Baby Bird in Hand

One of my best running tips is never found in the conventional coaching books.
Here it is: have the left lens of your glasses fall out about two minutes after the start.

Having your lens fall out might not really help you, but it helped me. If your glasses fall apart, you'll be forced to run the rest of the race with your glasses clutched gently in one of your hands. If you hold too tightly the frame might get bent in some way, holding them too loosely will bring on the disaster of trying to find the dropped lens in amongst twenty or so thousand moving running shoes. (Talk about impossible; in this Sunday morning's race I saw a plastic sandwich bag in the middle of the roadway just before the startline. In it, clearly visible, was a ten dollar bill.  About 100 people ran by it in the three or four seconds I was watching. I'm sure someone braved the on rushing crowd, but not me.)

This wasn't the first time I had to run with my glasses in my hand. The lens popped out on the beach in Florida once. It's subject to humidity and temperature it seems. It took forever to find it amongst the sea shells. A couple of times, it just seemed easier to see in a snowstorm without the glasses than with, sometimes I was bothered by the sweat in my eyes and I just took them off and in the 18 mile marathon warm-up last year, the weather was a softly blowing rain, not enough to soak you through but enough to fog my lens like a coating of Vaseline.

So, you carry your glasses as if they were a baby bird and because of that, because you can't hurtle along with clenched fists and half closed eyes, puffing like a toad and pounding your feet while zigging and zagging through the crowds of runners, you relax into the running. You can't do anything else. Holding a baby bird has this odd effect.   All you can do, baby bird in hand, is keep your pace steady and your breathing clear. This does not happen all at once, but it does seem to happen without you trying to do it. Your arm swing evens out and you start to place your feet upon the pavement. Place, not plop, or plunk or thwack, you -place -each -foot  where it needs to go.

You are able to take notice of the things happening around you, see the faces of the families and friends who will stand by the roadside for two hours to see the six second vision of their friend, their spouse, their sister, their sons and daughters running by, you hear a guy bemoaning the early defeat of Kansas in the NCAA tourney,  listen in as you pass the seven mile mark to a mom talking via her cellphone on a speakerphone to all her kids at home eating breakfast while she is out here running or you just listen,    listen,,,  to the myriad sounds of the footsteps and the breathing. That includes, of course, your own breathing which its now moving in and out of you so evenly you can almost see the arrows of it's direction.

 Now let me be clear, this just-right-tight-grip, steady pace, clear breathing and listening in on your surrounding universe does not mean running slower than your goal, it doesn't mean running slower at all. If anything, you notice that you are keeping or beating your average pace goal and you aren't getting all stressed about it. The hills are just there and then the tops of those hills. The downhills are run with the brakes off but you never seem to have the feeling of being out of control. Try as you might you cannot hear the sound of your own shoes on the roadway because you are nearly floating along.

Okay, and now here's the weird part, at some point you do feel as if you were floating. Really. That Vaseline look that the rain-covered lenses gave you now becomes how you see the whole world outside of you, moving from vaguely unformed features to see everything sharply crystallized. You become aware that you are seeing, but the body the eyes are in doesn't feel connected to the eyes. You know you are running and you feel as if you could run forever.

I told you it was weird.

The first time it happened to me, I was a little shocked and I tried to hold onto the moment, to hold onto the feeling, but that is like holding a babybird too tight. I slowed down and tried to drink in what I was seeing....and it was gone. And I could not get it back.

Weeks went by and then one morning, just as I was finishing a really good dream about being in someone's big home in the mountains, someone in the dream said "When it comes, go."
I woke up.
--
I do still run with my glasses sometimes, but not unless I will need them to read something after the run. Most of the time I do take my headset and listen to books on Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math.** But, most of the time, I just take me.

And in one of my hands I imagine I am holding a little baby bird.

And we fly.

~~~~~
**(Someone asked me the other day why I listen to books on Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math. I said it was because I don't know anything about Physics or Cosmology or the creation of modern English or Math.)

A January evening

It was too cold to do anything out of doors, the other basic chores - laundry, kitchen counters, wastebaskets, recycling - all were done. All that was left was the pile of  To-Be-Read on the desk. Well, that and about ten thousand other little things I have been avoiding, for example, the music CDs look like they were dropped on to the floor and thrown back up onto the shelves. They cry out for organizing (and dusting). There's a pile of photos I was supposed to Scan Next sometime before Christmas and there are four speakers on those CD shelves and only two are hooked up. I could go on.

I opted for the Read pile because I can scan a piece of paper quickly and file it or toss it. That went well for about three pieces of paper, a business card for a plumber -saved in the Contacts list, a coupon from Domino's -out,out, do not rest your eyes upon such, and a letter from the Co-op detailing the latest maintanence increase, filed. Then I picked up last year's calendar which I had laid on the Read pile because I wanted to have one more look at the pictures. The works are by Govinder, an artist about whom I know nothing except that I am drawn to the lines and whimsy in the art, the Big Blue Cat I described in this blog a few weeks ago, there's a skinny oddly shaped dog named Tumble Down Dick and more cats. Square, boxy cats in red, yellow and black, a cat (I think) named Ben with kind of a scaly snakelike patch of fur, the huge Mr. BIG and finally a terrific horse named Sundance. I like them all.

Three times I tried to throw the calendar away. Twice it wouldn't fit in the overstuffed basket by my desk and it ended up on desk's  corner, the third time I was headed for the trash chute outside my door when I looked up at the beam in my living room. It was a blank slate waiting.

I had thought about putting something on that beam over  the years I've lived here, I just never really thought about it, if you know what I mean and here, suddenly, was the answer to a question barely asked. I got the scissors, I got the silver push pins, I got the stepstool. I cut up the calendar month by month. The strange thing was then that I saw some of the art as if I had never seen it before. Here was a rabbit, Pippin. And what may be an elephant and some more horses which up until I looked again had seemed to me to be some kind of worms dancing. Nope, horses. Okay.

The skinny dog went in the middle and I added each page to each side until the space was filled with color and shapes, scaly and furry and blue. The only piece which didn't fit was the one of the Doves of Peace. I have that up elsewhere where I can get a better look at it. 

Then I added a Klimt poster which had been standing in a corner of my bedroom for about four months waiting for me to decide if I wanted to put new glass over it. No glass. 

So here is the finished look:

That's it. No big idea here. Or maybe there is. I kept thinking that whenever I see blank spaces in my life, it's good to fill them with inspiration. 

More, not much more, but more @ http://atthewindow.blogspot.com/

Sunrises, Sunsets and Who Watches Them

Fifty-Ninth and Columbus Circle, New York City


MTA Station Exit for the Downtown A Train

5:20AM

It's murky most mornings on the way across the street to Central Park. The huge golden statue is dulled by the darkness to the color of butter with about as much shine. Runners and bikers in knots of three and fours tie shoes, snug up helmets and otherwise occupy themselves as they wait for whoever is late. Someone is always late, someone is always waiting. I run alone so I can just push the Start button on my watch and head down the path into the gloom. It's just a short trot to the Central Park roadway. I can go left and run the 6 mile loop counterclockwise which has more, but smaller, hills or go right and run clockwise with steeper, but fewer, hills. I always go the opposite direction of whoever is running the roadway when I get to it. It's too early to make the decision myself. No matter how early I get to the Park, there is always somebody else there ahead of me.

There are lights. They make big pools of brightness that aren't connected so you run from deep darkness into an elongated glow, just about bright enough to allow you to read your watch, then back into the darkness again. On the West Side as you run up hills by the Theatre, the only light comes from the traffic signals, mushy green, cellophane yellow and then, a sullen red which is neither light nor darkness. I stare at the dim white line of the running lane. In the summertime, to my right, there are hundreds of people sitting or laying down in a line waiting for the box office to open. You can hear them quietly talking to each other. In the winter there is only the sound of your own breathing and the sh-sh-sh-sh of your shoes.

If things are going well I can make the loop in either direction in something less than an hour. When I was working, I would cut over to the East Side and take the 6 train downtown. It would still be dark in the winter, but in mid-Summer, the sun will be up and shining down 59th Street straight into my eyes which is not a good thing when you are trying to dodge early morning delivery trucks and taxicabs. It's more of a nuisance then anything else.

I got to thinking about this the other morning after reading a Ben Jeffries post about sitting and watching the sunrise from his balcony. "Wow," I thought, "Who watches the sunrise?" I tried to remember the last time I watched one. I'm up every morning on vacation in Florida way, way before anyone else. It's dark as I head up the beach and the sun is peeking over the condos by the time I get back, but I don't watch the sunrise. It's just there all of a sudden. It's time to trot over to the grocery store to get what's needed for lunches and breakfast.

Sunsets in Florida are another matter. They verge on being the sacred, a time to gather on the sand or in chairs on the patio and ooh and aah at the changing colors in the sky and water. The ones we are with talk about yesterdays and tomorrows and there is wine. There is joy and solemnity. I often wonder what it must have been like for humans eons ago to watch the sun setting behind a mountain or sinking into the sea, the darkness settling in, the sounds of the night beginning to rise.

It takes a lot of being ready for the rest of the day for a person in this modern age to take the time on a workday to watch a sunrise. I think it's something we've lost, or at least I have. When I think about this as I run I remember that sunrises were probably much more important to the ancients than those ominous sunsets. Sunrises were proof that life would still go on, that fields could be planted or harvested, that travel could begin, buildings built and all things were possible.

The folks at Stonehenge weren't looking at sunsets, they, in huge crowds we know now, were marking the rising of the sun at the ends of it's yearly back and forth travel on the horizon. The sunrise marked for them the true circle of life.

In Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun after-all, there are hundreds of sunrise watching sites. This one is the Husband and Wife Rocks.





Or head to a morning in Tibet in time to see this:

And we cannot leave out the event which is the true center of the Christian Year: The Easter Vigil. People gather every Spring in places as diverse as hay fields to parking lots to mark the coming of the light.



So, have I been missing something by churning up and around the park instead of stopping by the Reservoir for a few minutes to take in the beginning of the new day? Probably. So, I've been thinking, there must be a way I can watch a few sunrises a week. Maybe make it the time that I read my affirmations out loud, have a cup of coffee and  try to envision what the next twelve hours of daylight will bring. Or maybe even that is too active, too busy, too full of purpose. Maybe I should just watch the light change into the morning.

Then see what changes it brings in me.