Running is neu moonz

Hey.

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But we’re teetering on the brink of the apocalypse. The signs are everywhere. The Afghan election was a joke. Thom Yorke has officially gone BANANAS and furthered the Mormon Teenager Celebacy Empire by including a song (hey, at least it’s a very good song) on the new Twilight soundtrack. Glenn Beck now foals a slimy baby stallion of pure, incoherent hatred every night on television while the nation cheers and drools into KFC buckets resting gently in their quivering, fatty laps. Health care reform is going the way of the dodo. Coyotes are apparently now indestructible.  Leslie, Austin’s favorite local homeless transvestite and homeless advocate, is in the hospital with brain damage and the sitch doesn’t look good. And it turns out that even the simplest joys of life–like picking your own apples–are all big Ponzi schemes, too. I feel like the Publisher’s Clearing House just knocked on my door only to burn that oversize, novelty check right in front of my eyes, then rub the ashes into my teeth. What happened to the glimmering, impossible, electric peacock-feathered hopes that so dazzled our eyes when Obama took the stage that fateful evening last November? Why is everybody unemployed? Why do we get old and wrinkly? Why do people wear rainboots when it’s raining out and they end up slipping on hilly streets anyway, because apparently there’s no tread on the bottom of those things? And why does everyone who lives in Austin look like this:

I dunno.

But somewhere, Steve Nash is probably studying a pre-algebra textbook and rocking a sweater vest, figuring out a way to save us using the Pythagorean theorem and sea algae. He probably has a lukewarm can of Diet Coke sitting on the desk in front of him.

The good news is that I’m running the Austin Marathon. According to my (and Steve’s) calculations, me running just over 26 miles on Valentine’s Day, 2010 will draw the planets back into their proper alignment. All will be right with the world again. The woodland animals looting our Circuit Cities and liquor stores will be struck dumb and mute once more, and return to their forest homes. The Democrats will retain their control of Congress. Cormac McCarthy will show up at my front door and ask to go dutch on a six-pack of New Belgium’s finest while we talk about common sentence patterns. And a new and glorious dawn will break in hushed tones over the firmanent. Somewhere, in the background, the Verve will play. Everyone will cry their guts out.

Believe me when I tell you that I’m doing this for you. Most of me doesn’t even really want to run a marathon. I don’t even like running, people. I’d rather sit around in my own filthy bedsheets, feeling the sweat pool in my kneepits and gumming fistfuls of Crisco.

But I’m going to do it, anyway.  I bought new shoes over the weekend that are bioluminescent blue. As soon as I finish wading through the quagmire of grading the rest of this week’s student essays, this web-log will again discuss important matters. Some will pertain to running (e.g. interval training suggestions, nipple creme comparison shopping, whether or not to “pick up a water moccasin with a big stick just to show it to your girlfriend–surprise!” while running through Texas hill country), and some will fall well beyond the pale of pounding the pavement (how to train a pig to hunt truffles, what kind of food is good to eat when you’re crying, Sugar Ray, where to allocate my retirement savings, etc.).

I’m back. Brace yourselves.

-The Camercorn

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Days remaining until the Austin Marathon: 110

Miles completed since I (really) began training for said Austin Marathon: 10

On my most recent running soundtrack: the frostbitten righteousness of “Freya” by The Sword

Running is Volksgeist

Chris Carter
Executive Producer
The X-Files
20th Century Fox
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

Monday, April 6, 2009

Dear Mr. Carter,

About this time last year, I worked my way through the first three seasons of The X-Files. Despite the show’s increasingly dated special effects and early-90s wardrobes (Scully’s grey pantsuits! Flannel! Chunky shoes! Cable-knit sweaters!), I have to tell you: few television shows still have the creepy staying power that the X-Files does. Even the show’s occasional forehead-slapping foray into political incorrectness is sort of charming in retrospect. See, for example, the Season One’s episode “Shapes” (Also known as the “Native Americans are werewolves! Who knew?! Awrrrooo!!” episode).

For the record, I think that “Darkness Falls” is, by far, the best episode. Oregon loggers getting cocooned and sucked dry by mutant, bioluminescent swarms of prehistoric green bugs who’ve been released because the loggers clearcut a bunch of old growth? That’s so cool. SO COOL. I can’t even believe how cool that is.

Mr. Carter, do you believe in ghosts? I’m curious if the X-Files episodes you produced were in any way informed by actual paranormal experiences.

I tot. believe in ghosts.

There’s a place in rural Douglas County, Colorado near where I grew up. It is called (rather unimaginatively) the “Ghost Bridge.” There are two legends associated with the bridge, which is way out in the plains and spans a ditch formed by a seasonal creek. The first legend, at least the way I heard it from my friend Staci my junior year of high school, is that a bunch of “Indians were buried out there” and that “their spirits get really pissed off when white drive over their graves in their cars.” The second legend is that a schoolbus went flying over the guardrail back in the early 1970s after hitting a patch of black ice on a particularly cold morning. 30-some high schoolers and the driver were killed. Whose (again, according to Staci) “spirits get really pissed off when anybody drives over the bridge.”

The two legends are held in a weird dialectic whenever anybody goes out to the ghost bridge. You’re supposed to hear *both* the menacing, mossy thump of Indian war drums AND see ghostly children with black eyes screaming soundlessly at you from the far side of the bridge. Which is then supposed to drip blood from its I-beams.

Blood. Blood. Bloooood.

I’ve only been out to the ghost bridge twice, and both times nothing happened except that it was really cold, foggy, creepy, and a couple of cows started humping. One time, Staci claimed to have seen a “ghost school bus” on the road with no driver, but Staci also listened to a *lot* of Whitesnake, which tarnishes her reputation as a witness somewhat in my view.

I myself am a devout believer in ghosts after the most intensely frightening night of my life spent in a haunted bed-and-breakfast in Eureka Springs, Colorado in 2005. The B&B was an old, Victorian-style house owned by a man named Hugh. He’d moved to Eureka, a small mountain town near Colorado Springs, with his partner in 2000. They’d split up within six months. His partner bailed on Hugh because he couldn’t stand the house. It gave him “bad vibes,” pipes would constantly break, rooms would be freezing cold even with the heat on, and he couldn’t be in a room without feeling like the walls were “looking back at him.” Anyway, my parents and I were the only guests for the night and Hugh and I talked for a long time down in the kitchen, drinking, after my folks had gone to bed. Around 11:30, I made to go back upstairs and Hugh asked me to remind him which room he’d put me in. “The Peacock Room,” I said. “Oh,” Hugh said, “That one’s not so bad. With the ghosts.”

The Peacock Room was named because of its wallpaper, emerald green and purple. It was also decorated with bird-ish stuff, including a giant, hanging birdcage in the window and (how scrotum-tighteningly creepy is this) a taxidermied eagle on the dresser. I managed to pass out right away, but then awoke around 2:30 in the morning to a creaking. The birdcage swayed back and forth in the room for the next three hours. I’d left the window closed and there was nothing coming from the air conditioning vent. Except (and this is the thing that still gets me) the sound of somebody breathing. Right next to the bed. There were also footsteps coming from the hall at weird, shuffling intervals. I was too petrified to even get out of bed and reach for my phone for at least an hour, at which point I called my then-girflriend and mightily compromised my masculinity over the phone. I was way too scared to get out of the bed. Instead, I waited until dawn broke, when the birdcage abruptly stopped swinging and the panting ghost was banished back to its day-lair, or whatever. I’m never staying in a bed & breakfast (sorry, “B&B”) again. Ever. Not even if Kevin Sorbo was the owner and baked oatmeal scones wearing in a frilly gingham apron every morning, delivering them hot and fresh to guests’ rooms. Not then, not never.

That’s all for now.

Best wishes,
C. Turner

______________________________

Days streaked: 15

Total Miles: 57.1

colonna sonora di oggi : Common and Jay-Z.

Running is gross

I lost a blackened toenail earlier this week. It came off in the shower. The one on my left index toe. Traumatized during October’s Denver Marathon, it took a full four months for a new nail to incubate underneath it and finally shove the old, damaged guy out. If this is making a column of pre-puke arise in your throat, you can bail on this entry, guys. I’ll understand. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about toenails lately, though: those thin shells of pearlescence that protect your little pigges and mine from hamboned line dance partners and malevolent coffee table legs. 

Here’s what’s up with black toenails. Our feet often swell during physical activity and get compressed by your socks and shoes. That pressure, combined with the jackhammering impact of running, can pulverize your toenail beds, or create a blister under the toenail itself. (eww!) When this happens, the extra blood and fluid cause your toenail to separate from the toenail bed, from which your toenail emerges on an ongoing basis. The dried blood colors the toenail black. Kind of like stained glass, but grodier.

Much like the soul-quickening experience of your first snotcicle on a cold winter run, your first post-race dry heave in front of a concerned race volunteer in the finishing chute, and your first time smearing Vaseline on your areolas, the first black toenail is an inexorable runner’s rite of passage. Padre Cactus can recall with startling accuracy the number of toenails he’s lost over almost four decades of running and backpacking. (The majority because of late-70s Colorado Plateau canyon descents, his toes at the mercy of sketchy Army Surplus boots and a totally un-fucking-ergonomic Kelty external frame). My mother, who avoids thinking about feet in general, makes him wear his vaguely Euro sock-shoes in the house whenever he’s got one going on.

Like scars, tattoos, hair styles, birthmarks, piercings, scarrings, sad-tonsils-floating-in-ominously-lit-jars-on-the-shelving, bindings, piercings, stretchings, pearlings, pubic hair-weavings, tone, dyes, and a legion of other bodywork, the blackened toenail is a sign of both the limits of bodily identity, and the ways in which bodies serve as a record to what has happened to them. I like the idea of the black toenail. It exists, but is always passing. Always being replaced by the new nail. Dead matter that can’t be gotten rid of, an unsightly result of the run. Good luck wearing Birkenstocks to your church potlock with one. It shows that running creates a body-in-process–a mark that, like a race, serves a reminder of something that happened in space and time. It unnaturally lingers to remind us of where we have been, and of things we have chosen to write onto our flesh (and of those things that insist on writing on us). 

To run the risk of totally alienating you with the limits of the metaphor, the dead toenail somewhat resembles an ink stain. Whether purposeful or accidental in nature, I dunno. Hopefully (alert: precious metaphor collapse ahead) you can find someone who reads and appreciates it. 

If anybody takes this into racial allegory territory, I’m going to need another beer.

(pictured: unrelated fishblimp)

The last paragraph is–like most overwrought, self-indulgent things in the world–really Michel Foucault’s fault, who describes the body as

a surface on which events are inscribed (whereas language marks events and ideas dissolve them), place where the Me is dissociated (a Me to which it tries to lend the illusion of a substantial unity), it is a volume perpetually crumbling away. Genealogy, as an analysis of where things come from is thus situated at the point of articulation of the body and history. Its task is to show a body totally imprinted with history, and history destroying the body.

-Michel Foucault. (1991) [1971]. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. . In Paul Rabinow, (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, p. 83.

Hopefully I’ll get a couple more during spring training. I’d like to sit out in a lawn chair in Texas this June stretching out my naked dogs ahead of me, sucking down a cold one, until a nervous neighbor (or G) comes by to drape a modesty cloth over my feet.

Oh, and the Antlers’ Hospice is a good album, at least judging from the sounds they’ve put out in advance of the official release in March.

Running is collected pensées: a review of the Denver Marathon, 10/19/2008

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

-Whitman, “To You”

One of the recurring pleasures of a long-distance running race is also one of the sport’s greatest ironies: that the rigid boundaries of a solitary, ascetic practice are for a few hours made permeable as good, running folk throw their lots together and perform the joyous, arduous rituals of competition and improvisatory community. Like other groups whose interpersonal glue is that of commiseration (19th century whaling vessels, TA cubicle offices, AA meetings, and Denver Nuggets fans), races forge almost instantaneous relationships between runners and family members. Runners, I think, are often prone to the perception that the rest of the country sees them a bit like Civil War reenactors: unhealthily obsessed with arcane minutiae, insular, and weirder than turnips. Races thus affirm our weirdness and signify running as something worth doing for its own, Sisyphean sake.

In this spirit, I’m happy to recommend the Denver Marathon, especially to first-timers. Within a few years, I suspect that the Marathon could become a marquee event for the Colorado running community–something on par with the Bolder Boulder or Cherry Creek Sneak in terms of civic spirit, though prolly not participant numbers.

I want to return to the singular, wonderful people I met running the marathon in just a bit. I figure it’s my duty first, though, to remark on my three hallmarks of a successful race: an inventive, scenic course supported by aid stations in way that makes sense and isn’t annoyingly gimmicky; a race’s sense of pride; and the quality of food and brews served up at the expo.

The Course/Support. Wending its way through downtown high rises, major civic parks (City, Cheesman, and Washington), tree-lined Victorian boulevards, and along Santa Fe Drive (a historically Latino neighborhood that’s become the center of the city’s burgeoning art scene), I was struck by both the gorgeous vantages afforded by the course, as well as how it exposed runners to Denver’s broad socioeconomic and historic diversity. Aid stations were well-placed and abundant, manned by unnervingly enthusiastic volunteers, and offered Gatorade High-Endurance Formula and water the entire way. The somewhat more low-key Clif people were stationed at two points during the race, handing out Clif Shots. Running a race in October in Colorado is always a little bit of a gamble–last year’s marathon was apparently subject to a kind of King Lear-raving-out-on-the-heaths ice storm. This year, the weather was stunningly perfect (I was able to run the entire thing in a singlet without getting chilly, despite the 7 AM start), and the city’s autumn leaves were in proud display the entire way. My only complaint about the course was the fact that it perhaps spent too much time doing Daedalian loops around and inside Washington Park, which became increasingly frustrating as the race wore on, especially since it was comparatively late in the game. Part of this might be some latent PTSD on my part, too, involving all the repressed memories I’ve got from Turkey Trots and interval work in the Park during high school cross-country. The course was gently rolling, for the most part.

Pride and Spirit: Absolutely. As I ran, I had the sense that Coloradoans were immensely proud of both their status as one of the healthiest states in the Union, and of the city of Denver itself. There were sizable crowds at important intersections, and lots of stoic, heavily mustachioed guys from DPD holding up traffic importantly to let bedraggled-looking runners pass. I am somewhat saddened by the absence of Dinger outside Coors Field, but I guess Denver’s favorite purple dinosaur is a devout Episcopalian, or something, or the race people couldn’t scrounge up enough cash to get him to work early on a Sunday morning. As someone who’s away from my home state three-fourths of the year, this was all enormously heartening. I felt like this race was uniquely Colorado in all the right ways: from the choice of landmarks (my favorite part of the course, by far, was running accompanied by the ecstatic animal trumpeting coming from inside the Denver Zoo in City Park. Although I was disappointed not to see the Brunch drag crew at the Bump n’ Grind out on the sidewalk in front of their digs) to its pluralistic tramp through many of the city’s communities. The race announcer was professional and obviously cared about the race’s success. The race benefited a slew of charities, both state and national.

[Tangent: while Google image-searching for "the unsinkable Molly Brown," figuring that an appropriate choice to post following this paragraph, I came across this photograph. Which is from this, uh, website. I figure it expresses my feelings about the Denver Marathon more than anything else I could possibly dig up.]

Vittles: I’m not really the person to ask on this one. Despite all my ballyhooing about how effing good that Left Hand brew was going to be after the race, my stomach started doing a convincing Cirque du Soleil impression around mile 23, and by the time I staggered across the finish line, all I wanted was more gatorade and to curl up into a fetal ball on the Civic Center Park lawn. Which was exactly what I did, drifting in and out of sleep while a mischievous October breeze corderoyed the grass and terrible alt.rock flatulated from the Mötley Crüe tour-sized PA system on the south side of the Park. The food I did eventually ingest at the post-race Expo, however, was adequate. Although I was little taken aback to see McDonald’s, of all people, distributing miniature packages of apple slices at the finish line. Apples probably somehow secretly injected with nicotine and trans-fats. Oh, and don’t worry. I did, in fact, get a post-race beer–a cold Milwaukee’s Best thoughtfully provided to me by Liz after a post-race nap. Thanks, Liz!

But most of all, I’m thrilled that I chose Denver for my first marathon because of the indelible memories it offered up, especially the other runners I wheezingly chatted with along the way: John, a svelte, bald guy who quickly outpaced me around mile 15 and who, ravished by the virulently yellow oaks just north of Cheeseman, exclaimed, “God, I love that block” as we entered the park. An unnamed, stutter-stepping short guy in a Colorado flag singlet who I ran next to for three or four miles just before entering Washington Park who greeted everyone (including a number of dogs) along the race course with a resounding, “Good Morning!” And Simon, of course, giving me a killer high-five at mile 18, then rocketing ahead of me, shouting “stay strong!” behind his shoulder. Oh, and Chris and Buffy, of course, screaming and banging away at their hideously annoying, wonderful cowbells at several points during the race.

I didn’t run quite as well as I’d hoped to going into the race (I placed in the mid-50s and ran a 3:09, instead of going sub-3), but I’m pretty happy with my performance, since it was, after all, my first marathon. My problem, unsurprisingly, was going out way too fast: I was on pace for a 2:40 at the half-mary point, and the last six miles of the race felt like someone taking an economy-sized cheese grater to my calves.

I’m spending the next week doing runs light enough to be considered meringue-like in texture (lots of 3-milers and sauna trips), then starting to cobble together a training plan for Boston (any suggestions for how to structure it are welcome). I’m already thinking of literary-inflected, incisively clever things to put on my singlet to woo brainy hotties at the Wellesley Scream Tunnel. And by “woo,” I mean “be justifiably ignored by.”

Full results here
Course map here

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Slow recovery jaunt on the Lombardi treadmill.

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 3.1 miles, watching the 1985 Hawks/Celtics NBA finals on ESPN Classic.

Total Mileage to Date: 638

Days remaining to Boston!!:175

Running is a well-sharpened knife: #1

It all started, as most life-changing decisions usually do with me, with regrets about eating shitty food. While taking in Burn After Reading (captivated by Brad Pitt’s incredible, skunk-stripe, blowed-beyond-dry hair and Madonna-inspired gyrations), I drank roughly a gallon of Cherry Coke, pawed greasy little fistfuls of popcorn (with extra yellow topping!) from an oversize bag into my maw, and, uh, “ate” an entire package of these:

Confession: the only reason I purchased and consumed an actual package of Nuclear Sqworms was so that I, apparently a 22-year-old man-child, could utter the words, “Yes, and I would also like Nuclear Sqworms, please” and mean it.

Bad idea.

If you can’t tell from the picture above, the Rocky Flats-styled psychedelic nightcrawler mascot for Nuclear Sqworms is wearing a hardhat emblazoned with the international symbol for radioactive materials. This is less a marketing ploy than an actual, very sober warning. Beware! Beware, indeed, to anyone impulsive enough to put these things into his/her GI tract that doesn’t have the well-seasoned stomach lining of a 12-year-old boy who eats 2 cubic meters of candy a day. As a squirmvivor, I can attest that the half-life of Nuclear Sqworms is, roughly speaking, 3 hours. That’s how much time elapsed between the Sqworms’ initial penetration into my gullet and my collapse onto my recliner, breaking into a feverish cold sweat, curled into a comma shape, feeling like someone had poured the contents of a car battery into my abdomen. When I awoke the next morning, the taste in my mouth was something like a Sorel boot marinated in high fructose raccoon feces.

So. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to eat better. No more Mike ‘N Ike/habanero bean-dip/soy milk dinners. And I should say that this impulse isn’t coming out of a desire to lose weight–I’m actually the most svelte I’ve been since high school cross-country right now, which is to say that I’m rocking the Macaulay Culkin-meets-Skeletor look. Rather, the Belfry Real Food Project is motivated by the following: (a) not killing animals and eating them, thereby superficially and somewhat lazily doing something about climate change and my own ethical arguments about animal representation in my thesis/comps, (b) spending less money on things like XXL Fishbomb Burritos while out on the town, and in the process saving dough (zing!) to buy things like Phil Elverum records and sweaty locks of Gabriele Anderson-Scheiss’ hair off of eBay, (c) avoid further trauma to my threadbare stomach lining, as seen in the above episode, and (d) most importantly, do something to lighten the glowering raincloud of my mood.

Yes indeed–let’s talk about sadness and running and food! I’m thrilled to tell you that my faithful copilot through the ennui and meaninglessness of life, The New York Times, recently reported that exercise doesn’t do squat for depression:

Dutch researchers studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twins Registry, as well as 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents, all 18 to 50 years old. They recorded survey data about the frequency and duration of exercise and used well-validated scales to uncover symptoms of depression and anxiety. The study was published Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry.

Studying twins allowed the researchers to distinguish between genetic and environmental effects, and they found that the association of exercise with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms could be explained genetically: people disinclined to exercise also tend to be depressed. One does not cause the other.

I’m tempted to look a little askance at these findings because they involves the Dutch. And, as anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with our good friend in Boulder, M.B. Postma, can attest, the Dutch, considered as a people, are suspiciously lanky, cantankerous, enjoy bad film, have goiter fetishes, and wear too-small, garishly colored underwear.

Ok, so running isn’t going to turn the U.S.S. Weltschmerz around. And neither is moping underneath an afghan in the basement, morosely selecting the most bedraggled-looking Cheez-its out of the bag, while listening to the entirety of Louder Than Bombs for the four hundredth time. So what will?

Foooooooooooooddddd! Real food, that is! Gastronomie! The sweet science! All hail Alton Brown! Silpat! Gentlemen, start your salad shooters! Procrastinating on grading papers by making tulip-shaped, toooottalllyyy great Parmiaggiano crisps! Thaasss right-we’re adding a kitchen onto the belfry! So once a fortnight or so, I’ll spotlight a recipe. They’re original. I will attempt to try to make a literary pun on each title. You should make them! They’re liable to be affordable, edible, and runner-friendly! (in that they won’t cause your stomach to break into an impromptu Cirque du Soleil show every time you’re out for a jog–see, for example, my post-supper 4-miler experience with ramen, coffee, and two nectarines last week.)

Here’s what we’ve got on the smorgasboard this week:

The Grain Gatsby: A Salad (since, you know… uh… radishes are aristocratic? And rice vinegar is disillusioned about hedonistic materialism?)
Salad
1 1/2 cups quinoa, cooked according to the package. Or not, if you’re feeling risky and also want to end up with bad-tasting quinoa.
1 cup green onion, white & green parts; finely chopped
1 cup thinly sliced bell peppers–yellow and orange ones work the best here
1/2 cup radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 cup tarragon leaves, fresh

Dressing
Whisk together the following really, really well:
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup pure sesame seed oil
1/4 cup soy sauce

Make dressing separately. Then, in a large salad bowl, toss everything together. I’ve also tried this with 2 cups of quinoa and cucumbers from the garden out back, and it was ok. It’s even better with wild rice instead of quinoa, but then you’re missing out on protein. Make extra dressing if you’d like, following the same proportions. Stick in fridge. Wait impatiently for an hour or so. Eat with too-large, novelty Thundercats spoon. This shit is the delish.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: To Mogul and back along Truckee River Path/West 4th Street. Nice feeling to run from one town to another. Harassed briefly by asinine, X-TERRA-champ cop who pulled over along 4th after sunset to glibly inform me that “20 miles is way too short to get a *real* workout in.”

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 21 miles/no, but I could barely roll myself out of bed this morning.

Total Mileage to Date: 523

Days remaining to Denver: 25

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.

______________________________
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 insouciance

Two minor points of contention regarding the La Sportiva Eldora Trail 10 kilometer race (results are here) that I survived last Saturday:

1) Dear hypercompetitive software engineer with shaved calves and bowling ball-sized GPS watch who contemptuously passed me at mile 5: I don’t care if you thought I “cut the course.” In fact, that you made such an allegation was, to say the least, surprising. That is, considering that you told me so just after you had come bursting out of a thick patch of spruce trees on the side of the trail. It was almost like you were lying in wait in the brambles, foaming at the mouth at the prospect of Chernobyl’ing my nervous system as you discharged yourself mightily from the bowels of the forest. Look, man-floozie, everyone totally cut the course. I don’t think the course itself even knew where the hell it was supposed to go. That is, except for race winner Payton Batliner, because his intensely vertical hair hides an orienteering microchip that keeps him from getting lost. (Full disclosure: Amber also told me that Payton can kill baby endangered species with his mind, and that it’s somehow responsible for why he’s fast.) And you certainly further evidenced your unsavory character when, after finishing, you kvetched at the race director’s tent with all the other Type-A assholes for the next thirty minutes about the course. Meanwhile, the avuncular guy from Avery Brewing Co., who also ran the race in a respective time and was wearing an intimidating singlet just like yours, was over at the finishing line cheering in half-dead, nigh-comatose middle-of-the-packers. Because he, unlike you, understands that the populist benefits and provocations of distance running are not dependent on the whimsy of the race clock.

2) I wish that they (and I have no idea who that pronoun refers to here) would standardize race t-shirts. The medium I requested makes me feel like I’m wearing an evening gown. And I’ve decided that “tech fit” is marketing code for “nipple-revealing.”

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Long run along trails and roads on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park with Father Succulent Plant.

Workout/whether or not I expunged my organs: 10 miles/nope, although my knees are currently making me feel like an aged, rheumatic basset hound trying to manage a long flight of stairs.

Total Mileage to Date: 287

Days remaining to Denver: 74

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 hip. At least, it uses your hips.

Hello masses. It is apparently hot enough out here this afternoon to cause the underbelly of our local garter snake to practically smoke as it skated across our back patio a few minutes ago.There’s no way in six kinds of heck that I’m lacing up my Tibetan monk-orange Pearl Izumis and going for my long run until things cool off from their current Mad Max-level of dermis-obliterating, postapocalyptic heat.

So I’m stuck being an Indoor Kid for the rest of the afternoon, a role that I’m more than comfortable with, as I spent a fair amount of my adolescence playing it with considerable aplomb. Pale-skinned! Limp-wristed! Mouth-breathing! Mountain Dew-pounding! Yes! Look out ASCII, text-based online RPG, because me and my three-tailed snow-leopard-riding, Level 60 female dark elf necromancer, wearing only a platinum bikini, is rolling into Blackmoor! Somebody put on the new Deftones album!

While my fervent troll-slaughtering days are (mostly) behind me, I still am struck by a foundational, apparently uncrossable binary that began to draw into focus as I gratefully left my tenure as a suburban teenager. Running–actually, exercise in any form–has longed been regarded as somewhat suspect by kool kids. As the dice-rolling and rubber cement-huffing nerds I knew in high school developed into the Jeff Mangum-Googling hipsters of today, prolonged physical activity has come to be seen as something that’s irritatingly mainstream. It also takes away from valuable pursuits, like drawing vegan brownie zines involving apron-wearing anthropomorphic badgers, and learning to play the theremin while drinking box wine. Exercise is, in fact, only permissible when construed through the ironic prism of twisted childrens’ games, such as playing capture-the-flag while drinking 40s. Or when riding bikes, particularly if you’re concerned enough about the size of your man-tackle to engage in the singularly idiotic business of riding a fixed-gear bicycle through urban areas sans helmet.

Listen, my doughy, Hella-listening friends with romulan bangs. Huddle in here. Get in close. Snub out that Camel. I’m going to tell you something.

It’s ok to run. Really. You might even like it. If you do it more than a couple times. To quote Dr. Steve Brule: “It’s good for your body. It’s good for your health.” You can even wear sweatbands and over-large sunglasses, just like normal! They’ll even be functional! But you don’t have to take my word for it–your favorite musicians have been using the metaphor of running as fodder for their tunes for years, from Belle & Sebastian’s twee-gloom of “The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” to Fugazi’s Long Distance Runner to the Nike-commissioned LCD Soundsystem track 45:33, ostensibly written as a soundtrack for jogging. You can even bring your dog!

Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Near sundown at Teller. Definitely cooler than it is right now.

Workout/whether or not I spewed: tempo

Total Mileage to Date: 248

Days remaining to Denver:83

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.