2 km of LSD or 5 km of POT.  Above, I am approaching the final stretch of a 5 K trail race (2nd annual CAAFA 5K Race Against Violence, Prospector Park, Apache Junction, Arizona).  The date is wrong: should be 3/21/2010.  I finished in 45th place in a mixed field of 113, and 28th among 44 men.  Time: 33:38.8 for a pace of 10:49.8.  That's nothing to crow about, but then I'm 60 as is the gal right behind me.  Twenty years ago I could cover this distance at a 7:45 min/mile pace.  There were five 60+ males and I finished first among them.  Not a strong field!  But a beautiful cool crisp morning and a great course and a great run.  I could have pushed harder!  Could have and should have.

LSD: long slow distance.  POT: plenty of tempo.  Both terms borrowed from Joe Henderson.

The First Step to Enjoying Running

Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):

The first step to enjoying running -- and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step -- is to achieve perfect fitness.  I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing.  I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.

That's one hell of a first step.  But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week.   I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked.  And then the real run begins.  Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for your self.

Race and Race

During my 26.2 mile trip from the Peralta trailhead to Apache Junction's Prospector Park, I had ample opportunity to observe the ethnic and social composition of my fellow marathoners.  Only two blacks did I spy, an observation in illustration of a general truth: (American) blacks are not proportionally represented at running events.  No, I am not hastily generalizing from this one observation.  I am illustrating a general truth by giving an example.  Generalization and illustration are distinct intellectual procedures.  For corroboration of the general truth, see here.  And don't tell me that I could observe only the runners that ran near me: I surveyed the whole field before the race began as I walked from the starting line to the back of the pack before the gun went off.

The tendency of liberals will be to conclude that 'racism' is at work, that blacks are being excluded, and will call for a government program to 'level the playing field' to use one of the sillier of their silly expressions.  It apparently doesn't occur to these nimrods that certain sorts of people simply have no interest in certain sorts of things.

Here is a piece on U.S. runner demographics.  Figures on race are conspicuous by their absence, a fact that reflects the political correctness of the age.  There is nothing a liberal  fears more than to be labeled a racist, and for a liberal, any mention of race makes one a racist.

Why Run?

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And   what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise?   Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

The 26.2 Club

I affixed my 26.2 decal to the rear window of my Jeep Liberty this morning.  I've earned and have the right to advertise my entry into an elite club.  Sunday's Lost Dutchman was my second attempt but my first success.  The first attempt was Boston 1979.  My training had been overzealous and my knees were giving me serious trouble; fearing permanent injury I dropped out at the top of Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it, with Boston a mere five miles downhill.  (It was my first road race, I confess to running as a tag-along or a 'bandit' in today's parlance, I was young, I didn't know any better. Mea maxima culpa.)

How elite a club?  Joe Henderson, who has been marathoning and writing about it since the late '60s, says it well:

If you really want to know where you stand, don't count how many runners finish ahead of you.  Instead, turn around and look behind you.  Look especially at the people you can't see: those who trained for a marathon and didn't reach the starting line . . . who race but not at this distance . . . who run but never race . . . who used to run but don't any more . . . who never ran and never will.  [. . .]  Being a marathoner make you one in a thousand Americans.  Pat yourself on the back for doing something that 99.9 per cent of your countrymen or women couldn't or wouldn't do.

Don't call yourself slow, because you are not. You are fast enough to beat everyone who isn't in the race.  (Marathon Training, 2nd ed. 2004, p. 10)

Nun Run

Some in the habit of running run in a habit.  Might be fun to run with a nun.

Up With Running Skirts

During my last road race, and as a runner who has long been open to callipygian inspiration, I spied something I had seen but once before: a female runner sporting a short skirt in lieu of the usual shorts. I thought to myself: Is this the beginning of a trend? Apparently it is.

Vive la différence!

With Whom Would You Rather Run?

No contest, right?  And she's faster than me!  She claims a sub-4 marathon (26.2 miles in under four hours).  On Thanksgiving 2009 it took me over an hour (1:07:37) to crank through a 10 K (6.2 miles).  My excuses?  It was unseasonably hot and I was 10 lbs overweight.  Plus I have no athletic talent.  I am powered by will alone

Like her, I favor ASICS gel running shoes: anima sana in corpore sano.

rundangerously

An interesting blog I came across while looking up some Kerouac images.  From the masthead: "pain or love or danger makes you real again. ... the dharma bums."  By a soi-disant obsessive runner with a strong interest in the Beat Generation.  May also be a chess player and a conservative as images in his sidebar suggest.  A good source of running links.

Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 25 years ago today, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.

Kerouac 5K

Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago.  She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self  her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74.  35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado:  I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman.  (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race.  Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia.  Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar.  Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:

 

Overheard at the 20 Mile Mark

"Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?"

(An interesting non-temporal use of 'now':  tokening it, the speaker is obviously not referring to the time of utterance, but to a distance.)

Asics

Why are Asics running shoes so called?  After purchasing a pair on Saturday I was pleased to discover that Asics is an acronym for anima sana in corpore sano.  The standard tag is mens sana in corpore sano (A sound mind in a sound body), but Msics doesn't quite make it acronym-wise.  I am not enough of a Latinist so say whether anima sana in corpore sano occurs in any classical author. 

If water is the philosopher's drink (Thoreau), and running the philosopher's sport, then Asics may be the philosopher's running shoe.  But the mileage on my Asics Gel-Nimbuses is still too low (8 miles) to say for sure.  So far, they seem very good in terms of stability and cushioning.

A good running maxim: "Trash your shoes before they trash you."  Frugality has its limits.

The Boston Marathon and the Return of "Boston Billy"

Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the  occasion of the 113th running of the Boston Marathon, the grandpappy of them all.  My mind drifts back to my own attempt 30 years ago in 1979.  Like Bill Rodgers in 1999, I dropped out at Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it.  I was running with a knee injury, chondromalacia patellae, having foolishly overtrained.  Not only did I mess up my knee training for Boston, I trashed my immune system: the following summer I got three infections which developed with no visible external cause.  One day, upon returning from a long hard training run, I urinated blood: a sure sign of working too hard.  Akrasia in reverse, one might call it: I got caught up in the flush of burgeoning running prowess and I failed to discipline my discipline.  Just as it sometimes takes courage to be a 'chicken,' it sometimes takes discipline to cut yourself slack.  The spirit is famously willing where the flesh is weak.  The theory of training can be summed up in one sentence: you tear yourself down in order to build yourself back up at a slightly higher level of fitness.  But plenty of rest is essential to the equation.  A little common sense and cross-training can't hurt either.

Age and prostate cancer have taken their toll on Rodgers, who is now 61.  He completed today's 26.2 mile race but it took him 3:59.  That averages to a bit more than 9 minutes per mile.  A far cry from the sub-5 minute miles of the glory days.  He is no longer competitive even in his age group.  But every finisher is a hero so long as he does his best.  And perhaps those whose pace is slower, because they suffer longer, are more heroic than the elite competitors.  As George Sheehan wrote when he was seventy-something,

. . . every finisher warrants applause, especially those farthest back.  How does their 95 percent effort differ from the winners'?  It doesn't -- not in pain, not in fatigue, not in shortness of breath.  In every respect, I race at the very edge of what I can handle, and I do it longer.  Those of us who ran along with the leaders in years past and are now in the bottom third of the finishers know this firsthand . . . . When I finish, I will stand at the end of the chute and watch as those who ran behind me come through.  And I'll see that all are spent, some near collapse.  No one has done less than their best.  And their best, in a real sense, is better than everyone who finished ahead of them.  They are winners and heroes all. (On Running to Win, Rodale 1992, p. 147.)

Running as Equalizer?

Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:

Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists.  We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race -- and thus in life -- is a measure of our moral fiber.  Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour.  The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more  appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out.  A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him.  Hard work matters.

In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't. 

It levels the disparities of class and status and income.  You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk.  You won't be asked and no one cares.  The road to Boston or Mt Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away.  One does not run to shmooze.  This is not golf.  Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'  

But in quest of one's 'personal best' the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself.  We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain.  In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see.  Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand -- or fall.

So although running flattens the socioeconomic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.

Easter Morn

The magic came at 6:25 AM.  I was 50 minutes into the run when conditions turned auspicious.  The fleshly vehicle, now properly stoked, rose to the occasion of some serious striding under the sign of a celestial conjunction:  the Moon, on the wane but still nearly full, was setting over Dinosaur Mountain just as  Old Sol began his ascent over the Superstitions.  The heavy rains of the day before had released the subtle scents of the desert.  Their dominant note was supplied by the tiny oily dark green leaves of the creosote bush.  The palo verdes were in bloom.  The body rose, but receded, to enable that peculiar awareness in which one is Emerson's "transparent eyeball" witnessing Santayana's realm of essence.  There seemed in that moment nothing better to be than a transparent transcendental eyeball running down a road.

Marathons Reduce Car Crash Deaths

It makes the news when a runner drops dead during a marathon, but it is not news when a motorist dies in a crash.  This contributes to the illusion that marathoning is dangerous when it is not, compared to other things we do on a daily basis such as pilot metallic behemoths at 70 miles per hour over roads crammed with coffee-drinking, hamburger-munching, map-reading, cell-phone yacking, text-messaging, makeup-applying, substance-abusing, radio-tuning, CD-grabbing, and yes (I've seen it from my high SUV perch) masturbating motorists.  According to this source:

Heart stoppage killed 26 marathoners during races in the U.S. over the past 30 years, but Donald A. Redelmeier, M.D., and J. Ari Greenwald, of the University of Toronto, found 46 fewer motor vehicle fatalities than expected while the races were underway.

"For each person who died from sudden cardiac death, we estimated a ratio of almost two lives saved from fatal crashes that would otherwise have occurred," they wrote in the Dec. 22 issue of the BMJ.

So when I race I not only maintain my fitness, prove that the strenuous life is best by test, battle the hebetude of the flesh, contribute (via entry fees) to worthy causes, celebrate life, commune with my fellow mortals in a manner that rubs our noses in our mortality and frailty, and what all else -- I also help reduce car crash deaths!

This Running Life: Sheehan Remembered

You cannot convey to the nonrunner the romance of the road any more than you can bring a spiritual slug to savor the exquisite joys of philosophy and chess.  But if you are a runner you should be able to appreciate the following passage from On Running, pp. 166-167.  George Sheehan (1918-1993) has been dead for some time now and it pains me that he is pretty much forgotten.  He was one of the pioneers along with Jim Fixx and Kenneth Cooper. The young runners I query haven't heard of him, and an old guy I talked to the other day at the starting line hadn't either.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  Here's the passage:

One of the beautiful things about running is that age has no penalties.  The runner lives in an eternal present.  The passage of time does not alter his daily self-discovery, his struggles and his sufferings, his pains and his pleasures. The decline of his ability does not interfere with the constant interchange between him, his solitude, and the world and everyone around him.  And neither of these happenings prevents him from challenging himself to the ultimate limit, putting himself in jeopardy, courting crisis, risking catastrophe.

Because he refuses to look back, the runner remains ageless.  That is his secret, that and the fact that his pursuit of running is in obedience to, in Ellen Glasgow's phrase, "a permanent and self-renewing inner compulsion."

In my 50s, I am aware of all this.  Like all runners, I live in the present.  I am not interested in the way we were.  The past is already incorporated in me.  There is no use returning to it.  I live for the day.  Running gives me self-expression, a way of finding out who I am and who I will be.  It makes me intimate with pain.  I know the feeling of too little oxygen, of too much lactic acid.  I have, always within reach, the opportunity to test my absolute barriers, to search out the borders set up by straining muscles and a failing brain.

 

Phantom Runners

I took up running almost 35 years ago in the summer of 1974 in that romantic hub of running, Boston on the Charles, the Athens of America, where Hopkinton is Marathon and the road to Athens traverses Heartbreak Hill. It was a great time and place to be alive, young, studying philosophy, and running down the road. ‘Boston Billy’ Rodgers was in his prime; I lived a couple of blocks from the Boston Marathon course, and my training runs took me around the Chestnut Hill reservoir and past Rodger’s running center at Cleveland Circle. I actually ran abreast of Rodgers once on Commonwealth Avenue. He was headed for the Boston College track, racing flats in his hands, to run intervals. (I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out how I could possibly have been abreast of a marathoner who won Boston one year running at a blistering 4:54 min/mile pace. No, he didn't overtake me, and of course I didn't overtake him.)

Ruminations After a Road Race; Philippians 4:13

The following was written 19 February 2006.  This year I did better, achieving a personal best for this course, completing it in 2:23.  That's nothing to crow about, but without us rank-and-file pavement pounders, the real runners would not shine in all their glory.

..................

This morning I had occasion once again to verify the proposition that the strenuous life is best by test, but also the proposition that I am not much of a runner: it took me 2:26 to jog through the 13.1 mile Lost Dutchman half-marathon course. But we do the best we can with what we've got, and given my age, modest training base, and paucity of fast-twitch fibers, I am more than satisfied. I have never regretted any road race, hike, backpacking trip, or indeed any Jamesian 'strenuosity' whether physical, mental, moral, or spiritual. We are simply not made for sloth but for exertion, with Hegel's Anstrengung des Begriffs as important as any. Whatever the reason, experience teaches that we are most happy when active, or better, when actuating our powers, including our powers of contemplative repose.

Don't Say 'Turkey Day'

Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.

With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991.  Today is the first case of cold and rainy weather.  But I am thankful for the rain since it will 'inspire' me to run faster and harder.  I will run as if the Grim Reaper (the ultimate Repo man) is right behind me with the scythe of hypothermia at the ready.

UPDATE (11/28):  The rain let up  before the 9 AM starting gun went off.  My official time: 1:05:15.  A shamefully slow time especially given that I lost 23 lbs for this event.  In mitigation, I plead the fact that I went on a mere 19 training runs in preparation for the race beginning on September 7th.  That, age, and a paucity of fast-twitch fibers add up to my being no favorite of the goddess of running.  Nevertheless, I remain her humble acolyte.