Apart from the chance to wander up the byways of the biomedical literature, another advantage of my current job is that I travel. This stops me becoming stale, and offers the opportunity to listen to the radio while on the move. I'm usually a Radio 3 listener, but this morning I happened to turn on Radio 4 hear Kathleen Jamie on Woman's Hour. At one point she compared writers to athletes: each has their preferred forms, or distances. She, a poet and essayist, is a sprinter. I suppose writers of novellas and short stories are middle distance runners, while marathoners undertake the great long novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Or, in verse forms, a marathon might be a Homeric epic in twenty-four or even twenty-six books.
I find it interesting to think of Sunday's marathon as a large-scale work of art, but what should it be? I think less a work of literature, perhaps more a dance, as Julia Armstrong and I observed in her podcast the other week. Or maybe a work of music, an opera or a symphony of Mahlerian or Brucknerian proportions. So I shall run on Sunday in four movements, each approximately 6.55 miles, a first movement, a slow movement, a scherzo and a finale. This is not a simplistic attempt to dictate pace, a mechanistic allegro, largo, presto then allegro, but more a way to think about the different phases of the race. I will report back on how this works in practice.
First movement: start to the new sewage works in the middle of the A259 (on the way out...we also pass these on the way back from Ovingdean). if in sonata form, then the exposition would be the first two miles, the development the middle two or three, and the finale the final mile or two.
Second movement: sewage works to Ovingdean and back to the halfway point on the road above the finish on Madeira Drive
Third movement: halfway point to the first aid point in Portslade
Finale: to the docks, the turn and the run back east to the finish
Then again, perhaps it should be an experience that brings together many art forms. I doubt if Wagner would recognise his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the spectacle of a few thousand runners on the streets of Brighton, but it makes sense to me.
