Roads, Mills, Laps

These are my favorite race write-ups:

Kenyan Ass-Kicking

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From All the President’s Men.

Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.
Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s all. Just… follow the money.
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Top 15 in the 1st Annual Watergate 5k. 16:22. I posted the quote from All the President’s Men because I found a local race with $1k in prize money, on a fast course. I knew the Kenyans would be there and that if I followed the money, they’d lead me not to Nixon and his army of mustachioed 1970s sycophants in wide-lapeled suits, but instead to jazz hands, blogging worth a damn, and a 15:59 5k.

It was the same group of Betzwood guys; the same guys I saw on the trail a few weeks ago. They were segregated according to the vintage Nike singlet. The 15:10 guys–the pace-setters– they had the 2003 swoosh singlets. The 14:50 guys had the gray, ubiquitous-for-Ryan Shay-in-2004 singlets; they were out to race the top dogs in the newer, kick-us-some-serious-African-ass, blue and white uniforms. All this for a thousand dollars.

It was an African day at 8 a.m. with 78-degree temps and 70% humidity, so the Kenyans did African things: They sat under the shade of a copse of trees, within sight of the start line: They wore full sweats and draped their long arms over their sinews-for-legs. There was no pre-race ritual whatsoever; they swatted at flies and laughed, talking amongst themselves, occasionally standing up to stretch their calves up against the adjacent curb. There’s no escaping the contrast of it all: pearly white teeth flashing smiles, offset against dark, almost purplish skin. Yellow, clouded eyes with far off glances, staring out into space, contemplating 4:30 opening miles. And those arms, always draped over the legs–sticks piled upon sticks.

So as the Kenyans lazed in the shade, the same PT Barnum parade of American recreational running shit unfolded on center stage in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Over here a man in a sleeveless racing shirt douses himself with water and pops a GU for courage. Over there, a large woman holds on to a friend for balance as she desperately claws at her leg to pull it back into a half-stretch of some kind. She continues to claw and swipe, but she can’t seem to find her feet. Her friend gets tugged all over the street and so they dance a drunken dance. It’s painful to watch, and I am tempted to just go up, grab her leg, and hand it to her. Someone coordinated to have these plastic, bulbous cretins–who worked damned hard to have been born with ‘hot’ looks and a nice ass, who are salaried by $10 Lincoln Financial Dixie cup beer and the revenue stream from a million Eagles bumperstickers–to cheer us on and so they part the seas of horny men with stiff necks and shake their Pilates asses over to the optimal plastic-lady-hip-hip-hooray-watching position. Go home; go frequent someone else’s circus during your ‘off season.’

Five minutes to the start and the Kenyans stand up. Circa-2003 Nike Singlet guys snap their legs back while the circa-2005 singlet guys trot to the start chatting amongst themselves. The only non-Africans here worth a shit are Bart and Bill–both from the Philly Track Club. There’s another white guy who ends up running the race way up front with the Kenyans, but I don’t know him. He does really fast striders and since he could lap me in the 800, I can’t poke any fun at said striders; striders must work for him. Striders must make you run faster in races.

All of us endomorphic knuckleheads line up to the right, giving the Kenyans their deserved, cut-the-first- tangent position. Minutes before the race starts, two ladies in spandex elbow their way right to the front. I yield to them and go to the 2nd row. It’s damn near inevitable: if it’s not a balding headband man with ham hock flabs of hairy, smelly, tricep flesh pushing his way to the start, it’s either a Japanese tourist man with GU holsters or two ladies on a tee-hee dare. Every race has them. I guess it’s human nature for some folks to cheat their way to a place they don’t belong, for some folks to want to spend not more than three miles a week of effort to think they belong elbow-to-elbow with those who pound pavement and spit the white spit day after fucking day. They are reminiscent of those pay-as-you-go climbers on Krakauer’s ill-fated Everest climb in 1996 made famous by his wonderfully written mea culpa of a book, Into Thin Air: they want the glory and don’t know the price, and even if they knew the price, they couldn’t pay it because it can’t be found it in the catalog.

First mile in 5:00. It was an encouraging mile; I was able to actually see the clock tick 4:40 for the dark mass of flying sticks. I may never get up with them, but I’ll be damned if I don’t get to see the clock tick not just for their opening mile but for subsequent miles to come. It’s only a matter of time. They reach the turnaround and it’s what you expect of them: 2003 singlets cut the wind doing the work to set the pace for the pretty, sky blue 2005 singlet guys who sit in waiting to pop out and race for the prize at mile 2.5. 1.5’s got a clock and it’s telling me 7:35. 15:59’s gonna happen.

Mile 2. Death, hot damned uphill death. I let go; the rope I’m holding onto, the rope the Kenyans are supposed to pull me into a 15:59 with in their quest to win 2x the race winnings of the Mombasa Marathon, gets too long. The pace, too fast, my tolerance for 5:08 miles, too brittle. I’ll just leave it at that. Anyone who reads race reports for a living or anyone who reads race reports during their fidiethousand “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” internet work breaks, knows that all shitty 5K writeups follow the same, Shakespearian thread: me go out hard, me hold on, enter climax, me die in tragedy with witty wannabe-writer quote. Me pray to make it big as writer since me suck as runner.

I’m no different. It didn’t happen today. I crossed in 16:22, dry heaved, and walked into the shade. The Kenyans were sitting there by now, sticks over sticks. They chatted quickly in excited Swahili, surely about grand times and how to spend $1000. I was in the shade with them, but only momentarily; I kept walking. I walked through the copse of trees, along a secret park path that you find only in large, dirty cities, where used condoms and crinkled, singed, tin foil for crack hits, lay wantonly discarded next to matresses of cardboard –where animals for humans chase corporal pleasure upon corporal pleasure at any cost.

I was on the other side of it all and I got the hell out of there. Fast.
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Bob Beamon

5th overall, 8 Cone Turaround Jolly Time Popcorn Run. 36:2X?

Freedom Freedom is getting up and leaving during the middle of the track awards ceremony. Everything was all jazz hands and gimcrack and so I left. I did my mandatory cheering. Shit, half the people out there pumping out 200s were sleeping when I was doing my part for god and country so what does it matter? It’s all good. It’s equal.

Their ambivalence to watch my 36 minutes of death matches my ambivalence to watch their 36 seconds of spandex and kick ass flash and bang: shock and awe. The division between sprinters and distance goobers is a chasm–an enormous Grand Canyon, perhaps similar to the irreparable racial divide. Neither side understands the other. I can’t make sense of their malarkey and always feel like my death ritual is so much more protracted than theirs; my marathon or 10k is an all-day Mormon service, their 200 is in-n’-out transubstantion, 5:30 Saturday mass Catholic-style!

There’s no hope and so I threw on my running shoes and I ran. I ran out of the stadium, away from the fakeness and the smiles, away from the microphones and the sliver-haired officials in wide-brimmed hats taking control and barking orders with their arm bands and their guns. Why do people in control need guns? I left the fancy spikes and the batons and the people doing drills on the grass that don’t matter worth a damn; what they do is ritual. What they do are motions and rites, things to make them comfortable–things to make them feel like their silly sequence yields to the speed, and begets glory and the fist-pumping PRs: good deeds leading to heaven and the promised land. In the end, it was all a facade, it was 90% genetics, 5% choices, and 5% good luck.

That’s a fact. It wasn’t the drills or the malarkey; it wasn’t. I left. I spotted a butte. Golden is famous for these things. They are the devil’s molars; they jut up from brown hills. They are eroded shells, hollow skeletons. Just as everything Boulder is mountains and streams, fancy people on mocha chai highs running everywhere looking good while sweating. Just as everything Denver is railroad tracks and ancient brick buildings, hastily constructed to sell tack a long time ago–now gutted and made way for avante garde bookstores and Brazilian restaurants. So too is everything Golden brown buttes and rough terrain, grassland and horse farms, Buffalo Bill buried six feet under, eroding himself into modern day America from Ponderosa wagon to supersize Humvee.

So I ran up a butte. It was a mile up. It reached the sky; it touched the clouds. I had to leave the trail. I had to walk away from Golden’s new civilization with its green lawns and swimming pools. I ran where I could. I walked when I had to. I pulled at hard roots and grabbed a hold of red rocks. I summited. I looked over it all: east lay Denver jutting up and artificial thrusting, west lay the West, the mountains, the Rockies. I was above it all. I was away. There were no trails at the top of this butte; there was only elk scat and cacti. I was above it all. The track was below me.

Everyone ran around it in their little world. Bob Beamon–the USCAA paid guest–handed out awards and made egotistical, indecipherable speeches still stuck in his moment 40 years ago when the planets aligned in the thin Mexico City air: God help him, he needs it.* Sprinters sprinted. Officials fired guns and pushed their official hats down tight on their heads. Birds flew over them and headed towards the suburbs below. The suburbs, where someone watered their lawn; where a truck delivered possessions to a house of possessions; where Sunday lazed on around a fake pool with a fake climate in an arid land. I looked down one last time and ran back down into Golden.

Freedom Again. Freedom means leaving the chicken dance. It means leaving the electric slide when everyone’s in a celebratory haze–when the guys are getting desperate and the girls walking away, when the clock is nearing midnight and hookups aren’t looking possible for anyone. It means stepping away from the party and walking into the night–being alone, embracing solitude and leaving the light. It means distancing yourself from the bullshit DJ with the fake, beautiful people around him clapping and laughing at the drunk jocko with the gelled hair, stressed Gap jeans and manblouse trying to do the macarena. It means being different and smiling at it all. A lightning storm was tearing up the Rockies. Heat lightning gave way to slender bolts striking the tops of dark shapes. Thunder appeared;by the time the rain came, I was about a mile away from the party. I was walking barefoot, holding my sandals which kept sticking to the rocks and slowing me down. I was watching it all and laughing at the cars zip by, hauling ass, going from roof to roof, shelter to shelter–missing it all, not grabbing the wet pine needles and biting on them, not injesting their acidic, pungent taste while getting drenched.

These are those who aren’t living life; these are those who are refusing to get grit in their mouths and walk lonely roads in a rainstorm. These are the people who chicken dance and electric slide from building to building, from shelter to shelter as fast as their plastic car can drive. These are the ones missing the world, hiding and seeking shelter–conforming, oblivious to that gem on the mountain: freedom.
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*My three seconds with Bob Beamon.

Me: Mr. Beamon, I’m honored to meet you. I’m amazed your OR still holds. You are a true inspiration.

BB: Thanks.

Me: I’m glad you are championing the fight against child obesity.

BB: Thanks.

Me: I also like the fact….. (BB leaves during my mid-sentence to go eat lunch or something more pressing. He just leaves.)

That was my involvement with Bob Beamon. And so he exits stage left from my life. Good bye, Bob
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2nd overall. 12th annual Race Against Time. 5k. 16:33.

Here’s how the race went down. Upon stepping foot outside to walk my dog, I realized it was going to be a gray, morbid winter’s day. The weather was changing as evidenced by the movement of clouds, rain, and dropping temperatures. Accordingly, I went to turn on my computer and drop in some Morrissey on the Shuffle to provide a depressing backdrop to the gloomy day. My computer flashed the blue screen of death; I then rebooted it and found the words that send your heart into your throat: “Drive unreadable. Press control alt del to reboot.” It’s toast. I suspect its the motherboard since the hard drive spins. If the hard drive is gone, then many precious digital pics of my dog and daughter as well as a new short story that I was working on are buried with it in the cyber graveyard in a grave dug by Chinese slave labor hired by Michael Dell. What’s done is done. Nothing to do now but summon the ‘Geek Squad’ to drive up in their black and white Ghostbustermobile, pop 3 zits, rub their semen encrusted hands together, and go to town on my computer for $100 an hour.

So I drove into downtown Wilmington to the YMCA there. The building is pinched between a hospital and various banks. It’s out of place. I register and walk over to the course map. A man with a 1987 Boston Marathon jacket and the temple vein worms of a dedicated runner comes up to me. He’s spotted me tracing the route with my finger and offers his two cents, “That’s mile 1 to about 1.75. Pure uphill.” “Huh? I thought this course was flat?” “Who told you that? It’s nothing but hills. Up and down.” So I throw on all my warmup gear and head outside to jog.

Before I leave I spot a kid leaning against an ancient wooden, engraved lectern in the corner. The lectern appears to be property of the YMCA when they did more lecturing and less tolerating. The kid’s filling out his race form and mumbling the words to himself with his tongue sideways; he’s preaching to us before we sign up for the fool’s crusade. Odd. There’s nowhere to warm up. The building is an island between thousands of cars enroute to buy Corbel and party on. So I just do 200m circuits listening to Morrissey.

The song ‘Bengali in platforms’ comes on and it brings back the memory of Infantry Officer Basic School. My friend Bob and I were diehard Morrissey fans. One night we had to set up an ambush on a road. He was the M-60 gunner with ammo belts criss-crossed Rambo style; I was the assistant gunner responsible for carrying the gargantuan tripod which was 100 pounds of steel along with the extra ammunition in my rucksack. In a school that preached kill zones, the spirit of the bayonet, and the use of the word “Hooah!” at all times behind a constant backdrop of that oozing song, “I”m proud to be an American,” there were Bob and I. We traded the lyrics of a sexually ambiguous Englishman, Morrissey while digging in a squad machine gun position for an ambush. I’d throw out, “Oh no no..he does not want to depress you…Bengali in platforms…he only wants to embrrrrace your culture and to be your friend for ever….” Bob would look up from behind his Army issue birth control glasses with an entrenching tool in hand over his head and mutter the lyric from “Such a Little Thing Makes Such a Big Difference”…”There you go…wielding a bicycle chain!”

When the enemy sauntered into the the kill zone, Bob elbowed me awake muttering the lyric “do as I do and scrub your fey ways…grow up, be a man and close your mealy mouth…dial-a- cliche’!” He then proceeded to unleash the M-60’s blanks onto the scrambling enemy while smiling a devilsh grin behind the trigger screaming amid the muzzle flashes, “AND YOU’RE ALWAYS BUSY…REALLY BUSY..BUSY BUSY…HAIRDRESSER ON FIRE..ALL AROUND SLOANE SQUARE…HAIRDRESSER ON FIRE!!!!”

We were supposed to be singing Hank Williams Jr. and spitting tobacco thrusting our chests out like homophobic, Spartan roosters; we were supposed to be marrying Stepford wives and saying the right sycophantic drippings to Col Petraeus at his Xmas party.

We didn’t fit in. Now where was I? As I was basking in memory and getting ready to go really fast for 16 minutes I crossed the road and came across a graveyard with a sign reading “Plots available.” Ancient tombstones popped up in all angles, out of whack, uneven, and forgotten. One such tombstone belonged to John McDonald. Born 1863. Dead by 1872 –2 years of Civil War, 7 more years of misery in Wilmington and then caught some incurable disease, robbed at 9 years old; left to push up his own tombstone as an act of defiance, unnoticed until now by some runner on New Year’s Eve contemplating his own mortality.

I strided the hell away from there and lined up for the start. It’s pictured here. The announcer tells us that the overall winners of the mens and womens Tucson marathon have graced us with their presence. I take off my Cossack hat and impale it on the fence’s wrought iron spike. Anything Cossack needs to be impaled. It’s how things are done over there in that vast expanse of Eurasisa. The bullhorn sounds and we are off. The first mile is mostly downhill. I’m in 3rd place behind the Tucson kid and some other guy. The Tucson kid cuts the first turn down the hill sloppy and out of control as if he’s going into the ground instead of rounding it out; he pulls up out of his dive just in time. We pass mile 1. 5:05. Right on track. Uphill. Big hill. I pass the 2nd place guy and try to maintain/gain on the kid. The hill hurts. We reach the summit at mile 2. 10:42 split. Yuck. The kid looks at me as he plows down the hill out of control again. He keeps looking back. He’s not just throwing a quick glance, he’s turning his head to 120 degrees, holding it in place and staring at me. Step. Step. Step. Look back. Stop looking at me! Bengali in platforms. Wielding a bicycle chhhhaiiin!!! My arms come out of form and dance akimbo at my sides. I’m running downhill, but my lungs ask for recovery.

That’s the scoop. Legs feel fast.! Fine. On fire. Let’s fucking go man! Lungs — dead, slow down, we’re toast. The kid looks back again and I start to gain on him. Someone going up the hill tells me, “go nail that guy.” I think about my distance coach in high school who told me to never look back when in the lead and so I never do. Looking back is for the insecure and the fading; it wastes energy. Can I get him? Is he really hurting? But he slips away. I mistakenly think that we have to run back uphill to the start, but I see the finish clock in the distance and I get one more stare from the winner expecting him to flip me off as he crosses the line.

I pass an old man going the other way. He’s got no shirt on and only wearing shorts and what appears to be a navy flash hood worn by guys in grainy, vintage WW2 films pushing turret shells into the Bismark. I look up at the clock, see the 16:2x and shake my head. The end of the race is not an exclamation point — it’s an ellipsis. My legs expect to keep on going…. I’m in for 16:33 and get my pic taken with the 3rd place finisher who ran a 16:4X something at 42 years old. He asks me how old I am and then breaths a sigh of relief that I’m only 33. I don’t brief a sigh and wonder why the hell I get asked this question at every race. It must be my crows feet, Taliban teenager beard, and static madman hair. The gimcrack for my 2nd place showing is a sack with “Races to Run” ironed on it and a hug from Becky, a nice, 90 year-old running woman who reminds me of Ruth Gordon’s character in My Bodyguard.

Lessons:

1. Not a good time..slowest in a long while. I need more VO2 max workouts and desperately need to find fast runners to train with. Khatabi hasn’t returned my call and a friend put it this way to me, “Yeah, I’m a pretty good golfer…Tiger Woods didn’t return my call either.” The slow mileage has built leg strength, but I need to lay in more fast stuff even perhaps at the expense of miles.
2. Stomach hurts now in races. I know what’s going on. Need to address it.
3. Lose weight. Gotta hit 150s.
4. I won’t run another race until next year.
5. The winner ran a 2:28 at Tucson. So I need to be up with him not being looked at by him by the end of next year.
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2006 Miami Marathon

I’ve touched down amid bedlam. This is my first trip to Miami other than some distant change of planes in the 1970s enroute to the Larkin Brady Vacation. In a matter of ten minutes, I was lost –caught up in a foaming sea of humanity and carried to my resting spot — the waiting area for all inbound South American flights, left to watch sweaty men with thick hands and gold chains rattle off Spanish at 100mph while gnawing on toothpicks and fidgeting with oversized, decade-old cell phone bricks waiting for who knows what. I then spilled out onto the honking street and got caught up in the arrival entourage of a beaming African dictator. Suburbans appeared, and US Secret Service men, stone-faced behind Gargoyles, hopped out at either side. Their broad shoulders pulled tight the vents of their suits exposing Heckler and Koch MP5s at their waists and they threw me back into the sea of hands, Spanish, cheap cologne and squeaking luggage carts. Somehow I made it into a white van and arrived at a hotel in the middle of a gutting and sandwiched in between a Grand Theft Auto Golf Course and a zooming freeway full of angry Haitian cabdrivers firing patois broadsides back and forth between open windows.

I have no idea what my game plan is or how I’m going to run in this circus and need some time and a belly full of food found underneath those silver room service platters before I decide how to proceed in my last days of preparation.

Next day.

It’s probably best to account for today in time segments. Breakfast at 8am which entailed prying myself into an elevator chock full of Dutch and German tourists. I’m listening as they rattle off to each other completely unaware that the crazy American in the little booth with the Bosox cap smacking kaugummi understands alles. The tourists are typical tourists in foreign countries — overly nice, overly dressed, and completely confused.

I sit down for breakfast at my table and a German man with his wife approaches me not even trying English and asks me, “ist frei?” pointing to the 3 chairs at my table. Knowing the European way of seating is to sit wherever there’s space, I motion for him to have a seat. But the American way of Manifest Destiny, broad open spaces, and elbow room is ingrained in my head and it makes me pause for a moment and I consider telling him to wait for his piece of Oklahoma.

Then I nod again and blurt out some genuine rust water German, “Ja, Ja, Sie koennen hier setzen. Kein problem.” So after three cups of American coffee, we are old pals, kindred spirits, diplomatic examples of thawing German-American relations. My German’s not coming as well, but it got him to smile.

His wife tells me that my Deutsch, “ist, ja, also, OK.” “OK?” What happened to the days of being confused as a Dutch tourist or being narrowed down to the Kanton that I lived in? Gone. So to the buzz of the coffee, I’m reliving every conversation I had in Europe when I was 16. Yes, America is big. Yes, America is fat. Yes, America is busy, and fast, and consumes a lot. Yes, America is always building, expanding, and growing. Ja, Ja, Ja. I don’t debate or become nationalistic. It’s not worth it, and it just leads to walls.

I then went into my well-rehearsed spiel about German attention-to-detail, and industrial prowess. I took a class at West Point in technical German so I was getting into the wonders of the Wankelmotor nailing all the correct articles and modifying them when the nasty cases would come my way. Krupp coffee makers kick ass. BMWs rock. My first car was a VW bug with that wonderful air-cooled engine. Brilliance. Even the Krupp Rheinmetal 120mm turret on the Leopard 2 Main Battle Tank. I mean that thing was pristine. I actually fired one on a summer exchange. I hit the target head on; little recoil; Wunderbar! That one got a “wie bitte?” and I changed the subject. But I was on a roll and my friends were nodding and sipping. Schroeder’s gone, Bush has 2 years to go and the sun has started shining again over the Rhine.

11am I try to walk outside but the entire entrance is consumed with Dutch and German tourists wearing warm sweaters and thick pants engaged in animated conversation and I have to entschuldigung left and right to make it outside. The concierge tells me the best way to get downtown is to take a cab. The train ain’t worth it. I don’t want to take the train. So I take the train. The tri-rail train arrives 15 minutes late and hauls me at the clip of 5mph past endless metal shops.

Millions of latino men are hunched under the acetylene glow of millions of torches crafting God knows what. We continue to squeak on past garbage strewn hither and yon. Garbage is everywhere: cds, milk crates, McDonalds wrappers, old shoes, bottles, cans, ripped tarps, and blackened rotting piles of fruit in tattered brown paper bags. We squeak too slow. Get me the hell out of here. I change trains at some station in the wrong part of town. The ticket woman in the booth asks me why I got off the train. I shrug and get my ticket.

The opposing clocks on either side of the tracks both give the wrong time –American precision. I get on the next train and sit down next to a black man slumped in his seat yelling at decibel level 50 about his romantic liaisons and how much he charges for them. I’ve got Helmet on at decibel level 51 and I’m reading Tuchman. The slumped man raises his voice louder penetrating Helmet’s ‘Like I Care’ as well as Tuchman’s moving description of papal corruption and how the pious Templars hunted Slavic heathens as medieval target practice on their way to the Crusades.

So I look up and do what I do in uncomfortable situations such as these — I yawn.

“Oh, man….ya need juuuuice….gin n juice……juice it baBEEEEEE!!!! AINT THATA RIGHT BROTHA?” He’s looking at me.

“Yeah, juice works awesome.” I put my nose back in my book yawn again, and he smiles and slumps lower out of sight.

The train comes to the first downtown stop and I’m outta there. 1pm I get my bib and listen into many folks’ conversation about what it will be like to kill their first marathon. “What will it be like at mile 20?” “Should I take a GU every mile?” “What works for you when you hit the wall?” “Do you eat before the race?” “I just bought bodyglide, powerbars, and 10 GUs. I’m ready!” The ubiquitous Bart Yasso’s here and they announce his arrival quietly over the conference room speakers. I ironically pass him as this is going on and he’s looking down — temple worms wiggling and jiggling in deep thought about what to say to the virgin Privates heading into the front. I make one booth stop — the one put up by the Loco Running company.

I meet Mike, the co-founder and within seconds he’s got me into the Loco Bandito flats and I’m whipping out the credit card. $50? Insanely cheap. Mike’s all smiles and passion. This is a good company run by runners and I want to play a part. Sign me up. I’ve got the shirt.

2pm. Running outside. I thought this place was GTA Vice City, so I followed the angled tiers of the 50 story cruise ships East and expected to find that beach in the video game with the joggers and the rollerbabes. Instead I stumbled into a protest to free the Haitian priest Gerard Jean-Juste; I ran to the outside of the bullhorns and raised fists and stumbled upon a WWF exhibition down the block. Here, baseball-capped mullets in tattered flannel cutoff shirts are mingled with hands in pockets buying posters of flying steroid men and their entourage of lingerie-clad catfighters.

3pm. Back on the train. Instead of waiting at the station for an hour, I ran back to the hotel. Alison would be proud. I ran with a backpack and khaki cargo shorts. I ran past countless small, homogeneous homes — bars in the windows, Cuban men outside playing dominoes, viscous dogs chained and barking at me, and some visible form of green plastic sheathing propping up makeshift garages. Garbage everywhere. Run faster. Run aware and get the hell out of here. Someone calls this home. I paralleled the train tracks until they shot over a narrow bridge and my road turned into a Freeway with cab cars and bandannaed Haitian drivers. Decisions. I took the bridge and hopped the no-trespassing signs. I tripped on the trestle and cracked my knee good. The scab from the previous fall re-opened and drips of blood formed. Damn!

7pm. Company dinner. I sit next to Nick Gramsky and he tells me stories about the Trials. I’m the vicarious, jealous groupie asking him about the criterium layouts and the pace and who he rubbed elbows with. He debuted with a 2:20 in Chicago. He DEBUTED with a 2:20! He started next to Meb. MEB! 8pm. Writing a long-winded essay about an uneventful day.

9pm. Going to go to bed after a Seinfeld wakeup call check and an Airborne (I’m still in the sore throat phase of this cold). The winds are supposed to gust over 15mph. It’s supposed to be humid. This ain’t 2:29 material for me. I run horrible in the humidity. So I’m not going to blow my wad if the conditions aren’t there. I’m going in at 5:50-5:55 pace effort at first and see from there

The next day;

Shadenfreude, on the house! Having let the rich broth of lactic disgust stew for a day, and after a night strolling along South Beach observing lapdogs and narcissistic opulence, I am finally ready to write about my race. Why not put it into a quaint essay and pretend I’m happy and Mr.Witty?

At my company dinner the night before, I arranged a ride with Nick and a nice, young, married couple from Phoenix to the start. The night was sleepless and my throat scratched and forced me to toss, turn, and doubt. To boot, my knee throbbed. I had smacked it extremely hard against the tarred railroad trestle on that 40-minute Omega Man scramble across the barrio earlier in the day.

I doubted some more, pulled at it, coughed, and let the hours of the night tick by in true Ebenezer Scrooge style. Up at 3am and driving down to center city at 4. We’ve got a wonderful spot, arriving about 15 minutes before the 9000 people who thought 4:15 would do just fine. Always think when you need to leave for a major city marathon and then back it up 15 minutes and you will be golden. We sit down on the steps leading up to the American Airlines arena under a colossal banner of Shaq taking it to the hole and we talk about the race. I rub my knee continuously expecting that my fingers will zap the small, imagined fissures of the fracture shut and force the throbbing to cease. Go mind, go.

A DJ with pristine hair palmed a microphone with a bulbous, foam head and welcomed us with a fake, deep voice –exaggerating the excitement, and pumping us out of our sleep and meditation. He was educating us about the founding principals of the ING corporation. ING is quite the company; ING is YOUR company. ING is where YOUR money belongs. ING, Ing, InGGGGGG!!!!!

We drop our bags off, and then our fellowship breaks up and each person pursues a better path to that secret, empty, clean portalet that no one knows about, behind that secret corner that doesn’t exist. We shake hands and slap backs. No worries mates, we’ll make it. It’s all gooooood. I do some warm-ups strides and it’s a mess. The messiest of messes before a marathon. Not good.

My knee hurts at each extension; some pesky tendon refuses to strike bone elsewhere — how ignorant! My throat scratches and I feel the dead pockets of the stagnant humidity as I stride out a bit at marathon pace along the back lot of the arena where renegade men piss away cups of hotel water. The wind gusts suddenly, filling those pockets with briny air and I turn my head away imagining the first five miles of this horror. 10 minutes to the start and I hop the barricade into the seeded runner section.

I’m right at the starting line and stand next to a Japanese man wearing a 9000 bib # and a monstrous water bottle on his back. He’s snuck his way up to the starting line and he doesn’t belong. There’s always a sneaking Japanese tourist up at the starting lines of major marathons, so it’s no surprise to me. They want sneaky, stolen hubris and a candid picture with the big boys and girls. Some man with Don Imus’ hair gives his very best Jazz flute rendition of the Star Spangled Banner on the stage. Us zealous patriots have no flag to face and so we are turned every which way appearing like confused marionettes with hands stuck over our hearts. See, there’s a flag over yonder on that building! O! Say can you see?

Next, Frank Shorter hops up on stage and he’s right above me. He looks out into the crowd behind an aquiline nose wearing a full head of gray hair; he wishes us our best. I stare at him and picture the Frank Shorter of my imagination, ripping down tracks doing endless quarters repeats with a huge Mario Brothers’ mustache –looking back at the end– winning him some tragic Munich gold. He reaches down to get off the stage and flexes his legs to balance himself; he’s still got the canyons. Frank Shorter’s awesome.

Five minutes to go and the elites are released onto the starting line. They rush forward, popping legs back, high and crisp. Tall, lanky black Kenyans shake the hands of the diminutive Mexicans. No manties. The elite women don’t do much hand-shaking and instead bend down for final stretches and speak to their coaches while taking final swigs of drink concotions. Again, more of the same: Slavic, broad-shouldered women, skinny Asians, and a handful of aspiring Americans. The start is announced and we are off.

My goal is to hang with the elite women. I figure they are good for 2:35 pace and so I slip in behind them. We immediately climb a large bridge straight into the teeth of the wind. My wind recon. is spot on. The wind is right in our face. It’s a tough slog in the dark. The wind gusts up to 20 mph and we form a serpentine line.. The tallest of the women is the eventual Japanese winner and she’s only 5′7 or so which means that I get a nice vista of slumbering cruise ships and 4 inches of pure headwind. First mile in 6:10 which feels like 5:50. The first 5 miles are all causeway and all headwind.

The miles don’t come fast; they are paid for. This early! I have to pay for miles this early? WTF man? I am on 6:00 average mile pace and feel myself breathing hard. At 5 we turn North, away from he wind as my recon predicted. It’s dark and we run along South Beach’s palm-lined roads. Drunk men with unbuttoned Gap club shirt sleeves and wild, still-gelled hair stagger out from pastel, art deco bars encouraging us with illogical phrases. “FREEEEEBIRRRRRD!!!!!” “RUN FORREST RUN!!!!!” “YOU CAN DO IT!! ALMOST THERE!”

I’m still with the elite women leaders and we quietly ignore it all zipping down the street and grabbing water at every stop. A battery powered golf cart contraption accompanies us filming it all in the dark.

At mile 7, the lead elite woman pack pulls away and I let them go. It’s mile 7 and I’m not feeling good. My knee pain has subsided, but I struggle taking in the thick, moist air. I’ve never had a bad mile come so early. Time for damage control. Miles 8 and 9 are crossing back into the city, running past mansions where slumbering 7-foot NBA players recline in bed with their multiple feminine concubines. No one is out and we finally get some quiet city running. We cross bridges with huge grates and I half expect to fall through and find the ultimate excuse to distance myself from a bad time. I’m running 5:55s now and see that I’m slightly under 6:00 pace by multiplying 6 times the mile marker and expecting to see the preceding number. I do this in all my marathons. For example, 6 x 9 = 54, so I look for 53 minutes at mile 9 and then divide the seconds by the miles to get an average 5ish pace. I’m no math major so I’m always messing this up; it’s caveman math at the primal level.

At mile 10 I pass two men who are struggling –one of which is from my rival corporate team. I actually feel strong at this part. Die GE die. Miles 11-13.1 are back into the wind as it channels down skyscrapers. I hit the half at 1:18:5X and shake my head. I’m starting to die and this time pulls me down further into the pit of despair. 2:29 is a complete joke. 2:39 will require tenacity, guts and a Stalingrad-esque siege. Stalingrad for a 2:39? Oh boy.

Miles 14-15 are forgotten except for the police officer who tells me that I have hit the ½ way mark at mile 15. Miles 16-18: slow, slow, slog. Someone tells me, “Welcome to the grove.” as she hands me a cup of Gatorade. Screw the Grove and tip the panhandle over and let the grease drip from the pan. By now I’ve abandoned the watch; I’ve abandoned my goals; I’ve dumped my fuel. I’m going to just finish the thing. I have to finish it. Some company flew me out here to finish it. There’s no pride in quitting. A name next to an embarrassing time is better than a DNF. Don’t DNF. Bad times can be excused away, but those that quit become extinct. Ain’t that right Charles Darwin? YEAAAAAA…Go Beagle. Uh huh. Evolution rocks. Others choose to DNF.

A Kenyan laughs on the side of the road, joking with some friends as if he’s walking to St. Patricks on his way to class. What’s so funny? Has Colm gone soft these days? I thought you needed that $7000? Stop your laughing and joking; finish the race. Live up to your reputation. Be a Kenyan. A Ukrainian DNF’s. His head is down and it conceals his nationality except for RAINE. He’s got a 5 mile walk of shame. At mile 20, I hear the slapping of light, fast feet behind me. I know who it is. He’s my mile 20 dinner guest right on time to the party. Nick slides along me and beams a comfortable smile, “How’s it going dude? Having fun?” “Awful man. I’m dying. My legs are shot.” “Yeah, your arms look tired. Hang in there. I’ll stick with you for a while.”

I then pull a Jack Hawkins from Bridge Over the River Kwai and lean on my crutch, look away and tell him to go on in my theatrical best. “No, don’t hold back here with me Nick, go. I’ll be fine. Don’t let me hold you back”

Nick, ever the gentleman: “Are you sure?”

I look down at my flailing shadow and nod my head and give it my best melodramatic Hawkins: “Yes, go on Nick. I’ll be fine here manning the radio with my Thai village women.”

So Nick blasts away into the horizon. He has run this race like a professional. He came into the race with no expectations, started it with a female friend trying to run sub 7s and then progressed away down to sub 6s like disciplined runners do. He said he’ll do a 2:40 and he does a 2:39.

At mile 21, I am at my very worst. I pull up next to another man who has also bonked and we do what countless running strangers do in countless marathons at mile 21 — we help each other out. He gets in behind me and follows me footstep for footstep as I cut the wind until mile 24 at which time I wave him forward and he pulls me along. We swing the gate round and round to the end. My feet are hot and deflated. I am too heavy for the Loco Banditos. Their minimalist cushioning weren’t made for my 170 pounds on the hot streets of Miami. They ache; my arches ache. I think I’m slapping them into a stress fracture? Here’s mile 25. The last mile comes and I’m passed by four runners. A dude from Iceland has manties on and I just laugh. Manties got me at the end.

I hear the DJ helmet hair and then turn the corner into the finish cringing at the 2:44 clicking into a 2:45 — the slowest marathon that I have run in over a year. I get announced. I’m from Exton. Yay for me. Someone drapes 20 pounds of wasted landfill metal over my neck and I get thrown into complete chaos. This is the absolute worst finish of all marathons I’ve run. I’m mixed in with 2:45 half marathoners and fight my way for air amidst the pig ears, GU cannister flasks and spandex.

Nick finds me we both shake our heads: “What a clusterf$ck.” Someone thrusts a steaming bowl of black beans and rice into my face and I take it for some reason but I need water. I need water! There’s no medical attention or tin foil capes. What a zoo. No one’s helping me. The pig ears are all smiles and I can’t-believe-I did-its.

I finally find some water and a quiet piece of backwater with Nick and we both shake our heads again, “this race blew man.” Thoughts and next steps:So true to my form is to write a posting seeking sympathy and empathy. Even truer is to drown myself in self pity and self-flagellation. The reader is half expecting me to don sackcloth and ashes and beat myself with my earbuds until I bleed lactate-saturated blood. I’m not doing that this time. I actually believe that I am in 2:29 shape. The greater sin in all this was laying an expectation that I could run a 2:29 in an Art Deco city with a potential for horrendous, unfavorable conditions. That being said, I still need to pick apart the race and search for the seeds of 2:29 lessons. And so, again, after a night of dwelling while watching street men with boa constrictors and parrots entertain blond supermodels with Chloe Paddington bags, I’ll take a stab at the pros and cons.

Pros:
- Wind recon. It was dead on. It was well worth superimposing crude, red arrows over Gary Francis Powers’ 1950 spy photo of Miami.
- I didn’t quit. I didn’t DNF. I stayed in the arena and I’m taking the arrows of my naysayers with a smile on my face. Keep sending me the Shadenfreude links. I love them.
- I adjusted my pace and goals when I saw the forecast and adjusted them again when I awoke to a sore throat and a sore knee.

Cons:

- Don’t experiment with new, minimalist shoes until I lose another 10 pounds.
- Initial expectations of a fast time on a pathetic course at a horrendous race while fighting some sinus onslaught.
- Some training holes to be discussed next. Training next steps: So what’s next? How do I need to adjust the sails to prepare for my next summit attempt? Looking at the gold-hooped earings, large shades, and $500 Kenneth Cole designer heels of the giddy women at the Clevelander yesterday triggered these thoughts:
- More speedwork. Nick shared gems with me. He trains under a real coach and unlike me, actually does things called workouts with people –good people..
- 20 milers. I’m breaking down at the end of my marathons. I’m not doing the long run. duh. - Progression in all things. Start slow and pick it up. Make the end feel like the beginning usually feels.
- Contemplate mile repeats starting at MP and progressing down to 4:59 range. Lap jog between. Contemplate them like a Buddhist monk contemplates Nirvana. Why so slow? Humidity, missing 20 milers, no periodization, winds, shoes.
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On the non-running side, South Beach Miami….what a place. Can you tell I fit in there? Good God. I wanted to GTA with a baseball bat the lapdogs, the shades, the million shops, the self-absorption, the beautiful people outside all the restaurants trying to get me to have dinner at 11pm, the man asking me under his breath if I wanted…shhhhh. ‘weeeeed’, the machismo latinos honking and whistling misogynist at the women wearing the hoop earrings and the pumps, and the white wannabe reggae band in the Pirates of the Carribean bar with the tired leopard skinned dancers . But leave the pastel art deco safehouses and keep the Clevelander with the ghost of Scarface in the corner seat speaking out of the side of his mouth waxing all righteous and say-hello-to-my-little-friendish. That part of Miami rocks.
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Menin Road.

1st overall. Delaware Smash 5k. 16:42.
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These words are going to fall mostly on blind eyes; I’m not happy with my race. I haven’t run this slow of a 5K in a while. With all the quarters and the long miles this is nothing short of a major disappointment for me. The blind aren’t reading this; those that are, you can relate and understand.

Here’s the rundown.

The damned wind returned today. I heard it whistling through the trees and whipping down the street as I rolled around my bed at 5 a.m. this morning. This damned wind! It’s been everywhere this year. It sits on my shoulders when I sleep and it comes back into my face when I race. Go away, ok? Today was nothing but a scramble and a blue haze. I did a lot of yelling; Josie yelled back. She was late to school and I was late to work. Socks were never right and pants were too cold. Her lunch had to be PB and J and her hair was as perfect as a raven’s nest.

I pushed my greenhouse-gas-hypocrite-mobile down the road at 1mph in the largest sea of humanity East of L.A. and North of Washington D.C. People are reading papers; women put makeup on while easing their VW’s forward; thick Pennsylvanian men with padded vests and large hats sit in impossibly large pickup trucks with American flags and contemporary “Remember the Maine”-equivalent stickers, picking their noses and pulling out large tufts of jet black nosehair.

My ipod plays and plays. The tape deck adapter is on the edge of collapse and hums and squeals as the plastic cogs reluctantly turn. Everyone’s ipod plays in their one-person bubble of peace and sanctity–a parking lot of individuality. It’s the American way. Leave us the fuck alone and let us all consume and drive to the same place at 1mph in our little ipod worlds; let us shuffle and shuffle until we get our music in harmony with how we perceive our life to be at the moment. It’s Manifest Destiny–2006 style.

Over there, a happy woman who just got engaged plods along in her Mini Cooper shuffling to Coldplay–something from the Parachutes album. Behind her, dad’s pushing his rusty minivan thinking of his MRI today and he wanders over to Johnny Cash–San Quentin Cash. Reznor’s way back in the line. He got a late start with a tumultuous morning and he gets shuffled over and over and over again….

At 4:30 or so I realize that it’s cold outside and have packed only a tee shirt and shorts for my race. So I visit the company store and buy a company sweatshirt from the jaded, company cashier who hums along to Christopher Cross’ song, “Sailing” while she rings me up. She tells me that her daughter’s getting married next weekend. She takes my credit card and tilts her head up to catch the refrain. She tells me how much she loves this song: “Sailing…Takes me away…to where I’ve always heard it could be….just a dream and the wind to carry me…and soon I will be free.”

I take my card back, nod, and walk out to my car. The $19.99 sticker still hangs delicately from my left shoulder. While driving down I-95 to Wilmington, I get into a very contemplative mood.

I’m near the end of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise when Amory is totally alone and completely disillusioned. His transformation from the selfish egotist to the poor ascetic is near complete and I stare up at the sky and think of the brilliance of the novel and the brilliance of its author. You must read it some day. You are a damn fool if you disagree with Fitzgerald. Because we can all think back to the times of our youth when our dreams were so big. Nothing was impossible. We could be anything wanted and do anything. We hadn’t been told ‘no’ yet; we hadn’t witnessed the fallibility of our heroes. Time was a large, incalculable number. Age and its inevitable conclusion, death, held its feet fast. Government worked. Religion–omnipresent in my upbringing–swiftly ordered everything into simple, repeatable, unquestioned dogma. Black drifted to the bottom; white always rose to the top under the infallible, magnetic laws of innocence.

I drove on and looked up at the sky. Today has been one meteorological oddity. I drove Josie through a blizzard on the way to school and by the afternoon, chilly, 30mph winds parted the skies giving way to sunshine and then quickly advanced hulking sections of thickening clouds across the horizon. Shafts of light protruded downward touching the rusting sections of industrial Delaware. To me, today, they represented instead beams and trusses shooting upward–barely holding the sky together; shaking and flickering under the weight of mortality; eventually giving way in a thundering crash as soon as the starter’s gun went off. These shafts, offset by the walls for clouds, reminded me of Paul Nash’s wonderful painting of a World War 1 trench moonscape, “Menin Road.”

I arrived. I parked and registered. I got my bib and sat in my car listening to some of my pre-race favorites in my little bubble. Yo La Tengo’s “Last Days of Disco” was perfect for me to catch the wave of the moment and ride it out to the starting line when everything explodes and the bong hits of peace give way to the lactic violence and clinging death of a race. A man with a traffic vest appeared at my window, shattering my little world. He rapped on the window with a tennis racquet and told me that I can’t park here.

Me: “Why not? It’s the bank. I can park in the bank lot, just not the steakhouse lot.”
Man: “Sir, this is the steakhouse lot.”
Me: “It is? Where’s the steakhouse?”
Man, gesturing with his tennis racquet at the sign in front of me, “Right THERE.”
Me: “I’m sorry.”

I then reparked and did a course recon. The course was an out and back that winds around some stadium on the waterfront. The waterfront contains a few Joe’s Crab Shacks (read: upper scale McDonalds chain restaurants with a few hidden microwaves in the back) that play Jimmy Buffet 24/7 from rusting speakers out on the deck. You are supposed to dream about blue skies, white beaches, and Margaritaville while you slurp oysters on the half shell. Instead, this place has a view of a cylindrical oil tank that is painted to look like the wetlands. The whole place has been preserved or envisioned or something by a man named Russell Peterson. his bronze statue, cast with him holding binoculars, stands near the start. I gaze at it and think of it as the Audubon equivalent of the West Point Patton statue. Free birds over here, dead Krauts over there.

The wind.

It whips up and blows in my face. Me to myself: “Hmm…wind blows West to East….running out…first mile…wind sheltered by Joe’s Crabshack….damn look at that fucking oil tank…what the hell are these people thinking!…Mile 1.5 past discount shops selling high-end kitsch that will end up in the basements of Legopeople in Legoland… and now into the teeth of the wind…worst part of the race…..around the AA baseball stadium with 1,000 seats occupied by probably 100 people during the height of the season…..mile 2, tailwind finally….mile 2.5 crosswind….sheltered again by the shack and there’s the tank again…hot damn..what the hell?….mile 3…home stretch…bouncy boardwalk…cruising.”

We saunter to the start at 6:30. The gun is a bullhorn emergency signal. It barely crackles and we are off. A thousand kids bumrush the start like they always do; they are those flushed squirrels from yesterday and they wave goodbye to me and another guy, Barry (eventual 2nd place finisher). Barry looks at me and laughs, “They’ll be coming back to us soon.”

Mile 1. 5:10. I’m in the lead. 5:10? This hurts. This feels fast. 5:10? This is going to be a long race. What the hell is going on? I am the quarters man (NOT). I expected an opening mile of 4:59. Damn. Mile 2. Into the wind and out of the wind. Turns here and turns there. I’m in the lead. 10:33. Mile 3. I’m really hurting. I don’t look back but I realize my lead is sufficient for the win so I ease off. Were I not honest, I’d now write that I just cruised in and called it a ‘training run.’

Bullshit.

I gave it all I had and I was spent at the finish. I had troubling issues nearing the finish that I care not write about (all above the belt). Barry rolls in about ten seconds behind and slaps me on the back. We shake hands and pose for the camera. He’ s an incredibly friendly guy who’s training for his first Ironman. We do our cooldown together and we are a typical bunch of serious runners with endorphins still surging; we are a coffee buzz and a constant chatterbox of everything from life to marathons. We finish our run just in time for the awards.

I hate the fucking spotlight. I nod, shake, and get my gimcrack–a clock and a tennis racquet– and step away. But I get called back for some more claps and a question by the race director: “Do you play tennis?” My mind races and correlates random, recent facts: tennis, disillusionment….BAUMER. I look down and smile, “No, I don’t play tennis. But my daughter does.”…my daughter. She isn’t jaded yet. She’s still dreaming. The world’s black and white to her; titans, heroes, yes–her dad–walk tall, confidently driving demons and monsters from her midst.

I leave and drive down 95 with the sun setting off to my left. Its rays are now barely holding on under the immense weight of the darkening sky. The sun finally gives in; night crashes down. I have to drop Josie’s bag off with her mom. I ring the doorbell and my daughter opens the door, “Hi Daddy! How did you do?” “Hey Josie. I got first place. I won you something.” I hand her the racquet. She smiles and palms it, holding it up in the air making imaginary volleys.

It’s hers now.
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1st overall. 13th Community Run 5k in Wilmington. 16:54.

I’m not upset at my time today. Anyone that wins two races within three days no matter how small the field or how ridiculous the competition and complains about times, deserves to be silenced from blogging forever. I’ll take my miniscule medal and my 16:54 and ease back tonight while pretending that I’m drinking Falernian wine instead of Barton and Guestier.

Excuses:

-Torrential downpours throughout the race.
-Flooded streets requiring triple jumps or M1 Abrams blitzkriegs when negotiating the seas for puddles.
-Complete pre-race apathy towards pretty much everything.
-Gusting winds all over the place.
-Racing on tired legs.
-Racing within a span of three days.
-Performing a 1200 on stage at the cemetery theater yesterday to a sellout crowd.
-Really easing off at the end just to enjoy things for once.
-one jelly donut 40 minutes before the race.

Rundown.

In other words, more words than seconds in the entire race. Therefore, pretty much more boring drivel about a non-event on a rainy day….

The wonderful weather of yesterday gave way to apocalyptic showers this morning. I like running in the rain so I wasn’t phased. But hearing the occasional moaning of the wind down the same streets at 5am forced me to shake my head and pound my pillow. I came close to bailing on it all together. It hit me when I was in Dunkn’ Donuts. I had my pre-race coffee in hand and when the Indian cashier with a few orb-like, golden pinky rings containing opaque stones asked me in a throaty manner, “What else wouullld you like?” I pretty much decided that I was done with racing for a while.

I looked up at the tray of donuts and under that yellow, artificial light of yet another food trough in generica, and decided to change paths and turn my ship back home. I ordered a jelly donut, walked outside and wolfed it down–one big ass bite. Traces of jelly and sugar fell onto my fugly, two-dollar store pants and I looked down for a moment staring at the coagulated lard thinking about opening miles, gimcrack, slower times and a solidifying reputation as a newly indoctrinated has-been or never was. I went on and considered all the better runners that will always be better, the complete silliness of this endeavor, and, most ominously–the foolish selfishness of it all. The selfishness, it bothers me sometimes–it really does.

Now back in my car at a red light listening to some tired, reshuffled tunes from Bowie when he was uncertain if he was a man or a woman or both… I wavered still. I kept hearing the plastic clacking of the turn signal and the swishing of the windshield wipers as they flung drops of water onto the rusted car with the illegal immigrant mushroom farmers beside me. I stared at my flats in the passenger seat with the deep red skid marks of the Upper Merion track streaked across their bottoms. I took a deep breath, wiped the Dunkin lard off my pants, and, at the last minute, I changed the direction of the turn signal.

I was in.

The race was in downtown Wilmington–again. At the registration table, I handed my paperwork to the poor race director who was doing just about everything herself. She quickly wrote my name down on my bib and thrust it out without looking at me. I was registered with a name that contained an impossible permutation and combination of letters–one that has never been tried in 33 years of Duncan misspellings. This was a PR of sorts for me. I was renamed, reborn, cast into a new mold; I was now ‘Dahnkan Larkin.’

Some group of state trooper new cadets were here to run the race. They marched in formation up to the registration table and their platoon leader desperately tried to give them oddball drill commands such that their registration would appear as a one crisp, martial performance. They were neophyte State Troopers acting as if they were Pickett’s men forming ranks to walk across vast fields into the teeth of thundering cannon on a hot July day a long time ago. How odd. I haven’t come close to a marching in formation in a while and so I took it all in as a casual observer becoming instantly critical. Having marched in Clinton’s Inaugural Parade and having spent probably 1/3 of my college years either practicing drill or parading for dictators or withered, insignificant men, I consider myself proficient in the ins and outs of marching. I still know how to form a platoon, dress their ranks, and get them from point A to point B. In fact, I used to march Josie around the house. She liked it for about as long as I did–one day. As I watched them, I thought: “Man, look at this guy, he’s out of step! That whole fucking rank is hosed; what a damn disgrace. Holy shit, you call that a dress-right-dress? Your elbow…you call that a 45-degree angle? What was that command you gave? No such command exists. Von Steuben didn’t write that one. Try again.” Their ranks contained mostly men with shaved heads and nervous glances; they stood at attention and gave the race director “yes ma’ams” and “no ma’ams” as they crisply executed their signatures–one hand signing, the other still in the cupped position of attention at their sides. Their bodies formed perfect 90-degree angles as they signed. A squared plus B squared equals fucking neophyte state trooper’s C squared; their feet, clad in the same State-issue running shoes, were wedged together and themselves formed smaller 45-degree angles. What for?

The platoon reformed–with erroneous commands–and marched off into the distance to go warm up in unison and to run in unison. I guess it’s more rites of passage for unsuspecting idealists. We all sauntered over to the start and some guy from some charity gave some speech while we all held our hands together and looked down not really paying much attention because about 1000 buckets of water were being dumped on us.

The same crackling bullhorn from the other day announced the same start from the same cone. No one went out at any semblance of a pace and so I immediately broke ranks and shot forward into the lead. The same policeman on the same motorcycle led me along. His cycle had a tall, thin pole in the back and a flashing siren sat on top of it. It reminded me of a boat light–the kind you see flashing in harbors; I was being led out sea again.

The policeman would flick his siren every once in a while to remind no one on the streets that a race that no one cares about in the middle of a driving rainstorm in some park was going on. 5:15 opening mile with the 2nd half into a wall of rain and wind–across bridges and paths, skipping over puddles, hopping over slick metal grates. My T4s have very little traction and so it was more ballet than running at first. 10:36 mile two. There was no one behind me. My tired feet crashed through the puddles now, sending walls of water up over sidewalks where no one walked. The course was a figure eight so the cop and myself just turned and moved–turn, move, turn, move–speed up, turn, jump, speed up, turn…. The finish was anticlimactic; it was a slow slog following the boat back to the harbor. Once into the chute, the race director tore my number off and her only helper yelled out my finishing time.

I was handed a banana and I sat in my truck while I waited for the bauble festival. A man with short hair came up to me and congratulated me, “Good job man! Hey, are you in the Army?” I looked down and noticed that I was wearing my olive drab Army shirt from a long time and a lifetime ago.

I connected the dots, “Yeah. A long time ago. ..a really, really long time ago.”

He’s in the National Guard; he quizzed me on my life and this and that and then offered me a parting comment: “You know you should think about getting back in. We could use you in the Guard.”

I’m usually a shy guy that avoids eye contact–especially after a race. But this time, I looked a stranger dead in the eye, “I’m not interested. Thanks.”

“Are you sure? You could run on our National Guard team!”

Dead in the eyes again, “I’m not interested. Thanks.” I was thrown a rescue line–the bauble festival was kicking off. I got my gewgaw: a small medal–and then respectfully waited for the awards ceremony to end before I got the hell out of there.

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Epilogue. Something as verbose as this about pretty much nothing deserves an epilogue. I hope this is better than reading about someone winning a non-race and all his quirky idiocy. On the other side of the racing results today, over there, in the dusty part of the bookshelf, bolstering up the happy joggers and the swish-swish walkers, is a woman that deserves mention. Go back to the results and stop reading the #1 or the #2, or #3 spot. Take your damn mouse and scroll to the bottom. Go to #58. Becky is at every one of these races; she is 87 years-old.

When she arrived at the finish, everyone stopped what they were doing. Cadet Trooper quickly formed his ragtag Confederate Army and did probably one thing that a platoon of marching people is good for these days–he formed an honor guard. Becky–every bit of her aged frame, every tendon, every sinew–courage and determination. She was Karnazes turned upside down; she was demonstrated humility; she was raw strength and a reminder that yes, we will age, but we will never, ever lose our spirit. She gave power to the last and she took power away from us, the selfish first.

The rain fell and the guard marched along. Becky crossed the line and threw her arms up into the air–probably the same arms that have been thrown a thousand times in dead last place across thousands of finish lines–probably the same happy arms that raised a bouquet at her wedding. Yes, probably even the same sad arms that were raised, questioning skyward, on the casket of a husband or a son. Becky moved all of us into silence. Perhaps the race wasn’t wasted. Perhaps, like many races or events in my life, there was a purpose to watch the humility of the last break the tape before the fleeting vanity of the first.

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Penn Relays

Penn Relays. After the 9.75 mile run on Friday, I laid my forehead on my desk and contemplated it all; I was beat–perhaps 50% nerves, 50% real malaise. I forgot about the nervous lethargy that hits you hours before a track meet. Back in the REM Green days, pre-race ritual was more yawn, less strider; more laying on the hard plastic bus bench feeling the hum of the tires wishing it all could hurry up and be a quaint college application bullet and less bobbing head to NWA and 2LIVECREW in the walkman. I carpooled with a friend in his 1990-something beater car listening to Bob Seger’s “Nightmoves” on some crackling AM station while we rolled through rough sections of Philadelphia with giant banners of black heroes immaculately painted on the brick sides of the early 20th Century buildings with their brilliant spires and their gables.

My car mate was running on the A team 800 and I was the B team 1600. The nervous conversation was all selfish 400 splits, almost as if we were talking to ourselves:

“66s and I’m dead.”

“72s….gotta nail 72s.”

“64…if I even run a 64, it’s over. I got to hit 68 that first lap.”

“69….can tolerate that maybe, an opening 69, but 66…I’m toast. God I feel like shit man.”

Seger now, rough and ready as he always is: “WORKING ON MYSTERIES WITH OUT ANY CLUES…WORKING ON THE NIGHT MOVES….” No, it wasn’t Seger’s “Against the Wind.” That would have been too cliched.

We both shut up after the burst of fatalistic times and my friend pushed his beater car into increasing traffic from the relays. After parking in an impossible space and slamming the meter with quarters, we strolled up to the hulking mass that is Franklin Field. Built a long time ago, and probably spaded by Italian immigrant masons with thick moustaches and ten kids, Franklin Field is one towering mass of brick and mortar. Small pennants sat atop its steep spires and formed a tapestry of waving cloth.

At its base, we flashed our competitor badges to a disinterested security guard who performed a token search on the inside of one of my T-4s. Inside the gates now. Athletes, a disparate mixture of athletes–all runners–form on either side of us. Unintentionally, racially and distance-segregated masses of young men and women doing token warmups come and go.

Here, a clear group of white distance men jogging together; their hair all long, curly and unkempt, very 1970s-chic; their arms, rail thin; they are all perfected samples of lean body mass. They are white pictures of Iliac crests in Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs. There, on the other side, black sprinters in warm-up sweats–the flashing gold of their chains contrasting with their white, serpentine earbud cords–pumping their arms and legs in place. An enormous, out-of-place Army recruiting RV, reminiscent of the Urban Assault Vehicle in Stripes, is parked in the background of all this; it sits next to a gigantic blow-up Marine that wears a drill instructor hat. He’s flexing his muscles for no one. We enter the stadium through brick arches and up high stairs.

Shafts of light from the setting Friday sun form perfectly straight orange lines through the last set of the arches that lead out into the seats. I’m temporarily blinded by these rays and only hear the roar of the spectators as I feel my way out into it all….more roaring now, muffled announcers voice, followed by the crunch of fast spikes digging on rubber track.

Below me, a long line of men with their college singlets pound it out around turn 4. The track surface itself looks older than I imagined; it’s got inside lanes that are separated by a metal rail on the inside and a steeplechase obstacle with dirty, standing water on the outside lane. Men with cheesy red jackets, ties, and out-of-place baseball caps sit above it all in some watchtower carrying clipboards and acting official. A flashing screen behind them tells us the heat, the schools and the lane assignments as well as the times. Watching the watchers, watching all of us, sits an enormous castle for a building that cuts the stadium in a quarter. It’s very Ivy League–almost Oxford, but not quite.

Everyone else on the team wants to warmup; everyone’s excited and chipper. But I’m so very 1989-bus ride; despite the sun, I’m cold and so I put on my monk jacket and curl up into a ball up near the top of the stands–away from it all. Some girl just got passed in the 4 x 400 relay and so the stadium makes one large bullfrog sound: WHHHHHOOOOOP……WHOOOOOOOPPPPP!!!!! I forgot about these track antics; track meets even in the late 80s had some yell or expression to denote some silly event. The midfields were always circles of boys–white and black–yelling out “YO MAMA’S SO OLD THAT….”-cutdowns followed by the water balloon wars across the inside lanes as we ran our 8 laps. So the WHOOOP and the primal dances really don’t surprise me as much as it does others I suppose. More heats, more Whooping….more red-hatted old white men with hemorrhoids and power trips…

It’s our turn.

We pick up our bags and head down to the paddock area which is nothing but an alleyway of nervous energy guarded by a red jacketed man with a clipboard and a broad mustache. Mini water bottles litter the ground, as do clumps of hats, shirts, sweats and bags. Racers are all lined up in a sequential order and we form some sort of papal conclave of uniformed silliness. We enter, lay down our things and then exit and run across the street to do warmups on the adjacent U. Penn campus.

To the shock of my team, I don’t warmup and my two striders are more a contemplative Capuchin monk with hands still in my jacket’s pockets than a burst of explosive energy. I’ve got cottonmouth–another one of those things I forgot from the Green album days. Time to go! We run together back to the paddock and form up with the other corporate teams in a line. The red jackets scream out orders: “LEAD OFF LEGS….LETS GO! LEAVE YOUR SWEATS IN THE PADDOCK AREA!” We are waves of nervousness; I can’t help but compare it all to standing in a jump door of a plane. The guys up front near the door, those poor bastards, they are so close to it all. I’m back here….I got some more time. Whew.

My mouth crackles and my tongue has swollen with my nervousness. The smell of someone’s Ben Gay permeates my nose as I adjust my uniform and slap a large “N” on my left hip; I’m the anchor for the ‘N’ team. “OKAY…ANCHOR LEGS….LETS GO…MOVE FORWARD!” It’s a blur and before I know it I have the baton and begin to move out on the track. I pump my arms and look up at an empty stadium; the sun has set below the edges of the stadium and the shadows have come to bathe us all in darkness at certain turns.

The run is boring. I realize it’s slow and I just hope to not get passed and don’t expect to pass the GE guy ahead of me, because I recognize him as a damn good runner. “GO DUNCAN!!” echoes at the corners of all my turns…..lactic acid…..iron taste…..hitting that damned inside rail with my feet a couple times….here comes the END! Hands go to my knees and I heave in the dark air.

I move up next to the GE guy in the same position and ask him what he had for a time. He shrugs, “4:40 something?” (I was clocked at a 4:49 with a 69-second opening lap) There’s something in the air –pollution or pollen or both. It sticks to all of our lungs and fills our alveoli; it causes the entire field to heave and hack in the gloaming; we are this as we stumble our way up to the awards ceremony.

The ceremony is inside that castle that overlooks the field; it’s upstairs in some ornate, wood-paneled room donated by tree-rings for now dead, once-rich alumni. Ancient guys in 3-point stances and leathern helmets stare back at us from behind portraits and dusty plaques. We throw our stuff at the feet of one of these pictures; it’s a walrus-mustachioed man who died a hero in some forgotten war. His calvary sabers are crossed below his face and his real medals surround his chest; he gazes out at us through the fog of ignored dust.

I sometimes feel like I’m the only guy that sees these things. He’s clear to me and I stare at his medals: Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star with ‘V’ device. Damn fine job. Real gimcrack, I suppose. Enormous, open windows display the panorama of a now-dark, now-quiet track. The entire room is almost Oxford and Cambridge, but again, it falls short–the culprit this time, are the plastic cups, crunchy ice, and diet Pepsi drinks, served by a tired woman in a tee shirt.

I go up and congratulate Ryan who really ran a super closing race, on very tired legs, to win it all for Raytheon. One of the red jackets then appears; he gives a rather lengthy speech about the glory of corporate competition and then hands out awards to people holding paper plates with cubes of Swiss cheese and stalks of lettuce. Corporate DMR gimcrack ceremonies at the Penn Relays are a bit more fancy than a Barney Fife 5K, but not by much.

In the end it’s always the same operatic theme: food on flimsy plates, impatience, shitty speeches, and greedy hands. At its conclusion, my team makes a beeline for a bar. By now the atmosphere of the relays has substantially changed. The fans, flashy black sprinters, and gangly, curly-haired distance white boys with the model Iliac crests, are long gone.

U. Penn students–one gigantic crowd of over-achieving, application-embellishing, “society”-quoting High School presidents– are now spilled out into the street wearing their backpacks and discussing intellectual things while making intellectual laughs. We find a tavern and recline at table in its loud basement next to a table with red-faced college men wearing backwards baseball caps.

We all order greasy food and drink warm beer from wet glasses, raising them in a toast to a good race and a damn fine day.