Tarmac Meditations

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Ancient Footprints

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Originally Published by Marathon&Beyond 2008-reprinted with the permission.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…” Theodore Roosevelt

I heard Bob Dylan’s lines, “The streets of Rome/ are filled with rubble/ ancient footprints everywhere…” when I was a young man , maybe I was seventeen. Even so, I thought I knew what he meant. I have loved that line ever since with its implication that things past are here with us in the present, that we are informed by, driven by, the daily creation of our own lives, our own art.
I was fourteen when I saw my first marathon. I watched it on an old black and white Dumont TV, in the dining room of the house where I grew up. I was idly watching the 1960 Olympics in Rome, wasting time, chillin’ you might say, when I came upon the marathon. The race was run at 5:30 in the evening to lessen the effects of the heat of the day during the Roman summer. The organizers lit the route with hundreds of torches. Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian policeman, a palace guard in the service of the Emperor Haile Selassie, won while running in his bare feet. I remember the black and white screen, the light of torchbearers beside the road, the barefoot African running past the ruins of the Coliseum, arms low by his side, running easily, relentlessly. He seemed in my youthful imagination to be like the sirocco wind I had read about, bringing the sense of the desert into the dimly lit dining room, cleansing the earth and sky, leaving a hint of stories past, of dreams and glory, escape, of the seductive mystery of some other place.

I also remember that in my confused teenage night (weren’t we all confused in those years) I began to dream that I would go to Rome. Maybe I would get there for the marathon as an event, or maybe it was just an idea, an attitude I was after. I imagined me cruising past the Coliseum, free and running easy, everything that troubled me in the rear view mirror.

It seems this early morning that it will come to pass, that with Dylan’s lines in my head, his song on the IPod, I will line up after sunrise, to run a marathon through the streets of Rome.

Bikila’s accomplishments are legendary. He won 12 out of the 14 marathons he ran. He was the first African to win gold at a modern Olympics, the first to repeat a marathon victory in consecutive Olympics when he won in Tokyo. Even this morning, as I read the marathon magazine for tomorrow’s race, his name is included not only as the winner of the marathon all those years ago, but as a symbol of what the miles can come to represent for any of us, for all of us who put in the miles and show up on the day. He is a hero to this day in Ethiopia and wherever runners gather. For me this early morning he is still present, graceful, outlined in courage, glorious, unfathomable, a freeze frame carried forward from that long ago night.

It is a few hours before the race and I am slowly going into the place where I go before an event. It is a quiet place, sometimes sad, often melancholic, visited by the memories of what it has cost in miles, in obstacles overcome, in absent friends, in the time gone by to get here. There is a slow building of clarity of purpose, respect for the journey and a sense of connection to the people I have met along the way.

Eventually, as it must if one is to do this uncommon thing, it seems like everything that has come before is gone. That there is only now. I like what James Shapiro says in Meditations in the Breakdown Lane, his story of running across America, “Past life is gone, future life will never come, so there is only the doing.” he wrote. “I could talk for ten thousand years, but it wouldn’t carry me one inch closer.” For me that would be something about reading ten thousand running books or training programs (are there that many?), but with Shapiro, it brings me not one inch closer.

I open the patio doors in the hotel room and watch night sky slowly fade. There is mist in the trees, the seven hills are stark in the distance, the streets oddly quiet for a city that rarely sleeps. There is the smell of bread baking and the far off sounds of barking dogs. So many hours to go before the run. I’ve laid out my clothes, checked all the pockets in my Race Readies for goo and the requisite Ibuprofen. I’ve done it ten times tonight, twenty. It is way too early to call my friends who will be running the race with me, or more accurately, at the same time. I can’t figure out the time difference from Rome to Ottawa where my daughter is, so I can’t call her nor can I call my son who is playing poker in Vegas. So, now it is time to put on my headphones, dial up Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, drink some espresso prepared by the gracious night porter and get inside what’s coming. Bob and Eric and I are getting it together, “…knockin’ on heaven’s door”. I have never figured out why that song or the ritual but I guess I don’t have to.

The race begins at 9:00 AM, which is normally too late in the day for me to start a long run. My habit is to be out before daylight and run into the sunrise. I go down to the hotel lobby after several hours of sky watching, and begin to pace. I talk with Jeremy and Julie who are still up; with Erin’s brother Anthony, who will run the race in a time of four hours. Together we watch as the support crew begins to filter in. John and Ginger, Kristi and Erin, the various Susan’s, Tom and Louise who are parents to several of the group, all here for the trip to Rome;their first to Europe, here for the sights and sounds and later for the food and wine of Tuscany, but before all that, here for the marathon support thing.

Mark and Erin, with whom I shared the Avenue of the Giants and so much more, Aura and Judith, Team in Training alumni, Anthony and I take a couple of cabs to the start. The city is deserted, the streets empty, resonant. The locals say that it is the only time, the best time, to see Rome; on marathon day when the center is closed for the race. It is still dark when we arrive at the starting area at the Coliseum. Unbelievable, the Coliseum, the Forum in the distance, runners slowly gathering, the sun rising fiery over the ancient walls and of course, the blue porta potties. This being Europe, there is also a low level wall where apparently it is required that all men pee in some nod to tradition or, more likely, the fact that there are not very many porta potties.

The organization seemed quirky, the staging area separated from the course in a serpentine gate system, the buses for the bags parked in a long line, men to the front, women way to the back, protected from the crowd by a long fence. It all works out, runners figuring out, as they always do, what they need, but it is very different from the sometimes obessional organization of US events. The race began with hand waving and shouting, cheering sections from the roadway above; 10, 000 runners, we are off to circle the Coliseum and into the town. I knew almost immediately that this wasn’t my day. The foot pain that has become a neuroma and which normally holds off until twenty plus miles started in by the end of mile one. Between the cobblestones, the heat and the extra weight I am doomed, it seems, to forever carry (sigh) the pain becomes a constant companion.

I swore to myself after the run at Avenue of the Giants last May, that I would not run a city marathon ever again. Something about the trees going all the way to heaven and the silence that surrounds every footfall in the deep forest. But here I am in the ancient/modern streets of Rome, where there are buildings are as old as the redwoods I ran through and the silence is in cobblestone roadways underfoot. The sightlines, some unchanged since Caesar’s armies marched through the hills to the city, are riveting, breathtaking. For centuries the soldiers came, bearing news of victories in far off lands, telling tales of great valor and lost heroes, of comrades left in foreign soil, Pax Romana, Rome the eternal. After the conquering heroes came the vanquished armies running from the Goths and the Mongolian Khans, the decadent centuries, Constantine and the burgeoning church, the marauding crusaders, the Knights Templar, the relentless pursuit of art and commerce, DaVinci, Caravaggio, the Borgias, and later, Mussolini, the Sixth Army, pizza and eventually, Abebe Bikila. Everywhere along the route are the remnants of that astonishing parade of days.

Brass bands in traditional Italian costume announce our passage as we circle the Coliseum. We head out past Michelangelo’s Campidiglio, an enormous plaza. Once the seat of government and religion in Rome, it is “one of the most significant contributions ever made in the history of urban planning. The hill’s importance as a sacred site in antiquity had been largely forgotten…” says one writer of the Campidiglio. Not so I think. The sacred feeling of it remains, palpable in the rising heat of the morning, backlit by the sun. On to the Circo Massimo, Circus Maximus, built in the time of the Etruscan kings, enlarged by the Romans, restored by Constantine and now a public garden, misted, glowing on this morning; peaceful now, where there were once 200,000 spectators watching the chariots race.

Past the gardens, then a turn up along the Tiber and past the Sinagoga. It was built in 1897-1904 by architects Asvaldo Armanni and Vincenzo Costa or so I am told by one the runners passing me by. Of more interest to me is that on the wall facing the Tiber the big memorial tablets remind one of the martyrdom of Roman Jews in Nazi concentration camps. So much blood in this city, not all of it ancient, but so much of it remembered, honored, part of the eternal struggle that has been waged here for the souls of men. My own struggle seems inconsequential, Quixotic, but even so, the continuing on is a part of the fabric of this city, a tiny part of the seeking out of what is best in me under the knowing gaze of those who came before.

We cross the river and wind our way past St Peter’s Basilica, past the Sistine Chapel, not yet filled with worshippers, empty, waiting, poignant with an ineffable sense of grace.
Down the streets and along the river, we run past the Foro Italico, a grand, imperial complex that survived Mussolini and became part of the Olympic Stadium Village. It is hotter now and the cobblestones have done their work. My foot which was uncomfortable in mile one is now very painful and my run walk strategy is not any longer a matter of choice. Run a little, walk until the pain subsides. Run some more.

At one of the water stops I feel a hand in my back, shoving me out of the way. I get furious in an instant and turn on the culprit, who it turns out is older than I am, speaks no English and has a delightful smile in the face of my unconscionable rage. This has never happened to me in a race before and it leaves me very uncomfortable. A little while later a couple of guys come up to me and by means of gesture and much effort at speaking English, tell me that it is nothing. That the old man didn’t mean anything by it, that he stumbled, that he is from Germany like they are and is running in Rome to get ready to run in America. In New York, they say. I apologize for my attitude, telling them I am from New York which causes much laughing especially when they tell the old man. All’s well and we run together for several miles.

By the half I have decided to quit, but I keep running anyway. Just to the next kilometer sign I say to myself. I’ll quit then. After a couple more “next kilometer” promises, I begin to realize that I love the kilometer signs since they come more quickly than the mile signs and it seems so much more impressive to have run 20 something rather than twelve something. This has become a long day.

The course heads back to the city center and we pass the Belle Arti, the Piazza Navona, and eventually we get to the Piazza di Spagna, home to Lord Byron and Keats. The Spanish Steps are crowded with tourists but no less inspiring for that. I remember, as I run by oh so slowly, going there the night before, the stairs awash in the moonlight, the crowds gone, the words beneath the stones for all time, there for the lovers and the dreamers of any time, of any age. The Sunday morning streets are overflowing with pedestrians who quite rightfully believe that Sunday is for espresso and fresh bread at the cafes, and then some sightseeing, some shopping. We, however, are still running. It is an odd feeling, somehow consistent, that in this most complex of places, life and sport are interwoven, not as metaphor but as “get out of my way, I’m running heah, can’t you see this is killing me”. The Trevi fountains are sparkling in the noon sun, mocking me with their tranquility,their ease. The crowds are lively and sometimes they even get out of the way. This is less of a problem if you are a front runner but if you are me, a back-of-the-pack runner; it has its moments to be sure.

Past the Campidiglio again and there we are a 35K. The road widens out and heads away from the Coliseum, a tease if ever there was one. Down the road, past the water stop when suddenly there are Kristi and Erin , water in hand, looking great, falling in step, saying all the right things. Across the way Mark is still running, his son Jeremy running alongside, taking pictures, being there. I don’t see Erin, Marks’s wife, but I am told that she is still moving, still running, still getting it done. Mark hurt his ankle before we got to Rome and this has been a hellacious day. I can see it from across the roadway. It is in his face, in his stride. He keeps going, the finish line just out of sight, the day belongs to those that stay in the arena, that contend, that do what they can with what they’ve got.

For reasons that are obvious to me if no one else, I can’t help but put Erin and Kristi into Leonard Cohen’s song, Sisters of Mercy, which begins with “The sisters of mercy are not departed or gone/ they were waiting for me/ when I thought that I just can’t go on…” and so it was at 35K and 36 and so on. I always thought that Cohen was saying that these strangers knew him, saw him clearly, that he was revealed to them, that he was set free by their knowledge of him, that all his artifice was gone. So it was for me, nothing left to hide, no ability to hide it, speaking things out loud better left unsaid, seeking absolution, a necessary part of the leaving behind, of the cleansing and clarity that all such effort brings. We are all of us revealed in the last miles of a marathon. Ask anyone who has stood at the finish and watched the faces of the finishers.

Down to the turn around and back to the Coliseum ever closer, 39K, 40, 41, and over the last rise and down the hill to home. Much of the crowd has dispersed but no matter. There are John and Ginger, soon to be married; hands full of drinks and food, smiles and something like admiration mixed with a sense of “what is wrong with you people” in their eyes. Tom and Louise are there, Tom’s white hair a compliment to a smile that gladdens my heart. The run is done, the finishers’ medal around my neck, the pain and soreness to come. But for now, briefly, there are private tears… it has been a long, long journey from the old black and white in the dining room, down so many wrong roads, past all the empty mornings, the desperate broken midnights; a life lived in addiction, despairing of hope, lost somewhere under a jagged rainbow, my own personal metaphor for the promise and the failure inside the journey to the marathon. All that is long gone; the boy inside the man has lived to run his far off dream.

The Rome Marathon was for me the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming of  both a way out and ultimately, of a way in. I knew again that day that in the running there is something that lives on levels well beyond my ability to articulate. It feels like connection. In the pain and beauty of the miles, both on race day and in the preparation, the continuity/community/ solitude of the journey dissolves the barriers between us as people. We look at the other runners and see everyone we ever knew, and beyond our imagining, on levels we rarely touch, we love them, we forgive them their sins, as we begin to forgive our own. We, each us, knows something of value about the other, something of what we have been through, possibly even what we dream of being. The run is solitary, the victory entirely personal, but the community exists in the effort put out, in the inhale of the moment, in the exhale of a million breaths, woven together in the light of the day. Our day. We have shared life itself in some intangible form as we endure. We overcome our worst fears as we embrace our greatest aspirations, the best parts of who we are. We are reassured of our place in the world and of our connection to the forces of the spirit that make us holy, that make us altogether human.

Running With the Road to Ruin Runners Club

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Originally Published by Marathon&Beyond October 2006-reprinted with the permission.

Running with the Road to Ruin Runners Club

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it. ” Antoine de St. Exupery

These days I run. I lost that for a long while, but now I run long and I train for marathons. Sometimes it’s a specific event and sometimes it’s just that falsely casual, vaguely pretentious “Oh yeah, I run marathons” thing. Many days I put on a Road to Ruin Runners Club (RRRC) hat and maybe a RRRC tee shirt over the Coolmax micro fiber and head out the door.

I ran the Napa Marathon a couple of months ago. I didn’t do very well. I hadn’t trained well enough because of a relentless flu and a fractious attitude. Despite the fog rising out of the darkened valley, shadowy arms and legs moving jerky in anticipation at the start, and eventually the slow fire sun rise over the eastern ridgeline, I dropped out at 16 miles, hallucinatory, overheated, dehydrated and mad as hell. Back at the hotel I was reminded by a runner writer friend of mine that the hardest part of a marathon may be getting to the start line. It has been that way for me.

He pointed out that I had ten minutes to wallow in the failure as I saw it, then I had to pick another race, train for it and run it. He thought Avenue of the Giants, in the Redwood forests of California, eight weeks away, would put things right. I have come through the complexity and destruction that is drug addiction. The simplicity of having a plan, one that is built on getting out of bed, putting on running gear and going out for a run is a great blessing.

I revived the RRRC last year when I started running again in the early mornings. I needed a way to con myself out the door. I thought back to the days when every day began with coffee and a run, when I ran with a bunch of guys in the early morning in Toronto. The RRRC was Jerry, Dan, Ann and an assortment of women with Hungarian names and tempers to match. I went away for a few weeks and came back to find that Eddie had joined in. Over time there was Patrick and Jeff and Cameron and many others who stuck around for awhile and then moved on. We would meet up at 5-5:30 am and head out on a run. No real method to it, just running for the mileage, long and slow, talking marathons and the best places to run wherever we might find ourselves.

I had started running like all kids run; around the block, to the tree, down the road a ways. Nobody ever really lost a race except when Bobby Hatcher got into his stride. Bobby was the postman’s son, skinny, quiet and very fast. Bobby could beat anybody around the block. There was this one day when he and I unaccountably tied on an “around the block and back” race but that was before he went off to St Johns on track scholarship as a 440 guy, a quarter miler, and I learned how to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I had come back to running at one of the inevitable low spots in my career as a movie producer. A movie I had produced was in the middle of a financial partnership fight, which we were losing to the big guys. Things had gotten so tough it seemed that I never slept at all. I went to the store one early morning to get coffee and milk and ran a little bit on the way home. It felt awful but there was a moment when I remembered how good it could feel. I remembered that I had run track in college, that I was better at longer distance than at the sprints, that I was no good at all relative to the better runners on the squad. I had made the team as a reward for showing up at all the practices. This was a lesson I might have learned better than I did. All those many years latter, as life went awry and addiction took hold, the road back began with simply showing up.

The next morning, tired of not sleeping, I managed to run, walk, and stagger down to Bloor Street and back, maybe a mile and a half. After a couple of weeks I ran down to Bloor Street and around Christie Pits, an old sand and gravel pit. That was about a two a half mile run. Over next month or two one circuit of Christie pits became two, three, four. Deep as the Pits are in the ground, forty feet below the street surface, the run around the upper level is easy and flat, offering a wonderful view of the city skyline to the south.

I sometimes saw kids skating on the ice in the Pits which were home to several ball fields and ice rinks. The Pits were historic in Toronto for their role in the infamous ethnic riots of 1933, which began as the result of anti Semitic baiting between the Willowvale team, St. Peters, and the Harbord Park team featuring many members of the Spadina Avenue Gang from the heart of the Jewish community in Toronto. There had been continuing unrest as established Protestant Toronto tried to come to terms with not only the political machinations in Germany but also the ongoing struggle of labor to unionize.

Much of the union movement was thought to be communist inspired and directed by immigrants of all stripes though most particularly by the Jewish community. Tensions were high after the first game. Willowvale won the first game and it supporters took credit for the victory based on their intimidation of the Harbord players. The Spadina Avenue Gang showed up to the second game in strength. The police were known to very quickly quell any labor disturbance based on its Communist intent, but had demonstrated a lack of interest when the point of the disturbance was anti-Semitic or racial. At game’s end a red and black swastika flag was raised and out came the baseball bats and lead pipes. The police stood by for over an hour while the rioters fought.
The long ago gravel pit, ball field battleground, shows no trace of that bloody event. It has no monument, the earth washed clean long ago. It was perfect although the weather was getting wintry. The cold was offset as much by the running in many layers, before micro fiber, as by watching the kids play. It was hard to imagine the anger and violence of the past when watching the kids play shinny on the ice before they went to school.
They were kids of all ages and backgrounds, playing hockey in the dark, playing the game itself, no coaches or parents, brought together by the skating and their dreams. The sounds of skates cutting the ice, the spray of quick stops and slap shots, the kids shouting and carrying on, were as much a part of the place to me as the grey morning light and the icy wind blowing in off Lake Ontario.

One day in late winter, I realized that I was running a long way every day but it was no damn fun. I ran for miles in the cold and dark, feeling much the same on the inside as the winter weather looked on the outside. I mentioned to Dan one day that I was doing some running and he suggested that I join up with Jerry and him for a long run the following day. I knew Dan because he was the distributor of my first movie and we spent a lot of time together. He had told me about his running, about leaving the house very early, meeting up with his running buddy, but I never paid it much mind until that winter.

Dan asked me if I wanted to run the 1981 Longboat 10K on Toronto Island in the Toronto Harbour. The Longboat was named after Tom Longboat; a native Canadian runner who won the Hamilton “Around-the-Bay” race in 1906, the Boston Marathon in 1907 (setting a course record) and the Toronto Marathon in 1906, ’07 and ’08. Longboat also represented Canada at the 1908 Olympic Games. The Longboat 10k had been run for the first time the year before and Jerry and Dan were there. It may be that it was a rite of passage or just something to do in the golden age of Canadian running which was at its peak in the late seventies and early eighties. Jerome Drayton had won at Boston, Jacqueline Gareau had her victory stolen by Rosie Ruiz in Boston and many others were well known in the exploding world of road racing.

We went off to run it on beautiful spring morning. I went out fast despite Dan’s cautionary advice to take it easy at the beginning. A lot of walking followed but somewhere in there it was clear that I wanted to finish and then come back next year get it right. I know I finished because there was picture of me at the finish area, hands on my hips and a large belly draped over my shorts, looking like a candidate for bypass surgery. It made everyone laugh who saw it but it embarrassed me. The next morning I met Dan at his house and he, Jerry and I all ran through the neighborhood and north on Bayview to way past Steeles Ave. It could have been fifteen miles. It might have been eight. I know I loved it.

Jerry, (aka The Chairman), was once three hundred pounds strapped on a 5’6 body, a frenetic charmer who had had a heart attack and in his recovery came to running. This was 1975 or thereabouts. Over the next few years he lost 150 of those pounds by doing what he did best, running and talking. Within a couple of years he had run the New York, Boston, Marine Corps Marathons and several others. His best time was 3:41 or so he says. The Chairman met a girl, Ann, gave her a mink coat on the second date and she became part of the group as did any of the various girlfriends that Dan would bring around. It cost them a fortune in running shoes, but if you bought her a pair of Nikes she was clearly a serious contender for deep relationship. The Chairman married his girl and the rest of us have been jealous ever since, shoes or no shoes, mink or no mink.

I used to think that we weren’t much for runners but we put in 70-80 mile weeks. It turns out that we were pretty good. Dan had run a 3:19 in New York and never more than four hours. Jerry ran several 3:40’s. I guess we trained at 10 minutes per mile and ran races somewhat faster. By the time I came along most of the marathons had been run, Dan and Jerry having run some thirty between them. As it was, I missed a New York and a London, a Chicago. We were always training for something, whether or not we went was another story entirely.

It was new world. I saw the city as never before. We had runs with names, the King Street run, the Bayview run, Rosedale Valley Ravine, the Don River trail system, and many others. We ran to Lester Pearson Airport from downtown, just because. There was no reason to go there in running gear at 5:30 on a winter morning and it was a twenty-two mile run out and back. And there were the mythical runs, Oakville and back, Markham, Caledon, all thirty-two miles plus or something like that. We ran to the end of the trolley lines and out to the Beaches, all in the high teens for distance. We usually ran them on Sunday mornings and then gathered latter to eat big breakfasts at various restaurants or at the Chairman’s house. When the snow was deep and the city silent and glowing white, we put plastic baggies over our socks, put on toques and gloves and went out into the morning to get our miles. Once we ran 14 miles up and back to get bagels from Bagel World on Bathurst and Wilson, all uphill from Bloor Street, so that we could earn the right to sit and watch the NYC Marathon on TV. There were trips and all kinds of events, mostly planned and discussed at length and some actually happened.

I remember that many of our runs would bring us west along Danforth Ave, over the Prince Edward Viaduct, which sits astride ” …a glacio-fluvial valley” and has “ … a certain coalescence of natural and architectural greatness, awe inspiring in its grandeur” according to a local critic at its opening in 1913. It is famous still, because of its Beaux Arts architecture, its stormy political history during construction, its sightlines. The centerpiece of the poet/novelist Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful book , In the Skin of a Lion, the passion and grandeur of the city’s love affair with progress is revealed in all it’s painful glory.

The Viaduct turned us southeast along Bloor for the run in. Mostly we could get the sunrise coming in over the city towers to the south and the glow of the residential neighborhoods to the north. It was a special time of day, as it is for those who run in the early morning. We were lucky to be part of it.

We met for years at a donut shop on Yonge St. that had parking available. Dan and the Chairman used to meet at a Squash Club parking garage when there were just the two of them. Mysterious and a little like the movie All the President’s Men is how it struck me when I first heard about it. While it made me laugh, under the surface it was clear that each of us had our own demons and running was a way to get closer to them, put them at bay for awhile and get on with things. Often the runs were more like an ad hoc support group than they were anything else, this before Robert Bly and naked drumming

We all had highly speculative careers in real estate and movies and so there were a lot of big bust days and a few big win nights. All were celebrated and shared. I know I went through a divorce and the beginning of hard drug use which I kept hidden for nearly twenty years. Dan and the Chairman each had had their own troubles and there were other occasional runners whose lives were unruly, who found with us that the run in the early morning was a way to have some peace and some support in an often difficult world.

There was this morning when I heard someone coming in through the back door. It was 4:30 am and I was not alone. My first thought was that Danielle, warm and new and sleeping gentle in my bed, had told me she wasn’t married. Terrified to the core I went to see what was going on. It was the Chairman. He didn’t sleep very much it seemed and this morning his usual all night coffee shop had pitched him out. He came to get me so we could get some miles before the others showed up at 5:30. It never occurred to me that it was strange to leave the door unlocked, to have the Chairman walk in and to go out running in the snow with him.

Even though I had just met someone I wanted to spend time with, who intrigued me, someone who was a possibility for a pair of Nikes, I went. I told him this as we headed up Avenue Road, and he said, “Run first, spend time later.” It was careless of me as it turned out, but it made sense at the moment. Running came first despite, or maybe because of, the constant search of Nike candidates. If I had known then what I came to learn I would have seen that the addiction in me touched everything I did despite the appearance of good times with the gang.

If it sounds elegiac, I guess it is. In the end the group broke up as the Chairman had kids, Dan found a succession of girlfriends and sadly, family tragedy. Eddie appeared to go broke and went back to Phoenix before moving on to a new opportunity in London. I came slowly and steadily face to face with the gaping hole in my life when my kids moved out west with their mother. At one point in 1984, Dan and I had a conflict about a woman neither of us cared about and we both used it to trash the other. The group split leaving only the Chairman and me and occasionally some of his “in from the far west for some time in the big city” in-laws to run with us. I moved out to Vancouver to be with my kids. Eddie and Jerry still ran together. That ended when the deals ran out for both of them and life changed course for all involved.

The Road to Ruin Runners Club was a state of mind and for awhile a wonderful, oddly compassionate place to be. The logo suggests a rainbow with edges and a runner heading toward it. The pot of gold is not necessarily what it appears to be since the rainbow is jagged, just like life itself, full of color and promise and sometimes pain and blood in both the running and the living. We were friends for awhile and shared the world and all its gifts as we headed out in the mornings. What we lost was a companionship that was never to be replaced and properly so I guess. There is red on the bottom of the shoe of the new rainbow runner and I know that for me it means that in the getting from here to there blood is spilled and sometimes the path is so very difficult.

Last year I came back to running, in North Texas, where I live now. I seem to be free of the dragons that had consumed so much of my life since my journey on the road to ruin began. If I imagined that I was heading out the door to run with the RRRC I would actually get the run. I asked a friend to recreate the RRRC logo. The red shoe and the runner facing into the rainbow make it real for me these days.

I trained for and ran the Anchorage Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon for Team in Training. It went well until mile 13 and the years caught up with me in the form of Achilles problems that brought me to a walk. At that point I was on five hour pace, not much by comparison to the early days but plenty good for the first one back. When I came up Insult Hill to close out Anchorage I was able, maybe for the first time in 20 years, to let the past go, to take what was best in it and leave the rest by the side of the road. My last mile was my fastest mile of the run.

I put on a black Road to Ruin tee and walked. My first calls were to my kids. My next call was to the Chairman. Being the guy he is he first told me how great it was that I ran, how he had run a four “something” with an Achilles problem and that he was getting ready to maybe train for another run. It was perfect in its understanding of who we were, who we are and what we have been to each other. The RRRC was tongue in cheek when we made it up but underneath we accepted that we were not perfect, that life was hard and made harder still by the way we lived it. The RRRC had been less about the miles and the races and more, I finally realized, about friendship and love in some very hard times.

I spoke to Dan the other day and Eddie too. Eddie told me he doesn’t run anymore because of bad knees; Dan much the same although he plays lots of tennis. The Chairman and Ann and I are still close. He still coaches me on losing weight and running slow. Despite his being nearly seventy and no longer able to run, I can hear the distances run and the laughter coming down the phone line like turning for home on Bloor St., breathing easy, laughing out loud, rolling into the promise of the rising sun.

Next week, May 1, 2005, on the fourth anniversary of my getting clean and sober, I will run the Avenue of the Giants Marathon with some friends. We met at the start line in Anchorage, discovered that along with the running we shared recovery from alcohol and drugs. I will tell them about my friends in Texas who are runners like us, in recovery . None of us ever made it to the race in the old days, never made it to the start line. It’s different now. I know that when I get off the bus in the pre-dawn, breath steaming in the cool morning air, I will listen to the excited, hopeful, nervous chatter of the runners, I will see the ghostly movements of bodies in the mist, drink in the silence of the big trees. I will remember for a moment the countless early morning runs with my friends, then and now, and be quiet with the gift of being here. All this might go toward easing my own nerves about what the run will bring.

It was clear, is clear, to me that running is in our human cells, part of our biology, our evolutionary imagination. We are part of something much greater than ourselves when we get out of the door and start out down the road, across the field, up the lane, over the next rise. Rudyard Kipling says that if we should “….fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.” The road to ruin has become the road to what…redemption, reconciliation, recovery? Possibilities of all these I think, inside the ineffable sense of better days ahead.

Tarmac Meditations-Track Work on Election Day

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high school scoreboard and flag

Met M and R at coffee shop. The rain was light but steady, as much mist as rain, gentle, warmer than expected. Walk to the track. Straights and curves today. For me my fourth day with steady output. Came back later to take a picture of the flag on election day. Did not bring a tripod which limited my range of choice. Got what there was. Will likely go back another morning. On the way back to the car I remembered coming home to the US nearly ten years ago. I went to get my license renewed at Motor Vehicle Branch in Denton Texas. A big haired, bored, Texas gal took me through the paper work. Finally she looked up, said we were done but for one question. What party affiliation did I want to list on my voter registration card. I told her Democrat. After another minute or two she handed me my license and my voter registration card. I could drive legally in the US, approved by the State of Texas my license said and I could vote legally in the 26th congressional district in the Great Lonestar State. It was just another  Texas-hot day in June, but there in front of me was a battered, slightly crumpled guy, standing in front of the MVB window staring at two slips of paper with an amazed look on his face. I saw him looking back at me and it was only then that I noticed the tears rolling slowly down his cheeks,. The gal who had driven me over from the rehab joint I was in at the time came up to me and asked if everything was all right. :”Yeah,” I said, “I guess.” and I handed her the papers. She looked at them for what seemed a long time. “Welcome home Michael, glad you made it. ” she said and then turned away and headed back to the car. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t referring to Texas exactly, more like home from 30 plus years living abroad and more than that locked into drugs and alcohol. Yeah I said to myself, long time comin’ and wiped the tears away. Funny thing how the biggest moments, the end of the longest journey, can be marked by a little scrap of bureaucratic nonsense. Already voted by mail as we do here in Oregon, but before I did I took my now out of date Texas voter’s card out of its resting place in my desk drawer and renewed acquaintances with it; I remembered a big haired ol’ gal in a Texas motor vehicle bureau and said thanks y’all, my time to go and be counted.

Dark Roast

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Some days. Like today. Up before the alarm, rain sluicing down the west windows, a chilly morning in the Pacific Northwest. Spring. I go into the kitchen and start making my coffee. Everyday I make the same choice; that is, I decide whether or not to use the drip filter, the French press or the stove top espresso thing. Most mornings I go with the filter. Lately I have been grinding a pound of the strong stuff – Dark French – when I buy it at the market, so as not make an ungodly amount of noise when I start the coffee process at home. Did I mention that I get up most mornings at three thirty or earlier?

Once the coffee is measured into the filter, after a ritual of opening cupboard doors in order, taking down the paper filters, the requisite flick of the wrist to open the filter and the out-loud counting of double tablespoons, I turn to the sink, grab the ugly plastic cup that holds exactly the right amount of water, fill it, turn back to the machine, fill the tank and close the top. I hit the switch and turn to the freezer top of my refrigerator in order to get a couple of slices of “good” bread. Once I have my hands on the bread slices, I put them in the toaster on the island across from the coffee machine, put the dial up to eight and turn back to the refrigerator.

I take out the half and half. These days this comes from a local dairy operation which claims — but for the USDA Organic rules — their old-fashioned dairy farm would be certifiably organic. Whatever. They are local and cheaper,  and seem to be pretty tasty and easily available. I put the half and half on the counter top near the toaster, turn back to the refrigerator and grab the butter, carefully jammed into a ramekin for the memories of France and a long ago romance it suggests. With my other hand, I grab some jam made by a local farmer.

The toast pops, the coffee bubbles through, the kitchen smells of bread and coffee – pungent, reminiscent, inviting, earned. I put half and half into the hand-painted coffee cup that has followed me from that long ago romance and pour the dark roast home. I butter the toast lightly and spread a little jam on it, carefully, like each time is the first time. I slice the toast in halves and put it on another relic of France gone by.

Most mornings I sit at the table in the kitchen and look out the window to the west. This morning it is streaked with rain; the mist in the valley plays ghostly with the cedar and the spruce. The valley lights are circled and diffuse, the mill far off bellows smoke into the wet night sky like a dragon in search of a knight of the realm. It is peaceful here, in the dark. Quiet. It is morning, my time of day.

Today I remember that a few years ago I had just moved into a small place, a coach house with one big wood-paneled room and a kitchen and bathroom on the other side of the center wall. It too was a quiet place, off the road, set back among the Post Oaks and the Elms. I had just come through a long and heart-rending process wherein I gave up pretty nearly everything I had ever done, left everyone I knew, moved out of town, out of state, out of the country, to take a run a new start.

I was worn out, broke, jobless and clean.

I found myself just up the road from a store with an enormous pig on its sign. A chain supermarket that I had thought only existed in Eudora Welty or Barbara Kingsolver novels, yet there it was. I went down there after I unpacked my one suitcase and began to take stock, and stock up for the road ahead. Coffee was the first priority, but then I remembered that I did not have my assortment of pretentious high-priced coffee apparatuses. So what to do? I discovered, hiding in the back of the cupboard over the sink, a Mr. Coffee machine. The kind I used to howl at, as if anyone would ever use THAT to make coffee. But that’s what it had come to – so me and my new best friend, Mr. Coffee, began to get acquainted.

The machine didn’t change the fact that being new in a town with no coffee shops – not a Starbucks for 40 miles, and no good coffee immediately available – meant I was going to have reinvent my morning routine. I found some Fog Buster from San Francisco for six bucks a pound, ground. I went looking for “good” bread, artistic loaves, and found Franz white bread and a stray Orowheat whole wheat. The half and half came straight from the industrial complex outside of town. There was a jar of jam and a plastic container of whipped Land O’ Lakes butter in the fridge, a gift from the former tenant.

The next morning, after a ghastly, nightmare-filled sleepless night, I went into the kitchen, plugged in Mr. Coffee, pulled out the Fogbuster, eyeballed the measurement, filled the tank, put the toast in the toaster and waited. Eventually all things came to pass: the coffee brewed, the toast toasted, the whipped butter thing spread, the jam layered, the knife cut the halves and an awfully ugly but very serviceable plate carried the “first breakfast” to the table, which was in fact the very desk at which I sit right now.

A spring rain came hard out of the North, pounding rhythm on the red tiles.  Familiar and warm, it was also forlorn, the sound of something breaking apart, or maybe it was a sound of something healing. Time would tell.

The paned windows were streaked, the Post Oaks lovely, quiet in the rain. I could smell the coffee and the toast in the morning air. The room empty of nearly any familiar thing took on a different tone. It wasn’t six-dollar-a-loaf Sourdough made by an ancient recipe; it wasn’t Dark French roasted Arabica from Colombia or Sumatra; it wasn’t organic sweet butter from the cows just over the hill. What it was though, was my breakfast, the first in the new house, in the new land if you will, on the first day of the rest of my life – or so it seemed.

There was nothing familiar out there waiting for me. It would be a long day of finding meetings and learning the street names. It would be filled with false starts and wrong turns, some low-level swearing and a moment of recognition in the eyes of a stranger. It would be the beginning. If I did the footwork, stayed true to the possibility that I could survive the worst I had done to myself, then I would have another cup of coffee tomorrow morning, butter the whole wheat lightly, put a layer of jam on it and get on with it. It wasn’t much; in fact, it was nothing at all. A cup of cheap coffee, a couple of pieces of toast and jam, an early morning promise in a cracked cup. But it was mine and it felt like a true thing.

This morning the taste of it, the feeling of it comes back to me. The coffee is much better; the bread too. The view is longer and trees outside are large and evergreen. The mountains to the west are boundary to ocean and endless tide. Some days, despite the changes in my circumstances, the upward curve, the second chance, I am reminded of that coffee, of the smell of the morning rain down on the Elm Fork of the Trinity, of the sun rising over bayous to the south, of the early days, of my first days.

Some days that’s as good as it gets. Some days, like today, after the coffee is gone, and toast eaten, the dishes washed and stacked, there is nothing to do but hang on, to keep it tight, to seek out the words from wherever they may be hiding, to look far off south and keep the tears at bay, to wait for nightfall with its ghostly promise that tomorrow will be a better day.


Photo Credits

“Textured Coffee Cup” Scholastica Ees @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Piggly Wiggly” onesundaymorning @ igougo.com


Tarmac Meditations…Lessons I Learned at Marathon Camp While Walking in Washington DC -A year later

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Catch the Wind 1Marathon Camp Lesson #12 … “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Mr. Lincoln said that.

Marathon Camp Lesson #12.5 … It was raining when he said it.  It had been raining for weeks. It was raining today when I went to “the Linc”. K. Newsome, the security guy told me he didn’t mind the rain. “It’s the Lincoln Memorial.” he said in explanation. Made sense to me.

Marathon Camp Lesson #12.75 … The rain drifts across the Wall. I walk the length of it. And back. A younger guy, Marine Corps fit, is checking names. He stops for a while in front of Panel E-24. August 1967.  I was 21. As I leave, he is looking up something in the book. Father? Brother? It was raining years ago in March of ’68 when I left home for good. Went north. Stayed north for a long time.

Marathon Camp lesson 13.1…Came home 10 years ago to a hot and dusty place. Stayed for several years. When it got hard to stay clean I hunkered down and weathered the storms. I had a lot of help from my friends. Why is this lesson  numbered 13.1 pointing, as it does, to the distance of the poorly named half marathon event? Because  my journey has only half  begun, despite whatever the chronological clock may say. I came home, put in my time, moved back  to this place of big weather and ancient trees, fixin’ to begin again. And like the marathon, if you don’t make the starting line, you don’t run the race. I’m in it now and speaking just for me, I am damned glad I made it.

November 19, 2010

It was  raining a year ago, it is raining today.   You can go home again despite what Thomas Wolfe, an excellent writer,  said all those years ago in an important novel about being an artist in the world. In fact, it turns out, you must go home again. I said that. ( It occurs to me that Bobbie Ann Mason, author of  In Country, may have also said that.)

My father’s birthday came and went yesterday. He would have been 92. I associate the Lincoln Memorial, politics, political compassion , America and moral conscience with him. He tried to teach me that believing in something is crucial to a life of value, that belief is enduring despite changes in focus, that one cannot help others until one can help him/her self, that individual responsibility is the predecessor to the body politic and conscientious social change. In other words, there is a higher morality, go find it, and then live it to the best of your ability. All the rest is conversation.  There are many days that I wish I had heard him earlier, that our last years had been less complicated by my addiction and his failing health; that we had spoken of what we knew to be true, that love abides and that I could and would be of value once my personal war was over and won. RIP  M. Mickey Lebowitz November 18 1917-October 14, 2000.

This morning, like that of a year ago, I was out in the weather mixing my sweat with the falling rain, a middle ground between the earth and sky, connected by my actions and my dreams to the world of others. I came in, I dried off,  I ate something and I sat down to look for the words. This is, after all, the life I have and it’s time to get it right(Mark Twain said something like that).