This Running Life

The day began with such promise. It was a lovely morning out here on the left coast when I set out on my Saturday run at 6:30. I spotted a bicyclist before I got to the end of the block. Baristas were bustling around in the shadows inside Stumptown at the corner of Belmont and 34th, although the old fellow who peddles Street Roots had not yet set up his chair on the sidewalk at the door. I took a right down Yamhill, past the giant sunflower painted in the intersection at Sunnyside Piazza on 33rd, bound for the downtown waterfront loop, sunlight sparkling the river, the view from Tilikum Crossing, music piped out at Portland Opera there at the south end of the Eastbank Esplanade. I sighed with nostalgia for days gone by as a younger, faster runner passed. These days many are younger, and most faster.

A few blocks down, maybe half a mile from home, disaster struck. Yes, my toe caught an uneven spot in the sidewalk and I tripped. It happens from time to time. This was the first spill since sometime before May 2021, when my right ankle came down with a bad attitude, the first in a series of injuries that disrupted the running for major chunks of the past two years. The right knee went south on me in July of that year and was cranky off and on until the following summer. It was not until last fall that I was getting back to an approximation of where I had been before the ankle went bad, running five or six miles on Monday, four or five Wednesday, at least seven and up to nine or ten on Saturday. Weekend before Christmas I inflicted a hamstring strain on myself and another bout of rehab and recovery. The hamstring mended slowly and still bothered me slightly, but things were trending in the right direction.

My left wrist banged down hard on the side. I scraped my right hand and knee. I might have continued on, at least for a way, if not for the blood dripping onto my glasses as I got to my feet. It seems my head touched down sufficiently to come away with scrapes at my right temple and eyebrow. I could have used a good cut guy in my corner. At this point even I thought it advisable to return home and check out what I had done to myself. I put my Tulsa Runner shirt to good use, pressing it against the abrasions to stop the bleeding.

Once home I cleaned up my wounds, showered, wrapped the wrist in an Ace bandage, ate some breakfast. I experienced no ill effects from the bump on my head, not even a mild headache. It occurred to me today that, unless I am misremembering, my glasses were not knocked off. I do not recall even having to adjust them. The scrape at my eyebrow is just above the frame. Maybe somehow some small part of my head grazed the sidewalk just enough to rough it up. More like having sandpaper rubbed across it than being hit in the head with a hammer.

The wrist was another story. If not for the experience of a fractured right wrist in 2015, I might have waited to see if home treatment was sufficient. By noon it was bothersome enough to consult an advice nurse. She suggested I see a doctor within four hours. Fortunately, my friends, neighbors, landlords Vince and Hollye are the best. Well, Nigel the airedale terrier who allows us to live in his house is the best, but they’re right up there. Hollye’s car was gone. Vince had gotten home from the airport and sounded groggy from his early morning flight. Typically, he dropped what he was doing and delivered me to the ER.

The good news is the left wrist was not broken to make a matching pair with the right. The doctor did not seem too concerned about the head unless I experience headaches or nausea and vomiting. I came home with a brace for the wrist and took 600 mg of Ibuprofen per the doctor’s recommendation. That’s another thing. When I checked after the aborted run I found three bottles of over-the-counter pain meds, all of them three or four years beyond the expiration date. Hollye, who had relieved Vince at the ER so he could return home to rest and recover from what was already a long day, swung by the drug store on our way home so I could pick up Ibuprofen.

Adding to my misery, the care instructions I brought with me included a prohibition on alcohol for the next 24 hours. I consoled myself with a hearty bowl of Death by Chocolate ice cream after dinner. The wrist was noticeably better this morning. The brace and periodic icing seem to help. No need for Ibuprofen after the initial dose.

With a soupçon of luck the current mishap will prove less disruptive than its predecessors. I am hard-pressed to articulate precisely why running matters as it does. At this stage of my career denial of age has something to do with it. That does not explain why for the past forty years running has been as much part of my life and identity as poet and off-brand intellectual. Running is, as Jacques Derrida said of deconstruction, in some sense a pleasurable experience. There is something satisfying, and not just because it feels so good when I stop. A long run has a kind of psychical trajectory. Early on I feel daunted by how much farther I have to go and wonder if I really want to do it. Somewhere along the way that changes. With the end comes sublime melancholy because it is over already when seems like I just got started.

Memory of runs past recollected in tranquillity brings its own quiet pleasure. That I could no longer do some of those runs matters not a whit. There was the time in Atlanta on the trail past the Carter Center when I encountered three runners coming from the other direction, an older man in the middle flanked by two fit younger fellows. It was only after we passed each other that I realized the runner in the middle looked a lot like Jimmy Carter. Those 15-mile runs Saturday mornings in the mid 1980s with Mike and Diane, a pair of ultra marathoners recently moved to Atlanta from Pittsburgh who introduced me to the joys of long runs. Runs that took us on tours of downtown Decatur and the Emory University campus. Others up to Lenox Road and round and about through Piedmont Park.

Runs on visits home. Heading out across Hollingshed Creek at Shady Grove Methodist Church, and circling up along the road past St. John’s, the Lutheran Church of my childhood, part of a community that shaped my sense of right and wrong in profound ways I had no notion of then. At the end of that road a left onto Kennerly Road, where Bonnie Ellisor, now Stevens, still holds down the fort, and another left at the crossroads, past the Shealys and the Busbys, taking me back to the creek and a right turn on up the hill, a long hill, to our house.

And of course Portland runs. Springwater Corridor along the Willamette River past Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, where you might spot hawks, all manner of ducks, if lucky an eagle, and Oaks Amusement Park, where you might spot a Ferris wheel or a roller coaster, and on to Sellwood and looping through the park and heading home. In the early days of pandemic, from what we now know to be an excess of caution, I avoided bridges and the close encounters they bring, for a time, running south and east from home instead of west, past the Loyola Jesuit Center with its lovely grounds at Franklin and SE 43rd, past Franklin High School, and around the east side of Mt. Tabor somewhere up around 75th, a bugger of a bastard of climb, paraphrasing Samuel Beckett, but worth it for the spectacular view of Mt Hood to the east, not to mention the charater built getting to it. There are others. Best to break off before my indulgence becomes too tedious.

You know, in spite of all, it has become a nice weekend. Sometimes promise is fulfilled in ways we do not anticipate. Keep the faith. Stand with Urkaine.

Yr obdt svt