Greetings, friends. (XIV)

Greetings, friends. I keep forgetting to wish you all a Happy Lunar New Year. In spite of the violence that tarnishes our humanity, or maybe because of it, I hope that those of you who celebrate the season have a fortunate and prosperous year.

I’ll have more to say about the violence, I’m afraid. I still have to answer danbri and my Uncle Pat wants to know why I end all my entries aping Cato.

I did another training run today, two miles on an absolutely abysmal 15:00 pace. Do I need to convert for folks who live in the real world? That’s 3.2 km at 9:23 per klick. Please write and let me know if you would like me to report on my training in metric. My cheeks burn in shame, as I feel Hal frowning sadly at me, while his app accords me “94% compliance” with my training plan for all my efforts. Or maybe the burning sensation is just that I’m overheated and possibly dehydrated.

The truth is I hate running; I merely love having run. As mentioned in a previous episode, your correspondent is not fond of deeply physical labor, or of repetitive tasks, and running is nothing if not both. I have to keep my mind occupied, or I find myself glancing at my watch every 1/20th of a mile to discover that I have traversed only another 1/20th of a mile. (That’s about 1/12th of a kilometer for those of you who have national healthcare.)

Now I’m no chemist, but I believe that this equates to an average of wondering about 40 times in the span of 30 minutes whether I’m done yet. It drives me bonkers.

This time I brought the trusty Aranet 4 upstairs to where my mother kept her treadmill, which I think she only used for a span of a few months about ten years ago, when I took her to Cape Alava for her 65th birthday. That is a whole story in and of itself.

Treadmill, you say? Why, yes. Did you think I would go for a two mile run in the snowy nightmare that is New Hampshire this week? Perish the thought, lest I perish.

Needless to say, in the stuffy attic room, the CO₂ monitor quickly shot up to 3,000 ppm, which eagle-eyed readers among you will recognize as being equivalent to the interior of a Boeing 737 parked at a gate, about 2/3rds of the way through the boarding process.

No wonder I felt bug-eyed, overheated, and about to expire. I cracked open a window but it didn’t help much. I guess mammals crank out a lot of carbon dioxide when they engage in aerobic activity. I gotta get a fan up there or something.

I have no idea if the CO₂ level really mattered in the end. My pulse didn’t reach abnormal levels at any point during the run. Towards the end, I was trying to speed up just to make the training run go faster. My pulse peaked at 155 bpm, which isn’t abnormal for me when I’m running a sub-14 minute mile to make up for a terrible first one. But I felt more like garbage than usual.

Truth be told, I always feel like garbage at the start of a run. As I understand it, the human body doesn’t really kick in the full aerobic respiration process until about 10-20 minutes of elevated activity… which for me equates to the first mile or two. Apparently you don’t get things like endorphin release until you’re basically already done running, if all you do is two mile training runs.

But… twelve years ago, I did, once or twice, jogging painfully up or down the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, run far enough to reach that blessed place, where the running just kind of happens on its own. And the breathing gets easier. And you’re just hovering above the endless sequence of foot strikes. And it kind of feels like flying. And you could do it forever.

I know that feeling is out there, if I run far enough. But to do that, I have to get through the first 20 or so minutes. Three or four days a week. Every week. For the next four months. May the Lord almighty upon high have mercy on me for my ambition.

I’ve tried a number of strategies to keep my mind occupied. This time around, I’ve been trying podcasts, or if I’m on a treadmill, YouTube videos. I had a little luck with the Tides of History episode about the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 10th Century BCE, but aside from that, it’s just been looking at my watch every 42 seconds on average to see if I can die yet.

I’ve had better luck with music. Twelve years ago, it was a (mostly) ‘80s playlist on an iPod Nano. One song stuck out to me off that playlist as being exceptionally satisfying to run to, and it was, don’t laugh… Billy Joel’s “Still Rock 'n Roll to Me”.

No lie. That song would come up in my headphones and it was like being unshackled. Something about the driving rhythm, and most especially, the tempo. If you can connect your foot to the ground on every snare or kick beat, well, running becomes more like dancing. And I like dancing.

A quick search of the Internet reveals that this song clocks in at 141 beats per minute. My stride is about a yard, which means I get in about 1,760 strides per mile. If we divide that by 141 beats per minute…. we get almost exactly 12½ minutes per mile, which, curiously, is more or less the pace at which I used to train, back in the day. It ought to be a comfortable pace for me this time, too, once I’m in better shape. It might be the ideal endurance running speed for my physical size and build.

What else, what else! I have an Apple Music (formerly Spotify, formerly Rdio) playlist called “work it out.” which contains other songs I find satisfying to run to. It includes Talking Heads’ “Wild Wild Life” at 137 bpm, the Go-Gos’ “Our Lips Are Sealed” at a slightly more sedate 131 bpm, the B-52’s “Roam” at 135, Tears for Fears with “The Hurting” at a heart-quickening 146, and, reaching a little farther back into pop music history, Boz Scaggs and his “Lido Shuffle” at, you guessed it, exactly 141.

Lidooooo! whoa-oh-ohhh-ohhh-oh!

Feels good.

My only fear is that the playlist is too short, and I will get bored of it if I listen to it every time I run. For the love of God and all that is holy, please send me your favorite running jams, especially if they have a driving beat… and a tempo of 130 to 140 beats per minute.

On a less thrilling note, here is what an old lady’s primary functional wardrobe looks like before it is donated to a thrift store:

So that happened today.

Fourteen entries means two weeks, and I still look forward to this every day. Maybe even more so than when I started. It takes me too long to write, I write too much, and frankly it is unsustainable at this pace, but I love it already.

This will be news to no one reading this, but it turns out that verbalizing helps me organize my thoughts. It gives me a kind of peace to extrude my lived experience into a neat, narrative form. In some ways, this feels better than therapy, because a therapist is meant to be a mirror of their client, and I am very good at lying to myself. I have a harder time allowing myself to lie to you.

That said, I should probably get a therapist. I had one back in San Francisco, but they’re not licensed to treat clients remotely in Washington. My mother’s passing has brought up a lot of things, as I’m sure you can imagine. Things I need to say to myself, or my sister, or our family… and maybe not in public, out of respect to them. Things I wish I could’ve said to my mother, if she’d been able to listen.

There’s some joy in it, too. I have been saving up for myself, like a treat, the thrill of digging through Mom’s boxes of family photos and old correspondence and keepsakes. There’s four generations of lived experience right there. I’m trying to get through the truckloads of garbage, and clothing donations, and realtor consultations, and court orders, and probate bond applications… so I can get down to the good stuff with Adah, and write about all the delightful things we’re finding, and share it with you.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est, and I promise I will talk about why eventually. But, in the meantime, have a restful tonight and a fortunate tomorrow.