David Matthews

the Matthews boys

Why run a marathon? Why write Moby-Dick? Why should there be something and not nothing? That these existential and ontological questions are not amenable to easy answers or to any answer at all makes them no less compelling. They gnaw at us, and we gnaw back, with no final resolution on any side, yet the conviction remains that there is something worthwhile in the contemplation of them.

Running is a pure thing in my life. There is a pleasure to be had in it for its own sake. Strictly speaking, I do not run because it is a healthful activity. Any health benefits are appreciated, of course, but purely beside the point. Some runners, perhaps many of us, use races to motivate themselves to run. I suspect I stand outside the mainstream here. For me the race is kind of anticlimactic. The running is the thing.

My brother planted the marathon notion when he was in Portland Memorial Day weekend 2009 after I laid out my running routine for him. “Why not run a marathon?” he asked. “You’ve already got the base to train for one.” I was dubious but  intrigued enough to pick up the running a bit and see where it took me. By mid July I knew a marathon was not in the cards for 2009. What was in the cards was putting in more miles during July, August, and September than I had done in a long time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I cut back my mileage during the winter, as is my custom, picking it up again in late February as the days grew longer and the weather warmed. Sometime late April or early May I began to think seriously about taking a crack at a marathon. After all, the poetry was dead in me, I was unable to bring ideas for essays to fruition, and the two novels more or less in progress were hopelessly stalled. At workday’s end I did not have it in me to engage in activities of spirit and intellect. Running? I could do that. The marathon project was born at least in part of profound discontent with aspects of my life that mean the most to me. It turned to be a good thing.

I rendezvoused with Trani in San Antonio on Friday to run the 2010 San Antonio Marathon on Sunday. We did not see much of San Antonio, just a bit of downtown, the Alamodome, River Walk, and the area around Trinity University, where my niece is a junior art major. For the most part we hung out and enjoyed some marvelous meals and conversation with Rachel and her roommate Amy. I had a great time, though I grew increasingly anxious as the race approached, fearful that I would fail to finish and fretting about how embarrassing that would be.

This was Trani’s seventh marathon. He has always been better at athletic endeavors than I. Perhaps he has the competitive gene that I lack. Thinking about this as I trained for the race, it seemed to me that I was always expected to fail at sports, or at least not to do well, at the same time it was taken for granted  that I would excel at academics. In sports one is supposed to visualize  hitting a baseball or making a jump shot. I instinctively visualized failure. What if I could not finish?

Race day came and with it a kind of calm. In the dark we joined a horde of other runners streaming from downtown hotels to the starting line. The temperature was in the mid 50s as day broke to overcast skies and a high of 62 in the forecast. Not a beautiful day, but excellent conditions for a little run.

Trani was racing. He went for a PR, and he got it with 3:12.53, besting his old mark by a couple of minutes, finishing second in his age group and 100th overall out of just over 4500 marathon finishers. Pretty impressive for a  young fellow who celebrated his 53rd birthday the day before the race.

I was just going for a run, looking to find the finish line. Some 26,000 runners gathered at the start, lined up at the port-a-potties and herded into the corrals where we were grouped according to our projected finish times. Trani was in corral 2. I was back a ways in corral 12. There were a boat load of corrals back of me.

We were all together, the more or less sane 21,000 there to run the half marathon and the rest of us. My plan was to start slowly and hope to find my stride after four or five miles and fall into a good, steady pace I could hold for a good portion of the race. The plan was reasonable, maybe even good, but it did not pan out. It may be a good rule of thumb for a marathon that the main thing you can count on is that it will not go exactly as planned.

The pack did not break down appreciably until the 11-mile mark, where the half-marathoners headed back to the Alamodome for their finish while the rest of us forged on in the other direction. Until then I kept finding myself behind slower runners whose optimistic estimates of their finish times put them in corrals ahead of mine. Though not trying to run fast, I picked up my pace as I weaved around the slower runners and tried to find a bit of open space so as not to be jammed in shoulder to shoulder with my fellow maniacs. This may have contributed to the tiredness in my quads that crept in early on. Sometimes on a long run that will work itself out and I will find myself running easily again. Not this day. It might be too much to say the entire race was a struggle. I just never felt like I was running well.

There was nothing for it but to stubbornly put one foot in front of the other until I got there. They say the race took us past the Alamo. I don’t remember it. I did notice that some twisted bastard with a perverse sense of humor designed the course so it ran past a cemetery at mile 16.

The race promotion billed the course as fast and flat. It was not as flat as this led Trani and me to believe. There were no really steep hills, but there were a number of pronounced inclines, including a lengthy one at mile 18 and at the finish. I walked a bit of the hill at mile 18 and a good chunk of mile 23. Then I ran again because I was determined to run across the finish line and, anyway, walking was just too slow. I wanted to get to the end of the damn thing.

Running the hill to the finish I told myself I was just running up Harrison out of Ladd’s Addition to 30th Avenue like I had done every Saturday for months and months. Then it was over. Good grief. I ran myself a marathon. It only took me 26.2 miles to find the finish.

I made my way through the crowd looking around for Trani, and after a few minutes there he was, calling my name, with Rachel and Amy, who ran her first half marathon that day. Rachel took the obligatory photos and Trani handed me a Cliff Bar and we walked a mile back to the hotel. I was tired. I felt good.

I would not say running a marathon was fun. It was satisfying. Will I take a crack at another one? Possibly. The marathon is insidious. Almost from the moment I crossed the finish line, I found myself thinking of ways to tweak my training to be stronger next time. All we really know about the future is that it is uncertain. All we can count on is that things likely will not go exactly according to plan. I can see taking a crack at another one.

David :: Nov.19.2010 :: House Red: Running :: 1 Comment »

There is no pleasure or satisfaction to be gotten from criticizing a work by an artist who matters to us. Some would have us remain silent in these circumstances, saying that we should steer clear of negativity, eschew criticism that which only tears down, and save our remarks for what merits praise, passing over the rest, and maybe that passing over is commentary enough. I am sympathetic to this line but take a different tack, tending to distinguish between artists who have achieved a measure of success, commercial or critical or both, and those who operate more on the margins, maybe while holding down day jobs to pay the bills. I see no reason to hammer someone struggling to get the work in front of an audience, unless there is some exceptional and compelling reason to do so. It is different when an artist has outlets for the work, scores grants, is reviewed in The New York Review of Books, gets interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. That sort is fair game. There is also the matter of integrity. It seems only right to acknowledge when a favorite, the subject of praise on other occasions, comes up short.

It is not my way to make lists of ten best this, that, or the other. Ranking artists strikes me as a somewhat dubious pastime at best and not to be done without a host of caveats. Which is not to say I do not make qualitative distinctions, only that when doing so I think less in terms of a hard and fast ranking or inclusion and exclusion and more in terms of a core group who matter more than others. Whether this or that particular individual belongs in that first rank may be open to dispute, but the group’s general makeup not so much.

Woody Allen is among the significant film directors of his generation and perhaps among those directors of any generation who matter most to me. When the annual Woody Allen film comes out, I see it. A few weeks back I caught You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and found it not one of Allen’s better efforts. The plot is by the numbers and the pace flat, characters lackluster, dialogue uninspired. Allen has always used music as effectively as Fellini for panache, verve, and atmosphere, in all of which Tall Dark Stranger is deficient.

Josh Brolin is miscast as a tormented novelist (Roy) and Naomi Watts not a lot better as Sally, the wife who supports him while he lolls around the apartment suffering from writer’s block and recklessly eyeballing the shapely young woman who lives in the apartment across the way and does not know enough to draw her curtains when she really should. Brolin fails to deliver his lines convincingly, coming across as an actor trying to play a role and not quite getting it right. These shortcomings cannot be wholly laid on the actors. Some responsibility must fall to the direction and dialogue, which is to say, to Woody Allen.

Anthony Hopkins is okay as Sally’s well-to-do father, Alfie, who takes up exercise with a vengeance and leaves his wife after falling prey to intimations of mortality. Soon enough and fairly predictably, Alfie falls for a beautiful prostitute a third his age, a cardboard stereotype of a character in whom Allen seems to have put no effort whatsoever.

Alfie is a jerk for unceremoniously dumping his wife, Helena (Gemma Jones), but I am not inclined to be hard on him for throwing over this annoying woman who is under the spell of a charlatan, I mean, psychic, goes in for seances, and waxes vapidly about past and future lives. I am at a loss as to who is more ridiculous: Alfie waiting for his Viagra to kick in while his new young wife sprawls out before him or Helena speculating that she might have been Joan of Arc.

The man who gave us Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona does not owe us anything. Not every work will among an artist’s best, especially when one is as prolific and gifted as Woody Allen, whose best is very good indeed. I have no second thoughts about sitting through You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, whatever its shortcomings, and I look forward to the 2011 film Midnight in Paris, now in post-production.

David :: Nov.06.2010 :: House Red: Film :: 1 Comment »