Songs of Experience

All this chatter about relays has me remembering a great “running poem” by Ron Rash. Does anyone know who this guy is? What I know about him is that he nearly stopped time in this poem.

Running the Mile Relay,
by Ron Rash

Ours was an easy courage.
none of us college prep,
we did time in Crest High’s
vocational wing,

learning nothing
that would save us
from trailer parks and mill work,
of even a winding-down war.

So we ran against time,
lived for stolen seconds,
finding our measure
brassed in trophy cases.

Tight as the baton,
we gripped our certain knowledge:
this running in circles meant
more than anything coming.

WB Yeats, of course!

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I don’ t know why I’d never read her before, but this week I checked Joan Didion’s Sloughing Toward Bethlehem out of the library. Her writing reminds me of Anne Morrow Lindberg’s but a lot hipper. As I read around in the section called personals I came across a passage which could serve as a definition for what is the purpose of a blog?

It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (“You’re the least important person in the roomand don’t forget it,” Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.
And so we do. But our notebooks [or our blogs!] give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

That is the definition of a blog entry:
” … bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscrimintate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

My husband and I might co-author a book on running … a sort-of insiders guide … and I was thinking on my run today of all the “inside” things I do and say about running that maybe no one else does.

Does anyone else refer to the “cheater peel” when you take off an article of clothing for the last interval (ostensibly, to run faster)?
Does anyone else call intervals that descend (i.e. mile, 1,200m, 800m, 400m) “easy ladders”?
Does everyone run with a stick – swirling in a circular motion out in front of you- if you’re running on trails? (otherwise, you eat spider webs)
Does everyone know to yell “TRACK!” if you are coming up on someone in lane one – so they’ll move over? I did this once to some guy who was wearing a walkman that I couldn’t see. I screamed, “TRACK TRACK TRACK!” and when I ran by him, in lane two, he said, “Why are you yelling at me?” Apparently, he didn’t know the rule.
Does anyone else dry their wet shoes by placing them on the floor in front of the refridgerator door over night?
Does anyone else use the term “junk miles” when you are adding on slow minutes after work-outs to pad your weekly mileage?
Does anyone know the difference between a track geek and a running geek?
Does anyone know the secret shoe-tying technique to keep you from getting tendonitis on the top of your foot (and, if you are narrow-footed, to keep the shoe from slipping)?
How many ways can you say you are hurting? Rigging, Dying, Bonking, Hitting the wall, Running out of gas, Thrashed, Crushed, Wrecked, Shattered, Hammered, I-feel-li-shi (said as one word, in one breath) … and my personal favorite, “torn and frayed” (a la Mick Jagger).
Does anyone know the trick to keep from having to explain a bad race? As soon as someone asks, “How’d you do?” simply say, “Fine – how was your race?” and you’re off the hook; they will never ask you another thing about your race b/c everyone prefers to talk about him/herself.
Does anyone else put ice (or ice water) on the back of your neck to cool off quickly?
Does anyone else shower with baby wipes or change into dry clothes at stop lights?
Does anyone else run with a petzel headlamp at night in the winter?

And the beat goes on …

Every season I choose a theme for seejanerun and this fall I have selected “Nature” as my theme because of our goal race …. a 10-mile trail race in Charlottesville, VA … and because this is our fourth year of putting on The Pumpkin Trail Run in Chapel Hill. Our mission for this race has always been to raise awareness of the need to preserve green-space for the running, walking, biking [moving through space] community. Specifically, we have been lobbying for UNC to save/set aside a chunk of land in the 1,000 acre-wood, known to us as The University Woodlands (re-named Carolina North), for running trails. This morning in my coffee-read time, I came across a wonderful passage by Wendell Berry that sums up WHY we should respect our common ground:

�If the human and natural communities are given no standing in the computations, then the large farm or other large enterprise [i.e. UNC, Wal-Mart] acts as a siphon to drain economic and other values out of the locality into the “gross national product.� This happens because its technology functions on behalf of the national economy, not the local economy.

The only preventive and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another and their place, over the reward offered them by outside investors. The local community must understand itself finally as a community of interest – a common dependence on a common life and a common ground [our beloved trails]. And because a community is, by definition, placed, its success cannot be divided from the success of its place, its natural setting and surroundings: its soils, forests, grasslands, plants and animals, water, light, and air. The two economies, the natural and the human, support each other; each other’s hope of a durable and a livable life.�

by, Wendell Berry

“Does Community Have a Value?
1986

I just read an interesting paragraph by Jonathan Franzen in a short story called My Bird Problem (from Aug 8 & 15, 2005 New Yorker magazine).

“I’d been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself. To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird” (or, ways of being stuck in me-time).

I just got off the phone with my sister. I was telling her how much I was craving some “me” time after having been a stay-at-home mom all these years (we can’t even go to the potty alone!) and my childless, unmarried sister groaned, “Oh, God, all I’ve had is me time my whole life!” Yes, yes, the grass is always greener … but her comment got me to thinking about the balance we all need in our lives. I think we need equal parts of me, he/she, we, and Thee time.

me time: This is that time – outside of work – where we get to do what we want, alone. It could be anything from reading at a coffee shop to kayaking at sunrise to shape-note singing (one of my favorite “me time” treats). Unfortunately, our consumer-oriented culture has turned me time into a lifetime pursuit because, let’s face it, single people buy more stuff.

he/she time: This is the time we focus on one person (one-on-one time) with a lover or spouse or friend. It’s a bit like me time X 2 – also a prime target for advertisers (week-end getaways for two, fancy restaurants, two-seater sports cars, etc). It takes effort and scheduling to keep the one-on-one communication going, so its easy to see why marriages and friendships fail if one party is unaware of the need for he/she time in the balance of life we’re all trying to reach.

we time: This could be family time or community time. All the books say familes should spend at least one meal a day together to stay connected. This is a we-time philosophy. Making a dash through Wendy’s drive-through and chatting with your children in the rearview window in between cell phonecalls doesn’t count! At the end of a long summer of solo mileage (or over winter break), I have always looked so forward to returning to my running team (community we-time). It is no different for me today, at age 43, as I am getting ready to start-up another season of seejanerun with my running sisters.

Thee time: Okay, here’s the one that I hesitate to mention b/c it is really un-PC to talk about one’s faith, but I must have Thee-time/ God-time in my life to feel like a whole person. I imagine our society dismisses this need because going to church or temple or the mosque doesn’t translate into big bucks for big business (well, aside from the “business” of religion, but that’s not another blog entry). Luckily for me, running alone serves as me-time and Thee-time. Every so often (oddly enough, on Sundays) you might catch me running along the cross-country course at sunset with both arms raised up to heaven. Thank-you, God.

Its been a while since I’ve written. I was out visitng my daughters who live with their dad in Columbia, Missouri over the summer. While there, my ex asked me if I wouldn’t mind running with one of his former Mizzou colleagues who was in town overnight. “Sure, ” I said, “How fast is he?” Turns out he was plenty fast for old and slowing me and we hit the MKT trail at a brisk pace that never let up – nor did the conversation. Now, remember, I had never met this guy before in my life … and I don’t even know his last name or where he comes from … but for 50 straight minutes we talked about his girlfriend, my marriages, his moving to England, my dream of going back to grad. school, his future book on Sports films, my favorite jock movie [National Velvet ... "a girl and her horse?" Yes, but so much more. "Like what? How lovely Elizabeth Taylor's hair looks?" "You obviously haven't seen the movie..." which he hadn't, he admitted, only the pitiful modern version called, "International Velvet"], and then we quickly covered my seejanerunners, his brother, my daughers, his PR’s, my lack thereof, our both needing to run for it’s medicinal effect [to stay off of Zoloft, God- willing], our current running goals. “Ever run Hood-to-Coast?” Three times. Another good story. And another and so on and so on until 50 minutes had flown by.

THIS is the thing I love about running. Ours is a community of familiar strangers. Not unlike the “stranger phenomenon” that occurs on airplanes – where you talk and talk on a 6-hour flight to Gatwick, and then never see the person again – Mark and I ran along staring straight ahead and, because we didn’t have to look each other in the eye the way truly intimate people must, we were able to open up and be intimate or “familiar” in that sacred running space.

When I got back to my ex’s house, he said, “How was the run?”
“It was awesome; we talked about everything!” I gushed.
“Yeah, Mark’s a bit of a running geek.”

As my current husband would say, “Aren’t we all.”