“I’d run, but .¤.¤. it’s so boring.”
If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.
The deal was, as a young man in Canada, team sports was a big part of my life: playing organized ice hockey until I was eighteen, in high school varsity boys volleyball and soccer. Summer, lacrosse, and pickup sports: touch football, softball, and sure, running games of all sorts. But all of the sprint variety. The idea of a cross-country run a la Alan Sillitoe (“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”) out of the question. “I’d run, but . . . it’s so boring.”
So what happened? Adulthood, I guess. I do wax nostalgic for game sports – and yeah, Boomer pickup softball games are played in my ’hood; it’d be easy to get back into it. For years after high school, well into our twenties, our gang in Owen Sound, Ontario http://bit.ly/ulvB9C, returned to our alma mater, the West Hill Secondary School football field on Canadian Thanksgiving to play tackle football. A searing memory comes back as I write this: my pal BA, wide open in a courtyard game at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the ball perfectly thrown, a lofter at his fingertips, but before he could pull it in, BA, his arms splitting the upright of a lamp post, collided into it with such force that he catapulted backward to the ground, near-unconscious, and we players, unable to contain ourselves, falling to the ground, pissing ourselves. Another game, years later, still in our twenties, tackle football again, this time in Brockville, Ontario, with pal MH from Owen Sound, and a senior editor at my first daily newspaper, saying: “Here we go again: Friend to OC, OC to Friend, Friend to OC to Friend to OC. Would you guys just quit it!”
It also has something to do with what I came to regard as repetition. As a married and family man, I found, what with the responsibilities of a full-time job and other imperatives, that most of my leisure time I wanted to be with my wife and daughter, I developed other sides of myself: principally, writing, reading, travel, fatherhood. It’s true that pickup sports don’t break out on the street for fiftysomethings in the way that they do for teenagers. And New York City, of course, presents its own myriad obstacles to that happening.
But running, for me, in these halcyon days. It’s never boring. Which doesn’t mean to say that each day I feel the same jump-out-of-bed urgency to put on my running clothes, lace up my Brooks Defyance and lope out the door. But once I’m going, it’s like the ignition has fired in my old Camaro. Like I’m easing into my seat and being a part of, as well as watching, the world go by, both inside and outside. It’s time travel and the birds and the cold and the soft ground, the broken cobble, the dogs, the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood Cemetery, Our Lady’s Field of Windsor Terrace. The otherworldly howl of Thurb. . . .
Where is the repetition in that?
Next: Running for Your Life: Christmas Week
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