Archive for the 'House Red: Running' Category

closing out 2011

Thoughts at year’s end…strictly personal, leaving political, social, and the rest for another day…nothing profound, perhaps of some interest, perhaps not…

Only tops of the tallest buildings across the river downtown were visible through morning fog as I ran up onto Hawthorne Bridge. The sun was out and the fog quickly burned away, the morning become bright and clear, by the time I crossed over the Steel Bridge to the west bank. Temperature 34 degrees. A woman ran barefoot at a fair clip headed south along the Eastbank Esplanade as I went north. A young fellow ran in singlet and shorts. He did wear a stocking cap and gloves, which I suppose made him only about 90 percent crazy. We start with the gauge at 50 percent, half crazy, just for being out there and calling it fun. A woman on a park bench ate noodles with her fingers. The barefoot woman and I met again on the other side of the river as we looped around. Perhaps she smiled.

The eight-mile run was the first at that distance since I rolled my ankle two months ago. The ankle and foot are all but fully recovered, about as good as they are apt to be with the mileage on them. Much the same might be said of my spirit as the year sprints to the finish, a year that brought a few new poems, not enough and not good enough, they never are, but a few. Two poetry readings in Seattle, four in Portland, with small audiences that I think enjoyed what they heard. Read some books, saw some movies. Much alone, on occasion lonely, cherished friendships old and new and renewed. Christmas was with Trani and the family in Tulsa, hanging out at the store, running with the Tulsa Runner crowd, dinner at India Palace, raking leaves before a Christmas afternoon run, Midnight in Paris on DVD at home Christmas night, Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre at Circle Cinema. All in all, a pretty good close to a pretty good year.

Prospects for 2012 are problematic. Life is problematic, a circumstance we are often at some pains to deny or at least avoid acknowledging. Employment is uncertain, about which I suppose I should be more concerned than I am. Retirement does not loom in any plausible scenario. Most likely I will find myself in some job or other for which I am ill-suited until I keel over from a work-related stroke or heart attack, to a considerable extent consequence of a lifetime of foolish choices, dubious moves, regrettable decisions, and values to which I have tried to hold true. It is late in the day to forsake those values now, not that I would or can.

I turn 60 in August. If all goes reasonably well Trani and I will run a fall marathon—26.2 to celebrate 60. I do not think of myself as old, yet I know that I am a ways beyond young—as ever my goofy self, curious, caring, reticent, ambitious, uncertain, anxious, fearful, flaws a-plenty and passion too oft too well hid, poet by choice and by chance, student for the duration, still so much to learn, read, say, see, do, and never time enough for it. If all goes reasonably well 2012 figures to bring running, reading, poems, film, study of French and Italian, travel, and who knows what else that for now lies unseen. If fortune smiles I will do these things more with companions and less alone than in the past, to which end I should endeavor to be more forthcoming and open myself, something that has never come naturally or easily. Between doing alone and not doing, I do alone. I remain without expectation, given to hope, susceptible to enchantment, with a taste for the marvelous. We shall see what comes of it.

:: Dec.31.2011 :: House Red: Miscellany, House Red: Running :: 6 Comments »

Why a marathon?

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.

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

Scenes Along the Road to the San Antonio Marathon

The road to the San Antonio Marathon runs down Springwater Corridor along the Willamette River to Sellwood on Saturday mornings. The trail runs for the most part slightly downhill from downtown Portland to Sellwood, which means there is a slight incline on the way back even before I cut through Ladd’s Addition and build some character up Harrison to SE 37th Avenue. As I stretch out the long run, I return home at about the 14-mile mark for a bathroom break, carb replenishment, and hydration before setting out again through Laurelhurst Park and on to the Laurelhurst neighborhood to tack on a couple of miles. I am pretty wiped out by the finish back in the park at the east end of the pond, but it is a good wiped-out.

The road also runs through some shoes. It is borderline astounding how quickly the miles add up when you are putting in some serious mileage, granting that “serious mileage,” like “speed,” is a relative concept in this context. Last week I downgraded some ASICS GT-2140s from running to daily wear, a newer pair of GT-2140s from Christmas is well past midway through the life cycle, and the relatively new GT-2150s  used only on Saturday runs the past two months have better than a hundred miles on them. Thursday’s mail brought a Tulsa Runner care package with a new toy: ASICS Gel-Kayano® 15s that I immediately road tested with a 5.5 mile run to break them in for yesterday’s 16-miler that left my body a bit beaten up but my feet were smiling, even the runner’s black toenail middle toe of my left foot that I picked up about a week ago.

The Springwater Corridor runs these days are glorious, mornings almost always cool, in the mid to upper 50s when I set out between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. The trail is filled with runners, walkers, and bicyclists, solitary, in pairs, and in larger groups, in a multitude of shapes and sizes and at just about every conceivable performance level. For some it  appears to be something of a chore. Others are all discipline and focus, clearly looking to train hard. Many are pushing themselves to some degree or other, even when not to the extent of those lithe young, and some not so young, women and men who blow by me each weekend, and most seem to be relishing it. It is, as Jacques Derrida once said of deconstruction, in some sense a pleasurable experience.

Earlier in the season on several Saturdays in succession, I spotted an older woman, probably about my age, who rode her bicycle to a spot with a nice view of river and downtown Portland to the northwest. A cart was attached to the bicycle and in the cart was a folding lawn chair. When I ran by, on the way out to Sellwood and coming back, she would be reclined in her chair, reading the paper, and more than likely with a cup of coffee somewhere around. One morning I caught her eye and waved, and she waved back, but she seemed to be not paying too much attention to traffic on the trail, just enjoying her morning. It struck me as a wonderful way to kick off the weekend.

I have not seen the woman in the lawn chair the past few weeks, but other minor encounters added a little spice to the runs. One day while running back home from Sellwood I was passed first by two young women, then a few moments later by a third. A bit farther up the trail I saw the three of them walking together and figured they had completed their workout and were walking back to their car in one of the parking lots near OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). Not a quarter-mile down the trail, here they came pounding past me again. I called out good-naturedly, “So did you guys walk awhile just so you could blow by me again?” We all laughed. One of them said they were running with me, not by me, though clearly not for long. What happened, of course, was that the two faster women had given their friend a chance to catch up and catch her breath instead of leaving her to run alone behind them. That is part of what good running is all about.

I must have gotten off a little earlier than usual last weekend, because I had the trail almost to myself most of the way to Sellwood. A young woman came up on my left somewhere around Oaks Amusement Park and  asked if I was with Portland Fit. She was running with that group but out ahead of the pack and did not know how far down the trail they were supposed to go. When I said no, I was running alone, she asked if I was training for the marathon. I figured she had the Portland Marathon in mind and explained I am taking a crack at San Antonio with my brother in November. How far are you going today? she asked. Fifteen, I said. She was doing thirteen. We ran along together and chatted like that for a few hundred yards before she resumed her pace and ran on ahead.

Yesterday brought no memorable encounters, just the occasional nod or wave of acknowledgment that runners often exchange as they pass one another. I have been going at the training with fair intensity the past three months, intensity being another relative term, to be sure, with long runs of 15 miles the previous two weeks, 14 on three out of four weeks before that (an easy 9-miler on the fourth of those weeks), and prior to that a stretch of 12-mile runs, along with my three shorter runs each week. I will not be breaking any land speed records with a pace in the 9:30–9:50 range, generally toward the 9:30 end when I time myself using the trail mileposts, roughly at miles 4 and 5 of my run going south to Sellwood and miles 9 and 10 coming back. I time those miles to get a sense of my pace and use that to estimate my mileage. On those intervals I play little games with myself, on the one hand willing myself not to run faster than I ordinarily would, because I want an accurate measure of my pace, and on the other conscious of maintaining a steady pace. Speed is not the point, and a good thing given my pace, though I will confess that I do like to think I am not the slowest person on the trail. Still, everyone out there doing it is out there doing it, and that is all that really matters.

Under other circumstances I would have thrown an easy week or two into the past month’s mix, cutting back a long run or bagging one of the shorter weekday runs. I pushed through knowing that I will be easing off some the next two weeks. Wednesday I hope to catch the Oregon Literary Review First Wednesday reading at Blackbird Wine Shop, featuring Elizabeth Archers, Dennis McBride, Charles Deemer, and Nina Lary. Thursday is Red Cross Blood Drive day ,and I figure it advisable to take the day off when I am a pint low. That might be a good afternoon to check out the First Thursday arts fest after work.

On Saturday we have the Market Day Poetry Series at St. Johns Booksellers with Three Men of a Certain Age (Ric Vrana, Rogers Truax, and your oft humbled scribe). I will cut the run short that morning so I will not be wiped out or rushed to get to the reading at noon. The following Saturday I will be in Seattle to read with Sharmagne Leland-St. John at the Green Lake Branch of the Seattle Public Library (see Home page announcements for more info about both readings). I look forward to a short run along the Elliott Bay waterfront in Seattle but will not push it that day either.

Back in Portland I return to my regular routine on Monday the 16th, celebrate a birthday on the 18th, and crank out 15 or 16 on the 21st. Zut alors, it almost sounds as if I know what I am doing.

Ciao.

:: Aug.01.2010 :: House Red: Running :: No Comments »