Pardon me! It's just my fartlek.

I like running.  I'm not very good at it.  A more precise description of what I do might be called "shuffling."  But I still enjoy it.  There's something about lacing up those hot pink running shoes and heading outdoors into the crisp morning that brings joy to my soul.  It's also an excellent time to compose new music.  While my feet pound on the pavement rhythms and melodic fragments organize themselves in my mind to come out on paper later.

I recently discovered fartleks.  Fartlek is a Swedish word that means "speed play."  It involves alternating face paced intervals with slower recovery intervals.  I've been running some fartleks lately.  I give it my all for one hundred paces, then huff and puff pathetically in the slower interval that follows.  This is especially true if that slower interval happens to come when I am chugging up a hill.  Then I resemble the Little Engine That Couldn't more than a champion marathoner.  Many times I've encountered another runner on such a climb, during the resting phase of my fartlek, and as they dash past with grace and élan I want to shout, "I can go much faster!  I'm on a fartlek!"  In my mind I plead with them to not think I'm lazy due to my slow pace.

This has caused me to ponder the fartleks in our lives.  We all have times of success, prosperity, of moving towards a goal.  Then there are those periods of seeming stagnation and hopelessness.  The British composer Edward Elgar is a good example of this.  Born into a working class home in 1857, he worked diligently to overcome the class prejudices of Victorian England.  His modest success in the 1890's was crowned with a true masterpiece in 1899 with Variations on an Original Theme, more commonly called The Enigma Variations.  The Nimrod variation alone is so beautiful it defies description.  Numerous other outstanding compositions followed in the years to come, including one of the most well-known pieces in the United States, Pomp and Circumstance No. 1.  If you've attended any graduation, ever, you've heard it!

By 1912 Elgar was lauded and praised all over the world.  He was enjoying a fast fartlek interval.  But then World War I began, and Elgar became depressed and discouraged by the conflict.  He saw and understood that the British Empire, of which he was fiercely proud,  was on the wane.  He also recognized the dying gasps of the European Romantic music tradition, and knew he didn't belong to the new modernism that was rising.  Deeply troubled, he wrote no significant works for many years.  No doubt there were critics who judged him to be "finished."  Yet Elgar defied them all.  In 1919, with a burst of speed in a brilliant creative fartlek, he composed the Cello Concerto in e minor, and the cello canon has never been the same.  It is magnificent.  If he had composed nothing else, that concerto alone would have guaranteed his fame.

So let us look kindly on others who appear to be slow, unsuccessful, lost, or bewildered.  Let us help and encourage those who are on a "resting phase" and need to recharge.  Let us never confuse the recovery period of a fartlek with stupidity, laziness, or failure.  Do not judge.  The most glorious creation you can ever imagine may be just around the corner.

Sir Edward Elgar