The Wadded Bundle Drifted Like a Weary Soul

Photo by Albino Jimenez

Esto es para mi amigo Albino. We have triumphed together and we have failed together. The weather colored it all.

From the Running Journal, January 2011.

**********

Oh, the weather played a joke! The day after the Seville Marathon the local paper, ABC, featured a photograph of Constantina covered by snow. That town, just one marathon distance northeast of Seville, had not seen snow in 20 years, the paper said. So unusual was the storm, ABC spread it across six pages. Such rare weather coupled with such rare timing, gives you irony to wonder about.

At the XXI Maratón Ciudad de Sevilla that February Sunday, the material falling on Seville was not snow but rain. The temperature was 4 degrees C, and the wind was blowing.

The day before the race the weather had been sunny and pleasant, betraying no clue. We sat outside having coffee on Paseo Colón. Albino, Rafael, María José, their sister, Virginia, Rafael’s wife, Angel, a Madrid marathoner, and myself sat at a table overlooking the river. Townspeople and tourists alike strolled along the river walk. Albino said he could spot a tourist at a glance. I wanted to not look like one. I knew a few words of Spanish. I told María José her dress was pretty.

So the day before the marathon we sat in the sun relaxing on the street named after Columbus, at the place where exploration of the New World had its beginning. Before us stood Torro del Oro, the tower of gold, the building where Spanish ships off-loaded gold stolen from the Americas and the Indies. Some of it they mined, Albino reminded me. Behind me stood Plaza de Toros, where I like to imagine Hemingway hatched “The Undefeated,” a bullfighting story I’ve read and reread.

Time marched away that sunny day. Albino, Angel and I took a walk around the Cathedral of Seville, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, which dates to the 1100s. The Christians recaptured Seville and built the Cathedral on the foundation of a mosque begun by the Muslims. Columbus’ tomb is inside. One of the double doors was open. It was massive, as wide as a man is tall and twice as high, made of bronze, it appeared. I laid the back of my hand on the edge to gauge its thickness: six and a half inches. Stone saints, cast in relief, high on the wall guard the doors.

We strolled through the castle Real Alcázar and among its gardens. A giant tree spread its crown over us, its trunk thicker than a truck; Albino said it was a ficus tree. We had drinks at a sidewalk cafe where I saw the only SUV I can recall seeing in Seville. Then we drifted past the Cathedral back toward the car.

Next day, after some 36 kilometers, the marathon returned me to the Cathedral. My circumstances had changed. The wind and rain focused their attack where defense was weakest, my hands and feet. Their pain shriveled my spirit.

What about pain, marathoner? When it calls, where will you hide? When the race wearies your flesh and time grinds and erosion sets in, what then? Can you hold onto your dream?

Questions come: How much farther, what time, why, and so on. But question words are no help. A good runner stays in the moment. Right here. Right now. And knows there’s nothing else. A good runner accepts the ache with placid resignation, examines it with professional detachment, dwells in the “now” like a Buddhist, avoiding thoughts of the end.

But I am not so brave or wise. Patch after marathon patch, I stitched with nothing but yearning for the end, faith and hope meanwhile slipping away.

I glanced up at the soaring Cathedral. Men worked, and died, on it knowing they would never see it finished. But they had faith it would. Banal lyrics from a Latin rock band ran through my head:

Dáme fe, dáme alas, dáme fuerza
Para sobrevivir en este mundo

Imploring words from Maná asking for faith, for wings, for strength to survive in this world. Thus slopping along the wet pavement I came as close to prayer as I would come—and thereby stitched in yet another tiny patch of the marathon, like a seamstress bent at her work.

Hoping for it or not, the end does, in some manner or the other, eventually come. And so I ran across Puente de la Barqueta, the fourth and final bridge, the only one I can remember—remembering it only because I knew that I must. After the last turn, straight ahead a tunnel gaped open to the stadium where the finish line waited. I decided to shed the plastic bag that had sheltered me the entire way. I reached a frozen claw up to the neck hole and ripped it wide. When I flung the wadded bundle off, the wind drifted it to the side like a weary soul.

Then inside—and it was over.

Someone wrapped a towel around my shoulders. Who? I strode past a tent where I could have gotten help for hypothermia, across the field to the tunnel under the stands on the far side. Someone hung a finisher’s medal around my neck. The towel, already wet, draped over the medal.

At least the tunnel was dry of the rain, but a cold wind was blowing through. I drifted around in a growing crowd looking for a place to get warm, a place I couldn’t find. I went into a locker room, but it was crowded, and it stunk.

At a table in the tunnel people were picking up their warm-up clothes placed there by race management. But I had made no such provision, my clothes were in Rafael’s car, and it was in an enormous parking lot. I wasn’t sure I could find it even if I ventured into the rain searching. And I didn’t have a car key anyway. Only Angel and Rafael had a key, and I hadn’t seen either since the race began. Now I wished I had not thrown away the plastic bag.

Without my clothes, I could only do what I was doing—stand and shiver, drift around and shiver. Or maybe declare an emergency and let medical workers take over repair of my hypothermic self. But language deficiency and fear of humiliation made me hesitate.

I found a wad of clear plastic lying on the floor, the kind used to protect construction supplies. I wrapped the dirty mess around my shoulders and continued as before—standing and shivering.
Suddenly in the crowd I came face to face with Albino. He had run faster and finished quicker than he expected, having recently recovered from an injury. So here he was, cold like I was. I was relieved to see him.

“Let’s go get a massage,” he said.

“I don’t need a massage, I need to get warm.”

“It’s warm up there.”

Ah. We hopped on the elevator and landed in a warm room.

While the massage was pleasant enough, for me, it was mainly a way of stalling in a place where it was warm. And it led to an unhappy discovery—I’d lost my marathon medal. The ribbon still hung around my neck, but the wet towel had dissolved an adhesive joint in the ribbon allowing the medal to drop off.

Back downstairs in the tunnel, we discovered we were still cold, cold to the core.

“I need to go see if they’ll give me another medal,” I told Albino.

The table of medals was at the far end of the tunnel; lots of people were in the way. We stood looking, shivering, deciding. We could take that long walk to where the medals were or we could go the opposite way and catch a van to the car. A warm van.

“Let’s not go; I’m freezing,” Albino said. I was, too.

“I’d kinda like to have a medal,” I said, the idea fading to wistful hope.

“Here,” Albino said. He reached out his medal to me.

“I can’t take your medal, man!”

“Take it. I’ve got others.” He’d run the race before, he said.

Our friendship may seem unlikely. Albino has half the years of my 60-plus. We had met two years earlier, soon after he moved to Kentucky and started running races around Nashville. His job had brought him to the states.

We had made this trip to Spain as partners. He put me up in his Seville apartment gratis. He took me to his parents’ house for dinner, to his brother’s house for lunch, and guided me around town. Now he stood offering his finisher’s medal, too. And wouldn’t take no for an answer. So today in my study hangs a medal that bears special significance.

A man who gives you his marathon medal is a friend.

This story resists ending—there is a postscript, and it starts at the expo two days before the marathon. There they had placed the age-group trophies on display. As I wandered around among the bays, Albino came up to me.

“I made a picture of your trophy,” he said.

He’d set his camera on “close up” and made a picture of the first-place trophy for “Category J”, as my age group was called. For the trophy to be mine, I had to first win it, and I thought that was unlikely. I expected tough competition from the European runners.

“I don’t know, man. I may not win here.”

After the race, we had not gone to the awards ceremony. We were too cold. My finishing time of 3:26 was not too bad for a man who ran the whole race cowering inside a bag of polyethylene. But they don’t give awards for bag wearing. I wasn’t hopeful.

So I didn’t know if I’d even placed in the top three until I got back to my Cookeville home. Then a check of the marathon web page showed that I’d won second place, not first as Albino had predicted. Albino called and said he’d ask his brother, there in Seville, to pick up the trophy for me.When Rafael went to do that, they told him that my second place showing was a mistake. I had indeed won first place! Albino’s prediction at the expo that day was borne out after all. Proving his prediction, I have the picture. Proving my win, I have the trophy

Momma's Supper Table: A Running Son Remembers

          On Fridays I would take Momma out for supper. One Friday we ate at Pizza Hut where I could have spaghetti. She wondered why. It was because my first race, a 10K which I'd kept a secret, was on the next morning. Four days after her death, I had surgery, and, following recovery, trained for eight weeks and ran my first marathon. Running began a new life for me. For her, life itself was a hard run. By coincidence, it ended as my new one was beginning. Endurance had filled her days. She left it with me. 

**********

            On the Sunday supper table at Momma’s: chicken and dressing, giblets gravy, cranberry sauce, fried rattlesnake, boiled potatoes, fried corn, pinto beans, black-eyed peas, poke sallet, sliced tomatoes, green peppers, fruit salad, homemade relish, cornbread, biscuits, pecan pie and coconut pie.

            That supper was on September 23, 1984 in the Smith Bend community of Jackson County, Tennessee. Just an ordinary Sunday feast—except for the rattlesnake whose head I had chopped off after he failed to bite my brother and me. We dressed the snake, Momma cooked the meat. It would have been a feast even without it. Poke sallet? Momma served that delicious weed even in wintertime; she canned it.

            I know what was on the table that long ago day because as the women cleaned the dishes, I asked Momma for a pencil and piece of paper. She tore a sheet from a spiral binder and handed me a ballpoint pen, and I wrote down the list.

            Just before Christmas fourteen years later, we held Momma’s funeral. I gave the list to preacher Draper Murphy, a family friend. He read it at the service. When he came to the rattlesnake, he said, “She’d fix about anything those boys brought in.” Hearing him read out the items on that list, the people in the little chapel smiled knowingly. They didn’t doubt the lavish menu; they’d sat at Margaret Smith’s table. That list told more about Momma than a room full of sermonizing.

            Momma shouldn’t have died. At the age of seventy-eight she was in surpassingly good health. She stood five-four and weighed 105 pounds. She could outwork two good men—and often did. Her teeth, all still where God installed them, were porcelain white and contained not a single filling. Before I knew what toothpaste was, she’d taught us to brush our teeth with a mixture of salt and baking soda. No surgeon’s knife had gashed her skin.

            She died because of how she lived—allowing no concessions, yielding not an inch. Following Daddy’s death two years earlier, she had continued living on the farm, pasturing twenty head of cattle and a herd of goats. Neighbors unable to contact her on the phone would be shocked when they learned she had been back in the hills checking on her cattle. “Something could happen to you back there and nobody would know about it for days,” they’d say.

When we were kids—my sister, my two brothers and I—she used to take us to those hills in the fall to collect hickory nuts and walnuts. She used the hickory nuts in pies, doing the painstaking work to crack the hard shells and pick out enough kernels. No pecan pie could compete with her hickory nut pie.

On Friday nights I’d drive to her house, some thirty miles in the country, and take her to supper, and then go back to her house on Sunday for the big lunch and supper she’d cook up. One Friday I suggested eating at Pizza Hut, where I knew I could get pasta. She didn’t know why I wanted to eat there, since I had not before. The pasta was for my very first race, a 10K, on the next morning. I kept the race a secret until the following Sunday. Then I showed her my tee shirt and the two trophies, heavy mugs, I’d earned for winning both my age group and the master category.

She was proud. With that race, she saw the very beginning of my running. A few months later, it was too late. She never got to see my later success. I know she would have been surprised and pleased.

We didn’t take her high blood pressure seriously. She wouldn’t have listened if we had. Her abiding fatalism trumped any worry. “If it happens, it’s supposed to,” she had always said. Throughout her life, that sense of resignation gave her the endurance to work in the field all day, and to then come home and cook supper while the men rested. I think the running events I seek out express that ability she had to work, uncomplaining, at a steady pace for a long time. Any stoic endurance I have I got from her.

  Best we can figure she had the stroke on a Thursday. She had been out cutting weeds with a swing blade in the heat of a June day. That’s the way she was. It must have been a small stroke. People who talked to her Thursday and Friday noticed that she wasn’t quite herself. I, myself, took her to supper Friday night, and noticed she seemed a bit unsteady. But I didn’t suspect the awful truth.

Afterwards, I dropped her off at her house. “Wait a minute,” she said. She went into the house and came out with a present, a polo shirt for my birthday, which fell later in the week.

“My birthday’s not until Thursday.”

“I might not see you then.”  

She wanted me to stay the night. I had to go. I backed the truck out. I remember her standing there looking into the glare of my truck lights. Her oldest son was leaving; she stood helpless and utterly alone. I missed the best chance anyone had to get her prompt medical help, essential in the case of stroke. The next day, still ignorant, I remarked to a friend, “Last night Momma seemed old for the first time.”

My sister found her that day when she went for a visit. Momma was confused, and Sis checked her into a hospital.

At first, we were sure she would recover. But then she had another stoke, in the hospital, and was taken from Carthage to a big hospital in Nashville. A vigil began. We took turns staying with her night and day. My turn came on my fifty-eight birthday. Momma and I faced the struggle in the hospital room just as precisely fifty-eight years earlier we had faced a similar struggle in a two-room log house in Jackson County. Just the two of us again—except now it was my turn to help her live.

But I was inadequate. After six months Momma died in a Donelson Rest Home. We had chosen that particular home for its location, just a few blocks from my Sister’s house. Sis had visited her daily, bringing treats, staying to comb and plait her hair.

The night she died I drove to Donelson. My daughter Jill rode with me. In her room, Momma lay peacefully in the bed, her hands crossed. The nurses discretely withdrew. Sis, Jill and I stood there looking down.

After a few minutes, I left the room and walked outside. Jill followed. I walked along the path where I used to push Momma in her wheel chair—she always liked to be outside. The path led to a gap in a fencerow where we had always stopped. Looking west across a parking lot, we would watch the traffic on Donelson Pike.

It was a fencerow like the ones in Smith Bend where Momma had always lived, thick with tall Sassafras bushes, honeysuckle and briars. Jill and I stood there in the dark now, not speaking. I saw a wild grape vine hanging from the bushes. I slashed it off with my knife and yanked the severed vine with the sudden fury of a savage. Dead leaves and twigs rained down, branches snapped, bowing to the violence. I ripped the whole vine from the tree down to its last clinging tendril.

I rolled the fallen vine into a hoop, twisting the bushy branches around the main limb, and tucking the curlicues. When I finished, I had a platter-sized wreath.

I took it inside to Momma’s room and handed it to Sis. She turned it in her hands, admiring the curly twigs. “It needs a bow,” I said. Sis had an idea. A vase of flowers sat on the table, a small card attached by a pink ribbon. She untied the ribbon, and looped it into a graceful bow. Then she fastened the bow to the wreath and held it up. It was an elegant little wreath. She stepped forward and gently laid it on Momma’s folded hands. “It’s the last thing we can give you, Momma,” she said.

Two days later they closed the casket. It was twelve days before Christmas 1998.

My oldest son flew in from his Texas home. The night before the funeral, he and I spent the night in Momma’s house. Everything was just as she had left it six months earlier.

A rose bush Momma had recently planted stood at the corner of the front porch. It was thin and scrawny and hadn’t had much chance to grow. Though it was December, the sad little bush reached up a single red rose.

We gathered at Momma and Daddy’s house for Christmas that December as we always had. My sister, my two brothers and I, our families, kids and grandkids were all there. Gene, my youngest brother, had put up a cedar tree and decorated it just like Momma used to do. Gerald, my other brother, brought his shotguns for skeet shooting. We gathered around the tree and opened presents. Kids with new toys romped through the house squealing, raising a happy din.

The women brought a feast like Momma always fixed. Once again we sat around the big long table in front of the picture window that looks out over Cordell Hull Lake and the hills beyond.

It was a joyous Christmas obeying the spirit of past ones. But Momma now rested beside Daddy in the family graveyard a few paces from the back porch. A glance in that direction reminded us—it would never be the same.  

Weather Report: Seville, Spain

A story about the weather seemed a good idea, considering what I see outside my window on this cold, snowy day. From Running Journal, December 2010.

**********

We went barreling into the roundabout too fast for the wet cobblestones. The car lurched into a sickening skid. Rafael jerked the wheel, and we swooped through the circle clean as a pin. The lucky fact that no other cars were about at that early hour helped.

My friend Albino was riding shotgun; his older brother, Rafael, was driving, and I was in the back. The brothers and I burst out laughing. We didn’t care. The danger seemed small compared to what we were rushing toward, the place where our minds already were.

Which was the XXI Maratón Ciudad de Sevilla. On this February day that had yet an hour to wait before dawning, we rushed along wet streets heading for a rendezvous with the brothers’ running club. From there, according to plan, we would all drive to the marathon at Olympic Stadium.

The Peugeot’s thermometer showed 4 degrees C and the wipers beat back the rain. A little colder and there wouldn’t be rain—which would be an improvement. As it was, we’d be both cold and wet. Staying warm enough would be a problem.

“This is as bad as it gets, unless there’s wind too,” I said.

Then the wind came.

To this warm and dry city, an unusual weather system had sneaked overnight; the Seville Marathon was going to be a wet piece of business. Rafael had tuned in a station playing old pop hits from the United States. Dale Shannon was inconsolate: His little Run-Away had, sure enough, run away. “I’m walking in the rain…,” sang he.

At the pre-race expo two days earlier, a sunny day, Albino had picked up a folded piece of plastic and extended it to me.

“We may need these,” he’d said.

I doubted that but took it anyway. It was a plastic bag with a neck hole, the usual marathoner’s raincoat. That bag saved my race.

After linking up with the running club—an indefatigable group as sunny as the dawning day was cloudy, everyone wearing matching warm-up suits—we arrived at the Stadium to find the parking lot layered with water. We posed for a foggy group picture there, one that turned out blurred because Albino’s camera was inadvertently set for close-up photographs.

In cold conditions, what to wear is hard to decide. I don’t want any extra clothes to slow me down. On the other hand, freezing doesn’t help either. The plastic bag, I held in my hand. Sitting in the security of the Peugeot, I decided on shorts, tee shirt and glove liners, not gloves, for my hands—lightweight clothes for speed. I pulled the bag down over my head, and we walked through the rain to the start, a block from the Stadium.

I faced the gray day in just shorts and tee—and a plastic bag, which I planned to throw away after a mile or two, when I got warm. My guess was that once the sun came up, the rain would stop and the sky clear. And that was not only optimistic but also wrong.

It turned out to be a day of unblemished gray. The rain never let up. We slopped along wet streets. Water pooled at intersections. We cut across curbs and corners, or went splashing through, high-stepping like a guy wading through snakes. The sun never showed, the air never warmed, the rain pattered, and the wind rattled our plastic coats.

Early on, I had punched two holes in the plastic bag so that I could stick my arms outside for a natural arm swing. That didn’t work; my arms got too cold. I pulled them back inside. Thus cramped, I ran. Huddled, I ran. Nursing cold hands, I ran. Suffering wooden feet, I ran. Losing faith, I still ran.

It was easy. I couldn’t do anything else.

A woman passed me. She had a crooked left leg. It bowed outward at her knee. I guess she knew it. To compensate, she ran leaning to the side. Her short hair ran in matted spikes down her neck. She had no coat to protect her from the wind, the cold, the rain. She faced it like the runner I am not. And she ran faster than I could.

But her race is not my race, and her truth is not my truth. Whatever happens to her is as singular and as lonely as whatever happens to me. We share the cold, and the hard miles. And, together, we are ever separate.

Marathon fans can be counted on. They came out to watch, huddling under umbrellas and storefront shelters.

“Animo, animo!” they shouted.

A man with slicked-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses stood puffing a cigarette under a kiosk. I hopped up on the curb and ran by him. He looked at an apparition in flapping plastic. Our eyes met.

“Vamos!” he said.

The encouragement helped fight back the cruel weather for a few strides. Which is the way one runs a marathon—one little piece at a time. An observer might imagine a smooth continuum of passion. It’s not. Instead, one stitches together many patches and pieces along the way, finally unfolding a 42-kilometer pattern of random color previously hidden and hardly imaginable, like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Strange, what one remembers of the scenery. It is racing, after all, not sightseeing. The course crossed four bridges spanning Rio Guadalquivir. Two are modernistic and the most unusual I’ve seen. Having once designed bridges for a living, you’d think I would have noted each one.

But I can clearly remember crossing only one of those, the last one, Puente de la Barqueta. I remember it only because it was close to the finish line and because of a thought I had at the time: I need to remember this. From a high arch overhead, stay cables stretch down to the deck median.

The first one, Puente del Alamillo, I recall admiring from the car but not from the race. Parallel cables slant down to the floor median from a single massive column on the west bank. The column soars high and leans precariously away from the river, as if falling over backwards. The column’s weight pulls up on the bridge floor, putting those two great masses in exquisite balance, tugging at each other in a tensile standoff engineers call equilibrium and poets call a miracle. The taunt cables look like giant strings to pluck. The bridge is a harp for God to play.

Twenty-four kilometers into the race the crooked-legged woman quit. She was standing in the rain talking to a volunteer, a tall man. He was pointing down the street to a waiting ambulance.

The sound of wailing sirens spread over the city and became part of the race.

My Winning Year

With this post I broach a topic it's been my policy to avoid ever since I started this blog: me.

It's true, I write first person stories which have me in them, but those are adventure stories in which I've been directly involved. (Sometimes they were told to me by someone involved.) In any case, there is a big difference in writing first-person stories and, on the other hand, writing stories about...you know, "Me," Me with a capital M, facts and data about me. The first focuses on the adventure, events that actually happened.

So this is new. But it is not an enduring change. It is an exception, and I'll soon shut up about the boring topic and return to my policy of staying quiet about the ever-indulgent "me."

So, what brought this on? Why did I think anyone in the whole round world would want to read about what you will find below?

I had a pretty good year.

As a racer, that is. Maybe a remarkable year. My annual racing report summarizes it. I decided I'd put it up for whatever informational, instructional or inspirational value it may hold, and maybe it holds none. But if you are a racer also you may find it interesting. Or maybe not. Anyway, here it comes.

Beat it if you can.

**********

Annual Racing Report, 2010
Dallas Smith, Age 70; DOB June 25, 1940

Summary:

Miles run: 2612
Total no. races: 26 (2 ultra marathons; 7 marathons; 1 half marathon; 2 10-milers; 2 15Ks; 2 10Ks; 1 8K; 1 4-miler; 8 5Ks)
State records: 11 (6 at age 69, 5 at age 70)
Age-group competition: undefeated
Times in top 10 overall: 11

Race List: (age-graded time in parentheses; Rec. = single-age state record)

01. Callaway Gardens Marathon, Jan. 31, 3:26:26 (2:32:30), 9th o.a.
02. Mercedes Marathon, Birmingham, Feb. 28, 3:28:13 (2:33:39)
03. Fall Creek Thaw 15K, Mar. 6, 1:05:22 (48:03), Rec.
04. Tom King Half Marathon, Nashville, Mar. 13, 1:33:07 (1:08:30), Rec.
05. Running to Beat the Blues, Nashville, Mar. 27, 21:07 (15:30), Rec.
06. Mule Kick 5K, Columbia, TN, Apr. 3, 20:57 (15:23), Rec.
07. Purity Moosic City 10K, Nashville, Apr. 10, 42:08, (30:55), Rec.
08. Country Music Marathon, Nashville, Apr. 24, 3:21:11 (2:28:15), Rec.
09. Strolling Jim 41.2 ultra marathon, May 1, 6:59:38.2, (5:09:04)
10. Scenic City Trail Marathon, Chattanooga, May 22, 4:38:11 (3:24:46)
11. Cane Creek 5K, Cookeville, TN, June 5, 20:58 (15:22), 3rd o.a.
12. Race for Jordan 5K, Carthage, TN, 21:05, (15:26), 4th o.a.
13. RC Cola-Moon Pie 10-miler, Bell Buckle, TN, June 19, 1:14:51 (54:52)
14. Goodlettsville 4-miler, July 31, 27:28 (20:05), Rec.
15. After Dark 8K, Cookeville, TN, Aug. 8, 33:58 (24:49), Rec.
16. Blister in the Sun Marathon, Cookeville, TN, 4:32:11 (3:19:52), 7th o.a.
17. Baxter Street Fair 5K, Baxter, TN, Sept. 4, 20:09 (14:43), 3rd o.a.
18. Fall Fun Fest 10K, Cookeville, TN, Sept. 11, 44:21 (32:23), 5th o.a., Rec.
19. Run4Don 5K, Gainesboro, TN, Sept. 18, 21:11 (15:28), 2nd o.a.
20. Heavenly Host Lutheran School 5K, Cookeville, TN, Sept. 25, 22:07 (16:08), 2nd o.a.
21. Komen 5K, Cookeville, TN, Sept. 26, 20:39.62 (15:05), 5th o.a.
22. Shelby Bottoms Boogie 15K, Nashville, Oct. 2, 1:05:07 (47:34), Rec.
23. Nashville Ultra 50K, Oct. 16, 4:37:49 (3:23:35)
24. Team Nashville 10-miler, Goodlettsville, TN, Nov 13, 1:11:39 (52:17), 9th o.a., Rec.
25. Flying Monkey Marathon, Nashville, TN, Nov. 21, 3:35:36 (2:37:48)

26. Miss Gulf Coast Marathon, Waveland, MS, Nov. 27, 3:25:02 (2:30:04), 10th o.a.

One Day in Funkytown

From Running Journal, November, 2010.

**********

Morning comes to Barcelona.

The window in our seventh-floor room faces south, overlooking dark patios and balconies of apartments below. The crescent moon hangs low and a pale glow washes the eastern sky. It’ll be daylight soon. Our time is near. The marathon Albino and I’ve long aimed at will start at 8:30 this March morning, just two hours from now. I open the window and stick out my hand, the old anxious question about the weather. Barcelona hums and answers: perfect, calm and warm.

Albino and I meet our bunch in the lobby for the walk to the race. Alejandra, Jorge’s gracious wife, who is not running today, carries my camera to make pictures for me. We drift up Gran Via, a loose collection of six warriors. Morning is creeping over the city. There’s no sense of rush. Eduardo, the youngest of us, strolls with me, the oldest. Today he makes his first marathon attempt.

“How do you feel, Eduardo?"

“Pretty good. A little nervous.”

“Don’t worry. That will fly away as soon as the race starts.”

“I know.”

I would go into battle with this bunch. A man could do worse. Angel, talking with Albino at this moment, is competent and tough, a natural leader, always showing generosity to the others. Jorge is a big man with the muscle strength for strong-arm jobs, an engineer and problem solver. He has a booming laugh that keeps everyone in good humor. And who could guess the depth of quiet strength in Alejandra, the lone woman.

Look at Albino and Eduardo—two smart young guys, bold and successful, intimidated by nothing, Eduardo serving in the economic office of Spain’s president, Albino managing the finances of a multinational company.

A good team all right. We have to split up today though. Each has to go separate and alone. At the Placa, the five marathoners line up and pose for Alejandra.

The race starts on Avenida de la Reina Maria Cristina, a short street stretching from Placa de Espanya to Museu Nacional D’art Catalunya. I stand with 8,000 marathoners, among the “blue” group, up front due to my projected finishing time. The Plaza lies 200 meters ahead, an ornate monument anchoring a traffic circle flanked by two elegant towers. Behind us on a hill sets the Museum of Art, a palatial building fronted by Font Montjuic, the Magic Fountain. A more glorious place to start and end a race would be hard to find.

The Magic Fountain, asleep until now, springs to life. A soprano’s voice ascends high in the morning light, then swoops and soars over us, the Fountain choreographed to her singing. A few thousand jets, articulated and synchronized, create water acrobatics.

The central jets shoot founts of water higher than a tree. Peripheral founts dance and waver like ballerinas. Suddenly the central founts sweep outward, forming a giant water blossom of hurling water. The whole display trembles and collapses into a frothing cloud of angry mist and chaos, then recovers and dances again.

It’s a glorious send-off. I stand facing backwards, looking over the anxious faces of scowling runners. They appear oblivious to the water ballet. Why are they so worried? I wonder. Thus I am when the race begins, and I know we are under way when the throng surges forward, pushing me along like flotsam on a wave.

The race has started.

The first three miles it’s all elbows and heels, and body odor of others. I want a fresh breath.

At the end of the first 5K, I check my watch and discover I’ve fallen one minute behind, due mostly to the crowded conditions and twisting turns, I figure. During the next 5K, I make a point of fighting off the feeling of lost time and run no harder than before, monitoring my breathing to keep my effort in check. Even so, I gain back half the lost minute.

The thinning of the crowd makes the running quite easy. The markers pass me by: 10K, 15K, 20K.... My speed holds with little effort from me, varying only a few seconds from my planned pace of 23:17 per 5K.

A couple of young men, surprised at the old man running so swiftly through their town, cheer wildly.

“Muy bien, Senor!”

The scenery is hardcore. Barcelona is a complex city, a mixture of crass and sublime, sacred and profane. Ancient buildings and monument-filled plazas scatter throughout the city. On top of that, Barcelona boasts several architectural icons singularly unusual. The course takes us by some of them.

Catedral de Sagrada Familia, Church of the Holy Family, is a religious shrine like Las Vegas is a summer camp. Dark, imposing and forbidding, it squats before us, shooting spires of curvilinear taper high aloof. Its front is covered with statuary of saints and drips all sorts of scabby relief I can’t quite make out. No place looks plain. It is all busy, like a cave turned inside out. Pale salamanders would not surprise you.

A cathedral’s purpose is to instill a fear of God. Fearsome is the word for this temple. So gloomy and morose, it strikes me, paradoxically, as downright sinister. The Dark Lord of Mordor hatched his evil plans in a place like this. The church was designed by architect Antoni Guadi, who died in 1926. It’s still not finished.

Three miles later we come to a recent addition. Torre Agbar is as unusual in its shiny and garish way as the cathedral. This 474-foot tall structure of curving sides and round nose sets on the Plaza of Glories like a spent bullet clad with tinsel, a phallic paraboloid rising bluntly to a helpless sky.

Not actually tinsel, the second skin is assembled from glass sheets, some 59,619 of them, I’ve read, which open and close under command of the building’s climate system. At night its 4,500 LED lights glow myriad colors. The water company of Barcelona innocently owns this gaudy shaft.

The marathon fans are as friendly as the city is picturesque, helping me along with their shouts.

“Vamos! Venga!”

“Animo!”

This race transports me. We head across a cobblestone plaza where a drum corps bangs away. I fall in step. My foot slaps down smack on the beat. They’re playing my 7:30 pace! How did they know?

“Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom,” goes drum.

“Left-right, left-right, left-right,” goes me.

The music merges with me and me with it. We become one.

“Left-boom, left-boom, left-boom,” goes Me-Drum.

We run conjoined. Barcelona plays the root rhythm of my marathon soul, the canonical cadence of my Barcelona being. I race on, the sound fading, my eyes filling with water.

Oh. Trouble begins. I spot a grey man in a yellow tee 30 yards ahead. He looks to be in my age group. I have to go after him.

It soon becomes hopeless. He’s going too fast. After a half mile I give it up, unable to gain a whisker. To stay with him would take energy I will need later. I might ruin my race down the stretch. It is a tricky business to meter out as much energy as possible, but not enough to go busted.

I let him go and put him out of mind. You don’t always win. You shouldn’t expect it. This is Europe.

Around the 19-mile mark we come to the ocean front and follow it a couple of miles. I glance dully at the water. Water. Suddenly, I realize, the Mediterranean! A wind-rippled, sun-dappled water I’ve never seen before.

Meanwhile, the marathon sound track rolls on, pulsing from speakers unseen, surging in hot waves like the heartbeat of the city, its blood coursing streets and narrow alleys. I know that song: Donna Summer, gettin’ down on “Funkytown.”

If I’m wrong about the singer, Donna Summer lodges herself in my head anyway. I run along thinking about the meaning of it, the song ringing. I can’t connect the two, first view of the Mediterranean with Funkytown. Is there some lesson, some metaphor? The race has made me crazy. Some things just are. The Mediterranean just is. Donna Summer just is. Funkytown? Yes. Boogie on, woman!

Two miles to go, suddenly right in front of me is the man in the yellow tee! I hadn’t expected to see him again. I gauge his new situation: His juice is gone. He’s not dangerous now. No need to wait. I sprint around his right and don’t bother to look back. He won’t challenge; he’s finished. I know that story.

That was the moment, I believe, when I took the lead position for the over-65 age group. That night Albino and I were back in Burgos, having driven the 379 miles home that same day. Next day I checked my e-mail to find a message from Marato Barcelona informing me that I’d finished first in my age division, hitting the finish line in 3:17:05.

That was 35 seconds slower than I’d meant to run.

Burning Up the Road to Barcelona

This was an innocuous story about traveling to a marathon - or so I thought. But it drew a blistering letter to the editor. The writer thought I had disrespected Barcelona, a city I loved. She blasted me with both barrels. It was snarky. Best I could ever learn, she was married to a man originally from Barcelona and had strong nationalistic feeling about Catalonia as a region distinct from the rest of Spain. Filled with references to Spanish history, her letter must have been virtually unintelligible to the readers of a small-town newspaper in Tennessee. She even criticized me for calling Barcelona a town, an endearing term I'd thought. She then went on to educate me about how big it was, as if a guy who had run a marathon through its streets wouldn't know that. I never answered the letter. You never know who will read a story. From the Herald-Citizen, March 30, 2008.

**********

We were cruising through the mountains of northern Spain in Albino’s BMW. It is 379 miles from his home in Burgos to Barcelona, and we were headed there for the marathon, Marató Barcelona, which was scheduled for two days later.

My running watch thought it was already tomorrow, showing March 1 as we drove along, having forgotten about leap year—it was 2008. I scrolled up February 29, creating myself an extra day.

Albino had brought along a couple of soft cases filled with CDs for our listening pleasure during the long haul. He sat with a case spread open on his lap and flipped through the choices, occasionally minding the wheel while we rolled along at the sensible speed of 90 mph. He has an eclectic taste in music and we listened to everything from Andre Segovia to Miles Davis to Etta James.

That last one was on a CD called Night Train to Nashville, which Albino bought at the Country Music Hall Of Fame during an exhibit highlighting Nashville’s blues heritage. He held the CD up for me to see.

“You wanna hear that?”

“Sure, why not? Plug it in.”

The very first sound to come out blasted me backwards fifty years. It was disc jockey John Richburg—John R his own self!—introducing his blues show from Nashville’s WLAC-AM clear channel station. At night that station ruled the airways over two-thirds of the nation during the 1950s and 60s, days before FM radio. The sun went down, WLAC jacked up its power and all stations with the same frequency blinked off. It didn’t matter if you lived in a holler in Appalachia or drove a taxi in Chicago, you listened to John R advertising Ernie’s Record Mart, White Rose Petroleum Jelly and Silky Straight.

“…John R in Nashville, Tennessee, smack in the middle of Dixie!” John R was saying on the recording.

Dadgum! I swear I hadn’t heard that voice in nearly half a century. They’d captured his voice from that long ago time and stuck it on the CD. It was as if the space-time continuum stretched and twisted and folded back on itself. No longer was I hurling through arid mountains in northern Spain but instead lying on a feather bed in the unheated room of a farm house in Jackson County, Tennessee listening to an old white AM radio that sat beside the bed. John R talked me to sleep at night.

I never saw a picture of John R, and I hope I never do. I don’t know if he was black or white, and I don’t give two hoots which it was. What I have is his voice. And I’ll have that until they take away my drool bucket.

That’s how we drove 379 miles to a marathon—listening to obscure musicians that many people never heard of. Albino knows that old music from the 50s and 60s even though he grew up in Seville, Spain and wasn’t born until 1971. He collects vinyl records and owns 500 CDs. He moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 2003, and quickly fell in love with Nashville. He had fetched along a bit of Nashville for our trip today.

At 90 mph you can drive 379 miles in 4 hours and 13 minutes. Practically speaking it doesn’t work out that way. You lose time. We had to stop and buy gas, and eat lunch, and pay tolls. Three times we paid the toll takers. Two times it cost 26 Euros, or $39 US, non negligible, we thought.

The driver got sleepy, too. I suggested we pull into a parking area because I wanted to make a picture. Albino stretched out for a nap and I took a little hike to get my picture.

What picture? Of something that had bothered me a bit—the way the landscape is changing. We were traveling through a scrubland of brown rocks and badlands reminiscent of Wyoming, terrain familiar to fans of early Clint Eastwood westerns. Now and then we saw a compact town huddled on the slopes, some cropland.

And across the ridgeline marched rows of metallic invaders, tall aliens stalking the land, now facing windward at rigid attention. Legions of wind turbines turned lazily. The unearthly-looking machines provide clean energy all right but, in their imposing strangeness, they completely alter the value of landscape for the human spirit. As global oil production diminishes, I expect their numbers to grow. Spain, as well as all nations of the world, will need their help to meet energy needs. I made my picture, and photographed the future.

When we finally reached Sunotel on Gran Via in Barcelona, our nerves were whacked. It had all worn us out: Trying to find our hotel in traffic worse than New York City, getting the strap on my backpack caught in the car’s hatch so that it wouldn’t open while traffic backed up behind us, a guy insistently blowing his horn. Albino: “That’s why I don’t carry a weapon; I would have shot him!”

Albino asked a surly red-faced clerk for a late check-out time for Sunday, the day of the marathon, so that we could take a shower before starting our 379-mile drive back to Burgos. Hotels usually comply happily with that request. Yeah, he could do that but it would cost us 30 Euros extra. Sure. Another insult. Albino fumed, but we had little choice.

And then Angel arrived, a friend from Madrid, a generous hombre and also a formidable one. He had made our reservation. He dismissed our fear. Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay that, he assured us. He was as good as his word, we found out when we checked out that Sunday.

Eduardo and Jorge, two more Madrid friends, arrived. Jorge was escorting Alejandra, his esposa hermosa.

We all went to the marathon expo the next day, the place where you confirm your registration; pick up your timing chip, bib number and other miscellaneous stuff, a place where you can also shop for all sorts of running gear. It was crowded; about 8,000 runners had registered for the race.

The men’s water closet was crowded too. A woman worked to keep it orderly—while men were there. Men did arrive and men did go right in front of her, including myself. I was squeamish about that but overcame it.

In the words of Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book I was currently reading, Ernest Hemingway said, “There are no other countries like Spain.” I believe that’s true, and in many ways. Barcelona is maybe an example.

As far as the rest of Spain is concerned, the town is perhaps too proud of having its own language. Catalan, which is spoken by its seven million citizens, is distinct from Castilian, the Spanish language. The reality then is that people of Barcelona must be able to speak several languages in order to talk to anyone.

Nevertheless they cling to their history and culture. As we made the rounds of the various counters, booths and tables at the expo, Albino came up to me.

“Did you notice that nobody will open their mouth until you start talking? They don’t know what language to speak. There are so many languages here!”

Angel has refined taste, and he had made lunch reservations for our gang of six at Seven Doors, Siete Portes, a white tablecloth place where the waiters wear black ties and dinner jackets. It’s been in business since 1836 they claim. We had paella—good race food, rice based—and wine and beer. I abstained from those last two, in abeyance to race needs. The tab for six came to 220 Euros, roughly $330 US.

That night I passed up a visit to still another white tablecloth place, opting instead for marathon snacks, rest and television: professional basketball, the ACB, Europe’s answer to the NBA; and, maybe better, the Miss Espanya contest, a gaggle of gorgeous women in tiny Bikinis. One by one, they did prance, each gliding the runway like a walking horse hitting its gait.I was pulling for Miss Tenerife, but Albino came in around midnight and we turned in. I didn’t find out who won. Come 8:30 AM next morning we had a marathon to run.

On the Lonely Mesa a Rude Visitor Comes Calling

This is a newspaper story written for a special Halloween feature. It's as true as a double-bitted axe. From the Herald-Citizen, Oct. 30, 2005.

**********

It was getting dark and I was driving the two-lane blacktop north along the Utah mesa known as Island in the Sky, a monolith a few miles wide and 20 miles long rising into the air on vertical cliffs 1200 feet high. On my eastern flank jutted Dead Horse Point, a precipice named for the horses that once ran too close to the edge before they realized the awful truth.

Immediately around me the mesa looked like ordinary high plains. But I knew better; the abrupt cliffs are out there like the ultimate edge. A few miles north the cliffs play out enough that the road can wind its way down.

I was drifting through spring that year, on a solo trip around the Four Corners area. I’d been walking on the southern tip of Island in the Sky, a place known as Grandview Point that overlooks the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers. At the mesa’s tip, the very last rock juts out into space like an anvil’s point. I’d climbed out on that rock and gazed down into the terrible swooping distance below. The vista before me was as forbidding as it was immense, one scarred by deep canyons, standing rocks and mesas, raw naked rock, a case of geology gone mad. The Point earns its name.

The long walk over, I was leaving now, driving north. I needed a place to sleep. I spotted a Jeep path angling off to the west that looked like a good bet. I headed the truck down it, looking for a likely place to park. After a half mile, I came to a wide spot where it appeared campers had stayed before. I turned the truck around, ready for a quick get away, and parked it level beside the path.

The sky was clear and the moon was full, casting a yellow glow over the desert rocks. I looked forward to a peaceful, lonely night.

Stretching a hundred miles to the west lies some of the most barren land you can find—land so profoundly worthless as to be infinitely valuable. At least to the human soul. If a laser weapon high in space burned the whole region, it would kill precious little; the sage bushes would turn black and the black bushes would just get blacker.

The next day I planned to venture into that space and find a canyon where the ancient ones, the Anasazi, left elaborate petroglyphs on the walls. Extended drought 700 years ago decimated the Anasazi and drove them from this region. But their stark art still decorates the canyon, ghostly images of spirits long departed.

It was too early to go to bed. I sat in the truck cab for a while and discovered an FM station in Salt Lake City playing mainstream jazz, a rare kind of program I was glad to find.

Suddenly headlights came bouncing along the truck path toward me. This was disappointing; I wasn’t expecting company. A van rumbled by without stopping. I watched as it went on down the path. Probably just some camper looking for a place to sleep. Soon the taillights dipped out of sight over a rise. Good. Whatever they had in mind, it didn’t look like they’d be doing it close to me.

It soon got too cold to sit in the truck without running the heater, and I wasn’t going to do that. I stood around outside and sat on the tailgate. The moonlight was a pale liquid falling on an austere landscape of sand, rock and shrub. To the west the view faded to darkness, as if that harsh land swallowed light.

I had dismissed the van. It was time to go to bed. My truck had a camper shell and my sleeping bag was already stretched out in the back. I climbed in, closed the main tailgate, the camper gate, and slid into the warm bag, removing only my sneakers. Moon glow came through the windows, lighting the inside. I was tired and soon drifted off.

Crunching metal jarred me awake like a garbage truck. I sat bolt upright, grabbing my .38. Somebody’s outside! What do they mean? You can’t come into a man's camp raising hell! You’ll get shot!

I sat there holding my breath, trying to get a fix on their direction, see if I could hear talking. It had sounded like guys stomping beer cans just outside my truck. Anyone would have to know the hostility of that. Menace was their clear intent, and they probably weren’t through, I thought.

My pulse was roaring. It seemed like all the blood in my body was trying to rush into my head.

I couldn’t see anyone outside the windows. They could have crouched down beside the truck, I knew. As quietly as I could I leaned over to each side window and looked down, but saw nothing. The same for the back window. They may have retreated to the rocks a few yards away or be hidden toward the front of the truck.

One thing was obvious to everybody concerned—there was only one way out of the truck bed, and that was through the back. I had to get out. I was a sitting duck inside. I slipped on my sneakers as quietly as I could and got set to jump.

Here goes! I flipped up the camper door, slammed the main gate down and hit the ground facing the truck, pistol ready.

And saw nobody.

Not at the sides of the truck, not at the front. I fetched my flashlight and swept underneath the truck, but nobody was under there either. They had retreated to the rocks, I figured.

I checked the ground near the left rear wheel, where I thought the can crushing sounds had come from. There were no cans there. Neither was there any metal left over from a previous camper that could have caused the noise. From that, I assumed they had taken the cans with them when they ran—all the better to annoy a lone camper.

Well, I wasn’t leaving. I stood around, wondering. A hard moonlight fell on the desert rocks—which now took on a new evil dimension.

Oddly, I remember noticing the beauty of it all, too. The moon was so bright I could clearly see the snow on top of Tukuhnikivats, flagship peak of the La Sal Mountains, thirty miles to the east.

I went back to bed. I lay there not quite asleep.

The sound started again.

Again jerking upright, I couldn’t see a soul outside the truck. The sound had changed, I noticed, to a metallic crunching, something like a hack saw on sheet metal, a rhythmic sound akin to gnawing. Gnawing?

Ah, yes, there was my answer. It must be some kind of desert rodent gnawing on my truck. The metal bed of the truck had amplified the sound, making it louder, especially to my ears so close to the floor. I decided I’d get out and find the little varmint.

The commotion of my getting out made it stop the sound, of course. It’d be hiding. I scanned the underside of the truck with my light, expecting to see a furry scurrying. But it held tight.

I knew where it would be—the engine compartment. There’s tasty stuff there. I raised the hood. It was cagey and probably small, but I figured I could find it or, at the least, make it run away. I inspected closely, looking inside the fan shroud, underneath the AC compressor and alternator, wherever it might be crouching.

I satisfied myself that it wasn’t there, that it had already bailed out. Everything was quiet. Good enough, I thought, a lesson learned for both of us, a happy outcome all around.

I returned to the back of the truck, prepared to go to bed once again. For some reason, before climbing in I decided to have one more look underneath the back of the truck. It wouldn’t be there, of course. The commotion of slamming the hood and door would’ve already scared anything away.

I stooped down and shined my light on the rear axle and the spare tire area.
As if cued by the light the metallic crunching suddenly started.

It was in front of my face, just past the tailgate, at precisely where I was pointing the light. As if mocking me, my light, my futile search, it scrunched and screeched, metallic and undaunted.

Crouched there on that harsh lonely mesa drowned by cold moonlight, I pointed my light at a grating sound made by something I could not see—and conveniently re-affirmed a long-held position, one unsupported by the immediate empirical data: I don’t believe in ghosts.

With that, I climbed back into the truck and slipped into my bag. While it gnawed on the steel bowels of my truck I drifted gently into a sweet sleep.