Winter wonderland
Our posse dressed for action in 16-degree weather & wind chill below zero.
Last January the snow was thick and wet during the first week of the year. Yet in a fit of cabin fever and thanks to some serious Manhattans on a Friday night, my companion Sue and I were talked into joining a crew of folks at the Sno Fun Run in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The race attracts a thousand or so people, and sends them all off in a herd into the snow and wind until they all turn around again.
The roads were awful. A combination of new slush and snow had fallen, but no one seemed to care. The winners still came tearing past us on the return trip of the out and back course. Each was fighting for footholds on the thin sections of road where the snow was scraped away.
After the top runners passed us, I did a stupid thing. In a fit of coltish behavior and semi-youthful vigor, I hurdled a tall orange cone pretending, as it were, that I still had some steeplechase talent in me.
So Not. My knee reverberated like a bad brass gong inside. Only the downing of four Rumchattas (or whatever they’re called) when I finished
the race kept me from worrying about the knee. Then we drank and drank the rest of the day. And that was fun. And produced some awesomeness far from the madness of running.
And then it was time to return to reality.
It would take six weeks for the knee to heal. At first, I wondered if the knee would recover at all. There is no ACL in that knee thanks to the fact that I tore it once playing soccer, and had it repaired. Two years later I tore it again and did not look back.
So it was with a shiver of initial fear that I gingerly felt the knee. It took a full week to be able to run again. It was a bit swollen and greasy inside. Yet I recognized those sensations from having rehabbed the leg before. It would take some strength work to build the support muscles and ligaments back again. Essentially the injury just “loosened” the joint, and that takes some time to knit back together.
The frustrating part of the injury was the fact that I’d mapped out a program to lose some weight last winter by running. All of us have our body challenges. Mine centers in a layer of belly fat that typically builds up during the holidays. It’s all from excess carbs. And also age. And a slower metabolism. Yet that fat around my middle is still shocking to me. I was once so thin that a nurse measuring my 3% body fat told me not to get caught in the rain. At that measurement, there were times when I wasn’t even all that healthy. Hard training left me with colds and overuse injuries. But I was fast. So there’s that.
That’s life. Tradeoffs. Transitions. Change. You gotta deal with it. That’s exactly why I started cycling more than a decade ago, and why I’m swimming now. To combat possible letdowns caused by injury. And, to build a body based around sustainable strength. There’s more than one way to get around the tarsnakes of injury and sloth. Cross-training is the key to long term health.
So last winter I retreated to the gym during the running layoff, and used the pool a bit for rehab. But all told, it was an ignominious start to the year. I had to lay low with the injured knee, and go slow. You all know how much “fun” that is. When you want to get up and go, and can’t.
That means there is a singular resolution that needs to be made going into 2016. No hurdling anything, in a physical sense at least. Life throws enough hurdles at you without creating them for yourself on a snowy road on a January day.
Did you ever try to figure out how you came to be the person you are now? Perhaps the process starts when you read a particular book that sets off the process of consideration. From there you might delve into your personal history in other ways. Perhaps a photo album or two. Or your Facebook history.
I wonder at times if some people have ever paused to think about who they are and how they got there. I’m reading a book right now titled 
For example, when people go barking about their religion when it is clear they have not stopped to think about the adverse impact their brand of faith is having on the lives of others, I’m willing to do some asshole things to point that out. I’ll write or post a piece of satire, for example, that illustrated why their asshole brand of faith is so out of line with what scripture actually says. See, Jesus was a bit of an asshole that way too. So was John the Baptist. And Moses with all those plagues. Big. Asshole. To the Pharoah, at least.
It’s because good people always seek out good qualities in others. They hang in there as friends even if those friends abuse them by acting like assholes.
People become assholes when they cease (or never begin) to develop and understanding from whence they came. They push their past behind them and adopt the attitude that they’ve come this far and deserve whatever benefits their asshole behavior can deliver.
As a true child of the 60s, there are still some songs that pop into my head when least expected.
During my five-mile run this morning, I ran from Geneva, Il. up to St. Charles and back. Having lived in both of those communities over the years, the route I took has plenty of personal history. I’ve trained on these streets since the early 1970s, and am happy to live in an area as pretty as the Tri-Cities 35 miles west of Chicago. The Fox River cuts through St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia and bike paths follow both sides of the valley.
They were dogs. Big dogs. One wore reindeer antlers. The other leaned up to give me a kiss while she obliged me with a photo in the company of her dogs.
I quickly shared how the dog that entered our life played the same role. Our dog Chuck was a companion and ‘rescuer’ to our family during times of great strife.
And so it largely went until I became a cyclist. That first summer at the age of 45 I noticed a new look about my legs. Now they rise and fall every summer depending on the type and degree of miles I put in. That ability to actually enlarge my thighs was something of a miracle to a guy that had lived so long with really lean thighs. Muscle! What a revelation!
There is a white fence installed at the front of my house. I put it in the ground perhaps 18 years ago. It needs paint this spring but other than that it is not rotted or likely to fall down anytime soon.
I’d notice and even say hello to the tree when I walked out the front door on my way out to go for a run. Or I’d sometimes pump up my bike tires next to its friendly little branches. I’ve always loved the way pine trees look in the same way I like bass as a fish. They both seem like a “good” species to have around. Their shapes are nice, and they generally are not pests.
So I’ll enjoy the company of my little tree this year. She and I have already seen many years together. When we’re all through with Christmas, she and her big sister will go out back with the bird feeders. They’ll provide welcome cover for the juncos, sparrow, finches, rabbits and squirrels over the winter. The kingdom of God is not judgmental. It is practical and true. It shares and shares alike. It blooms and it absorbs.
I hold grudging admiration even for the politicians I most despise. They may be attempting to do the most egregious things imaginable, but one must admire their determination.
I get into the City of Chicago fairly frequently. Compared to twenty or thirty years ago, the city is neat, clean and well run. It’s more expensive than ever thanks to for-profit parking policies and elimination of simple metered parking in many places. But overall the city looks and acts world class.
There are bike lanes everywhere, and commuting by bike is well respected. That’s a very European dynamic, and a sign of a somewhat advancing notion of what it means to live in a civilized city. Accommodating bikes shows that a city respects the human beings occupying its streets, not just motorists.
America should have a minimum three-foot shoulder on every road, so that cyclists can move outside the white line when traffic is approaching from behind. Those lines should be dotted so that cars do know bikes have the right-of-way to move into the lane for regular riding. Cyclists could learn to show courtesy and intelligence by communicating and moving off the main road surface when needed.
It’s a strange dichotomy to see a Mayor trying to do good things on everything from recycling to urban sustainability and be faced with the ugly specters of street crime, gun violence and a generally aggressive and dissatisfied society that loves to blame the government for all these problems.
Instead, they point fingers at a minority of cyclists and build the hate meme by pointing out mistakes made by cyclists in traffic. This lumps all riders into the same category.
The last two days I made the wonderful drive up to Minneapolis, Minnesota and back. And I mean that seriously. It really is a beautiful drive.
North of Madison the landscape turns into sandstone hills where the Wisconsin River runs. Years ago a great inland sea dumped billions of tons of sand deposits that make up the bedrock of Wisconsin. Some hardened while others eroded, leaving crazy outcrops that resemble the hoodoos of southwestern Utah.
While driving north I thought about all those running and cycling experiences over the years. With business to conduct in Middleton, I drove west on 14 through Cross Plains following the meeting. That’s a corner of the Ironman Wisconsin course that I’ve covered many times now with Sue and our triathlon teammates and friends. I got a wisftul feeling glancing at the road where we make the turn south. That part of the course holds the hills known to all triathletes as the Three Bitches. They are interesting climbs to be sure. One is gradual and long through a soft green woods. The second is abrupt and sharp on an open road. The final Bitch 
turns menacingly to the left in a grinding arc that makes you appreciate that Wisconsin is indeed not a flat state. Of geography. Or being.
remains. It took the help of friends to usher me through that night of Vicodin and getting up in a daze at 2:00 in the morning to take a shivering piss in the cold stare of moonlight outside the tent. “What the hell are you doing?” my best friend asked while regarding the patently blank expression of my ass crack a few meters outside the tent flap. I just laughed. “Taking a fucking piss,” I laughed while holding my crank in one shaking hand to make a jagged line in the campground dust.
Then there is the cumulative effect of all those years in our memory banks. Some of them are crisp. Some foggy.
It seems like life hunts our hopes and dreams the same way at times. We can be innocently flying along when some shot of reality strikes at our hearts. We realize something we long believed was never true. “What a fool believes is always better than nothing,” the Doobie Brothers once sang. And that’s true for the moment. That’s one of those phrases that’s both true and untrue at the same time.
It shows you that we’re not immune to either moments or memories. I think about my own children coping to this day with the loss of their mother and it tears me apart sometimes. 
During college I took a course in existentialism. We read Sartre and Camus, to name one or two. One of the concepts we studied was the irreversibility of time. And it’s true. Despite all our succulent wishes for time travel, we cannot enter the past. We are “frozen forward” in time.
make sense of all we’ve experienced and are experiencing in the moment. Perhaps we make a cell phone call to a friend along the way. I did just that, making a call to a high school friend along the way. ” I’m driving past the place where you threw up that Boone’s Farm wine at Lake Delton,” I laughed. And he laughed. And that was it. The mists of memory.
