With the exception of bike racing, no other sport involves as much time to think as long-distance running. To run five or 10 or 26 miles is, as much as anything else, to engage in a sustained way with the deep strangeness that is the human mind.
What are they thinking? Whatever your opinions about running, that is a reasonable question to ask, not just rhetorically but also literally, about the more than fifty thousand people who ran the New York City Marathon on Sunday. Like most major races these days, the marathon has become a serious spectator sport, with more than two million onlookers crowding the city’s sidewalks, and millions more watching on TV. Yet the essence of the experience remains invisible.
The results make for entertaining, if not exactly convincing, reading. The group of runners spent most of their time thinking about pace and distance—translated cynically, about how hard it was to move at their desired speed and about how soon they could stop . But, after that, the runners mostly thought about how miserable it was to run.
The same could be said of stories in general—so far, fiction does a better job of capturing consciousness than any other method ever tried—but, unfortunately, running stories are, at best, uneven. For every Alan Sillitoe there is a Paul Christman, whose 1983 novel, “The Purple Runner,” begins with a blonde in nylon running shorts slowing to a stop. “Arms akimbo, she cocked her hips to rest upon one of her two statuesque legs, breathing deeply to settle the anaerobic debt acquired from her climb.
Poverty Creek is a meandering stream, edged by wetlands and shaded by Appalachian hardwood, that flows southwest from the continental divide just outside of Blacksburg, Virginia. For nearly ten years, the trail system that surrounds it and shares its name has served as the running route of Thomas Gardner, a professor of literature at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, better known as Virginia Tech.
From the very beginning, though, Gardner’s journal makes clear how far it will diverge from a conventional runner’s log. “My right calf is still a little stiff from where I strained it last week doing mile repeats in the cold. Just enough to not let me out of my body,” he writes in the first entry. And then: “When Emily Dickinson writes about Jacob, she never mentions his limp.
Other kinds of grief pace this book as well. We learn, fifteen entries in, that Gardner was in Boston running the marathon on April 16, 2007, the day a Virginia Tech undergraduate shot and killed thirty-two students and faculty and wounded seventeen others. In Boston, the weather had been so bad—rain, sleet, icy roads, gusting winds—that race organizers came closer to cancelling the marathon than at any time in its then hundred-and-eleven-year history.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
Similar News:Vous pouvez également lire des articles d'actualité similaires à celui-ci que nous avons collectés auprès d'autres sources d'information.
Rihanna Is Getting Paid So Much Less Than You Think for the Super BowlI guess they don't have her money.
Lire la suite »
The Important Reason You Should Think Twice Before Policing Someone's Table MannersTake a moment to consider who you're criticizing and why.
Lire la suite »
The Galaxy S23 bloatware problem isn’t as bad as you think | Digital TrendsThere's been a little controversy lately about the system files taking up a lot of storage on the Samsung Galaxy S23. But it's really not as bad as you think.
Lire la suite »
Fans think Rihanna’s Super Bowl look was a tribute to a late fashion iconThe singer rocked a larger-than-life red puffy coat that resembled one worn by the late André Leon Talley.
Lire la suite »
Google's own employees think Bard, its ChatGPT competitor, is being 'rushed'Google employees are reportedly unhappy with the 'rushed' and 'botched' announcement of Bard, its ChatGPT competitor.
Lire la suite »