ALL OF US experience days when we’re out running or riding or swimming and we just feel dead. The legs are heavy. Even the mind can feel like it’s sinking down into the abyss of the neck. We drag ourselves through a workout and slog through the shower. “Thank God,” we murmur to ourselves. “That almost killed me.”
Well, that’s the rhetorical version of being dead on your feet anyway.
This weekend I’ll be driving east to Cleveland to visit my son and attend a graduation party for my niece, who is graduating from high school and will play college volleyball with her sister before the older sibling graduates next year.
So the time is right to rally with family and get another job done in the process. My father passed away last October and by his own directives was cremated. The same thing took place in 2005 for my mother. It was my father’s wishes that they both be buried in a cemetery in Upstate New York, the region where they were both born and raised. So my brother who lives out east made a couple trips to the Bainbridge area to secure a beautiful spot on a hillside cemetery. My father and mother’s remains will be buried there.
On the way to Cleveland, I’m planning a little stop on the way to ride the Cuyahoga bike trail. I may ride thirty miles or so and jump off the bike for a run too. It looks like lovely territory for a workout and getting a taste for the natural areas of Ohio.
When I get back home there will be yet another matter of cremains to attend. I’ve had discussions with my late wife’s family and we’re considering a burial place for her with her father in the cemetery of the church where she was raised. She’d never really indicated any other plans beyond the directive to be cremated. It seems strange to say that we didn’t discuss ideas beyond that, but really her reticence was the product of her unwillingness to give into ovarian cancer, the disease that took her life three years ago.
I’ll confess to the fact that carrying all these remains around has had an effect on me. In some respects, it has fueled an ire. Life itself feels absurd in some ways. And politically, there’s almost no excuse for people to devalue others and to do the stupid things they do, including murder and the taking of life so casually or willingly.
All my life, from the youngest memories I have, there has always been a sensitivity to social justice in my soul. Even from my earliest years as a little kid I fought back against bullies and sometimes paid the price. But I don’t regret those fights, on the ones in which I engage to this day. I don’t think I’m wrong to do that, or to care so much.
I recall a period in the early 1980s when I was working hard to become an even better runner than I had been in college. The results came, but the drive was so deep within me that I was in some ways maniacally joyous and at the same time profoundly unhappy. The drive to do better fueled both emotions. That is life in a capsule if you ask me, and what remains for each of us to figure out whether the joy or the unhappiness is the true reality.
I am conscious of this duality every time I go for a run, ride a bike or slide into a pool. I am alive, therefore I do. It’s not much more complicated than that, and yet it means so much to be conscious and grateful for these or any abilities.
In this ashes to ashes world, the bridge between the simple act of being alive, which we too often take for granted, and the “I do” choices we make in our existence define our will to live, and how to do it best. What remains is history; be it personal, perpetual, or whatever we can make of it.
LOVE LIFE.
Way back in the early 2000s I tore my ACL playing soccer. It was a sudden injury and a shocking incident given my lifetime of playing ballistic sports such as basketball, baseball and other activities requiring hard cuts and sudden stops. I triple-jumped in high school, which involves three consecutive jumps at full speed down a runway and into a sandpit. And I didn’t tear my ACL doing that?
It will cost me a little money to get the training and become more dedicated about my strength training. It’s frankly overdue. Neglecting your strength training is like making minimum payments on your credit card bill. It feels like progress is occurring, but actually, it’s not. Sooner or later the principle actually comes due.
At the race packet pickup last Saturday, the guy handing out the numbers gave me a weird smile. “I hate to tell you this,” he grinned. “But your number is 666.”
I’ve waited a few days to think through the meaning of the 
Endurance sports are widely measured in empiric ways. You have personal records at a specific distance or type of event. But these numbers by themselves do not measure every type of success you can achieve. In fact, numbers can actually be deceiving.
The first year I bought a real racing bike ten years ago, I raced in a series of criteriums from June through September. The lessons learned were many. How to ride in a hurtling pack. How to turn without braking. How to draft within inches of the wheel ahead of you. And how to get dropped.
That’s what my fiance Sue Astra was advising another of her swimming students to do. The gal had recently trouble in the opening yards of the swim segment in her first triathlon of the season. “Next time, go out slower than you normally would to start,” she told her. “And find some space to the side if you can. Get some rhythm going and your breathing will come along better.”
Our week in Tampa was wonderful, capped by that wonderful run yesterday morning on the Starkey Wilderness Trail. When we got back to the parking lot we heard the chatter and laughter of a running group echoing beneath the steel shelter next to the bathrooms.
It proves that so many of us operate in time-out-of-mind fashion. We place ourselves somewhere and make it work. Yet we still long for other places, better races and friendlier faces.
When one of those aggressive Sunshine State lawyers gets done with your case you can live high on the hog the rest of your life. Buy yourself that new Specialized Shiv. Invest in several pairs of Saucony ISO Triumphs as a symbol of your newly earned decadence and buy some Speedo swim goggles with miniature windshield wipers on them if you like.
