’tis the season when running is nothing but a pleasure once more
Spring comes to Portland cool, damp, and incredibly lush. Alas, the names of trees, flowers, and plant life generally, like French vocabulary, have never stuck in my mind the way sports trivia does. For instance, off the top of my head, starting line-up for the 1964 UCLA national championship team coached by John Wooden: guards Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, forwards Keith Erickson and Jack Hirsch, center Fred Slaughter, sixth man Kenny Washington from Beaufort, SC. (I confess to a momentary brain cramp that led me to google the roster to confirm I was correct about Hirsch.) But what is that tree across the street? The vine crawling up the fence? The incredible wine-dark leaves of what I have in my mind is a Japanese maple but could be mistaken. Absurd, isn’t it? To my good fortune, the capacity be moved by these wonders is not diminished by the limits of my knowledge, though I believe knowing more is generally better and more delightful than knowing less and appreciation is enhanced by it.
With spring comes the transition out of the winter running routine, when I cut back my mileage a bit. I do not recall when I began doing this. It was not so much a conscious decision as something I sensed was happening only after the fact and thought, yes, that seems reasonable. The weather is less than optimal, cold and often as not in Portland raining, runs on workdays are in the dark, and there is almost without fail at least one ratty cold that causes me to take enough time off to lose a little conditioning and some of the mental edge that comes with routine.
The challenge in winter is getting myself into the running clothes and out the door. It is way too easy to come home from the office tired, cold, and damp and think this would a good day to take a day off. Once out and putting one foot in front of the other, most days it is good even in cold and rain as long as it is not too cold and the rain holds back to that Portland drizzle we know and love, but there is an element of that which is to be endured in even the best of the winter runs. They are worth enduring, and more, if only as preparation to enjoy running in the early mornings and late afternoons of spring, summer, and autumn.
Backing off a bit from time to time also gives my body a break, and it is not just the body that benefits from it. By late winter when we are tantalized by brief spells of warmer, sunnier weather, I find myself eager, anxious, excited at the prospect of jacking up the mileage and getting back into those longer runs that are qualitatively different from the shorter ones. Talk of mileage is always relative. I have run at a pretty low level for years. Thanks in part to Big T’s Memorial Day visit when he tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon, I put in more miles in 2009 than any year going back at least to 2004, and that was largely due to a fairly modest 25-30 miles a week July through September, as satisfying a period as I have enjoyed in a long time.
Ten days into May and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve run in t-shirt and shorts. I’m looking forward to more of those days, but I’ll take the ones I’m having. Temperature was around 45, not cold but coolish, when I set out on the Springwater Corridor to Sellwood run the last two weekends, a glorious loop somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve miles. Yesterday marked only the third time I have gone that distance since September. The run started off somewhat problematically with discomfort in my right Achilles tendon area. This first cropped up Thursday, toward the end of a 5.5 mile run. I stopped to stretch a bit then and was okay the rest of that run. Yesterday the discomfort appeared not a half a mile into it. I paused to stretch, continued a few blocks, then stretched a bit more, and was fine until near the the end when I felt it again as I built some character coming out of Ladd’s Addition up Harrison to 30th, but heck, I’m supposed to feel discomfort on that mother of a hill. Aches and pains and injuries are part of the deal. It is important to pay attention and back off when it’s called for, difficult as that may be this time of year. There is a fair chance the current discomfort is nothing serious and can be resolved with some special attention, a little extra stretching. We’ll see how that goes.
The sky was blue and cloudless, the streets quiet, the air bright and fresh. I sighted a dragon boat on the river at the Hawthorne Bridge as I turned south along the Eastbank Esplanade and another as I ran down past OMSI to pick up the trail that would take me on to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Oaks Amusement Park with fellow runners, bicyclists, walkers, three kids with fishing poles clambering up from the river bank, two geese with three little ones in the grass. Two cats were there at the food and water bowls just the the other side of the fence that separates the trail from the railroad track where the week before I saw two women filling those bowls.
I have yet to encounter two women I regularly met last summer coming up the trail as I approached Sellwood. One was a tiny Asian woman a bit older than I am, the other a middle-aged woman who runs like a fury. Both women ran alone, as do I. We smiled and waved as we passed and continued on our way. A gesture, a small thing, yet each week I found myself looking forward to that part of the run. Maybe some Saturday soon we will meet again.
David :: May.10.2010 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »