A Little Thoreau Is Never a Bad Thing...

The Wizard of Walden on the concept of solitude. Gotta love him:

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
-- Walden

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
-- Journal

I thrive best on solitude. If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected. It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.
-- Journal

I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life: I must cultivate privacy. It is very dissipating to be with people too much.
-- Journal

I do not know if I am singular when I say that I believe there is no man with whom I can associate who will not, comparatively speaking, spoil my afternoon.
--- Journal

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
-- Walden

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality disturb us.
-- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. -- Journal

I am tired of frivolous society, in which silence is forever the most natural and the best manners. I would fain walk on the deep waters, but my companions will only walk on shallows and puddles.
-- Journal

Why will you waste so many regards on me, and not I of my silence? Infer from it what you might from the pine wood. It is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, and the chickadee winds up his clock. My silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more.
-- Familiar Letters

You think that I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
-- Journal

Scott Jurek on Enduranceplanet

Scott Jurek, maybe the best ultrarunner ever from the U.S. and recent winner of the Hardrock 100, did a great audio interview for endurance planet. If you have heard it yet, check it out.

http://www.enduranceplanet.com/

scroll down to July 30th.

Aches and Pains

I know I am starting to get real training in when I ache the morning after a good workout. The twinges and soreness are part of what I love about running. They offer a barometer of effort that signify real effort.

On a three hour trail run, a real run, not a slog, the hip will twinge an hour in, then mysteriously the ache wanes a few miles later, ditto some slight pain, then gone until the next long run. You learn to gauge your bodies signals. To me, and I would guess to most who run, this is a normal part of the process, the breaking down, adapting, then growing stronger. A recovery day in between, maybe a slow three miler, will invariably get the legs right again.

Part of the fun of running is pushing training, seeing what you can handle, how to take care of the body in such a way that normal aches and pains don't push into injury. I've had several injuries in 6 years of running, I won't list them, but I can trace most of them to stupidity in terms of overuse, doing too much after a hard effort, or just plain not training enough for the effort I was putting out.

I've learned a few lessons. Not to say you become bulletproof, but over time balance is sought, and if you listen to the signals, you can run harder and longer, then build off those efforts. For me this has been the case. Mind you, I am a middle to back of the packer, but it's the process, the act of running that is important. The training leading up the event rather than the end result of my place in the final standings are what keep me motivated to get out there.
_____

Training has been going pretty well. The goal has been to lay base for more mileage and longer runs, and the plan has been working out well this summer. A couple weekends ago I had the pleasure of doing an 8 miler out at Farmdale with ultrarunner Lynnor Matheny from Texas. Nice lady and a fun run. This past weekend was an estimated 16 miles at Farmdale in 2:56.

Next up is the Eureka Lake 5k on the 18th. I know every root and bump of the course, which will probably offer ZERO advantage.

Of Rus and Corn Fields

I've always had an affinity for the Russian writers. Maybe it's the spirit of my grandfather, germanic in heritage, but born along the waters of the Black Sea coast in Bessarabia. He knew the Russian language, and I suspect, the Russian soul. Perhaps some of that genetic code found its way to my being.

While Tolstoy and Dostoevksy are the most celebrated, for me, Turgenev, to an even larger extent Nikolai Gogol symbolized what it means to be Russian, to be connected to the land in some almost undefinable way. This from his 1842 novel, Dead Souls:

"Everything in you is open, empty and flat; your low towns peep out like dots or marks from the plains; there is nothing to seduce and capture one's gaze. But what is the incomprehensible, mysterious force that draws me to you? Why does your mournful song, carried along your whole length and breadth from sea to sea, echo and re-echo incessantly in my ears?

What is there in this song, what is it?...Rus! What do you want of me? What is that mysterious, hidden bond between us? What do those immense, wide, far-flung open spaces prophesy? Is it not here, is it not in you that some boundless thought will be born, since you are yourself without end?...Oh, what a glittering, wondrous infinity of space the world knows nothing of Rus!"

To see that daily in my runs through the countryside. My good friend Jake is back from England, we were on the Mackinaw a few days past. I know Gogol there also. These are my plains, but the nature of the soul is the same.

Racing the Antelope

In his book, Bernd Heinrich delves into the evolutionary components of endurance of both animals and humans. Framed over the backdrop of the story of his own 100km record training and race in 1981, his is a story that offers inspiration. And maybe, some insight into why, in his view, we have literally evolved to be runners. All of us.

"My suspicion is that the effects of running are quite ordinary. It is the other states, all other feelings, that are peculiar, for they are an abnegation of the way you and I are intended to feel. As runners, I think we reach directly back along the endless chain of history. We experience what we would have felt had we lived ten thousand years ago, eating fruits, nuts and vegetables, and keeping our hearts and lungs and muscles fit by constant movement. We are reasserting as modern man seldom does, our kinship with ancient man, and even with the wild beasts that preceded him."

On the notion that "vision" is what separates from other predators and informs our running.

"A quick pounce-and-kill requires no dream. Dreams are the beacons that carry us far ahead into the hunt, into the future, and into a marathon. We can visualize far ahead. We see our quarry even as it recedes over the hills and into the mists.

It is still in our mind's eye, still a target, and imagination becomes the main motivator. It is the pull that allows us to reach into the future, whether it is to kill a mammoth or an antelope, or to write a book, or to achieve record time in a race.

Other things being equal, those hunters who had the most love of nature would be the ones who sought out all its allures. They were the ones who persisted the longest on the trail. They derived pleasure from being out, exploring, and traveling afar. When they felt fatigue and pain, they did not stop, because their dream carried them still forward. They were our ancestors."

"I believe our common hunter's heart is the ability to impart value far in excess of what seems practical. That's dreaming. That's a large part of what makes us human. If modern runners were drawn around a campfire in a warm African night, they would, like any Bushmen, poke the embers and relive the run all the way to the finish line and beyond. "