Category: Running

I run a lot, and sometimes I write about it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Things don’t always have to mean something!

“Keep Running, Faggot!”

Pavowski9 Comments

Short one tonight.

Most of the time when I run, it’s either in the dark of the wee hours or it’s off the beaten path away from traffic.  Today, however, I went for an evening run in the vicinity of the main drag near my house.  Why an evening run?  Well, I missed the chance to go this morning, but more and more in my life of late I am realizing that momentum matters, so I didn’t want to just let it slide, so after the sprout went down to sleep, I laced up.

It was hot out, but the sun was down and a breeze was blowing through courtesy of the cold front that’s on its way in, so it was all pretty pleasant.  And then I hit the little side street by the post office where the sidewalk disappears for about a thousand feet.  I was alternating between the curb and the runaway grass when I heard a honking horn and a brash male voice shouting at me (from the opposite side of the road, let the record show), “Keep running, faggot!”

Not that it matters, and certainly not to generalize where generalizing would be inappropriate, but he was driving a big ol’ truck, probably to match his enormous manhood.

I have to say, I’m perplexed.

First of all, I know that for all the “progress” we’re making in the world, there are still people out there that have no truck with forward thinking and want to stay racist and homophobic and idiotic and drunk all the time.  But it’s a little saddening to me to learn firsthand that we still live in a world where an idiot feels just fine — probably righteously justified or even compelled — to lean out the window and shout at me for no other reason than that he thought he knew something about me.

Second, I really don’t know what he was implying.  Was he implying that there was something I was already running from  and should continue to flee?  His own indignant and puny and inwardly terrified hate speech, for example?  Or was he in a weird and twisted way trying to offer encouragement (keep going!  You got this!) and then forgot himself and added the homophobic epithet at the end?

Third, I cannot for the life of me think what he hoped to gain by his shout.  A momentary chuckle and boost in the eyes of his paleolithic social circle?  That superior feeling you get from watching over-made-up faux-celebrities pull each others’ hair in a flurry of bleeped language on reality TV (well, at least my life isn’t THAT crazy)?  More likely, he just wanted me to feel like an idiot.  I have news for you.  I already know.  You don’t go running during the waking hours in Georgia in the summertime if you don’t have at least one or two screws loose.  Or maybe he wanted to hurt my feelings.  But sticks and stones and all that.  All I really felt, ultimately, was sorry for him.

I know this is a biiiig stretch and a helluva long way to walk, but I wonder if this is an inkling of what women must feel when guys (is it ever anything other than idiotic, small-minded guys?) catcall them for running or in fact for just being a woman in public.  I’m not saying I know how it feels, but I’m saying maybe I can empathize a little bit.  For just a moment — I mean a brief, fleeting, lightning-strike of a passing moment — I felt hurt.  Not because he’d struck at the depths of my soul with his comment, but because it was just so egregiously disrespectful.  Then after that, I felt sad, because for one reason or another, this walking (and driving!) bacterium has made it through his life without anybody telling him that that sharknado is totally out of line and uncalled for, regardless of whether it’s true.  Finally, I felt frustrated that this spineless sack had occupied as much of my thinking as he has, as evidenced by the fact that I took the trouble to write about this little interlude.  I’m sure I was out of his gadfly’s brain without a second thought moments after the encounter, but he stuck with me, and I wonder if that doesn’t make me at least a little bit of the idiot in this tale.

Is there anything more cowardly than the drive-by shouting?

There Are Good Runs, and Then There Are Exceptional Runs

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This summer has been a bit of a running renaissance for me.

I got my latest start in running a little over two years ago, flew a bit too close to the sun back in January, crashed and burned at the beginning of the year and have been clawing my way back, clutching at gnarled roots and jagged cliffsides ever since.  Today, I went for my first “relaxed” 10k run in more than a while, and I’m happy to say that I feel damn good afterward.  But it’s not the run I want to talk about.  Er, rather, it’s not the distance.

In trying to get myself out of the injured dumps, I’ve been running this summer with a mind toward becoming more complete: running more trails, especially, but also varying my workouts and working to stay healthy rather than just trying to spin the wheels on the odometer.  I think it’s paying off, but more importantly, I think I’m really getting to enjoy my runs again, rather than facing each one with the fear that the next step is going to injure me again and set me back for a couple months.

This morning found me on the Atlanta Beltline, a series of paved “trails” that wend through and around downtown Atlanta.  It’s been much-touted by colleagues of mine and runners I know in the area, but is one of those things I just hadn’t gotten around to doing (man, that’s a long list).  Mainly I’ve avoided it because it doesn’t jive with my minimalist philosophy of running to drive half an hour just to go on a leisurely run; I prefer to just step out the door and go.  But a facebook group of local runners scheduled the event for this morning; said group is composed of some folks I know from high school and some others I’ve not met yet, so it seemed a good time.

Just by the by, does anybody else have horrible luck when signing up for casual “events” on facebook?  I’ve tried this one or two other times and everybody seems to bail at the last minute.  You see where this is going.  I pull up to the meeting spot at five minutes til the start time and I see a big smiling crowd of zero people.  Yep, ten people signed up as “definitely going” and I was the only one.  Except for my pal from high school, J.  He hops out of his car and hits me with a warm grin and a hearty handshake and a “great to see you.”  We chat for a few minutes about how pitiful it is that nobody else has slogged their butts out of bed on a Saturday (seriously, what are you doing that you can’t get up at 5:45 to go for a run??), then, after allowing enough time for any reasonable latecomers to show up, we’re off.

We set an easy pace — J’s a lot faster than me, but he’s logged a lot of miles this week and wants to relax a bit, and I’m a bit jangly over attempting my first six-miler since a race I ran (and probably overran, to be honest) a month ago.  And my first six-miler ever in my Vibrams, for that matter.

A lot of people, when recounting their runs, like to give a breakdown of each mile, the highs and lows, the hills and the hurts, but that seems silly to me.  I could no more recount each moment of a good run — let alone a good long run — than recount every bite of my breakfast this morning, and it wouldn’t be good reading besides.  (Now, whether the alternative makes for good reading…)

First, a review of the trail.  The Beltline is a very long series of trails, I found out, but we ran a stretch of it from Piedmont Park East over to Ponce de Leon, then doubled back and took a tour of Piedmont Park.  The line is a very well kept, spacious jaunt through residential areas and commercial developments, under overpasses and through great sweeping vistas of the Atlanta skyline.  Nearly every overpass or concrete wall is adorned with the sort of tasteful graffiti that almost feels like an art exhibit.  And the line is so popular that it’s absolutely bursting with runners, bikers, walkers, rollerbladers.  We must have passed or been passed by a hundred people or more in our four miles on the line.  I’m sure that’s nothing new to regulars in the area, but for a guy like me who runs out in the burbs and, on a good day, glimpses maybe three or four other runners in my heavily trafficked zones (none at all otherwise), it was a welcome sight.  Made me feel less like a lunatic on an island and a little more like maybe a guy in a bodysuit at a convention.  Still not totally normal, but at least at home among the other freaks.

Then, the fact that I was running with a guy I’ve not spoken to in any meaningful capacity for oh, about fifteen years (please kill me).  We ruminated a bit about running, a bit about life, a lot about people and marriage and kids and pop music and only a little bit about work, with the kind of easy, unhurried conversation that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.  You bump into somebody in line at the DMV or at the grocery store, and he’s got someplace he’d rather be, something he’d rather be doing, and he doesn’t want to waste time getting there and doing it.  You settle in for an easy six miles and you find there’s no need to rush things, you let the talk drift where it will.

To top it off, as we hit the turnaround and headed back for the trailhead, I look up and see my young Padawan cruising toward us.  This is a guy who saw me start running and lose thirty pounds two years ago, then took up running himself and has since lost in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds.  He now runs races about every other weekend and is a big contributor and participant with running groups in Atlanta.  Unfortunately, he lives on the opposite side of town from me, so we’ve never actually had a run together — and we didn’t today, because he was hustling along, late for a meeting with his running group.  Still, seeing him in action was just another shot of good vibes on an already good morning.

An hour passed faster than it had any right to.  The run finished, we headed back to our cars and agreed to try and meet up again soon.  I like to think it was the sort of agreement we’ll follow through on — it’s hard to lie and be phony after you’ve just run six miles — but whether we do or not, I’m thankful for the time we had today.  Running is one of those things that binds people together in ways that don’t even make sense a lot of the time, and it certainly brought J and me together today.  I’m one of those hippy-dippy people that thinks there is no such thing as a bad run; that every time you lace up you accomplish something.  But even if there are no bad runs, certainly some runs are better than others.

Today’s was exceptional.

Nothing a Little Run Can’t Fix

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Once more onto the beach, or however that saying goes.

I dutifully took my two weeks(ish?) off from SERIOUS writing to let the mind decompress and drift back into its natural jellylike state after four months of grind, but today is the day I pick it up again and continue whipping my word-vomit into something approaching Prose Worth Reading.

As with virtually every writing or otherwise creative project I have ever undertaken, the choosing was the hardest part.  For better or worse, choose I have, and now I press on with the goal of expanding one of my recent Flash Fictions into a fuller, more developed short story.  I’m aiming for about ten thousand words, just as a ballpark sort of area I’d like to land in, but if it runs long or short that won’t upset me terribly.  I’m not sure what the real goal will be as far as what I’d like to do with this one when it’s written, but I want to try out a length in between these little lightning strikes I’m spitting out every week and another full-length heartstomper like the novel has been.  Ten thousand words seems a nice happy medium, and when I’m finished with that, it will perhaps be time to start back in on editing Accidentally Inspired.

If you’re curious (why wouldn’t you be?!) I’m going to be expanding my entry from a couple of weeks ago, Powdered Chaos.  I feel like I scratched the surface of something really interesting with that one and I think it’s worth the time to delve into that particular cave and see what squishy bits of sweetmeats I can deliver back to the colony.  What’s that?  “Sweetmeats” aren’t what I think they are?

Hold on.

Okay, a sweetmeat is, of all things, a pastry.  The word I was thinking of was “sweetbread”, which for some reason is the name for pancreas.  English is a whimsical old thing, innit?

Anyway, I’ll be delving that particular cave over the next several weeks, with a much more reasonable goal of 600 words daily.  900 was a great goal for the novel, and I may use that as a benchmark in future times of novel writing dementia, but there were more than a few days when I started wanting to chop down trees with my keyboard after word 600.  Keyboards not being a particularly effective cutting implement, that’s the kind of impulse I’d like to, y’know, steer away from.  So.  600 words, five days a week, that’s about four weeks to turn Powdered Chaos into something that’s… well, something.  This is all experimental; don’t look at me if a zombie goliath of stitched-together story bits and half-formed ideas begins roaming the countryside and devouring your livestock and KILL IT WITH FIRE.

First day (night actually) of working on this one went swimmingly.  I chalk it up to my run this morning.  No, seriously.

I decided this was the project I wanted on Thursday but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about expanding it.  Start farther out front?  Deal with multiple characters and their interaction with the thing?  Maybe continue on past the one outlined in the story?  It was a problem and I was blocked.

As I’ve mentioned before, Past Me would hit a roadblock when writing and park the car, slash the tires and hitchhike back to town, abandoning the vehicle to looters and hobos.  New Me has no truck with blocks; he drives right at them with the brights on and the horn sounding its dopplerized war cry, and if the block is still there when I get around to my writing that day, well then WE’RE BOTH GOING DOWN.  Writing tonight was a given.  The how and the what and the whatever would come to me.  So I laced up.  (Actually I strapped up because my Vibrams don’t have laces, but… yeah, “strapped up” sounds a little bit like… okay let’s just move on.)

It was a rainy morning, so I left the sprout at home.  Also because of the raininess of the morning I didn’t take my headphones with me (they are a bright shiny BIRTHDAY GIFT and I am not ready to ruin them yet even though they are life-altering and awesome and give me wings).  Imagine!  Running completely unfettered by forty pounds of toddler + stroller and undistracted by mindless thumping dubstep!  I’ve not had such a run in months and I desperately miss it.

Running without distractions is something I always say I’m going to do more often and never actually get around to doing much at all, but I maintain that the experience is peerless when it comes to solving problems personal and mental.  So I’m hoofing it and enjoying the quickest pace I’ve had on a run in a while and delighting in the mist on my face and now and then pondering the question of what I’m going to do when I come up against this roadblock in actually starting the thing and then I get this idea, like a midget was following right on my heels and hopped up on my back and whispered in my ear so softly I could barely hear it, “point of view.”

And I cocked my head and pondered on that, because it’s not a complete sentence after all, but when ideas drift into my head on a run they usually do it for some sort of reason and I always at least try poking at them to see if they bite back.  “Point of view?” I pondered.  No answer.  The various Me’s bouncing around in my head only answer when they feel like it, or when I’ve had a few adult beverages.  And I run and I ponder, run, ponder.  It hits me that the point of view in that story is wrong.  Not wrong like five is not the answer to two plus two, but wrong like whitewall tires on a tractor.  The thing still runs, but it ain’t optimal.

So, change it.  But to what?

Well, I won’t spoil it yet, but needless to say, the point of view has been changed, and in a way that I hope will be both surprising and satisfying.  And I got a cool 750 words in tonight without breaking a sweat, but of course that should be tempered immediately because the honeymoon is just getting started with this thing.

At any rate, lesson learned.  There has not yet been a day when I’ve had a run and not felt better about my writing at the end of it.  It’s a lesson I keep learning and somehow keep forgetting, so THIS POST should serve as a reminder to any and all Future Me’s: Next time you get blocked, or think you might get blocked, or even think you might think about the possibility that in some future eventuality you could possibly get blocked, just lace up.  (Or strap up.  No, just lace up and adjust for your needs.)  The road and your feet and the void will go to work on the problem and before you know it, you’re home and ready for a shower and a good write.

Routine and Breaking With It

Pavowski12 Comments

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1214/

The theme for the week is “getting away, or getting out.”  As usual with these stream of consciousness posts, I won’t be doing any editing or fixorating after this post is finished, so it may be a bit unpolished, which I guess is the point.

In the four (now five, yikes) months since I’ve been “seriously writing,” I’ve come to notice a few things about, well, writing.  Specifically, that while rituals are important, they can also be limiting.  What I mean by that is, there’s this box.  And you always hear that it’s important to think outside the box, or whatever, and that’s true.  The box can hold you back.  But that sells the box short, really, because the box can also be comforting, like an old sweatshirt you slip into on the first cold days of Autumn or like a glass of wine before bed.

Case in point, when school was in session, I wrote in virtually the same way every day.  I’d steal a solid thirty minutes on my lunch break to work on my novel, using that time to block out any other distractions.  Really focused work.  Looking back, now, I can identify the work that I completed in that way not just by the timestamps but also by the way it’s written.  Word choice, sentence structure, ratio of dialogue to prose… my work completed by the routine has a certain feel to it that my work outside of routine doesn’t have.  Not to say it’s better; there are certainly merits to the work I completed outside of routine.  But the routine was the box, and I came to depend on it, so much so that in the last month of the Project I found myself mentally blocked, in no small part I fear because I didn’t have my routine to mentally prepare myself.

Now I love routine, but this experience with my first draft has shown me that you can’t always count on routines, so one thing I want to work on in my next project is shaking things up a bit and breaking at least some of my dependence on routine.

It shouldn’t shock me the effect routine has on my writing; it’s the same with my running.  When I was just getting started running, I did all my runs at the mall.  Well, as I increased my ability to run faster and farther, I started to become aware of hitting a wall with my runs at the mall.  After all, it was the same loop, the same hills, over and over and over.  So I started to branch out, to run different routes all around my neighborhood and, as I pushed my distance still farther, around town, and I noticed my pace and my endurance increasing all the more.  Breaking the routine allowed me to make bigger gains faster than if I’d kept doing the same thing over and over.  With new hills and new turns I was challenging myself in different ways, and that helped make me into a better runner.

It puts me in mind of those ads for P90X and Insanity that were big over the last couple of years, the central tenet of which was “muscle confusion.”  Here was a program designed to keep you from getting into the box in the first place.  The focus of these workouts was to exercise in a different way every single day to keep the body and the muscles from recognizing a pattern and getting lazy.  I never tried the workouts myself, but the reasoning seems sound enough.

So the box helps — routine helps — but more and more I think it’s going to be important that I work to get away from routines, get away from what’s comfortable and easy, and force myself to step off the reservation, out of the box, and go tumbling down a cliffside every now and then.  That’s my writing as well as my running and my cross training.  Hell, the fact that I’m cross training at all now — something I haven’t done in two years of running — is a step in that direction.

But I’m not trashing the box.  Just like there is no good without bad, no light without dark, neither can there be invention and experimentation without the norm to return to occasionally, even regularly.

It begs the question, then: what’s “out of the box” in terms of writing?  Off the top of my head, it means straying from some of these habits and tendencies.  Overuse of fancy say-nothing words like “particularly”.  Preoccupation with sounding clever or intelligent.  Fear of the simple statement.  Gravitating toward dark subject matter in short fiction.  Trying too hard to avoid dialogue tags.

For that matter, how can I get out of the box with running?  It’s harder than ever at the moment to break with routine since the sprout joins me for most of my runs, and that means the stroller, and that means I’m very limited in where I can go.  But here are some ideas.  More speedwork and/or interval sessions.  Running without music more.  Varying the dips and twists and turns in my route as much as possible.  Making sure to drive to a more interesting location for a run every couple weeks or so.

In short, routine can be helpful, but it can also be a crutch, and if you don’t escape the routine every now and then, then like a mouse in a cage, you will become trapped by it.

Am I overthinking routine?  How else can you push the boundaries while still getting the most out of a routine?  And do I overstate or understate the value of getting away from it?

Happy Trail (No, not that kind of happy trail)

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New running resolution: find a way to run on a trail at least once a month.  This is going to be a difficult one for me to keep, for a couple of reasons.

First, and most importantly, is the time it takes.  The nearest trail to me is about a fifteen minute drive.  Now that’s not much, but when you consider that my time is as precious as dolla dolla bills between kids and writing time and occasionally spending some time with the wife, fifteen minutes out and back in addition to the time it takes to actually complete the run makes it a not-insignificant factor.

Second, on a more practical note, is that it’s very very difficult to get a run in by myself lately.  The vast majority of my runs over the summer (and by vast majority I really do mean all but maybe two or three runs in the last six weeks) have been completed from behind the stroller, pushing his highness the sprout around like a sheik on a fancy rickshaw.  (Is that how you spell sheik?  Spellcheck is telling me it’s wrong either way.  Technology!)  Trails are not stroller-friendly, at least not the type of trails I’m talking about.

Third, and most sillily (yep), I have to drive to the trail.  This sort of goes against my zen minimalist philosophy of running, which is that you just step out the front door and go.  Add in a drive to a running location and I might as well be shelling out $20 a month to pound a treadmill into oblivion.  Okay, that’s not a perfect comparison with driving to a trail, but this is really the way my mind works.

So it will be tough to get out there even once a month.  But, ah, trails!  They delight.  Especially for a road warrior like me, there are some things you get from running on a trail that street miles just can’t even touch.

  1. I’m off the roads.  This could be its own list, but being able to complete a run without having to worry about drivers not seeing me and turning me into road pizza gives me more peace of mind than it probably should.  I had no idea how much space that tiny fear was taking up in my mind on every run.  It just evaporates on a trail.
  2. Nature smells nice.  Even just a few miles outside of town, the air changes a bit and it feels easier to breathe.  This is probably because, on the trails in my area at least, I’m surrounded by a literal oxygen factory.
  3. Shade.  Holy god, it’s hot out.  Have you noticed?  90% of the trail I covered today was engulfed in fantastical, splendiferous, glorious shade.  On my typical routes I’m lucky if I see shade for thirty seconds at a time; today, it was the sunlight on me that was the rarity.  Again, this point alone is worth virtually the price of admission in its own right.
  4. The quiet.  There’s so much ambient noise when I run around the suburbs — even in my own neighborhood — that just isn’t there out in the woods.  I don’t feel compelled to plug in headphones to block out the dull roar; rather, I feel like leaving them out entirely.  Wearing headphones in the woods almost seems a sacrilege, like I’m bringing something profane onto hallowed ground.
  5. The workout.  Even the gnarliest of roads won’t give you a hill to climb like the ones I saw today.  My calves and quads are burning just thinking about it.  The ascents and descents are sharp, sudden, and sometimes without warning, and there are rocks and roots to hop over or sidestep, which brings me to the next point:
  6. You can’t tune it out.  I think there’s value in being able to meditate, to detach and unplug and just go on autopilot during a run, and roads are great for that.  Surfaces are (generally) uniform, so you don’t have to watch your feet so much as the oncoming traffic. Generally you can leave your brain at home.  Trails are not nearly so detached.  The rocks and roots and sudden drops and uneven surfaces can send you sprawling in a heartbeat, or twist your ankle if you’re really unlucky.  Each step has to be carefully chosen and plotted, which means you’re always scanning the ground in front of you, plotting the best course.  It sounds like it should be taxing, but it’s actually rather Zen, I think.  You have to be in the moment and incredibly focused, but there’s calm in that.
  7. Spiderwebs.  Aargh running through spiderwebs is the worst and I am pretty sure I still have spiders down my back twelve hours later SERIOUSLY WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THE SPIDERWEBS

Road runs, even runs where I really run like the zombies are chasing me, do not leave me feeling wrecked like I feel today after four miles on the trails at Clinton Nature Preserve.  It was exhausting and invigorating and it reminds me that I really do have to make an effort to leave the roads behind now and then.

Now to run an ice bath for my aching, pummeled feet…