So here’s the first week’s totals: Exactly thirty miles, the long run, 11 miles on Day 6, moderate hills and hard to moderate pace. No pain, although after Day 7, an ill-thought-out cross-training/treadmill with only hamstring strengthening and 6:30 per minute pace, with not enough time to stretch afterward; hamstring and groin muscle tightening to tension. A little scare. But Monday (Dec.5, Week Two, Day One), after a easy to moderate five-miler, there is no aftereffect, only tiniest of feelings in the butt-hamstring, even the forefoot feels fly. Note to self: Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! After cross-training, treadmill or running.
Today, then, rather than writing about striking a balance, with the body seemingly in training mode, I turn to the mind. Like dance. Lead with your head.
I’m thinking Derek Boogaard. The New York Times’ Pulitzer Putsch three-parter http://nyti.ms/sRCYTm on the life and death of a hockey enforcer. Putting it out there. Hockey in rural and small town Canada, my home and native land, the most telling moment when Boogaard (part one) learns that when he’s drafted into The Show (the NHL), he’s in a dark room, showing little or nothing in terms of a reaction because he has a headache, again, one that he can’t shake.
I'm nineteen (in 1974) with wheels but modest girth, not what you need to play, to continue to play, organized hockey, where speed and playmaking, particularly for those who are undersized, don't catch the eye of Coach. Five times into the corner and, Son, can you get the puck even once?! Elbows up, sticks up, players with just enough balance to stay up on their skates but chock full of testesterone, a mouthful of Chiclets for teeth, wide gaps where they'd paid the price. Coach takes note of that ... The praise call from the Bench, not Nice Hands! or Shifty Skating! or Good Pass!, but Oooo, what a Cement Head! Man, that boy can take hit after hit and keep going. Can't wait to see how he squares off against that skilled power forward who plays for our archrival. Two shots to the head and we take out their biggest threat to score. And when their enforcer jumps in and gets in his licks, Cement Head takes it like a man. And is back on the ice five minutes later; doesn’t miss a shift! See http://bit.ly/tKrYuJ.
I used to get endorphins, the runner’s high. No more, though. Or not often. Those days are over. Now, on mild pre-winter days like these, I feel a low-level high after a week of running. My mind electric.
Which helps when you are working on a memoir. Cherchez la cliché, but now instead of a runner’ high, that periodic burst of MJ-life ecstasy, I’m very quickly when I step out into a slow-moderate 8:30ish per mile pace, looking at better than 5 miles in 45 mins, 10 miles in 90 mins, 15 in 2 hrs 15 mins, etc., feeling that my whole life lives inside me.
I’m back at the bottom of the world, the Kapiti Coast (See Running for Your Life: Runners' Journals, first in Older Posts) in October 1983, only four months after running my first marathon, drilling down, down, the darkness of the DVT days, middle ’70s, after my freshman year, at the start of my second semester sophomore year, I’m deathly ill, managing to gain sufficient credits so that the year is not lost, and then a year away from college, a gap year, they call it now, a sketch of myself that I keep at my worktable bears the date: NOVEMBER 1976, but that has for decades made no sense because the image is from another time, when I was DJing at a summer party.
But no, on my run Monday (Dec. 5), I realize that what I’d done was make the sketch from a photograph that I’ve since lost, while living in Paris, Ontario, a tiny house in a farmer’s field where the summer of 1977 we’d had the party to end all parties because I was leaving within the week for the gold mines of the Northwest Territories, or at least that was the plan; the weekend of my departure I awake with a near-ruptured appendix that requires emergency surgery, my mom and dad off to a trip down south, and I stay and sleep in the screened-in porch of my uncle and aunt’s house, convalescing, and I would never work in the mines, rather at my hometown daily newspaper, the sports beat for a summer before my third year at college, that summer (1978) in Edmonton, where I went with my college friend, Clive – again, a name lost to me but found on Monday’s run – and Stan, too, a name lost and found.
Stan, who earlier that year had heard reports of abuse of his son in clear view of people at a restaurant, and now he is asking me, his tenant for the summer, if I would accompany him to the town where his son lived with the boy’s mother, who had long been estranged from Stan and was putting the boy through hell. Or so Stan was led to believe.
I went with him, crossing the Alberta-British Columbia border to help if I could. He went to family court for a hearing to do the right thing by his son in this rough and tumble out of the way place, the Kapiti Coast of the Pacific Northwest, Prince George, a town I hadn’t thought about since I’d read the first parter in the Derek Boogaard series, where Boogaard had honed his skills as a brawler, where he would sow the seeds of his tragic end.
And an editor friend, who when told of my running and writing about it, paused and said, “That really is a body of work.”
Next: Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance
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