Detail of painting Oil and Water, acrylic on board, by Christopher Cudworth.
The best intentions sometimes don’t work out. Last Friday night I held an art opening for my solo show “Urban Wilds” at Water Street Studios. People liked the work and visitors were still arriving at 7:30 p.m., but I was scheduled to leave for a drive to Ann Arbor that evening at 8:00.
Under normal conditions, the trip was supposed to take just over four hours. I’d planned to leave by 8:00 and arrive by midnight, then get up to attend the running coach certification course held by the Road Runner’s Club of America.
I’d done my homework. Watched the required video on Vimeo about the history of running coaches. I already knew them by heart, for the most part. Arthur Lydiard. Percy Cerutty. These were the guys who informed our training in the early 1970s. However, I never purchased a pair of Lydiard-brand shoes because they were $70 at the time. How times have changed.
I was excited to take the course but a bit concerned about the drive east. When I signed up the art show dates were not set. But then they synced up with that Friday and I decided to make do.
The storm path was approximately 100 miles wide and headed in a northeasterly direction.
There was one problem. Big storms were pushing through the Chicago area and up into western Michigan. The skies were dumping boatloads of rain as I climbed in the car to start driving. I made it all the way to Woodridge, about 30 miles southeast, before pulling off I-355 to look at the radar on the Weather Channel app.
It did not deliver good news. The rain storm was coming from the southwest and heading on a continual, broad path in the exact same direction I’d be heading on Route 80 to 94 and up in to Michigan.
While sitting in the car on the road shoulder next to the tool booth, my phone made a strange sound and a FLASH FLOOD ADVISORY came up. That equated to a DNF in my book. It would be too stressful to drive through that weather for hours without relief.
I took one last look at the radar. The band of dark green indicating rain clouds was at least 100 miles wide and flowing like a river northward over the path I needed to drive. I sat there with a sigh. Then I called the hotel in Ann Arbor and told them it was impossible for me to make it that evening. So they cancelled my room. Thank you, Candlewood Suites.
Then I emailed the clinic organizers and explained the situation. It simply wasn’t advisable to attempt that drive at that time of night in what would likely be driving rain for the next three hours. I hope they’ll let me apply my course fees as a credit for a future seminar.
Oil and Water 2, Original Painting by Christopher Cudworth, for the show Urban Wilds.
As a younger idiot I might have attempted that long drive in the rain. But I’m an older idiot now who possesses a dose of common sense. So I turned around and headed back home.
Only I had gotten myself so pumped to do the drive it was difficult to get to sleep. So the DNF on the RRCA turned into a CNS (Could Not Sleep) night of fitful rest.
But I still got up and rode 30 miles with my buddies, who were fortunately a bit hung over from a class reunion the night before. So we rode 16 mph and called it a morning.
The funny thing about the entire evening was the strange resemblance between my painting Oil and Water and the image of the weather from Friday night. There indeed seemed to be some sort of flow going on, and a lesson that life isn’t always what you want to make of it.
The squirrels who visit my front yard bird feeder played a bit of a practical joke on me. A tall corn stalk has popped up in the front garden. It stands nearly five feet tall now. Whether it will produce ears of corn remains to be seen. But it’s still August. So there’s time.
I recall smoking some weed back in college days when my buddy handed me a pipe and sat chuckling in the front seat of a 7-11. I took a draw or two and then my head slammed back against the seat. “Like it?” he squealed through squinty eyes. “It’s hashish!”
Midway through my ride yesterday, I turned right from Burr Road onto Silver Glen Road heading east toward a bridge across the Fox River. It was a mellow ride thus far, a bit of recovery two days after the Sprint Triathlon in Naperville.
In the early phases of my career in marketing, the company for whom I worked shipped me out East to Philadelphia from Chicago. The President of the company walked in my office one day (because he was the one that hired me) and said, “We’re moving all marketing activities to Philly. You need to move by August.” It was April.
We survived that too. But I recall my brother Jim and I huddled in the backseat of the Wildcat singing clips of Beatles songs together as we drove away from Lancaster. “Onetwothreefourfivesixseven….allgoodchildrengotoheaven…”
Perhaps we don’t like to admit it, but there always seems to be a bit of anger that follows us as we move through life. There was for me, anyway. The move from Seneca Falls to Lancaster disturbed me even at the age of five years old.
There are sentimental reasons to keep my house. But there is also the need I feel to embark on a new chapter in life that challenges me in new ways. I have long learned to accept my faults, and have grappled with the benefits of working for myself and having a steady paycheck. I’ve launched into my art again, and have a studio where I pump paint out of my fingers, it seems, in mad expression of all that lurks within. I have a new show coming up this weekend.
Emerging from the swim at the Naperville Sprint Triathlon, I glanced down at my watch chronometer and it still read 0:00. We’d waited so long to begin the swim by setting off in random groups of four that I’d completely forgotten to hit the START button.
The better triathletes have their shoes mounted on the pedals and ready to go. Barefeet and all, they just climb on and go riding. Those of us not so adept at transition are forced to play games with our own mobility. We flounder, in other words, in a world of ‘trime’ in which normal physical activities are mixed together in a sport salad we call triathlon. It can be quite comical, and at times dangerous. Last year I fell flat on my ass while coming off the bike and trotting through transition to my running shoes. I just laughed. It was funny.
Transition trime can be an embarrassment of sorts. It is the necessary evil that hides within your triathlon overall time. Transition is akin to stepping out to take a shit during an important company meeting. You excuse yourself momentarily to sneak out of a deep discussion and squat on the toilet doing this most humble of deeds. Then you wash your hands and ease back into the meeting room as if nothing in the world ever happened. But truly, those few minutes are gone forever. They won’t show on the meeting notes. “Verna stepped out to take a shit,” is not going to contribute anything to the notion of profitability or branding of the company. It’s the same thing with transition. “Christopher Cudworth contemplatively shoved his feet into his bike shoes” does not make for a better overall triathlon time.
Last year my bike split haunted me. I’d been clobbered by several minutes by those in my age group. This year I was determined to cut that gap. And I did, cycling almost two minutes faster than my bike split of 2015. 37:15 for 13 miles. Progress.
So it was with a combination of relief and acceptance that took 13th place in my age group this year, after a 10th last year. My slower run time was a product of some trime spent just getting healthy again.
But all those trime factors show that a formerly pure distance runner like me must learn to make adjustments. It’s been a rolling process, one might say, learning the triathlon. I’ve raced five times this year, all at the Sprint Distance, and gotten a little hardware in the process. I first got into cycling in 2003 as a sustainable sport, and raced my bike in crits for several years. Now I’m doing triathlon as part of a lifelong balance of activities. This is all part of a different kind of transition for me. One must learn to suppress some native instincts about how time and races actually work.
This summer unlike many summers before, I purchased a pool pass to get in some swim practice. Last year I faked it through the only Sprint Triathlon I did, which required only a 400-meter swim before letting you emerge to the more sane activities of land-based activities.
Yet here we have the Muslim culture expressing their normal, everyday values in secure, respectful and conservative ways. In fact, there are millions of people who abide by the faith of Islam in the United States. They are peace-loving, normal people who contribute greatly to our society. These kids at the swimming pool were not terrorists. That handsome young man posed absolutely no threat to anyone. And her kind face and smiling eyes beneath her head covering were joyous, youthful and eager about life. They were just kids with their feet in the sand at the pool. Real Americans.
