Songs of Experience

Recently, I attended a seminar on The American Conscience and I came across an excerpt from Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House:

“Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of his “restless fits,� which preceded his drunken periods, “coming on,� if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed without disaster, but that “nothing else would do it.� This story threw a flood of light upon the dead man’s struggle and on the stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never been told? What had blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of this father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.�

I have thought a lot about this passage as it relates to why I continue to train hard at the over-ripe age of 43. I crave strenuous work-outs in much the same way Addams’ goldsmith craved a piece of gold to work on/with. Whether I was/am training to make an Olympic team or running simply to “solace the toil” of motherhood, it is not a gold medal I seek, but the pure, artistic act of engraving – hills, intervals, long runs – that hard training provides. Hard training for me may well be “the salvation of [my] uncertain temperament.â€?

I often explain to people that the reason I can’t quit running is because I want to play outside every day … just like I did as a kid! I ran home from school, threw my stuff down, maybe ate some cheese toast (cooked under the broiler with butter) then bolted out the door to play in the neighborhood. I didn’t come back indoors until I heard my dad call, “Jeff, Julie, Joan, John … DINNER!!” I think this poem below, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of the famous Yellow Wallpaper), expresses the ageless desire to play outside.

Just To Be Out of Doors! So still! So green!
With unbreathed air, illimitable, clean,
With soft, sweet scent of happy growing things,
The leaves’ soft flutter, sound of sudden wings,
The far faint hills, the water wide between.

Breast of the great earth-mother! Here we lean
With no conventions hard to intervene,
Content, with the contentment nature brings,
Just to be out of doors.

And under all the feeling half foreseen
Of what this lovely world will come to mean
To all of us when the uncounted strings
Are keyed aright, and one clear music rings
In all our hearts. Joy universal, keen,
Just to be out of doors.

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Here is a quiz I gave to the Winston-Salem track club last year.
If you answer “yes” to 5 or more of the questions below, you are officially a lifer.

Feel free to add your own questions!!

(more…)

We all know about anonymous organ donors or anonymous philanthropic donations, but what about those people who donate hope without knowing it? In my life as a runner, so many people have kept me going, have inspired me to try and try again (through what they said or did) even though they didn’t know it. My high school coach was the first person to plant a mantra in my head: “Its yours if you want it, Joanie.” Coach McAfee could never know how many times I would use his words in work-outs or races to eek out another few seconds or to make a final. Next, there was a fellow Carolina runner and one-time boyfriend, Jim Cooper, who phoned me out of the blue after I had “given up running” post-collegeiately at the wisdom-less age of 23. He said, simply, “You are too good to quit” and then went on to write work-outs for me to get back in racing shape. I wonder if he knows how much his selfless phone call changed my life. Then came my British coach, Harry Wilson, who coached me long-distance (before the interenet made this easy) and wrote this hand-scribbled note at the bottom of a three-week training plan after I finished last in the 10,000m final at the 1988 Olympic Trials: “Be disappointed, but not discouraged.” Did he know I would say that to myself over and over until I finally DID make the Olympic team 8 years later? Does the great runner/coach/friend Chris Fox know that I chanted a quote of his for the entire year of 1995 as I tried to make the World team: “This thing I can do.”? Probably not. You see, that’s the thing about anonymous donors. They share the spirit of their lives and their love of track & field without expecting anything in return.

“Found notes and letters open up the entire range of human experience; they offer a shortcut directly into people’s minds and hearts. We often feel most alive when we’re glimpsing someone at their most honest and raw. I think that’s because when we read thse notes, there’s a powerful moment of recognition; we see another person – maybe someone very different from us – experiencing the same thoughts and feelings and emotions that we’ve experienced. It’s startling and it’s magical. Suddenly, we feel connected to this person we’ve never met before and probably never will, and in turn, to all people. The idea that we all share the same universal emotions and experiences – that we’re all connected – strikes me as profoundly beautiful.”

-Davy Rothbart, Found magazine

“The thing about life, Harry told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities – see the humanity – in everybody you meet. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.”

from a story in Runaway called “Tresspasses”