Running is i hate the snot out of the track

No, that’s not true. C’mere track. Come on back now. It’s ok. I didn’t mean it, honest.

I should say, rather, that I have a healthy (if occasionally bordering-on-an-unbridled-rage) respect for that black oval fixture at high schools, colleges, and the occasional, out-of-touch health club all across our nation. The track, assessed when I’m not threatening to cough up alveoli going around it at high speeds, is a marvelous thing of implacable beauty, I think. If you look quite carefully, with the sun hiting its pitted surface at the proper angle, it becomes a halcyon field of small sunbursts, like the vision when walking out onto your porch one bright morning to find a snow that came mysteriously overnight on a strange wind.

The track, like most things I’ve mentioned here, is also a vessel for nostalgia. For anybody who survived high school cross-country and track, it’s impossible not to walk out onto the cinders without a strange, almost unnameable stirring of the blood. The track in late afternoon even has a particular smell that invariably triggers Proustian bolts of memory: that overbaked polyurethane odor that faintly recalls burned Goodyears. For this writer, it’s a scent forever associated with miserable quarter repeats in late August while the porridge-brained, mouth-breathing defensive line of Regis Jesuit’s Freshman B football team look bewilderingly at the bedraggled kids boondoggling their afternoon as they run endless circles.

Yeah, the track suxxors, sometimes. Doing track workouts, as my coach used to say, is like running headfirst into a brick wall: it only feels good when you stop. But the track, unlike most things in this world, doesn’t lie. There is no escape. You know precisely (sometimes painfully so) how fast you’re going. Unless there’s an inch or two of sleet on the thing, its conditions are as regular as rain. The distance doesn’t change. The curves don’t change.

Even the people who hang out at the track haven’t changed since Buddha got metaphorically nailed on the melon by a perspicacious lotus. From the sweatsuited, knobbly-kneed oldsters attempting feeble boxing jabs as they trot rheumatically along Lane 7, to the fourteen-year-old kids in gigantic basketball shorts who run two laps at a rabid pace, then stretch out, their workout apparently completed (one assumes that they’re trying to get in shape for some other sport, which is an unforgivable abuse of the track). And in the case of Centaurus, where I’ve been doing my intervals this summer and where the bleachers are currently being renovated, there are the mustachioed construction workers who inevitably quit what they’re doing and race each other along the 100m straightaways, their guts wobbling disarmingly. Or who clap me on the back as I lean into the last curve on my last lap of my last 800, yelling ¡Vamos! and shaking their head at the stupid-ass gringo ectomorph with a white ring of salt around his mouth doing laps in 95-degree heat, looking to be on the very precipice of death. And, of course, there are the other runners. Usually wearing their race kits and flats, of all things–the track brings out the harrier’s best, and worst, sartorial instincts. Doing intervals while other people are out on the track also attempting fast workouts can be a dicey business. While it doesn’t have the same passive-aggressive chumminess of an actual race (an upcoming post after this weekend), sharing the rubber inevitably throws off your pace. And that’s because it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to catch and pass someone on a track, one which rises from somewhere deep in the pineal gland and throttles any sense of logic trying desperately to operate during the run.

But for all this empirical constancy, the track is also a place of wild variability. The exact distance that it represents (1312.34 feet per lap) may not be subject to change, but your brain sure as heck is. The further I get into a set of intervals or a nasty pyramid, the track starts to resemble a particularly bewildering Buñuel piece. It seems to take half an hour just to get through a straightaway, but after finishing a mile repeat, I feel as though no time has elapsed at all. I start to hear voices, even songs, from the middle of the field, but there’s no when there when I turn to look (last week it was the first few bars of the old Lawrence Welk Theme Song being repeated ad nauseum). The worst part is the fact that my sinus pressure starts to go nuts and i’ll end up with one ear popped and the other unpressurized. And that I switch between a dreamy, detached monologue (”I wonder if the fumes surrounding Dolly Parton’s bouffant kill people when she rides public transportation”) and an intense self-consciousness (”WHEN THE BLESSED ONION WILL THIS END EVERYTHING HURTS KILL ME NOW ZEUS”). And each time I round the hash mark at the tail end of the east straightaway, I am something different. The last lap has been something entirely new. More feathers have moulted and come free. And I am about to do it again.

Thus, the track becomes not only the prime means to self-improvement through repetition and rigor: a classic form of discipline, although certainly not the only way to get faster. It is emblematic of how running, in general, holds together opposite strands in dialectic while refusing to provide the relief of synthesis. (Full disclosure: thank you to F.L. for a certain recent discussion regarding certain medieval iconography for reminding me of this.) The track, in its simultaneous flux and stasis, its stark objectivity and shimmering apprehension by the mind as phenomena, is a potent physical expression of what Cleanth Brooks talks about in “The Language of Paradox,” one of the shibboleths of New Criticism (and one of the few pieces from the movement that still holds its salt): that the poetic imagination (in this case, Coleridge’s)

…reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects, a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order…(Brooks 40)

Well now. With that extremely important business taken care of, I’m running the La Sportiva Eldora Trail 10 kilometer race this Saturday morning. I plan on wearing lots of nylon and dorky sunglasses. Look out now: The Cleats are back on the scene and it’s Shark Week. Anyone who’d like to come watch me devour the field in my dripping, probably not nearly as fast as i’m making myself out to be fangs, is certainly welcome (there is, of course, a beer tent afterwards, otherwise I wouldn’t even consider this race. Am praying for Miller). Although it’s at 7:30 in the morning, so that might be a serious deterrent.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Centaurus. Perfect evening, if a little hot.

Workout/whether or not I heaved mightily: 6 x 1,200, with a mile warm-up and a mile cool-down/one mighty dry-heave on repeat no. 5.

Total Mileage to Date: 265, roughly (need to check the Turner Trot Journal for exact details)

Days remaining to Denver: 79