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The Mythology of Lance Armstrong
Sport is different from life, but it is also a part of life. It's this tension that makes the whole Lance issue so difficult.We can pretend that sport is its own pure realm, a kind of fantasy place...
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Interview: Andy Anderson on his Grand Teton Speed Record
Andy Anderson surprised the small world of speed mountaineering by setting two classic FKT marks in a period of two weeks, first on Long's Peak, then on the Grand Teton--just days after Kilian Jornet...
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Lydiard, Thoreau, and Training as Vision
Two quick things to draw your attention to, then some remarks on the role of vision in training.1) A quote from Thoreau: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in...
View ArticlePaul Ryan's Marathon Lie -- Should We Care?
This blog is predicated on the idea that there is some bleed-over between the values and practices of running and the values and practices of life. This bleed-over has now caught the nation's attention...
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On Running and Habit
"The greatest thing, in all education, is to make the nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. ... For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we...
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Philosophy, Running, and Life Beyond Justification
The question "what is philosophy?" is perhaps most expressive of the temperament and ambitions of philosophers. We are simultaneously proud of our ability to ask this question and ashamed that we have...
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Racing Season, Election Season, and the Role of Intuition in Making Some...
"In the great boardinghouse of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific suspicion if they do."...
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Race Report: 2007 Flying Monkey Marathon
In anticipation of the best (and toughest) marathon around, the Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon, which takes place in about five weeks, I thought I would publish an old race report that never made...
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Blood in the Heartland: The Adidas Invite
[Editor's note:] I had just put on my flats for that most glorious of runner's runs, the October morning tempo. The brilliant fall leaves out my window brought to mind the flashing of spikes and the...
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Mile Repeats as Religious Experience
"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in...
View ArticleJust Run, Baby!
"He who lives as children live -- who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance -- remains childlike. "F. Nietzsche, "Daybreak""The beast...
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Listening to the Body: Neuroscience and the Art of Training
If you want to frustrate a new runner and come off as an elitist prick on message boards, there is a quick and easy path. Tell them to listen to their body. Long time runners are always offering this...
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Baby News, and Some Reflections on Equality
First off, apologies for the delay in posting. I have a good excuse, maybe the best excuse, as my daughter was born a little over two weeks ago. Since then I've been too caught up in life to reflect on...
View ArticleTwo Takes on the Newtown Tragedy
It seems to me that there have been two primary types of reactions to this week's school shooting in Newtown as people struggle to make sense of this awful event. The first is a secular reaction: many...
View ArticleHansons' Marathon Method and Pfitzinger's Advanced Marathoning -- the two...
On the message boards at RunningAhead, there have been a ton of recent threads about the new Hanson's Marathon Method, most of them comparing it with Pfitz' "old reliable" Advanced Marathoning. One of...
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Suzy Favor Hamilton -- An Attempt to Understand
It's with more than a bit of hesitation that I offer some thoughts on the news of the day in the running world. The tendency to analyze the lives of people we do not know seems to me to be one of the...
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New Year, Another Post
A guy I know and respect once told me: quit worrying about writing something deep and interesting, just write more. That thought pretty much got this blog rolling. Here's a post in that spirit!Here's...
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What Is an Easy Run?
What is an easy run?Well, most basically, it's a run that's easy to accomplish. It's the backbone of training. It's the run that makes every other run possible.For some runners, this is all that needs...
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How to Get in Shape
"...the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." -- R.W. Emerson, "Experience"Not belief, but the impulse to believe.Not...
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The Self-Monitoring Fallacy: Reflections on Self-Knowledge
“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?" So begins Nietzsche's Genealogy of...
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