The Logic of Long Distance

From a message board, a response to a buddy, looking for a reason to run. Whatever. There are no tricks. Run because you have to. Run because you love it. Run because you want to be fast. Run because you want to be skinny. Run to find some quiet time. Run to sweat. Run to eat. Run hear your heart pound in your ears. Run because you're a runner. Run because you gotta keep the streak. Run because you don't know why the hell you're running. Run because you fought with your partner. Run because your job is shitty. Run because you got no money. Run for the sunrise. Run for a race. Run because it's impossible. Run because it's easy. Run instead of doing the laundry. Run instead of watching TV. Run because no one else understands. Run because the cool kids do it. Run because you're tired of talking. run for numbers. Run for feel. Run to prove something. Run because it fucking hurts. Or don't run. If you got something better to do.

What is "running by feel?" I think there are three related features to this approach to training: 1. "Primary experience" is privileged over "secondary experience." What does this mean? It means that when there is a conflict between the immediate experience of running and the reflective experience of thinking about running, the immediate experience is given priority. For example, I might decide after reflecting on my running that what's best for me to do tomorrow is to 8 x 800 at 10k pace. I head to the track and try the first one at 10k pace and struggle to make it. The immediate experience is telling me that this pace is too fast. Instead of clinging to the idea that I have to run 10k pace, I back off and listen to the primary experience of the workout. The reverse is sometimes, also, fortunately true. We can have good days and beat our expectations. For running by feel, the "problem" of training is always to bring the secondary experience ...

Emerson wrote this in "The American Scholar" : The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. In these words, we find an early compelling account of the idea of exper...

This NYTimes article on cosmology headed the "most emailed" list for a few hours this morning. I think that this graphic explains the view best. The article's position on this popularity list raises a couple of questions. First, how is it that scientists could hold such a strange view of the universe? And second, why do readers of the New York Times care so much (at least this morning) about this totally strange view? My problem with Boltzmann's Brain theory (which basically suggests that the probability that we are brains in vats is much higher than the probability that our ordinary commonsense world exists) is that it is not an empirical theory, but a mathematical one. It starts with an idea, the notion that matter is basically a collection of atoms sitting in empty space, and then sets out to ask whether or not our current universe is consistent with that idea. Well, when it turns out that our universe and the original idea aren't too compatible, the react...

Since my last (and first!) entry, I've taken a step forward in my writing and a step back in my running. Strangely, the step backwards is more easily recognized as progress than the step forward. I made it through the Flying Monkey Marathon with a second place finish and a harder-than-it-should-have-been 2:58:17. Since then, I've run twice, and basically have decided that it will be in my best long term interests to lay off of "training" and just run when I feel like it until the end of the year. Let my body get strong and healthy and make another run at a fast marathon in April. After I finished the Monkey, I wrote the first chapter of the dissertation. The main idea behind the chapter is to show how the three concepts of education, experience, and experimentation relate to each other in the context of thinking about the value of values. I struggle a bit trying to pull together the style of my writing with the content that I would like to express. This is something ...

Run a fast marathon. Write a dissertation. The two goals for the next year. I thought I'd track my own progress here for myself and for family and friends that want to follow along. We'll see how it goes. I'm working now on the first chapter of the dissertation. The challenge is setting up the context for my ideas about the nature of experience, experimentalism, and a social view of education. The key figures in the dissertation will be William James and John Dewey, and their ideas will be supplemented by more contemporary folks like Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Cornell West, and Paulo Friere. The basic idea behind the dissertation is that if we properly understand the nature of experience, then we understand ourselves as educational beings. The task of building democracy means building institutions and ways of thinking that allow folks to take education into their own hands. This is the meaning of autonomy--to be able to play a part in the making of one...

It really hit me when I was planning out when and where I would be so that my family could scope out their spectating routes (yes, they are awesome). Start at 7am. Mile 2.5 around 7:15. Mile 7 around 7:42. Mile 14 around 8:24. Mile 21 around 9:06. Finish around 9:37. It seemed so precise, but how was I to know with such accuracy the effect of the 1000+ miles I had put on my legs since my last attempt at the distance? Any number of things could go wrong, and yet here I was planning out a schedule as if I were a subway train, programmed to run by the clock. Trains don't even run on schedule--how, then, this mass of sinew, flesh, and bone? I shrugged and gave them their schedules. They seemed unperplexed. Maybe it was possible. Friday night. After three months of serious training. Finally. I slept well until birds out my window woke me at 4am. I lay in bed until 5 and got up. The morning was cool, damp, and gray. I slipped into my running shorts. I made some coffee, ate a Clif bar a...