The Logic of Long Distance

[Editor's note:]   I had just put on my flats for that most glorious of runner's runs, the October morning tempo. The brilliant fall leaves out my window brought to mind the flashing of spikes and the copper taste of hard effort that we runners associate with the season. I opened the door and was slammed by the stench of stale whisky. There was a bottle laying there with a note stuffed inside. In the bushes were scattered loose papers. Apparently the good doctor RVT had dropped by during his daily stupor and left me a gift. I picked up the bottle, shook out the note, and deciphered the scrawl: "If Weldon and Robert are too shaken by our Fear fiasco where we had to tell Various lawyers to climb back in their ambulances and read up on Defamation law, we can always shop this piece down our Purple Cow pipeline to fellow Eph Tim Layden at Sports Illustrated.   I'm sure they have a battery of lawyers bigger than Penn State's attorneys in the Paterno pool." ...

The following piece is written by Andy Anderson, who is a climbing ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. Andy set a new fastest known time up Long's Peak last summer, and last week he took almost four more minutes off that time and broke the ascent record, which had stood since 1982. The official stats: 1:56:46 for the round trip, 1:14:08 up, 42:38 down. You can read more about the history of the record here .  Andy has been nice enough to provide us a view from the inside of that run. --LLD Update: Andy broke the Grand Teton round trip record yesterday (8/22). Here's his interview about that record. *  *  * Ah, 6:30 am on a Wednesday morning, my last day off and I am awake before my 2 year old son. Not only did he sleep all night, but the neighbors also took a night off from the 2am disco parties they have been having all summer. A good night sleep was had by all. "Daddy! Huck's awake! Ready to get up! Want to eat strawberry yogurt!" comes piping...

[ Editor's note. ] There has been some confusion about the reality of Dr. RVT after his last piece . I'm getting sick of the strung out groupies knocking on my door at 2am. So, let me make this clear. I can't say more, but I can assure you that RVT is fully real, and that I'm not him.  I was able to convince him to take some time out from his roaming in France to respond to the Letsrun message board junkies and give us his scoop on the tour. The fax came in this morning. * * * Boyo, was I in for a kick-in-the-nuts surprise when I emerged from my night out in Metz with Bob and Phil only to find the Letsrun message board playing host to the selection committee for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize .  I had a bad enough headache from the absinthe that Phil foisted upon me, claiming it was a real "panty-dropper" for the ladies traipsing after him on the Tour de Farce.  At his age, he better be glad Le Dopage Controlle doesn't come after his V...

If Dr. HST were an athlete, he'd have been a distance runner. This piece is based on some true events. However, it has been fictionalized. The “facts” in this piece have no bearing on any fact, living or dead. Read and draw conclusions at your own risk. Some assembly required. Batteries not included. [ Editor’s note :] I woke this morning and found a thick manila envelope jammed under my front door. Across it was scrawled:  “Still alive. Here’s the report as you ordered. Pay me in Vegas.”  --Dr. RVT.  I thought there must have been some confusion, but I opened the envelope to find some ragged and coffee-stained papers. I knew they had found their way to me for a reason. This is what they said. * * * I was ten kilometers from Eugene when the lactic acid began to take hold.  I was used to the stuff inside my body during track sessions, but this was something wholly other.  A nefarious doctor from the suspect and secretive ...

The following is a guest post by new contributor Nader Abadir. He has his own blog, Sneakers and Books , which reflects on his religion and running. Check it out. You will enjoy this one. * * * I don’t like to admit it, but I started running to lose weight. Worse yet, I got past the initial hurdles because I was captivated by the story of a famous “Ultramarathon Man.” Worst of all, I picked up that book because the dude on the cover was ripped. I suppose these are “admissions” because I’d feel cooler if a Zenish statement -- like “Runners run.” -- had applied to me all along. Like many new, middle-aged runners, I was active as a kid. I played organized baseball into my teens. I never hit for power, but was always proud of my speed. Mookie Wilson, Vince Coleman, Tim Raines, Lenny Dykstra, Rickey Henderson; these were the guys that got me excited. I had never heard the names Pre, Kennedy, or Rogers. “Salazar” evoked “Luis.” From about age 14, my afternoons, weekends and ni...

LLD is happy to present a guest post from friend Zach VanderVeen, author of The Garden of Forking Paths blog on database design and philosophy. Zach has written a couple of posts before . Hope you enjoy! The unity of achievement and enjoyment, of competence and consummation, is just one aspect of a central wholeness to which running restores us. Good running engages mind and body. Here the mind is more than an intelligence that happens to be housed in a body. Rather the mind is the sensitivity and the endurance of the body. --Albert Borgmann I recently wrote a post , in which I suggested that the problem with technology is that it can drown out important kinds of reflection. We often focus on how to get things done faster and more efficiently, not why we should do so. We separate the journey from the destination, or the means from the ends. But it's easy to complain about technology without showing how we can free ourselves from the tyranny of efficiency. Even if we were al...

In case you haven't noticed, I've been farming out the blog recently to some of my favorite running-philosophers. This is because I've been traveling all summer, and posting presently from Paraguay. (In 2009, I wrote a series of "dispatches" from Paraguay for those who are interested in what life is like down here. Here's one on running that you might like . ) Vacation and travel make it difficult to continue with your regular habits--my writing and running have both been erratic. But it's for this very reason that we need to travel, to break up those old habits and allow some newness to leak in. The tendency is to think that travel and vacation are supplementary to ordinary life, but of course the familiarity of ordinary life would be mere routine without strange and new experiences. In the very same way, I hope that the inclusion of these guest pieces are not merely supplemental, but that they give you a break from my voice and perspective. They certainl...

LLD: The following is another guest post from Scout. His first post, How to Run Like a Stoic , remains one of the most popular on the blog. Here, Scout takes up some of the same themes but looks more explicitly at some common issues in training. I think you will enjoy his straightforward and clear-thinking style and find his advice useful. Without further ado...  I see the same questions come up again and again... - "What pace should I run my race/training at?" - "How do I avoid bonking in training/racing?" - "Am I going to slow/fast/hard/easy?" It seems to me that a number of people seem to base their racing and training plans on some sort of fear, and this fear stems from a perception of failure. People are afraid of failing in their training and racing. Which makes me wonder, what exactly constitutes this fear of failure in training and racing? Fear of injury is most obvious; people hold back in training and racing out of a concern of get...

The following piece is a guest post by "Scout7," a sporadic but long time poster on the Running Ahead message boards . I asked Scout to do this piece for two reasons. First, he is not a philosopher by training, but I have always found his insights on running to be philosophical--mindful of the place of running within the larger ethical task of living life well. Second, his posts on training and running on Running Ahead have helped me think more intelligently about how to train and have influenced my own running philosophy. I believe both of these reasons will be evident in what he has written below. Enjoy! " First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.   "                      -- Epictetus Epictetus was a slave. His philosophy, not ironically, was a practice of freedom. Jeff asked me if I would mind writing a guest post for his blog, and of course I agreed.  I mean, why not?  How h...

A guest contribution by Zach V, aspiring runner and one-time philosopher. One of the things I like most about running is that there are as many reasons to run as there are runners. For those who like to geek out, there’s gear that will track your every move via satellite and automatically update your cloud-based running log, while minimalists can run without even buying shoes. There’s a 5k at a place near you whenever you are feeling competitive. If you want to lose weight, six miles at a ten-minute pace will burn 680 calories. If you can't catch a ball, you can still enjoy the experience of a team sport. At the same time, running is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get away from it all. I think running illuminates what Freud called the “polymorphous perversity” of desire. Maybe the word “perverse” is a little strong, but the idea is that people can get their jollies in lots of different ways. Forget your cartoon image of Freud—the uptight Austrian with a mother fixa...