ProneOboe

I was out running this morning and I crossed the street to avoid a perfectly nice lady walking her perfectly nice dog.  We smiled and waved at each other - but didn’t dare to get close.  Runners in this COVID season allow a lot of space.  The air I use when I run comes right out of the bottom of my lungs, like my whole body is exhaling at once, and I’m aware, in a way that I never was before, about the cloud of exhale that surrounds me when I am breathing like this. About having to keep it to myself. 
 And then I got to thinking about the oboe.  
 We use our air in a variety of ways, right? And we oboists have that trick, that superpower, of not ACTUALLY needing that much ACTUAL air to play the instrument, so I often see students trying to get away with HEAD air only. Blowing only from the neck up, letting their lower body NOT be a part of the process.  As you might expect, this leads to an unsupported sound, a fair amount of throat strain, a need for very s...

Sometimes I just like having run. After your shower and your coffee it feels good to have run, earlier in the day, and to feel that gentle ache and tiredness in the muscles that comes from having used your body productively. I don't always enjoy running while it's happening, and I HATE the snow. But running in the snow is such a pleasure.  It's exhilarating.  It's freeing.  It feels like being a kid again, with the icy wind in your face and the triumphant feeling of doing something all by yourself.  Anyone can go out for a jog when it's 65 and sunny, but I was out this morning, in 22 degree weather, with the snow all blowing up in my face, and I met another woman running  - and as we passed each other we both raised our arms like Rocky and cheered for each other, and for ourselves, just filled with the gleefulness of being in the club. The club of crazies. This pleasure, the joy of winter running, is hard to come by.  It's HARD to power through the re...

The first speed work of the season - the first time I really try to push my running in a specific, measured way - knocks me to the ground.  I accomplish most of the workout, and then drag myself around for the rest of the day and sleep 9 hours and wake up still tired.  I wonder how I, or anyone else, could ever do it.  But by the next week, I’m ready to try again. And sure enough, I am able to complete a planned workout better at that time.  I’m tired afterward but not dead on my feet.  By the third or fourth week of track workouts, I can sort of take them in stride.  They’re hard but a good hard. As you know, my running’s been in the tank this whole year, but I found myself on a track yesterday after dropping Zoe off at camp, and had the above-mentioned experience, and can’t WAIT to do another one next week, for the above-mentioned reasons. Mercifully, I can recover much faster on the oboe than I can running.  Which is why I'm not a professional at...

More on the eerie parallels between exercise and the oboe. I’ve been struggling with my running all spring.  Mainly because I quit it all winter, honestly - but for the past few months I’ve been dragging myself through workouts, ignoring the twinges of old injuries, and assuming that I was one good run away from a real breakthrough.  As recently as a few weeks ago I figured I was just a couple of long runs away from a successful half-marathon at the end of this month.  I mean, I wasn’t actually accomplishing my three and four milers without walking, and I hadn’t ACTUALLY done anything over six miles since November - but I just knew that if I kept pushing through these uncomfortable, gasping, leg-burning miles I would pop back into the body and fitness that I had last May. Turns out it doesn’t work like that when you’re forty. I’m playing the Strauss Oboe Concerto with a community orchestra on June 12, and somehow, shockingly, my first rehearsal with them is this Tuesd...

You’ve heard before that Zoe is struggling with the cello. It turns out that not every week is as fun as the first week.  And we almost caved and let her quit a few months ago, which I’m sure would have been a relief to her teacher.  We’ve been dragging through this semester, waiting for summer and a much-needed break.  And then last week we went to her lesson and she ACED it.  Had a huge breakthrough with her counting and plucking, got to play a little bit of a duet with her teacher.  Seemed to be re-inspired.  Has had better practice sessions ever since.  I have a high school student who can’t count.  Has NO rhythm or internal pulse.  We’ve been banging our heads against the walls all year trying to solve this problem.  She’s an adept mimic, which is how she’s made it through the system this long - if I play something for her she can play it right back, and if she hears a lick in band often enough she can approximate it pretty well....

I did five pushups this evening.  I’ve been off running for two weeks now, with tendinitis in my foot, and although I’ve done a bit of biking - commuting, is all - nothing for me tops the pleasure of rolling out the door for 6 or 10 miles and checking my watch to see how close I am to my goal time - per mile, per route, per plan.  I miss my marathon training like crazy. Last night I was chatting with a good friend at a gig, and brought up my frustration at being off my feet.  She said she’d gone through the same thing, stopped running a year ago, and recommended pushups.  I said she was crazy.  She pointed out that you could count them, and improve your number every day.  And I said she was awesome. Why did that simple statement make all the difference for me?  Running has been my dream sport for years not because I am a good runner, or fast, or apparently able to do it without injury.  What I love is the numbers.  I can go out for a run and ...

This was not the race I wanted.  I had plans and goals.  I had worked hard.  And what did I do?  I went out too fast - at a fun and comfortable pace rather than the very conservative one recommended by the running magazines- and stayed joyfully ahead of my own goal pace for 10 miles.  Then I sank back into my goal pace for about 5 more.  Then I began to feel some twinges from my IT band, an old injury that had not arisen once during training.  I ignored it and ran a little more.  The twinges started to be pain.  I stopped, stretched, continued.  Stopped, walked, went back to running.  Knew that this could not be happening!  I was prepared!  I had made it uninjured to the start line - this was supposed to be my triumph!  But no.  By the time I got to mile 18 I couldn’t deny that I was having a real ITB flare-up.  It was really painful, and, more to the point, I remembered how long it would take to heal if I d...

I’m going to run a marathon!  I did not believe I could ever get to this point, but I’ve done my last long run, and I’m tapering just like the training plan says, and after June 1 I will be a marathon finisher. Honestly, I’ve never been worried about my ability to complete a marathon.  I’ve been in enough hard races - where running turned into short walk breaks which turned into long walk breaks which turned into walking - to not be afraid of that option, and if walking is an option I know perfectly well that I can finish a marathon.  I do have a time goal, which I’ve been revising over the course of my training, and I still don’t know whether I can achieve that or not.  But I know I can finish.  I just wasn’t sure I could start.   I had never run more than 13.1 miles, and I have tended to get ITB injuries when my mileage goes up, and I WRECKED my knees seven or eight years ago in an olympic distance triathlon that I really hadn’t trained well enough f...

You know I am training for a marathon.  I’m not near the level of Boston, the Mecca of Marathons, but I could imagine someday being.  My dad ran Boston a number of times.  I had friends running today.  Two weeks ago I was ready to give up on my marathon training.  Clearly I was just not meant to run such distances.  I had had that cold back in early March, and the bronchitis, and had taken about a week off from my training schedule.  When I started back up I had one sort of OK run and then everything went downhill fast. I was stopping short of my mileage goals and getting nowhere near my pace goals, and generally felt lousy about the whole endeavor.  This lasted for almost three weeks, or “forever” in runner’s jargon.  I wanted to quit.  The worst thing about a running slump is the mysterious feeling of getting progressively worse.  Of fighting a losing battle against your own limits.  Of inexplicably sliding further and furthe...

Building right onto my last post , may I say that I am thrilled and slightly intimidated by the amount of exciting, terrific, and difficult repertoire I have coming up in the next few weeks? This Monday we in the South Bend Symphony are presenting our annual tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, over at the campus of IUSB, and because we try to feature the work of African-American composers and because African-American composers are by definition not nineteenth-century European composers, we get to play new music!  This year I am most excited about Adolphus Hailstork’s An American Port of Call .  It uses the orchestra to portray the sounds of a busy harbor city, and the licks in my part are tricky and rhythmic and fun.  I can’t wait to start rehearsals tomorrow. Next weekend we’ve got a Chamber concert, featuring our outstanding principal clarinetist in the Copland Concerto , and although I am not playing that work I do get to do Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony .  No...

I got out for a Thanksgiving run this morning.  It was a late run, because I had to make a cake and a veggie side dish first, so by the time I was out on the path it was fairly deserted.   My workouts have been feeling pretty logey lately, and today was no exception.  My ankle’s been twingey, and I was just trotting along, taking some idle walk breaks, when I spotted a runner way ahead of me on the path.  Immediately my game improved.  I raised my head, lifted my feet, and picked up my pace just a little bit.  I wasn’t racing, no, but I wondered if I might be able to gain on her before I turned around for home.  I pushed myself and got closer.  Finally I passed, and smiled happily at her.  Raised my hand in the traditional runner’s salute. Oh, she said, smiling, I was feeling pretty good out here until you just passed me… I had a great time chasing you down!  I responded. I meant it - having a presence in front of me totally made my...

Before Zoe was born I was a triathlete.  Love me some multi-sport summer fun.  I was never especially competitive or fast, but I loved having an excuse to get outside and crash around in the summer.  “But I’m TRAINING!”  I would holler over my shoulder, as I stepped away from the oboe, the dirty dishes, or the argument with Steve and biked across Chicago to do an open water swim or a long run.   I haven’t swum regularly since little girl was born. It just takes so long to drive to the gym and change and between the time I’m away from home working and the time I have to spend at home working I can’t justify any more time away from her.  But now that she’s in SCHOOL I have some morning hours to reclaim. So for the past month I’ve been getting over to the Y once a week to swim.  The first time I slid into the water I almost cried at the beauty of it.  A couple of strokes in I felt sleek as an otter, slicing through the water with an effortlessne...

We are driving back home to Indiana.  The Breckenridge Music Festival has been a great experience for me - a five week experiment in being totally out of my comfort zone.   I am used to being the principal oboist of a small regional orchestra.  I am used to being a strong presence in the group, because of my position and because I am very good at my job.  I have the personal confidence to speak in rehearsals and meetings, and people know who I am.  In contrast, for more than a month I feel that I’ve been scrambling to keep up with an orchestra full of great musicians, and trying mostly to fly under the radar.  Both roles are new to me.  In the first place, I am not an English horn player.  I have always been able to kind of get around on the instrument, and play the solos, but that’s very different from being able to sit in a high-quality professional orchestra week after week and confidently make soft entrances, at altitude.  Early on, ...

This spring, I have been running by Perceived Effort.  My sports watch died last fall, and I haven’t gotten around to a new one.  Also, from our new house, I have a general idea of the distances of my various routes, but I haven’t GPSed them precisely, so most mornings I go out to run ABOUT three or four miles, and I look at my tiny wristwatch with no second hand or even minute subdivisions on the face and note the approximate beginning and end times of my run.  On my “speedwork” days I just run fast for a while and slow for a while, measuring time by the number of breaths I take and pace by how hard it feels.  I figure if it feels hard it’s probably fast, and if it feels REALLY hard it’s probably really fast.  In this way I do a variety of different kinds of workouts, and while I’m not going to be an Olympian any time soon, I have been keeping myself more-or-less in shape and working on my speed and endurance in a good-enough-for-now way.  But Perceived Ef...

When I was in great shape - like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, I loved the feeling of strength that running gave me.  Finding that extra gear in a race and being able to lengthen my stride and float past my competitors felt the same as having the power to project in the orchestra - to bring the oboe’s voice effortlessly to the fore, after subduing it in an accompaniment or tutti section. That sensation of deep power and ease was a link between my two loves. Now, I have to admit that somehow this spring has caught me unawares.  I have been working a lot, and traveling a lot, and parenting a lot.  I’m not doing speed work, or long runs in an organized way, and I haven’t run a race yet this season.  I feel a little sluggish, and a little fat, and I feel that way on the oboe as well.  In my practicing recently, I’ve been aware that I’m really straining for big dynamics.  I’m playing with a forced sound that I don’t particularly like....

It’s been a rough few weeks.  For no good reason, really - I’ve just been feeling left-over as the season comes to an end, and a little tired of the oboe, and the driving, and the meetings.  I drag myself to my practice room and force the excerpts, and the reed-making, and retreat as soon as I can justify it.  Nothing feels particularly great, and both of my oboes have cracks that need attention that I haven’t had time to give them.  I’ve been running, but as a respite from playing and not as a project in itself - my fitness is not where it should be at this point in the spring and I’m not doing any real training.  Things came to a head recently when I warmed up carefully and mindfully, played my scales and and etude, and turned right around and left the room.  Nothing was going to make me stay there any longer.  I played my concert that night - and then left the oboe in its case. I think this is a natural part of the cycle.  I hit this wall over ...

Why can’t I write? I can’t seem to have any ideas or focus this month.  I have impulses for ideas, as I am sitting in the orchestra or driving, and I make notes about them.  But I can’t seem to turn them into posts, or even particularly smart ideas.  I’ve been busy - but I don’t actually believe that I’ve been any busier than normal.  The college year has just ended, so I have 1 and 2 half additional days in my week now, and although I did just travel to the East Coast for a major recital that I had been working very hard on as it was a different program from the two self-produced recitals I delivered a month earlier, and although I am working on promoting my Reed Boot Camp and learning a fairly unusual excerpt list for an audition and reviving the Lofstrom Concertino for a performance at IDRS in July, and trying to determine a recital program two weeks later, and although I just played the Rite of Spring this evening, I don’t see why all that and an active 2 year ...

Here’s a workout I love - Treadmill Excerpt Fartleks. I come armed with a complete playlist of all the excerpts for my next audition, and start with the treadmill at a comfortable jogging pace.  I set my iPod to shuffle, and start with a nice slow piece for a warmup.  As soon as the oboe solo is over I click ahead to the next track and notch my treadmill 0.3 MPH faster.  Because I’m shuffling the playlist I have no idea how long the next track will be, but I let it play out until I’ve heard my solo.  Might be 30 seconds, might be 7 minutes.  I click ahead and take my speed back down 0.2 MPH.  Another excerpt, another .3 faster, another excerpt, .2 down. This workout is a multi-tasker’s dream.  At the end of 30 minutes I am running nearly a 10K pace (results vary based on how close to the front of the track the excerpts sit) and because it wasn’t continuous fast running but intervals of easier and harder work, I still have the energy to face the rest of...

The running magazines and books I read all stress the importance of knowing what your workout is before you go out. Of having a number of different workouts that you do at different times of the year and different days of the week, each of which focuses on different skills and hones different strengths. Even though I continue to go out for the same 6-mile loop 75% of the time, I acknowledge this intelligent idea. When I added a weekly speed workout a few years ago I DID get a lot faster, and when I make myself do a weekly long run I DO get stronger. I schedule my runs in little tables, just like the magazines say. When I get away from my routine, as I did earlier this summer, I notice the change for the worse. I do this on the oboe too - different kinds of practicing for different purposes - but I almost never plan in advance. Rather, I get on the instrument, work through my warm-ups for a while and just see where the day takes me. How much more productive could I be if I had...

It's a slippery slope. One day you wake up a little late and don't go running. After all, one missed day certainly won't matter. The next day you do run, but it's kind of hot out and you go a little shorter, or a little slower than you had planned. Listen to your body, you say. The next day, because you ran yesterday, you can totally justify not running because you don't really feel like it, and before you know it you are running 3-mile weeks when your training schedule (which you haven't looked at in quite a while) suggests 18-20. You start the habit of eating ice cream with the baby right before bed. She needs the calories, and sleeps better with food on her stomach, and a little bowl of ice cream covered with fresh strawberries is practically healthy. All those antioxidants! Then you run out of strawberries, but the ice cream is still there. Then Zoe goes to bed early but you still justify a nice big bowl, because you're a runner. (Sort of.) Befor...