Inspiration: The Paramuses

These are the first of my aerobic muses: the Preacher for wisdom, Paul for the calling, Philippides for the adventure and Lucian for the retelling.  There are others, too,  paramuses standing for a variety of inspirations, including some whom I have already given nods to: Robert Browning for the poetry, Pierre de Coubertin for the spectacle, Kendall Scherr for the antitheticals, my de facto running club, even Anheuser Busch for a sense of perspective; and others not yet mentioned: Dennis Kimetto, Chicago Marathon record holder, for the perfection of pace; Johnny A. Kelley, a Boston Marathon pioneer, for being forever young; and all those affected by the 2013 Boston bombing —victims and families, citizens and supporters, runners and cheerers-on— whose Boston Strong spirit would not be stopped.
 
The original Muses, the daughters of Zeus, have long served as inspiration for arts and sciences, dance and song, so why not muses for running too?  The traditional realms of these early sisters may not seem to align with a runner’s interests, and even the generic name of muse, inspiring music and museums, conjures more sedentary and leisurely reflections, but consider them one at a time:
 
Calliope, muse of epic poetry: not short sonnet sprints but works that go on and on;
Clio, muse of history: not just what reporters write but the stuff of enduring legends;
Euterpe, muse of lyric poetry: instilling, beyond song, the discipline of meters and pace;
Thalia, muse of the pastoral landscape: leading us through fennels fields and beyond;
Melpomenene, muse of tragedy: bidding us to save some breath for the final finish line;
Terpsichore, muse of dance: demonstrating the beauty of composition and grace;
Erato, muse of romance: the charm more than reality that leads us down the path; Polyhymnia, muse of sacred works: the choir all around us and the harmony between; and Urania, muse of the stars: of all that courses across an endless sky.

Maybe running deserves a category of its own, a tenth Muse devoted to the poetry of the run, but even as I consider this in turns pastoral and epic and choreographed, I don’t mean to diminish the inspirations.  Let each run find its own beat and sustain its own song: no headphones, please!  And let my inspirations be plural and multidimensional, to merge those classical reflections with the para-muses of philosophy and spiritual calling, of adventure and retelling, and, yes, of poetry.

On my way to my first half-marathon, already seven months ago, I wrote my own poem of the run, not inspired by Robert Browning’s Pheidippides, which I had not yet heard, but by Wallace Stevens and Basil Bunting and, again, the writer of Ecclesiastes —and also, of course, by the run itself.  I’d like to say the poem was composed in flashes during my training runs, but it was not; rather, I wrote it in the more reflective, in-between run times, which were, in retrospect, like this journal itself, a key part of my training.


—Fennel, —I grasped it a-tremble
     with dew —whatever it bode...
          ...if I ran hitherto—
    Be sure that the rest of my
         journey, I ran no longer,
              but flew.

—Pheidippides, by Robert Browning, 1879.