Warning: This entry goes on way too long and gets a bit too academic-y near the end. Just thought you should know. My apologies in advance.
There’s this great little pizza joint just down the street from where my wife and I live. On first sight, it looks pretty much like any other neighbourhood pizza place. It’s in a non-descript grey boxy building with one of those standard plastic signs over the door lit from behind with long fluorescent bulbs. Inside there are a few tables and chairs scattered around, but you can tell that it’s mainly a take-out place. There’s a big L-shaped counter that dominates the space, and there’s a big oven in the corner, right next to the deep fryer.
Tired of paying for delivery from chain pizza places, Julie-Ann and I eventually decided to try this place – The Hungry Hut – just to see. The pizza was great: their “works” pizza rivals any I’ve had. Since then, we’ve always ordered our pizza from them for pick-up. As a result, the folks who own and run the place have gotten to recognize me, both in person and on the phone. We have great little chats, and every time I walk past the storefront, they always give a wave. It’s a real community pizza place with lovely owners – the kind of place I’d keep going to even if something cheaper opened up next door.
The last time I was in there, the guy who owns the joint asked me about running. He and his wife always see me running past the store, and they were wondering how often I run. Pretty much every day, I told them. The guy shook his head – non-runners always seem struck either with amazement or suspicion (or both) when they find out how much we runners actually run. He asked how long I run. It varies, I told him, depending on the purpose of the day’s run, but my longest is generally around 3 hours. His eyes widened a bit, and his wife (who’d just joined the conversation) congratulated me on all the running. At this point, they both lamented about how they should do a bit of running and how they’ve done a bit in the past but not kept it up. And they both related traumatic tales from their childhoods about running in gym class (I think that tale is pretty much universal).
I wasn’t sure if they were serious when they expressed interest in running, but I tried to impart some beginner’s wisdom nonetheless. I told them a bit about my own story: how I was overweight and couldn’t run for more than 15 minutes at a time when I started. I told them that most people try to do too much when they begin – that’s one of the major reasons why so many don’t keep up with it. The best approach is to listen to your body and not expect too much. Even if you can only run a minute or less at a time, you have to start with what you have and then build slowly, methodically, and persistently.
I imagine that neither will take up running, that they were simply being polite – and that’s fine. But the conversation got me thinking about just how trainable and adaptable the human body really is. In fact, the guy who owns the Hut has had some experience with this: he lifts weights and has the pipes to show for it. Weightlifting is all about slow, methodical progression – there’s no other way to transform (for example) your biceps from skinny little wires that tremble curling 5 lbs to hulking pythons that can curl a small bus. The metamorphoses that training can produce are darn near miraculous.
My own experience with metamorphosis has been fascinating. I’ve dissolved pounds, made inches vanish – I look and feel different from how I looked and felt 6 years ago. There are large parts of “me” that no longer exist – I am not the same. Through a progressive and disciplined training program my body has gained the capacity to move much more quickly through the gravitational pull of space and time. My muscles have changed, my cells have changed, my metabolism has changed – even my cardiovascular system has changed. My heart beats significantly slower; I breathe more deeply into clearer lungs.
The human body is malleable. Certainly, the possibilities are not endless – there are limits to how much we can change. But those limits are much wider than we generally think. The only way to test them, though, is through disciplined training.
These kinds of thoughts about training were rolling around my mind as I was leaving the pizza place with a medium works. Walking home, I found myself contemplating the relationship between training and other aspects of my life. In acquiring any skill, we generally recognize the importance of training. The workers converting the old Greenvale School into loft apartments across the street needed to be trained in carpentry, masonry, and so forth in order to do the job. The same goes for the intellect. All of my university training exercised that part of my mind – the part that reads and writes and thinks critically.
For almost every aspect of life, we go through a disciplined progression of training – we don’t assume that things will simply come “naturally.” But it struck me that there is one glaring area where we do not extend this wisdom about training – moral behaviour.
I guess I shouldn’t use the collective “we” in this discussion because I don’t actually know about everyone else, but I can say from my own experience that I’ve never really practiced doing “good” things. In school, in Sunday school, in books, in parental admonitions, I’ve learned the cultural norms about right and wrong – but this is simply training the intellect, and it would be naive to believe that the intellect is fully in control of behaviour… or that it even should be. As a kid, getting in trouble was one way of learning what the boundaries between good and bad behaviour were – but this is not the same as actively practicing doing good things. I was given the rules; I was shown the consequences of breaking them; but the rest was left to chance and nature. It was as if someone showed me how to run and then expected me to race at the peak of my potential the very same day.
Perhaps my running and training analogy is a false one – perhaps people are simply born with a tendency towards “bad” or “good” behaviour or born into a set of circumstances that leans them one way or another. But what if moral behaviour is trainable, what if it’s something you have to work at persistently?
I know, I know – this is all a little more complicated than I’m making it out to be. Perhaps these issues are a bit too broad for a blog entry. I mean, I’m whimsically ignoring questions like what is and is not “good” behaviour and who gets to decide what good and bad really are anyway? Oh well… not everything has to be decided today in this blog.
I guess what I’m wondering is why we don’t train for things like generosity or compassion or kindness or patience or tolerance – types of behaviour that are pretty much universally accepted as “good.” For example, “by nature” I’m not a particularly generous person, but I value generosity. There is a disconnect between my intellectual understanding of morality and my actual behaviour. So how do I mend that disconnect? Simply resolving in my mind to be more generous has yielded no fruit. I tell myself to be more generous, and I agree with myself wholeheartedly, but nothing changes. If this were a running problem – like I want to run 10k in under 36 minutes – I would never simply tell myself to run faster. I would back the desire with training. But is there such a thing as generosity training?
I suspect there is. In fact, I imagine most religions outline some kind of behavioural training, although I never really experienced that when I went to Church – I was given the rules but no training program. However, in my reading about Buddhism, I’ve discovered that many Buddhist monastic traditions are all about training. They (and I’m grossly oversimplifying here, of course) do not assume that the mind and body are already prepared for the enlightenment experience; rather, they develop long-term training programs to strengthen the body, settle the mind, and develop what they’ve traditionally defined as morally good behaviours. What Buddhists have recognized is that being “good” isn’t something you do just because – rather, being good helps to create the physical, emotional, and mental conditions required for enlightenment – and it takes practice. For example, the disciplined practice of selfless giving and all the experiences it evokes is preparatory for both giver and receiver on their paths to enlightenment. What this means is that Buddhist monks are trained to act like enlightened beings on their way to actually becoming enlightened beings. To me, this all sounds like progressive training – to me, Buddhist teachers sound a lot like coaches.
The image of behavioural change that I’m more used to is what might be called the “sudden” or “dramatic” change. Take Ebenezer Scrooge for example. His selfish, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, hard-hearted, miserly ways magically vanish into the cold Christmas air after just one night and three visitations. His moral conversion hangs simply on his sudden intellectual and emotional realization that not only will he die miserable and alone but that he is, in fact, an ass. Pop. That’s all it takes for his heart to melt with sympathy and for the good behaviours to flow.
The academic in me wonders if this idea comes from the notion of spiritual conversion or new birth that was first made popular in 17th- and 18th-century Protestant movements such as Puritanism, Methodism, and Baptism. Simply put, in these traditions, you go through a period of morbid introspection where you become aware not only of your mortality but of your unavoidably sinful state. The key here is anxiety: you’re going to die and there’s no way to avoid the fires of hell… unless. But the way out is not to see a spiritual coach and draw up a training schedule to amend bad behaviours. No way – your inherently sinful nature makes this route pointless. Rather, at some point, your anxiety reaches a kind of tipping point when you realize your utter dependence on the saving power of Jesus and throw yourself on his mercy. If you're one of the lucky ones, your anxiety will suddenly flow away under the cooling waters of redemptive grace (more or less). Pop. You’re saved and your behaviour will automatically change.
This may be a long stretch, but it seems to me that this pattern of sudden conversion is the same kind of pattern common to sit coms and popular dramas on TV. Someone’s acting like an ass – they don’t know why – over the course of the show, the source of the ass-like behaviour is revealed – and all is resolved. It’s like a mini conversion: all that’s required is some kind of psychoanalytic-like penetrating insight and the rest will follow naturally.
But does it really? How often has a sudden epiphany resulted in long-term behavioural change? I really can’t say. I’m sure it does sometimes, but I’ve revealed to other people all sorts of penetrating insights about themselves… and it never goes like it does on TV. Funny that.
Basically, the idea I’m batting around here is that body and mind and behaviour are all malleable and trainable – and perhaps the best tool for change is training. If you want to become faster, you train to become faster. If you want to become smarter, you train to become smarter. But for some reason, this logic doesn’t always get extended into the realm of moral behaviour. And part of me agrees – it does seem a little inauthentic to practice goodness – but how else are we to become “better” people?
Boy, this blog really went much further than I’d intended. I’m a long way from the pizza joint and I’m not sure how to tie it all together. Oh well, like running on a new trail, I just wanted to see where these reflections were going. My hope is that these thoughts will inspire me to undertake some disciplined training when it comes to good behaviour – I won’t hold my breath, though. It’s easy to think about, but who actually wants to do it??
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Running Blog Rhetoric
You know, blogging is a pretty interesting rhetorical exercise. Perhaps I’m overly self-conscious about all this; perhaps I analyze things a bit too much; perhaps normal people don’t use the word perhaps quite so much – but it’s been an interesting struggle to find an appropriate voice (or ethos) to suit the blogging environment. I have a feeling that most bloggers don’t pay much attention to this sort of thing – they just write, just say what they want to say, and the results are great. But I don’t feel like I have a singular voice or even a default voice – for me, tone is a conscious choice.
In fact, part of the reason I wanted to start blogging was to explore different writing voices and to find a more honest and less formal voice. My problem is that I spent well over a decade doing undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Lit. This is partly a blessing because I got a lot of practice writing and thinking and following clear lines of argument like highway lines in the night. But it was also partly a curse: much of the writing I did was rigid and formal. Over time, that structured formality became my voice. There have always been other voices in me waiting to speak (no, I don’t “hear voices”), but I never gave them a chance.
It seems to me, though, that the academic voice, while great for expository essays, doesn’t really fit with the ethos of the blogosphere – it’s as uncomfortable as showing up in a suit and tie to a surfer beach party: you can do it, and it’s okay, but you might be more comfortable in something a little less formal.
So each time I sit down to write a blog entry, I worry about voice. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of audience – and if you don’t know who you’re writing to, then it’s difficult to settle into your writing self. Just as the tone you adopt when you talk to your friends is different from the tone you use with a stranger on the street, writing tone changes with audience. So who am I talking to in this blog? Is it friends and family, other runners, the general public? Each choice would make me write differently.
Part of me (the part that is sick of things like rhetorical theory) wants nothing to do with all of this analyzing – part of me just wants to write honestly and straightforwardly, without pretence, without scheming – to write long uninhibited honest sentences that unfold without hesitation across the empty potential of the screen like the sentences Kerouac wrote while criss-crossing the continent in the sad American night. But what’s so “honest” about that? Isn’t that just another writer’s mask? Mask after mask – is there anything but masks?
Wouldn’t it be crazy if qualities like “honesty” and “straightforwardness” and “candor” in writing were nothing more than rhetorical devices? Maybe there’s no essential self to find underneath all those masks, just various patterns of speech and behaviour. Hmmm. I’m not sure I want to think about that right now.
One of the things I love about some other running blogs is that they seem so unselfconscious. Bloggers will post the most mundane and banal things about their running without apology. And why not? After all, most of our lives are made up of the mundane and the everyday – if we can’t find meaning and value in those moments, then the bulk of our lives is just dead air.
It’s kind of like those French still-life paintings you see of bowls of fruit or a kitchen table strewn with crumbs and cheese and a cutting board, all lit with a faded afternoon light. At first, these paintings seem dull – where is the heroic action or the beautiful sweeping landscape or the sublime abstraction? But what they say to me is that the casual, the mundane, the trivial moments of life are infused with a quiet beauty if you take the time to look. Or even if the moments don’t hold any of their own beauty, they have the potential to be perceived as beautiful and meaningful in a subtle way.
So when I read that some runner in Minnesota had a pretty good long run on the weekend but her calves are a bit sore, I don’t click away from the page in disdain – instead, I find myself fascinated with the details. Part of the reason is that I too have had sore calves after certain long runs, so I can relate and sympathize. But that’s not the whole story. To me, that mundane blog detail is a little hint that someone out there is making choices about how best to live day-to-day in this bewildering world. Without all this philosophizing and analyzing and brooding, someone has gone out for a long run and now her calves are sore. It’s wonderful.
For me, though, it would be denying a big part of who I am to ignore all the crazy philosophizing (even if it makes people’s eyes roll). Maybe my writing is a bit stiff and formal and overly self-conscious, but why not? As long as it feels honest, then I’m okay with it. My voice may change over time as my ideas about audience and purpose change, but for now, I’ll just write what I feel like writing and try not to worry too much about it. (I’m lying, of course – I’ll always worry!)
In fact, part of the reason I wanted to start blogging was to explore different writing voices and to find a more honest and less formal voice. My problem is that I spent well over a decade doing undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Lit. This is partly a blessing because I got a lot of practice writing and thinking and following clear lines of argument like highway lines in the night. But it was also partly a curse: much of the writing I did was rigid and formal. Over time, that structured formality became my voice. There have always been other voices in me waiting to speak (no, I don’t “hear voices”), but I never gave them a chance.
It seems to me, though, that the academic voice, while great for expository essays, doesn’t really fit with the ethos of the blogosphere – it’s as uncomfortable as showing up in a suit and tie to a surfer beach party: you can do it, and it’s okay, but you might be more comfortable in something a little less formal.
So each time I sit down to write a blog entry, I worry about voice. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of audience – and if you don’t know who you’re writing to, then it’s difficult to settle into your writing self. Just as the tone you adopt when you talk to your friends is different from the tone you use with a stranger on the street, writing tone changes with audience. So who am I talking to in this blog? Is it friends and family, other runners, the general public? Each choice would make me write differently.
Part of me (the part that is sick of things like rhetorical theory) wants nothing to do with all of this analyzing – part of me just wants to write honestly and straightforwardly, without pretence, without scheming – to write long uninhibited honest sentences that unfold without hesitation across the empty potential of the screen like the sentences Kerouac wrote while criss-crossing the continent in the sad American night. But what’s so “honest” about that? Isn’t that just another writer’s mask? Mask after mask – is there anything but masks?
Wouldn’t it be crazy if qualities like “honesty” and “straightforwardness” and “candor” in writing were nothing more than rhetorical devices? Maybe there’s no essential self to find underneath all those masks, just various patterns of speech and behaviour. Hmmm. I’m not sure I want to think about that right now.
One of the things I love about some other running blogs is that they seem so unselfconscious. Bloggers will post the most mundane and banal things about their running without apology. And why not? After all, most of our lives are made up of the mundane and the everyday – if we can’t find meaning and value in those moments, then the bulk of our lives is just dead air.
It’s kind of like those French still-life paintings you see of bowls of fruit or a kitchen table strewn with crumbs and cheese and a cutting board, all lit with a faded afternoon light. At first, these paintings seem dull – where is the heroic action or the beautiful sweeping landscape or the sublime abstraction? But what they say to me is that the casual, the mundane, the trivial moments of life are infused with a quiet beauty if you take the time to look. Or even if the moments don’t hold any of their own beauty, they have the potential to be perceived as beautiful and meaningful in a subtle way.
So when I read that some runner in Minnesota had a pretty good long run on the weekend but her calves are a bit sore, I don’t click away from the page in disdain – instead, I find myself fascinated with the details. Part of the reason is that I too have had sore calves after certain long runs, so I can relate and sympathize. But that’s not the whole story. To me, that mundane blog detail is a little hint that someone out there is making choices about how best to live day-to-day in this bewildering world. Without all this philosophizing and analyzing and brooding, someone has gone out for a long run and now her calves are sore. It’s wonderful.
For me, though, it would be denying a big part of who I am to ignore all the crazy philosophizing (even if it makes people’s eyes roll). Maybe my writing is a bit stiff and formal and overly self-conscious, but why not? As long as it feels honest, then I’m okay with it. My voice may change over time as my ideas about audience and purpose change, but for now, I’ll just write what I feel like writing and try not to worry too much about it. (I’m lying, of course – I’ll always worry!)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Lark Runners
When I meet people and they find out that I’m a runner, almost invariably they have a story about their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend or whoever who ran some race as a lark without training and in clown shoes and did incredibly well considering that they didn’t work at it. They tell this story with enthusiasm, focussing on what great athletes their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend must be in order to run and beat others who have trained so hard. The story sucks – and I always find my plastic smile faltering as they try to get me to validate what a wonderful accomplishment that lark of a run was. Sometimes they include an ode to how fast their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend would be if they ever deigned to try.
Sometimes I wish I weren’t so polite.
Yes, sure, it’s nice that someone ran a half or a full without the usual investment of training – and yes, it must take a certain level of athleticism to do that – but to me, it’s singularly unimpressive. To me, an athlete is someone who commits to what she's doing, someone who sets challenging goals and then works like stink to achieve them – no matter how fast or slow. Athletes take risks. Someone who tells everyone they haven’t trained a bit and are lacing up their shoes for a race risks virtually nothing. If they don’t finish – well, it’s because they didn’t train. If they finish – whooee what an accomplishment… and look at all those suckers who were slower than I was. And those who finished faster? Well, those losers spend so much time training, of course they were faster. If I trained…
It’s a whole dump truck loaded with garbage.
I know the people telling me these heroic stories are probably just trying to relate; they probably don’t mean to be insulting – but celebrating a half-assed performance is just not something I can stomach. Perhaps the half-assed runner does have potential, but potential don’t mean diddly. One of the beauties of running is working hard to discover just what your potential really is – simply talking about potential and feeling good about it without actually doing it is just… sad. Why is this something to celebrate with a heroic tale?
I like running stories where somebody’s sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend worked for years to qualify for Boston and finally did – like my physiotherapist – not where someone qualified on a lark. Or like my sister-in-law’s sister who trained hard after having a baby with the goal of running a sub-1:40 half – and she did it. Or like a friend here in Halifax who trained hard but missed his marathon goal this weekend after hitting the wall. In these stories there is reward, but there is also risk. All of them run at different paces, but they are all athletes – all runners.
I think the test of a good running tale is what the tale implies about other runners. In the tale of the lark run, the implication is that other runners are chumps for taking running seriously. As a result, the story becomes one of those ego stuffers that puffs one person up by deflating others. But a good running tale, while it usually focuses on only one runner, takes the whole process of setting goals and working to achieve them seriously. This implies that all those others in the race ahead or behind are also engaged in a meaningful pursuit. The story is told with understanding and sympathy. Runners passed in the final kilometres are not perceived as chumps; rather, they’re perceived with a sympathetic “I’ve been there” grimace. A good running tale communicates a sense of camaraderie, a sense of community surrounding individual pursuits – from other runners to the volunteers who make the racing stories possible. A lark runner never even notices the volunteers.
I imagine there will be no end to the triumphant telling of lark runner heroics, and I will probably continue to bite my tongue and smile through each exuberantly told story, but I think I’m going to resolve not to celebrate the “accomplishment” with the person telling the tale – I’ll change the subject instead.
Secretly, though, I hope all those lark runners drop the lark and become runners. I hope they come to realize that running is much more than finishing a race. And if running is not for them, no problem – I just hope they gain more respect for the whole pursuit than their chroniclers seem to have.
Sometimes I wish I weren’t so polite.
Yes, sure, it’s nice that someone ran a half or a full without the usual investment of training – and yes, it must take a certain level of athleticism to do that – but to me, it’s singularly unimpressive. To me, an athlete is someone who commits to what she's doing, someone who sets challenging goals and then works like stink to achieve them – no matter how fast or slow. Athletes take risks. Someone who tells everyone they haven’t trained a bit and are lacing up their shoes for a race risks virtually nothing. If they don’t finish – well, it’s because they didn’t train. If they finish – whooee what an accomplishment… and look at all those suckers who were slower than I was. And those who finished faster? Well, those losers spend so much time training, of course they were faster. If I trained…
It’s a whole dump truck loaded with garbage.
I know the people telling me these heroic stories are probably just trying to relate; they probably don’t mean to be insulting – but celebrating a half-assed performance is just not something I can stomach. Perhaps the half-assed runner does have potential, but potential don’t mean diddly. One of the beauties of running is working hard to discover just what your potential really is – simply talking about potential and feeling good about it without actually doing it is just… sad. Why is this something to celebrate with a heroic tale?
I like running stories where somebody’s sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend worked for years to qualify for Boston and finally did – like my physiotherapist – not where someone qualified on a lark. Or like my sister-in-law’s sister who trained hard after having a baby with the goal of running a sub-1:40 half – and she did it. Or like a friend here in Halifax who trained hard but missed his marathon goal this weekend after hitting the wall. In these stories there is reward, but there is also risk. All of them run at different paces, but they are all athletes – all runners.
I think the test of a good running tale is what the tale implies about other runners. In the tale of the lark run, the implication is that other runners are chumps for taking running seriously. As a result, the story becomes one of those ego stuffers that puffs one person up by deflating others. But a good running tale, while it usually focuses on only one runner, takes the whole process of setting goals and working to achieve them seriously. This implies that all those others in the race ahead or behind are also engaged in a meaningful pursuit. The story is told with understanding and sympathy. Runners passed in the final kilometres are not perceived as chumps; rather, they’re perceived with a sympathetic “I’ve been there” grimace. A good running tale communicates a sense of camaraderie, a sense of community surrounding individual pursuits – from other runners to the volunteers who make the racing stories possible. A lark runner never even notices the volunteers.
I imagine there will be no end to the triumphant telling of lark runner heroics, and I will probably continue to bite my tongue and smile through each exuberantly told story, but I think I’m going to resolve not to celebrate the “accomplishment” with the person telling the tale – I’ll change the subject instead.
Secretly, though, I hope all those lark runners drop the lark and become runners. I hope they come to realize that running is much more than finishing a race. And if running is not for them, no problem – I just hope they gain more respect for the whole pursuit than their chroniclers seem to have.
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