The Logic of Long Distance

Here is the last paragraph of Thoreau's "Life Without Principle." It's a little long -- Thoreau takes his sauntering seriously -- but worth the attention: Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra -human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confi...

I want to talk about John Freeman today. On a horribly beautiful April morning, not unlike this Monday, the top runner and team captain of the cross-country team that I coached was hit by a train and killed. Running had saved his life before he lost it. As a ninth grader, like many, John had been struggling in school. The running helped him with his attention, and it gave him an identity at the school. By his senior year, he was one of the school's best athletes, an honor roll student, and had been accepted to a top university in the Northeast. He was going to try to walk-on the team. When I heard of the bombing at the Boston marathon, thoughts of John surged up from the deep places. The memories are too clear. His family invited me to the hospital to say goodbye before they stopped the respirator. I stood there with his mother and his father and thought of how the runner's heart in his chest continued to beat blood through his damaged brain. Running had made me a part of...

Runners are more than familiar with pain. It's our bread and butter. We love to hurt. We believe in endurance, in suffering, in brutal and soul-withering work. But ours is not a violent sport. See, there's a difference between pain and violence. Violence violates. You see it so clearly in what happened today. The morning showed pain as triumph and pain as failure. The suffering carved out on the face of Dulce Felix (what a sweet name) as her legs no longer worked, as her glory faded into defeat, as the marathon gods smote her for believing too much, for wanting too much, was noble suffering. The suffering of loss, but sensible loss, human loss. This sort of loss was not a violation because all it risked was victory -- such a small thing in the grand scheme. Sweet happiness led the race, and then faded. Such is life. It requires endurance. With Jeptoo we saw strength overcoming pain. We saw her, after 24 miles of hard running, run harder. We saw the glory of a healthy body...

I had been on a good run of posts -- a couple years I really hit my goal of writing weekly, but for the last month I have just not really been feeling it in terms of the old blogaroo. I think there's a lot of good content on the blog, so I hope you will keep browsing through, maybe re-read a piece or two. I make no future promises about the blog for now: I hope to return posting more frequently. Here's a quick one for the road. *  *  * "In the writings of a hermit one always hears something of the echo of desolate regions, something of the whispered tones and furtive look of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still vibrates a new and dangerous kind of silence -- of burying something in silence. When a man has been sitting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year out, day and night; when in his cave -- it may be a labyrinth or gold mine -- he has become a cave bear or a treasure digger or a treasure guard or ...

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...