Running

Optimal use of energy

Running must be one of the oldest sports.

Competitive racing goes way back in time, and the Tailteann Games in Ireland as well as the Olympic Games are examples of our common heritage in this respect.

Running has been described as the world’s most accessible sport.

To put your body forward in space while running is an experience that people around the globe cultivate.

I go running with a great group of friends in the forest several times a week. Being very inspired by Yves Klein’s sport practice, I reflect while running and try to experience air and space at the same time.

While running in nature with others, you seem to be getting the most of everything; social connectedness, physical training, natural atmosphere, contact with air streaming through space.

You get the sounds of nature, nature gets to you.

Also, reflecting on Blixen themes often happens when running, and the best ideas occur while in the middle of a running session.

Aiming for weightlessness, Yves Klein conquers space. His expression is not running as such, but the art of judo.

His practice and endeavours of judo are juxtaposed to his artistic practice and production. He even writes a comprehensive book on judo: ”Yves Klein, Kodokan Fourth Dan: The Foundations of Judo”. The book is first published in French in 1954 as ”Les Fondements du Judo”. The book is re-published in 2006, and in this edition the president of the French Judo Federation Jean-Luc Rougé states: ”Yves Klein, one of the major artists of the twentieth century, arrived at his style of painting, in large part, because of his ”judo education”.

Even before his first artistic achievements, Yves Klein devoted a long stay in Japan to studying judo.

His work as an artist, which was so original, drew on the unadorned simplicity of judo: the first monochrones recalled the different coloured belts, and of the justly celebrated Leap into the Void, he said that as a judoka he was always involved in ”dynamic levitation”. If I had to describe his work with a maxim of Jigoro Kano, I would choose: ”Optimal use of energy”.”

Just do it.