{"id":73049,"date":"2022-04-22T07:27:48","date_gmt":"2022-04-22T05:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/runlovers.it\/2022\/andrea-marcolongos-de-arte-gymnastica-the-body-and-mind-maintenance-manual\/"},"modified":"2022-11-15T15:53:55","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T14:53:55","slug":"andrea-marcolongos-de-arte-gymnastica-the-body-and-mind-maintenance-manual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runlovers.it\/en\/2022\/andrea-marcolongos-de-arte-gymnastica-the-body-and-mind-maintenance-manual\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrea Marcolongo’s De Arte Gymnastica: the body and mind maintenance manual"},"content":{"rendered":"

The<\/span> phrase Andrea Marcolongo<\/a> often repeats is “If they had told me three years ago that I would write a book about running, I would have laughed.” The amazement that has accompanied her since she not only started running-she, a person who up to that point had never played sports-still shows no signs of waning. She cannot explain it and so, as she is used to doing, she investigates it by writing. And thinking about what to write while running. Getting as far as“De Arte Gymnastica <\/a>.From Marathon to Athens with Wings on Your Feet<\/a>,” published by Laterza. <\/span> <\/p>\n

An unexplored dimension<\/h3>\n

To better understand his amazement, it is good to take a step back to just before he unexpectedly wore running shoes (or “sneakers,” as he calls them in his book, in a nostalgic way that reminds us all of what we used to call them when we used them for physical education in school) for the first time.<\/p>\n

Andrea Marcolongo is a highly respected connoisseur of the culture and language of Ancient Greece. She is also and above all a very good popularizer who with her many books (Brilliant language. 9 reasons to love Greek<\/a>,<\/em> The Lesson of Aeneas<\/a>, The Heroic Measure<\/a>, and <\/em> At the Source of Words<\/a>) <\/em>was able to enthrall anyone to a culture that underlies our own but often seems distant to us. Yet she manages to find the points of contact between that ancient world and our own, making us realize how much that language and that kind of life still have to teach us after more than two millennia of history.<\/p>\n

One of the things that you realize very early on when you start running is that you can change, that you can find yourself passionate about doing something that until recently did not belong to you at all, and most importantly that this great little personal revolution has a force that reverberates throughout our entire existence. You can change, everything is never the same and unchanging, those who adapt to change win, not those who oppose it.<\/p>\n

Andrea Marcolongo enters this new phase of her life with a curiosity that takes the form of two very specific desires: that of understanding why she is doing it and that of continuing to do it, having a goal in mind, namely to run The Marathon, the original one, from Marathon to Athens.<\/p>\n

After all, anyone who gets into running and is changed by it always asks that question: why am I doing this? Why have I changed to the point of doing something I never thought I would do? To arrive, I believe, also at the question of what is its true nature: that of the previous life or the present one?<\/p>\n

In short: we all ask this question but the difference is in the answer, and the ones Andrea Marcolongo gives are articulate and most importantly-unlike so many other books about running-have such a broad historical and philosophical scope that they span millennia.<\/p>\n

De Arte Gymnastica<\/em>, however, does not talk about the history of running. As she puts it, writing a book is “another form of endurance running, an all-intellectual marathon at the end of which I always come out shattered, exhausted, feeling that I have given everything and more and the certainty that I never want to hear about the subject around which I have written again.”<\/p>\n

His writing alternates memories and personal impressions with quotes and stories about the relationship Greeks had with sports, alternating with reflections on the social value of running in modernity. All starting from a very ancient manual on physical education: that of Philostratus – De Arte Gymnastica precisely – which she began to read convinced that she would find in it the tables of the first Olympians and instead discovering in it a culture of sport radically different from ours. And in many ways healthier and more integrated into daily life.<\/p>\n

Reconnecting with the body<\/h3>\n

Moving into territory that, by her own admission, was unfamiliar to her, Marcolongo demonstrates how the body does not belong to a dimension antithetical to or different from that of the mind: the two parts of the human being, as the ancient Romans used to say, are one or two sides of the same coin. They are mens et corpore.<\/p>\n

During the Fuorisoglia interview<\/a>, I asked her if it could be a reconnection with something she had forgotten, like her body precisely. Accustomed to studying and spending more time with her mind than in her physical dimension, running had led her to realize that there were not two Andrew’s but one woman who had not only learned (or re-learned) to do an unusual thing but had allowed these two modes (static and dynamic, mental and physical) to mix giving an unprecedented result.<\/p>\n

When she runs she thinks and when she studies and writes she thinks about running. Running is not separate but is a different way of being itself. In search of an answer to one of his existential dilemmas: the fear of dying.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that at the very beginning of the book he talks about the happiness that children express through running, as if running in adulthood is a way of reclaiming that dimension and escaping death. Like running away from time and the end, toward the origin of everything.<\/p>\n

Talking to the Greeks<\/h3>\n

While reading De Arte Gymnastica<\/em> I thought about what relationship I might have with the ancient Greeks. I thought that instead of considering them as the founders of our culture and belonging to a past buried by millennia of history, I can consider them as a neighboring but foreign people with whom to establish a dialogue. Comparisons and differences make one grow-even with difficulty but always with fruit-and in the end it is the conversation that makes progress. The one that Andrea Marcolongo established with running and the one in which, pleasantly, she dragged me along with the ancient Greeks. That they had a significantly healthier and more serene relationship with time, with the body, with life.
\nPerhaps because they understood what Andrea Marcolongo learned from running: that physical activity is not separate from life, it is not a break or an escape: it is just and above all another way of being that coexists with the rest.<\/p>\n

Life is also that thing that happens to you by running. In fact: especially that one.<\/p>\n