Reading
Assignments
In the beginning pages of his reading companion, Gardner writes:
Letting poems and other bits of writing I dearly love work themselves into the on-going conversation I had with myself and the landscape and the weather over the course of my morning runs in 2012 was one of the goals of this experiment.
TASK: What are my goals for this project? Make a list. Completed
Gardner continues:
I’ve remembered that moment and have taken it as permission, in my teaching and my running, to move back and forth between body and spirit, body and mind, using one to metaphorically unfold and speak back to the other, and vice versa. This sequence tries to capture some of that back-and-forth, improvising on the notes I took each morning after running—weather, distance, the condition of the trail, but also what passed through my mind, the inner landscapes that appeared and disappeared as the trail bent and dipped and turned back on itself.
TASK: A central theme in my story project is the relationship between mind and body. I’m intrigued by the idea of a “back-and-forth” between them. Find examples from his text. Completed
Assignment One: Goals, completed on 25 jan
What are my goals (so far) for this project?
- To document the process of training for my first marathon for myself and for my kids, who might want to learn more about who I am/what I do and think at some in their lives
- To learn and write about running: on the joy of running, on writers who run and runners who write
- To experiment with new ways to craft and share stories that are honest and that help me to more authentically express who I am and what I believe in
- To push at the rigid split between Sara-the-thinker (mind) and Sara-the-runner (body)
- To envision training outside of the limited model of discipline
- To deconstruct (critically analyze/play with/transform) the narrative form of “my running story”
- To stay healthy and injury-free and to care for my knees
- To experiment with even more ways to tell my stories online…and to learn the skills (and the code) I need to build those projects myself
- To work with others, especially my husband Scott, to gather more images/footage of my running and to use those in my stories
- To give particular attention to how Best’s disease affects my running/experiences out in the world
I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with this list, but it’s a start.
Assignment Two: Mind/Body Examples
1/ JANUARY 6, 2012
Finishing up the run this morning, cresting the ridge above the pond into a sudden blinding sun reflecting off the ice. As if the light were alive, preparing to speak. And then turning ordinary again as I came down the ridge and the angle changed and the light pulled back into itself. 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. When Emily Dickinson writes about Jacob, she never mentions his limp, even though that awareness of limits is everywhere in her work. Instead, she writes about his bewilderment–cunning Jacob, refusing to let go until he had received a blessing and then suddenly realizing, as “light swung…silver fleeces” across the “Hills beyond,” that he had been wrestling all night with God. He had seen God’s face and lived. The limp is what we take away. It means there must be a way back. It almost goes without saying (3).
Even as we try to transcend our bodies while running, we are constantly reminded of our limits. We are bodies. We need that reminder to ground us and to keep us from getting too lost in the dreamlike state that running creates. Gardner discusses the dreamlike state in several other entries.
On the dreamlike state:
one (wrote about it in log post)
I’m hardly aware of myself, my edges grown fluid and instinct. Not real speed. No thinking. What would it take to enter this dream, to let it take me completely? Hard now even to recall it—chalk marks dissolving on a sidewalk, a whisper of voices in the fog [from 2/ January 10, 2012].
two
Time moves differently out there. A bit like half sleep, when you’re awake in a way, but aware of dreams passing in a kind of un-retraceable wandering [5/ February 2, 2012].
And more on his pesky calf:
Struggling again with my calf this morning. A dull ache, about half a mile into the run, as if my body were no longer my own, no longer transparent. Each step is a reminder of some uneasiness I can’t quite locate [6/ February 13, 2012].
The threat of injury is often present for me, especially since I had my first big injury about a year ago. I’d like to write more about my experiences with and feelings about injury.
On trying to run a faster pace and the fear of not being able to
The first ten or twenty steps seem very fast and I feel a flutter of panic, but then my body adjusts. It feels hard, but not impossibly hard. I don’t understand how this works. It’s as if all I do is think more quickly–as if there’s a kind of inner music that carries me along, quickening my steps and lengthening my stride. Oliver Sacks calls this a “kinetic melody” and tells a harrowing story of suffering a major injury to the quadriceps in one leg, the nerve damage so severe that even after the muscle had been reattached he couldn’t find his leg and remember how to walk. A bit of Mendelssohn sifting through his memory gave him the leg back, two weeks after the fall. Another flutter of panic, deeper now, as I think about not being able to find myslef, about losing the way to that music [11/ March 21, 2012].
When I started running slower, I had this fear of losing my faster pace. I still do, to some extent. I’d like to write more about this and how, in my running, I’ve let my fears haunt my training.
on being two bodies at once
I’m letting myself up the effort once a week, feeling my way toward a pace just this side of hard, my body seemingly two bodies at once, one the other’s shadow, quietly urging more [13 april 9, 2012].
I like this idea of the two bodies and how it’s ambiguous here. The two bodies are his, but the two bodies are also him and his brother, who died that year. Bodies beside each other. Do I feel this too? Not sure. Sometimes I think about my dead mom when I’m running, but she’s never there, running with me. I want to think about this idea some more.