The Logic of Long Distance

Common sense tends to oppose work and play. We associate play with something like entertainment--momentary immersion that may be satisfying temporarily but doesn't lead with necessity in any direction. We consider play valuable in itself, but a waste of time in terms of other life functions. We associate work with something like drudgery--boring or painful labor in pursuit of a distant but necessary end ($). We consider work to be a hardship in itself, but valuable in terms of other life functions. This way of considering play and work leaves little space for dignified human activity. It divides life into moments of distracted entertainment that lead nowhere and periods of unsatisfying labor carried on under the compulsion of ends that are external to the activity itself. In Democracy and Education , John Dewey rethinks the relation between play and work. He asserts that both play and work seek results; both are oriented towards ends. The primary difference between the two ...

Kingsport used to host NASCAR races at the Speedway Kingsport, Tennessee is probably the last place that you would believe the world's fastest 8k is run. This is NASCAR and football country. Distance running, as a spectator sport, is practically dead in the U.S. It's written off as boring. Dominated by nameless Africans. We are told again and again that it lacks the violence and commercial breaks necessary to be interesting for the American fan. But race director Hank Brown has somehow figured out a way to bring out the whole town of Kingsport to watch these nameless Africans fly around the streets of this small northeast Tennessee town. Crazy 8s is a night race, with a start time of 9:58pm, so it's either stay the night after the race in Kingsport or drive back in the early hours of the morning.  Though I am nowhere near the level of the truly elite runners in this race, the race was kind enough to give me a hotel room and free entry for the race.   The accommodati...

It is popular these days (and attractive to us runners) to believe that humans are born to run and that running is a natural practice that somehow lies prior to culture or is at least shared across cultures. Of course Chris MacDougall makes this case most vividly in the book Born to Run by connecting running with two things: the ancient "pre-civilized" culture of the Tarahumara and the remarkably fertile image of the bare foot. He gives us a picture of running as something at least in principle raw, pre-consumer, and innate. These qualities of running, especially as practiced by this primitive tribe, make it a possible practice of liberating ourselves from a decadent, insulated, sedentary Western consumer culture. The bare foot is a particularly potent sign for this liberation. It is a double image. A bare foot reminds us of two contrasting feelings at the same time: the stinging pain of stepping on a sharp gravel  and  the bliss of digging the toes into soft and dewy ...

First off, check out this  stellar 2008 review of the cult classic Once a Runner  by Marc Tracy. The book was given to me when I was 17. It was a gift from a girl. Back then (before the internet when things were harder to replicate and books were physical objects) the book was out of print. This copy had obviously been handed around from person to person before it got to me. It felt like the book found me as much as I found it. The writing is cheesy and adolescent, but I was cheesy and adolescent, and it spoke to me. It's set in the late 70s and the book paints runners as neither hippies nor squares, but folks who simply opt out of the stale culture wars. By then everyone knew that the hippy movement was going nowhere and that the square mainstream culture was pretty much going nowhere either. Both the culture and the counterculture were sorta dead. The culture war was over; nobody won. So what's a young person with energy supposed to do with himself, without politics, ...