who wants pudding?

« how much, how often | Main | I WANNA ROCK! »

December 01, 2004

the turkey trot

last wednesday, the day after the last entry, was a short day at work. i got off at noon and went to the parque zaragosa gym down on east seventh street. it's a beautiful gym, just far enough into the hood to have some flava without having to worry too much about getting your ass kicked for no good reason.

for about an hour, i was alone in the gym, just shooting, and i rediscovered a little bit of the peace that used to bring me. eventually, some high-school aged and younger kids started to show up, and I ended up playing for hours.

don't laugh. these kids are good. incredibly quick, and there were some great shooters out there, too. the kid I played against most of the afternoon was as big as I was, though probably no older than 15 or 16. it was fun - i was the elder veteran out there, trying to keep my team focused, which is apparently very difficult at their age.

i then went down to the Run-Tex Store for Psychotic Running People to sign up my friend fran and me to run the 14th annual Turkey Trot thanksgiving morning. here's something I discovered in that process: "5mi." is different from "5K". i remember as a kid in the seventies being really excited about the thought of the entire nation picking up and switching to a whole different way of measuring everything, from the distance to grandma's house, to the weight of a pair of twinkies.

but people, that ship has sailed. the metric system didn't fly. apparently, however, no one bothered to tell that to these nutty running people. as a result of endorphin overdose or the repeated jarring of their brain from running on pavement, or years of consistently suffering from heat stroke, they can't make up their damned minds whether to use the metric system or the standard system. they run 5K to prepare for the 5mi the week before the 10K, in the hopes of eventually running a 26 mile marathon. it's senseless, and deceptive to the average citizen like myself who is merely trying to pose as a serious runner.

following this revelation, i had to choose between a $10 gift certificate for thundercloud subs, or a long sleeve t-shirt with an embarassingly ungainly-looking turkey-thing caricatured on the front. when it was a 5K race in my head, i was just gonna get my damn sandwich money. but when it became 5mi., i was damn well gonna get a fcuking t-shirt out of the deal.

thursday morning, i was a bit late picking up fran, and when we got there, sure enough, i had to pee. the event seemed to be extremely well-organized, except for the following ratio: over 7,000 runners... to 8 porta-potties. i stood in line for several minutes, and finally got into one shortly after the race started, only to find it was... sort of unneccesary. a false alarm.

i exploded out of the portable outhouse, rejoined my friend, lied to her about how much better i felt, and we started the run. in my frenzy, i completely forgot to spit at, yell derisive insults at, or even glare at our worthless, ruthless, piece of crap, bought and paid for by insurance companies, aggie-assed governor Prick Perry.

And for that, I am truly, deeply sorry.

anyway, fran runs about an eight minute mile, on average. me... not so much. let's talk about 11 minutes. i kept up with her for the first two miles, then, fortunately, i was unable to get through the tiny gaps in the jogging, jostling crowd that she was able to slip through. two miles into it, and i was completely burned out, alone, and without music, and still hurting a bit from playing ball with kids half my age for three hours the day before. nonetheless, i finished the damned thing, spurred on by the burning need to not get outrun by the guy in the full-body plush turkey costume. the cool computer-chip timing would later show that i cut over a minute off my recent average mile time, averaging 10:08 minutes per mile.

on the downhill to the finish, i felt my legs again, and i cut it loose into a full sprint. i felt great, not just in running terms, but in my own body. my legs flew so fast and so long that i almost wiped out near the finish line, feeling just short of being able to take flight. i heard fran near the finish, cheering me on, her voice cutting through all the cheering and noise and music and the annoying country music announcer that seems, in my admittedly limited experience, to emcee all the running events around here. a photographer at the finish line even gave me a shout for finishing strong.

of course, a respectable distance after crossing the finish line, i came to an abrupt stop, collapsed on the curb, and struggled for air. eventually i found fran, and we searched for cookies, only to find they had been hoarded by the early finishers. fran had forgone chocolate chip cookies to cheer my belated finish. that's a true friend.

for the next 30 minutes to an hour, we wandered a bit, and ran into people we knew. fran was able to be super-cool with runners she knew: "yeah, i did chicago [referring to the marathon], and i just decided to take it easy after that."

i ran into donnie and laura, faces from my own past. i met laura back at the university of texas in 1989, when she lived on the same dormitory hallway as mary, the mary that was for so many years the Love and Truth and Legend, the Light and Shadow, of a good piece of my life. true, now she is simply the Past, but it was a significant chunk of time full of significant events and feelings at a significant point in my life. i had worked with donnie, and introduced him to laura. when mary and i parted ways, donnie and laura and many of those friends went with her.

fran ran into a friend she had known since high school. we ran into suzi, one of fran's coworkers. there in waterloo park, that looked just as it had to me when i was a child there on a field trip, past and present and maybe futures melted together. for once, for a moment so rare these days, i knew the joy of the moment, knew the truth of the present not only as the intersection of past and future, but a place in and of itself in which to reside. my body felt light, healthy, and strong. my heart and mind were at ease as they always are with fran, my new friend, despite her cursed running pace.

in all of this, maybe in the slight delirium of exhaustion, i felt the realization that pieces of the future would one day feel like pieces of the past, good and bad, and i knew, in my heart felt, that there is hope in that. sometimes, as pink floyd has taught us, we see and feel pieces added to the wall we build around our heart. but sometimes, many more times lately, i see and feel the pieces laid in the path before me. i speak so often here of hope. events and people have moved me. i am beginning to see hope in the one stone laid before me, laid sometimes by myself, sometimes by those around me, the path continuing, ready to receive my next step.

Posted by Rob at December 1, 2004 01:06 AM

Comments

Posted by: shahnaz at December 2, 2004 08:48 PM

Posted by: Eileenie Weenie at December 3, 2004 01:04 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: