Sub-3 @ 53: "Damned asshole! Acts like he owns this garden!"

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

"Damned asshole! Acts like he owns this garden!"

[26 days before the marathon]

"Damned asshole! Acts like he owns this garden!"

In addition to a nearly-unbearable happiness (running for the first day in 13, realizing what a think blanket of depression I'd been suffocating under), oxygen deprivation (9000 feet above sea level, first full day in New Mexico), and a cannabis-induced otherworldiness , the forest can be a spooky place without crossing paths with someone who yells a phrase as they pass you in a voice tinged with tenseness, anger and eyes a little glazed over.

Spooky enough that the Joker's phrase - spoken just before he nonchalantly kills his next victim - came to mind...

"Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

If I was passing a psychopath then I had to follow the rules of etiquette gleaned from What To Do When Encountering A Psychopath in the Wilderness (Natural or Urban) [Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1984, NYC, briefly...

Don't ask about their mother/father/childhood/first sexual experience
Don't criticize their visual presentation
Don't laugh sarcastically
Avoid eye contact
Do move away quickly
Do - if the guilt feeling is right - toss out a non sequitur (e.g. "Have you noticed how everyone around here drives as if they're comatose?") - idea being to invoke a sense of camaraderie.

I couldn't think of anything cool to say so I kept going...but then became plagued with the question: If he's not a psychopath, what the f*ck was that all about?

After awhile I pieced together a plausible narrative: he was a former Jesuit monk, excommunicated, because he'd converted his love of God into love for Nature (smart move) and had an epiphany regarding the raw evil ensconced within the International Capitalist Conspiracy and therefore was ranting about the self-righteous fat landowner who'd chewed him out when he'd veered from the path onto private private...in this case "garden" being a poetic reference to the Earth belonging to everyone equally perhaps.

Today, just below the summit, we inverted the scene (with him on his way down). Silent this time - except for the vague tumble of music from his headphones.

Ah! Yesterday he was singing along with the lyrics!

But what freakin' song has those lyrics??! Given his delivery style I'm thinking something closer to to the grindcore band, Godflesh, than Godspeed You Black Emperor. Ideas?

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Cut to the Chase

In 1982 I hitchhiked from Champaign-Urbana - where I'd just finished architecture school - to Boston. The 2 previous summers I'd bicycled West (C-U to LA to Vancouver) then East (C-U to DC to Boston) and had settled back into running 20-50 miles/week. I'd tried my first marathon in 1978 in Chicago: the race kicked off at 11:30 on July 5 in 90 degree jungle heat and 4 runners were dead by the mid-afternoon which is when I finished - crumpled from the heat but with a respectable first time of 3:34.

I remember 3 things about the event. The first was the final ride into Boston with 3 Navy guys in a Mustang, going 100 miles/hr. The second - the most exhilarating - was spotting my lover, Susan, at the halfway mark and finding out I was running at a pace faster than that of a 3-hr marathon. The third was those fucking hills - Heartbreak Hill - from mile 17-21. I walked for a short stretch at the 23rd or 24th mile, and that's what snatched away the prize: I came in at 3:02.

Twenty years later (and still without a sub-3), I came across the same finish line and collapsed, and had my one and only experience being carted off in a wheelchair. In a theme I've followed in all of the 25-or-so marathons since 1978, I ran this one for someone close: my mother. She'd died suddenly at the too-young age of 65 the year before. It may have been that the difficulty of the race reflected the difficulty of the relationship we had, but the searing pain that kicked in after the second mile from plantar faciitis may have been the real culprit.

p a i n

I started running because before the 3rd stepfather drove his car off a bridge 2 weeks before he and mom were supposed to marry, flew through the windshield, and emerged without a cut or bruise but with a snapped neck, damaged spinal cord and a strong propensity for the kind of bitterness that turned him into a mean-spirited, judgmental, ultra-conservative rat bastard, he had the wherewithal to suggest I do what he'd been doing for years to bitch slap the asthma i'd had since age 4 into oblivion: run. So one Spring day in 1975 - shortly after he checked into the Rehab center in Peoria, I started wheezing and gasping my way into The Cure. Within months the asthma was gone and I found something that was extreme enough, intense enough and demanding enough to get its hooks into my neurotic, Ayn Rand-warped brain. I've been running ever since.

Cut to July, 2011: my new guru - a ferociously observant and gorgeous PT on the island of Maui - and I have a Skype session 11 time zones apart. Her powers of observation - and her insistence I strip on our first "date" (so she says, she can observe musculature as I walk/run back and forth across the room - even though I'm onto her lecherous vibe as quickly as she's onto my off-kilter gait) earn me her quick respect, as does the 90-minute/day routine she works up for me. 3 months later I leave my 30-year old nephew in the dust in Chinatown at the 18th mile of the Chicago Marathon and cruise across the finish in 3:26 which - adjusted for age - is more or less the equivalent of a 3-hour marathon for a younger man.

And that takes us up to now: I'm clocking 6-minute miles on the treadmill, and can run 4 miles in a row at a 6:53 min/mile pace. All I need to do is string another 22 of them onto that train and that sub-3 I've been chasing for 34 years is mine. Which it will be - barring unforeseen circumstances like a broken leg or a piano falling on my head - on October 21 of this year, in Amsterdam. I'll be chased by that same nephew, Freeman, and my older sister, Ann, running her first marathon at the tender age of 56. Be there.