I’ve been thinking a lot about running recently—and doing a fair amount of it along the way. It’s helped keep the Covid-craziness and my restlessness at bay, provided some normalcy and pleasure at a time when I desperately need them. (Electoral angst, anyone?) To paraphrase from a song by Wye Oak: “I have to run / Or else I do not recognize myself.” On most runs I avoid the mean streets of Brockport and head east along the Barge Canal: a route free of vehicles, asphalt and cement, as quiet as I can find by simply stepping out my door. And once a week I’ve been driving south to a county park for longer trail runs, as a substitute for the mountain running that I enjoyed last summer—but with the advent of deer season (rifles, shotguns, AR-15s, whatever) I’ve begun avoiding the local trails, even where hunting is prohibited. Above all else I need to relax, and international orange is not a soothing color for me. I returned to Brockport in early August and since then I’ve followed the seasons from running shorts and not much else to hat, gloves, and multiple layers. Late summer’s lush deciduous foliage has yielded to a tangle of bare branches etched against a lead-gray sky. Drab-plumaged drake mallards have molted into their full mating glory, and the hoarse August calls of local catbirds have been replaced by the ragged, half-assed songs of migrant white-throated sparrows, young-of-the-year headed south: time’s passage writ small over the last four months, but a reminder of a longer movement, my years running on and running down. My runs have given me time and space to think, and one thing that I’ve contemplated is how rapidly my approach to running has evolved during the last six months—changes partly wrought by the mandates of physical decline, partly by my desire for quiet and quietude. I have been running for almost fifty years now—and confronting the realities of aging for at least thirty of them, that inevitable transition from pushing PRs to accepting a growing list of PWs (personal worsts), from running a full marathon at a 6:45-per-mile pace to the impossibility of running even one 6:45 mile. “Mind over matter” no longer works as viable strategy; intellectually I understood this long ago, but only in the last six months have I fully embraced it on a visceral level. As the philosopher (Olivia Newton-John) once sang, I’ve got to hear my body talk, even if I’m not particularly crazy about what it’s been saying lately. I’ve had my come-to-me-Krishna moment and so have stopped running for distance, pace, or on most days even destination. At times I’m envious of runners who fully inhabit the world of GPS watches, interval workouts and Strava—my son Martin is one of them and his mountain runs amaze me—but now I run for nothing more than elapsed time: on most days forty-five minutes to an hour, occasionally two hours or more. I’ve dropped the last tattered shreds of my running ego and no longer care what other people might think about that old guy trotting along the canal path; instead I focus on form and count my breaths, trying for a steady pace and quasi-meditative state. And oddly enough I’ve taken to early morning runs. I’ve never been eager for such things but now I’m happy to set out in the darkness and watch the day come on. I’ve also abandoned my constant running companions of almost twenty years—ear buds and iPod—because I want to be as present as possible with the birds and wildflowers, wind and rain, heat and humidity, tired muscles and sweaty back. My days of long distance running are becoming more and more finite, but I hope to enjoy this sensuous (and sensual) world for as long as I am able, commit it to what’s left of my memory. Cue Kate Bush and her take on the last chapter of Ulysses . I think that I'm no longer training for anything. Most of all I want to be fully present in each day, something that’s never been easy. I want to pay attention: to my body (sometimes aching, sometimes not) and breath; to the head-pump mating displays of male mallards, their seductive oh-baby inflections; to the three northern short-tailed shrews that I found one morning, each one dead and seemingly frozen in motion; to a katydid-green preying praying mantis, hunting the gray canal path gravel; to ragged cloud-shards north of Brockport, drifting clear above Lake Ontario; to the inflections and permutations of light, subtleties of earth and sky. Of course it’s not all harmony and acceptance. On some days, for reasons that remain unclear to me, I struggle physically. And I sometimes think that my longest runs are motivated by an amalgam of conflicting desires: to be fully alive in the world and myself, while at the same time pushing back against the realities of my senescence—and perhaps wanting to momentarily obliterate, through exhaustion, the darker parts of my being. To be washed clean. Something more to consider as I plod along, now most often beneath gray skies. 5:30 a.m., mid-November. I step into the pre-dawn dark, walk for a hundred yards, then switch on my headlamp and begin to jog. The village is still. At first I move at little more than a shuffle, but after I turn onto the canal path my lower back loosens and I speed up a bit, search out my rhythm. Ten minutes later and Brockport’s lights drop away. I count my breaths: up to ten, back to one, up to ten, again and again. My mind wanders and I bring it back to my breaths. Duck-shadows on dark water, a cardinal’s desultory song, up ahead the eye-shine of a white-tailed deer, tapetum lucidum. (Oh bright tapestry!) Dawn blossoms from crepuscular light and I switch off my headlamp, watch morning settle over the land. After forty minutes I turn back into a chilling westerly wind, curse, try to let it go, try to be nowhere else than where I am. Easier now but not easy; I am a poor acolyte. Another thirty minutes or so (I refuse to look at my watch) and I pass a few early-morning walkers and the small wetland where in the right season there are green herons and the bright spring jewels of migrating warblers. Then across the Park Avenue liftbridge and I am home—tired and sweaty, happy. I bow slightly, a bit self-consciously, but I need a physical expression of gratitude, some small gesture of thanks: for this rising day, for the ducks and deer and cardinal song, for the morning light and my aging but not yet aged body. So grateful that I can do this, and that the world awaits.
1 Comment
12/26/2023 03:35:50 am
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
Categories |