Dumb Luck, Stupid Ambition

Cynthia has made it public that she’s going to run a half marathon in two months. “It’s the Slacker Half,” she says, as if its name’s a beacon for mildly ambitious weekend runners. Cynthia’s only run a 5K so far, and that was a struggle.

The truth is, she’s scared pissless. And excited.

The Slacker Half Marathon is so named because it’s a downhill course with a 2,230 foot descent. It begins at Loveland Ski Area, 10,630 feet above sea level. Cynthia lives in Fort Collins, Colorado where the elevation is a few feet below the Mile-High City. The climb alone will suck the air from her lungs. And the descent will wreak havoc on her ankles. I don’t tell her that. She’s already scared pissless.

She’s started her training. She ran two miles yesterday. She finished it in 22:35. She posted her route on her Facebook page with the caption: “Just need to add another 11 miles to that by the end of June. Crap.”

She’s got guts. She’s got ambition. And she’ll run the Slacker Half and finish in just over three hours, even if she hobbles through stress fractures and stomach cramps, because she’s stubborn.

Ambition leeches off those who are foolhardy. There’s something admirable about that degree of recklessness.

Cynthia’s a lot like Mike, a newbie swimmer who swims in my lane during strokes class. Mike’s got a powerful build in the shoulders and when he tires during intervals he muscles through the water to the end. He wants nothing more than to lock into the perfect stroke and hold it. “It just kills me that I can’t do it,” he says.

He’s got a lot riding on a good stroke, at least one that will carry him for just over a mile-long swim without tiring his body. He’s signed up for a long-distance triathlon, a distance comparable to the Ironman 70.3. After the swim, he’ll transition to a 56 mile bike ride, then to a 13.1 mile run, a distance totaling 70.3 miles.

“On the bike, I’m strong,” he says. “And I’m fine on the run.” But in the water, he’s as tight and nervous as an electrically-charged wire. “When I signed up, my friends told me not to worry about the swim. I’ll be in a wetsuit. I’ll be buoyant.” At least, there’s that.

The 70.3 is in July. He’ll most likely not perfect his stroke by then. But when morning comes and he’s standing at the foot of the cold Horsetooth Reservoir, he’ll feel the tinges of nervousness and excitement churn in his bowels and he’ll dive in somewhere mid-pack and muscle his way to the finish, looking forward to coasting on his bike where he feels strong and confident and competitive.

The desire to want more, to crave, to pine for something beyond what we already have, in part defines what it means to be human. Cynthia and Mike might fail, but their efforts are nothing to shrug at. Like McMurphy in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest, they’ll be able to say, “But I tried, though…Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, didn’t I?”

Occasionally, someone with that kind of reckless ambition succeeds. When my friend Peter told me that he wanted to publish a novel and be famous I regarded his comment as a silly, naked aside, easy to throw away. When he told me he was writing a horror-genre novel because “it’s fun to blow off steam and kill a few zombies every night,” it sounded like the literary equivalent of playing a video game. When he told me that he sold his novel to Random House, my jaw dropped.

Writing a novel is its own kind of endurance test. Peter didn’t just write one during the three years he spent working on a Master of Fine Arts degree at Colorado State University; he wrote several. It was ambitious to throw his chips into such a strange, risky lottery. But he did and he came up a winner. What dumb luck.

In just a few months, Cynthia and Mike will stress their bodies beyond what they are prepared to endure. They will hurt and they will suffer. And with a little dumb luck, they might succeed.

On a Wire

My grandfather drank a lot.

He and my grandmother were farmers, keeping alive a tradition that is hard, laboring, and disappearing in a world of mass-produced food. As a kid, I didn’t know much about, nor was I interested in, the backbreaking work that it entailed. All I remember are the visits, the darkened barn that I wasn’t permitted to enter without an adult, from which the cooing squawks of sitting hens could be heard; the peacock that had wandered onto the property one afternoon and now strutted around fluffing its regalia for whoever would stop for one admiring glance; the raccoon that had been trapped and now scratched around in a cage too small; the vegetable garden itself, from which grew the tastiest vegetables a kid could bite into; the gutted boxcar a mile and a half from the house; and, of course, the house, a darkened, rotting monolith that spooked me more than anything.

The farm was my grandmother’s responsibility. Every morning, she would rise to feed the animals and, in the summer months, tend the garden. I saw her work one summer that I spent there. My parents had driven two hours south from Fort Smith, Arkansas so that I could spend a week with my grandparents. In the morning she rose before I did, but soon after breakfast I trailed her as she tended to her chores.

My grandfather left early. He’d drive into town for the day, returning just before dusk, and when he did he swaggered in giddy, carefree.

He was a country musician. I never saw him perform, but remember seeing him in photos dressed in a vintage, red western shirt, surrounded by other men dressed the same. In the evenings, sometimes he’d fret cords while I strummed the strings of his guitar.

There are few things I remember about him. He was a man of poor health. He had asthma and an inhaler was usually within arm’s reach. He injected insulin into his gut. He also smoked. And he drank a lot.

If my grandmother was ever upset because of the roles she and my grandfather held, that she was the sole laborer, he the child at play, her protests were private, solemn. She was a plain-spoken woman, gruff, earthy, matter-of-fact.

I never heard her raise her voice. I never saw her angry. The one time I saw my father challenge my grandfather, a dispute that was provoked by too much drinking, she kept quiet, invisible.

My father was an engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad and was gone often. There was a stint when my grandfather would wander over to the house mid-afternoon and spend several hours talking with my mother. I was young, still in grade school, and their talk was the indecipherable caw of adults.

One afternoon, my grandfather left abruptly and in the evening, after my father returned home from being on the rails for several days, we drove the twenty minutes to my grandparents’ farm. I can’t say what had occurred in those moments before my grandfather left my mother that afternoon, what provoked my father to raise his voice, to challenge his own father, to lay his anger nakedly on the slab.

This, I know. My grandfather drank a lot. But there was something else, something more. My father’s anger showed me the bruised tiger in him. He brooded often, unsatisfied, unsatiated. Quick to anger, resentful, discontent. He slept around while away from home. He didn’t like having a family. He wasn’t satisfied living two lives.

My father didn’t drink often, but he resembled his own father in a number of other ways. That evening, he saw something in his father, my grandfather, that scared him. He saw his own weaknesses, his infidelities, his loneliness. He saw his own life stretched thin on a wire, swaggering in a drunken sway to defend himself.

Fire Breather

When I was fifteen, I smoked my first cigarette, a short-stubbed and already half-smoked Marlboro Light that my friend and I pulled from my parents’ ashtray and shared between the two of us. Never mind that it was stale and had probably been sitting in the ashtray for three or four days already. It was the act of breathing smoke, the first sensation of a chemically-enhanced tobacco burn on my lungs, that was appealing. This was also the same year that I first tried chewing tobacco. I was well on my way to supporting the state of North Carolina.

At that age I was underdeveloped, skinny as a sea slug and a foot shorter than most kids my age. I’d never been athletic, preferring the lazy dreck of post-school television consumption to spitting out the last few ounces of energy playing outdoors. This wasn’t the best time to start smoking. I wasn’t in any sort of shape for the habit. Not that’s there is a best time for that sort of thing.

The next cigarette, my friend had lifted from his mom. He had a whole pack of Marlboro Reds. “It was easy,” he said. “She buys a carton and never counts how many packs she has left.” His mom, like both of my parents, were heavy smokers, chuffing away at an easy one to two packs a day.

My life, up to that point, had been infused in a haze of cloudy, blue smoke. When I think back on my parents I see them as fire breathers, always smiling, their teeth a nicotine-yellow, and with plumes of smoke rolling from their mouths, noses, and ears.

Eventually, smoking became more than a habit. Everything I did was first measured against how much time it could potentially divorce me from my one true love, the Marlboro Man.

My fingers started to yellow.

I quit smoking when I was twenty-nine, just before I started dating who has since become my wife. It was Julia who got me running. I hated running then. Loathed it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to lace up and go for a jog for two or three miles in the brisk, morning cold. Why would anyone want to do anything that hurt? But, alas, I had a soon-to-be-wife to impress, just enough self-loathing, and an obsessive-compulsive personality to appease.

This act of self-punishment continued for two years. I ran and every time I sent curses to every ugly-headed child I passed. At the end of a light jog, I was ready to kick my own teeth in. It was all part of the cleansing process. I was healing.

It was sometime in year three that I had a change of heart. I went for a six-mile run. There wasn’t a magic moment of trumpets and fireworks that it all became easier. At the end of the six-mile stretch my muscles still developed lactic acid. I was still a little winded and tired. But I didn’t mind. I simply said, “Eh, that’s not so bad.”

Maybe there’s a moral here. Maybe this is some sort of psychoanalytic parable. My father, the fire breather, was diagnosed with throat cancer last November. When he told me, I wasn’t surprised. He died just more than a month later after he started chemo and radiation. He was fifty-seven.

I’m scared as shit of dying young.

Lent

It’s Lent. I’m not Catholic but my wife is what she calls a secular Catholic. If we had children I imagine they’d be of mixed origin, reluctant Catholics. This is good. I can get behind the secularization of any religion, really. It’s silent, private, and occasional. My wife still votes liberally. She champions birth control and women’s rights. She’s still all-American.

As the spouse of a Catholic I’m not obligated to alter my life for forty days. I don’t feel any compulsion to give up chocolate chips or pork chops. My life, more or less, will go on as normal. I’ll continue to shave every morning. Some nights, I’ll have a beer before bed. On the best nights, I’ll have a glass of Jameson or (God bless it!) Johnny Walker.

That’s not to say that I’m not affected by my wife’s decisions. For Lent, Julia has decided to go to bed an hour earlier every night, get up an hour earlier every morning, and push through a run just as the sun is breaking above the eastern horizon. To me, this is a blessing.

If I want to swim at the university’s recreation center, where I do all of my indoor training, I have to get there as early as possible, slip out of my clothes and into my shorts, swim a few slapdash laps, then shower before heading off to work at the university’s Writing Center across campus. I have to get there early so that I can be at work at a decent hour. Most importantly, though, I have to get there before the most ambitious freshmen and sophomores, who still live in dorm rooms just a few blocks from the rec center, shuffle in, because the rec center only has four swimming lanes and if I end up sharing a lane, I’m afraid I’ll crash into someone much more fluid, much more graceful, than me.

But most mornings I don’t swim. Most mornings I run. Even before this week, before Julia and I decided to hobble our way out of bed at six a.m., I got the most joy lacing up my shoes in the morning and setting out on the streets of Fort Collins just as my body was springing to life. I hate to get soft here, but there’s something purple and romantic about pounding your feet into the pavement when a lot of the world is still brooding over their first cup of coffee.

This is even truer at six in the morning when the night is still hanging around, refusing, just yet, to leave. At that hour there are only a handful of minutes left to savor the near dark, the silence. The few people you pass by, you share a certain kinship with, especially other runners, or cyclists, or even those out walking their dogs. They, like you, know what it means to still be half-dazed from sleep and trying to catch a glimpse of something beautiful before your mind is awake enough to register what that something is.

Today’s the first day of Lent and we’ve been waking up at six a.m. for less than a week and it feels like a honeymoon.

As runners, Julia and I have different goals. I like to run longer than she does. This morning I eagerly dressed myself to run, slammed down half a cup of coffee, gave her a kiss, then took off out the door just as she was getting dressed. Fort Collins has several miles of intersecting bicycle paths that cut through town. You can get on them and just go without hitting a street for several miles. At six in the morning there are few people on the paths and they make for good running. I hopped on, heading east, following the curves toward the rising sun. Already, the blue-black of the night was turning pink beyond the tree line and I wanted to run and run, heading toward the east, toward the sun, as if it might be the last day on Earth, as if there wouldn’t be another sunrise tomorrow morning.

I’ll never know what it means to be Catholic, to carry around that faith like an heirloom. Or what Lent means, what it feels like to sacrifice a piece of yourself year after year, to seek penance through self-denial. But that’s ok. I can live with that.

I may grow weary of traipsing through my mornings at a brisker pace than most people see throughout their days, but for now, at least, it’s worth relishing.

Swim Lessons

At thirty-three, I’m learning to swim.

When I called my mother and told her this, that for the first time in my life I’m slipping my bone-thin body into a pool for public swimming lessons, she reminded me that she’d already paid for lessons. That I should already know how to swim. “That was over twenty years ago,” I remind her.

“And you’ve forgotten?”

The truth is I’ve never learned to swim. Not well. Not competitively. I’ve learned to flounder, to kick and punch at the water as if it’s challenging me in a street fight. After three weeks of lessons, I still do that. Only, with more grace.

When I was fourteen, I almost drowned. My friends and I were swimming in the wave pool at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. The waves crashed on top of me. Then they crashed on top of me again. I panicked. I remember being sucked under, the hazy summer light bobbing on the surface seemed miles away, though I was only submerged enough to catch a mouthful of water before rising for air again. I bobbed. I kicked. I punched. If it was a street fight, I was losing.

I wanted to warble out a scream. But to do so would require more breath. When a middle-aged woman with bruises on her ankles floated by on a tube, I grabbed the slick rubbery thing and held on for my life.

Now, I’m learning to swim. Every week (for three consecutive weeks now!) I pay my fees at the Mulberry Pool and swim. I’m learning to kick, but with my legs streamlined and fluid. I’m learning to use my chest as a buoy. I’m learning to pivot and turn and breathe. I’m learning not to punch the water. I’ll never win that fight, anyway.

When I told my wife that I’m learning the fundamentals of the breast stroke, she corrected me. “That’s freestyle, babe.”

I’ve gotten more serious. I bought a Speedo. I make sure my face and head are shaved every morning (though I ignore that my chest and legs are covered in wild fur) so as to prevent drag.

This week, I swam my first twenty-five. That’s a whole half a lap.

The delectable, exquisite Italian Greyhound - Luca.