Archives for May 2013

Tarmac Meditations #124: Comin’ Father’s Day

May 26, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

As she ran by me at mile 18 of the McDonald Forest 50K she seemed pretty happy. I noticed a Chinese ideogram tattoo on her shoulder. I asked her what it meant. She smiled and said ‘father”, very quietly.

She turned and headed down the trail.

At the finish line I asked one of the volunteers why some people were finishing backwards. They told me the story of a man who had run a 5k backwards, who had died after crossing the finish line at Mac 10 years ago, who was being honored by those who remembered by their own finishing backwards. I finally put it together when I saw this at the finish.

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Tarmac Meditations #123: Love Poem #38

May 19, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

Written over many years, this piece came back to me this morning. I thought that I wanted to run but it turned out that I needed to write.

Love Poem #38

Up here on the north coast there are many days when all there is to see is distance and rain.

It’s hard to know why it began or how it should have played out. Why it ended the way it did. After a few months there was nothing left.

Before I left the island the last time I walked on our favorite beach. I remembered that someone once said they were here to make some preliminary arrangements for the apocalypse.

Maybe they watched the sunset fires light up the rain or tracked the eagles soaring on ancient thermals. Maybe they came in time for the late afternoon calm and skipped rounded grey blue stones, counting the bounces out loud, remembering simpler times. My guess is that they did all of these things and then went back to from where they came, lighter, maybe sad, finally ready to move on.

The rocks revealed traces of our dreams.

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Tarmac Meditations #122: Ripples

May 12, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Thinkin’ about Dennis Aslett, a former Marine I met in Idaho a year and a half ago and saw again last October. Before he ran the 100 miles in front of him, we talked long about how he rode a 50cal north of Danang and I rode the steel rail west to Vancouver, about how choices last a lifetime, about how we got it wrong, each in our own way, about how we got it right, about how the truth was that if you make peace not war then love will follow so long as you stay in, stay steady, stay alive.

Shooting a 50k in the woods come Saturday I’ll be keepin’ it real for myself and for those who are “out there”. I’ll be done when they are. All I can do is the best I’ve got and most days it seems to work out. People ask me why I stay all the way to the end, shoot images of every runner and I tell ‘em something like “it’s my job” or some other non-answer. I stay because until every one of them comes in “we” have people “out there” and we leave no one behind. It is not military or fake heroics; it is built into the fabric of ultra running. I’m privileged to be a part of it.

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