Roads, Mills, Laps

I’m down at the Delaware beach right now. I made some sort of ridiculous resolution: I decided today at the spur of the moment to run for exactly 2:00 down the length of Bethany Beach, past Fenwick Island, ending up along the busy tee shirt and shell store-lined streets of Ocean City, Maryland. True to my, devil-may-care running preparatory tendencies, I just shot down the strand heading west for 1:00 and wherever I ended up, figured I’d turn around and battle my way back to my starting location. I didn’t bring any water (I’m still Siddartha-esque despite my average of 1.4 miles over the course of 13 months.) I didn’t bring gels or gus or gummi bears.

You see, there are these people that fish in the ocean. Through some mad loophole in the blue state’s law, they are allowed to drive their monstrous trucks right up to the water’s edge, get out, stick big rods into the sand and set up a little get down. They fly big flags–American, confederate, and NASCAR. They drive vampire-killing-sized stakes into the sand and chain their foaming, sadly abused mongrels to them and then they drink beer–lots of watered down, hoe down beer. They sit in throne-like lawn chairs with cozy holes augured out of their arms–their hairy paunches sticking out–and make idle chit-chat about Bobby Engram beating Boober Flakenhurst at the HOME DEPOT 500. Their mulleted kin wander aimlessly around the beach–throwing footballs, maiming fast-retreating aquatic life, and wrastlin’ with each other as if they were in the back of pappy Jenkins’ rusted truck up on blocks out behind the trailer.

From afar while approaching them bobbing along at a pathetic 7.5mph clip on the hard, wet part of the beach, the part where the sandpipers zip along with their little feet;the part closest to the approaching waves, these folks look like aliens to me–a Mad Max crowd of rowdies; a beach-bound trailer park; a circus–no, a carnival. I expect drunken babes atop fat shoulders flashing me; I expect Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring; I expect entire rows of missing teeth; dirty cutoff jeans; and lumpy, tattooed bodies with buttcracks and back hair.

Whatever, to each his own as they say, but they horde the beach and so it is not to each his own! It is to be written about! It is worth the spite; trust me. These are me-me, land-grabbing, love-it-or-leave it barbarians.

To run down the public beach towards the surfcasting crowd–to approach them properly–one has to remove one’s shades in order to spot the location of their flagpole-sized surfaster’s monofilament line; you have to gird yourself–expecting to be called a faggot at any moment; you with your shirt off and your short, faggoty shorts that expose the strangest of leg hair and the whitest of flesh. Their fishing lines run high–for the most part. Some are untended, though–left to the drifting tides, sagging and limp–ignored by the worst of the surfcasters as they heckle and thump their chests while tearing off sections of grilled meat with one hand and pumping vapid beer into their gullets with the other. Smoke from convenience store cigarillos wafts into your face; music–Bob Seger and Springsteen; dopey ballads sung by that lowbrowed countryboy Napoleon, Kenney Chesney–play in your ears and sear holes into your medulla oblongata.

Their flags flap proudly, you see, because these proud Americans are there to catch big American fish–big, fleshy fish; angry fish; territorial fish. The surfcasters love so much about America–the flag is so much theirs–that they feel OBLIGATED to bring them to their fishing spots in order to ward off any foreign invaders–any devils or terrorists arriving in wooden junks or gunmetal gray destroyers or old Spanish man o’wars on those sacred shores to lay claim to their public beach. American surfcasters are their to tell you that no prisoner will be left behind in Vietnam–even now; and that nobody races better than Bobby Engram, number 8 (Bobby Engram Sr.: may he rest in peace.) American fish; American prisoners of war; American cars driven by chaw-chewing good ole’ American boys that can push their feet down on a metal pedal and turn a plastic steering wheel better than the rest of ‘em.

And as for the the fish–those supposed objects of their profligate pursuit: I never saw one caught–never even saw a line dip and shake. I just saw empty bottles, plastic sacks stuck on shafts of dune grass blowing in the wind, snarling dogs, mullets, piles of half-empty white Styrofoam containers (with red hamburger blood pooled in their bottoms), and big, idling trucks dripping oil down onto that proud American beach.

I obviously didn’t enjoy the beach during that segment of the run: I was on guard; I expected to be closelined at one moment and the heckled the next. Running this gauntlet made me cringe and so I ran up and behind them and their trucks and their dogs and their kids; I ran on the snow-like sand, my legs giving away with every step.

And then I gave up entirely and crossed over the grassy dunes–running along the side of the hot, asphalted road where jeeploads of teenagers yelled out various har-har things just as they passed me (you know, in order to pull the old “scare the runner” trick?).

1:00 came and I ran back.

A few “faggots” and other drunken catcalls later, I was back on my bike (a beach cruiser)–riding west again, chasing the setting sun, wearing no shirt, no socks, carrying no towel or bottle of water–just living and running pure again.

The Frank Shorter-era treadmill that I was running on today got stuck every 1K or so. It would go from 8.6mph to 9.5mph to 4.5mph. The first time it happened to me, it nearly threw me into the flabby arms of the sweaty man who was huff-huffing away on the exercise bike behind me. Pretty soon I figured out the pattern. When it was going to hiccup on me, I would jump into the air and let it do it’s shitting underneath me while I floated above it, hovering like Bob Beamon in the pristine, mile-high Mexico City air.
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Good watch: Fam’s steeple qualifier this weekend. Even better: his buck-the-system comments about NOT wanting to pursue the American dream–about wanting to seek a life outside maximizing comfort position.

Good watch as well: the woman’s Oly Marathon. I watched it starting about the 10K mark. As soon as the TV warmed up and I saw the lead pack, I was like “Where the hell is Deena?” Throughout the whole race, I was consulted as to how it was going to unfold.

About 20K into it I said something dopey this: “Tomescu is a nut; this is not how you run a race.”

25K: “She’s going to get caught and dusted; just you wait and see.”

30K: “She’s stupid; here comes the chase pack.” I then clapped my hands slowly together and said, “Boom! Like that.”

35K: “She’s going to win the race.”

I was then asked why my opinion suddenly changed. “Her form; she looks strong. Look at it; it’s all intact. The chase pack is a mess.”

I was then asked by a non-runner, a casual observer, why I originally said it was stupid to run from the front like that. I was then asked what made me change my mind and why I got the whole race wrong. I suddenly felt confronted. The expert in the room was a boob.

“I guess I haven’t run a race in so long I forgot,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“You should stick to print interviews and not branch out into live coverage of running,” I was told.

40K mark.

“Look there’s Catherine Ndereba! I interviewed her! Isn’t that cool?” I exclaimed, changing the subject.

Bad watch: pretty much the rest of the show. Worst: Phelps’ mother blabbing for 10 minutes about ADHD and her poor gold-medal-winner-of-a-sad-sack-for-a-son.

I despise the ubermasculine announcers–that one guy with the bulging carotid arterial veins and the $1000 coiffure. I want skinny, Tim Broe-type guys and gals to announce the track and field results to me: a former distance runner. I don’t want a shot putter or a guy who undoubtedly DVRs NFL pre-season football games while he’s out of country telling me about the Bekele making his move at the 6500-meter mark as if he knew anything about what it means to say “67-second to 57-second quarters.”

I don’t want the Flying Tomato making a cameo with his zits and his peyote-stained teeth; I don’t want babbling in-studio guests like the President of America stumbling over his spoon-fed lines about South Ossetia. I want them all to disappear. I want NBC to pack up the 10,000 experts in their air conditioned vans and hand the broadcasting reigns over to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. When I last watched their Olympic coverage a long time ago, it was 24hrs and CSPAN-esque; it had no soundtracks–no cheesecloth. It was pure Olympics.

Around 9 last night, I found myself with a handful of Bethany Beach fudge in my mouth. I had been watching the $40M opening ceremonies. I mumbled (bragged?) to members of my extended family that there was a chance that I had actually spoken to one of the hard-working athletes who were parading in front of the cameras at that very moment (the U.S. contingent had just entered the stadium). I half expected to see Ryan Hall or Nick Symmonds on the screen; I half expected to jump up and down and say that I have their voice still on my Best Buy/Nixonian digital tape recorder. Even when the South African team walked on, I half expected to see Ramaala or when it was Kenya’s turn, Catherine the Great. I expected something to raise my fudge finger in the air at.

No.

I got nothing. I am fully accustomed to disappointment at this stage of my life and I should have expected it then.

When it was time for team ‘Merica to walk into the limelight, the cameraman was obviously an NBA fan, because we got to see the redeem team for an unusually long amount of time. We got to see Kobe Bryant, strutting like an ostrich, snapping his gum–all relaxed; his arms limp at his side, awaiting a basketball to be thrown to him at any moment; awaiting to “take it the hole.” We got to see Bob Costas’ band of merry Olympic celebrities, the NBC cast of superheroes who we will be constantly reminded of throughout the Olympiad: Phelps, Gay etc. (Remember that zany Flying Tomato 2 years ago?) And the “redeem team:” Let us never forget these under-covered, distinguished giants. They don’t get on TV that much, so we should zoom in on them and let them be actors, playing the chewing gum-chewing Americans in some unpublished Bertolt Brecht play about ugly American stereotypes.

Lord God, creator of all that is good and just, bless us with a Chicom Gold for the redeem team, because first-place medals belong in the wide palms of superstar American professionals. And the Chicom gold-plated basketball coach whistles belong the mouths of the rooster-strutting Coach Normand Dale types who’ve always got a life-changing proverb at the tip of of their tongues.

We Americans love our sprinters–hot damn do we or what? We love to hover around the track for 9 point whatever-it-is-these-days seconds and then going on to doing something else. We never love to wait for anything; we like Fast Pass and reset buttons. We love on/off switches and instant results. We hate chess matches and marathons. We don’t wait well. In high school and college, we especially love footballs, 4th down-and-10 situations, and warm hot dogs in our mouths on crisp fall nights. We don’t like counting out 8 laps for the 2-mile event. We’ve been accustomed to call anything where little skinny people flail for more than a minute around a dusty track “faggoty.” Real men thump their chests like apes, take knees at the edges of 100-yard fields of glory, and motivate men while looking like Phil Cowher. “Faggots” wear short shorts, expose their rib cages, and run a lot for no real real reason.

You know Costas himself reminded us fudge chewers last night that the world fastest human is a Jamaican man named Bolt. I corrected him from my angry perch, but he didn’t hear me. I said screamed (with pieces of brown sugar lard dripping on the floor) something like “He is the world’s fastest accelerator at 100 meters! He is not the world’s fastest sustained runner at 5000, 10,000, or 42,195M! Is Bolt the world’s most efficient fat converter? HE IS NOT!” Ah damn them all–injustice will always sit on us American distance runners like the weight of a suit of Gothic plate armor.
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Two other great and terrible American broadcasting moments from last night:

1. Costas joking about the Central African Republic when it was time for their one athlete to march on. It struck me as somewhat arrogant. He chortled–reminding us Americans (ourselves completely ignorant about geography) that it is a republic in central Africa. I wanted to say, “And the United States are a bunch of states that are united–hardee-fucking-har!”

2. The infamous Sesame Street moment: Some China expert telling me and the 100 million tear-dripping Cracker Barrel grandmas about the Chinese belief in Chi: describing it thusly “It’s a force that runs through everything–including me and you!”

It’s that time; it’s the time for the world’s worst coverage of the world’s largest athletic event from the world’s largest lover of packaged poop. It’s time for sentimentalism and barbecued nationalism. It’s time for the comeback story and the montage sequences showing a determined athlete rowing at 3am on calm waters or running down darkened streets while John Tesh bangs away on a keyboard with his bony knuckles. It’s time to cheer for that determined midget woman who’s been locked up in a modern-day zoo camp and caressed by the calloused hands of Bela Karolyis into courageously tumbling herself (with half-broken ankle) into a magic moment that simultaneously wins her a Chicom Gold, a McDonald’s 50-year commercial contract, and the well-wishes of five million graying, tear-dripping grandmas from the banks of the Mississippi to the New Jersey Shore. The Today Show awaits! Letterman and Lauer: prepare!

I hate it.

Not the Olympics, that is (well I do despise the Mafia-esque IOC and their nefarious supersecret Monacan yacht fund), but my country’s highest bidding network’s pathetic attempt to “cover” it by making it a long epic–a love story–with good guys and bad guys, soundtracks, and pathetic, baritone-voiced, has-been narrators–orating to us like modern-day Demosthenes’. I also hate the commercials and the the medal counts. The former: always trying to tell us how much they are doing for them darned aw shucks Olympians. The latter: Instead of breaking them out by nation, how about we show them by these categories:

1. # of Gold medals won by clean athletes

2. # of Gold medals won by supposedly clean athletes

3. # of Gold medals won according to the Bono-Geldoff Ratio ™ which is: (GDP)-(Amount skimmed by the country’s Olympic committee)*baksheesh factor (see: Sir Bono’s Guide to Saving the World) / # of circa 1990s tee shirts circulating in the given land.

4. # of Gold medals won per the Walmart standard ™ which is: # of Walmarts in said land + nation’s obesity percentage (that is BMI>30) MINUS ((the doping probability factor–DPF) + (doohickey/contraption factor–DCF which can be calculated by determining the power requirements of said country’s Olympic training facility, because a lot of power is required to fuel those antigravity treadmills and those Supershockballsixer ™ machines etc). An alternate to the DCF would be the mean value of the coaches’ cars in the Olympic training facilities’ parking lots.

Ok…this is turning into a drinking game.

5. # of times Jim McKay is wheeled out and placed under the lamps–casting long shadows on those canyons-for-wrinkles; making his face look like the crumbling, circa 1906 San Francisco facade that it is.

6. # of comeback kid/aw shucks stories.

And so on. (Can you tell that I’m reading Breakfast of Champions presently?)

The title for this post comes from the fact that I recently read that the former host of Masterpiece Theater’s 90-year-old cancer’fied bones were picked off his body before his cremation and sold on the body-part black market. How is that for an epitaph–a final footnote to his long, otherwise fully-lettered life? I am imagining, for some reason, some bodysnatcher standing in a smoky bowling alley–his fingers are wedged into the eye sockets of that wizened, lord of the manor’s skull. He tosses….strike!
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Anyway, I have something running related to note: Have you ever run along, say, a busy road and you have some stupid person inside their car, all in a hurry and whatnot; all rushed to go do whatever is more important than someone else’s life, and they are going to make a right turn into the right lane of said busy road; have you ever seen them not even look to the right to see if someone happens to be on the sidewalk/trying to cross; have you ever seen them just gun it with their neck craned to the left? I don’t even try anymore. I just run around these idiots.
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Summer uniform for university chicks: baby doll dress, bugeye shades, cell phone. If these chicks were in a play, it would be called Everyone Acts the Same!

Act 1 of Everyone Acts the Same! would start as follows:

[College chick enters stage right, she strolls lazily and smiles as she text messages]….

Act 2 would start like this:

[It’s morning. College chick was out late the night before. She’s wearing tight shorts with big hand prints on her ass. She’s also wearing her bugeye shades. She text messages as she strolls towards Starbucks…]

Act 3 would end like this:

[College chick wipes the tears that drop down from her bugeye shades like raindrops falling from the eave of an old house. She sniffs as she text messages the final emoticons: ISSTYLM ICBYDTTMYFI. She exits stage left with her Dooney and Bourke bag slung over her back. Curtain falls. Dark, requiem/dirge-type music plays. Audience ponders the meaning of life and gets up reluctantly; attendants at the exits are available for assistance; mental health counselors have booths set up; medical staff holding defibrilators are on call to jump start any failing hearts]
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Act 1: [Runner runs down the street; he dodges car. He cuts his run short and makes a beeline for his home. He sits behind his computer and writes about all the bad/stupid people out there–the polluting, non-runner types who are destroying his beautiful world. He thinks about an idea for a play about mindless college chicks. Then he showers–whistling Wolf Parade’s “Language City”–and dries himself off. He puts on his alternacool clothes; he slings some stupid Jim-from-the-Office Gap mapcasebagthing over his shoulder; he tugs at his patchy beard and mumbles a few Che Guevara quotes to get him used to talking Indie-like; then he walks down the street, gets into a car (a hybrid because hybrids are what the masses want) and goes here to sip some rum and Cokes before Act 2 starts; he is on the list; he gets to bring in his camera and so he is excited].

Act 2…it’s happening now!

oil on 5 x 7 board

but here goes.

Seriously, this article should serve as a reminder to anyone wishing to freelance to never give up. I sent what seemed like 20 reminders, was assured, was forgotten, was assured again, was forgotten again, and then I sent one last reminder (like the rest, a polite one) and I got the article published. I have the right to complain about the typo that thevy created, but it’s not worth it. I’ll just bask in my Warhol-esque 800 words of fame for now.

But I if I had to live off the income that I received for this article for two years, I’d have had to wedding crash large-city races–stealing free bagels, using free porta potties, wearing free tee shirts etc.

On my flight to Texas Friday, I read (and subsequently underlined) the following passage from Irving’s book; it’s about Garp’s running; it’s actually from one of Garp’s short stories: “I concede that the open road is theirs: when I train there I keep my place. I run in the stuff of the soft shoulder, in the hot sand in the gravel, in the beer-bottle glass–among the mangled cats , the maimed birds, the mashed condoms.”

I think I’ve read something similar before, but I can’t remember where.
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Saturday morning, I decided to go for a run. Using this Web site, I found a decent route in Plano and got myself psyched up to run on the surface of Mercury. When I dug into my bag, I found that I had only packed one shoe so I opted to instead run barefoot on the hotel’s Kolehmainen-era Startrac that was stuck at a 5% grade.
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Barefoot running on treadmills, while a noble concept and certainly espoused on some dopey Web site or in some gimmicky book, is not to be undertaken if the balls of the feet aren’t calloused.

Startrac treadmills are squeaky abominations and should be banned outright. In hotels, they never seem to be properly grounded; their belts are Jackson Pollock-like: painted by a hundred sweaty businessmen who’ve been henpecked by their distant wives to do something about their bellyrolls. Paces are never to be trusted–especially anything under 8:45/mile. When one mounts a Startrac, one must expect anything: from instant termination to sudden, 12 mph acceleration. They are deathtraps–capable of snapping your legs off or sending you flying off backwards into the hotel’s unused weight pile where you will crack your skull and lay there (brains exposed) until the Mexican cleaning lady with the yellow dish gloves finds you.
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In chatting about Texas this weekend, someone (a good-hearted Texan with an ax to grind) dropped this little factoid in my head.

No player left behind.
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oil on canvas