It’s ghastly hot and humid, the forecast is calling for a brutal week, when I have the dream:
I’m at a place of supreme importance, although I’m not sure exactly where. I’ve set aside an ice-cold bottle of Champagne for toasting the event in which high performance is required. I’m sitting in what must be a dressing room next to a famous person (athlete?) who also has a bottle of Champagne. Both bottles are morphed into the shape of a leg and a foot; large, magnum-size.
I put on socks and lace up my skates. I have packed very carefully for the journey to this place, but have forgotten, inexplicably, to pack my hockey gear. I think to put on my hockey pants, but then see that I’ve left them at home. Briefly, I think I can dash to Brooklyn and get them, or wing it in some other fashion, but immediately reject the idea as absurd.
Then, in a panic, I wake up. It is 8:15, on Sunday, Week Five, half-way to the marathon.
*
I had wanted to have gotten in more miles by now. But the heat and humidity is eating me up. Note to self: Favor spring marathons not fall ones, especially as the Northeast is withering in record temps, making those critical weeks of high-octane training necessary to properly prepare for a race even more punishing. No wonder I’m having performance anxiety dreams. The week will end with a second visit with our friends in Millbrook, when the heat is finally expected to break. In Week Five, though, I have to get in some miles: 35, at least.
*
We call it The Halftrack. It’s was Dad’s idea to get it. A friend was unloading this blue Volkswagen station wagon that had all the sex appeal of a kielbasa on wheels. It’d been well-serviced, got good gas mileage, and so that was that. It’s June 1976, and I’m in the back seat of The Halftrack, my leg elevated like the doctors told me to do.
The clots were gone, the doctors assured me, and I had a few months supply of Wafarin, a blood-thinner, to ward against a recurrence. It might not be the best idea, but I’d landed a summer job as the night houseman at the Chateau Lake Louise, a resort hotel in the Alberta Rockies, and my friend, Rick, and I are heading out west in The Halftrack.
With a night job, I could exercise during the day along the trails. I’d lost 40 pounds in the hospital (See RFYL:The Hospital Story) and still looked like a man twice my age, but I wasn’t about to lie around and feel sorry for myself. I hadn’t even tried to set a summer job at home; I wouldn’t be able to play tennis at the park courts, or even golf. I couldn’t imagine a summer of long faces from my family and friends. So, instead, I’m lying in the back seat of The Halftrack, the leg up on the top of the front seat, higher than your heart, the doctors say, which should keep the swelling down. It does – sort of. But every hour on the trip: three days solid driving from Owen Sound, Ontario, to Lake Louise, I have Rick stop The Halftrack and I get out. I imagine myself a wasted German solider, slowly marking a path around The Halftrack, once, twice, three times, before the leg seems a little less swollen, and I go back inside, elevate it again, and off we go.
*
Wednesday it’s finally September. 98 degrees. Deadly, but I’ve gotta go. I’d like to go back to Green-Wood Cemetery, but I’d made a doctor’s appointment for a skin issue that I was sure was related to my running. (This is a personal blog, yeah, but not THAT! personal). The visit to the office on East 34th Street in Manhattan is pretty much a waste of time; try Lamasil, he says, and powder.
I’m dressed to run – in a Montreal Expos T and Brooklyn Public Library baseball cap with a Velcro pouch, $16: $15 for the copay and a house key. “Casual Wednesday?” the doc says when he sees me, minutes before he directs me to the fastest route to the East River.
Outside, the wall of heat hits like a rubber mallet. I ease out, 8:40 per mile, maybe slower. The sun is near-zenith too, 11:20. If I can do two hours, what I feel I need to do to keep to my training sked, it’ll be a miracle.
Patients, doctors, green-blue shirts mill about Bellevue Hospital; food carts, old folks pushing walkers, a lineup at emergency, all sour-faced in the heat. Across 23rd to the river and the scene is less Calcutta at the Vets Hospital. Soon, though, I’m in Stuy Cove, the waterside park at Manhattan’s bankrupt residential complex – billionaires bashing each other over the distressed property like it’s a West Virginia coal mines; buy a co-op, renters be damned.
There’s water and I take a long pull at a fountain. Only stray joggers at near-noon, as I struggle on. One twentysomething looks at me; both of us drenched in sweat. “Diseased, aren’t we?” the look says.
On the east side of the river going south there are plenty of trees and shade and cages for recreation as if built for “The Land of the Giants.” Weird. Must be an East Side thing.
Parkside water fountains and shade keep me going. Not down to a 9-minute-mile, not yet. Bloomberg bike path to the canyons of Wall Street, where pre-Labor Day only the interns are out getting lunch, and avoiding the Ground Zero pilgrims because even in this punishing heat they come, in droves. Not like the trickle that still go to see the first Ground Zero. At Trinity Site, New Mexico.
I’m in Battery Park City on the Hudson when I reconsider. I won’t make two hours. No way. I had planned to head north, up to the Christopher Street pier. Instead, I’m heading home, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, surprising myself with the climb, just shuffling really, but not walking. Finally, though, I’m exhausted, ready to throw it in at the eastern tower, where a man is selling ice-cold Poland Springs for a $1, and I stop, take out the sweat-limp single from my cap-pouch and buy a drink. I down half of it, and manage a wee kick going downhill; there’s a breeze, not a hot one, I tell myself, as I make a bee line for the Clark Street station subway.
In all my years of running I’d never done a Rosie Ruiz, the woman infamous for crossing the finish line first at the 1980 Boston Marathon, and later being discovered to have faked it. I jumped in the air-cooled subway car, not touching anything because I was literally dripping sweat, and rode to my home station, a five-minute run to my door that I managed to do at a good pace. Not two hours. But 1:40 (NOT counting the subway). That will have to do.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Six
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