Farewell, David Bowie

Today's unfortunate news about the death of David Bowie had a profound effect upon me. I'm not any sort of Rock n Roll groupie, but we all have our particular favorites, and David Bowie was one of mine.

I guess it was partly the innovation, partly the reinvention, partly the notion of a misfit succeeding at being a misfit, and proud of it, on behalf of all non-mainstream people everywhere.

Regardless, today would be a proper time to repost my all-time favorite David Bowie tune, the one that speaks directly to Ultrarunners and to ordinary people everywhere: Heroes.

Please take the time to actually click the YouTube video and to watch this amazing, multilayered song (if the embedded video playeth not, here's the link).

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Friday, May 31, 2013

We Can Be Heroes, Just for One Day...and Ultrarunning

After several years--indeed, the love affair has only intensified--I rely mightily on my Sirius XM Radio for musical enjoyment and inspiration.

Just today I heard a David Bowie song--Heroes--that I had not heard for some time. The passage of time enabled me to hear it from an Ultrarunner's perspective.

I think it probably hits on one of the key precepts of why we run these vast distances: we can be heroes.  We have our everyday lives, but for one day, when we don the mantle of an Ultrarunner--we can be heroes.  We could be set apart from every other human being on the planet.

This tune is so not at all about athletic achievement, but I think of it in that way anyway.  The music and the main lyric are so catchy:
   
     We can be heroes
     Just for one day.

If that day is our day, the day when "suddenly it is all as easy as a bird in flight," then we can achieve distances or times that were formerly unimaginable.

Like when I cracked the 24 hour barrier for 100 miles at Umstead in 2010, when--seriously--all I was hoping for was to finish.

You all have your stories, I am sure, of the day when you were a hero, if just for one day.