It’s rare indeed that I run a race with headphones; the few times I’ve gone the musical accompaniment route is when I’m doing multiple loops on a course. But training runs are a different story. Runs during the week almost always involve me donning a pair of airline supplied freebie headphones and hitting “shuffle” on my long-since-discontinued iPod.
But this morning as I was heading out the door, I noticed my screen had a different message than usual:
I had forgotten to charge it after almost a week’s worth of running here in Santa Fe… and who remembers how many runs before that. It’s an all too common mistake for me. Far worse is when I forget to plug in my GPS watch before a race and run timer-less.
Today then I ran without headphones and just listened to the sounds of Santa Fe. Heading to the bike path route I’ve grown accustomed to running, the roadworks continue, the sidewalks being ripped up to make way for… more construction? I’m not entirely sure why the sidewalks are being ripped apart as they repave the roads. In any case, I soon found myself on the bike path with nothing more than the rustling, whistling winds, and the occasional bark of a dog. My lumbering footfalls echoed, my labored breathing reverberated through my ears, the HItchcockian-era hotel key jimgle-jangled in my pocket. I realized as I slowly… ever so slowly I regret to say… made my way to my arbitrary turnaround point, that the sound of silence is not always silent. Goofy stray thoughts that meander across the plains of existence…
Ye gods, that’s pretentious.
The other thing I realized as I huffed and puffed my way along is that those San Fran photos are probably incredibly accurate depictions of me whilst running. I think I may have a pained, resting/running sour face. I try and smile and grab selfies along the way but I think when I’m not looking and actively trying to get a smile plastered on my mug, I must look as awful as those photos imply. I’m not advocating I dunk my head in a vat of Acme Chemical Acids, a la the Joker in Batman, but I do kinda wish I had a less sourpuss visage as I ran. There are clinics for proper running form… I wonder if there are clinics for proper smiling form? I could join a modeling academy… though somehow I don’t think I’d pass the admissions interview.
The title of this entry is the Call of the Wild and the tertiary reason for this is that as I got back to the hotel I reflected on the aches and pains of the morning. My ankle wasn’t an issue but the bottom of my foot felt like there it had a large cement core. Were I a princess lying on a mattress, I’d detect the pea no doubt. But the “pain” or at least weird aching sensation of that knot in the foot’s base had me thinking oddly of Jack London. At least, I think it’s Jack London. I have this vague recollection of being in a seventh grade English class reading something about a northern wilderness lad who had fallen into a freezing lake. He was injured – maybe his leg was hurt or his shoulder? Anyway, in the narrator’s experience the brain can only so much pain at any one time; as a result, he bites his tongue so that the pain there is so acute that the brain is fooled into ignoring the pain in his leg or shoulder and he can swim to shore. Maybe it’s another London story – To Build a Fire? Or maybe it’s somewhere in the Davy Crockett legends, he of “Killed Himself a B’ar When He Was Only Three?” Whatever the case, I thought about the mental capacity for pain with regards to my ankle. Maybe the “pea” in my shoe was covering the ankle, knee, and top of foot aches of the past few days. Maybe what I should do before next weekend’s marathon is stub my toe… or actually drop a bowling ball on my foot. Ya know, for science’s sake? This of course would break the cardinal rule of avoiding doing anything new on race day. I suppose I could do a practice run with a bowling ball… hmmm… the mind boggles.
See what happens when I don’t run with music during non-race days? I hear the call… the call of the wild and crazy.
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END NOTE: I’ve been struggling with the entries the last few days… hell, for the last few months I suppose. They’ve been very rambling and stream of consciousness… but perhaps that’s indicative of the running I’ve been doing as well. There’s challenges ahead, fun races and experiences, but I’m currently sorta goal-less. Oh, sure there’s the ongoing “Road To…” Marathon Series quest. And I’ve got just fun one-off events in weird, far-flung, and/or bucket list locales. But there are times of late that I’m feeling like Alexander.
When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
— Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988)… some claim it’s Milton, some Plutarch, but really – it’s Hans.
There are of course many worlds to conquer. It is not as if I have done everything. Off the top of my head, I’d love to run the Athens Marathon, and there are more than a few other international races I’m itching to toe the line at. However, I’m feeling a bit… unfocused. I’m still trying to cut back on the quantity of races next year, instead focusing on quality experiences… and yet here I am contemplating running a seven day series at year’s end. I’m a contradiction, an inconsistent pinball bouncing round and round but not bound by the laws of physics.
These posts are indicative of the fuzzy, out-of-phase mindset I find myself in of late. They’ve been sloppy and erratic, lumbering, as has been my running in general. There’s not a problem per se but there is a lingering sense of, “huh… something’s not quite right…”
On the plus side, my iPod has a full charge once again. Would that we humans could recharge to 100% so easily.
