There's running, and there's talking about running

I have long contended that the reason I am generally so happy is that I’m good at telling stories.

The stories we tell are not life, but only the means we have of arranging the chaos of life into manageable, comprehensible clips.  If we tried to narrate our lives as they happened, the stories would be full of digressions, non sequiturs, accidents, and tedium. 

So we tell stories.  We choose and arrange the random pieces of our lives in ways that create more cogent narratives, where actions lead to actions, where motivations are more or less clear, where characters can be introduced and developed in ways that the folks who populate our lives cannot be.  We can cut out what doesn’t matter, or what is embarrassing or not, we expand, highlight, contract, all in an effort to make sense out of what is otherwise and arguably non-sense.  We can create suspense, humor, gloom, or joy, all by how we arrange the words, the sentences, the paragraphs. 

As with all art, story-telling seeks to create (or recreate) particular feelings of a particular event or set of events.  We want readers and listeners to feel what we felt, to understand the physical and psychic boundaries crossed or approached, to laugh at the humor and cry at the sadness, to follow the process of falling in love, or to experience the beauty we experienced. We use to tricks to get our message across—metaphors, similes, analogies; we note and highlight irony, juxtaposition, and all sorts of other devices that scholars identify.  

But the actions we describe do not happen the way we describe them.  Life is not metaphor—we make metaphors out of the telling of it.  The fog rising from the lake in the early morning does not come on little cat feet, but that vision helps convey one I felt that morning, setting off on a 24-mile run, crossing the spillway as we started our way around the lake. 

The end of a bad stretch of the 2010 Smoky Mountain Relay.  I'm looking for a joke in there somewhere.

I seek in running the moment, the feeling of the air on my skin, the strength in my legs at the meeting of shoe and dirt, thoughts of nothing but where I am, how I feel, at one with the surroundings and the day.  Not that that always happens—often I think of work, or family, or the way I’ll tell the story of the run I’m on.

When I ran in road races, every other week or so, lowering my times and finishing in the top 5 of most of the local races I ran, I found the effortless gliding of a PR run one of the prime moments I sought.  And I over-ran that limit some, and feeling crappy I‘d often start into the story of the race—where I lost it, where the proverbial wheels came off.  Then I knew I was shattered, out of the moment, doomed to just hold on for whatever distance I had left.     

Though my running has changed, I still seek that gliding feeling, not necessarily for speed, but for distance and terrain.  Sometimes now the telling of the story gives me energy and laughs.  During that 24-mile run, I started rolling back and forth between feeling good and feeling bad.  Nineteen miles in, I got a little out of the moment, and thinking about the next 5 or so miles, I got ahead of me.  But I kept it in, and suddenly I thought that every other step was a good one.  I told Seth, “That was a good step.”  He was in the same state, replying, “That was a good 120 seconds.”  Saying it brought me back to it, and the chuckles helped.

I set new goals these days for races.  The varied terrain of trail races doesn’t really allow for PRs the way road races do; in my upcoming third 50k, I’ll climb more than the two previous races combined. But I have the same goals: love the day, love the woods, and say something funny at every aid station.  The last one keeps me occupied; I think of a lot of funny things, and then I have to pick the right one.  Of course, I can use two at one station. 

I’ll let you know how it goes.

More Vehicles Than People | Planetizen

More Vehicles Than People Planetizen

Concord, Massachussetts, hometown of Henry David Thoreau, has more cars than people.  My favorite line:  "Thoreau believed in asking deliberate questions and making deliberate choices,and these questions are as pertinent today as ever,” [Director of the Thoreau Society, Michael Frederick] said. Thoreau would probably appreciate 'the Catch-22' of more parents driving kids everywhere, he said. With all the other cars on the road, adults perceive it as safer than letting youngsters walk or bike, which leads to more parents driving more kids and 'an irony Thoreau would have worked with.'"

Night Running

In the more than 25 years I’ve been running for exercise, I’ve run in about every situation I can think of.  But lately, I’ve been running at night, on trails, with a headlamp.

I’ve run through the streets of Beijing, New York, Anchorage, and many other cities large and small; run in northern New Hampshire when it was 25 degrees below zero, and in Tucson, Arizona when it was 108.  I’ve run alone, with regular partners, with random strangers, and in large groups.  I’ve run in a couple hundred races or more, from 400 meters to 50 kilometers. 

This winter my two main training partners and I started running at night on trails, at first out of necessity (early dark) and then out of interest and desire.  As daylight hours extend, I sometimes start a run in the light, then finish in the dark by headlamp.  I’ve done some runs by myself with my dog, and some with my friends. 

Some folks think we’re crazy, asking for turned ankles and skinned hands and knees.  But the running style changes, slows slightly, we pick up our feet and plant them more firmly to assure good footing.  We run on familiar trails, but they are made unfamiliar by darkness.  It’s not always easy to know where we are, and trail surface becomes much more of a factor as we shine lights ahead of our steps.

Often, in the descending light, focusing without turning on the headlamp makes it easier to see the roots and rocks of the trail.  I feel Bristol hesitate just a bit as we approach major turns we both know well enough to anticipate.  When I turn the light on for good, he accelerates slightly to get just off the front of my light, the better to use his canine sight. With the light illuminating the trail just a few steps ahead of my feet, I have to let myself push on, trusting my light and feet.  The process takes getting used to.

Dark descends quickly at the end, leaving me with that eerie feeling of being watched, though I am comforted knowing we don’t have bears or big cats in this area, and by Bristol’s keen dog-awareness.  Trust my dog, I tell myself.  He’ll let me know if there’s anything out there.

The start line of this year's Rocky Raccoon 100-miler

These runs last about an hour or so, sometimes all of it in the dark.  Many 50-milers start in the dark, and if I ever run a 100-miler, I’ll have to run overnight, most likely.  

And this is definitely something to practice—it’s not easy to be alone, with nothing but a light, which makes a kind of bubble around my eyes.  I strain to see beyond the light, and remember Edward Abbey’s dictum to get rid of the light because it limits your sight. 

Now, with the time change, I likely won’t get in any more dark evening runs; perhaps I’ll get out early some mornings to get that start-in-the-dark practice. 

Built Environment 101

Despite calls to exercise more and eat healthier—which many have heard, as the running and aerobics crazes show—obesity rates in the United States have tripled over the last 30 years. Obesity rates among children have also tripled, with rising rates of adult-onset disease like Type II diabetes being diagnosed in children as young as 7 years old.  Poor and underserved populations are disproportionately affected.

These frightening statistics have led public health leaders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to target community design as one of the culprits, and have sought to make changes in policy and in the way we build. 

So now we hear new words slung around, words generally reserved for city planners and engineers, like “built environment,” “environmental change,” “connectivity,” “complete streets,” and “food deserts.” But what do these words mean?

The built environment is made up of all the stuff we build to meet our needs: roads, sidewalks, sewer rights-of-way, buildings, parking lots, and all that kind of thing.

 As I’ve said before, since World War II, the patterns of the built environment have favored automobiles travel, with interstates, wide roads with no sidewalks, and buildings set back from the street behind massive parking lots designed to hold Black Friday traffic. 

We’re seeing examples of environmental change in cities around the world as we try to retrofit the built environment to allow for pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass-transit users safe passage. We’ve added sidewalks, reduced the number and width of travel lanes, and increased the mileage of bike lanes. In many areas, renovations of defunct shopping areas have included more pedestrian friendly designs to create the types of neighborhoods many of our planners grew up in.

These renovations and additions have the goal of making our communities more connected.  Connectivity is the degree to which the amenities of a city are accessible by foot, bicycle, and mass transit. Can you walk to school? Can you get to a grocer by bike? Is there more than one exit from a subdivision? Many studies show that if a neighborhood has sidewalks, more people will walk.  Many of these changes are based on the “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” idea, but research and evidence shows that these changes result in a healthier community.

But roadway renovations are not always immediate. In that case, a Complete Streets policy, in which the body that owns the road makes a commitment to include sidewalks, bike lanes and transit stops in all new road way development and in any major renovations. This type of policy allows for changes in administration and staff without losing the commitment. The South Carolina Department of Transportation, the City and the County of Spartanburg all have resolved to build complete streets.

While physical activity is one element of the obesity problem, eating is the other. Many communities are becoming aware of a dynamic of the built environment called food deserts. A food desert is a neighborhood where unhealthy food options, like fast food restaurants and convenience stores, significantly outnumber healthy food options.  When that ratio exceeds 5-1, we call that a food desert.  The City of Spartanburg’s ratio is 8.5 to 1. In other words, for every grocery store or year-round produce store, there are 8.5 fast food restaurants and convenience stores. If you put eight plates of cookies and one plate of carrots out at a party, which one will folks fill up on?

The food desert problem is complicated with free market capitalism, private property rights and “this economic climate.” But many cities, counties, and states are using incentives to attract new grocery stores and other fresh food outlets, and are working with existing convenience stores to offer more healthy options. 

Falls Creek Falls and Hospital Rock at Jones Gap, 2/26/2011

Three qualities characterize trails at Jones Gap: very steep, rocky, almost violent ascents and descents; old road beds that follow contours, climbing and descending into the many draws that feed the Middle Saluda River; and rolling ridgeline singletrack.  Falls Creek and Hospital Rock trails provide all three, draped in a variety of flora. 

Mine was the only car in the parking area when I left the trailhead off Falls Creek Road.  Steep blocky trails climbed quickly to Falls Creek Falls, for me a real surprise, falling some 100 feet in two steps.

The trail crossed the bottom of the second step, and changed names to Hospital Rock Trail for no apparent reason. 

 The trail climbed sharply, and by the sound of things, parallel to the falls, then worked its way upstream.  This is Falls Creek just before the falls, rhododendron hanging thick above the stream and trail.

 The trail continued to climb, sometimes very steeply, traversing the base of granite cliffs left exposed by a variety of geological events in roiling turmoil that marks the area. 

Having reached the ridge about 50 minutes in, I crossed over the peak of whatever ridge I was on, with filtered views that will disappear come summer.  I was just on the edge of cold in a t-shirt. 

The trail bears the scars of the violent geology of the Blue Ridge escarpment; cliffs loom overhead, trees grow into and around rock outcrops, blocks fall down steep draws.

The view up Jones Gap, viewable because of the wide electric utility right of way scar.  Below me were digging machines and fresh damage.

 The trail crosses the top of and then descends beside Cleveland Cliffs, passing below this waterfall whose name I don’t know.  I remember at this point that I’m running back up there on the way back.

 This portion was runnable, climbing and descending slightly both ways, fun rolling terrain.  In summer, the many briars on the sides of the trail are probably out of control.  Somewhere through here a turkey lifted off, a cacophony of beating wings.

 I stop often for small things.

I was there. 

Run details:

distance: >13 miles

ascent: <3600 feet

total time: 3:40



Interfering with Traffic?

Film-maker Jay Mallin takes on suburban highways in the DC area in this excellent blog post and video about a pedestrian who was hit crossing a busy highway, and then cited for "interfering with traffic."

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9455/how-pedestrians-interfere-with-traffic/