Whoa! It’s been a long road, and one, if I’m true to what will be my destination, and what it might be a surprise to a casual reader to realize given that these past months of non-running, working through injury, that destination being, Running for My Life, that the road is not so flat and true, this body cannot just on its own, through running alone, and yeah, I’ve done some strengthening and stretching since returning to running marathons, my first in twenty-three years was Pittsburgh 2010, in the months before did a bit of core, flat-on-my-back leg raises, three sets of ten, and sit-ups, sixty at a go, and a slow pace, but now after the hamstring pull in early February, it was, more than three-and-a-half months ago, those days are gone even though I feel as good as I did before the injury, I’m changed. Think of the road as being changed: No longer flat and smooth, but pot-holed, chopped up, a mountain trail versus a high school track and for my body to continue on its way on the road, and not just for this season but for all seasons, or at least from now through the next thirty-five years, I have to change what I’m doing.
I’ve never put it out there before now but here it is: This year marks my thirty-fifth year of identifying myself as a runner. I’m halfway there. And heretofore, I’m going to be smart about it, in training, going slow when I need to, tailoring my goals so that the difference between reality and expectation is better managed. It’s not that I won’t get injured again; that would be foolish to suggest, but today I want to make a pledge. If I see my running life as a marathon, beginning when I was twenty years old, only a few months out of hospital, where I barely survived a bout of blood clots, a severe pulmonary embolism, then I am at 13.1-mile mark. I’ve another 13.1 to go. I’m going to be a runner for another thirty-five years, when I’ll be jogging along, I kid you not, at the ripe old age of ninety.
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A dot-com diary (diarrhea?):
mymtaalerts.com
myspace.com
myverizon.com
myohmy.com
myyouareanarcissisticsoandso.com
callyourmother.com
And the most thoroughly un-my universe Web site,
getyourheadoutofyourass.com
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Before Running for Your Life I kept a blog for awhile. It’s funny how this space works, digital storage, that is, and those words that I wrote in a late-life Mark Twain sort of way are still out there, not like that Sixth Grade short story I wrote, the teacher Mr. L saying we could choose any topic under the sun and in my memory of an eleven-year-old L I recall asking for clarification, something about hearing it twice made it real, and yes, Mr. L left no doubt on what was expected so sure enough I wrote, “Dracula Meets Mr. L,” and being a bold and strangely-certain-of-my-comic-powers kind of kid, I was first to implore Mr. L to read “DMML” to the assembled class, which I did, antically playing out the parts, and gosh, and part of me wishes I still had that story to wonder at its sheer balls, or more likely, wince for poor unsuspecting Mr. L, my most poignant memory of that episode after I have finished my reading and resumed my seat, Mr. L is sitting at his desk, face-forward on his crossed hands on the tabletop, a posture he kept for what I remember was a very long time.
Those, I dare say, were paper days. Now the words never fade, and who but the most backward Luddite in 2011 leaves their work only on paper. Even the squiggles and words, no way without a magnifying glass can you tell the difference between the original and the copy of a page of writing and doodles, say, that has been scanned by an off-the-shelf machine and digitized so that everything, all words and images can be downloaded onto an iPad or a PlayBook (Isn’t it time that all words are mid-framed with a Capital letter? As Schopenhauer tells us that human beings may have the capacity to think, but they don’t, they accept) all there in its entirety, no reason not to have that Sixth Grade story that had the class at first in nervous laughter then in eerie silence as my first public reading went on to the point where, if memory serves, not a single person made a sound; I’m reading the last few bits in jaw-breaking silence because any sign of support is likely to be viewed as complicit, corporal punishment de rigueur, Principal H, one time I’ll never forget, letting me have it more than once with a whipping fast ruler across my open palms, but not this time, no, Mr. L just had his head down on his hands, not taking me to task for what I’d done because he’d asked for it, given us the freedom to write anything and I did and today forty-four years later, if I'm true to myself I'd have to say that I'm glad I can’t just log on and read what I wrote because this written-down memory seems so much more alive, and is why this writing on the page, in my case in a journal on the subway, with pen and open notebook feels to me the only way to retell this tale, to bring it alive in ways the already-existing everywhere-existing cyberstories simply can’t.
Love the rain! Not the forty days and nights Noah-like deluge, which I found myself in the other night (May 18). Ha! That’s what God was talking about, rain as heavy as a Victorian cloak, seconds in the outside and you’re wearing it, soaked to the skin, how the Earth could be covered in deep water (Rat We!), and sure for years I comforted myself with the thought that Noah is the saint of the non-swimmers, first hint of Apocalypse, the “Water World” variety, and he’s not practicing the breaststroke, obsessing about his center of buoyancy, but building the biggest F-ing boat he can so that he’ll be so high up and off the waterline that he doesn’t have to THINK about swimming in it.
Now, though, I’m in the swim. Thankfully, on May 18 there was only an hour or so of the Victorian cloak rain. Not forty days and nights. Not now in any case. Not before I get to know water later this summer.
Next (in mid-June): Running for Your Life: Summer Road
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