Running is Walt Whitman’s Ecstasy

Last week, I swallowed a very small butterfly while running.

I was only running. While looping through Lower Purgatory Open Space in San Marcos, Texas, fist-punching my way to a new PR during a Tuesday speedwork sesh, a monarch disastrously fluttered its way into my gullet.

Days remaining until the Austin Marathon: 95

Miles completed since I (really) began training for said Austin Marathon: 73

Running is metathesis

Miranda July
PO Box 26596
Los Angeles, CA 90026
USA

Dear Ms. July,

Earlier today, I was putting the finishing touches on the introduction to my Master’s thesis. While discussing the role of animal enclosures in late nineteenth century British colonialism, I accidentally typed “hamster narrative” instead of “master narrative.”

This seemed like the kind of thing that you should be aware of.

It’s even funnier, too, because my thesis is about monstrous animals. And I’m sure there’s got to be an actual monstrous hamster narrative out there in the cultural ether somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cannibal Hamster Holocaust is playing on TBS right now, actually.

Anyway, thanks for You and Me and Everyone We Know–that scene with the goldfish makes me so wonderfully sad. It makes me want to go out and make gravestone rubbings with my best friends, or have another go at writing fiction again.

-C. Turner

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Days streaked: 19

Total Miles: 71.1

Today’s running mixxx: Efterklang

Running is in the mouth, a desert

Ochotona curzoniae
c/o “Plague of Desert Rats”
Gurbantunggut desert
China

March 28th, 2009

Dear black-lipped pikas,

I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we’re subjecting your species to one of my species’ eugenics programs. Especially since we already guillotined your American cousins a few years ago thanks to climate change; pikas, apparently, aren’t having one your best decades.  Human beings, while we’ve invented ingenious things like democratic socialism, salad shooters, and putting machines with automatic golf ball return, can be profoundly stupid sometimes. I don’t know why we’re building you an enormous, metaphorical Habitrail that ultimately dead-ends in a windy land of darkness and forgetfulness, but hey, I guess the monolithic Chinese state knows what it’s doing when it comes to environmentally responsible economic growth, desertification mitigation, and species protection.

Not.

Hang in there and don’t eat any weird-smelling pellets you see lying around,
-C. Turner

P.S. I was going to include some kind of tasteless joke about how you might consider converting to Catholocism, giving yourself an “out” with the whole contraceptive thing, but that seemed too sad. Pikas, you might also consider soliciting help from these guys in Qinghai.

(photos from Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory)

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Days streaked: 7

Total Miles: 26.2

Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running: Bowerbirds’ Hymns for a Dark Horse, highly recommended for fans of Devendra Banhart, Beirut, Fleet Foxes, and Horse Feathers. Even their websites’ news updates are life-affirming:

“It’s spring and babies are being born everywhere. The airstream is shining silver and is at times more like an oven than a home. We have field mice, which is wonderful. They give us a strong sense of community while we go about our daily activites which include, but are not limited to, making things.”

(free Jeff Luers)

Running is hating on time management/academic intermission #1

As the long, ominous silence here in recent weeks might well have indicated, I’m currently whelmed over with thesis research and reading for my comprehensive exams. As Virgil’s Laocoön was swarmed by a gaggle of seriously irritated sea snakes on a dirty beach, who probably bit at every little nasty bit of flesh they could get too and hissed wildly and drove him battier than a dough-covered chipmunk, so too I wrestle mightily with my reading list.

So I’m going on hiatus. At least until comps are over (the first week of Fibberuary). Then, I promise, dear friends, I shall commence again to pense le courir.

In the meantime, as I know some misguided souls who read the Belfry are as interested in animal representation as I am (save Weston, who hates animals. I know. I saw him break every inviolable rule of the food chain in 2006 when he gave a couple of unsuspecting squirrels little nibbles of Tra-Ling orange chicken) , I’ll offer up the occasional gem uncovered by my researches for my readership’s entertainment and edification.

Today’s excerpt comes from New Zealand English professor Philip Armstrong’s wildly digressive, but occasionally useful critical study from 2008, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, page 98:

Elias Canetti has coined the phrase ‘Lilliput effect’ to describe the experience of a ’single large individual seeing himself in opposition to a numberless host of tiny aggressors,’ a perception exemplified by antipathy towards “vermin”. Whether these mosquitoes or lice, locusts or ants, they have always occupied men’s imaginations [and, we might add, women's imaginations as well]. Their threat lies in the fact that they appear in great crowds and very suddenly’ (1962: 419-20). To this list we might add Crusoe’s cats, Gulliver’s Brobdingnagian wasps and rats, the ‘multitude of filthy animals’ imagined by Frankenstein, and Montgomery’s rabbits [in The Island of Doctor Moreau]. The same anxiety is invoked by H.G. Wells again in ‘The Empire of the Ants’, a story about a species of rapidly mutating insects who have learnt to work in an organized hierarchy, manufacture weaponry out of poison crystals, and are carnivorous (for Wells, a sure sign of evolutionary pugnacity) . . . At the end of the story it is forecast that ‘they will finally dispossess man over the whole of tropical South America’, be ‘halfway down the Amazon’ by 1920, and reach Europe by ‘1950 or ‘60 at the latest‘

Look out, Andorra in 1955! THE ANTS. THEY COME. THEY BEAR CRYSTALS.

I can’t say why, but this quote makes me think immediately of Postma. In addition to the following touchstones of popular culture:

Running is Die Hard V

During my run earlier this evening, I was chewing on a couple of passages in tandem that I’ve come across lately in my reading, putting them in dialogue and basically confusing the delightful hell out of myself trying to reconcile them. One’s from the book I’ve been reading before passing out in recent nights, and the other’s from a book on corporeal feminist theory for my comps exam.

Running allows a positive view of something often considered frightening: aloneness. Many never accept it during their lives and are often depressed because of it. Such people surround themselves with other people and activities so they don’t have to acknowledge their aloneness. If they are constantly surrounded, they can deceive themselves into believing they are not alone. This is the cause of their almost inevitable depression . . . But it is true: we are born alone and we will die alone. Sure, along the way there are people to help us through individual situations and problems, to bring us joy and understanding, and to pull us along emotionally. But psychically, we are alone, and in our decisions we are alone . . .

Running is similar to Zen in that it can act as a form of meditation to quell these fears. The runner is alone; and this fact becomes clearer as he continues in the activity. He is alone while running, because his mind has no immediate problem on which to focus its attention. Therefore, it must occupy itself. The runner must accept aloneness . . .

When this process takes place, a cleansing results; the waste that is removed is confusion, doubt, and fear. It will be a realization that the person isn’t as closely tied to his responsibility, his work, as he perhaps supposed . . . Philip Kapleau wrote, in the book Zen Keys:

“Yet we live in a society where the object for so many is to do as little work as possible, where the work place, whether office or home, is looked upon as a place of drudgery and boredom, where work, rather than being a creative and fulfilling aspect of one’s life is seen as oppressive and unsatisfying. How different this is from Zen! In Zen, everything one does becomes a vehicle for self-realization, every act, every movement is done wholeheartedly, with nothing left over.”
-James Marlin, “Running and Zen,” in New Guide to Distance Running, 1983.

[Pictured: irony]

And:

What Descartes accomplished was not really the separation of mind from body (a separation which had already been long anticipated in Greek philosophy since the time of Plato) but the separation of soul from nature. Descartes distinguished two kinds of substances: a thinking substance (res cogitans, mind) from an extended substance (res extensa, body); only the latter, he believed, could be considered part of nature, governed by its physical laws and ontological exigencies. The body is a self-moving machine, a mechanical device, functioning according to causal laws and the laws of nature. The mind, the thinking substance, the soul, or consciousness, has no place in the natural world. This exclusion of the soul from nature, this evacuation of consciousness from the world, is the prerequisite for founding a knowledge, or better, a science, of the governing principles of nature, a science which excludes and is indifferent to considerations of the subject. Indeed, the impingements of subjectivity will, from Descartes’ time on, mitigate the status and value of scientific formulations . . . Descartes, in short, succeeded in linking the mind-body opposition to the foundations of knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body. From that time until the present, subject or consciousness is separated from and can reflect on the world of the body, objects, qualities.
-Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, 6

Putting these texts into a dialectic led me into some interesting terrains of thought: penises v. vaginas v. organs that are in-between (thinking more symbolically than biologically on this one), the postcolonial politics of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, ice cream birthday cakes, narcissism, those gross tumors that grow teeth and hair that they sometimes show on TLC, liturgical dance/Sufism, horror movies where hands gain sentience and attempt to kill their owners, whether or not I have margarine in the fridge, whether or not to confront Jens when he says horrifyingly misogynistic things with his German accent, and this one awesome ice dancing video on YouTube.

Anyway. So I was in the middle of trying to remember whether it was Brad Pitt or Kiefer Sutherland who starred in Seven Years in Tibet, sashaying through Chrissi McLaughlan Park at dusk around mile 7 or so of my run today, giving myself tinnitus with “Darker” by the Doves. My cogitations were cut abruptly and terrifyingly short, however, because of the dog.

A pony-sized, black-and-grey Great Dane came barreling out of the nether regions of the park, with blood in its eyes and its tongue lolling crazily out of one side of its mouth. I just about soiled my track pants as I frantically tried to remember what Simon did a few months ago when similarly confronted by a slavering beast. Especially since the dog’s owner, a portly septuagenarian in a Raiders windbreaker, shuffled into sight from behind a hill, screaming, “No, Bruce Willis, come back! Goddamnit! You goddamn dog! Dammit come back come back!”

I ended up opting to freeze in place and hope that the dog would spare my Achilles tendons and other vital running ligaments (“I can probably recover from a calf puncture wound within two weeks or so,” I remember thinking). Bruce Willis, however, skidded to a halt just as he was about to bowl me over and disembowel me. Watching a Great Dane put on the brakes after a full gallop, by the way, is a fantastic sight; think of a rocket-powered deer on ice skates trying to avoid sliding into a wall. Bruce Willis then proceeded to flop ecstatically over onto his back and look up at me with a wild, demanding, triumphant gaze. He wanted a belly rub.

Which brings me to today’s epiphany: Philosophy is no match for a playful Bruce Willis.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Frosty, cloudy, twilit. Long and slow from Idlewild out to the Last Bridge and back.

Workout: 8 miles

Total Mileage to Date: 681

Days remaining to Boston!!: 160

p.s. During the course of research for this post, I found out that Marmaduke was apparently (up until last Tuesday, anyway) putting together a 2008 presidential bid.

Running is transgression and errancy

I have to make two important decisions today:

1) Do I notify/reimburse my bearded, Viking Metal-loving roommate, Darryl, since I borrowed ± ½ jar of his Pace Mild and Chunky salsa. I’m normally pretty OCD about the convoluted, inter-fridge rules about whose food is whose in our household. I wouldn’t even have crossed the line, except that my waning food budget in these last, lingering days of the month before I get my paycheck (here’s lookin’ at you, Nevada taxpayers!) have led to me to inventive culinary measures employing the scanty, sad-looking contents of my cupboard. The de facto meal in these gastronomic doldrums has been a lively little number I call “pasta with peanut butter,” which is more or less exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes soy sauce is involved, too. Last night, the pasta ran out, so I cooked up my other signature, late-in-the-month dish: the “Pueblo Steelrunner,” which consists of a microwaved flour tortilla with a flotilla of black beans and lumpy bits of potato sailing atop it. The ‘runner is totally taste-impoverished without some kind of cheese or salsa propping it up. I was out of the former (cheese is wayyy too expensive for end-of-the-month criteria). And, unbelievably, I was also out of salsa. Which, let’s face it, is my personal, piquant, much cheaper version of crack cocaine.

I hope Darryl will understand. He probably won’t even notice, since that jug of salsa is bigger than a porpoise head. But I can’t stand it. The guilt is slowly ravishing my conscious, feasting on it like a giant, Puritanical polyp. As such, I’m soliciting your opinions:

2) It’s increasingly worn on me that the byline, or subtitle, of the Belfry isn’t very accurate as to whatever it is that goes on here. I don’t even run every day, so “the daily run” is misleading. And I run through sagebrush once every two weeks, at most. And running the stark, spartan, brownish hills outside of Reno is nowhere near as “spooky-ass” as running through downtown Reno at twilight. There, my friends, unspeakeable, scrotum-tightening things scorch one’s eyes and turn even the strongest woman’s heart to dribbly marmalade. (E.g., my friend Jaffney was hanging out down on 4th street one hot, dry morning when a rheumy-eyed woman in a peacock-patterned raincoat approached her out of some scummy alley, blood running out of a corner of her mouth, offering to “do anything you want for four dollars”).

(don’t do meth, guys.)

Running through even the most rattlesnake-infested sagebrush is like eating Jiffy with a spoon in a recliner while taking in “Geraldo at Large” compared to that shit. So the “spooky” moniker is inaccurate. And most of these posts have been about running in Colorado, anyway: the true spiritual home of my dusty sneakers and too-hot-to-trot Union Jack shorties. So I figure it’s time for a change.

Some of my best ideas for a replacement slogan—“Bowerman’s Belfry: Where Duchovny Happens,” and “Bowerman’s Belfry: Because You’re Worth It,” and “Bowerman’s Belfry: The Legendary Journeys of Zip the Goat”—have tenuous, perhaps nonexistent, connections with the Belfry’s subject matter. Which, for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend is running. As such, I’m opening up the forum to you. Yes, you! Everyone! Even the Googlebot (and those sketchballs who leave spam comments about “the sex photo of hot iPod young girl better wireless coverage” on seemingly every one of my posts) can participate!

How do you, dear reader, think the Belfry’s subtitle should read? The winning entry (provided that it’s penned by someone other than, well, me) gets a special prize. Which may or may not be a The Legendary Journeys of Zip the Goat lithograph that I’ma blackmail Amber into making. Which may turn out to be complicated, if Amber writes the winning phrase. Because then I’d have to blackmail her into giving a prize to herself. One that she’s spent hours working on.

Running is not being able to properly update a blog because you’ve been reading about workingclass poetics all day

Mexicans Begin Jogging

At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.

Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans–
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.

-Gary Soto, from A New Geography of Poets. Eds. Edward Field, Gerald Locklin, and Charles Stetler. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1992.

Today, while trail running through chilly canyon updrafts and looking for Basque arborglyphs on Peavine Mountain, I witnessed a red-tail, on the wing and flying faster than greased electricity, sink its talons into some grey sparrow-ish bird.
This made sense at the time, as I was listening to Iron Maiden.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: decidedly autumnal: cold and gorgeous with a sharp wind and even sharper sunlight. I ended up as rosy-cheeked as a gin-blossomed hobbit.

Workout/whether or not my innards gave way : eight slow, rolling miles with everything downstairs feeling relatively tranquil.

Total Mileage to Date: 601

Days remaining to Denver: 6

Running is an excuse to write about animals. Particularly, the scene in my groundbreaking, forthcoming young adult novel where Maurice the Morose Badger surveys the ruined landscape before him, takes a pinch of snuff, kneels, rubs dark loamy soil into the pads of his paws, and weighs his own mortality heavy in his earthy, clouded mind.

“…and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”
–Rilke, from “Duino Elegies”

(pictured: The Face That Launched a Thousand Indie-Boy Ships.)

Here are, to the best of my recollection, all of the animals I have had the fortune to meet while running: various kinds of squirrels, chipmunks, ground squirrels, pika, rattlesnakes, mice, rats, black bears, moose, coyotes, tortoises, garter snakes, rubber boas, voles, elk, mule deer, antelopes, cottontails, hares, cows, horses, llamas, salamanders, newts, lizards (assorted), bighorn sheep, regular (admittedly less exciting) sheep, alpacas, black-tailed prairie dogs, raccoons eating trash out of various receptacles on the Boulder Creek Path, skunks (approached with extreme care), and an unsurprisingly capacious collection of neighborhood dogs and cats. I don’t even bring up birds or fish here because I don’t have much of a memory for anything but charismatic megafauna, anyway.

I have been pursued, often on the verge of six simultaneous heart attacks and at Kenenisa Bekele pace, by a surprisingly tenacious basset hound, two German Shepherds, a coyote, and a seriously irritated momma blue grouse (the lattermost while hiking near Granby, Colorado). Other than these times, I often find myself stopping my watch, even during a tempo or fartlek (giggle) run, to watch wildlife rummage through foliage (bear—see a logorrheic post from earlier this summer), yip ineffectually in warning (prairie dog), stare blandly back at me while chewing (moose), or perform erratic movements that language cannot help but fail before (the squirrels I witnessed mating—I think—in the wheel well of a parked Toyota Camry on CU’s campus in early summer, 2005).

Recently, while watching a bunch of jays noisily taking apart a half-loaf of bread near the Reno High School track and remembering my Coloradan housecat, Waffles, I started (unsurprisingly) thinking about home. Animals, I’ve begun to think, are in fact inextricably bound with the dull, unmistakable agony of nostalgia for many observers. Or at least, kind of.

As everyone’s favorite wizened, impossibly rumpled University of Colorado English Dept. fixture, Jeffrey Robinson, might tell you if you rub elbows with him the right way, nostalgia’s etymology is Greek, stemming from nostos (home) and algos (pain). A cognitive dissonance that arises from an awareness of the discrepancy between where one is and where one belongs. Which sucks mightily, but probably characterizes human experience more than anything else I’ve lived through—it’s at least up there with loss, wonder, and love.

Displacement and nostalgia show up often enough in literature and culture enough for me to start wondering if we should ask them politely to leave, honey, don’t you think, because it’s getting awfully late and didn’t we see tem yesterday at the grocery store, anyway, and why won’t they stop hanging around the cheese tray and hogging all the punch? For example, there’s: the pining for Eden in Judeo-Christian thought; Lacan’s symbolic order; The Odyssey (speaking of which, I can’t wait to totally wreck the lives of 40 college freshmen here in a week when they’re forced to read the entire saga in two weeks. So much for beer pong and looking for new filmy freshman sundresses that piss off my dearest Yam-Bear. Lolz!); Annie Dillard’s musings on the environment and self-consciousness; Bob Sagat’s recent resurgence in celebrity; Wordsworthian reflection in sheep-saturated meadows; saccharine-voiced Sedona crystal-worshipping white people; whiskey-soaked, late-night Hemingway-ish reflection involving old love letters and cold revolvers lying on coffee tables; LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”; Americans’ collective identity centering around anything with an early- to mid-90s Disney stamp; any VH1 show prefixed by “I Love The…”; this very blog’s rosy take on anybody between 1972 and 1988 wearing Union Jack-emblazoned bun huggers and Onitsuka Tiger running flats; and, of course, Emerson’s contention that the role of the poet is to revive language itself from a debased state:

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,–and re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,–disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. For these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.

pheewwww. Congratulations on hacking through all those clauses. Charles Dickens would doubtlessly approve of the length of that list. I imagine his beard wagging delightfully as he claps on faintly from beyond the sorrow and suffering of this mortal sphere. (We can refer to him Darles Chickens, if we’re feeling especially irreverent.) Nevertheless, the verdict stands: We live, apparently, in a degraded, rust-covered age, far from our warm, imagined burrows where Things Were Always Better.

But nostalgia’s also kind of a drag. It’s selective amnesia. It can be more solipsistic than, say, driving past a schoolbus fire only to wonder if there’s a Jack in the Box nearby so you can get breakfast. It allows us to choose—somewhat hastily—what we want to see, in lieu of actually perceiving what we see (assuming we can even make a distinction between the two—thanks a lot, Kant, you shitbag). More generally, it monolithically assumes that the world should break and bend to the vision of how we would have it be. Which is why nostalgia drives people like Donna Haraway and anybody who’s a fan of the Futurists (except for the Fascist bits, that is) nuttier than a ground squirrel who’s just been declared CFO of Planters as a publicity stunt. And, to step softly onto the very, very thin cultural ice of Hallmark Original Movies: it’s true that you can never really go home again. (cf. Frodo Baggins.)

But I remain transfixed by animals. They exhibit a shocking integrity, a neat completeness, and an attunement to the slightest, soft murmurings of weather and other living things around them that I envy and imagine that we might have once maintained, but have long since lost. Instead, they speak in voices that resound in us both from within and without. A cuneiform that is indecipherable, but which we’ve read many years ago. So here’s another step in the dialectic of running: the run itself as a form that forces me to pay attention to what, exactly, I’m doing with my body at any given moment and how it feels (usually terrible), counterbalanced with an awareness that I am aware and am wracked by history, spirituality, memory, and all that other shit to which literature’s supposed to satisfactorily speak. But hey, maybe it’s a problem to talk about or for animals at all. And for that, I defer to my Cape Cod demigod, Henry Beston:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by a complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, seeing thereby a feather magnified, the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

________________________________

Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: I’ve been more or less squatting at UNR’s new library (redact that: the new Knowledge Center, sorry. Blech.) the past week, supervising the crack team of Jolt Cola-sustained orangutans at work on my thesis prospectus and comps reading list. So today it was 5 miles on the treadmill at Lombardi, watching the gold medal womens volleyball match between the US and Brazil. *grrowwwwllll*

Workout/whether or not I vomir‘ed: Dailed the machine at 7:04 pace for the whole thing–stupid, really, considering tomorrow’s long run, but hey, someone’s got to impress the sorority chicks on the ellipticals behind the treadmills–and ended up dumping a lot of corrosive sweat all over the treadmill/Didn’t puke, for which I’m thankful.

How to get there if you’re in Reno: Lombardi’s just above the new student union up on the hill. But you’re going to have to cough up some cash if you’re not unfortunate enough to be a UNR student.

Total Mileage to Date: 374

Days remaining to Denver: 55

Running is going higher, going back

Mike P., 1980, near Kings Canyon Nat’l Park, CA

Oh my jesus the lord. These poor dogs are baaaarking. Today I skipped my scheduled track workout (a painful decision, since I was looking forward to a 200m rematch with my new construction worker friends, Juan and Feliz). Instead, I attempted the 14,424 ft. summit of Mount Massive, a sprawling titan perched high above the mine wastes and hinterlands of Lake County, Colorado. The peak is the second highest in the state (after next-door neighbor, Mt. Elbert). For trail nerds out there, I followed the standard route up the grassy east side of the peak, which eventually tops out on a narrow saddle between Mt. Massive and Massive South. I then scrambled up the last 500 feet of gendarmes and sketchy climbers’ trail to the summit, where I was creepily hit on by a group of gigglers from an all-girls Lutheran summer camp. I saw at least three obese marmots, one of whom shrieked menacingly at me and threatened to steal my camera and feed it to its young if I took a picture of it. As a result of this hike (probably the best ramble I’ve gone on since wading through the Paria’s quicksands with Chris and Postma a few years ago) I make the following general observations:

July 22nd, 2008, bringing style to Colorado’s ceiling

1) I WANT TO STAB calf-implant-sporting goateed guys wearing $600 Marmot dayglo shells and MSR polypro bucket hats who jam out to their iPods while exploring one of the most beautiful, sacred spots in North America. And who block the trail when I’m trying to get past them because, despite being so effing pumped up on their music (While I couldn’t hear what they were listening to, I’d put twenty bucks on Crazy Town or John Mayer), they still waddle along at a paraplegic snail’s pace. Wilderness is not a gym with trees and ground squirrels added for ornament. I say “guys” above because there were two of these douchebagels farting around on Massive today. Also: asking me if I’ve “ever hiked with a heart rate monitor,” because I “really should try it to keep track of calories and altitude” is… well.. it’s roughly equivalent to asking me if I’d ever consider topping a burrito with the virulently yellow, vaguely sulfurous stuff my oldest cat sometimes pukes up when she’s upset because there’s a thunderstorm outside.
2) Running, contrary to popular opinion, actually does not get in you in shape to do anything other than run more. Which explains this blog’s author dry heaves and Pomeranian-in-a-malfunctioning-sauna-like panting upon finally reaching the summit. There just plain isn’t any air up there. I’ve been hobbling around the house ever since I got home with my hips threatening to come unmoored from their abused sockets.
3) The Colorado High Country in midsummer remains, objectively speaking, more beautiful than anyplace else in the universe. Unless you count parts of Deep Space Nine involving Chase Masterson. I don’t know why I’d want to live anywhere else. It’s more gorgeous, even, than the dramatic topography of Vigo Mortenson’s cheekbones. And I don’t want to hear any raised-eyebrow arguments that mention “Lake Superior” or “Illinois” or “The Musée D’Orsay” in the comments.

Dyrone Cleats 1979 Around the Lake Relay Team, anchorman, Lake Tahoe, CA

4) Hearing the flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a rockslide careening down from a high ridge, even from a safe distance of several miles away, is enough to send one’s stomach into a fit of cartwheels.
5) Mt. Massive is, in fact, quite large. Bigger than your head, even.
6) This trip confirms my suspicion that the key to all wisdom and happiness on this earth is, in fact, found in reenacting the illustrious section of my father’s running and backpacking slide collection that spans 1979 to 1984. Some particularly vibrant selections have been featured in this very post. More are coming down the blogpipe. Hang on to your butts.

My father and my “Uncle Larry,” Around the Lake relay, 1979. Notice that the capillaries in my father’s face are about to explode from severe, intestine-straining effort while Larry floats serenely by like a breeze-pampered cirrus cloud. Running track in college in Oregon will do that.

7) Speaking of the Paternal Cactus, you may have noticed that my dad is wearing the most incredible running singlet ever put to cloth in the photo directly below. On the day that my father’s long-extinct, once preeminently exclusive running club, the Lake Tahoe Dyrone Cleats, made these suckers, I think the effervescent spirit of the 70s running boom–yes, that ambrosia that fuels the mighty engines of Bowerman’s Belfry–reached its zenith. The Dyrone Cleats, the origins of whose name are shrouded in the mists of Miller Lite and my father’s memory, were a potent force in the Lake Tahoe road racing scene in the late 70s/early 80s. Or, at least my dad is pretty sure they were. One thing is for certain: they wore bad sweaters with little to no sense of irony (photo coming). This singlet, unfortunately, along with all other Cleats paraphenalia, were lost somewhere over the past few decades. I am, however, considering raising the Cleats triumphantly from the ashes and getting my dad a replica singlet made for Xmas. What do you guys think? Oh, and I’d prolly print ones for my friends who run. And maybe even my friends who don’t. They can have chain-smoking races in them. And maybe we can even get extra-puffy, ill-fitting track jackets, too, with brown and burnt sienna racing stripes.

J.T. on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, 1980

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Teller Farm/the tanks. twilight.

Workout/whether or not I spewed: 12 miles. quiet. no.

Total Mileage to Date: 226

Days remaining to Denver: 88

The Cow Guy. Around the Lake Relay, 1979.

Running is anxiously awaiting a caustic, disapproving letter from PETA

My old pal Curtis Imrie has been chasing ass —wild mountain ass— all over the Rockies for nigh on forty years. By the late-1970s, when we first met, he was already well-established on the burro racing circuit which, at that time, included races in the mountain towns of Leadville, Fairplay and Buena Vista (collectively known as burro racing’s Triple Crown).

The spectacle of burro racing is as much marathon as rodeo. A High-Country sport indigenous to Colorado, it involves twenty-some miles of mountain running more or less tethered to a burro who, in the best of scenarios might help pull you up a hill, and in less desirable situations, might plant all four hooves on the wrong side of a creek with every intention of staying put.

In a restless quest for some fresh adventure in the early-’80s, I decided to prepare for The Buena Vista Race, it being the easiest of the three at lower elevations and a length of only 24 miles, and at the time in my hometown. In order to train I needed a willing burro, and asked Curtis if he could help. “If you got the legs,” he said, “we’ll find the ass.”

Floating down Buena Vista’s main drag in a state of endorphin-fueled bliss some four-and-a-half hours after the starting gun, I knew that my burro wrassling/racing career had been a one-shot deal. Never before had the tried-and-true Buddhist method of sitting on one’s own ass seemed more reasonable and intuitive.

From Peter Anderson’s “Distance Running Donkey Finds a Place in Politics” from the April 2008 Mountain Gazette, quite possibly the best thing on paper since This was published.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Boulder Creek path around midnight. Temperate.

Workout/whether or not I spewed: fast night run, watching an enormous, buttery moon blot out everything else in the sky.

How to get there if you’re in Boulder ark at Boulder High School on Arapahoe Rd. The creek path is out back. Rinse and repeat.

Total Mileage to Date: 214

Days remaining to Denver: 90