Okay... I know what you're all thinking. Where the hell have I been?!
As some of my teammates still in college know, the end of the semester can be a real pinch. It is also an incredibly busy time for the professors. I mean, I have to think of a bunch of tedious, time-consuming assignments to make my student's lives hell. It's not easy. Trust me.
I ran the Mendon Ponds 15k yesterday. I was a little concerned about the race. The week before last, I only put in two days of training. I had a pretty decent swim on Monday and then started my bike workout Tuesday evening at 9:00 p.m. Yup, I was riding until 10:30 p.m. Lovely. That was apparently just enough to send my immune system into a tailspin. I did zero running that week. Zero. By Sunday, I felt a little better and put in a nice ten mile run with Coach Mary and a few of her athletes.
Mendon Ponds is hilly—really hilly. Luckily, I felt pretty decent. I was just so happy to be out there running with the sun shining that I barely noticed that I was putting in a pretty decent effort. I was happy with my 1:16:08 (8:10) pace. A ouple of times during the race I got a little lazy running down one of the big hills after working hard to get up that I allowed my foot to cross over and scrape my opposite ankle. It stung a little, but I really did not think anything of it until I looked down after the race and saw this:
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| Lovely, eh? |
Who knew sneakers at high velocities could become a dangerous weapon?
Last night, I sat up writing this post and attempted to upload my Garmin data. Where are you Garmin data?! Ugh. I have to call Garmin today and figure out where it went and why my watch suddenly stopped communicating with my computer. Curse you technology!
I know I missed last week. I will try to catch up this week with the Friday Top Five.
The Friday Top Five: My Five Favorite Books
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: This was a game changer for me on so many levels. I read this book again while finishing my dissertation and it reaffirmed the fact—for me—that I can argue a ham sandwich if I need to. I think this text should be passed out at birth for everyone to read before their eighteenth birthday. It discusses the classical/romantic divide, and subjectivity and objectivity in aesthetics. I feel so strongly that this is a book that everyone should read, that I have actually purchased copies of this text for friends and colleagues.
The book resonates for me on a different level as well. About a year before my father passed, I lent him my copy of the book and asked him if he would read it. My father and I never really talked about books, music, or aesthetics. He had very little understanding of my world, and I had even less of his. I am a composer and musician and my father was a tool maker. For years, we would have conversations about the sole common denominator between us: the New York Yankees.
My father read the book, and as he was reading it, we had some of the most beautiful conversations that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
2. Harold and the Purple Crayon: I read this book for the first time when I read it to my son Luca. Children are funny about books. They could read the same ones over and over and not get bored of them. Oddly, I never got tired of reading this book either. The book ends with Harold drawing his sheets over his bed (literally with his purple crayon), and then falling asleep.
3. Born to Run: Oddly enough, I am a huge fan of the Springsteen album released back in 1975 by the same name. For me, Born to Run was important in in validating the important fact that humans are made to move. The author—Christopher McDougall—goes to great lengths discussing the historical and physiological evidence to prove that human beings are indeed running animals. McDougall somehow manages to write a concise narrative addressing the commodity factor of running shoe sales, anthropological study of the run, and an ongoing narrative about the Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Madre's in Mexico.
4. Morton Feldman Says: There have been a lot of important books relating to composers, the craft of composition, the discussion of aesthetics, form and process. I have read a lot of them. None of them were as profoundly important in shaping my philosophy of composition as this collection of interviews and essays with the American iconic composer, Morton Feldman. Perhaps some of his contemporaries—John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez (to name a few) enjoyed more validation as composers in their lifetime, but I find Feldman's philosophy on music to be the most refreshing and post-modern. He freely admitted that there were times when he looked back after finishing a work that he had no idea how he created it. He could not speak about the large-scale form, or the collection of pitches and timbre he used from the instruments. He worked solely by intuition. The important thing I took away from this is that I do not have to always answer how or why I create my art—it just is.
5. The Little Engine that Could: A classic. There are still times when I am out there on a long run that I remember that book. It is a story told in many longer —and not as well-conceived narratives—about the power of the "human" spirit and the drive to continue in the face of insurmountable odds.
Training is going pretty well. Coach Mary said that my swim test time improved, although I am hardly buying it.
Okay, more soon. Train Smart!
"Winners are not those who never fail, but those who never quit."
Whether you agree with Christopher McDougall's assertion that the modern running shoe is solely (pun intended) born out of corporate greed, increase running related injuries, and will lead inevitably to the downfall of western civilization—I personally believe it will be the world's steadily growing addiction to social networking sites—you should consider the main premise of the book to be worthwhile, i.e. human beings are physiologically 'hardwired' to run. Not only are humans decent runners, but no other mammal on the planet is equipped with the long-term endurance capacity that we have inherited from our primordial ancestors. Okay, the running shoes will long be debated. I know runners who love their shoes, have run tens of thousands of miles in them, and have gone their entire lives without ever sustaining an injury. Of course, for me, it is very convincing that some of the greatest track coaches in the United States make their athletes practice barefooted at least part of the time. What I am convinced with—wholeheartedly—is that we are all born to run.
The proof came to me fairly early in life. While I was a 25-year old graduate student at Ithaca College, I would ride my canary yellow Giant ATX 760 up South Hill to the music department. It was a good 2 mile climb. It wasn't Boulder, Colorado, but it was still a nice little ride that accelerated my heart rate and woke me up on many frosty fall and winter mornings. I had a lot of energy to burn. Most of my time was spent in front of a piano either writing or learning music. One time, I walked outside the music department on a unusually warm October afternoon and just had this overwhelming urge to run. I had just finished practicing and was on my way across the quad to grab some lunch when I broke into a little trot. Perhaps I am just an impatient human being, but I just want to get places quickly. When I started teaching at the university, I would run everywhere I need to go.
I could be sporting khakis and dress shoes with back pack in tow, and I would still run just about everywhere. It always made me feel great to just go! Even now, if I go to the grocery store, I will park a little further away so that I can run. Crazy, right? These days, I almost invariably wear my New Balance running shoes everywhere I go. I think it is pretty normal to want to run. Wouldn't it be cool if everyone just started running more often—to work, the grocery store, school, away from five children. Kidding. What is interesting, and telling, is that my kids all run around during the summer like Kenyan runners on Red Bull. Why is that? I think humans do not learn how to run, they learn how to slow down and walk. We tell our children to slow down. Well, I seldom do, unless they are running around the house threatening to break any of the luxury items that we might own, you know piano, okay... piano.
Timex Triathlon Race Trainer Kit: I will be writing an extensive review of the Time Triathlon Race Trainer Kit. I want to thank the nice people at Timex and Tristan Panasik who sent me the kit—per FTC regulations—to review on my blog. Adam and I are still doing some tests that we will finish up this morning with our 1:30 brick workout (50 minute bike, 30 minute run.) Did I mention we are in day two of Ironman training? Wahoo!
Get out there!
Few books have left a profound and lasting influence on my life. If I were to list those that have, and place them on a shelf in my library effectively dubbed "Life Changers," it would seem that the curator would be suffering from a severe case of attention deficit—if you believe in ADD (but that is a topic for another post)—and/or multi-personality disorder. Among the few that I would list as having left an indelible impact are The Little Engine That Could, Moby Dick, Morton Feldman Says, The Giving Tree and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I can now certainly add Christopher McDougall's book, Born to Run to that short list.
When I was doing my course work for my PhD, a composition professor of mine once asked "can you think about all the musical compositions that you like, from different historical eras, that represent disparate musical vocabularies [a la Josquin des Prez to Radiohead] that you think work—for whatever reason—and find similarities between these?" I think the question he was was really asking is 'Why do you like what you like?' There are chord progressions in Handel that remind me of Jamaroqui. The descending chromatic figure (passacaglia) in "Dido's Lament" from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas and the one in Radiohead's Exit Music (For A Film), are both filled with a barren, austere, gut-wrenching sense of loss I find honest and sincere. Coincidentally, the latter was heavily inspired by Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor. Still, that does not really explain what I like about the music. It only explains that I like two different pieces that share a common musical parameter, the passacaglia: a bass line that continually pervades the entire fabric of the composition; think Freddy Mercury and David Bowie's Under Pressure (or the later bastardized Vanilla Ice rip off Ice Ice Baby.)
Now, If I think what I like about all my favorite aforementioned texts, it is that there are some deep philosophical, and moral questions at work. Every one of the texts, from The Little Engine That Could to Born to Run are more than stories. Much more. They examine life, question objectivity, and make us vulnerable in ways that leave us to confront our own transgressions.
Look, I am not one for hero-worship, or discussing something using glowing , or panegyric rhetoric in order to convince anyone to read a book. Well, that is not entirely true. When I feel passionate about something, I usually pester the hell out of everyone I know before they read, eat, drink, participate in something that I think is wonderful, and I want them to experience for themselves. Pushy? A tad, perhaps. I blame it on my Italian upbringing. I am a first generation Italian-American and grew up in a family where my mother was always feeding every friend who came over to the house, despite the fact many times we were returning to my house at dinner time just after having eaten a bucket of chicken wings, and a large pizza.
McDougall's writing, walks the incredibly magical line of being both incredibly entertaining and unbelievably informative—not surprising considering he served as a war correspondent for the Associated Press. He writes in an unassuming, humble way, using both common-man colloquialisms and an Ivy League caliber vocabulary to a share a story one of the most unique underground cultures that I have ever read about—the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. But the book does not start and end there. Along the way, McDougall takes you on a journey that investigates the genesis of "running shoes" in America by Bill Bowerman, Pat Knight and the Nike machine and the ultrarunning phenomenon.
Ironically, about a year ago, I got into a pretty heated debate with my nephew Nicholas—a 26 year old climber who like me, documents his psychosis for all to scrutinize—about the relatively "fringe" trend of barefoot running that has been cropping up since around 2002. He argued that running with running shoes with arch support, 'shocks,' pronation support, and all the other bells and whistles are actually causing injury from weakening the foot and causing human beings to run heel to toe, instead of the way that nature intended—from the fleshy part of the ball of our feet. His evidence? Watch your kids run outside without shoes during the summer. Do they run on their heels or on the balls of their feet? McDougall brings some other inconvenient truths to light as well. One that we all know. I don't recall where I read it now, but "In order for an object to retain currency, [it]—the commodity in question—must remain current." Ah, yes, corporate greed again. And yet, we the masses go out in droves to purchase bottled water, and expensive running shoes. Odd. My take in part deux.
Coming Up: Born to Run, Part II
Review: Timex Ironman Race Trainer Kit with Heart Monitor
Happy Training Friends!
