Greetings, friends. (X)

Greetings, friends. I hope you are feeling better rested today than I am. In spite of having waxed lyrical yesterday about the wonders of modern air travel, one downside of being able to cross the northern United States in a little over five hours is that, in mid-winter, you manage to miss daylight almost completely. I was already going crosseyed at the carpets in PDX a quarter hour after the sun came up, and it had fully set by the time I collected my luggage at Logan. To be honest, it kinda messes me up.

A little less than 12 years ago, I was huffing and puffing up Divisadero Street in San Francisco, in a tank top, shorts, and trainers, covered in sweat, when who should I come across but Shannon and Besha sitting in the sun at a table outside Bean Bag Café. I stopped to say hello.

“Schuyler’s training for Bay to Breakers,” Shannon explained.

Besha hoisted her beer in salute. “So am I,” she said.

You can see why I love this woman.

I was not, however, training for the Bay to Breakers race, per se. What I thought I was doing at the time was training for the San Francisco Marathon. I did run Bay to Breakers, and unlike most San Franciscans, I actually ran the whole race sober and not in costume. I finished in personal record time, at a very modest 11 minute pace. I then foolishly went right back to training the following week, developed severe pain in my knees from having overtrained and gave myself iliotibial band syndrome. By the time I could run again without pain, it was too late to get back in shape. I did not wind up running the marathon.

But, from a young age, I had once thought I wanted to be a runner. I was deeply inspired by Carl Lewis and his quadruple gold triumph on the track in LA during the ‘84 Olympics. Lewis’s feat that summer mirrored perfectly that of Jesse Owens, who thumbed his nose at Aryan superiority from the podium in Berlin in ‘36.

Looking back, it’s strange to realize that, today, almost as many years have passed since Lewis’s accomplishments in ‘84 as separated him from those of Owens in ‘36.

Anyway, egged on by the Olympic broadcasts, and that summer’s network TV special “The Jesse Owens Story”, I decided to train for future greatness on the track. Each day, I swore to myself, I would race around the block my mother lived on in West Philadelphia. I chose this training route because it was about as far as I was allowed to stray from our house on my own at the age of 6.

So, each day, I ran around the block, to the strains of the “Chariots of Fire” theme soaring on an endless synthesizer loop in my young mind. This lasted, I think, about two days. Maybe three.

It turns out I don’t really have the physique to be a great runner, or even a good one, over any distance, long or short. I am made mostly of lumbering muscle. I also have never had the discipline, nor, since age 6, the genuine desire to overcome this mismatch in physical gifts.

But when a few of my colleagues at SimpleGeo announced in the spring of 2011 that they were signing up for the San Francisco Marathon in July, I couldn’t resist trying to prove to myself that I was as gritty and determined as they were. I knew wasn’t going to break any records — I just wanted to reach the finish line.

In this aspiration, I think I was inspired less by Carl Lewis and Jesse Owens, and more by the example of Eric and Jon and Jana. I met the latter two through Eric, because the three of them had been inseparable friends in high school.

As I understand it, Jana comes from a family of distance runners. It’s something they’ve done together, as a family activity. So when a number of Jana’s close family members decided to run the New York Marathon, Jana naturally decided to join them.

Now this fact in and of itself might not have mattered to Eric, but I think Jon saw himself as a close peer of Jana’s, and he was determined that, if she could meet the challenge of completing a marathon, then he was going to prove that he could do it too.

Of course when Eric found out that Jana and Jon were both running the New York Marathon, naturally he was not going to let the two of them accomplish a feat of that magnitude without also doing so it himself. It was simply a matter of equity and personal pride.

So the three of them trained, and ran the marathon, and all three finished it.

I tell this story, which is almost certainly factually incorrect in every particular, because I think it represents the best of human relationships. The best relationships in our lives challenge us to do better, to be better, to realize our own potential as humans.

The fact that this story is at least semi-fictional does not, to me, diminish the object lesson in the slightest. I am grateful to Michelle for providing me with similar inspiration to tick a long distance race off of my own bucket list. I mean, if Eric and Jon and Jana and Michelle all can do it…?

To be honest, I also have begun to feel the vicissitudes of advancing age, mostly in little ways. I understand that the best way to keep senescence at bay is to resist it actively. You gotta use it or you lose it, baby.

I hope I’m not biting off more than I can chew, but I’ve doubled down on the running thing. The Brooklyn Half is still a long way off, so I decided to set my sights in the interim on Portland’s Shamrock Run, which is quite naturally in mid-March.

I signed up for the 8k version of the run, because that’s about where I’m hoping to be in my own half-marathon training program by then. I’m a little uncomfortable with the whole goofy fetishization of Irish-American heritage… but I’m probably still going to race with my bib pinned to something luridly green, to honor my ancestors from the Emerald Isle.

I’m telling you this because, now that I have announced it, pride will keep me to my training schedule. My own internal accountability is, sadly, far weaker than my attachment to being perceived socially as having integrity. So my thanks to all of you, also, for being there to challenge me to do better, and be better, and maybe realize a bit more of my own potential.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Have a wonderful evening.