Running is smiled upon by the mendicant orders

Yesterday, I found myself with a few hours to thumb-twiddle my way through. Because I’ll tangle with any kind of text that involves running/exercise/nutrition/cooking (including, unfortunately, skimming this while waiting to get my teeth cleaned a month or so ago), I ended up leafing through some of the lackluster literature from the goodie bag from at last weekend’s 10k. Included was the slim, exhaustively titled “magazine,” La Sportiva TrailRunner 2008 Trophy Series Supplement. The cover piece profiles the preeminant trailrunning veteran Simon Gutierrez, describing his laissez-faire training regimen in Alamosa, Colorado. It’s actually a pretty good piece, written by Justin Nyberg, one of Outside’s editors. But then there’s this:

Gutierrez changes out of his running clothes, and plops onto the living room carpet with a pint of beer. He’s wearing an orange Life is Good T-shirt with a little runner bounding across the logo. On a chalkboard in the kitchen, a similar stick figure goes bounding up a mountain with a big smile. The caption says: “It’s all good!”

Apparently, if you want to run like Simon, you’ve got to wear the right goods. Now, I’ve covered my distaste for $25.00, witheringly naive L.I.G. shirts in other, admittedly more intoxicated portions of the Belfry. But this struck me as a particularly egregious example of nasty product placement that further reinforces running’s cultural image-at-large as something that White Suburban People With Disposable Income And Large REI Dividend Check do. To reiterate the main argument of the Belfry (a contention that I’ve begun to refer to as Henry David Thoreau’s Surly Neckbeard and Its Magic Sneakers Argument): running doesn’t require this, or this, and/or especially this (in the event that you’re off enough of your medication to consider adventure racing). All you need is a pair of shoes, some natty cutoffs, a post-run beer in a funky Alf coozy, and, if God has so blessed you with it, a turbocharged imagination. It also helps to have a sick sense of humor, a genetic predisposition towards purposeless masochism, and some degree of comfort being gawked at by bourbon-soaked tramps trying to sleep in underpasses when you’re doing night runs in Boulder County. The roads are open 24 hours a day (although you may have to run armed in some places, a practice that this writer neither engages in nor necessarily encourages, unless you’re talking about Kevin Sorbo mowing through the crowd at the Marine Corps Marathon with two katanas strapped across his back and a Braveheart-inspired woad across the left side of his face).

But the most irritating, and telling, aspect of the above, adjective-frontloaded paragraph is that the author fails to identify what kind of brewski Gutierrez’s got in his chillingly generic “pint.” Not knowing what beer he likes is going to drive me up the wall every time I think about Gutierrez. I imagine it was a rote, mid-budget runner choice, like Fat Tire or Sam Adams. But what if he was pouring something prim and magisterial (Smithwick’s), or straight up South-Central (Evil Eye), or something you’d have to be crazier than a shithouse rat to pour down your gullet (Miller Sharps, recently microwaved Guinness, Budweiser & Clamato).

Considering all of this, I’m asking yam-bear or one of my other more visual art-inclined friends to please draw up a “Life is Not Particularly Good” t-shirt design that involves a stick figure drawings of an albatross getting its head stuck in a plastic ring from a six-pack of pop, or an orphanage burning down, or someone booting black tar heroin. Or whatever.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Short and quick at Teller Farm. Strange evening weather out–I was more than a little scared I’d get crispified by a stray lightning bolt, as the sky was covered in bizarre storm clouds that resembled nothing so much as the introductory credits to 1984’s The Neverending Story.

Workout/whether or not I expunged my organs: 5k and strides/nope

Total Mileage to Date: 295

Days remaining to Denver: 73

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

Running is contracting the black lung, apparently

For starters, I’d like to welcome everyone who’s googling “David Duchovny” to my Internetlog, Bowerman’s Belfry (32 hits over the last 24 hours, according to WordPress’ counter). Thanks for making it out, you guys. I’m heartened to know that my target web demographic is finally being reached. You’ve come to the one-stop shop for breaking Duchovny news, entertaining features, X-Files-themed Sudoku, and cutting-edge software.

If dear readers would be so kind to excuse some tender-hearted writing today, I’d like to wax sentimental for a spell in the high lonesome tower of the Bowery today. Maybe it’s because it’s July. And that means Christmas in July. Which means it’s inadvertantly a very, very Dickensian time of year. The cockles of one’s heart are overheated, Ford Pinto radiator-like, and expel a shimmering cloud of cloying empathy, good cheer, and childrens’ syrupy chirrups of GOD BLESS YE, SIRS! into the bright, pollen-choked bliss of a Colorado summer’s afternoon.

Yes, that’s precisely what’s going on.

So here’s the deal. I’m not gonna lie: I worry about Paula Radcliffe, Jenny Barringer, Sammy Wanjiru, Paul Tergat, etc. ALL THE FREAKING TIME. I CARE. So much. I can’t… God. Jesus. I mean, look. I sometimes wake up covered in a cold sheen of sweat at 4:30 AM, weak-kneed, hot tears streaming down my cheeks from a nightmare about professional runners meeting disaster. Alan Webb fracturing every bone in his body in a freak snowmobiling accident in some remote corner of Michigan. Kenenisa Bekele contracting e. bola from bad lentils. You should worry too. Especially this summer.

As the world’s premier harriers assemble in Beijing to participate in everyone’s favorite passive-aggressive, “goodwilled” test of absolute national supremacy, The Olympic Fucking Games, The Sunday Times reports that the city’s level of air pollution might be five times greater than the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization. I can’t help but picture the entire city as being engulfed in a diarrheatic cloud, one swirling about in carcinogenic Brownian motion. Like Peanuts’ Pig-Pen, but, you know… an entire city. Beijing’s miasma particularly threatens the slow-twitch muscle crowd, such as triathletes, runners, and racewalkers (giggle), whose medal aspirations are even more dependent upon, well, air than sprinters, pole vaulters, and rhythmic gymnasts. Marathon world record-holder Haile Gebrselassie has opted to sit Beijing out, as he fears a cataclysmic asthma attack brought on by inhaling China’s brackish soup of an atmosphere.

Now, I’m no doctor (although I do play one on TV! Wakka wakka wakka!). But I am concerned about our best distance runners’ lungs being transmogrified into a substance that resembles the tarry post-bbq residue left on my Weber after leaving zucchini spears on too long (sidenote: delish!).

Given, I could put on my dusty John Muir costume, fetch the old ink-and-quill from my rolltop desk, summon up some gravitas, and pen an acidic, yet respectfully formal letter on behalf of both Chinese Nature and The God-Given, Happy Athleticism Our Young Olympians. In lieu of writing these startlingly ineffectual letters to Chinese Olympics officials, however, I’ve decided that we should just change the events themselves to keep our runners’ lungs more fleecily white and pristine than a bleached lamb:

[Smog - Rock Bottom Riser. 2005. Drag City/Domino Records]

1 / Construct oversize, climate-controlled CritterTrail over the entire Beijing Marathon route. Include salt licks at key intersects to combat Hyponatremia.
2 / Outfit runners with Wookie breath masks, as featured in the infamous Mynock/Asteroid scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
3 / Terraform China and further stimulate the hell out of its economy.
4 / Force Olympic tourists/everybody in China to carry a messenger bag full of willow and poplar saplings, which they would then plant in the next two weeks. Just like Johnny Appleseed! Coonskin Caps optional!
5 / Summon Captain Planet. Especially that spicy Russian girl. You know. To make the pollution go away through the power of wind. Or whatever.

6 / Replace Accelerade aid stations with Windex aid stations to give runners’ alveolae a streak-free shine.
7 / Invade China. Twist the IOC’s arm into holding the Games in Utah again.
8 / Convert the thousands of Chinese factories making University of Colorado sport visors, Eurosealers, dreamcatcher keychains, Kenny G posters, and glow-in-the-dark spyder rings to manufacture hot-selling canisters of clean oxygen instead (sidenote: I can’t even believe the smooth makeout jam this website has streaming. Oxygen’s just so… clean. Fresh. Sex. Sex. Sex.)
9 / Line Beijing National Stadium (“The Bird’s Nest”) with the millions of filmy, creepy plastic bags meandering through depressed Bed Bath ‘n Beyond parking lots in Broomfield, Colorado.
10 / On a similar note, just turn all of Beijing into a mega-terrarium. All of it. Seal it up, man. Try not to kill Olympians in it the way that I somehow managed to kill my pet turtle, Samuel, when I was six and had a terrarium.

I, of course, welcome any additional suggestions from readers to pass on to the appropriate authorities.

Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: long, hot, miserable, thigh-cramping jog along Eagle Trail to Foothills Trail to Wonderland Lake and back. Was given quite a start by a jackrabbit that I thought was a prairie rattlesnake around mile 6.

Workout/whether or not I rolfed: 10 miles/no, although I did get some epic armpit chafing. Which was gross.

How to get there if you’re in Boulder: Take 28th north to Jay Road, turn right. Follow the signs to Boulder Reservoir–you make a left just before you’re about to cross Diagonal Highway. Go PAST the Reservoir’s entrance on your right and stay on the same road for about a mile and a half. You’ll see the parking lot for the Eagle Trail/Boulder County Open Space on your left.

Total Mileage to Date: 195

Days remaining to Denver: 95


Today’s Duchovny trivia: Where did our favorite paranormal sleuth on the X-Files (NOT Scully!) attend University? What about the actor who PLAYS our favorite paranormal sleuth on Teevee?