It’s too patently obvious to remark that this blog is no ordinary runners’ journal. Suffice to say it is not a place to go (although in the beginning I had a sense it might be but it has evolved in its own way, a little of this, a little of that, and all me) for info on carbo-loading and shoe choice and sock preference, and interval training and I don’t know what all.
Which is not to say that Running for Your Life isn’t a runner’s journal. Rather it is a journal of a runner who also happens to be a writer. If suddenly I were no longer running I would probalby keep up the blog because the running I’ve done in the past thirty-six years would find a way into this space. It would be hard not running. But not writing? Hardest. Because I would most certainly be dead.
I’ve been digging around in my journals these past many months, working on an idea for a memoir, and while photos I’ve taken over the years and greeting cards and such have gone astray, it seems to me I can put my hands on every scrap of paper and tiny journal, the smallest thought or exclamation to issue forth from my, at times, troubled and angered and ecstatic soul.
There’s something about looking at the words written down, the appearance of what a touch of hubris allows me to say might be seen as a touch of style. Or even just to look at something that I wrote with my own hand when I was stricken and lovelorn at twenty, or alone and frantic at twenty-seven (in early September 1983, I was, due to a foolish but alarming bank-transfer error, penniless on the streets of Auckland, New Zealand, living hand-to-mouth with no idea of what would happen next.) Not just the words but the script itself. To me, these writings are treasures.
In the digital age it saddens me to think that another deeply fulfilling human custom – the keeping of a pen and journal – seems in decline. Of course, science tells us one person’s decline is a second person’s ascent. Close a door and open a window. Decline and fall of the Roman (American?) Empire. Really? You think things are bad, you ain’t seen nuthin’.
History teaches us that at the dawn of every revolution the displacement of industries and peoples leads to a pessimism among citizens and subjects. They often characterize the times as apocalyptic while the architects of the revolution, the visionaries, shed a light that eventually burns off the gloom and forms the fundaments of the new society in the wreckage.
That revolution is currently a digital-creative one. Savvy investros will tell you that that is the place were the new elites are forming. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (age 42) for president of the new USA (say about 2024, when she will be 55) and my daughter, K (she of the Pittsburgh Marathon pic at right below), her chief of staff. (Pardon the parental K-vell; but it is not such a far-fetched idea .¤.¤.)
Ahem, the topic. Journaling. It may not be for everyone. But I’ve been keeping a journal, off and on, not as regularly as running, since May 1983 when I left my friend Vida’s apartment off Bloor Street in Toronto for a yearlong trek across the US by bus and by air to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba before meeting a pilot friend and flying in his four-seater Cessna from the Texas-Mexico border at Laredo to Philly – and buses and trains eventually home to Canada.
As well, I kept paper souvenirs. One I looked at the other day: the Tour of the Kapiti Coast, October 1983. It’s funny the effect the race results printout has on me. Twenty-eight years old – half my age. The size and quality of the paper no longer in production, worthy of an early computer museum. I’m thinking Daisy Wheel (in wide use until the mid-1980s) print. Two segments, folded sheets, on old-school newsprint – a paper that’s very familiar to me from my reporter’s clippings I've also kept (circa 1979-1983). And I wish as I hold the paper that the race itself comes back to me in more than a vague memory of running along rutted roads, mountain trails, often with high above views of the South Pacific Ocean along the southwestern coast of the North Island, New Zealand. But so far, very little. Only a touch of what it felt like to finally cross the finish line: 4:38:35 after I began. In 81st place among 87 men and women finishers.
It’s only seven years after the hospital, and in May that year I’d run my first marathon, and finished not too shabby, at 4:02 and change as I remember, although I saved no paperwork from then – and wasn’t yet keeping a journal.
Kapiti, as I remember it, was ultra-marathon tough. Mountain roads like I’d seen in the Rockies, when I first started running after the hospital. I’ve blacked out the memory because it was in this race that I’d flown too close to the sun, my wings melting. I’d been running the hills of Auckland and felt myself ready for this mountain test. Others were, but me . . . I’d come out decently enough, but faded in many stages. Surely my leg protested too much. That it swelled to the point that I had to stop and walk; the humiliation of even the slowest runner passing me .¤.¤. I’d always seen myself as an athlete, as someone deserving of being in the top twenty percent of competition, simply devastated by the results of that day.
All of this beginning to emerge as I retrace the Daisy Wheel printout:
Stage 1, 6:16 (Place 70); Stage 2, 67:36 (Place 86); Stage 3, 50:26 (Place 81); Stage 4, 99:42 (Place 80); Stage 5, 54:36 (82); Total Time, 4:38:35 (81).
Which is to say, nothing would’ve been retained in my mind – or here – if not for the saved paper. I fold it up and put it away for the next time.
Next: Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel
0 comments:
Post a Comment