I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush

By Christopher Cudworth

Ask me why I take pictures of things run over on the road and I’ll share the reason that the road is a transient place, its surface is ever changing, and there is something symbolic about that fact, for it resembles our memories, and how we form them from impressions we choose to hold about something in the past.

Just passing through

The road also holds our running and our riding, but only lightly. We pass objects on the road with blithe disregard. But some of us take a prurient fascination in the discarded and found objects of the world. It works with people too. I have always held a soft spot for the lost souls of this universe, and their traces. Including my own.

Reunion with my former self

Once I attended a 2oth high school reunion for the class with which I would have graduated had our family not moved away from Pennsylvania to Illinois when I was in 7th grade. I felt at that time, living in Pennsylvania, that the future held all sorts of good things. Which meant that tearing me away from my best friends really felt like middle school hell. It was sad and devastating, but we drove off to Illinois anyway.

So it was both strange and fun to go back and visit those people left behind. Yet when one walks into a room of people with whom you attended both elementary and middle school, it’s like you never left. You know every one of them somehow.

Not quite

Minutes into the reunion one person did ask me what I was doing these days, and when I told him about the move to Illinois back in 7th grade, and how I’d gone on to college in Iowa, he looked puzzled. “Wait,” he said. “You moved away?”

Nice, I thought. Glad you remembered me. That’s how it goes at reunions. For a moment, I was crushed.

Not so crushed

Some impressions stick while others ultimately fade away, like an orange peel on the street. Real orange crush.

Yet some impressions do stick. A quiet guy in the corner nursing a tired looking beer actually perked up when he saw me. “Hey, Chris Cudworth,” he exclaimed. “Welcome back!”

I smiled and shook his hand. Then he said, “You know what I remember about you? You were always nice to everybody.”

Unpopular ways

It’s strange thing to hear your young life encapsulated like that. But you feel good that it was a decent observation, and hopefully true. And I do recall having friends that weren’t popular. We met for ballgames and played with toy soldiers and all kinds of other geeky, self-absorbing kid things that feel now a little like road kill in the stretched out, flattened memories of an adult. But they were very real then. And that matters.

Running for your life

I also knew that my running career really began in 7th grade in Pennsylvania. Our gym class did a series of tests for fitness measurement and one of them was a 12:00 run. Round the cinder track we went. I was literally wearing Red Ball Jets, the most famous sneaker of the day, but hardly a set of running shoes.

At 11:49 I crossed the 2 mile point, 8 laps, and continued for another 10 seconds further around the track before the whistle blew to stop. A sense of power and joy instantly filled my head. Only one other kid, a boy named Ward Shope, who would later go on to be the top runner at Lampeter Strasburg High School where I would have gone had we stayed in Pennsylvania, ran 2 miles in 12:00.

An unfolding spirit

That was my goal, to run two miles, and I don’t know exactly why, or how I figured out that 6:00 pace was possible at 12 or 13 years of age. Sometimes we’re called to destinies about which we know very little. We chase them just the same.

Some aspect of running and riding has offered balance all these years.

It felt so good to run, and run hard, that some part of my brain knew it was good for me too. Not just physically, but mentally. Even at a young age I felt anxious inside, wired that way from birth I have learned. Running helped to erase those feelings, that anxiety, and also freed me from standing still, which was the worst fate I could think about. It still is, in some ways.

By 8th grade track in Illinois, I’d found a new calling in running, choosing to run for an hour in gym class rather than play badminton, which I thought was a stupid, sissy game.

Then came outdoor track and running the half mile, the longest distance available, in 2:23. We ran against street toughs from Aurora and country bumpkins from Sycamore. All of them put up a good fight. A weird bond was felt even with competitors. Anyone with the guts to stick it out on the cinders, in the wind and around two laps and 880 yards deserved a little respect.

True and untrue measures

By high school I was ran Varsity cross country as a freshman, and earned top points my sophomore year. That following spring a bunch of us naive sophomores ran a 30 mile walkathon out in DeKalb, Illinois. There was no water along the way and it became a marathon death march, 26.2 miles plus nearly four more. That convinced me the marathon was not something special, just something stupid, and I never completed a competitive marathon because it was not a top priority. It was like asking to be road kill. I learned that once and didn’t have to learn it again. My best attempt was 1:25 at the 15 mile mark before hypothermia forced me off the course at the Twin Cities Marathon.

For the same reasons, I’m not obsessed with fixed measures of endurance in cycling, either. If I never ride a Century I might be disappointed, but certainly not crushed. Is 80 miles of riding really so different than 100? Are we to only feel good about ourselves if we put stickers on our vehicles proclaiming our achievements?

Stickers do fade, but some experiences do stick. Cars with stickers on them also get old, and faded, and then get crushed. Your once new car is now on the junk heap. It’s all part of the process of being. The sage knows that the crystal goblet he carries about in his knapsack is already technically broken. It only exists as a whole in the present moment, so he knows to enjoy it while it exists. When it gets broken, or crushed, the wise soul holds onto the feeling of when it was whole. It no longer matters that it is gone.

Most of our fates work that way, and our memories too. We try to cling to what matters, not what must be discarded, lest it hold us back.

Other crushing experiences

As a junior in HS it was my job to lead the team and that meant running into real competition. One local stud named Tom Burridge read an article in the newspaper about my supposed success and when he lined up against me in a triangular meet, he first sneered and then left me in the dust. I felt flattened that day, finishing in a good time, but way behind a guy who would go on to become All State in Illinois and later All American at University of Kentucky. He was a great runner, where I was only above average.

Sometimes we win. Sometimes we get crushed.

Little reminders

All it takes to remind us of the humility we feel in those moments is a discarded orange peel on the street, or a flattened can of Orange Crush. One faces decomposition, the other recycling. Meryl Streep once noted that her pride about having her photo on the cover of Time magazine was crushed when she saw people stepping on her image while walking over discarded magazines on the street.

That part of ourselves that gets crushed in any pursuit; be it athletics, or in life, is the part we should remember when things are going really well. Then it’s important to be grateful, lest our inner egos get flattened. It seems ironic, but our humility is sometimes the one thing that helps us survive in the face of all else. Even when we’ve supposedly been crushed. There are whole religions based on that simple fact.

As REM once put it, I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush.