Espiens, France 06-08-09

Today I ran 10k with David Byrne. The rest of the Talking Heads were just behind us.  It’s not often that I allow any one artist to run exclusively with me.  As a rule, I am like a little league coach.  I allow any player who passes the Tangerine 140 BPM test to have a chance to play.  But I had this hypothesis that was proven correct today.  David Byrne and the Talking Heads make the best music for runners.

It’s not easy for me to say this.  I distrust people who speak in declarative statements.  In the best case they are simple fools who can’t see the grey between the black and white.  In the worst case they are hiding something or trying to sell me a load of crap.

I had a colleague in my consulting days that sometimes backed himself into untenable logic positions during his presentations.  To extract himself he would come up with most outrageous statements that made no sense at all.  But he stated these great porkpie lies with such conviction that the clients actually believed him.  I was flabbergasted every time this happened.  These were intelligent people who knew their businesses better than we did.  That’s usually the case with consultants. I guess the declarative statements together with the price tag they paid let faith overrule common sense.

Now that I have stated this with such conviction, you can decide if I am a fool or selling you a packet of lies.

I will tell you this:  The Talking Heads are THE best band to run with.  I may save them for the 30 to 40k stretch in New York that everyone tells me are the hardest.

The best Talking Heads song for a runner is ‘Don’t Fence Me In”. Somehow, the beat and the lyrics conspire together to create a feeling of near invincibility. On this last run, which finishes with a steep 2k climb, David Byrne saved this song for last.  This makes David Byrne much more polite than David Laurance, who sings for slightly less well-known band called Father Festus.

I ran the same 10K track with David Laurance a few weeks ago and he did not stick with me for those last 2 difficult kilometers.  He ran off ahead of me.  For the record, I am claiming a foot injury as the reason I finished 4 minutes behind David.  But the truth is he is in better shape than me or simply a faster runner.

David Laurance is one of a group of high school friends that I have managed to keep in contact with despite the odds and circumstances being stacked against us.  Twenty-two years of living on the other side of the world make this unlikely at best. Most of those years were without the convenience of email, g-phones, facebook or twitter.  And in the early days especially, we could not afford very frequent flights back the States.  I honestly find it hard to remember how we communicated then.

We used to get in so much trouble in high school and college that our parents, on more than one occasion, forbade my brother and me to hang out with Dave.  Naturally this just made the friendship stronger.  Even Ronald Reagan could figure out that a common foe builds stronger bonds. It got so bad at one point that our parents stopped speaking to each other.  We began to wonder who was being punished.  It seemed to us that they were being exceptionally hard on themselves.  Perhaps our mothers were secretly chatting to each other in the supermarket aisles?  We were certainly sneaking out of our houses at night to cause more trouble.

Dave had been visiting us in France with his family when we ran the 10K hill circuit.  He and Margaret were married just a few weeks after Odile and me.  So it seemed appropriate to get together after twenty years had marked those two events. Not so many couples make it that long these days.   His oldest daughter is around the age of our kids.  This brought about some awkward dinner conversation decisions.  These teenagers pay much more attention to what their parents are talking about than I seem recall when I was their age.

With visitors in Espiens, if we are not running, swimming or shopping for dinner, we are sitting around a table drinking and talking.  With old high school friends this inevitably leads towards discussions of pranks, misdemeanors, larceny and the occasional felonious activity.  I am not saying that we were personally involved in any of these activities but we can tell the stories as if we were really there.

This is when the kids suddenly take an interest in our conversation.  What exactly should we say about juvenile delinquency to juveniles?

On one of the Laurance’s last nights in Espiens the house was full of French teenage cousins and friends.  In the morning there was an empty 5 liter keg of beer and some sticky euro coins on the kitchen table.  I think Dave and I may have been talking about a game called ‘quarters’ that some kids we knew used to play.  I know we didn’t drink the beer because I had some good Buzet wine and a fine bottle of Armagnac to test. We had no need nor room for beer.  Dave’s oldest daughter didn’t emerge until lunch time and she was moving rather slowly.  I am quite sure that was her first hangover.  I am not so sure Dave and Margaret thought it was a good thing.  Our own parents would probably have found this amusing.  Unfortunately, Dave’s mother passed away a few years ago but if she were still around perhaps our parents would have something to talk about now.