Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the thin anklet socks. One layer long sleeve and unlined windbreaker. Thankfully there’s no wind to speak of. But plenty cold. From my “cattle” stall, the eight-plus-minute milers, I can see the CNN sign south in the pre-dawn light: 14 F. The same temperature as two years ago for the Manhattan Half, two loops of Central Park. In 2009, it did warm up to 18 F by 10 a.m., said S, a Park Slope neighbor who traveled with me to the 8 a.m. start. To the east, across the Sheep Meadow, the sun is finally rising. How freezing it must be for the young girl her voice trembling as she sings, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” S and I exchange “Good Lucks!”, she in a scarf and three layers of long sleeves and waist-hugging thermal windbreaker, setting in her earbuds, turning on her iPod, saying she’s off to her zone, and we slowly move along in the mass of 4,358 runners, it’s long past the official starting line before we pick up any pace at all, and I lope ahead because I could have stood waiting for the start in a stall for faster runners but I was enjoying S’s company, but now I’m in my zone, a 13.1-mile race in cold like I haven’t been in since I ran in North Bay, Ontario, twenty-four years ago.
*
Are you Cardio Hungry? the sign says at The Cycle Bar, a neighborhood place whose backroom is chock-a-block with bikes requiring special shoes to ride, and spinning classes where exercisers come to be in groups and sweat themselves into better health. Right to channel the idea of hunger, group exercise as necessity, here though is the rub: A mile or so into the Central Park Half – and it’s not always the case in a long run – but this time it is and I’m away. Not in a place of necessity exactly, only as it is a necessity for a songbird to fly because running often plunges me deep into solitude, where my capacity for creativity lies.
*
The day I meet up with my old friend M at the Cocoa Bar in Park Slope The Times publishes its obituary on the novelist and teacher Reynolds Price. What I didn’t know before I read the obit was Price won plaudits for the opening of his first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” in 1962, “Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers .¤.¤.” At 77 he is gone and twenty-three years ago he was about my age, and the literary star of a conference at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I would meet the woman who would be my wife, M and I, the lone northerners, Price the figurehead, or so I was told because of all in attendance I had the biggest claim to fraud, was “accepted” into conference workshop on the basis of a fictional stream of consciousness, thinly veiled story surrounding a (literally) lame anti-hero, and I quote from “Rose’s Talisman,” “Guy finished the last row of shingles, climbed down to the ground and walked to the base of Crenshaw’s oak tree. He looked like a veteran policeman approaching his wife’s best friend on a crowded street, unsure of how to address her in public so as not to attract too much attention,” and poems, too, and the Price obit said that he valued “the art of language” and I remember the reading, how moved I was, thinking he was the real thing, the hush of the room, how in early 2011 I’m moved to think that beginnings marked only in words are still seen as sacred space.
*
After the Cocoa Bar, I’m on my way to the Upper East Side to pick up my race bib for the Central Park Half. I’m one to see things as half-full, but the CP Half is half-empty. Registration for my first choice, the Brooklyn Half, is closed, and I’m not feeling the Central Park one. Or Manhattan for that matter. This No. 5 Train seems old hat, reminds me of We, The Pizza, in DC. Whites in J Crew, LL Bean, M Z Wallace handbags, not blacks in service but leaking music in the shoulder-to-shoulder subway car, and what of all these fake fur hats, the ear flaps and the girl sitting across from me as I write this, staring like baby food? Even now, twenty-plus years of riding the subway, each line is different, this one full of worker bees, drones above but down here in winter, bulked up, long commutes to homes in the outer boroughs, folks who’ve forgotten more pathways to quiet strength than those above have been on, some just resting, others listening and a white girl next to me, reading Barbara Kingsolver, “The Lacuna,” so many voices and here it is not about groups, except being unapologetically Democrat, the subway ad: “If you store your stuff outside the city, it may come back Republican.”
*
What I was saying to S about America as a rural place, what one feels in its parks, the American faith trusts its core narrative to its rural origins; pure country, impure city. Consider Central Park among these brand-buying thousands: the light, the sky, the limestone buildings, a reservoir, mechanical plants, on Harlem Hill the rock outcroppings suggest glacial times, people reduced to a universe of smallness, what principle can we claim to answer the naked power of a London Plane tree amidst untrodden snow, on this thirteen-point-one mile run, not a single plastic bag, unlike three hours before when I made my way to the subway at 6:15 am, eerily in the near-dark a plastic bag making that nasty noise that they do, at eye height and then away in a gust of frigid air, dry as dust because even a drop of moisture would freeze fast today.
I stop at the first water station, tip back the cup and a baby fist-size clump of ice, a bit of water at the bottom shooting it forward, hits me square in the nose.
(Check race results, NYRR Manhattan Half-Marathon, @ http://www.nyrrc.org, Bib No. 4548)
Next: Running for Your Life: Let the Training Begin
0 comments:
Post a Comment