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Santa Fe Dreams

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The E Train went by underground, shaking the floor, the glasses on the bar. The kid standing next to me looked startled.

“When I was a kid the Santa Fe freights used to wake me up,” the kid said.  He seemed lost and kind of lowdown when he said it.

We were strangers, standing at the rail of an uptown joint in the snow bound northern city where I grew up. I had come home to visit my father. He was in the stroke ward at the nearby hospital. It wasn’t going well between us, Dad and me. It never did.

“I can still hear them ol’ freights, like rolling thunder,” he said.

After awhile he said he used to wait for the circus to come to town. “Yeah I get that.” I said. “We would go to the Garden, just down the street, and watch the clowns”.   I told him how the clowns scared the hell out me, how I thought that my  dad thought it was funny that clowns scared me. Later, much later, it turned out it wasn’t true he thought that.

The kid looked at me like I was a crazy old man or maybe just drunk.  “I used to hear the circus coming from miles away” he said, “I could hear the calliope from way far off. Folks in town would stop what they were doing and listen.Get ready to party.” Then he stopped, as if caught up in a dust devil memory  he shook his head and said very quietly, “they  would get a funny look in their eyes, maybe thinkin’ it was  something more than the end of summer, more than another year gone to harvest.”  He was quiet after that. 

Before I left I asked him where he was from. He told me he was from a little town just outside of Denton, Texas. I told him I knew where it was, that I had heard the Santa Fe freights rolling by, that I had stayed awhile and moved on. I wished him well and went out the door. I walked down the once familiar streets to the uncertainty that was waiting at the hospital.

I didn’t tell him that I had been in Denton because I was running for cover, drying out, getting clean. That the trains in the night sounded like all things lost, that lonesome was a way station on the road back from where I had been.

drifter's escape_sm

Photograph by Michael Lebowitz ©2011

Filed Under: Journal, Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: Denton, dreaming, loss, recovery

Tarmac Meditations-My New Year’s Resolutions 2011

December 31, 2010 By longrun 2 Comments

The ColumbiaUnder the heading of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” what are your New Year’s resolutions for 2011 for the runners in the crowd, the writers, and the peeps with dreams and schemes and other such that might bring them closer to the light in which they believe…post them in the comment section below or keep them to yourself BUT all the best of everything and may this year be a year  in which you get closer to to the light of that in which you believe for you and those you love.

Here are mine:

1. turn 65 years old

2. lose 65 lbs

3. run a 65 mile run in my 65th year

4. make a plan, follow the plan consistently, listen to the coaches

5. get to the start line of every event

6. keep a consistent journal of the journey: pretraining, training, and running.

7. write the book, take the pictures

8. Remember, everyday, to be grateful for the gift of being alive and to express it…

9. in an act of kindness for which no thank you is needed.

10. take a step, take another step, breathe, repeat.

Filed Under: Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: dreaming, finish line, journal, Photography, running, training journal, Writing

Christmas Eve comin’ in …

December 24, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

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Down the valley the mill makes monsters, rising smoke forms alliances with passing clouds. It all seems so simple really. Sky above, earth below, night time comin’ on. Put a log on the fire and hot tea in a cup. Read a good book and be one with the stillness of it. Christmas is not really my holiday, but the world seems easier for the moment and the inner voices are quiet. A passing breeze brings raindrops.

Filed Under: Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: dreaming, journal, meditation, rain

Tarmac Meditations-Evolving and Resolving Inside a Mystery

November 18, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Road Sign AfternoonAnother long night. Ran to my meeting . Left the house at 6 something. Didn’t look at the time when I arrived. Felt good although the onset of cold and wet weather makes my breathing complicated. It helps to take walk breaks to ease the back tension  which eventually closes down my breathing. Age and injury are not for the faint of heart. Going to investigate a project possibility that entails training for and running a marathon, a fifty K (50K) trail run and a 50 mile trail run in aid of running a 100K (62.5 miles) on or around my 65th birthday next August. This is the beginning of a plan that seems doable if I remember that I have traveled great distances from where I was to where I am and that getting to the start line and eventually getting to the finish line are the important metrics. Time over distance is not. Distance over time and attention paid is what I am after. The medals, should there be any, will last longer than I will, but the deed, the doing of it, is all that matters to me. Take a step. Take another step. Breathe in and out. Look around. Repeat.

Filed Under: Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: dreaming, marathon, prayer, running, time, training journal, ultras

Running On Empty

November 4, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Running to Fight Addiction and Stay Clean
At first I ran to hide addiction. Now I run to stay clean.

By Michael Lebowitz

Newsweek-May 14, 2007 issue

I’m an addict/alcoholic. Pretty much everything I do reflects this part of me. Perhaps the best way to describe the nature of me in the world is to say, in a phrase from the Eagles, that I’ve wanted “everything, all the time.” It has been a hard way to live. For folks like me, and there are an awful lot of us, addiction is best described as taking a normal activity and doing it abnormally in response to what’s going on inside. One such activity for me has been long-distance running.

I started running the way all kids do, down the block, around the corner. In college I ran on the track team in order to stay in shape for swimming. Running was about fitness as much as it was about competition and courage. I learned early on in the ’60s that I was free to indulge in drugs and alcohol and sex if for no other reason than to try to be included in my generation. I did my part. Running changed for me—it became my way of balancing the hard living, of “sweating out” the whisky, of clearing away the cobwebs of the drugs. The more I used, the more I ran, 70 miles a week for years. The inevitable disaster took the form of a cocaine-induced heart attack at the age of 50. The irony of it is that my heart sustained very little lasting damage—the result, the doctors said, of all the running. I was invulnerable, it seemed, and foolish. I went right back to the drugs and hard living. Complete collapse—broke and jobless, out of time, out of hope, alone, beyond despair—came five years later, in 2001.

I went to treatment in Texas. The facility frowned on running as an activity in early recovery because the activity itself was part of the disease; the endorphins created a masking effect, a running away from self. Maybe this was true. It didn’t really matter. The loss of running, while poignant, was simply one more loss among many.

Two months into my stay I went out one morning to do hill repeats, which require running up and down a hill many times. After all, what did the doctors know, I thought—running is good for me. Repeats are an activity that requires training, fitness and care. I had none of those. My choice to do them and my attitude are absolutely typical of addiction and early recovery. I not only didn’t run very well, I finished in the ER of the local hospital, having pulled my Achilles tendon. The weeks of limping and moaning that followed made a strong case for the doctors’ point of view. The lesson was clear enough. My way wasn’t going to work. I was going to have to start from scratch, to re-invent everything in sobriety before I could return to even the most benign of activities.

Two and a half years into recovery, I was ready to run long again. I was aware, finally, of the need to invest the activity with the lessons of recovery that I had learned. I set out to train for a marathon, six months away in June 2004. I had to start slowly, take it a day at a time, follow a plan, allow myself the opportunity to succeed, have the discipline to overcome a poor day. My running had to be an addition to my recovery; running had to be running for itself, for its restorative quality, a time for reflection, an opportunity for gratitude. For the most part it worked out that way.

In the course of training for the marathon, I found myself thinking back to the days in Toronto when I ran in the early morning with a group of guys and gals. We thought of ourselves as the Road to Ruin Runners Club (RRRC). My growing addiction took me away from all of it—the running, the friendships, the feeling that life would be all right for me. Early on in the Texas training, it came to me that I was the Texas chapter of the RRRC. It got me out the door most mornings. I reconnected with most of the RRRC and discovered that the running and the friendships had survived the worst I had done. I ran the marathon in Anchorage; not well, not fast, but all the way to the end. Along the way I made a promise to myself to write about it. Not long ago my article about the RRRC was published in a running magazine. I have run six more marathons since Anchorage.

Running is different now. For one thing, I’m older and I’m slower. The other morning I realized that things had changed in a more meaningful way. I was out for a run before 5, as is my habit. The rain-wet morning streets that used to be my battleground, home to my desperate search for any means of escape, had become my “cathedral,” home to my daily prayer. I have discovered that I run now because running enables me to fight my limitations, to endure the pain, to fight the evil desire in me to hide; it teaches me every day not to give in, to keep on keepin’ on, to believe.

Mr. Lebowitz lives in Eugene, Ore.

Filed Under: Non Fiction Tagged With: dreaming, drifting, marathon, recovery, road trip, Rome, running

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