Running Journal 9

I ran twice this week. That's a breakthrough, by the way. Up to this point in my new, life-changing practice of running, I've only run once a week, so when I got home from work before dark on Friday, it was a novel experience to change clothes and go for a slow jog to the pond off East Park St. in the warm early evening.

It took awhile to warm up the muscles and joints, regardless of the fair weather. My mantra is: Take it slow. And so I did, taking an eternity just to get to the pond, about a mile away, but then it got a little more fun on the soft footing of the trail, circling the half-frozen pond on a mixture of fine gravel, snow, ice, slush, mud, a nice boardwalk, you name it. So I took my time and got back in about 40 minutes, less mileage than usual but that's okay, since we're breaking new ground here.

I felt so good, I suggested going out for pizza instead of ordering in. We tried out a new restaurant, Carsonie's, down south on Westerville Road, and it was another new experience. According to my amateur ethnographic observations, it's an old Westerville hangout, full of DeSales graduates from the latter half of the 20th century, a too-loud sound system playing top-40 hits from that era, and an promising menu of pizza, beer, and calzones.

We ordered a medium veggie pizza and an appetizer, waited half an hour, nothing. Then they brought a pizza with the wrong toppings, promised another one with what we ordered, but forgot the appetizer. Long story short, we eventually got the pizza we asked for (in a box), a couple of Deviant Dave's IPAs, and an order of meatball sliders, all for free, plus a gift certificate to say they want us to come back.The Deviant Dave's was pretty good, the sliders not bad, and the apologies from multiple waitpersons were effusive.

Saturday morning, Gven Golly and I walked over to Church of the Master for a lecture by Otterbein professor Geoffrey Barstow on Buddhist meditation. Barstow has studied Tibetan Buddhist texts and practices for several years in Nepal and brings first-hand experience to the Western, Christian academic setting. His talk gave the local community, right there in the Fellowship Hall of the Methodist church, an even-handed and non-judgmental description of Tibetan Buddhist training that cut through its exoticism and mystery.  Of course, you can only go so far in an hour and a half, but I was glad we went.

I spent the afternoon washing the truck, cleaning out the garage, and fixing the back gate. We had (free) leftover pizza and fresh guacamole for supper, built a nice fire in the stove, and talked to my Dad on the phone.

Sunday morning seminar with the regulars at Java Central was exceptionally lively, and it's a good thing because the annual Children's Sabbath at Church of the Master was an ordeal of saccharine sweetness. I escaped to go home and do laundry, sweep the den, and bake bread. It was nice enough outside to follow through on the nice, clean garage by cleaning out the carport and reorganizing some lumber in the woodshed. Not that any real work will get done, but it feels good to have stuff in order.

With the sun sinking near the horizon and bread loaves rising, it was now or never, so I put on my running clothes and retraced my muddy steps to the pond.

It didn't go smoothly. My knees balked at the effort. A big black dog charged down a driveway on East Park St. to warn me away from his territory, but he stopped at the curb, I only flinched for a second, and I lived to tell the  tale. I repeated my mantra and focused extra attention on lifting the knees, which seems to increase the bounce from a short, toe-first stride, slow as it is. The thing is, speed does not matter. I'm just out there learning how to run again. Ask me in seven years if I'm really a runner.

Running Journal 8

Conditions were not ideal, and I almost didn't go, but now that I'm in the endorphin zone, I am here to testify, brothers and sisters, that even if the temperature is in the twenties, there's a bit of a wind, and that Bartleby the Scrivener inside is saying, "I would prefer not to," go outside and do it anyway. Run, walk the dog, ski, snowshoe, bicycle, build a snowman, whatever it is, (with apologies to Nike) just do it.

It had been an okay day so far, a medium red-eye and a bagel at Java Central, a little conversation with the regulars, mostly about books because they seem to think I 'm all about books, and it was Mike's birthday. Another atypical Sunday at Church of the Master was focused on Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, paramilitary displays of flags, marching, images of war, "Onward Christian Soldiers" and the whole nine yards of God and Country and Leadership. There was also a perfectly lovely piano solo by one of the Girl Scouts.

So I stopped at Java Central on my way home and handed Andy, the barista par excellence, the insert from the church bulletin about an upcoming series of lectures about "Buddhism in a Multi-Faith World" by Dr. Geoff Barstow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Otterbein University, because I knew from a previous conversation that Andy was interested in Buddhism. Then I went home, ate lunch, read the paper, checked Facebook, and watched the Michigan State game. Ouch, the Spartans lost one at home to Nebraska.

It was not a busy day. Gven and I discussed which week in August would interfere least with our rec center teaching schedules, and I emailed the caretakers at Thayer Lake to book a cabin. I did manage to get outside for a while, did some Basic Movement in the shelter of the woodshed, which brought me to life a little, and carried some firewood inside. That little bit of warmup probably got me going.

Running was improvisational. I didn't want to go east on Park St. to the nature preserve, because then I would come back against the wind. Then I departed from my usual route up the bike path, because the asphalt was icy, and headed west on Home St. past the Otterbein track, which was locked tightly, and meandered north and west past the baseball and softball fields to the cross-country course down the hill toward the Community Center, made the turn at County Line Rd., and came back a different way than I went out.
 
I had forgotten to put the knee brace on and didn't miss it. I was surprised how good it felt in my legs to take short, high strides and softly strike the ground with the toes, but I had to resist the urge to go faster. It's a little like a Fartlek workout, but without the sprint between the slowdowns, just nice and steady, with the focus on form, not speed.

I got home in about an hour, so I'm guessing it was five miles at a 12-minute mile pace. That's a mile more than last week and no pain in the knees, so I'll take it. The cool-down was great, lying on my back on the bamboo mat upstairs, stretching and generating lots of ideas about things to do on our vacation in Michigan.

Running Journal 7

So I missed a week, and I wasn't sure whether I could sustain the bit of momentum gained from the first six weeks of running once a week, for what that's worth. And apparently it wasn't that big a deal, because to my relief all the moving parts seem to still be working.

Or maybe it was just a superb job of preparation, warm-up, and execution. For future reference, I suggest the following:
1. The day before, ride your bike from the car repair shop to the bank, to the barber shop, and home. Act nonchalant, like you do this all the time in February, even though you're taking your life in your hands with Saturday morning drivers crowding the right lane up and down route 3 in Methodistville. Which means you are a badass on wheels, yo!
2. Do it again, but in reverse, this time against the wind with the temperature dropping at the end of the day, to go pick up the car at the shop. Above all, act like it's nothing. Your old-dude super-coolness will take away some of the sting of the 900 shekels you just paid to have your brakes fixed.
3. Observe your highly disciplined training table regimen: have a drink, build a fire in the woodstove, eat a nice chicken dinner, and watch a movie with the wife (Jim Broadbent is masterful in Mike Leigh's "Another Year"). 
4. Next morning, drink three cups of strong coffee, making sure you are never far from a restroom as you make your way to Java Central to church and home through the snow.
5. Find time, preferably in the middle of the afternoon while the sun makes an appearance, to shovel the fresh, weightless snow, demonstrating once again how to be both macho and righteously Midwestern.
6. Pausing only long enough to put the bread in the oven, stride out the gate and across the park to the snow-covered bike trail. Please note: by "stride" I mean take a lot of little tiny steps with no regard whatsoever for speed. Going faster is NOT the goal. On the contrary, move slowly up the trail, across College Ave., Broadway, and County Line Road to Maxtown concentrating on knee-lift and toe-strike, resisting the urge to get there and back sooner rather than later.
7. Ice the knee in question while lying on your back, stretching neck, shoulders, back, hips, ankles, and everything in between. Hydrate with Columbus IPA (blue corn chips with sour cream-horseradish dip optional). 

Running Journal 6

Good news, good news.

I ran 4 miles, and my knees didn't hurt at all.

It was not an ideal day for a run, but I think the 8 inches of snow that fell in the last 24 hours was actually an advantage. I mean aside from the fact that it gave me a reason to go outside and shovel fluffy white powder not once but twice during a single weekend. Several inches of soft snow underfoot was the perfect cushion for a nice, slow jog up the bike trail and back.Rather than being an encumbrance, it actually freed me up to run with almost no impact on the joint.

Common sense and a healthy dose of paranoia still dictated an hour or so of stretching with an ice pack strapped to my right knee, followed by a vodka tonic for additional pain management. You can't be too careful. 

The fact remains that once a week is not a workout schedule that will build strength, endurance, speed, or aerobic capacity. You know what? I don't care. I'm able to run. At least when there's 8 inches of snow on the ground. 

Running Journal 5

Good news, bad news. Beautiful sunny day in January, although it's a bit cold, I'll take it. Had a nice walk to the cafe and church in the morning, only took half an hour to shovel the walk, and the rest was gravy. Read the paper, finish the book I've been reading for an eternity, start another book I've been itching to get into, and it's even better than I anticipated. By 5 o'clock I realize it's now or never, so strap it on and go.

Heel and toe for the first half mile, just trying to get into a rhythm and not do any damage. Once I'm warmed up, I switched to a toe-heel gait, totally different but pain free, so I just stayed with it for another couple of miles, cautiously making the turn to come back and staying on the soft surface of grass and snow every chance I got. Tuna half miles with no pain to speak of, again, I'll take it.

Cool-down was great, with an ice pack on one knee at a time, lying on my back on the mat upstairs, rotating both hips outward and inward, rotating both ankles in circles to release the leftover effects of half an hour of effort and let the muscles and joints recover. Actually drifted off into a nice nap for a few minutes, got up, got dressed, came downstairs, started a fire, mixed a drink and made guacamole before dinner.

After the endorphins, the fact remains that running once a week is not enough to have a training effect, and I have to find a way to get my New Balance butt out there more often. As in work-life balance, as in leaving the office at 5 like regular, rational people. 

Running Journal 4

The break in the weather offered me an opportunity to run, so I couldn't pass it up. It was warm and a bit raining today after several days of intense cold that coincided with a week of long workdays with little respite save eating and sleeping, so I was due. The sun actually came out a couple of times. In Central Ohio. In January.

So it came as no surprise that my knees hurt as I slowly - slowly - jogged up the bike trail, but it did surprise me a bit that the pain did not go away, as it did the last time I ran, even though I took it slowly the first mile, hung a right at Old County Line Road, and took care to alter my gait every half mile or so, and tried to be patient. No luck. Maybe less distance more often would ease the transition for my medial collateral ligaments. Cut it short at about 2.5 miles at roughly the same pace I've been running, 12-minute miles.

Maybe the cool-down will help. Ice pack on both knees and some moderate stretching for hips, back, and shoulders, but less lateral rotation to take the stress off the knees. As my own doctor, I prescribed vodka and orange juice, crackers and brie, and a turkey burger. Then I watched a pretty good movie with Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, "Admissions" with elevated legs on the coffee table, and noticed that my knees don't hurt. Note to self: repair torn ligaments with a screwdriver.

Running Journal 3

It isn't as cold as it was yesterday, and the wind has pretty much died down, so I'm taking the opportunity to go for a run. It's actually a beautiful day, and I'm going to make the most of it: basic movement outside this morning, lefse and eggs for breakfast, qigong body-mind method this afternoon, a little bit of work in the shed-garage-workshop, and as the sun begins to descend in the west, I head out on a different path. Variety is.

It's less than a mile east on Park Street to the nature preserve with a trail around a nice, quiet pond. I have it to myself, though people have been walking their dogs. Once around is about half a mile, so I do three laps, alternating heel-toe and toe-heel, and the surface is great, especially the boardwalk that crosses the marshy north end of the pond. I take a little detour on the way back to avoid the construction area where Park St. is torn up, and it works out to right around four miles in about 40 minutes, a slight improvement on my last time, not that it matters.

I'm tracking in mud and slush but it's worth it. I'll reward myself with a Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA with the last of the homemade lefse and a very garlicky guacamole. Oofda!

Running Journal 2

It's been a week, not your ideal recovery time, but I couldn't very well run up and down the mountain while I was in Tennessee over the weekend, and I worked New Year's Eve, and I went for a bike ride Monday, which was out anniversary, and, and, and; so here I am, having a more difficult time the second time out. The trail is a mess with melted snow turned to mud, and my beginner's luck has deserted me. But I did make it to Maxtown Road with a tiny bit of walking, so it's not that bad. It's New Year's Day, and I'm starting it out on the right foot.

Time is slightly faster than last time for the same distance, just under 12-minute miles, not that time matters, and I'm right around 100 breathing cycles per half-mile, but who's counting. I think I'll reward myself with a screwdriver while watching Michigan State and Stanford in the Rose Bowl.

Running Journal 1

Late afternoon, almost dark on Christmas Day, my first time out in how many years? Fifteen, sixteen? No matter. I needed a different kind of workout in the winter, so my sweet family gave me some nice, medium-priced New Balance running shoes that fit like a glove, and here I am, trying to become a runner again.

Surprisingly, I'm pain-free for the first couple of miles, slow but pain-free. I'm in no hurry, just want to see what I'm capable of, find a breathing rhythm, and try not to hurt anything. It's a bit cold, but I grossly over-dressed and had to shed layers on the way back. The bike trail that goes through the park across the street is familiar territory, so I head north. About a mile in, I switch from heel-toe to toe-heel, and my legs welcome the change. Note to self: keep changing your gait at intervals to be determined.

About two miles in, I made the turn at Maxtown Road and headed back the way I came, taking no chances with a longer loop. My right calf starts to tighten up just as I get back to the park, so I walk the last block or so and congratulate myself that I didn't bite off more than I could chew. Cool-down while stretching upstairs on the bamboo mat was delightful.

Ask me if I'm bad.

Everything is miscellaneous

(subtitle:) The power of the new digital disorder. David Weinberger. New York, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2007.

(dedication:) To the librarians.

My excitement about this book, coupled with the fact that it was published five years ago, tells you something about how far behind the times I am. To many of you, this is old news. But my literacy level has sunk so low, relative to twenty-first century informational sea level as defined by the current population of the planet, that I am positively buoyant when I make an amazing discovery that is (a) common knowledge to half the world (What, you hadn't heard?) and so passe that it hardly merits acknowledgement to the other half (yawn).

Anonymous authors. No editors. No special privileges for experts. Signs plastering articles detailing the ways they fall short. All the disagreements about each article posted in public. Easy access to all the previous drafts - including highlighting of the specific changes. No one who can certify that an article is done and ready. It would seem that Wikipedia does everything in its power to avoid being an authority, yet that seems only to increase its authority - a paradox that indicates an important change in the nature of authority itself. (p. 142)

That kind of sums up one of the main premises of Weinberger's argument that universal miscellany is both new and good. And this seemingly slippery slope level of openness that is characteristic of Wikipedia, is a central factor in its power and its limitations. It's a little like Prof. Christina Kirk's self-deprecating comment on her directorial triumph in staging Bertolt Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" at Otterbein: "How do you make Brechtian theater in a Brechtian age?" The pace of change has made the traditional, fixed, static, and authoritative encyclopedia so obsolete that a radically mutable, malleable, and less reliable wikipedia is unremarkable however new and different.

If you want to know what Joshua Schachter is interested in, visit...his Delicious page.....If you click on the "view as cloud" link, the list rearranges itself into an alphabetized paragraph, with the font size of each tag indicating in relative terms how many times the tag has been used.... Like a playlist or a mix tape, the truth is often hidden between what's explicit. We can go right or wrong in our sizing up of the person behind the cloud, but we are very likely to go because tag clouds visually express a person's interests, compiled from data the person communicated unintentionally. (p. 162)

Beyond McLuhan but standing on his shoulders, in line with Laotzu but highly technological, semiotically like but aesthetically unlike Nelson Goodman, with just a touch of George Lakoff's metaphorical mindset, the point is that message and data, not to mention metamessages and metadata, are everywhere, even (or especially) in the spaces between the items of compiled lists of favorites. Data mining could be the gold rush of the future, as more people produce and process more information in more media all the time, it just gives the "intelligence" community more stuff to track, profile, and sell to the highest bidder.

Enquire doesn't just keep a list of the parts of a particular machine or the people working on a particular project. Rather, it tracks the context of relationships among the people, parts, and information so that users can know not only that something is, say, a handle, but that it is part of the cranking assembly, that it includes a partucular ball-bearing assembly, that it turns clockwise, that it's made out of iron, and that it was produced by the Acme Crank company. To achieve this, Berners-Lee designed Enquire to include relationships such as "made by," "includes," "uses," "describes," "background," and "similar to." (p. 190)

The guy who devised this layered tracking system had a passion for taxonomy, obviously, for meaning that can be named in an orderly space, a la Wittgenstein, as well as a healthy respect for the changing, shifting unpredictability of the real, non-semantic, non-algorithmic world of stuff.

The world and our third-order understanding of the world are miscellaneous in different ways. The world offers an indefinite number of joints without any preference about which ones we attend to: The rocks will continue to circle the sun whether or not the International Astronomical Union decides to stop calling some of them planets. The miscellaneous digital world we're building for ourselves, on the other hand, consists of what we have chosen as leaves - Hamlet, a particular edition of Hamlet, or a quotation from Hamlet - and the connections we've made explicitly or implicitly. (pp. 228-29)

Mao recognized this in his essay "On Practice" where he argued forcefully for working on theory in continual adjustment to the theoretical flaws revealed by application and misapplication to practical problems, not unlike John Dewey's model of education.

I don't recognize myself without my glasses.
On the bright side: these oval-shaped lenses
allow me to see my own image in the mirror,
not to mention a book, newspaper, phone, or
computer screen. Where would I be without them?
And the thin, dark rims mask the bags under my eyes,
so the guy I can't see in the mirror is the guy I'd rather not be. 

[Title to come] 2

If I were directing this movie (and I am) there would be no discernible music during the opening scene, and the opening credits would start across the screen later, much later, after the stage has been set and the setting been established and the characters have introduced themselves to each other. Most of that happens visually, through movement, with a few phrases of dialog to punctuate the sounds of rustling paper and clothes, the clinking of cups and bowls, the pulling and pushing of chairs and treading on the floor.

Right about the time someone comes around corner where the kitchen meets the den, one of them asks, "You have plans today?" and the other replies "Actually I do," and there you go, 'The Exception that Proves the Rule' [working title] scrolls across the screen, followed by discreetly placed notes of who made the film, who performs in it, who did the grunt work, and called the shots. It's a story about a man and a woman who live in a house on the other side of town.

Because there is no music to speak of doesn't mean there is no soundtrack, and in the few minutes just passed - coffee, morning paper, breakfast - a barely audible hum has been slow building in volume, tones changing slightly every few seconds, and somewhere around the three-minute mark it reaches a point where this hum is recognizable as an intentional shape and color produced by instruments - let's say string bass and clarinet.

With dialog comes a plot. Her plans for the day begin with walking the dog, giving blood at the library, and a movie with her best friend Kat. If that doesn't lend itself to a subplot of two, we have business making this movie about another Saturday in Columbus. 'Ulysses' it is not. Sven and Gven Golly are not Leopold and Molly Bloom. Columbus, Ohio, is not Dublin, Ireland, but it might be possible to get to know them a little through the lens of their suburban domicile, where their private dramas unfold within these walls.

He slouches in a wicker chair, resting his aching head against the high back. Rather than disclosing his plans for the day, he announces his dilemma: whether to clean up around the edges or launch a major project, the eternal Saturday problem facing mankind in the first cup of coffee. After Gven goes out the door, the camera follows as Sven wanders from room to room, the doorway framing his movements watering plants, sweeping the floor, putting dishes in the dishwasher. The minutiae only take a minute on the screen, but you can see how this stuff could take all day.

Going outside to gauge the weather and clear the debris from his clouded brain, he sees only things to fix, dispose of, and re-arrange. Each potential task links his to-do list with an extended family issue - his brother would do this, his sister would do that, his father would have done it this way, his mother would never have let it be that way. Each parental or sibling subplot winds around the bone, nerve, and sinew of his waking-up body as he walks slowly out the sticky screen door, past the scraps of lumber to the woodshed.

It will take a while in real time, but eventually he gathers the necessary tools - hand drill, hammer, finishing nails, wood screws and screwdriver - to secure the split door frame that caused the screen door to hang askew. Sven heaves a sigh of satisfaction and takes a break to eat lunch.