The Logic of Long Distance

Rod Dixon "Happiness is the activity of the soul expressing complete virtue." -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics "All I want to do is drink beer and train like an animal." --Rod Dixon, great Kiwi runner Last night I watched the great sports documentary The Two Escobars . It's a must see for anyone interested in the intense and troubled relation between sports and society. In a prior post discussing the Lance Armstrong case , I wrote that part of what made his case so enthralling and ultimately tragic is the blurring of the lines between sport and life. The Two Escobars  tells that tale again, marking over and over again how the clean, crisp, well-refereed, and meritocratic space of the soccer field provided escape from the turmoil and violence and uncertainty of Colombian life. Then, how awfully and inexorably, the value of that space as a moment of escape became so great that it was consumed by the very forces that it initially was created to escape. ...

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?" So begins Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals . I happen to be teaching this book now, so I am re-reading it for perhaps the fourth time, and like all great books, it deepens and expands with each re-reading. Nietzsche has many targets of criticism in the Genealogy , but the one that he mentions first is our relationship with knowledge. One of the fundamental goals of philosophical reflection (or maybe we should just say plain old thinking ) is the old Socratic dictum: "Know thyself." Self-knowledge is a key to good living. In order to achieve what makes us happy in life, we need to know at least at some basic level what makes us happy. Ouch! But the self turns out not to be so easy to know. There are any number of impediments to self-knowledge, and you don't need a PhD in philosophy to know the p...

"... the universal impulse to believe , that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." -- R.W. Emerson, "Experience" Not belief, but the impulse to believe. Not our precious and polished knick knacks of thought, cluttering the house of the mind. Not the desire to be happier, faster, fitter. Instead -- the gut that yanks us out, over and against the plans of our better selves. Not the goals that we have, not the PRs we've run, but the thrill in the neck, the ache in the hamstrings, the sideways glance to hold him off, or to die. Not the workout on paper, not the feeling of completion. Not the endless entries in the training log. The sand in your shoulders at the end of a race. Not the setting of the alarm clock, not the morning coffee. The weak winter sunrise, the breath in the air, the wet and frozen dew. Not the training philosophies, not the books and coaches and blogs and message board bull. Not the mil...

What is an easy run? Well, most basically, it's a run that's easy to accomplish. It's the backbone of training. It's the run that makes every other run possible. For some runners, this is all that needs to be said. But for a lot of other runners, especially new runners or runners who are entering a new stage of fitness, the concept of "easy" can be somewhat elusive. Heck, if you are really out of shape, there's no such thing as an easy run because nothing feels easy. That said, I think there are a few things I can say about easy running that will help new runners and experienced runners alike, mostly because I think that most people -- believe it or not -- can do their easy running better. The place to start when looking to understand what an easy run is and how it works in training is to think about what it's not. An easy run is not a workout, which means that it's not a couple more things: it's not structured or planned or focused...

A guy I know and respect once told me: quit worrying about writing something deep and interesting, just write more. That thought pretty much got this blog rolling. Here's a post in that spirit! Here's an interesting short video on the life of a professional runner, Ryan Vail. He does his best to make it seem really boring. But I guess in the end what makes folks like Vail admirable is that somehow they have made this really boring thing into something that they can pay attention to and thrive on. It's a kind of ascetic triumph that would impress, say, Nietzsche but also make him ask why the heck for? What's in store for the blog this year? I am not so sure. I am hoping to get my training ramped back up, as I fell off the wagon for good reasons over the last couple of months. I am reminding myself in these early out of shape days "how it works."  Also, LLD's friends at I  HEART to Run have created some shirts with some of my words on them. I think t...

It's with more than a bit of hesitation that I offer some thoughts on the news of the day in the running world. The tendency to analyze the lives of people we do not know seems to me to be one of the most odious tendencies in contemporary culture -- it reduces lives which are always more complex than they seem and usually more incomprehensible than we would like to admit to simple and usually quite stupid narratives. But I guess at a certain point, famous people are reduced to simple narratives. This is the price of fame. Before you read this, I'd encourage you to read this piece written by Brooks Johnson, " But for the gRACE OF GOD. " He actually knew Suzy as a person and athlete. *  *  * "Fear? If I have gained anything at all by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear." --J. P. Sartre Can you imagine what it takes to be the top runner in the country? To stand on the line and beat all comers? To not just be good, but to be ...

On the message boards at RunningAhead, there have been a ton of recent threads about the new Hanson's Marathon Method , most of them comparing it with Pfitz' "old reliable" Advanced Marathoning.  One of the smartest posters on the board (the guy solves Rubik's Cubes while marathoning) bhearn put together a comparison of the different marathon approaches that is truly excellent. If you are looking to get more intelligent about your marathon training, bhearn's summary of the similarities and differences in these two fundamentally sound approaches wouldn't be the worst place to start. The most interesting aspect of bhearn's analysis is his comparison of the total mileage done at various intensities in the two plans over the course of a training cycle. He breaks it down in terms of the classic physiological moments of VO2max, Lactic Threshold, and MP (sometimes called Aerobic Threshold.) I am stealing his chart and pasting it below: Hansons Pfitzinge...