I would have been lousy in combat. I was nearing the end of
my 13-mile run and I didn’t see them until I practically ran into them, until I
noticed that tree up ahead actually seemed to have a human face like the ones
in The Wizard of Oz. Damn. Now that’s camo. I didn’t like those trees in the
movie—freakier by far than the flying monkeys, in my opinion—and I didn’t like
seeing a similar sight in the woods, especially when the trees-with-faces were
armed with shotguns and not just apples. Fortunately, the faces smiled at me. I
nodded—that runner’s nod you do because you know if you try to speak it’ll come
out as a gasp or a blob of spit or worse—and kept running. Of course, that’s
probably what their prey would do, but then their prey doesn’t have cool trail
shoes with high-tech inserts.
Fall is the season of contradictions, of life and of death.
The leaves are dying, the light is dying, the year is dying, but all the
critters in creation are frisky as hell, hoping to get in one last good shag
before it’s time to hibernate. The apples are amazing, but with every
sweet-tart crunch comes the sickening knowledge that this is just about the
only source of fiber you’re going to get for the next seven months. Bu-bye,
blueberries. So long, strawberries. Good to know you, nectarines. We’re truly
apples-to-apples now.
Fall has the best running weather of the year, in my view.
Spring is a mushy mess, summer is a sweatfest, and winter—let us not speak of
winter just yet. In Fall I run in the chill-but-not-cold, in the
sunwarmed-but-not-roasty, and I feel more alive than ever. And yet I know the
end is near. Another year is coming to a close, and where have I gotten in that
time? What am I doing? Who the hell am I, anyway?
A writer I know once made a poster that consisted of a photo
of himself as a child and the caption, “This Boy Is Dead.” And you think I have
a dark side. What he meant by this, he explained, was that if you really
thought about it, the caption was true: the boy depicted in the picture does
not exist at all at this point in time. Yes, of course he grew into the
bleak-humored aspiring author I hung out with in the bleak little town where we
went to grad school (the town’s claim to fame being that Twilight Zone's Rod Serling was born
and raised there), but the boy in the photo was gone forever. Kind of puts a
morbid pall over scrapbooking, doesn’t it.
Sometimes I think about what the person I used to be, the
Dead-Me, would have said about doing these trail ultras I do. OK, so, you are running up and down steep hills where there are rocks
and roots to trip you and nettles and bees to sting you and holes you could
step in and break an ankle and ravines you could fall into and stay down there
forever or at least until some hungry carnivore or other starts gnawing on you,
and this is supposed to be fun? And yeah, so maybe that’s the worst case
scenario, but what’s the best case scenario, you do this stupid thing nobody
cares about but you and you get all sweaty and dirty and possibly injured
because, what, because you have to do something meaningful before you die so it
might as well be this freaky thing only other obsessive freaks do, and this is
supposed to be fun?
And Living-Me answers, it isn’t supposed to be fun, it is
fun. And because Dead-Me is dead, I win the argument. Always pick fights with
those who no longer exist; victory shall be yours.
But maybe Dead-Me isn’t quite dead yet, as a certain
too-often-quoted British comic movie might say. Maybe she’s still here with
Living-Me, reminding me how much things can change. I’m sure one day everything
I’m saying now will seem like dead-speak, like something said by someone else I
can’t imagine ever having been. I can only hope it’s because I’ve become an
ultra-running-astronaut who can’t believe I used to think running was confined
to a single planet.
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