Knackered Downunder observes a man who tests endurance to the limit

Seeing as the Knackered Hack is losing his faith in marathon running, he’s unlikely to find the example of American endurance runner Dean Karnazes as inspiring as I did.

Karnazes has just finished a tour of Australia and New Zealand, getting in some long-distance running (naturally) and promoting his book Ultramarathon Man, Confessions of an all-night runner. The book is well worth reading. If you walk away with one theme, it’s the value of sheer doggedness and determination and how far they can get you. In Karnazes’ case, it’s literally hundreds of miles. Continue reading ‘ultra-marathon runner tells all’

Earlier this year, the UK government announced a plan to invest £10 million on an initiative to promote singing in schools. The government’s so-called singing ambassador – composer and broadcaster Howard Goodall - will spearhead the project. Today on Aled Jones’ Radio 3 programme The Choir Goodall, who has penned theme tunes for Blackadder, Vicar of Dibley and others, explained how an organized singing programme i.e. singing incorporated into day-to-day classroom activities including learning of times tables, can improve behaviour and drive dramatic improvements in struggling schools.

The programme is worth hearing in its entirety (it will be gone after seven days), not least for Continue reading ‘singing improves behaviour in schools’

It’s not a shark but the blank page that can induce a sense of failure in a writer, observed US singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman today on BBC Radio 2 (about 75 minutes in). She said the hardest work you may do as a writer is staring at that blank space for two hours when nothing is coming through.

But achieving nothing concrete in that time is not failure. “You just lifted 2,000 pounds in the gym of creativity,” she said. She also used a marathon metaphor: “People don’t run out the door and run 26 miles. They create the muscles first.” You do that by making sure you turn up and try, even if you don’t write something.

Nielsen Chapman teaches creativity and songwriting and believes creativity exists within everyone, but in many of us this is blocked. It’s like a fine white linen towel on a high shelf waiting to be reached and pulled down, she said.

Perhaps, as well as latent talent, it is knowledge of how to persist that separates the elite athlete or the Nielsen Chapman from the rest of us. They persist until they can reach.