A little too much is just enough for me

Epigram attributed to Isadora Duncan, the dancer. Like "moderation in all things, including moderation," this manifesto is a kind of corollary or counterweight to MacKenzie's Laws (see Archives, April) for making you "stronger as you go along" in running or your sport of choice. But I digress. I think Isadora was more interested in the momentary sensation than the long-run consequences.

But the important thing is to keep moving, paraphrasing Anthony Burgess, who said the important thing is to keep writing, which I also firmly believe. So when I obey my own Commandment about cross-training (see Archives, June), and I actually follow through on a grueling day of copyediting and style guide meetings in an air-conditioned office, taiji in the park, hardship after hardship, and go for a jog up the bike trail in a quiet Ohio suburb, I'm practicing what I preach. And living the regulated life, I feel good and righteous about it.

Somehow I think I've veered away from Isadora's version. The way it unfolded the other day...no wait, I really have to go back at least a week to provide the context. I did a "dues-paying run" on Tuesday and felt like hell. (Addendum to MacKenzie's Laws: Some days you feel energized from the get-go, and you can feel a natural rhythm carry you down the trail; other days you never find a rhythm, and you just have to pay your dues and endure.) I probably ran farther or faster than I should have, or took too many days off, or not enough. But because of having run badly on Tuesday, I ran better on Thursday and felt stronger.

For me, at this stage of my somatic/athletic life, this was kind of a breakthrough, so I celebrated with a tall gin and tonic. It's part of the cool-down process: drink water, change clothes, and stretch - preferably while listening to music, in this case Neil Young's "Decades" (greatest hits), the high points being "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold" and "Even Richard Nixon has got soul" and other classics of the earthy-peacenik-rock genre. Then, after the excessively sedentary day, the excessively pushing-the-envelope run, and the excessively euphoric endorphin rush, only then does the double shot of Gordon's gin meet a generous slice of lime and 3-4 ice cubes in a glass tumbler of Canada Dry tonic water. Can you feel the fizz of the carbonation? Can you taste the tang of juniper berry colliding with lime?

A bite to eat and a book complete the evening. In this case it happened to be the remains of a pizza Helga brought home from Grinders, a spinach salad, and the catchy, jaded prose of Carl Hiaason's novel "Basket Case" set appropriately in hot, muggy Miami. A representative morsel: "It's an occupational hazard for obit writers - memorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one's own life - I can't seem to stop myself."

Where am I going with this? Who knows, which is, I guess, the point of surrendering to the momentum of excesses and contradiction. With any luck, the contradictory excesses balance each other out.