Steve the Owl's Blog

Some of you may remember when I posted this summer about my attempts to make a comeback in racing after a ten year layoff. My goal race was the Eagle National Bank 5K Run for Cancer. I also mentioned that my ultimate running goal is to run a five-minute mile before my 40th birthday (which gives me nine years and a little less than one month to do it). So, I thought that I would follow up and give you an update on my training and the race.

Restarting a Good Habit

In the time I ran competitively, especially in the first two and a half years, I ran on a very regular basis. I was hardly ever in the lead pack in a race, but I was working hard and, except for my last season, seemed to make progress in racing season. However, as time and injuries took their toll, I ran much less, until I either never ran at all, or wanted to run, and felt so guilty about not doing so that I would do one long run and then not run again for a long time. So, with a goal and a timeline in place, I decided to restart my running.

Unfortunately, this proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I kept getting really bad blisters on my feet, which took away about half of my training period. So, instead of building up to 25-30 miles a week, my training topped out at 15 miles per week, running five days a week. I also knew that, because of my long absence, I had slowed down considerably. I had a time trial in July running 5000 meters on a track in 37:43, and one three weeks before the race at 35:04. Whether you are a runner or not, I can assure you that these times are very, very slow. Because of this, I said that I would be happy to run the race in 30:00 or less, which is a pace of 9:41-9:42 per mile.

Increasing the Intensity

When someone prepares for a long-distance race, there are two kinds of running that are the most beneficial below the marathon level. You either run a longer distance than your race or you run faster than your race. Most of my daily runs did not fit either criterion, but I was running at a pace faster than my time trial. With three weeks left until the race (instead of the six I had planned), I began to incorporate interval training, and I started to use the heart rate monitor I bought the week before to insure that I was not running too slowly to have any training effect. (Based on my resting and full exertion heart rate, I had to keep my heart rate above 140 during my slow days.)

There are many ways to do interval training, but one that I have found works very well for building endurance is one that is called “VO2 Max Intervals.” In this set, you do 6-10 repeats of 800 meters at your 5,000 meter pace (or, in my case, a little faster than my goal pace, as I tried to do each interval in 4:30 or less) and doing a recovery by either walking or slowly jogging for about the same amount of time as the run, and at no point are you to enter oxygen debt (oxygen debt is acceptable for other training methods, but not for this one because it is designed to build endurance rather than speed). Because I was easing into this, my goal was to do six. I was able to do the first four at my goal pace, but I did my last two in 4:41 and 4:46, showing that I was not there yet. The next week, much to my surprise, I was able to do the first five in times ranging from 4:21 to 4:26. So, in order to see what kind of shape I was in, I wanted to see how fast I could do the last one without building an oxygen debt, and I was able to finish in 4:10. In the build-up to the race, I wanted to do one speed workout, although I must point out that this is a relative term here I decided to try to run eight 400 meter repeats in 2:00 or less with a 200 meter walk recovery. I succeeded in this, as I ran them in times ranging from 1:51-1:57.

Race Day and the Law of Attraction

Perhaps the thing I missed least from my racing days was the tendency of race officials to be very unpunctual. I experienced it again as I arrived an hour before the race. I tried to read and relax a little bit once I got there, and I began my warm-up at about 9:30. We were lined up at a little bit before 10:00, and I was a few rows back. However, the race did not start until 10:08, and despite my efforts to stay warm at the starting line, I could feel the rust when I got to the starting line. However, there was a fairly long hill at the beginning of the race, and I noticed that I was able to make a lot of headway against runners who were used to running on more level surfaces, so I could feel my confidence build, and I finished the first mile in 9:21.

However, I could feel that the pace was a little bit much, and I knew I was going slower even though the course was much flatter in the middle, and the second mile took 9:50, which meant that I had less than 11 minutes to run 1.1 miles if I wanted to meet my goal. I knew that it would be close, and I tried to time my kick as I went back in forth in position with some of the runners. I looked at my stopwatch and noticed that I was over seven minutes into the third mile, so I knew that I had to make my move, and I accelerated. I crossed the finish line as it said 29:55, and I found out later that it took me seven seconds to get to the starting line, so my official time was 29:48.6, meeting my goal.

However, I joked later that I should have set a faster goal. I don’t know whether I could have been ready for one or not, but anyone who knows racing can tell you that taking more than five minutes off of one’s time for 5000 meters in three weeks is quite a feat, especially going from a track to the road. So, I chalk this up as another lesson in the Law of Attraction. I said that 30:00 would be an acceptable time, and my mind and body combined to help me beat that time by 11.4 seconds.

This also taught me the importance of intermediate goals. There are some people in business who think that they have to be overnight successes, but sometimes a big goal is just getting that first sale or that first member on your team. So, with that in mind, if you know where you want to go, it is a lot easier to get there by setting smaller goals along the way and celebrating them. I have completed my first, so I know that I can start looking for another race, and another step closer to my five-minute mile.

One of the things in life that I’ve always found interesting is the question of sacrifice. Sometimes, someone really does give up something that meant everything to him/her without the expectation of something in return for something bigger than him/herself. Other times, there is something that seems like it is a sacrifice, but in the end, it turns out not to be a sacrifice at all.

What Is Beauty?

In Western society, one of the indicators of physical attractiveness for women is hair, and it is usually accented by long hair. While there are periods where short hair becomes more in fashion, such as in the 1920′s, these periods tend to be the exception. However, going to the other end of the spectrum and giving up hair completely seems to be the last taboo for beauty in our culture. While there are some in pop culture who have defied this ideal in the media largely to acclaim, this is still the exception rather than the rule in society at large. However, while some notions of beauty tend to be universal (such as symmetry and proportion), there are some that seem to be more culturally specific, and the question of hair seems to be one of those things. In some cultures, a shaved head (regardless of gender) is seen as a sign of a new beginning or of religious conversion.

What Is Sacrifice?

It is with this in mind that I tell you a story from last year. A while back, just for fun, my then-girlfriend and I were playing around with photoshop, and we saw what we would look like without hair. So, she decided that, after we got married and moved into a place of our own, that she would give away all of her hair to charity. I promised her that if she ever did, I would do the same with my hair, as well as get rid of my beard.

So, I got some hair clippers on sale at the store, and made sure to get extra razors and shave gel. We got married on May 23, came back from our honeymoon May 31, and moved into our new place over the next two days. On the evening of June 3rd, we started the process. Because my wife’s hair is extremely thick, she put it into five pony tails before the donation began. I thought that she could make more, but she insisted that five would be enough. However, as we would soon find out as my scissors were put to the test, five was not quite enough. Also, because of how thick her hair was, the clippers started to overheat, so we decided that we had to finish the job the next day. With her hair less than an inch long, I used the clippers and razor to finish the job, and because my hair was only three inches long (thus making it far too short to donate), my wife got the clippers and razors and finished my hair pretty quickly.

So, why do I say that there are times when something really isn’t a sacrifice? Well, here is what we looked like after she gave her hair away, so I will let you be the judge:

What I think makes her so beautiful in these pictures is not so much the way that she looks, although I do think that she is extremely beautiful in the picture, and I think that it does really bring out her eyes. However, I think that she is about the most beautiful I have ever seen her in this picture because she showed her true beauty by taking a risk about her physical appearance to help someone who may never even know that she was the one who gave them everything she had.

Here in the United States, today marks Labor Day, often called “the unofficial end of summer.” It has turned into a day of parties and barbecues, but we really miss the point of Labor Day, and a movie that I saw the other day reminded me of the lessons of Labor Day.

Struggling to Build a Life

The movie that brought the point home about the lessons of Labor Day was The Wrestler, a 2008 movie starring Mickey Rourke as a washed-up professional wrestler who is trying to put his life together after he suffers a heart attack. The ultimate thrust of the movie involves questions of fame and people who try to find success outside of their chosen field.

However, there was something else that struck me as one of the undercurrents of the movie. In the making-of special, the director, Darren Aronofsky, explains that the movie is somewhat based on a subculture of wrestlers who never make it to the top levels of the field, and several who were once big stars who still wrestle at the lower levels today, such as King Kong Bundy. The money really isn’t good at that level at all, so there is a good chance that some of them continue to wrestle because they have to do so financially.

The Importance of Labor Unions

Most professional athletes are represented by labor unions, and despite arguments about greedy athletes, I think that this is one of the examples of the success of fighting for the long-term interests of the athletes. In a field where people are past their prime at an early age, there is a need to provide for people once their earning potential is gone or significantly reduced. However, the WWE is not unionized, and despite the billions it makes every year, most athletes do not make enough money to develop a secure retirement or any sort of pension program to take care of them once their days in the square circle are done.

The question of the importance of labor unions is one that is also very important to me on a personal level. When I was 11 years old, my mom had a gangrenous gall bladder that was removed only after an eight-month delay because my dad’s non-union job at the time did not have enough employees to afford to get a group rate for health insurance. A few years later, he got a union job, and within three months, we knew that we never had to worry about anything like that again. For this reason, you will never hear me complain about any group that wants to make sure that hard-working people earn more money and receive benefits for their work.

Why Today is Labor Day

In most industrialized nations, workers are celebrated on May 1, rather than the first Monday in September. However, in 1893, there was a railroad workers’ strike that ended violently. Rather than give workers rights, President Grover Cleveland decided to create a holiday instead. As someone who comes from central Appalachia, I know the history of our region in terms of the fight for workers’ rights, including the the battles in Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920, and Harlan County, Kentucky, known as “Bloody Harlan.” In the 1930′s, workers finally won the right to organize. So, as we think of time off, we should take this time to remember the people who made it possible.

This blog post will conclude my five-part series on Citizen Kane, the greatest movie ever made, with a look at the man behind the movie, and what led him to such greatness: both the positives and the negatives. (A lot of the information from this blog comes from the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane.)

Early Success

Orson Welles was born in 1915 in Wisconsin. His family life was filled with turmoil, with his mother dying when he was nine, and his often-absent father dying six years later. Young Orson would respond to this grief by throwing himself into the world of art. Later in life, he described himself at this point as “Spoiled in a different way. When I would play, people said they never heard such playing. When I would paint, they said they never saw such painting. When I would write, they said that they never read such writing.” There is no question that Orson Welles was extremely talented in many fields, including, but not limited to, acting, writing, directing, magic, oratory, voiceover work, political activism, and public relations. He was a man of large appetite in nearly every sense of the word, and he put a lot of that energy into his art.

A Visionary on the Stage

These skills came together for Orson Welles in 1936. As part of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era jobs program, Welles was hired by the Federal Theatre Project, which was designed to find work for unemployed actors. Welles went to New York, and he hired actors to perform the works of Shakespeare radically re-imagined. His first effort was to move Macbeth to Haiti, in a play that became known as Voodoo Macbeth. This is where his penchant for risk-taking appears. While most directors are content with showing Shakespeare in its classical setting, others try to make the play work in different surroundings to make the play more relevant. Sometimes, this works better than others, but when it works, it can be an amazing sight to see.

Not only was Welles taking a risk by moving his play to Haiti, but he was also taking a risk by his choices in actors. One of the actors acknowledged that the literacy of most of the actors (himself included) made performing Macbeth very difficult to learn, regardless of the setting. However, the anticipation in New York could not have been greater, and all of the movers and shakers and opinion-makers made the trip to Harlem to witness this play and the vision of its 20-year-old director, and it was met with wild acclaim.

Then, in 1937, Welles turned to his next project, a re-imagining of Julius Caesar, this time set in Nazi Germany with lights as the only set decoration. Welles furiously wrote and re-wrote the version of the script that would appear on the stage. However, the first night, everyone was shocked to learn that there was absolutely no curtain call. Worried that this play would fail, Welles then re-inserted a scene with the murder of a minor character. When the play was performed with this scene, the scene would always get a standing ovation of about three minutes. In the words of the man who played the assassinated character, “Everyone surrounded me in this menacing way, and then the lights died, and the organ hit all of the bass notes, signifying that my character was dead, and it stopped the show. To use an old showbiz expression, it literally stopped the show.” This performance of Julius Caesar is often mentioned as the most important staging of Shakespeare in the history of the American stage.

A New Medium

Welles’ relationship with the Federal Theatre Project ended after Julius Ceasar, and Orson Welles formed the Mercury Theater. However, in order to fund his plays, Orson began to work in radio, often performing at both CBS and NBC. His schedule was so frantic that he found a loophole in city law, and hired ambulances to rush him from one studio to the next. (New York has since made a law that only sick people can hire ambulances.) By the fall of 1938, he landed a series with CBS, The Mercury Playhouse. Similar to his work on the stage, he arranged classical works of literature and drama.

His most famous radio effort came October 30, 1938. His show ran Sunday evenings against the much more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Hour. He decided to stage War of the Worlds, based on the H.G. Wells novel written at the turn of the century. However, he decided to do so through his understanding of the medium: Rather than re-enact the story as a straight drama, Welles knew that Edgar Bergen often took his first commercial break at 12 minutes past the hour. People were known to flip the dial (thus demonstrating that channel surfing predates TV), and this was when the first news bulletin interrupted the music being played at CBS. The news bulletins told the story of a Martian invasion, which led to widespread panic. Welles, despite warnings from CBS top brass, refused to interrupt the show and tell people that it was fake.

Risk and Reward

There was public outcry, and people thought Welles was finished. He apologized for the scare while admitting that he was surprised that a book that had been around for 40 years would cause such a panic. However, the play was a hit, and Welles got a sponsor, and a year later, he got a contract to Hollywood, with his first movie being the greatest ever made. A movie that is so great that, on another message board when someone called American Beauty the greatest movie ever made by a first-time director, and I gently pointed out that Citizen Kane was Welles’ first movie, and he said that it was a movie that was so good that he forgot it was Welles’ first.

I am not suggesting that it is necessary to go to such great lengths, but this shows the power of taking chances. While you may not always be successful, you will learn what works and what doesn’t work, and your work will be greatly rewarded. So, what chances are you going to take today?

Welcome back to my blog. It has been a crazy week as I started my most recent semester at Temple University in my Ph.D. program. Now that I have some time off, I thought I would come back to the blog, and continue my series on Citizen Kane. As you have realized by now, I cannot find enough nice things to say about this movie. However, almost as compelling as the movie itself is the story behind the movie. If you have never seen the movie The Battle Over Citizen Kane, initially presented as a PBS documentary for American Experience, it is a fascinating tale in its own right. One of the things that makes the story so compelling is the behind the scenes battle between Orson Welles, the movie’s auteur, and William Randolph Hearst, the primary inspiration for the movie. The narrator says that “each man was a genius in his own right, and the battle would ultimately destroy them both.”

An Unwilling Subject

In 1939, 24-year-old Orson Welles was given the greatest contract ever given to someone who had never directed a movie: a two-picture deal with RKO Radio Pictures giving him complete artistic control, including what every director truly desires: absolute control over the final cut. Welles made his name as a theater and radio director in New York, and the event that probably gave him his greatest notoriety with the general public was his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ (no relation) classic novel The War of the Worlds.

He did not want to go to Hollywood just to make blockbusters; he wanted to make truly great art. His first idea was to make an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, only he wanted the camera to represent one of the leading actors. However, the concept faltered, and he was left without a movie. He attempted another remake, but there were issues with the rights, and ultimately, Welles decided that he should make a movie based on an original concept that he could get behind.

Finally, he had his break: Herman Mankiewicz, a friend of Kane’s who used to visit San Simeon, Hearst’s massive estate, had a falling out, and he decided to tell Welles some of his ideas for a story based on Hearst. Originally, the idea was a sort of docu-drama, but Welles and Mankiewicz, agreed to fictionalize the story, and draw examples from several tycoons and some events from Welles’ own life.

However, Hearst ultimately found out about the movie, and he did everything in his power to kill it. Threatening to use 15 years of Hollywood gossip he suppressed at the request of the major studios, as well as playing on the anti-Semitism of the day, Hearst’s pressure ultimately led to Louis B. Mayer offering RKO $800,000 (the cost of the movie) to buy the negatives with the intent of burning them. He also tried to put pressure on Orson Welles by questioning his sexual orientation, his relationship with actress Dolores Del Rio, who was not yet divorced when the relationship began, questioning Welles’ patriotism (He failed his Army draft physical due to a heart murmur, but he was only 25 at the time, so he was vulnerable on this front.), and red-baiting, ultimately leading to an FBI file.

Welles Fights Back

However, Welles and everyone involved with the movie knew that they had something great. Welles was convinced that the audiences would love the movie if only they had a chance to see it. So, he countered with an offer of $1 million to buy the film to distribute it himself, and the threat of a lawsuit if RKO ever did sell the negatives. He then pled his case on the grounds of free speech.

Ultimately, I don’t think I need to tell you the end result. Welles won his argument and the film was released on May 1, 1941, five days before his twenty-sixth birthday. However, orders came from on high that no Hearst newspaper would ever accept advertisements for Citizen Kane, no Hearst newspaper would ever review Citizen Kane, and pressure was put on the movie theaters not to show any RKO movies because of their association with the movie. Ultimately, the movie had a decent box office run, earning $650,000 in its initial release (still the sixth-highest of the year) due in part to the problems with distribution.

However, it had won numerous critics’ awards, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive (it is one of the few movies to earn a 100% rating from the website Rotten Tomatoes), so Welles hoped for vindication at Oscar time. The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music, Best Sound, and Best Art Direction), and Welles was nominated for four Oscars (sharing the nomination for Best Original Screenplay with Mankiewicz). Unfortunately, there was only one win, for Best Original Screenplay. The movie was quietly retired to RKO’s vault and largely forgotten.

Greatness Cannot Be Denied

However, in 1956, several events collided to gave Citizen Kane its due place in cinematic history. That year, RKO decided to release its video vault to television, and the movie found a receptive audience. Also, European filmmakers, most notably from the French New Wave, sighted the movie as a tremendous influence. Ultimately, critics started to remember the movie, and in 1962, when the British magazine Sight & Sound made its decennial list of the greatest movies of all time, Citizen Kane was named #1, a spot that it has held in each successive listing. It has been at or near the top of virtually every list of great movies. While Welles himself never enjoyed that level of success again, in part because he never won the creative control that he needed, Citizen Kane stands for all time as a monument to great cinema.