When the fog lifts

1.
The week started with overcast skies and fog so dense that visibility was pretty tight--during Monday morning's run, there were times when we couldn't see more than a few houses down the road.

And it was hard not to see the fog as a metaphor for the week: it promised to be one of those weeks when there would be much more work to be done than there would be time to do, one of those weeks when it was hard to see any space of clarity ahead.

But by the time the sun rose, the fog had almost burned off, the clouds had thinned, and the sky looked something like this:

The picture doesn't do it justice, of course, but it's hard not to be hopeful when you look up and see that.

2.
I'd planned for my world lit classes to spend the first three days of the week talking about four of Derek Walcott's poems. But, as things go sometimes, we ended up spending all three days on a single poem. It was refreshing to move slowly through a poem, to spend a couple of hours weighing each word, each phrase.

My favorite day, I think, was Wednesday, when we talked about the volta. I was going to say that the volta is one of my absolute things to talk about in poetry, but maybe I'll just say that it's one of my favorite things.

3.
Last weekend, I tackled a home-improvement project.

This so-called "five-minute" fan from Hunter took me only seventy-five minutes to install. It didn't help, of course, that the first time I got everything put together, one of the wires came disconnected, so I had to take the whole thing down and re-wire it.

I also tried my hand at making scones last weekend. I started with my recipe for biscuits, added a couple of eggs, a bit of brown sugar, cinnamon, raisins, some vanilla, and then tried to balance the quantity of flour by feel.

Next time, I'll change a few things, but overall, they weren't bad for a first attempt.

In which I do not resolve to blog more frequently

1.
Look, I just want to be upfront about this.

I know that in the spirit of making resolutions for the new year, people across the internet have been committing publicly to write more frequently on their blogs.

You'll get no such promises from me.

In which I consider running and pain

1.
There was a great post from Jeff a while ago over at The Logic of Long Distance on running and pain. Jeff writes,

While the runner must monitor his effort closely and be very attuned to sensation and impending or present pain in the early stages of the race, James helps us understand how attention to pain can be detrimental in the later stages of the race. If, as he writes, "the preperception is half the perception of the looked-for thing," then the runner has to be wary of projecting onto his experience more pain than is actually felt. As pain rises up in the latter part of the race, attending to the pain actually magnifies its quantity, adding to the "actual pain" the image of pain in the mind's eye.

2.
As a coach, this problem presents a challenge nearly every day. After all, distance running--almost by definition--hurts. I once heard someone describe distance running as management of the body's pain. And so nearly every day, I have runners telling to me about the things that ail them. "Pain is inevitable," as that saying goes. "Suffering is optional."

3.
The trick, of course, is to know which pains to ignore and which to heed. That's a difficult enough challenge when you're considering your own pains. Is that pain in your lower leg a muscle that's pulling, a tendon, the beginning signs of a stress fracture, or what?

4.
But when it's another person's body, it's even more difficult. Maybe even impossible. Especially when we consider the differences in people's tolerance for pain.

5.
Lately, I've been asking runners to define their measurements of pain based on their experiences with it. "Ok," I tell them, "so this feels like a 7. Now tell me, what's the most painful thing you've ever felt? What's a 10?"