Songs of Experience

I feel I need to defend myself in this post. It seems I received my first official comment about an erstwhile blog on “one-dimensional fitness freaks.” I responded directly to Besty in the comment thread below, but let me explain further in this upper room. My rancor over self-obsessed runners stems from an encounter I had with a DAD – a father of 7 children – who was out with us on the second of his two, week-end long runs as he was preparing for yet another ultra-marathon. I could not believe that a man with 7 young children at home with his wife/(slave?) would indulge himself so shamelessy on BOTH Saturday and Sunday, running all morning – and probably napping all afternoon – with no guilt or awareness of his familial responsibility. He arrogantly justified this addiction as “healthy” or “heroic” or whatEVER … when I saw it as, simply, abusive. Fuming after hearing this guy’s story, my training partner (a fellow mom, I might add) and I simultaneously decided to pick up the pace to drop this loser. We ran so fast in the last two miles that Mr. Megalomaniac, “ultra-man” was only able to speak in one-word utterances. We were chatting away about our children and our lives as moms as we ran faster and faster and faster while he could only grunt, “I, me, my …”

I often tell my athletes they should feel “pleasantly fatigued” after a work-out during taper week (rather than exhausted or shattered). Well, I have a new favorite oxymoronic term for that feeling you get after a hard season of labor: “rigorous content.” It comes from a poem called SONNET by Richard Wilbur and I like to think of the farmer as a runner after she crosses the finish line in her last race of the season …

Sonnet

“The winter deepening, the hay all in,
The barn fat with cattle, the apple-crop
Conveyed to market or the fragrant bin,
He thinks the time has come to make a
stop,

And sinks half-grudgingly in his firelit seat,
Though with his heavy body’s full consent,
In what would be the posture of defeat,
But for that look of rigorous content.”