Category: Exertion

March 16, 2003 /

There are two reasons I usually need to go running. One, the need for exercise and endorphins and exuberance, has been with me for most of spring term. It’s a good thing, and it’s something I know enough not to indulge when I’ve only had four hours of sleep (as I did for most of this past week).

Earlier tonight I felt the other need, the bad old kind, the fall term kind. It’s not as nice and it’s not rewarding. It is, as it took me a while to realize, a form of self-punishment.

My friends are hurting right now and I don’t know how to fix them. I want to be able to fix anything, but these are human problems with unknown quantities and there’s no easy solution. I know that. But.

This weekend I won one argument: I managed to convince someone that what happened fall term, what made me need to go running, wasn’t her fault. I’m glad of that. I lost another argument: I wanted to visit someone who wouldn’t see me, not because she doesn’t want to, but because she needs time for herself. I don’t mind losing in itself, but I still wish I could talk to her.

I can’t make the cause for the second person’s time alone go away; I can’t fix what’s making the first person want to blame herself; I can’t fix people who are sick and tired, I can’t fix people with misplaced affections, I can’t do much of anything except give of my time.

One of the most important things I learned during my internship, though, is that time isn’t free. My time isn’t free. There’s only so much of it, and I’m more conscious than ever of the fact that I can’t run on four-hour nights indefinitely.

This entry isn’t a question, and it’s not a cry for help. It’s just a monologue. I know people will read this and try to think of ways to help, and that’s beautiful: I hope you know I appreciate it. But I don’t need help yet. I just need to figure out a way to proportion the time I give–to figure out how much is mine to give, and how much is already bought.

That’s one problem I will figure out, I believe. I believe.

January 25, 2003 /

This morning I got up at 6:30 and, after a little wait, drove to Lexington, where I stripped down to my swimsuit and a 10th Planet t-shirt, then jumped in an outdoor pool.

I yelled on the way in, and then got out, because it was very cold. There were still pieces of ice floating in it. I felt like I was getting out pretty quickly, but on the version in my aunt’s camcorder, I’m moving roughly as fast as you’d expect someone to move when his lower spinal functions have just shut down.

My uncle Cliff, meanwhile, moved like a man possessed. By speed. This is most likely because he went in with Cole and Clint, my eight- and nine-year-old (I think) cousins, and had getting them out of the water as his chief concern. He used to play football, and can still put an impressive spiral on a smallish human being.

It was wonderful. Also, painful. I wish I had another year at college now, just so I could make all my friends go back with me next time.

November 2, 2002 /

I think that as of this week I have reached Critical Busy Mass. I’m scraping together the stuff towork at the family biz for my winter internship, to take the GRE (I’m so poor it’s free!), and of course figure out if and where I want to do the grad school thing. And that’s the long-term stuff. There’s also still the play, and the other play, and the job, and the other job, and I just remembered I have to run (literally) down to the flower shop to pick up a corsage. Yow!

I’ve pretty much had to quit running, thanks to the frigid weather (I have no cold-running gear) and the fact that what used to be my afternoon time slot is now usually filled with other stuff. I’m keeping the weight off with sheer nervous energy, I think, but I miss it. The exercise, that is, not the weight. It’s too bad Halo doesn’t burn calories.

Today: Corsage! Build set! Visit Emily R from Richmond! Hang out / eat / dance with Audrey! It’s a mad house.

In the middle of the street.

October 11, 2002 /

Things I Hate About Running

  • The way I look afterwards.
  • Fucking gnats.
  • My legs hurt all the time. It’s my own fault, obviously, for running five days a week. I’m building new muscle, too, which is kind of a novelty, but I think a lot of it is the fact that I’m running on concrete instead of grass. I wish there were something I could do about that. I am alone in my circle of acquaintances in that I’ve had good knees for most of my life, and I’d rather not lose them now.
  • Uphills.
  • Forgetting my towel for my shower afterwards. I’ve done it so frequently now that I finally taped a sign to the bathroom door to remind me. Running about naked is all well and good, but who wants to drip all over the linoleum?

Things I Love About Running

  • The dachshunds in somebody’s back yard at my end-of-West Lexington turnaround. They’re always very excited and concerned to see me, even though I’ve been coming by almost daily for a month.They remind me of our dachshund, Fritzi, who died a couple years ago and who had one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen.
  • Downhills. The dip between St. Mildreds and Fifth Street is awful on the way up, but on the way down coming back it’s like an obstacle course–a lot of head-level tree limbs and street signs to tap. Also, I’m one of a select group of people the world over who really understand how to run downhill, so I can really cut loose (the secret is to go ahead and start falling, and trust your legs to catch up).
  • Showers afterwards, which I like to start pretty hot and end icy. I feel like I’m running on auto a lot lately, so the shock of awareness that comes with the cold water is a rare and beautiful thing.
  • And speaking of cold water: running in the rain. I got to do that yesterday, and it ranks high on the list of Best Things There Is. It was hard rain, too, like of significantly higher humidity than your average pond. My clothes haven’t dried yet.

    Since yesterday I’ve been trying to quantify exactly what it is about running in the rain that’s so great, and I’ve yet to come up with anything concrete. It’s a certain I don’t know what.

    Partly it’s that you stay cool and your mouth doesn’t dry out, and partly it’s the feeling that you’re fighting something other than gravity and yourself, and partly it’s just the sense of abandon you get from realizing that it doesn’t matter how wet you are because you’re just going to get wetter. Maybe it’s the ozone. Or maybe it’s just that you get to look at the torrents of water and the mud and the clouds, and think “what kind of maniac would be out in this weather?” and then think “oh, yeah, me.”

Things I Love AND Hate About Running

  • Schrodinger Point. There’s a day, about every couple weeks or so, when I realize I’ve just jogged almost my entire route without taking a break. It’s cool because, well, it means I’m stronger and faster and in better shape than I have been in a while. It’s simultaneously totally uncool, because it means I’m going to have to run longer or faster my next time out. Thus Schrodinger Point: it exists in both states at the same time! (This isn’t technically what Schrodinger was describing, but in this case accuracy is discarded in favor of sounding cool.)

Tonight: Elvis Costello!

with all the will in the world
diving for dear life

September 1, 2002 /

So I’m back online. If I haven’t gotten to your email, I will soon.

Running is the art of deliberately hurting yourself a little more than you really want to be hurt. I went for a run today, a physical self-flagellation in lieu of a mental one. It started raining about half a mile in, big thick drops. It still wasn’t enough.

April 28, 2002 /

Yesterday morning, my uncle John got up at some ridiculous hour and ran fifty kilometers. Fifty kilometers. Then he kept walking until he had done fifty miles. Then he went home, had something to eat and went to an unusual retrospective of his work.

Uncle John makes custom birthday cards, and has done so since he was a teenager. A few weeks ago, my aunt Dana started sending letters to friends and family asking to borrow any cards we might have saved. Of course, everybody had saved everything–you don’t get a personal work of art in the mail and throw it away when you’re done.

They got enough cards to fill four rooms full of shelves (and they had leftovers). During the day it was an exhibition for clients; that night, when I got there, it was food and a jazz band and my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party.

It was one of the best gallery shows I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of work and creativity and originality was humbling and inspiring and it still stuns me a little to think that I own at least a dozen of those original pieces myself.

I think it was my tenth birthday when I got the foldout card. It was a huge battle scene my uncle had drawn and then left half-empty, inviting me to fill in the rest. It was perfect. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I could probably redraw it from memory.

I was a weird little kid, and if I’d been born to different parents I probably would have been a Ritalin poster child.The only things that could get me to sit still for ten minutes were a big fat fantasy book or a chance to draw with my uncle. I didn’t quite get all the genes that give him his talent, or maybe his dedication–he did better stuff at fifteen than I can hope for now–but everything I love about sequential art comes from trading panels with him on “Captain Zero” and “The Adventures of Petey.” That this site exists as more than a blog is due to him.

A dozen cards, a million comic strips. Happy birthday, Uncle John, and thanks for all my presents.

January 17, 2002 /

I quit running around finals last term, and I just got back from my first attempt at it since then. It’s been at least a month, and it shows, and the cold air is unkind to my raspy secondhand lungs–but I feel better, and I haven’t slipped as much as I thought. Then again, I also have new shoes, so that could be part of it.

Part of KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act, which went into effect around seventh grade for me) meant that we wrote a lot more in school. I think that’s a good thing. What’s stupid about it, though, is that we were doing the work for nothing. As we got older we started to realize it. I have no doubt that the low scores for our junior KIRIS tests were due not to a lack of ability, but to a lack of caring.

My tracery of KERA results:

  • Students began to write more.
  • Because this writing was intended to judge teacher ability levels, teachers made students spend time on these pieces instead of regular course work. At the same time, students were not graded for said pieces because they were portfolio-bound. This had two direct results.
    1. Students were not taught as much useful material.
    2. Students were taught that it was more important to write more than to write well.
  • Students did a great deal of work for which they were not held accountable. They got a wishy-washy level like “apprentice” or “distinguished” for it, but they couldn’t put it on a college application.
  • Because it was stressed that students have a wide variety of work available for portfolio assembly, no piece could be thrown away–which, as most teachers translated, meant no criticism.

And that’s what really gets to me about the whole damn thing. We as a generation have not been taught to separate critiques of work from personal criticism, a desperately important distinction that most of us are forced to learn on our own. I think it hurts a lot of people when they get to college, and it’s not their fault.

October 23, 2001 /

Until my lungs feel ticklish like I’m breathing water, until my teeth hurt because they’re drying out, until I can’t bring my arms up to touch my chest, until I forget that I was a lot better at this two years and thirty pounds ago, until I play games with my mind so I won’t slow down, until colors change in my vision, until the rush beats out everything else.

I run. That’s what I do.