Random ideas experienced on the plod lately
Sometime after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, cities in the U.S. and around the world began honoring his memory by naming new streets and renaming existing roads after him. It's a gesture, not a meaningful move in the direction of civil rights, and some of these roads are in very nasty parts of the cities through which they run.
I have been staying with friends in Concord, New Hampshire, close to where I grew up and lived until about fifteen years ago. While running on the local roads and trails, I've noticed that many of the streets in residential developments that weren't here when I moved away bear girls' names: Lisa, Jennifer, Judith and Susan have all been given nods just in the East Concord section of town.
I've noticed this in other parts of the country as well. This seems to be to feminism what MLK Jr. Drive is to race relations: We can't achieve anything like genuine equality, so we'll at least name things after underrepresented or otherwise beleaguered groups of people.Not for the first time, I own a pair of shoes that feel sublime on my feet but have laces that come untied every two minutes no matter how I knot them; likewise, for at least the twentieth time in the past 30 years, I have a pair worn-out shoes that at least have miraculously reliable laces. Yet I can almost never be bothered to remove a pair of great laces from a pair of shitty shoes and put them in the great shoes. I guess this idea will simply never occur to me.
The other day, I was running on a trail and was confronted by a puddle so extensive it might have been better classified as a bog. (It's been raining at least two days in three since I got to New England at the beginning of the month.) I had been on this trail for about two miles, and I could see the paved road I was hoping to reach right on the far side of the puddle, maybe 200 feet away. Despite my shoes already being somewhat wet anyway, I decided to pick my way around the puddle rather than plunge through it, hoping to keep my feet from being absolutely soaked for the last 2.5 miles of the run. This resulted in a 10-minute side trip through some underbrush and a fair number of new scratches on my legs. When I was about ten feet from the road, I stepped into a puddle I had somehow failed to spot with both feet, right up to mid-calf. When this happened, I just stood there for a moment in the cold water, ruminating.
This experience seems to encapsulates the entire state of my running at the moment. Wander, plan, try some workarounds, commit, hesitate, and blunder in the end no matter what.Scott Douglas' new book Running Is My Therapy is proving to be an excellent read. I admit that I expected no less and would probably praise it even if I found it wanting, but the chances of Scott turning out a less-than-super piece of writing are very small. I'll post my Amazon review here once I, you know, write it, which means finishing the book.
I did a couple of workouts this week. One involved running a set distance on a track in a specified amount of time, while the other was effort-based on confined to the road. I did these on the basis of what my coach instructed, and strayed only slightly from the prescribed sessions. Clearly, this is progress.
See if you can figure out who "Literal_Crap_Bag" is, other than, obviously, an intoxicated person (the Subreddit is called "Crippling Alcoholism") blaring lies about the man she's obsessed with -- a guy who, according to her, is a drunk and dishonest social-media user who wants to have sex with her.
If projection were a felony, Kim Duclos would get 35 years to life.
With some regret -- I'm loving seeing my friends, but hating the N.H. weather -- I'm heading back toward home, a 2,000-mile drive, at the end of the week. I will be giving a talk to a youth running group outside a major city along the way. That will no doubt make those of you convinced I am the spawn of Satan, a drunken woman-beater, or both deeply distressed.
