Welcome to the Monkey House

November 24, 2019

I wandered deep into Topanga on Saturday and emerged, at days end, a different person.…

Black Smoke. White Smoke.

November 18, 2019

Two key questions: are the Santa Ana’s blowing and what color is the smoke? If…

Fret Not

November 3, 2019

Was at an orchestra concert the other day watching my favorite cellist and noticed that…

Thirteen

October 24, 2019

Backpack half zipped on the kitchen table,Beat up paperback Fahrenheit 451 in the side pocket,Simpsons…

Deadicated 6.16.18

June 25, 2018

FADE IN Citi Field.  General Admission. Three rows back from the stage. The crowd dances,…

Divine Intervention

June 20, 2018

So here I am driving down the road, reeling from an earlier conversation, trying to…

Luggage or leverage?

June 3, 2018

One step back…WTF? These freaking voices in my head… So, the other day, I am…

Year of the Rabbit

May 1, 2018

"What year?" Vince asks. "1963." I say with a certain amount of pride. "Huh, year…

Oh, my…

April 15, 2018

Went to Supercuts on Saturday: to the usual one over on 18th and Wilshire.  All…

Learning to fly

March 18, 2018

  Took flight again today at Pranayama Breathe Class on a Sunday afternoon. I visited…

Squeak!

February 24, 2018

Squeak. Step. Squeak. Step. Squeak. Pause. Stop. Pause. Step. Squeak. Humph… My favorite shoes are…

#leftearrightear

February 14, 2018

  FADE IN. EXT: DAD comes into focus, a big guy, burley, mid-thirties, Oklahoma t-shirt,…

Have and Have Nots

February 6, 2018

I am struggling a bit.   A few days ago I woke up pre-dawn, made a…

I don’t know, it just

January 15, 2018

drives me crazy that people don’t really greet each other anymore. I’m not sure why…

Turn the tables

August 31, 2017

I have a coach that helps me navigate the training regime for all of these…

385 in dog years…

August 6, 2017

I am getting old. I’m almost 385 in dog years. Humph… The other day I…

And he lives in Nashville. Went there recently to reconnect and discovered a whole new…

Owling

July 24, 2017

Went owling with Vince the other night. We have a big tree in the backyard…

Coco and Adele

July 23, 2017

One afternoon in the Marais (how cool is that for an opening line?) Teri and…

Merci Madame Killelay

July 19, 2017

One of my favorite teachers, Madame Killlelay, taught high school French. I think she tops…

Nice is nice (PG13)

July 13, 2017

Was a hot day in Nice. I had some down time before the flight back…

Comrades in arms…

July 10, 2017

And legs. And mind, body and spirit. Just whisper “Kowies, Fields, Bothas, Inchanga or Polly…

Triple death by…

July 7, 2017

Seriously? It’s Saturday morning. I mean what kind of message is that suppose to send…

Wump-Wump-Wump

July 6, 2017

Thursday afternoon Dad via text: “send a pic people here want to see” Dad’s internal…

La Decima

July 5, 2017

He’s a god, a modern day god, like Zeus with a tennis racket. And we…

So this past Sunday I ran a 4:11 here in the Wellington marathon. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I should say I survived for four hours and eleven minutes.

The rain. Here in Wellington, New Zealand it rains horizontally. These are not the small dainty drops of a mid-summer night. The drops are powerful, big and fat and filled with water. They are born out of a tempest: kin to those of a Nor’easter. The maddening part is that you never know when to expect them. One minute it’s a nice comfortable drizzle and everything is great, the next you can’t open you eyes from the blinding wall of water coming at you at warp speed. Clearly there is no escape from the madness and over time it does strange things to the nerves: you flinch now and again as you run forward drenched to your very core.

The wind. Blowing is such a gentle description for such a beast of an element. Think more along the lines of howling, violently thrashing, disrupting, challenging. It knocks into you as if to say, “how dare you run, here, on this day, on my turf.” It stands you up and screams, “take notice runner, you must earn all of it, every kilometer, step by step.” Every once in a while it comes at you so hard that all you can do is scream as loud as you can: but it won’t answer you. You need to answer for yourself. So you push forward with everything you have and remind yourself that this day you will not be denied.

The contest. The road you are on is all there is between sea and shore. You run right along the thin line where the two meet: green hills on one side, whitecaps on the other: where solid ground battles the ocean depths. It’s a fitting place to test your limits. Part of you, the physical part, stays with the land, confirming with each step that you are indeed running, ever onward. The other part, the mind, drifts out to sea to float up and down with the waves, ever fluid, and constantly changing, sometimes forward, sometimes back. In essence, as you run the road, you become the contest: you are the very race itself.

The mind. In the end the only way you finish these things is to will yourself across the line – at both the start and finish. I love marathons because the distance exposes everything about you in such a short amount of time. Over a few hours the distance forces you to make choices and tradeoffs, to deal with extreme highs and lows, to balance judgment and risk huge downside for immense satisfaction. In the end, you get back only if you are willing to give…

Today, on a lonely road in Wellington New Zealand, Nature showed up to remind us all just who is in charge and what we are capable of. By all accounts it was a glorious test of will, or as they say here down under, today was brilliant, simply brilliant!

Onward ->

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