songs of experience

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my “elite” running days, but while I was re-reading The Crack-up after my search, I came across a date I’d scribbled in the right-hand margin, “Feb.18, 1986,” so I immediately traveled back twenty years in my memory …

What was going on in my life in 1986? Who was I? I was just 2 years out of school, trying to “make it” as a professional runner outside of the the structure and support (what I call the “college cocoon”) that is NCAA competition. I was living in a house full of runners that only cost me $149.00 a month rent but, oddly, none of us trained together. We all had separate work and running schedules that made for an eerie, specterous existence - souls floating in and out of The Ranch at odd hours of the day and night to run, and eat, and shower, and then disappear behind closed doors. There were a few memorable communal moments - like the time we lost power in a snow storm and were forced to huddle together around the light and warmth of a fireplace in the living room. I don’t recall what all we talked about but I can still see their faces over the glow of candles - smiling, joking, debating … being together. When the power returned, we all snuck back to our rooms, our caves, our singular lives.

My own schedule consisted of sleeping in too late, lingering too long over a second cup of coffee, and then rushing out to get my “morning run” in before noon. After lunch, I would try to read or work on my masters’ thesis (ha) but I was often way too jittery to sit still so I would do mindless chores around the empty house or make phone calls to other runners I’d met on the road racing circuit - for inspiration? connection? Finally, after I’d killed enough time, I would get ready for my second run of the day. I had all these bizarre rituals to try to psyche myself up. I’d take a shower before running (a “spritz-off” I called it) and then drink more coffee - at a coffee shop - while reading some running magazine to see how other runners made it, then I’d play some U-2 music in the car on the way to the track, then I’d run an absurdly fast warm-up before launching into full-on anaerobic intervals that were like a bunch of little races in a half hour. Once, a fellow “elite” did a set of 12 X 400 with me and commented, “Why haven’t you run faster than 9:06 (for 3k)?” Because, as they say, I was leaving it all on the practice track.

My whole life was running in circles. I needed, as Fitzgerald said in the section where I wrote in the margin, “a clean break.”

“This lead me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jail-break when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be fored back to the old one. The famous “Escape” or “run away from it all” is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the south seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for years?”

My clean break was helped along by an injury - my one and only injury in 25 years of running. I eventually moved out of the running ranch and left that empty shell of being just-a-runner. I know others have no problem adjusting to the running bum lifestyle but, like Fitzgerald, I am a midwesterner, raised with an American work ethic and a strong moral impetus to “do something important with my life.” Running in circles - literally (or should I say “running in ovals”?) - just wasn’t cutting it. I needed to find the reason WHY I should run.

Like Oblio, I needed to find my point.