Do You Run with Music?

A number of races used to nominally ban running with music but few if any bothered to enforce this in any meaningful way. How could they? Picture the Chicago Marathon with 45,000. The elite runner don't use them and the hackers (myself included) are far too numerous to do anything about it. As a result, most of the races have backed away from unenforceable bans and adopted a sensible " Run with Care and Be Aware of Your Surroundings" policy.

First, the legal realist in me applauds the eventual merging of the law on the books with the law in action.

Second, I am interested in what my fellow bloggers do on training runs and in races. I do run with an iPod almost always when I am running by myself. Not today though, because its my final 5K before the Chicago half and I want to focus on a gorgeous fall like day and my mechanics. But normally if I don't have the pleasure of good company, I prefer to drift away to various tunes and podcasts as the miles go by.

Next time, what I listen to. You'd be surprised.

Teaching Economics

I held my yearly "Antitrust Economics from 30,000 Feet" class last week. That topic is always a bruiser. I have never found a happy way to communicate the dynamics of supply and demand in markets characterized by differing levels of concentration. I frankly wonder if the idea of setting that topic apart in a separate class meeting is a futile endeavor. I would love to appeal to students' intuitions, but for all my efforts talk of gas stations, wheat farmers, auto makers and Microsoft, I am rewarded mostly with blank stares.

To show this is not off-topic: I deliberately schedule that class for after the close of the add-drop period, for fear of students running for the door!

Going Private

I read two articles/editorials yesterday questioning the long-term sustainability of the business model of public education. One was in the Financial Times, discussing how the UCLA Business School is separating from the University of California system and going private. (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5745294-b9d9-11df-8804-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss) One would think the law schools at UCLA and Cal., at least, might be salivating to do the same thing. Both schools would compete quite well for private giving and surely could maintain their stature if private. Other public schools, mine included, likely would cease to exist if not supported by the state.

The other was an essay in the NY Times Review of Books (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Shea-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=homepage&src=me&adxnnlx=1283788874-EI3F/iQn5Pc+iZfNkzu3rQ) reviewing two recent books by academics -- Hacker & Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids, and Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities -- suggesting that emphases on scholarly output over teaching, and the resulting creation of a rock star professoriate, is not sustainable in the long term. One of the arguments in the books is that the tenure system should not continue. Both books appear to discuss undergraduate education rather than professional education.

I find both stories rather discouraging. This is a fun career, and well worth the rather extraordinary opportunity costs, when students, administrators and (for public school professors) legislators appreciate our dual roles of educating and contributing to the scholarly conversation. This career will not be worth the rather extraordinary opportunity cost if that circumstance changes. Others on this blog, who have seen trends in this industry over more years than I, including through prior periods of economic malaise, may have more optimistic views.

Tapering

A little tapering is always in order, even before a half-marathon. So yesterday, I ran a leisurely 4.5 miles down the beach, took a nap, and then spent the afternoon in Grant Park for the Chicago Jazz Festival. It is a well attended but incredibly mellow crowd with first rate national and local acts spread across three main stages and a number of smaller tents and performance areas. I wandered from the Heritage Stage with the 5 after 7 Project to the Jackson Street stage for Brian Blade and the Fellowship Project. Then just sat in the park for a while reading Orson Scott Card's Ender in Exile before heading over for the Brad Mehldau Trio at the Petrillo Band Shell.

Why I Run

I did not start running regularly until the spring of 2001, the year after I moved back to Chicago from New York. I had never run regularly before that except for a brief stretch in my twenties in Washington, DC, which started because of a girl friend I was trying to impress and ended with a ill-placed pot hole and several weeks on crutches. Of our little merry band of bloggers, I am among the oldest and definitely the slowest.

So I was turning 44 and looking for a good mid-life crisis. I rejected anything to do with my thinning hair, don’t care about sports car, and am not a Tiger Woods kind of guy. I also wanted something a little extreme without serious danger. I had sky dived in college and bungee jumped out of a hot air balloon in my thirties. So I had already checked those boxes, plus they aren’t really hobbies to do on a regular basis (at least next to the lake in Chicago).

So completing a marathon seemed like a good idea. Except that as a runner I was past a prime that I never really had. I started small and slowly (and mostly stayed slow). A few miles here and there in the park and gradually expanded the radius of what I ran both north and south of my apartment.

My first race was the Thanksgiving 2001 Turkey Trot, an 8K where I finished behind several thousand people and a guy in a full turkey costume. Since then, I have finished behind people in many varieties of super hero costumes, some seriously old people, 11 year old boys, runners with those J-type prosthetic legs, and an incredibly irritating guy who runs endless 8 minute miles while juggling. I train between 800 and 1200 miles a year and run almost year round except when its bitter cold or icy in January and February. I have now run virtually every block of Chicago within 10 miles of my apartment, in most major cities in the US, on four continents, and in 15 or so countries. I have lumbered my way through 5 marathons, never faster than 4:19.

So why bother? Why didn’t I close up shop after I finished my first Chicago marathon in 2003?
The best I can figure out is that running help me turn back the hands of time literally and metaphorically. Like having kids and publishing stuff, it’s a little slice of immortality. We have embedded ourselves in the training runs, conversations with training partners, races, results, web sites, and medals that mark our accomplishments, but that is the least of it. Every pr, every hill, every sprint, every step along the way, is a defiance of the effects of time both physically and mentally.

And no matter whether I am merely running, training for some particular purpose, in the starting corral, or in the middle of the next race, I find my mind goes blank. Not the single mindedness of purpose that Max talks about, perhaps more like the down time of the ind that Ted mentioned in the recent article he saw in the Chronicle. Sometimes it’s a time of inspiration, sometimes it’s a time of memory. Most of the time it’s just a blank. Then for a moment that can last a stride or the hours of a marathon, time has stopped and I am somewhere else.

Isn’t that what Proust was talking about when he titled his masterwork “In Search of Lost Time?”

The Reading Part

Reading is, after all, the first on the list in the blog title. I'm thinking of a list of great running books. Here are a few. Others?

Once a Runner, by John L. Parker Jr. Spencer lent me this, and I proceeded to buy two copies -- one for home and one for the office. It's a fabulous book that follows the exploits of the mythical Quentin Cassidy as he trains and runs a remarkable mile.

The Perfect Mile, by Neal Bascomb. A detailed account of the years 1952-54, when Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee fought to be the first to run sub-4:00, and then, after both had achieved the mark, Bannister raced Landy in the Empire Games in Vancouver. Remarkable, and if you read it, tell me if the Empire Games mile doesn't parallel Cassidy's race with John Walton at the end of Once a Runner.

Duel in the Sun, by John Brant. This follows Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon, and for the decades following as each dealt with his own demons. A great book, but I could have used more racing, less, well, not racing. Does anybody know if that race is available on video?

Jogging the mind

There's an article in the September 3 "Chronicle of Higher Education" titled "Running Jogs the Academic Mind." It's a poorly titled piece. The first three examples are: an administrator in California who had a Eureka moment while running, having to do with her un-academic administrative duties; (2) the Archimedes legend, and his (literal) Eureka moment in the bathtub; and (3) an MIT Nobel Laureate physicist who says he runs too fast to have any real brainstorms while doing it.

And it fails to cite this blog.