Larry was a short, birdish, blonde guy on my high school cross-country team who liked techno and hard drugs. When I was a freshman, I got a ride with Larry to the Dakota Ridge X-Country Invitational. As we flew westward on C-470 and Larry ate lemon-lime gatorade powder straight from the container, I lost approximately thirty percent of my hearing because he’d put on Bone Thugs at a high enough volume to puree my brains into a texture approximate to that of rice pudding. Meetchu at da crosssroaaddss (da crossroaadsss)…
I bring Larry up because, as I’ve returned to running in Boulder, I’ve been struck (as always) by how stunningly physically attractive and well-poised the joggers here are. I’m referring specifically to the late-twenties-to-mid-forties white people are that frequent the Bobolink and Teller Farms trails. They float across the tall bunchgrass like svelte savanna beasts, the fibres of their calves rippling, iPod earbud cords lying perfectly across their chests, unmoving. I have yet to see one of these runners expectorate. There are guys who must massage a third of a bottle of gel into their frosted spikes before putting on their mesh visors and heading out for a quick 5k.
Which brings me back to Larry. Our coach in high school, an Orwellian figure who used to have us chant “one heart, one lung!” whenever we did long runs, would often force us to do a “magic quarter” at the end of interval days. For the uninitiated, a magic quarter means that you run a 400 (one lap around the track) as quickly as you possibly can, just after you’ve finished a grueling interval workout where that cheesesteak you had for lunch threatens to come up the entire time. Whenever coach yelled for a magic quarter, Larry and his buddy Christian would roll down the elastic bands on their shorties and expose the top inch or so of their pubic hair. They would then run the magic quarter, often flying across the line in under 60. (Larry, although kind of an idiot, and although he really, really liked Paul Oakenfold, was also pretty fast.) They had recast the magic quarter as a “pubic quarter.” Coach, a Type-A guy drowning in a quarter-life-crisis and depressed by his inability to get 45 gawky white teenagers to break 18 for a 5k, never noticed. And as Larry and Christian crossed the line, two slender concoctions of bone and very little muscle, they collapsed into giggles. Christian would then go stretch his quads, leaning on the chainlink fence surrounding the track, his pubes riffled by the west wind.
Sometimes, if I’m doing a track workout that involves 400s, I’ll occasionally roll down the elastic and let the breeze in. Running isn’t about gore-tex fetishization or attempting to reform the body into something that approximates Artemis’ physique. (Although it can be these things.) It is the respite for freaks–the carb-counting, bandaid-over-the-nipples, sweaty-necked, bespectacled, giraffe-necked geeknozzles whose hand-eye coordination is less developed than that of a fetus. One is, in short, supposed to look pretty stupid while running.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: 6.6 miles along South Boulder Creek trail with Padre Cactus, who ran the second half by himself since he “had to stop and take a dump, unbelievably” around mile 4.
Workout/whether or not I rolfed: Pretty slow, since my ass still hurts from the nightmarish, 1000-mile drive out here with Will Weston trying to give me a wet willie every fifteen minutes.
How to get there if you’re in Boulder: take Baseline east until just before it dead-ends into Cherryvale. The parking lot for the Bobolink/South Boulder Creek trail is on your right.
Total Mileage to Date: 50
Days remaining to Denver: 133
