Running is having reservations

Dear Land ‘O Lakes Butter,

My parents go to Santa Fe almost every year. They drive, stopping for lunch in Pueblo on the way, and spend the weekend buying all kinds of stuff. Chili pepper Christmas lights. Ristras. Santos. Navajo rugs with different earth tones mashing up against one another with their polygonal sawteeth. A ladder built from split cords of poplar wood, bound together with plastic animal gut and sinew. Spindly squash gourd earrings, fashioned together with obsidian. Pastel colors. Zig-zag patterns. Dreamcatchers to keep the incubi at bay. Some nights at home, they page through a guide they got off the Internet on Hopi kachina dolls. They buy the ones that interest them and get them Fedex’d overnight and spend thirty minutes looking at them when they finally arrive. Then they arrange them on the windowsill in dramatic poses. Fighting brave under fluorescent track lighting. Angwusnasomtaka next to runner up golf trophy. Crow Mother next to family heirloom Bavarian beer stein. Dancing Bear (with authenticity certificate signed by the artist) juxtaposed with a book on IRA mutual fund options. Jean Baudrilliard could probably write a whole book about that windowsill.

One year on the way down to Arizona for a backpacking trip, my dad and I stayed in a Motel 8 on the Navajo Reservation, in Kayenta. I remember a lot of driving. Some of the Navajos walk. You’ll be thirty miles out from the nearest town on a two-lane road, surrounded by juniper and sage and spindly cattle fences and wild moonscaped terraces of crimson dirt and you’ll see a Navajo just out there walking. On the shoulder. It’s usually the old guys and elderly women, in mesh hats and flannel, or bulky, wool skirts. When we got into town, Kayenta was full of sandblasted Quonset huts, gutted F-150s lying like beached mechanical whales in the arid wastes of their front lawns. It was Easter Sunday and the restaurant downstairs in the lobby was serving a special holiday menu. They served a lamb chop so dry it could’ve doubled as a joke on the BBC, paired with some congealed mint chutney and a pile of wilted endives. My dad ate it all. Then spent most of the night in the can, keeping me up with diarrhetic moaning.

(pictured: Louis Tewanima)

One time, when I went to an advanced placement engineering camp at a local university during high school, I roomed with a Shoshoni guy, about five ten, sixteen years old. He spent a lot of time reading Mad. A bunch of Shoshonis were on scholarship at the camp, learning how to mechanically dissect water timers. I don’t remember the guy’s name. Isn’t that horrible? I think it was something like Ivan. I’ll go ahead and call him Ivan, since I doubt he’ll read this. Anyway, one hot evening, Ivan took a thick bundle of dried sage from his bag and hung it in the doorway of our dorm room with extreme care. Sitting at my desk, unable to figure out how to apply a quadratic equation to an especially nasty geometry problem, I swore. Ivan looked at me.
“Apologize to the sage,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You just swore in front of the sage smudge. Apologize.”
“To a plant?”
“Yeah.”
“Apologize to a plant?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t.
And I forgot about it until last Christmas, in front of a painting by Sanford R. Gifford or Bierstadt at the Gilcrease  in Tulsa.

Regards,

-C. Turner

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Days streaked: 21

Total Miles: 79.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Dodos, Born Ruffians, and 764-HERO

Running is gratitude

I realize that I’ve done precious little analysis of the Olympics over the past couple weeks. And now that they’re over, I feel a bit like I’m re-entering a dark, all-too-familiar tunnel. For me, the Summer Olympiad is a bit like a trip to Disneyworld: it’s loud, sometimes garish, triumphant, expensive, there’s too much to pay attention in just one day, justifiably self-important, and it carries an EPCOT-like sheen of utopian multiculturalism. And I love it. Much like Disneyworld, too, now that the Games are over (thanks, Jimmy Page!), I’ve begun the long trek back to my metaphorical Buick Roadmaster station wagon with wood paneling sides, a night march under buzzing halogen lights to the farthest reaches of a rancid-smelling parking lot, with enfants terribles in tow.

It’s sad. The Olympics are the only time that distance runners get an audience of millions, who may or may not be enthusiastic about what they’re watching, but are forced to watch it anyway thanks to the programming tyranny of NBC primetime scheduling (see also: swimming, gymnastics, ice skating, beach volleyball, Bob Costas’ face, which grew increasingly haggard and melty over the course of two weeks of nonstop coverage).

Long track events and the marathon at the Olympics, for me, are endlessly interesting because they combine aesthetic pleasure with technical prowess–especially when it comes to the kind of running form that wastes absolutely no superfluous energy. I don’t think I noticed Tsegay Kebede’s upper body moving out of rhythm once the entire race. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. As I mentioned before, I think about elite runners a lot. Fantasizing. Enough to start trembling on my mattress each night as I consider the prospect of snorting lines of Accelerade powder out of Paula Radcliffe’s armpits.

But what struck me most from Beijing was the evocative contrast–and I may be reaching here–between Usain Bolt and Sammy Wanjiru at the tail ends of their races.

Bolt did something roughly akin to this upon setting a new world record in the 200m:

And then we, the world, watched as Bolt spent approximately twenty minutes cavorting playfully about on the track, flexing, beaming, practically diving into the crowd, tossing up two index fingers, kissing the track, and, at times, seeming like a total jackass. Jens, my eternally skeptical German roommate, who is convinced the Bolt dopes, kept dourly intoning, “That guy’s on drugs.”

And then there was Sammy Wanjiru’s exhausted, but beatific smile as he entered the Bird’s Nest after 26 miles of scorching pavement, muggy pollution, and being hounded by TV motorcycle cameramen. He crossed the line, crossed himself a couple of times, and tactfully, quietly took a victory lap with Kenya’s flag to celebrate the country’s first, well-deserved gold medal in the Men’s Marathon.

Maybe it’s just a discrepancy in personality. And you could probably say something here, too, about my own subjectivity, which tends to look on most kinds of showboating as somewhat vulgar and narcissistic. I guess the question that these photos demand is roughly something like, “How should one act after winning a race?” I suppose you could say, “Anyway you want–you’re the one who just won the damn thing.”

But it’s difficult not to take Winjiru’s finish as somewhat emblematic of the psychology of distance running, in which a competitive edge is just as critical to success, but the grueling nature of the events somehow cracks open the thick shell of ego at the finish line and lays it bare, revealing its bones to be ghostly and untenable. So what one feels at the end of the race is profound gratitude. Gratitude for demanding coaches, understanding family members, the resilience of your body that is very lucky to have survived the countless miles of preparation leading up to the event without injury, and for the gift to have scrawny, svelte legs that can perform miracles.

This is not to say that Wanjiru doesn’t have the same iron-cored, Nietzscheian Will to Power that Bolt obviously does, or that Bolt doesn’t work as hard at what he does as Wanjiru. Sammy, after all, is gunning for the Marathon World Record next (Gebrselassie’s 2:04.26) and said he was going to “win the Marathon” going into the race. And I don’t want to set up a false sprinting/distance running dichotomy here, as these two athletes’ respective finishes are by no means representative of their sports as a whole.

But I do think that you’d never see this in an Olympic 400 meter pumpfest:

Bikila, Rome, 1960

or this:

Akhwari, 1968, Mexico City

and that’s why I’ll tune out track semifinals to go nuke a burrito or cut brownish, matted clumps of hair off of my cat, but I’ll ne’er miss a minute of the Olympic marathon.

Oh, and just to keep my readership’s rudder on course, here are some of the screeds I’m working on for upcoming weeks:
*Running is learning to become a postindustrial Vasco de Gama
*Running is learning to properly use a food processor without taking a trip to the E.R. afterward
*and an entry (a long time coming) wherein I mercilessly dismantle the kind of pithy running quotes found on Successories prints in dentists’ offices, high school cross-country team t-shirts, and grandma runner websites infested with these kinds of animated .gifs:

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: 16 miles through purplish rabbitbrush as the sun faded on Steamboat Ditch.

Workout/whether or not I vomir‘ed: long. And I actually did puke when I got back to the house, but it was one of those fake, false alarm heaves. I blame it on the free vanilla Clif Shot I was test-driving during the run, which felt suspiciously like how I’d imagine a pureed ox tongue would feel as it slid down my throat. Next week I think I’ll stick to either PB&J or see if I can purloin a Hammer Gel from somebody in the English dept., which is positively brimming with runners.

Total Mileage to Date: 390

Days remaining to Denver: 53

Running is collected pensées: a review of the Georgetown to Idaho Springs Half Marathon, 8/9/08

Contrary to the colloquialism that inevitably follows any mention of the race in certain Colorado running/social circles, the Georgetown to Idaho Springs Half Marathon is not, in fact, the “slacker’s half marathon.” Be tricked not, wise running coyote children!

(before I go on, results are available here)

It is true that the course’s net elevation loss over its length is roughly 1,000 feet (it roughly follows Clear Creek all the way from Georgetown’s lofty aerie at 8,500 down to Idaho Springs at 7,500). While driving, bleary-eyed, up I-70 to the race at 5:30 in the morning, I couldn’t help but think the race was going to be a bit of a cakewalk in sneakers. The running equivalent to spending a Saturday morning with my butt osmosing into a Barcalounger, downing mimosas and perusing the Times, with Ravi Shankar ragas dripping from the speakers while assorted woodland creatures wax and shammy my car outside in the drive. So I was a little surprised when I discovered hills that went up on the course. And there were a lot of them. Given, the majority of the race is on a gentle downgrade. But there are enough hills–mostly where the I-70 frontage road veers up to meet the highway–to make the course much harder than I thought it’d be.

That said, I also set a PR and got tons of free foodstuffs at the end of the race, so I’m not going to kvetch. Although, now having consumed approximately 14 free containers of Joint Juice (it’s the booth lady’s fault for suggesting that I should “take as much as you want!”), I’ve decided that I’m through putting shit in my body that tastes vaguely like chalk.

Overall, the half marathon was expertly conducted, measured, supported, started, and advertised. Mile splits were well-marked. The chip timing worked with precision and accuracy. There were ample aid stations with water and virulently blue Powerade, crewed by extremely (perhaps offsettingly) enthusiastic members of the Clear Creek School District, who the race benefits every year. There were flotillas of surprisingly hygienic johns at the start and finish, although the wait time for them was longer than anticipated at Georgetown. The weather was cool and sunny throughout the race–a welcome change from an overbaked Front Range. The race is almost entirely on pavement, with a nice dirt road section for a couple miles in Downieville, about halfway through the race, to stave off exploding knees. The first few miles were especially pleasant, as the sun had yet to rise into the canyon and the vermilion-cheeked good people of Georgetown came out en masse to watch the race and cheer.

The awards were some of the coolest race schwag I’ve seen–big ups to the race organizers for paying homage to Colorado’s mining history by using gold pans instead of plaques.

The parking situation, as the race website took great care to mention, is more than a little squirrelly. I had a friend drop me off in Georgetown and pick me up in Idaho Springs. If you can manage to press gang a friend or family member to do the same and feign interest in your running career, I’d highly recommend doing the same. Otherwise, you’re going to have to either: a) get up ludicrously early, park in Idaho Springs, and take a shuttle bus up to the start surrounded by cranky endurance athletes with bladders about to reach critical mass; or b) park in Georgetown and hitch/bike/walk/run/whatever the 13.1 miles back up there after the race. Good luck with that.

I have but a few minor, totally subjective gripes that could be addressed in next year’s race. Trifles and opinionated murmers, really, if the organizers feel like catering to this particular runner’s tastes:

1) If I have to listen to more egregiously optimistic, White People-pleasing, adult alternative music before, during, or after a running race in Colorado, I’ma flip out and tip over an aid station table onto a bunch of middle schoolers. Friends don’t let friends listen to KBCO. This means no Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band, and Yello’s “Oh Yeah.” The lattermost of which I cannot even *believe* was the last song I listened to before I started the race. If they played something like this instead, I’d probably go sub-5:15:

and my friend Liz would probably start doing her patented pointed-fingers-out-from-the-hips-while-swiveling dance at the startline. Which would make every runner’s day a little brighter. That’s a promise.
2) Comic sans, shadowboxes, and clip art, when combined, do not make for a particularly aesthetically groundbreaking race t-shirt.
3) O’Douls? Seriously? The greatest part about running races is that they sociologically legitimate a 10:30 AM beer buzz. And t he fact that race expo’s beer tent dishes out a macrobrewed, corn-based non-alcoholic beer produced by an out-of-state brewer is bewildering, considering that Colorado is the halcyon land of microbrewed wünderbiers, from Avery to Twisted Pine to New Belgium to Flying Dog. Many of whom sponsor races.

Other than this small litany of complaints, the race was superb and I’ll definitely hoof it again next year. Great jorrrrb!

(cross-posted from RunColo–thanks a million, once again, to Simon. I owe you a long run and a beer when I’m back in the Mile High City.)

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In other news, I’ve been lighting hosts of votives and doing the Pepper Seed every thirty minutes to send massive doses of good luck to Fam and JBarr, both running the Steeplechase finals in Beijing. You should too. Wish them luck, that is. (Unless you’re rapido enough to compete, in which case I don’t understand why you’re reading the Belfry instead of getting warmed up.) Go’merica!

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: 5 mile loop from the Mordhaus down through UNR’s campus to the Quaker house and back. Lonesome night run, punctuated only by the unexpected sight of a bunch of fire fighters playing shirtless hoops at 10:00 PM out in front of the station on Ralston. And yes, you’re more than welcome to use that image in your steamy romance novel.

Workout/whether or not I rolfed: Still readjusting to running in Reno’s climate, so it was a pokey sort of crawl last night. No stomach issues, but I’ve somehow developed a sore throat over the past couple days. Don’t think it’s any kind of disease–just the climate. The high desert isn’t anywhere as luxurious and accommodating as how Sting makes it out to be:

How to get there if you’re in Reno: start at the top of Rancho San Rafael regional park (just off of Coleman). Run south on Coleman to 12th and follow the neighborhoods east to UNR and across campus. Watch out for potholes and guys in bathrobes hosing down their driveways late in the evening.

Total Mileage to Date: 318

Days remaining to Denver: 62

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 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?