Author: Tim

The Philospher and the Wolf (Mark Rowlands)

This morning I finished reading Mark Rowland’s book ‘The Philosopher and the Wolf’:

I came to this title having last year read his book ‘Running with the Pack’ which blended his experiences running, and especially running with his wolf and dogs, and his work as a philosopher/academic. In that book, a section describing the states of mind that can occur when running long distances in terms of various classic philosophical ideas particularly struck me and it was largely because of that section that I identified TPatW as a future title to read.

I am really not a dog person. In fact I am not much of an animals person. I am certainly not be the sort of person who might think that it would be good, fun, sensible, practical or reasonable to have a wolf around the house. But I certainly AM interested in philosophy, at least I increasingly find myself thinking that it is a subject that I really would like to pursue in more depth. Consequently, I came to TPatW in search of more of Rowlands’s wonderful exposition of philosophical ideas and not out of an interest in the wolf!

Anyway, once again I really enjoyed Rowlands’s writing – the mix of cautious autobiography, education and philosophical musing – and am more convinced than ever that I need to try to find some kind of structured introduction to philosophy to work through. Rowlands uses his observations of the wolf (Brenin) and the intertwining of their lives and actions to draw out some profound messages about what it is to be a human (and a wolf) and ends up arguing that the meaning of life is not to be found in possession or in purpose but in the ‘higher moments’ (moments where we dig in and carry on regardless of the adversity that we face [my definition]) that lie scattered along the timeline of life. Rowlands describes these moments as ones where we shout “F**k You” to the Gods and it is clear that by choosing to melt part of his existence with the life of Brenin, he was doing just that.

Captain Ultra and the See-Saw of Vulnerability

I mentioned in my entry yesterday that I am running the New Forest Marathon on Sunday and with that in mind this seemed like a good time to post a short cartoon strip that I wrote a few months ago, prior to tackling my first 50 mile ultramarathon. The cartoon was inspired by an episode of the Train Runner Nation podcast which discussed how prior to a big event it can seem that you are loading up more and more issues and stresses relating to the run which weigh you down and can make a successful outcome seem impossible. When running the event, if self-doubt creeps in, you may never reach the point where you can overcome this adverse load and a DNF (Did Not Finish) may result. The knack is to keep believing and digging into your inner strength beyond the point that you thought possible until a pivot point is reached when the balance tips and the adverse load smashes down and the race is beaten. As I listened to the podcast on my way home from work, I really liked the visual analogy that was developed, and so I drew out my cartoon almost as soon as I arrived home – it was great fun to produce, and, from my limited experience, does capture the reality of preparing for and completing an endurance event pretty well.

Task Carnage

Last week I was on holiday and, therefore, away from work. In the two preceding weeks I felt that I had worked very efficiently and effectively, pushing forward quite a few projects and starting to establish some interesting ways of structuring some parts of my activity. I spent a good chunk of time before I went away setting things up ready for my return, for example deciding what I was going to do each day this week in what I thought was a sensible, achievable manner.

I returned to work yesterday with ~90 emails to wade through. Some of these were trivial – bits of information that I didn’t need to act on or store anywhere, although even these took a certain amount of time and bandwidth to process. Others required my attention, authorizing payments, forwarding timetabling requests, chasing assessment marks etc. I had one 1 hour meeting scheduled in the afternoon – it became a 1.5 hour meeting. Today I had two meetings scheduled – essentially the whole morning. I have further meetings scheduled for Wednesday (2 hours) and Friday (2 hours plus, now, another 2 hours or so…). I quickly realized that my best laid plans for this week needed to be completely scrapped – there was simply top much ‘stuff’ shouting for my urgent attention to have the luxury of getting on with the work that I planned and wanted (and needed) to do, for example starting to prepare for the new academic year’s teaching in less than 3 weeks’ time… So the plan has been almost entirely erased from my whiteboard, the tasks I had scheduled for myself have been unscheduled, the programme of ‘nudge’ tasks I had laid out (office improvements, alumni database) has been shelved for now.

With a bit of luck I can get my head down tomorrow, work through all of the new ‘stuff’ and emerge on Thursday with a clearer space to set about things afresh. I certainly need to start thinking about next year’s teaching soon. Just to add a little more stress to the current situation, I have an abnormal weekend ahead which involves traveling to and from the New Forest to run the New Forest Marathon on Sunday morning. If the weather is good then it ought to be an enjoyable and uplifting run in some great surroundings. But one thing is certain, it won’t leave me feeling refreshed and full of energy ready for the week ahead!

Vendee Sunset

I had a week off from writing on this blog last week because I was on holiday with my family near Saint-Jean-de-Monts in the Vendee region of France. It’s an area that we have visited before and the intention was simply to have a few days away not rushing about visiting places but reading books, relaxing on the beach or by the pool and just doing simple things. When we arrived at 9pm on the Sunday evening after a very smooth ferry crossing from Plymouth to Roscoff and a 4.5 hour drive southwards, the temperature was still over 30 degrees Celsius, but for the rest of the week it was considerably cooler than this with sunny days interspersed with cloudier ones with some rain midweek. We went to the beach a couple of times, swam in the sea (just the once), played on the excellent mini-golf courses near to the site we were staying at, spent quite a lot of time in French supermarkets, did a couple of runs including an 11 mile one and had a few evening trips to wander along the beach/waterfront in various places.

On the Monday night we walked to the local beach (Plage de Paree de Jonc) and caught a most wonderful sunset which I just about managed to capture the glory of. I think I will leave my best picture of it to do the talking here…

What Audience?

I have been writing daily (weekday) entries on this blog now for a couple of weeks, trying to stick to a routine and add something (anything) each day. I’ve not announced this to anyone and I don’t actively promote this blog anywhere and so it is unlikely that anyone I know realizes that I am doing this. If they did know, I think I would probably be asked questions such as ‘Why?’ and ‘Who are you writing for?’. They are not bad questions, and, in essence, they can be summed up by the title of this post: ‘What Audience?’. This could mean who is the audience (intended or otherwise) or it could be meant perhaps disparagingly as a comment that there is actually no audience. At the moment, the latter statement is pretty much true, although I was surprised that the two entries I wrote about running WERE picked up by people out there.

When I consider the question, my own answer is that there is NO intended audience and I really care little about whether there will ever be one. When I used to write on this blog I think I had an idea that I might have some interesting things to communicate and that there might actually be people out there who would appreciate them. Now, whilst I acknowledge that this MIGHT be true, that is not my driver. Basically, I just want to write, and making a decision to try to add something regularly to this blog is simply a way of forcing myself to sit down each day for 15-20 minutes, tap away at the keyboard, and write. If it turns out that I write something interesting then all the better.

So my audience is myself. I am now quite happy adding to this blog just for 1) the writing discipline that it is helping to build and 2) as a way of pulling together random threads in my head. If you are reading this blog then great, if you are enjoying reading it or finding it interesting then double great. I am enjoying writing it and building the site generally.

Running lists added

I have just added a couple of new Lists called ‘Running (Daily)’ and ‘Running (Monthly)’ to this site, accessible via the links at the top or on the sidebar. The intention is to keep a very simple visual record of my running activity capturing when and how far I run (or don’t run) each day on the daily list and month-by-month totals on the monthly one. Keeping this (the daily summary) up-to-date may not last long and it might turn out that I don’t like this addition but I will try to give it a fair crack. Ultimately it would be nice to go back in time with this but that would be quite a lot of effort. For now the monthly summary will have to suffice for the historic record.

The Language of Spirit

Inspired by a recommendation from Austin Kleon (e.g. see this blog post) I ordered a copy of The Language of Spirit by Jan Swafford and when I got home yesterday evening it was waiting for me to open.

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As I think I mentioned in an entry last week, I grew up on a diet of Classical music both as a listener and as a performer and throughout my teens and well into my 20s I routinely listened to Classical works, mainly from the period 1830 through to 1930. I was (am) a particular fan of the Romantic period – Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Borodin, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Nielsen and a host of other – pieces that my mother often referred to as ‘troubled’ music. But in the last 25 years or so I have not listened to Classical music much. In fact I have not listened to any music much (properly).

Looking through the book I find myself ridiculously excited to reconnected with so many old favourites and, I am sure, to discover some new ones. The book is arranged as short chapters each giving a brief overview of the life and works of a different composer and presented in essentially chronological order. In each chapter there are recommendations for works to listen to and glancing through I could see a lot that I knew but also a lot that I didn’t. I am pondering the idea of reading the book slowly, progressing through the composers in date order and listening to each and every work that is highlighted. This is a project that could take a long time and I might get frustrated by the time it takes me to get through to my (currently) preferred era, but it seems to me that if I want to give myself a really thorough re-grounding in this musical world it makes sense to follow its development in a logical fashion. Also, if I don’t adopt some kind of methodical/disciplined approach then I think I will just cherry-pick works I know well and then I will potentially miss out on a lot of what this journey might have to offer. We will see.

Game of Thrones (at last!)

Finally, only a few years after the rest of the world began to get over-excited about it, I have started watching the HBO TV series ‘Game of Thrones’, based on the books of George R.R. Martin. The first GoT book was published in 1996 and the HBO TV adaptation began airing in 2011 so I am only about 6 years behind the times. I think the first time anyone enthused about GoT to me was in 2013 when a friend visiting from Australia said how much he liked it. Since then both of my daughters have become utterly obsessed with it and are currently watching the latest series (7) as it comes out.

We started watching Series 1 together last week and have already got through to Episode 8 (of 10). It’s obviously very derivative – lots of the same ideas and themes pop up, for example, in Tolkien’s work, and there are many allusions to British history (Wars of the Roses) and geography (wild people north of The Wall) – but it is still fun. I am not a fan of the gore/violence although so far the worst scenes have been pretty short-lived and the nudity/sex is obviously gratuitous and serves little purpose in the story, but the programme isn’t actually as bad in either of these respects as I was expecting (perhaps it gets ‘worse’ over time).

With two episodes of Series 1 to go it is pretty obvious that there is a lot of fighting to pack in and I am expecting multiple key (up to now) characters to meet a sticky end before Episode 10 concludes. One of the tricky things is that there are quite a few things I want to look up in relation to the actors and influences but I don’t dare to do so because doubtless this will give away all kinds of plot details that I don’t need to know yet. I suspect that it will be necessary to watch Episode 10 immediately after watching Episode 9 – there is bound to be a dramatic cliff-hanger – so I think I am in for a GoT watching mini-binge tonight…

Incremental Progress

In the last few days I have been exploring the power of making incremental progress. Last week, I identified several long-term projects or areas of activity that I wanted to complete and, since then, I have set about making one small piece of progress on each one every day. The projects include writing an entry on this blog each work day (6 in a row not including this one), progressively sorting out my office at work and completing a short set of core exercises each work day (7 in a row). Obviously I need to keep things going for longer before I can make a proper judgement about this activity and rate my success but I feel that the early signs are promising. I feel that I have already been working on these tasks long enough to begin to feel and see progress and can catch a glimpse of how things will be when I have extended my runs up into the 10s of days.

There is really something quite alluring about the idea that if I do something for, say, just 10 minutes every weekday for a year then I will have accomplished over 40 hours of activity in a year. If I consider what I could achieve if I sat down and wrote for 40+ hours or did 40+ hours of exercise or spent 40+ hours sorting out my office (of course I don’t think I will need quite that long…) then the possibilities are enormous. Obviously, there is a limit to the type of activities that can usefully be performed in this manner – if I want to write a novel then I probably need to lengthen the time spent on writing each day (but perhaps not). Nevertheless, there seems to me to be a lot to say for the idea of making slow, steady, incremental, progress. I liken it to being the tortoise racing the hare, and idea that often pops into my head when I am out on a long run. If I remember the fable correctly, in the end the tortoise wins the race…

Come Rain or Shine

Last Wednesday I went out for a run in the rain. It was heavy rain and by the end of the run (just 30 minutes) I was throughly soaked. Yesterday morning I went out in the rain again, this time to complete just over 14 miles, and although it wasn’t raining for the whole duration I still had to suffer a good amount of the wet stuff. To make matters worse it was towards the end of the run (last 3 miles or so) when I was tired and heading uphill towards home. I also went out for a short walk yesterday evening, just to a local shop and again it was raining and I got wet.

I am trying to avoid using rainy weather as an excuse not to get out and about and especially as an excuse not to run. I want to expose myself to inclement conditions more so that they ease to be an obstacle to action. I often think that I have been incredibly lucky with the weather for all of the significant race events I have done and I know that at some point this luck will break and I will be faced with running a marathon or some such in the rain. I have decided I should prepare for that eventuality.

So, from now on I am trying to adopt the frame of mind that if I have planned to run at a particular time and the weather is poor I will still run. Moreover, I am going to try not to take too much account of the forecast weather when I plan my runs for the upcoming weeks. It can’t be a bad thing to broaden my comfort zone and after all, it’s only water.