Everything Hurts. Yee-haw!
Hey, folkses. I write to you from the house of Marshall where we are about to prepare a lovely meat-based feast. Last night we had this great conversation with my new (soon to be former) roommate in which she said, quite rightly, re. her vegetarianism, “I mean, I’m not a caveman I'm not running around for my survival. I don’t need to eat bison every day.”
Today Marshall and I ran the Peachtree Roadrace. Today we eat bison.
It was my first time running the thing and I was actually tossing and then turning in la bed last night, worried that I wasn’t amply trained. So I got out of bed at 2:00 and had a swig from someone’s raspberry flavored rum. Which was gross, but made me feel all warm and drowsy again. That feeling was then interrupted by the worry that I would wake up this morning hung-over.
I did have kind of a headache this morning and Marshall wasn’t really wearing good running shoes and I was also somewhat beset by personal lady-woes of the Red Tide variety – but none of this – None of This – kept us from having a surprisingly amazing time running these six-and-some-change miles today along with tens of thousands of our closest friends.
Running the Peachtree Roadrace is Exactly the sort of thing I would never, ever have conceived of doing when I was seventeen. When I was seventeen, I’d walk the Mile Run that we had to do for gym class along with my friends, all of us scoffing at the kids who actually tried - who, you know, ran. Running was for sporty kids. It was really hard. Running hurt.
A few years later I was twenty and in Sevilla, Spain for a semester and had seen and done everything there was to do in Sevilla, Spain. I had two friends from our little student group and we were sick of one another by Month Two. I was lonely and yes, bored. My Senora’s son’s fiancé told me that my tremendous love of crusty bread was making me a little fat. It was right around then that I went to the department store and bought my first pair of running shoes. Those five months I probably both ran and drank more than I ever have since. I ran to the soundtrack of Grosse Point Blank. The first song was “Rudie Can’t Fail” by The Clash. Spaniards would give me funny looks because Spanish people do not run. They are way too fucking cool and too fucking beautiful to run. All of them. The sidewalks in Sevilla are not designed for runners. In parts, they are caving in, and in parts they are upended. There are tree-roots poking up here and there and dog shit just about everywhere. I didn’t care, though. I would run, dodging all these things with my fleet feet just like those tennis-shoe ad people. I would run in the morning sometimes and again in the afternoon. I ran and wrote in my journal and went out at night and drank and danced and drank. Then I got up in the morning, rinsed and repeated. The running probably saved my liver and it cleared my mind. It let me breathe. I still gained weight from all that crusty bread but I came home with a new, uniquely American habit.
I am the dorkish one.
Running is not dignified. At least, I’m not dignified when I run. After fifteen minutes, I am sweating rivers, my face is tomato-red and I’m huffing and puffing. I may feel like that tennis-shoe ad, but I look like a PSA for a heart attack.
I seem to be riding some sort of backlash-it-y wave, though, in recent years, from my high school days of worrying about The Cool. Nowadays I actually gravitate toward the very things I found most undignified as a young gal. If running is undignified, running the Peachtree is extremely so. You like running alone? At dawn or dusk? Just you and the sound of your Chariots of Fire feet chuck-chuck-chucking against the gravel? Take that and add thousands and thousands of other people, in various states of fitness, all hoarded in together on one street. A street lined with giant chain stores and restaurants and office buildings. Along the way, you get sprayed with water. Soon, you find yourself singing along with the John Cougar songs one of the radio stations is blasting at top volume at Mile 2. You befriend the people running alongside you and you grin at all the people who got up at the crack of dawn to wave flags and ring cowbells at you. This is because, instead of feeling like you’re gonna die, which is what you expected, you feel immortal, and it’s these things that are powering you on and making you feel like every cheesy sports metaphor you ever heard about the Eye of the Tiger in the thick of the Zone on a Runner’s High Feeling the Burn is true.
You’ve always hated this shit. Since you figured it out at age fourteen, you’ve taken pride in being nerdy in the coolgirl way: which is well-read and listening to NPR and being a rock-n-roll snob. Now you’re suddenly uncool in a way that can never be made cool: You are finding yourself lured by the jock life. Very lured. You’re talking about future 10-Ks. You’re talking about joining a running club next year when you go back to school. You’re imagining the new ugly running shoes you’ll buy once today is all over. For you, m’dear - m’sweaty, one-hour-twelve-minute 10-K dear - it is all over.
Hey, folkses. I write to you from the house of Marshall where we are about to prepare a lovely meat-based feast. Last night we had this great conversation with my new (soon to be former) roommate in which she said, quite rightly, re. her vegetarianism, “I mean, I’m not a caveman I'm not running around for my survival. I don’t need to eat bison every day.”
Today Marshall and I ran the Peachtree Roadrace. Today we eat bison.
It was my first time running the thing and I was actually tossing and then turning in la bed last night, worried that I wasn’t amply trained. So I got out of bed at 2:00 and had a swig from someone’s raspberry flavored rum. Which was gross, but made me feel all warm and drowsy again. That feeling was then interrupted by the worry that I would wake up this morning hung-over.
I did have kind of a headache this morning and Marshall wasn’t really wearing good running shoes and I was also somewhat beset by personal lady-woes of the Red Tide variety – but none of this – None of This – kept us from having a surprisingly amazing time running these six-and-some-change miles today along with tens of thousands of our closest friends.
Running the Peachtree Roadrace is Exactly the sort of thing I would never, ever have conceived of doing when I was seventeen. When I was seventeen, I’d walk the Mile Run that we had to do for gym class along with my friends, all of us scoffing at the kids who actually tried - who, you know, ran. Running was for sporty kids. It was really hard. Running hurt.
A few years later I was twenty and in Sevilla, Spain for a semester and had seen and done everything there was to do in Sevilla, Spain. I had two friends from our little student group and we were sick of one another by Month Two. I was lonely and yes, bored. My Senora’s son’s fiancé told me that my tremendous love of crusty bread was making me a little fat. It was right around then that I went to the department store and bought my first pair of running shoes. Those five months I probably both ran and drank more than I ever have since. I ran to the soundtrack of Grosse Point Blank. The first song was “Rudie Can’t Fail” by The Clash. Spaniards would give me funny looks because Spanish people do not run. They are way too fucking cool and too fucking beautiful to run. All of them. The sidewalks in Sevilla are not designed for runners. In parts, they are caving in, and in parts they are upended. There are tree-roots poking up here and there and dog shit just about everywhere. I didn’t care, though. I would run, dodging all these things with my fleet feet just like those tennis-shoe ad people. I would run in the morning sometimes and again in the afternoon. I ran and wrote in my journal and went out at night and drank and danced and drank. Then I got up in the morning, rinsed and repeated. The running probably saved my liver and it cleared my mind. It let me breathe. I still gained weight from all that crusty bread but I came home with a new, uniquely American habit.
I am the dorkish one.
Running is not dignified. At least, I’m not dignified when I run. After fifteen minutes, I am sweating rivers, my face is tomato-red and I’m huffing and puffing. I may feel like that tennis-shoe ad, but I look like a PSA for a heart attack.
I seem to be riding some sort of backlash-it-y wave, though, in recent years, from my high school days of worrying about The Cool. Nowadays I actually gravitate toward the very things I found most undignified as a young gal. If running is undignified, running the Peachtree is extremely so. You like running alone? At dawn or dusk? Just you and the sound of your Chariots of Fire feet chuck-chuck-chucking against the gravel? Take that and add thousands and thousands of other people, in various states of fitness, all hoarded in together on one street. A street lined with giant chain stores and restaurants and office buildings. Along the way, you get sprayed with water. Soon, you find yourself singing along with the John Cougar songs one of the radio stations is blasting at top volume at Mile 2. You befriend the people running alongside you and you grin at all the people who got up at the crack of dawn to wave flags and ring cowbells at you. This is because, instead of feeling like you’re gonna die, which is what you expected, you feel immortal, and it’s these things that are powering you on and making you feel like every cheesy sports metaphor you ever heard about the Eye of the Tiger in the thick of the Zone on a Runner’s High Feeling the Burn is true.
You’ve always hated this shit. Since you figured it out at age fourteen, you’ve taken pride in being nerdy in the coolgirl way: which is well-read and listening to NPR and being a rock-n-roll snob. Now you’re suddenly uncool in a way that can never be made cool: You are finding yourself lured by the jock life. Very lured. You’re talking about future 10-Ks. You’re talking about joining a running club next year when you go back to school. You’re imagining the new ugly running shoes you’ll buy once today is all over. For you, m’dear - m’sweaty, one-hour-twelve-minute 10-K dear - it is all over.
Labels: nostalgialand
posted by Alice at 12:47 PM
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