Running

I love running. I love the exhilaration of running, the elevation of mood, the euphoric charge of unfettered movement. Any time I find myself caught up in stressful speculations or dreary ruminations, running pulls me out of the muck and sets me back on solid ground. It takes my mind off the nonsense and puts me back in my body, where I belong. Sometimes it takes a mile, sometimes two, but gradually the mind-numbing miasmas of brooding and worry dissipate, and the invigorating immediacies of wind and cloud and sunlight and frost get my full attention. The space between my ears gains clarity. Relentless gloom turns rowdy.

I started running when I was 45. It was a complete surprise. I’d never been athletic. Not in grade school. Not in high school. Not on planet Earth. I spent my adolescence lounging and lollygagging whenever I could, reading books like Brave New World and Dharma Bums and Tropic of Cancer and getting high on rock and whiskey when time and luck and opportunity triangulated on the weekends. It was a long adolescence. I only recently felt its last little tremor quietly vanish in a bubbly, wistful poof. Age 45, middle age, was a renaissance. In 1986, after my second divorce, I went into a clinical depression. With the help of some meds and therapy I became quite friendly with Bacchus once again. Alcoholism is a darn sight better than depression, but its fatiguing, and saps your life energy. I have to hand it to Charles Bukowski. That guy had stamina. I quit drinking in 1990 and began attending AA meetings. I loved the AA meetings. I discovered how much I like to talk. Conversation is the next best thing to sex. And combined with sex, it is most certainly at the top of the hit parade.

Two years later, in 1992, I quit smoking. And that’s when the running began. I started out doing a couple of miles, then increased my distance to about six miles. I had a beautiful run that went from the crowded, narrow streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill district up a gentle slope to the broad lawns and stately, 1890 ambiance of Volunteer Park down to the narrow road winding its way through the heavily wooded serenity of Interlaken, cross 23^rd street, segue into the arboretum, and loop around to home again. I was doing this at 5:00 in the morning, so it was quite serene, with no traffic, just me and the raccoons.

And now I’m 77. Still running, though the running has begun to feel a little more critical, a little more urgent, and a little more strenuous. I’ve learned how to avoid overuse injuries, which put frustrating holes in my running routine. I’ve always got a bit of runner’s knee – also known as patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) - is a chronic pain in and around the kneecap. I had it so bad once following a half-marathon that I was limping like Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys. Unfortunately, nobody younger than 70 will get that allusion. But maybe you can find it on YouTube. Crotchety Walter Brennan as Grandpa Amos McCloy grinning and limping into the TV screen. That was me limping down Mercer Street at the finish of the half-marathon. Crotchety old me dreaming of one day catching up to Mick Jagger.

The stubbornest overuse injury was peroneal tendonitis, an inflammation of the peroneal tendons, which run along the outside of the ankle and help stabilize the foot. I took eight weeks off from running and iced and massaged the afflicted area at the edge of my foot, but it persisted. I made an appointment with a podiatrist who X-rayed my foot and turned it from side to side and emphasized the importance of running shoes, and taking time off. I told him I’d been in the habit of running every day of the week. He suggested I start with a running schedule of two days on and one day off. Later, I can try running three days, two days off, or three days on, one day off. See how it goes. The important thing is to give your body time to recover. Damaged muscle tissue needs to be repaired. The cells need to disassemble old or damaged cell parts and use whatever is salvageable to create new cells. It’s called cellular recycling. There’s also mitosis, the generation of cells that are genetically identical to one another. He returned to the subject of running shoes and recommended two brands, which he scribbled on the back of a prescription form, which made it an official prescription, which I handed to the clerk at the shoe store, who went in the back and brought a pair of elegant ghosts (Ghost is a shoe brand) and invited me to try them on and do a little jog outside to get a feel of them. They felt fine, lighter and thinner than my regular shoes, which have good support, but don’t distribute weight properly. I’m not an expert on the engineering of the human foot – a subject that fascinates me – and neither am I a good judge of shoe engineering. But whatever the dynamic is, my new high end running shoes, my Ghosts, had a decidedly salubrious effect. My foot was feeling better within a week. I liked the new schedule, too. On my day off I began a dumbbell routine. I enjoy lifting dumbbells. I feel an affinity to them. The brand name is Ethos. Ethos dumbbells.

But it’s still running I love best. Outdoors with open sky and crows and robins and hummingbirds and sparrows and the geese down by Lake Union expands the mind. Mind and sky seem like the same thing. The same energy. The same mists and mountains of air.

Every time I commit to going for a run, I make it a point of pride to never change my mind and go back. There’s a joy in being a little Spartan. Intemperate weather can be invigorating. I’ve been hailed upon and snowed upon and poured upon. Today was different. It was cold—about 43 degrees—and pouring rain. March rain. That rain that’s been spurred by winter and whipped by the wind. It’s a mean rain. Inconsiderate. Downright sassy. Penetrates the skin. Kisses the bones.

A few weeks earlier, R - my wife - had been ravaged by an intense respiratory virus. She coughed nonstop for over a week. Watching her slowly get better was a great relief. We’re both getting on in years. I was afraid of contracting the same illness, which could be fatal. A few months previous to R’s illness, in late August, after passing a kidney stone, I caught a respiratory virus that sent my temperature soaring to 104 degrees. R stripped the covers and blankets off the bed and covered my naked body with towels soaked in icy water. This got my temperature down to a 101-degrees. It took at least two weeks to recover from that bug.

Running strengthens the immune system. But there’s a limit to that, and that limit becomes increasingly apparent with age. It’s a situation I liken to that moment late at night when a bar closes and the bartender turns the lights on and off, which shatters that pleasant state of Dionysian insouciance with the leaden inevitability of closing time. Always a bummer. Mortality sucks. Mortality is another kind of bar. No booze. No bartender. But the flus and broken bones and rashes and dimmed vision and diminished hearing of senescence are the lights of the bar turning on and off. It’s closing time. The problem is, I’m not ready to leave yet. Deep down, there’s a twinkling little light, a stirring, an agitation, a rebellious quickening of nerve. And there it is. My adolescence again.

R and I generally run together. We’ve been running together for 30 years. Lately, she’s had to take a break. On December 26^th, as we were running down the sidewalk running parallel to Mercer, she got distracted by some crows, tripped, and felt flat on her face, breaking a molar, scraping her chin and inflaming her facial muscles. She needed a dentist, tout de suite. Our normal dentist did not provide an emergency service. He suggested we go to the emergency room. But emergency rooms don’t have dentists. We called another dentist and got a message suggesting an emergency dentist in downtown Seattle. We called and were able to get in that same day. Several hours later, after some screaming, the dentist managed to get the molar out in five pieces, which he later showed me, describing how difficult it had been to remove. The good news was that she hadn’t broken any bones or injured any joints. The bad news was the number of weeks it took for the inflammation to go down. She took several months off from running and has started again running with me again. Somewhat gingerly at first, of course.

Sunday, March 16th. We go for a run. The air is crisp and invigorating. R is doing well. She's able to keep up with me, which makes me glad. Very glad. We've been enduring a lot of anxiety lately, due to the savage cuts that the president has been making on federal programs like Medicaid, and Medicare, and now even Social Security. We feel very precarious. Nothing in the public domain feels remotely under our control or influence. The country doesn't feel stable. A rug has been pulled out from under our feet. Running isn’t a panacea, but it does help you keep on your feet during times of unrest and volatility. It’s one of the few things over which we have choice and agency. And – unlike skiing or parasailing - it’s relatively inexpensive. The shoes can get a little pricey, but apart from that, all you need is the will, the time, and a pair of feet.