Tabletop Burner Tuesday*

Black Friday, for my non-US readers, is an annual holiday, celebrated by patting oneself on the back for caring more about friends/family/experiences than stuff. On Black Friday, those who can afford things full-priced, or who are so confident in their socioeconomic status that they see no need to signal such status through the use of anything so crude as brands, or who favor brands too posh to hold discounts on the day after Thanksgiving... all such individuals celebrate the day by ostentatiously not shopping. They may, however, patronize Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc. And if they happen to be in Paris for the soldes, it's OK, because "sale" in proverbial yellow subtitles is acceptable.

Anyway, seems I totally forgot to do my annual-ish reminder that anti-Black-Friday sentiment is largely-but-fine-not-entirely about class snobbery. I also skipped Black Friday for the very noble reason of, I slept through most of the day. It had been a very long time since I'd gone running, and keeping up (kind of!) with my fit friends left over enough energy for grocery-shopping and little else. But I did make something of Swing By The Mall Saturday, and am now the proud owner of a $12-but-originally-$15 ear-warmer, purchased half to avoid jogging in a pom-pom winter hat, and half to guilt myself into actually running when it's cold out, having now invested twelve dollars in this activity.

*Not a thing, unfortunately. Although what stops me from going that route remains not so much the price of a hot-pot set-up (which... who knows) as the fear that such a device (which I'd inevitably buy with Japanese-only instructions) would somehow lead to my building burning down.

Japan!!!!!

I'm going, at last! To Kyoto, Takayama, and Tokyo, but with most of the time in Tokyo. Recommendations? Kei? Gwyneth?

In other, more immediate news, I have a fitness accomplishment to humblebrag about: I now finally outrun a miniature poodle. After several runs with my oh-so-athletic neighbors (most of whom are far taller than I am, forcing me to go that much faster), I've gotten out of whichever plateau. But I only learned this when I took Bisou for a run and found that she - she! - was lagging. I also had the sudden realization that, for my friends here, going running with me is probably much like what I experience going with Bisou.

Fitness strategies for the desperate

It was, as many readers no doubt noticed, a cold winter in parts of the U.S. Was and is. While I'd been very good about running in the fall, when the ice arrived, and I couldn't alternate between the treadmill and running outside, it all kind of came to a halt. Various minor winter-blah illnesses further conspired to get me as out-of-shape as possible as quickly as possible. The prospect of a half-hour of guilt-free weekday sitcom consumption failed to cancel out the two frozen minutes' walk to the gym. Did I mention I've gotten very used to life with a car? 

So behold, my plans for battling running-inertia. 

-Make appointments to go running with friends in the area. This means keeping a mental - maybe even physical - list of who might want to do this, and being a bit more the organizer than I usually am. But seeing as all that needs to be organized is a time and place to show up in sneakers, I can probably handle it. 

-Announce to the aforementioned list that I am about to go running, not so much to go with people (people do tend to require notice) as to compel myself off the couch. There, the danger is in spamming my friends, but the chances of my doing this (the running or the emailing) often enough to constitute spam are low indeed. 

-Bring Bisou! Except I'm never quite sure this counts as exercise. With all the sniffing and marking, there's not much continuous jogging involved. But it has a certain undeniable two-birds-one-stone advantage.

-Save the better and longer podcasts for running, i.e. not for dog-walks. That would be Dan Savage, of course, or the Marc Maron interview with Lena Dunham. That would most definitely not be anything about recipes from NPR. 

-Tell myself (and this I've been doing, sort of) that it's a damn shame not to run when it's warm out. (Check!) Convince myself that anything above freezing counts as "warm." (Eh...) 

-Be a French aristocratic fashion model (who says things like, "See, I've had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born tall, with a pretty face (not to everyone's taste, I concede), and a thin body."), move to Paris, and hire someone called Bruno to whip me into shape.

"I really wish that women would stop spinning."

It's supposed to be a thing, to be "in shape." But I remember failing the UChicago orientation-week fitness test (yes, this is, or was, also a thing), this despite being in what was by all accounts the best shape of my life - after three years of high school track, and before whichever college debauchery, which, granted, largely consisted of the vending machine outside the Maroon offices. I remember, during those high school track days, being just fine on long runs, but when it snowed and we had a "stairs" day in our ten-floor building, I... did not hold up as well.

And then there's this: I can now run reasonably long distances and reasonable paces: 10-minute miles for a seven-mile jog outside, or under nine per mile for a half-hour one on the treadmill. (Both of which required great effort to arrive at, so yes, I'm going to announce these stats in an obnoxious, braggy-overshare manner.) Yet biking to town, which takes maybe ten minutes, leaves me beat. Or it did today. The two hills (and these are nothing major) took all my might. Part of it was the flat-ish tires, and my not noticing them until quite far along on the bigger hill. Part of it was also that it's about a year since I've biked regularly, and several months since I've gotten on it at all, so whichever exact leg muscles are relevant for this, fine, may have atrophied.

But isn't there supposed to be such a thing as cardiovascular health? Or in colloquial terms, fitness? And isn't biking 1.5 miles supposed to require less of the stuff than running at least twice that distance? What is this "shape" they speak of, that's supposedly transferrable?

*****

Tracy Anderson continues (remember long-butt?) to fascinate:

I really wish that women would stop spinning. I say that with such conviction because almost every day in my office, I see women crying and unhappy because they can't fit into their jeans, because of the thigh bulking. 

The gnocchi workout

The Canal Towpath! How had I not been jogging there before? If I'm going to run for a long time (and I'm going to say seven miles counts), far better that way than the treadmill, the tick-y woods, or running as many 0.7 mile road loops as I can stand. Apart from the bit at the beginning of the jog, when I had to dodge a couple men who'd gotten out of a van to pee on opposite sides of said van, thereby blocking the narrow road to the towpath, it was a bucolic experience indeed.

Nevertheless, I may keep on going to the gym as well. If only because the butt-toning machine - and none of the others - has instructions only in Italian:

Which fits with my earlier impression of Italy as a place unusually concerned with this area. This in any case became the only strength-training machine at the gym that interested me, the translation exercise a gateway into exercise. 

The only drawback is my strong association of the Italian language with food. Whatever "ginocchia" is (knee?), it brings to mind the potato-dumpling pasta (in a Gorgonzola sauce, or maybe pesto) I'd rather be having. Not that working out means abandoning pasta for kale juice. If anything, one may work out specifically in order to eat even more pasta. But not, like, during the leg-press. Or leg panino, as is the technical term.

A false sense of accomplishment

For about a day recently, I had nothing to do.* Nothing. On a weekday. Sure, I could have summoned something - there are always footnotes to format, new projects to begin. But the best I could come up with was an apartment-organizing marathon. And a nap. Also some running.

This comes up in Jamie Quatro's essay on running: "delusions of grandeur: visions of the Self at moments of glory." I've never experienced this as anything quite so specific as what she describes. It's more that everything worrying me - whichever insecurities I'm experiencing - vanish. But beyond that, there's also this sense, while running, that I'm being productive, and once the run is over, that I've accomplished something. (Hank Azaria describes something similar in his Marc Maron interview.)

In reality, neither of these things are the case. Running is nice and all, but I walk a good amount (a hyperactive dog demands this), and I possess adequate amounts of no-doctor-would-call-me-overweight-except-maybe-we-could-find-one-with-that-view-on-the-Upper-East-Side privilege. Any time spent running probably should be spent doing something else. Honestly, given my ambitions, blogging is a more productive use of my time than running loops through this tick-filled idyll. Running beats anxiety, but so too does a glass of red wine with dinner, which, given the tick situation (can you tell I'm reading that New Yorker article?) might be the healthier choice. Whatever marginal, only-I-would-ever-notice-it aesthetic benefit comes from running is zilch compared with what could be accomplished if I more regularly remembered to style my hair and put on eyeliner. And running reduces the likelihood of primping, enforcing a kind of low-maintenanceness-by-default.

But the appeal of running for me kind of does come down to that sense of accomplishment. Therefore my commitment to running probably correlates inversely with my overall sense of getting things done. Which is weird, right? Runners are so often these hyper-accomplished people. I can't figure it out. All I know is, if I ever announce plans to run a race longer than, say, six miles, or a jog longer than, say, nine, it might be time for some kind of towel-throwing-in intervention.

*Rest assured, various edits later, I have plenty to do.

Confessions of a woods-hermit

-We're all going to get the super-flu. Even those of us who got flu shots months ago. I'm going to make use of the lack of commute and the fact that my husband (who works with other people, as opposed to writes a dissertation on the couch) is away, and hermit it up a storm for the next few days. I'm not usually so germophobic, but I've read that this thing puts you out for three weeks. No thanks. Problem: groceries. Solution: the apocalypse mac'n'cheese I bought when holed up because of Sandy.

-Hermit-workout of running with poodle in the woods was, predictably, not quite enough exercise for the twelve-pound animal, but probably too much for the significantly larger one. Listened to Tom Ashbrook interview a bunch of people about online dating and monogamy. Racy and easy-to-follow enough to make me almost forget that I was jogging. I wanted desperately to give a history-of-marriage and common-sense lesson to the guy who called in and said internet dating is a problem because it messes with "natural selection," but pre-recorded public-radio podcasts don't have that function.

-Best Styles story ever: outrageously expensive clothing specially designed for sitting and doing nothing. Lululemon is described in it as the "relatively affordable" option, which will be my only hint as to how expensive we're talking. OK, never mind, can't resist: Donna Karan's selling sweatpants for $995. Of course, stories like this always impact readers (this reader) in the same way: first it's all, 'but who would spend a thousand dollars on sweatpants?' which quickly transitions to 'so maybe I'm not unreasonable for considering buying myself properly-fitting jeans that cost more than $100 as a reward for having passed my road test.' Considering, and this is very much contingent on my leaving the woods and trying said jeans on.

-I know I was going to boycott Into The Gloss, what with its borderline-pro-ana turn, but then they go and have a "top shelf" with a Hemingway heiress who says the following: "I’ve never used deodorant; my mother doesn’t use it, either. I don’t smell, so I don’t want to use anything. And sometimes my B.O. is kind of floral, I don’t know why. [Laughs]." It takes all my restraint not to speculate on this woman's self-awareness regarding the odor of her other bodily excretions.