Easy Runner

I think it's three years since I involved myself in a training schedule based on jog-walking.
Should I invent a new word: jalking? Or jolking? It might make some sense to do so, especially if the essential definition insisted that the jolker had to honestly admit that his schedule included a walking gait any time his oxygen supply felt compromised. Or his mind felt that it was losing its meditative edge and the ordinary buoyancy that usually comes with modestly regulated excercise.
I remember that two years ago I simply did not have much inspiration for getting out on the running routes. Part of my motivation for years had been weight control, and by that time Marianne as cook had well settled into the Ayruvedic routine of the biggest meal at noon followed by a very light supper. The waste line was thus under relatively easy control, and of course, my principle concern was no longer to prove the advantages, to the long term athlete, of nasal breathing, but to get down to the continually elusive secrets of a common sense methods for studying instrumental music. Each little discovery - always so monumental as to make me convinced I had come upon the final solution - seemed much more useful to mankind than any mileage programme I might have in mind.
Yet I did not stop thinking about running, and assumed that some day, probably when the music research was done, I would go back to it.
So I'm back to it, very happily, but probably with more discretion than I've ever had before. I've no interest whatsoever in accumulating mileage or setting some kind of speed record for a senior's age group, in my case under 80. As far as I can see, my prime goal is to use jogging as an aid to balance maintenance and keeping my lower limbs as nimble as possible. This means I feel, so far, none of the over-achiever's usual ambitions. Three trots on the concourse at the Community Complex now, and in each case I'm content with a mere mile. In our building that's basically eight laps, and never did I finish even one lap without a good proportion of walking, until my third outing this Sunday past, when I did manage a single circuit that was all run. I also managed to share some of John Douillard's wisdom with a complex employee. She had never heard of nasal breathing, but was going to try it the next time she was out for a run.
All this was as symbolic as it was enjoyable, because it is such a good sign of the basic music research being done. The numbers have proved themselves over and over again, continually getting me out of jackpots, to the conclusion of a number of assignments. Not only is Tim McDaniel happily reading a tune in three voices, but he is reading it in a delightfully foundational format, a pattern that simply invites logical building of harmonic understanding. Furthermore, circumstances have unearthed a very promising publisher, as well as an experienced and talented graphic designer sympathetic to nature's principles. This pair is indeed to promising that the situation has provoked my first letter to the new Pope, to invite him to stir up the Church to help with the distribution of this information.
And to cap it off, I was moved yesterday, as well as given the insight, to rearrange a Gregorian harmony I found quite unpleasant. The lesson? When harmonizing a melody in Mode One, use a major chord built on the seventh, unless there is a profoundly good reason for some alternative, any time the tune calls for a second or a seventh.