The Old Man & the Wedding
The old man, in center, & his girlfriend, on right.
My stepfather and I had not talked in 14 years. Our relationship had never been that terribly close because we’re both suspicious, distrustful characters, and we’d both given up on each other by the time I got to be about 10 years old.
My little sister got married last month and the old man and I spent some time together. I was struck by how terribly similar we are in so many ways. It’s the similarities that are the source of so many of our disagreements. They’re not really even disagreements so much as they are gaps in understanding from which we both backed away in hostile silence until the gaps became as expansive as the Canadian prairie.
My stepfather is a quiet prairie boy who prefers the company of a few close friends and his dog, and would much rather be out in the mountains than at a party.
I’m a quiet desert boy who prefers the company of a few close friends and his cat, and would much rather be out in the mountains than at a party.
Neither of us particularly like people. I think I can speak for my stepfather also when I say that we don’t trust people much. They don’t have our best interests at heart. They are loud & aggressive or quiet and passive aggressive, they always seem to want much more than they are willing to give, and social interaction always seems potentially dangerous unless you keep your guard up. And we both find that to be exhausting.
There is a good chance I learned most of these things from him. He raised me from the time I was 3 and taught me almost everything I know about social interaction. All the things I needed to be afraid of I learned before, from a larger-than-life father whose moods would swing rapidly from oversized love to brutally violent rage. My father showed me that humans were to be feared and distrusted. My stepfather showed me how to deal with that distrust and how to carry on human relations. His primary lesson: avoidance. Try to get as far away from people as you can. An animal is a much more trustworthy companion. If you need to be around people, make sure you have a buzz on.
My stepfather has a lot to do with who I am, and yet we’ve never been able to understand each other, and in many ways couldn’t be more different. I often think we are opposite people who tend to react to most things the exact same way. By all accounts my father was very, very different, and I find myself sometimes heading to the territory that defined my father. I guess there’s something to be said for genetics and blood.
I used to blame my stepfather for the parts of me I didn’t like. Now I just accept those parts because to dislike them is to dislike myself, and wishing I was someone else is not really a healthy way to live.
We were at my sister’s wedding reception.
The volume suddenly escalated for no apparent reason, as often happens when there are a lot of people around. The old man, who doesn’t say much anymore, turned to me and said “People sure are loud”.
“People sure are loud”. I suddenly felt more connected to him than perhaps I ever have. My life is about two things: the noise of people – aural, visual & emotional noise – and my desire to get away from it. People and their loudness is why my greatest happiness comes from lacing on a pair of trail shoes and running 20 miles through dirt and rock.
When I ran Calico there were significant chunks of the race during which I did not see another runner. I was running through country that you can’t get to except on foot or perhaps on horseback. When I ran the San Diego Rock’n'Roll marathon last June there were 20,000 other runners, including one guy who was running beside me shouting woohoo! woohoo! woohoo! at the top of his lungs while pumping his fists. Then he settled down to bellowing along with whatever was on his ipod.
There’s a reason why I don’t run road races anymore.
My stepfather came from a tiny prairie town called Glenaven, Saskatchewan, current population 104. If you look up images of Glenavon you will mostly see grain elevators. I’m a bit surprised that pictures of the town even exist. On Google maps you will see a town that’s about 6 square blocks, potholed roads, and lots of vintage cars and pickup trucks. And a stormy sky. Here in California it’s the ground that’s unpredictable. Out on the prairies it’s the sky.
He never talked much about growing up. I don’t suspect it was the best of times. The only story I ever heard was of an older sister trying to drown him. He still hates the water.
At some point he drove away from Glenavon. He went to the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, Calgary Alberta, Turkey, Gabon, Libya, back to Calgary, Dallas, Egypt, Norway, Denver, Vancouver Island, and now back to Calgary again. He’s not so young anymore, and his one passion seems to be driving. After all that traveling he’s brought it back down to a car and the road.
He might have more passions, actually. He’s never been the most expressive guy, and now that he’s old he’s particularly hard to decipher. 80 years of practice has made him pretty much inscrutable.
And so we sat together at a table on the roof of some building on Venice Beach, enjoying the fact that neither of us had anything that needed saying, and that there could be a little oasis of quiet amidst all the annoying and sometimes alarming noise of a bunch of loud people making occasionally inappropriate toasts as they celebrated the union of two of them. A few hours later he quietly slipped out the door without much in the way of a goodbye to anyone, back to his hotel to relax and rest up before the long drive home to Calgary.
Feet on the Ground
This week I did a handful of gentle, exploratory runs to test how the foot is healing. The runs felt great, each a little better than the last.
This week’s pictures are not from any of those runs, but from a 50 miler on the San Gabriel River Bike Path, starting in the foothills of the mountains, down and across the Santa Fe Dam, and then down to Whittier Narrows, a trip that covers a lot of shifts in terrain, from mountains to cactus and desert to semi industrial to working class ‘burbs, with a natural riverbed contained inside a man-made channel off to the side.
It’s an interesting ride. Some parts are beautiful. Other stretches are not beautiful at all. There’s a stretch up against blue-collar back yards and broken down horse stables, James Ellroy’s El Monte, or the characters in Dave Alvin songs, so many of which take place along the 605 freeway on the other side of the river.
It’s a broken down stretch of old working class suburbs that doesn’t really seem like a part of Los Angeles at all.
What I Think About When I Think About Riding
Today while riding I thought about what I think about while riding.
It was a great example of the self referential pointlessness of most thought.
A thought is a form conceived in the mind, rather than a form perceived through the five senses. Humans think a lot. 60,000 or more individual thoughts per day. [1] More than any of us can keep track of.
As we walk, run, drive, meander, trudge, ride through this world, we spend an extraordinary amount of time in our own heads. Some of those thoughts are pretty basic: get up. make coffee. brush my teeth. feed the cat. go to work. Many of those thoughts are not so pleasant: imagined fears that we are going to get fired or our partner is cheating on us or that we have no talent…or maybe judgments about others: does that guy ever shut up? what a loser. I wouldn’t wear that outfit to mardi gras.
In Buddhism, this stuff is known as monkey mind: the untrained mind’s incessant chattering that sounds like a room full of screaming monkeys, all competing with each other and clamoring for attention. It’s noisy, exhausting, crazy, restless, and reckoned to be a cause of 95% of our dukkha, or suffering. (The other 5% is caused by reality).
One method for dealing with monkey mind is to try to soothe it through a mantra (as in T.M.). Another method is to carefully observe the chatter, as in mindfulness meditation, or Vipassana, which is what I practice. I observe my thoughts with detachment, without engaging, just letting them emerge and then fade. Using a labeling system devised by Shinzen Young, I note my thoughts, labeling the verbal chatter “talk” and the visual thought “image”.[2] Detaching and observing shows me a chunk – maybe 10 – 15 minutes worth – of those 60,000 mentally conceived forms. It can be an avalanche of chaos. One benefit of observing this chaos through meditation is that I get to witness the intensity and inanity of my monkey mind, which makes me a little less inclined to listen to and believe those injurious thoughts. I can trace back the strands as an observer rather than engage as a participant.
When I’m riding early in the morning on an empty bike path, I’ll lock into a cadence. I can maintain that cadence more easily than I can when running because I can adjust the resistance by shifting gears. The path is flat, I can work up some speed, and my motion is in a nicely uniform groove. Everything is so smooth. There’s really no room for chaotic monkey mind, and my thinking while riding about the things I think about while riding is too circular and self referential to possibly be chaotic.
Shinzen writes about a process called echoing talk, where the meditator mentally repeats the thoughts he hears in his head, intentionally echoing the conscious part of his spontaneous verbal thinking process. The effects are said to be more silence, increased clarity to the thoughts, (which become slower and easier to follow), a greater distance between the meditator and his (or her) thoughts, less involvement in the content, and a greater appreciation not of the words but of their qualities as sound. Thinking about the things I think about while thinking has an echoing quality.
Part of why I run and ride is because I love the feel in my body. I love the sensations in my legs, even when they are the pain of tiredness; I love the gulping of fresh air, the expansion of my lungs, the feel of sweat, the smell of flowers, or of cedar, or of clay. I especially love the flow of those sensations. It’s a bit symphonic the way one sensation or another will swell and take its turn in the foreground.
The other reason I love to run and to ride is because of the harmony my mind can achieve with my body, and with itself. These are the hours when I am not going to be tormented by my thoughts about a boss’s temper tantrum, or worries about the future and that time is running out and there’s nothing in savings for retirement and the usual refrains that haunt me these days (those would be them). Instead, I am free.
[1] This is a wiki, hive-mind figure – in other words, it is widely quoted on the internet, which means it’s commonly accepted as true, but I can’t find any authoritative citations.
[2] A good article on this can be found here.
Coyote
Coyote in San Gabriel Mountains, photo by Justin Johnson
I often pass coyotes up on the fireroads climbing the hills through Griffith Park. I see them most early in the mornings, when there aren’t other people around and the senses of peace and freedom are greatest.
I’ve come to judge how good a ride or run is by the number of coyotes I pass.
The other day I saw a pair of them as I came down the hill. They didn’t look frightened or aggressive or hostile as I passed, but mildly curious. We shared the hillside as I passed through. Beautiful animals. They looked comfortable.
Friday I saw a coyote around the corner from my house, up where Cerro Gordo turns into Alvarado. It stood on the edge of the street, tail not quite tucked between its legs. Its mottled coat didn’t do much for camouflage against the pavement. The expression in its eyes was bewilderment, resignation and fear. Somehow it had ended up out in the open in broad daylight in the city, with pavement and cars driving by and it knew the situation was wrong, unnatural, and probably dangerous.
I often feel like that coyote.
The coyote has actually enlarged its range in the face of human encroachment. They’ve learned to coexist well with humans by avoiding them.
I also relate to that.
New Newtons
I’m turning into the Imelda Marcos of running shoes. It’s kind of fucking sad. But…
Today I bought a pair of Newtons.
Here’s the deal: Newtons are these garishly colored, fancy priced, rather ugly shoes that claim they will have you running naturally, on the balls of your feet, like Kenyans (although perhaps not as fast). It’s the latest trend, sort of like those Vibram 5 Fingers, and it all has this very green, hippy awkwardness to it, a sort of creepy earnestness, the kind of thing that makes old punk rockers like me cringe as a matter of principal, even if it sounds sort of attractive and, underneath all the hippy trappings, makes sense. (Like Buddhism, for example). They even have this thing called Chi Running, which is basically proper running form meets New Age.
Newtons are named after Isaac Newton, who I’m pretty sure wasn’t a runner, but whatever. The dude knew his science and these are supposed to be scientific shoes. Here’s what Newton has to say: Get a fast, flexible ride with greater energy return and less impact…This shoe allows you to run naturally — faster with greater efficiency and less overuse injuries (like achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis).
In the weeks leading up to the LA Marathon, I started experiencing some pretty bad heel pain. They even have a fancy-name-that-I-can’t-pronounce for it: plantar fasciitis. The deal with plantar fasciitis is you have all this rigid protein connective tissue that runs from the heel to the base of the toes, and that stuff can get tiny tears in it, especially on old guys, ’cause us old guys are kind of stiff (this is actual medical fact here).
As I began training for the next marathon, I started paying attention to pace, and kicked it out on some of the shorter ones. After a particularly fast run on pavement I noticed the heel pain was really acute. At the same time, I saw my photos from the LA Marathon: bad heel strike, and over-striding. The over-striding was especially emphatic when I ran harder; lengthening my stride was not accomplished by pushing harder with my back leg but by stretching the leading leg further out in front. Needless to say, this made a heel strike unavoidable.
I started paying attention to form. The idea was/is to land mid-foot to toe, with the foot directly below the hips. A slight forward lean enhances the motion; you are propelling yourself in part by falling forward.
It was really difficult and awkward at first. My thickly padded Asics Nimbus aren’t really made for an efficient toe strike but rather to soften the much-more-common-in-the-recreational-runner heel strike, and even though they are a neutral shoe (I’m one of that 20% that does not over or under pronate) they’re still fairly inflexible. After working on being mindful of form (and appreciative of the lack of pain afterwards), I got the overstriding in check and settled into a nice mid-foot plant.
An old friend of mine said she picked up a pair of Newtons in NYC and suggested they might make a good marathon shoe, which is how I came to read up about them.
I stopped off at my local running store today with no intention of buying shoes. I spotted the Newtons and decided to give ‘em a test drive.
Nice and light. 3 blocks out and back, immediately running on the balls of my feet. Unlike the standard clunky training shoe, where toe running takes concentration and mental energy because it is unnatural to the shoe, in the Newtons you really have no choice but to run properly. It feels right.
So I bought ‘em. They are not cheap.
The instructions say you need to work your way into these shoes. You are going to be running in a different manner than you are used to, using more of your calf muscles, so take it easy and start with just a mile or two. I disregarded that and ran 7 miles. It felt great. Maybe I’d trained myself some with all that attention to form and foot strike this past month and a half. Yes, I could feel it in my calves once I stopped running – they’d had more than the normal 7 mile workout – but I had nice easy kick in the last mile even with that wind-tunnel head wind one always hits going south on the bike path, especially in the afternoon. It was hard not to run faster than usual – a more efficient gait has an immediate affect on pace.
I don’t know if I’ll be running San Diego R’n'R three weeks from now in these things – that might be a job for the faithful Asics I ran LA in – but it’s a rad shoe and I’ve got a feeling it’s gonna come into play when I set a new PR this fall…
A Warm Rain’s Gonna Fall
I was raised in the desert. I’m not so much of a rain guy. Yesterday evening, though, I was out walking down Sunset, and it was a really warm rain, so instead of dashing from under one awning to the next I decided to just stroll and get soaked. When I got to the coffee shop I was pretty much drenched, I guess – everyone kept commenting “Wow, it must be really pouring out there”…Not really, though. Just a beautiful warm rain. And this morning it feels like the same.
Here’s what it looked like at my place up on top of the hills in Echo Park last year in the rain:
