The Logic of Long Distance

"... 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...

It seems to me that there have been two primary types of reactions to this week's school shooting in Newtown as people struggle to make sense of this awful event. The first is a secular reaction: many people look to make sense of it in terms of certain social, cultural, or psychological problems. The cause of the massacre is our access to and infatuation with guns. Or perhaps it was a case of a mental illness inappropriately diagnosed and dealt with. This sort of explanation of the event turns us to re-examine our failures as a society and leads us to political debates about how to restructure society or certain policies in order to eliminate or reduce the chance of this happening again. The second sort of reaction is a religious reaction. I have seen just as many people speaking about this event as an instance of pure evil, as evidence of our fallen condition, and of the original sin that will always plague humanity. The cause of the massacre is explained as a consequence of hum...

First off, apologies for the delay in posting. I have a good excuse, maybe the best excuse, as my daughter was born a little over two weeks ago. Since then I've been too caught up in life to reflect on it. I have been able to get out for a few runs, and man is it nice.  One of my philosophical friends who is a mother herself, sent me this John Dewey quote when she heard of our good news, which I thought was nice: "A baby in the family is equal with others, not because of some antecedent and structural quality which is the same as that of others, but in so far as his needs for care and development are attended to without being sacrificed to the superior strength, possessions and matured abilities of others. Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or physical equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted for another. It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological ineq...