Sunday Run

Well, managed a 3 plus hour run this morning at McNaughton. Conditions were absolutely ideal, cool temps in the 50's, trails are adequately dried out after recent rain, creeks were even down a bit but up enough to cool me off. Felt pretty solid throughout the run, I think I'll go ahead and sign up for Howl at the Moon and shoot for just over marathon distance. Much positive energy: A great run, the fish are getting to spawn and hence are active, allowing for a whole slew of nice bluegill caught at the pond last night, two rounds of disc golf this weekend, and the Cardinals are kicking some serious tail.

I finished reading Stephen Bodio's On the Edge of the Wild a collection of essays on the west, hunting, guns, food, and a few book reviews. Bodio writes with eloquence and immediacy and these essays reek of fresh cooked venison over an open fire, celebrating the beauty found in the blood and grime; those arm chair reactionaries would do well to steer clear of Bodio--everyone else, sidle up to the bar, order a stiff shot and enjoy the burn of the whiskey over some great conversation.

"Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight. I like to imagine a "depth ecology" that would go to the dark side of nature...the ball of crunched bones in the scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable appetite. The other side of 'sacred' is the sight of your beloved in the underworld dripping with maggots. Can you live with the thought of that consequence?"

Soundtrack: Son Volt "Trace"

David Blaine, Ultrarunning, and the Meaning of Endurance

I recently happened upon magician David Blaine's primetime television spectacle, during which he attempted to break the world record for submerged breath holding after having lived for a week in a water filled glass sphere. It is easy to dismiss Blaine as a huckster showman, a wannabe noveau-Houdini, which he readily admits to being. Yet, despite the veneer of self-promotion, I believe there are more layers to a man like Blaine. I've had some interest in him for years, even perusing his book "Mysterious Stranger" at one point. A street magician and illusionist, it's not these skills that interest me, but rather his feats of endurance and will where nothing traditionally magical enters the equation, just pure human spirit.

Blaine asks us to look into ourselves to find our perceived limits, assess if those limits are real or artificial and then make a decision to accept them or seek something beyond the artificial horizon of self-doubt.

Ultrarunning asks some of us the same questions. Why run 50, 100, or more miles in a single shot? Has not evolution eliminated the need for modern man to cover long distances on foot? Yes, as a utilitarian enterprise, there isn't a lot of discernible merit to distance running, living underwater for a week, free diving to almost unfathomable depths, being encased in ice for two days, or myriad other "crazy" human enterprises; and still such endurance certainly holds the potential to redefine what we are capable of.

I sometimes observe the look on a person's face when it's made known my desire to distance run (although the info is usually given grudgingly). Consternation is often the response. Is it perhaps natural to want to jump back from the cliff? To mock or be horrified by something so far outside our perceived comfort zone that the mere notion shellshocks our supposedly civilized sensibilities? The anarchist in me says to hell with such sensibility.

A few years ago I was vacationing in Colorado on a hike up in Yankee Boy Basin and struck up a conversation with an outdoorsy looking younger gentleman and a retired couple. The young man pointed up to an exposed rock face about 1500 feet above where we stood and told us that the previous winter he'd watched two skiers descend that vertical drop into the basin, to the which the older guy displayed not only shock but an intensely hateful response something to the words of "What crazy sons of bitches, they deserved to die for being so stupid." Why the vitriol? Jealousy? Fear? Perhaps the unwillingness to acknowledge that some humans push boundaries he'd never so much as considered.

One of David Blaine's stunts was to be suspended over the Thames River for 44 days, during which time many folks came by to taunt him with profanity or throw objects at him, proving yet again that some us truly do hate people or concepts we don't understand. But not I! My inclination is to attempt to embrace what I don't or seemingly cannot understand, that which may detonate my bodily and psychological security. I will run 100 miles!

The beautiful thing about endurance as a mode for exploration is that it unlocks the potential we have to go deep into our internal realms, to face down the shadows of being. That old guy in the mountains, I would wager, has spent a lifetime turning from his shadows. To house it in the running vernacular I shouldn't say that 5k runners are less enlightened (ok, maybe I should an am) but yes, sometimes speed is sex and distance is true love.

In our era of Mountain Dew fueled X-gaming, extreme just about anything, hell you can buy "x-treme" deodorant for lawd's sake, the heart of endurance still offers a gentle beat and a place for contemplative self-awareness. Free diver, Paul Kotnik puts it like this:

"I saw, for the first time, an approach to aquatics that is diametrically opposed to the heart pounding, blood curdling, white knuckle, hair-raising adrenalism of my windsurfing co-conspirators. My instructors mindset was one of...alert serenity. Everyone I'd ever known approached windsurfing or spearfishing as if he was going to war. They (instructors) were going to peace."

And so do Blaine, the ultrarunners, the thru hikers, those who endure embrace the calm found in another kind of extreme--the extreme effort that contacts all levels of being.

On my so small stage, I too will keep seeking the serenity just waiting to be discovered in the soft soul of endurance--to move toward peace.

Running Plans

I've only been out for one semi-long run since McNaughton (but lots of short ones), athree hour out at Farmdale. Erring on the side of too much recovery I think is better for me. Besides, have had some little flareups of plantar fasciitis, nothing too severe, but you gotta watch that mess. My hope was to maybe do the Howl at the Moon 8 hour as a training sort of run for Dances With Dirt in September. I've heard nothing but great things about Howl, so that's a must-do this year. After that, who knows. Lose some weight, sharpen the speed, try and avoid injury, and see what transpires.

On a side note, finally tried my Montrail Masai trail shoes. I don't know, they're awfully narrow, but then compared the gunboats that are the Brooks Beast, snowshoes would feel tight. I'll withhold judgement until I get a few more runs in with them.

Eagle Dreams

I recently finished Steven Bodio's book Eagle Dreams: Looking for Legends in Wild Mongolia. It is, at once, a book about falconry, deep tradition of the pastoral peoples of northwestern Mongolia and southern Kazakhstan, travelogue, and reflection on the depth and differences from a culture lovingly birthed over millennia and in opposition to our own petrie dish conceptions, new off the show lot sparkle of the right and proper path of the human condition.

Bodio is a naturalist with a romantic's soul and the early parts of this book on hunting and the somewhat esoteric world of falconry are suitably fascinating, the narrative tailing off a bit towards the middle when he lulls into more a straightforward travel writing tone. I persisted through the minutia of what exists on numerous menus in Ulan Bataar and got to the meat, the reason Bodio was traveling to these outer reaches in the first place: a chronicle of the peoples who still hold to the ancient (and yes, they are literally ancient) art of hunting with falcons and golden eagles. It's these people, stereotypical sometimes, in flowing colorful nomadic costume, resplendent with glorious feathers, craggy, weather worn faces, dark eyes holding the mysterious secrets of a life lived on and with the steppe. And yet, they are real faces, not caricatures, not an act put on for the industrial tourist, but humans upholding and disseminating the code of a primal part of all us. Bodio does a masterful job of taking us into this world while at the same time not romantically lapsing into voyeuristic complacency. And then we have the birds themselves. Their concerts with their human counterparts, maybe the real story needing to be felt:

"An eagle's perception of its own life might be of a bright eternal present, like a carnivorous Buddhist’s--confident, centered, and watchful, with a dimmer past and no thought of the future. If she thought of us at all, she might think that we crawl on the earth, eating dirt and sticks, killing from afar with a loud noise if we manage to see prey at all. If she could speak, she might say, 'I hold creation in my foot/or fly up, and revolve it all slowly--I kill where I please because it is all mine--Nothing has changed since I began."

Rites of Spring

Spring, she comes in like a tidal wave, building somewhere in the South Pacific off a craggy atoll and racing towards some Asiatic coast on the crest of those frosted March mornings. The Natives, the ones conditioned by generations of listening and feeling the sea, sense her impending landfall (yes, spring is indeed a lady) long before the moderns are wise and swept up in an inescapable current. And so she comes down.

If you open your senses, feel her barreling past the Phillipines taking the shape of a single green bud on the timber floor, that cardinal passing through the switchgrass thicket at sunup.

And then she hits--surrounded by a swirling eddy of rising colors, the greens, the purples and pinks of the violets, yellowish hues on hardwood foliage, remains from autumns vanished.

On my run the other day I stop in the that favorite bluebell patch ( I savor their tenuous nature) and gently sheperded a handful home along with an apple blossom to rest on my kitchen counter for a few days, their presence prolonging my willingingness to drown in the seismic tempest first subtly sensed many runs ago.

"You ask why I live in the mountain forest,
and I smile and am silent,
And even my soul remains quiet:
It lives in the other world
Which no one owns
The peach tree blossoms.
The water flows."

Li Po