After leaving the hospital, I took some time off my studies at college and landed a job at a mall drugstore in a town far from home. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, which is convenient because the room I rent from a retired Italian woman doesn’t have one. Cheap ties hang around my collar like misbegotten chromosones. The room is big enough for a double bed and an oversized bureau. Floral wallpaper. The day before my first shift I buy a can of tobacco and cigarette papers and smoke rollie after rollie until with each breath I feel sharp pains where the clot had been in my lung, the smoke so thick that I couldn’t see the wooden crucifix tacked above the door.
My phone won’t be in for a week so I go to a street booth a couple of blocks away. “Will you accept a collect call?” the operator asks.
“Sure will,” Mum says .... “How are you, son? We’ve been worried sick about you. Wondering when you’d call.”
“I dunno,” I says, tapping ash from the cigarette. “I’m just getting myself sorted out down here.”
“So, how’s it going?”
“Goin’? It’s goin’.”
“No, really.”
“I don’t know, it’s a little too early to say.”
“Well, y’know, it’s new, son. Give yourself some time. How was the weather? Today was a little wet but tonight the sun came out and gave us a lovely sunset. It is a little cooler too.” “Uh huh.”
“Next time you’re up, I’ll tell you some TALL TALES. Tuesday Afternoon Ladies League and Thursday Afternoon Ladies Euchre Series. That’s the new name for our alley bowling and card-playing groups. Whaddya think? Can you believe it, they made me the secretary? Your sister’s fine, don’t see her as often as we’d like. Here’s your father. Now, call again soon, promise?”
Working-class dates cruise by in pickups and low-riding Chevies. Tires squeal. The pale roof lamp flickers, threatens to go out.
“You’re all right?” Father asks. He’s sitting in the LazyBoy, watching Jewish comics, scanning TV Guide.
I don’t say I’m as sad as I’ve ever been. It’s his view that retail life is in my cards. That college is unnecessary. “Yup, I’m OK,” I say in my practiced manner. With Dad, it’s all about the physical state. I’m not under heavy mortar fire in a foreign city, a war reporter under siege. No broken bones, gushing blood vessels. My head isn’t severed, lying in the middle of the road. “Yup. OK.”
“Now’s not the time to talk, then; I’ll check with your mother for the details. Call when you have your own phone, okay? Home for Christmas? Fine. Good luck on the job.” And then we hang up.
I go to my room and put on my running clothes. I’m not skin and bones any more, but straggly-looking. That summer (see Getting Started: Part One) I’d begun my practice, running every other day. It takes me awhile, but finally I’m in a bit of a rhythm. Maybe a quarter-mile, I think, maybe I go as long as that today.
I haven’t gone a few hundred yards, my left leg heavy as a post, lame as Chester on “Gunsmoke.” A red GTO rumbles beside me, the window powers down. Run a mile for me!” A girl in a cocktail dress and ponytail, both hands gripping the car door. “Keep your legs up!” she says, as her boyfriend guns the beast, burning rubber. I feel like a husk, as though the wind could blow me away.
Before entering my room that night, I hear the faint sound of voices on the second floor of my rooming house. It appears to be coming from behind a door at the end of the hall, and walking closer, I hear a man’s voice. “Go ahead. I’ve got you. Over.” The next voice is Eastern European, I think, civil yet insistent. “Please. Speak to my brother in Thunder Bay. I can’t get through. Mama dreamed of him last night. She wants to hear his voice. Over.” The man behind the closed door asks for the call numbers, says he will do the best he can. He is hailing Thunder Bay as I creep away.
Recently, M and I were in Spain. Cadiz Province, in a place called Zahara de los Atunes. In Zahara aging bulls and their cows will wander to the beach, and on long runs, miles from other bathers, I ran past them. They give a funny look. Later, a young man sunning with his girlfriend props himself up on his elbow and yells at me, “Ole!”, his right hand cutting the air.
I’ve put in a lot of miles between those two cat calls. And these days, of course, running in New York, where I live and have put most of my time, the looks and acknowledgments I get as I pass (if I get any at all) are more in the admiring category, the thumbs up, a slow, approving nod, than the disrespectful ones. As any half-marathoner or marathoner will tell you, the shouts and cheers of support we get on the street from onlookers keep us going, are a big part of what makes running a marathon unforgettable.
But that’s the big race. How about those long training days? The book guides will tell you that to best finish the 26.2 miles of a marathon that you should, over a one-hundred day training period, put in a minimum of three hundred and sixty miles. No matter how fast you run, that’s a lot of quiet time. A long time to be alone on the road.
There is something my father-in-law said to M around his eightieth birthday. Sol lived to be nearly one hundred and three, and he never thought he had twenty-plus years to live when he told M about a dream he had. I won’t go into the specifics of the dream here, but he had this profound feeling: My whole life lives inside me, he told her.
I will have more to say about motivation in the next post. More practical suggestions. Staying motivated, not just finding that route to a healthy addiction, but sticking to it, is arguably the most critical lesson to be learned. Believe in the Seven S’s: Some will, some won’t, so what?, stop whining, someone’s waiting, so stick to it, start now.
But what Sol told M gets to the heart of how I stay motivated. My injury, my left leg that will never be okay, will always swell to an uncomfortable size when I run, brought me to a running life. My health has been in the hands of doctors, but it is running that has been my route to healing. I like to think the every-other day running I’ve done for more than thirty years is more of a want than a need. I’d be kidding myself if I said it was a balance, although it is what I’d like it to be.
That is why I began talking about motivation from a memory during my early running life. From one of the lives that lives inside me. I don’t, as a rule, think about those days. Many are painful memories – in more ways than one. But they taught me something. Sol had twenty-three more years to live when he told M of his dream.
Another life, if you will. Me, I am running for my life. I can’t write about motivation and not start at the beginning. From the physical state, but more important for me, the mental one. Because it is the mind that will keep us going. Be in balance: train the mind and the body.
Next: Staying Motivated: Part Two
