Tag Archives: Running

Keep running! You’re doing great!

I’m always looking to help out, to pass along a little positivity wherever I can. Like when I’m running a race. I get it, you’re not in great shape, maybe this is your first 10k or whatever, so I’ll give you some support. You’ll see me right before, I’ll be the one doing practice laps across the starting line. And I’ll give you a high five. I’ll tell you, “Good luck out there! You’re going to do great! Just keep going! Don’t forget, don’t give up, because I believe in you!”

It’s a nice gesture, giving people a little motivation, maybe a few pre-race tips. I like to find runners beforehand that I can kind of tell haven’t really had too much race experience, I give them helpful hints like, “Make sure you’re striking the ground with the front of your foot instead of the heel! This is going to help your knees in the long run, trust me, I’ve been running for years! I’ve ran thirty-eight marathons! I’m training for an ultra right now!”

You might need a little boost, I carry all of these energy gel-packs in my running fanny-pack. Do you want one? I can give you one. Save it for about a quarter of the way through, and then down the whole thing. Just try not to litter, OK? You really shouldn’t litter during a race. You know what? I’ll probably have crossed the finish line already, and so if you see me running backwards along the racecourse, you can just hand me the trash, I’ll throw it away for you.

That’s another thing that I do, when I finish, I like to immediately turn around and start cheering on everyone else who hasn’t finished yet. It’s great, you might be struggling, each step getting progressively harder, you’re sweating, out of breath, and then you see me, I look like I haven’t even broken a sweat. You’ll get inspired, you’ll think, wow, that guy right there is living proof that anybody can do this.

Anybody that dedicates themselves to my level of training, of course. But you could do that. It’s possible. And you, and you too. That’s what I’m thinking when I’m cheering you on, “Go for it!” I’ll always say. Or another good one is, “Keep going! You can do it!” and I can just tell by the pained expressions on people’s faces that they want to quit right there, that you don’t want to keep going, like you feel like you can’t do it, so I encourage them, “You’re almost there! Great work!”

Because you can do this. You don’t think I’m feeling any pain when I’m running? I mean, sure, I don’t look like it. And yeah, it’s only a 10k. Did I mention that I’m a marathon runner? Did I tell you that I’m training for an ultra? Now that’s some serious pain. But I don’t give in, no I keep going, I start cheering myself on, I’m like, “Come on Rob!” I scream it out loud, I clench my teeth and I start digging even deeper.

So just keep that in mind, your own challenges, your own personal struggles. Do not give up! Look out for me running backwards. It’s a nice way for me to cool down, to look at all the people I’m inspiring to keep at it. And sometimes some of the other top tier runners will do the same thing, and then we kind of have like a race-after-the-race race backwards, which, there’s no real finish line there, but still, if they’re getting close, I like to really push hard, sprint way back to the start, motivate even more runners along the way.

And when I get there first, I immediately stop and turn around, like I’m running forward again, but now I’m cheering on the other people running backwards, I’m saying stuff like, “Great job! Way to inspire! Keep on motivating!” like I’m the source of even more positive energy, like it’s just sending ripples of good vibes outward.

Did I tell you about that Iron Man I was training for a while back? Man, I don’t care how fast you’ve run a race, you haven’t felt anything until you’ve done an Iron Man. Just think, if he can do it, I can do it. I’m talking about me. And you. Just keep it up. Don’t stop, because you’re doing great. We’re all doing great. I’m feeling just terrific.

Let’s race!

You want to race? I’m always racing, people, groups of people, I can’t help it. I’m just so competitive. Like one time I was playing basketball and these guys on the other side of the court challenged me and my friends to a game of basketball. Like I said, very competitive, which, when we’re talking about basketball anyway, all of the competitiveness in the world wasn’t going to help. We got crushed. It was humiliating. And not really entirely my fault, anyway, not totally, Frank missed the majority of his shots, when he wasn’t getting blocked.

But even though basketball in this case happened to be a race to twenty-one points, yes, I’m talking about a race, race. Right after the game, and maybe I should have cooled down a little bit, maybe I should have just taken that high-five from the other team’s big guy because, yeah, I guess it was gracious at the time, but I couldn’t. “Let’s race!” I started getting in their faces.

And not the big guy, although, he did surprise me, how quick and light on his feet he was for a big man. And it was like that Sandra Bullock football movie, the big guy was like, hey man, I actually don’t like being called big guy. And I was like, sure thing big man. But I was just trying to get in his head. Again, I probably shouldn’t have discounted him entirely, making fun of him for accepting the challenge in the first place. Because like I said, he was pretty quick.

Not quick enough, because he didn’t win. But let’s be honest, he was never really in the running, pun totally intended, like running, get it? No, it was the little guy with the crew cut who looked like he might be the fastest. “What are you talking about race? Who’s got the next game?”

I got right in this kid’s face, like you’re not going to accept? Fine, I’ve got to make you accept. I threw the ball over the tall fence on the other side of the park, and while he was busy being all, “What the hell man?” I was like, “Come on, what are you scared? You little baby? You little scardey cat? Buck-buck buckaw!”

It worked, he took the bait, although it was a little dramatic, the way he ripped his shirt off, easy there Turbo, it’s entirely possible to run a race without taking your shirt off. But, whatever, if his intended effect was to intimidate me by showing off how ripped he was, like totally in shape, very cut, then yeah, I’ll admit it, it was slightly unnerving, I was caught just a little off guard, like shit, I had better win this race, like how did he get those bumpy muscles under his ribs so well defined? He’s got to be doing something besides cardio. I hope he’s not a runner.

“So what are we doing, like laps around the park? Four? Five?” It was the big guy asking the questions, and I was like, “Take it easy big man. This is between me and Turbo over here.” I was actually calling him Turbo all game, like trying to get in his head, but I don’t know, my whole smack-talking game, one, it’s much more effective when my team is solidly in the lead, and two, it just wasn’t really on that day, I don’t think it’s ever really on. But we’re never getting pummeled that badly, and I guess that was my lesson to learn, on shutting my mouth with the amateur smack-talk when I’m getting destroyed by this team of semi-pro guys, just all really built, like not everybody as built as Turbo, but man, all really pretty cut.

“Go!” and that was it. Turbo wasn’t a runner, it turned out, so you know, I stayed with him for the first three laps, just to make sure he wasn’t saving anything for the end, and then on that last lap I took off. Like I got so far ahead at one point I even turned around, started running backwards, I was like, “Is that all you’ve got Turbo? Ha!”

And yeah, that was all Turbo had. But the big guy, I think I mentioned already, he gave me a little scare, he definitely saved a little something for the end, and so I had to abandon my smack-talk, which sucked, because this was exactly the type of blowout that would’ve made even my talk sound like it was smack, like smacking. Smacking talk? No. You see what I mean?

I won, barely, and I was way too out of breath by the time I crossed the finish line to do any sort of a convincing gloat. “Whatever man,” Turbo was being a sore loser, “Just go and get my ball.” And I was like, “What? Loser gets the ball.” And he was like, “Says who? You threw it!”

But I refused. And he didn’t really have a choice, he had to hop the fence, a big one, like two stories tall maybe. On the other side it was just trash, just like a weird space between the neighboring building. And he jumped down and tiptoed around all the garbage to his ball, he was like, “Fuck man! It landed on a piece of glass!”

Yeah, that kind of sucked, it was all deflated. But he was behind a fence, so what was he going to do? I had like a good minute, minute and a half head start, and by the time he made it back to this side, I was gone.

Look both ways

This morning I went for a run. In an effort to keep things interesting, I have a few routes that I like to take. I was on what I guess would be Route C, and there was this one section, two blocks long, where I had to cross over from one side of the street to the other.

It’s always a challenge going for runs in the city. You want to maintain some sort of a rhythm, but it’s kind of hard with traffic, with lights that don’t always synch up with what you’re doing, your pace, plus the other eight or so million people living in this city, some of them out, some of them on the same street that you are, everybody jockeying for space, trying to just go about life with as few collisions as possible.

I ran by the first corner but the light wasn’t on my side. About halfway down I noticed that the light up ahead was good to go. But I wasn’t going to make it all the way there in time to catch it. So I figured, OK, I’ll just cross right now, right in the middle of the street. I do it all the time. It’s New York. You cross when you have to cross.

Only, and I’ve heard of stuff like this happening to other people, but I ran into the street to find myself directly in the way of a bicycle delivery guy. There was no time to react. I just stepped in the street and found myself exactly in his path. He didn’t even have time to swerve, he just kind of shouted something, I think I shouted something, although I might not have, it’s kind of a blur.

Incredibly, I was able to maneuver my torso, like a matador taunting a charging bull, in such away that I made very minimal contact with the bike as he came at me from my left. I turned to the right to see everything play out. The bike kind of wobbled, and I thought, he’s going to fall, but then he managed to correct the imbalance. For about a quarter of a second, everything looked like it was about to be OK. But then whatever grip he tentatively regained slipped away again and he tumbled off and over the bike.

It wasn’t the worst crash in the world. It was a relatively low-speed affair, but still, I’ve fallen off of my bike plenty. He was probably a little banged up. And what about his bike? What about the delivery? I went up to the guy and started apologizing immediately, “I’m so sorry,” like that’s going to do anything.

I gave him my hand to pull him up but he just kept shouting something in what I’m assuming was Chinese, just a snap judgment based on the Chinese restaurant logo on his delivery vest. Through his gesturing, I figured that he was worried about his bike, it was one of those new electric models with an engine and everything. I pulled it up, steadied everything out, turned off the motor.

Then he just kept saying stuff in that different language. I was asking the basics, “Are you OK?” telling him I was sorry. He kind of looked through his merchandise, everything seemed to be salvageable. He pulled up his pant leg but there wasn’t any noticeable damage. We made eye contact and he just kind of kept muttering something before making a gesture with his arm, like don’t worry about it, get out of here.

And then he got back on his bike and took off. I felt really bad. I felt like I should have done something else. But what? What was to be done? All of these things flashed through my mind. About how I always complain about my job, about how I hate going to work. I tried putting myself in his place, delivering takeout on a bike in the cold in a country where I don’t even speak a single word of the language. And I get hit by a runner. And maybe my leg does hurt. Maybe I have to go back to the restaurant and get new food, and the boss will chew me out for poor bike riding skills. Maybe the restaurant owns the bike, maybe the owner is a real dick and makes me pay for any scratches or superficial damage.

Man, I just try to be a good guy, so it stings especially when I make a stupid careless mistake, one that has actual ramifications on somebody else. And I had no idea what I could have done differently, you know, expect for looking both ways or waiting to cross at a corner, or just having a clue about my surroundings, not stuck in my head, unaware of the rest of the world, all of these eight million people with whom I’m trying to peacefully coexist.

We’re all doomed

I get so paranoid sometimes, like way too paranoid. It’s overwhelming, crushing, really. It’s all stupid crazy stuff, and it sounds just like how these blog posts sound, only out loud, in my head, with no word limit, just this constant stream churning a million different detailed scenarios about how I’m going to die, how, yeah, things are going pretty well right now, but it’s just a matter of time before everything takes a sharp and dramatic turn for the worse.

Like this morning, I was feeling especially on edge, I couldn’t find a comfortable spot, not sitting down, not lying down, not standing up. So I thought I’d go for a long run, get into that soothing rhythm where I focus on my breathing. Only this backfired. As I got maybe a quarter of the way over the Queensboro Bridge, I noticed how windy it was.

Specifically, I could feel the wind coming at me from the other side of the bridge, taking all of that gridlocked traffic, accumulating all of that slow, idling exhaust, and shooting it straight into my lungs in concentrated bursts. I tried to ignore it, to just deal with it, to tell myself that, hey idiot, you live in a big city, this problem probably isn’t limited to being on a bridge.

But then I started thinking about all of the bridges and tunnels in the city. I started thinking about all of those bridge and tunnel workers, the cops that stand there and do whatever it is they’re doing, the maintenance guys, the toll collectors. They always have these crazy World War I style gas masks on. And here I am like an idiot running across the bridge, getting my respiratory system into such a state that I’m actually taking in more air than necessary, I’m taking in as many large gulps of pollution as I can.

OK this isn’t helping. I needed to put that out of my head also. What am I going to do, never go outside? Never run across the bridge? It’s not always this bad. Sometimes the wind comes from the other direction and I get to enjoy what it feels like if there were no cars around. But that taste. I could taste exhaust on my tongue. And I wanted to wipe the taste off somehow, but there was nothing to do, I kind of just moved my tongue around, rubbed it on my teeth. And now I was totally going crazy, because I swear I could feel like a film on my teeth, like the inside of my mouth was just covered with this grime.

I was getting out of control here. Clearly this had to be at least somewhat in my head. New York isn’t that dirty. It’s not like how people describe Los Angeles during the eighties, or Beijing right now. All of those other human beings are making it through OK. I’ll manage just fine. And that calmed me down for a second, but then another image flashed through my mind. I remembered I went for a similar long run like a year ago, the same route, the across the bridge, but it was a little longer, I ran along the East River and down the to the Brooklyn Bridge before turning around and heading back to Queens.

And when I got home and collapsed and took off my sneakers I could see it, a clear line in my socks, white below the ankle line, but above? Where the sock didn’t have any sneaker to cover it? It was stained, browned, just being exposed to this city for a couple of hours had somehow done actual damage, like there’s enough dust and grime at the foot level to somehow make its way into the fabric.

And I run a lot, over and over again, back and forth across that bridge, I’m breathing in and out. All I can think of is tiny micro-particulate, the smokestacks to my right in Long Island City, the smokestacks to my left by the FDR Drive, all of that exhaust, the kind of dust that’s so small it takes decades to float down to the earth’s surface, and I’m breathing it in, giving it that powerful inhale, letting it get all the way inside my system, deep in my lungs, into the tiniest crevasses of my alveoli, accumulating run after run after run.

And someday ten, twenty, thirty years from now, I’ll develop this weird post-post-post industrial cough, and the oncologist will be like, “Yeah, we’re seeing that from a lot of guys your age. Nobody really knows any good answers, but here, we’ll give you a bunch of chemotherapy and hope for the best.”

This is crazy. This is a crazy way to spend a Wednesday morning. It’s too much for me. I need a drink. I need some more coffee. And another drink. We’re all doomed.

Look, I don’t want to race you, it’s just … GO!

What is it, that feeling you get when you’re stopped at a red light, and another car pulls up next to you, and you’re both waiting for the light to turn green, and when it turns green that feeling escapes, overcomes your better judgment, and you peel out and try to stay ahead of that other car? Sure, not everybody does that. It’s really not safe. I don’t do it. Well, I don’t try to do it. Every once in a while that feeling comes out of nowhere, it’s overwhelming, and it’s really stupid. What compels us to naturally want to compete with each other, with complete strangers, over something so stupid?

I ride my bike to work everyday. This feeling is much worse on a bike because, unlike in a car, you really don’t have any reason to keep yourself in check. It’s not like you’re going to kill anybody by riding as fast as you can. I know you still could, but it’s way less likely. I’ll be riding over the bridge and I might be coming up on somebody. On a bike it’s not like you’re just going to fly past another rider. If you’re going only slightly faster, you’ll just kind of gradually creep up on and then overtake them.

But the thing is, as soon as the biker up front notices that I’m right behind, he or she will always start pedaling harder. And it’s like, what is this, a race? So I start pedaling harder also. And now it really is a race. Both of us giving as much as we’ve got. But the bridge is only so long, and so even if you win, what do you do when you and your competition both come cruising to the end? You’re eye to eye now, do you say something? If you lose, do you say congratulations to the victor?

It’s all very silly. But when you’re in the moment, it doesn’t matter if you know that it’s silly. All that’s important is getting there first. One time I went running, and I was crossing the same bridge. It’s like a mile across. And I was just kind of zoning out, timing my strides with my breath, when all of the sudden this other runner comes out of nowhere and runs ahead of me. So now I’m thinking, OK, I can either let it go, go back to concentrating on the rhythms of my lungs, and just maintain the pace that I was maintaining all along.

Or, I could up my speed and take back my lead. The only problem with that is, once I make that much of an effort to get back in front, I’m the one officially making it a race. Before, it was just two people running their own separate runs at their own individual paces. But this, no, I’m doing my own pace, seeing his pace, and then deciding to match it. One, I had better be sure that I can keep this new elevated pace for the duration of the bridge. Nothing would be worse than sprinting ahead only to have to slow down thirty seconds later, out of breath, clearly trying too hard to be a big shot, with that other guy effortlessly taking back his number one spot. And two, I also have to realize that, after I move up front, if this guy makes another run to overtake me, I absolutely have to up my speed again, a second time, and keep upping it, until one of us gets to the other side first. So I made that choice and ran ahead. And I didn’t look back. And by the time I got to the other side, out of breath, giving it much more than I thought I had, I turned around, imagining this guy on my heels the entire length of the bridge. But he wasn’t anywhere near me. He must have just maintained his own speed, like it wasn’t a race at all, like it was just me acting crazy and engaging in a competition with nobody.

But that’s not always the case. One time I was in the reverse situation, where I came running up to the bridge and I was in my head, again, concentrating on my pace, and I wasn’t looking around at anybody else, but I started to come up on another runner, and as soon as I passed him, he made it obvious that he wouldn’t take that lying down. So he started sprinting, and I had no time to think, to talk myself out of engaging in another race with another stranger. All I knew what that I would not let this guy get back up front.

This was the uphill part of the bridge, and we wound up, the both of us, sprinting as fast as we could. It was like the four hundred meter dash, but for idiots. When you’re in a footrace, it’s not really running anymore. It’s something else. There’s a primal feeling in the pit of your stomach, a discomfort, a palpable fear that you’re going to lose. It must be some sort of built-in survival instinct. And I had to really dig down for energy, to go a little faster, to stay up front. And I did it. But then I was so far ahead that I kind of just got back in my head again. And I ran all the way until the bridge started going downhill. Everybody knows downhill is a joke, so I was just kind of taking it easy. I had assumed that the race was over once the uphill climb ended. And this guy wasn’t on my heels anymore so it wasn’t a big deal. But then like halfway down, all of the sudden he comes up from behind, flying, sprinting, to the point where even if I tried to match it, he was already way too far ahead, he caught me by surprise, and he got to the end first.

And I was just thinking, who really won? Was it a race to the top or a race to the bottom? Because I totally stopped racing once I got to the top. But only because I thought that I had already won. It’s so stupid. Because we were totally in a race and now he was ahead and it bothered me. Because we were just two random people deciding to engage in a stupid competition. Why does everything have to be a competition? Every once in a while I’ll be riding my bike to work and I’ll get in the same exact type of race. But it’s always lose-lose, because if I lose, well, then I feel weak, like a loser. But if I win, it’s obviously because I was trying way too hard, and I’m on my way to work, so I’m not dressed up in exercise clothes, so when I do finally get there, I’m all sweaty and gross and I have to deal with the discomfort of damp underwear for the entirety of the day.