We Run and Ride

50 Years of Running: The cold heart of a Chicago winter

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

The 1764 N. Clark apartment where it typically never got above sixty degrees inside during the winter of 1983-84.

Our landlord was a cheap bastard when it came to heating our building. At times, the inside temps sank to fifty degrees indoors. I’d struggle to keep painting or writing under those conditions. We complained, but it was no use. These days there are city codes dictating the allowable temperatures in all buildings. But back then, we shivered and complained.

And let’s not kid around here. The winter of 1984 was extremely cold. On January 19 I wrote, “It’s supposed to hit -25 tonight. I can hear the wind outside. Guess I’m one lucky person. Saw a cold old man trying to reach a bus tonight. Which among other things makes me think of money. Am I the only person scratching away at my principles like a contest entrant hoping to see a winning number underneath? I’ve got about $700 to my name. Have to make it last, but God always provides, it seems, if I use my abilities. I painted from 8:00 to 4:30 today. Ran ten easy miles too. My body feels real strong right now. I drank a half a bottle of wine tonight. It’s 10:05 and I’m pretty relaxed, as you can see from the handwriting.”

During one of those dark, cold nights I ran up to the park at Montrose and back with the wind blowing hard off the lake. At a point where the icy running path converged with the cement walls along the lakefront, a giant wave smashed against the shore and threw a massive wave of water over me on the trail. I stopped in a state of shock, and then instantly began shivering as the cold water soaked right through the Gore-Tex shoulders of my Bill Rodgers running suit. My Gore-Tex pants were soaked through as well. That’s when I realized that I needed to keep moving. I picked up the pace and ran a few miles back to the apartment where the shower could not get warm quick enough. Thankfully my body was already warm from the four miles I’d covered up to Montrose, or I might have gotten frostbite. Honestly, spending much longer outside in that condition might have been fatal.

We had multiple sub-zero days that winter, dropping to -5 and -10 below in mid-January. Some days I’d stay inside and placed my clunky Columbia bike on the MagTurbo indoor trainer that I’d purchased that winter. I’d ride hard into the night, sweating even in the fifty-degree conditions inside our apartment.

By late January my relationship with the runner girl blossomed into going out on dates and late-night dancing and sex. I was clearly torn about two-timing Linda, but the allure of the other woman was also strong. “I call Linda and love her,” I wrote on January 19. ” She’s dedicated, a sweet, sweet girl who I love in many ways. I call the other woman and she excites me, vaguely, as if I should pursue her. She’s obtusely strong, strong by the difficulties she seems to have faced. But the women in my life––are they meant to challenge me or assist me? I seem to start them up like cars with my conceit. But I feel such a strong need––as if I am not whole without being loved. And I am not. I need approval. I need love. I need people. I need to work. I have so many needs I am like a child. But I will not always let myself be childlike and learn, I must continue to learn. I just grow…I can be……great.”

Dancing daze

The following weekend I went out again with my downtown lover along with my roommate and his new squeeze. “Spent Friday roustabouting with the crew…” I wrote. “Danced hard, foot was sore and sex was difficult when I got home. Couldn’t get it up. Her body was so firm and fine. She’s a very honest, unabashed sort. I like her attitude. Her sister asked where she’d been all day and night, to which she replied, “Having wild sex.” So I guess she must be pleasured to a degree. By the time I was hard in the am, she was dry. But I made her laugh and held her close even though we were both quite crabby from lack of sleep. I was lucky she didn’t just crack me one. But she warned me. It was so fucking cold in that apartment. I awoke with chills and fatigue…but the hugs…meanwhile, Linda and I made love that night. Shhweird. Then we had a good fight––she in tears and me in transit––but she refuses to believe I want to leave her. What can I say?”

It doesn’t make me proud to record some of these words for posterity. But they are the truth, and the arc of my life (and many others, I would assume) does not make sense without these perspectives. Admittedly I was a lovesick and confused young man. At once too selfish to commit and yet honest enough to try to tell the truth. I was conflicted. I did have feelings for that other woman. She was incredible in her own way, and professionally accomplished as well, making $90K (in 1984 that was big money!) for a large publishing company on the data and programming side of the business. I knew little about her larger family other than she was of Polish heritage, and strong in many ways because of it.

Frankly, she deserved better than my dalliances. And for all I knew at the time, she might have been getting it.

Consumed by creation

Like the author Henry Miller, I was consumed by passionate interests so diverse and deranged that I could see no way back to whatever someone else might call reality. I painted and wrote all day, creating as fast as I could wheneve I wasn’t doing graphic design projects on commission, and on the fly. In between, I lusted and dreamed. The two are often quite difficult to tell apart, and some of those sessions went on for hours, or else played on repeat in one creative act after another, until I was sore for the dreaming. Yet when reality comes in the door, what do you say to a woman who pulls you to the floor and says, “F*** my eyes out?” Don’t lie to me. When you’re a 25-year-old young man living in the city, you say yes, that’s what you do. I was reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn, and Sexus…and here’s what Henry Miller wrote about life…

“What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin– to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.”

He also wrote: “How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo.”

And finally, the passage that most applied to me in the cold heart of a Chicago winter: “From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity – creation.”

World-class glimpses

I finished up a month of cold training in January 1984 with a 9:32 indoor two-mile out in Sterling, Illinois, a fair effort, but not as fast as I’d have liked. That building held one of the few indoor tracks in northern Illinois and hosted meets fairly frequently. Often top-level athletes showed up to compete. That winter, the long and triple jumper Mike Conley––who went on to become an Olympian––did sprints and jumps, while his friend Mark Witherspoon, I think it was, ran the sprints. It was exciting watching those premier athletes do their stuff.

She was long frustrated by my inability to commit long-term to our relationship. But we eventually did.

I also spent weekends with Linda out in the suburbs where she continued teaching and lived with a teaching associate in St. Charles. “Spent last night and today with Linda,” I wrote on February 8. “She and I get along well. She’s very observant, keen of eye in the field and alert. Loves a walk. Loves me. Loves my work and prays for me. I can hardly deny her. There may come a time when I choose to let nothing come between us. Lust is all that really prevents me. That and a few naive ideals of hers. My closest friend is resisting in the same way. Physicality is what we crave. His woman and mine are similar, and they are such sweet souls and so affectionate that our hearts don’t mind the tie. As much as we irk each other now and then, I love my friends. If we all married up it would make six interesting people/couples. But am I ready? Perhaps I’ll never be and must just do it. The whitewater syndrome is quite strong in me. Adultery is like whitecaps on a quiet bay.”

By now, having read this far, it is easy enough to surmise that I would indeed go on to marry Linda. But a heady year was approaching. There would be many races to run, and many twisted nights to enjoy, before coming to any such conclusions. Coming out of the cold heart of a Chicago winter, I turned my sights toward my racing commitments for the year. My immediate goal was finding more work to sustain my journey, and making sense of life the best way I knew how.

Posted in fear, God, life and death, love, mental health, nature, race pace, running, sex | Tagged artist, becoming a writer, becoming an artist, henry miller sexus, henry miller tropic of cancer, indoor track, running indoors, the cold heart of a chicago winter, writer | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: The singular nature of a double life

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

“Wrestling with the Self” painting by Christopher Cudworth, 2018

In late October of 1983, with the racing season nearing its end, I was still attending workouts with the Tom Brunick crew at both University of Illinois-Chicago as well as the odd little cinder track at Northwestern in the upper part of the Loop. One night, while spinning the final laps of workout in the company of the “A” group, I noticed a strong young woman among the top female athletes. She had a smooth stride and frankly, an amazing body to go with it.

During cooldowns, I hustled around the track to catch up with her. When the right moment came, I trotted next to her and asked, “How’d the workout go?”

She turned to me with a quick smile and said, “Pretty awesome!”

I thought to myself. “”How interesting. She has one blue eye and one brown eye.”

We talked for a lap or two. She seemed friendly and open to my interest in her. Finally, we slowed to a walk. I learned that she lived north of me and asked her for a ride back to Lincoln Park. “I was going to run home but it’s getting really cool,” I told her. “Any chance you could drive me?”

“Sure,” she replied. So we gathered our stuff and walked over to her car, a cute little Subaru. I’d never really ridden in one before. When she turned the ignition key, a bright display showed up beneath the steering wheel. “How cool is that?” I said, pointing to the display.

“Yes, I love this car,” she replied.

Actually, I lied to her that evening. My own car was parked right next to the Northwestern track. I just wanted the chance to spend more time with her and to show her where we lived. I recall having a fun conversation during the ride, talking about running and how her training was going. She was fast, I discovered, with a 10K PR well under 40:00.

She dropped me off at 1764 N. Clark and I leaned back in the door to ask her to do out on a date. She said yes, and then drove off in her cute little Subaru.

Singular nature

I don’t know all the reasons I felt such compulsions to live a double life at the time. Certainly, there was a dichotomy going on in the physical sense. I lived in downtown Chicago all week and spent many weekends with Linda out in the suburbs. I was meeting all-new people in the city and trying to figure out whether I belonged there for a job or should seek work someplace else.

Linda was traveling to my races, and I appreciated the support. She’d seen me win a few and come close to winning in several others. In late summer, we’d spent a week together camping in the Upper Peninsula in August. There was a genuine connection there, and I’d grown to love her company. She was observant and smart. Her family, once I’d met them, were all sweet and interesting people. Her mother Joan had traveled to Israel as a Christian when I first met Linda in the fall of 1981. Upon her return from Israel, her mother took a deep interest in Judaism, ultimately converting to that faith and practice for quite a while. I loved talking with her about religion and her beliefs.

Linda was a straightforward product of the Lutheran Missouri Synod church when I first met her. But that upbringing had its cost because she’d rebelled against her parochial school upbringing and gotten into partying with her closest friends during her teenage years. The high school she attended was huge and overcrowded, so her class schedule ended at 1:30 in the afternoon. That left a bunch of free time to fill. She played a bit of volleyball through her freshman year because of her height at 5’11”, but the practices bored her, so she went to work in a local candy factory to make money. During the summer months, she’d play 16″ softball with a bunch of tough factory girls and had a bent finger or two to show for it.

But more than anything during those years, she and her close friends loved smoking pot. That proved to be a heavy influence on her teen years. She fell in with an abusive, stoner boyfriend whose controlling behavior didn’t cease even after she broke off their relationship. That had something to do with a proposed wedding that I never fully understood. There were also other, even darker aspects of their time together. I didn’t quite understand how such a smart person like her could get involved with a dark soul like him. But I’d seen other women that got involved in bad relationships, so it wasn’t a total surprise. In some ways, I’d been a version of the bad guy once or twice myself.

By the time I first met Linda, she was teaching high school special education. She’d graduated Magna cum Laude graduate from Northern Illinois University but was still grappling with the damaging effects of that prior relationship and he kept trying to get back into her life. As a result, she was trying to figure herself out as well. That’s the singular nature of having led a double life. The effects don’t disappear right away.

Conservative upbringings

Linda and I making dinner together in 1983

That’s the odd thing about the impact of a conservative upbringing. They often don’t produce the outcomes one might expect. For all the rigidity and repression of Missouri Synod theology with its preaching about sexual abstinence and self-control and fire-and-brimstone sermons against science and gays, its effects on people aren’t always healthy.

Despite all that, we still attended an LCMS church together. Fortunately, the pastor at that time was quite an intellectual and something of a liberal by the synod’s standards. We loved the guy because he once gave a sermon titled, “Radicals, bleeding hearts, and do-gooders: Jesus was the original liberal.”

That goes to show you can’t write off an entire religion based on the bad apples, despite how many might be lying around on the ground. To Linda’s credit, she’d kicked most of the bad apples out of her life. She’d sworn off pot, for example, and in the twenty-eight years that we were married, she never smoked it again. Sure, she enjoyed good wine and made a wickedly good margarita and strong gin-and-tonics, but she really kept it all under control.

So, I was not alone in dealing with personality dualities during my mid-twenties. She had her own share of issues to work through. I will confess that part of me wondered about getting married because of those factors. So while I kept our relationship going, and I deeply loved her, I was not yet ready to tie the knot.

Does that bit of conflicted judgment sound harsh? Perhaps it was. Truth be told, I’d come to recognize that life itself was harsh. I was waiting to see how our love developed, and where our relationship might take us. Until then I was going to continue on the singular path to self-actualization, with running and all that as part of it. It seems to me there are plenty of people that go through similar growth challenges and back-and-forth relationships in their 20s. I wanted to make sure that once I did commit to marriage, I was ready in mind, body, and spirit.

Pee Wee’s Playhouse

At the same time, I was getting weird social pressures and critical signals from the peer group that joined my roommate and me for nights downtown. Some were close couples destined for marriage fairly soon down the road. One night we shared dinner with a group of them before going to the Park West theater to watch a live show with Pee Wee Herman. I wrote about that night: “Felt the orbs of ostracization with friends last night after seeing Pee Wee Herman,” I wrote. “Cracks about buying Playboy. Ah, the Old Bend,” I wrote.

Here’s the irony of social criticism in general. The couple that made fun of me and intimated that I spent most of my nights alone jerking off had plenty of flaws to address as well. For one thing, they came from wealth yet they stiffed the rest of us on paying for their part of the bill that night. It was a selfish move that none of us could believe. Given my own tight money situation, I was beyond disgusted by their behavior, and so were my other friends.

That bit of cluelessness made me wonder if they’d actually understood any of the social commentary in the Pee Wee Herman show. In his Pee Wee character, Paul Reubens mocked the supposed sophistication of many kinds of social constructs. That night at Park West, he purposely exasperated the audience by going through the entire crowd giving every single a person a nickname that consisted of nothing more than the person’s actual first name plus the letter “0.” It took forever to call everyone by these unimaginative names, with “Greg-O” and “Chris-O,” “Jeanne-O and Madison-0.” It went on for ten minutes. And some of the crowd. Just. Didn’t. Get it. Including our supposed social experts.

Pee Wee’s performance was rife with crass sexual humor and the taboo. At one point he pretended to be playing with a Ken Doll and a GI Joe, whereupon he made the Ken Doll hump the grunting GI Joe. Pee Wee leveraged all the latent instincts of childhood to make people laugh. His retort when faced with insults of any kind was equally childish, “I know you are…but what am I?”

Years later, Pee Wee’s Playhouse premiered on TV and the award-winning series celebrated the same innuendo-rich humor, albeit tuned quite close to the censorship rules. His relationship with the chiffon-cloaked Miss Yvonne bore weirdly repressed undertones, while the gay undertones of Jambi the Genie were barely disguised. Then came Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, a film about his love for a prized bike and the evil, selfish rich kid that stole it. There is no doubt that Reubens was pointing a humorous dagger at the repressed yet prurient nature of early-80s American culture. And I loved it.

Then in the late 80s, when a friend got married, for his bachelor party I used a dual set of video cassette decks to mash the film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure together with the X-rated Marilyn Chambers movie Behind the Green Door. It was a Meta-masterpiece of sorts, bringing Pee Wee’s latent sexuality to the forefront, and that proved to be prophetic. Paul Reubens got caught whacking it in public, an event that drove him into forced retirement before re-emerging under his own name as a credible actor.

Critical nature

“Charge of the Weird Brigade” an illustration by Ralph Steadman for Hunter S. Thompson savage take on running.

But every new pile of criticism pointed toward me made dealing with my self-doubt a little tougher. Following the rant in my journal about the Playboy conversation, I wrote, “Felt the first twitches of alter ego after reading an article about narcissism and running. (Hunter S. Thompson with illustrations by Ralph Steadman). and doubts surface as to my purpose for racing. Just an ego quash? I’m trying to get better. I’ve just got to race harder. Probably looked crazy talking to the Converse rep Mark McFarland cause he thinks I’m racing two consecutive days. Maybe I should. Half the time feel great the day after.”

On those remarks, I was referencing prior experiences in which I’d run a fast shorter race followed by a strong performance at the 10K or more distance. I thought We used to double on the same day in college, why not race back-to-back days in the post-collegiate world? I figured if I was going to lead a double life, why not double down on everything?

And while Hunter S. Thompson somewhat mocked running as self-absorbed and narcissistic in his book The Curse of Lono, he also recognized it’s unique qualities, noting:

“Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world’s best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would scoring a touchdown in the NFL.”

I stopped to consider that quote, and realized that while I was a player, I was also a frequent winner. There was nothing to be ashamed about in that.

Sperm hoarder

With all these tectonic forces impacting my life, it was inevitable that the work front was just as cataclysmic. I’d continued working for Vertel’s and also landed work with my landlord, who owned a manufacturing company that made rolled and formed steel parts. He lived across the street in an apartment jammed inside with stacks of magazines and newspapers. In modern parlance, he’d be known as a hoarder. He kept an eye out the window on his properties and had seen me in the company of the hot little runner girl I’d just met. Before we talked business, he wanted to know?”Are you having sex with her?”

“Not yet,” I half chuckled. “But I hope so.”

“Well,” he observed, leaning forward to fix my eyes with his gaze. “Never come inside a woman, because it gives her control over you…” he said. “I make them come and I hold back so that they don’t own me.” Then he nodded as if he’d just dispensed the greatest bit of wisdom he could possibly share. It turned out he was a sperm hoarder too.

I walked out the door to his apartment that day and muttered, “Well, that’s fucked up.”

But perhaps he was right in some sense? And what then? Men should go through life without letting women have any control over them at all? That’s absurd.

Looking for a release of pressure on my mind, on November 14th I went birding out in the country west of Geneva and St. Charles. The day was calm and dank. “Saw a young hawk who let me get too close. I could see his youthful green eyes. Young but powerful, he moved tree to tree… the way I move project to project, keeping a safe distance from collapse of ego and the danger of going broke. I am the grown but still young hawk.”

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, gay marriage, God, love, mental health, mental illness, nature, race pace, running, sex, track and field, training | Tagged charge of the weird brigade, converse, dating advice, dating experiences, hunter s thompson, jambi the genie, leading a double life, marilyn chambers, miss yvonne, pee wee herman, Pee wee's big adventure, post-collegiate world, ralph steadman illustrations, training | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: In the company of legends

Posted on February 12, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

My illustration of the human skeleton for the book Running to the Top of the Mountain by Dr. John Durkin and Coach Joe Newton of York High school. Published in 1988.

My association with my former coach Trent Richards grew in 1983 and ’84. We finished up his brochure for his new company One-On-One Fitness, and spent some time learning biomechanical analysis from his associate and podiatrist friend Dr. John Durkin.

Richards knew Durkin through his work with runners. As a podiatrist, Durkin’s practice was leading the way in treating injuries from a biomechanical perspective. He ran his practice along with his father, and his brother Mike was a world-class distance runner and a 1976 United States Olympian.

Durkin also befriended the legendary York cross country and track coach Joe Newton, who authored a book titled The Long Green Line based on the success of his coaching. The title came from the green uniforms of the York High School cross country team, and the size of the program as well. Newton’s teams won multiple state titles over several decades. I ran in the York Sectional cross country meet for several years, and never advanced to the state meet thanks to the high quality of teams and individual runners competing there.

I’d also heard Joe Newton speak. He was a powerfully motivating man, with a deep bed of stories to relate, so he was known for his inspirational talks. By contrast, Dr. John Durkin tended to be taciturn. He was a ‘no mess’ kind of guy. Even his bedside manner was a bit brusque, as I learned when my girlfriend Linda had bunion surgery and he kind of plowed through the procedure with all the pursuant noise of sawing bones. Durkin was not a gentle man in some respects.

World-class treatment

But that’s what made him the ideal candidate to work with world-class athletes, whose sometimes determined and prickly personalities were hard to handle, especially when facing injuries that interrupted their training or racing. Durkin cut through the crap on many occasions, fitting runners like Craig Virgin, Jim Spivey, and even world-record-holder Sebastian Coe with orthotics to keep them from running into injury problems.

It all came down to some simple principles. Few of us have a perfect body structure or ideal biomechanical foundations. The bones in our bodies, especially our feet and legs, all depend on a host of balancing fulcrums that determine how the muscles and supporting tissues perform under stress. If something in the bone structure is out of line, a biomechanical weakness ensures. That places body parts under pressure, whereupon strains and tears, stress fractures, and even broken bones can result.

My illustration of the muscular and fascia structures of the knee and lower leg

I’d seen horrible things happen in real life with a track teammate at Luther College. He was our top 400-meter hurdler and ranked near the top of the nation. Unfortunately, his feet and lower legs were susceptible to stress fractures, and he had to train in a pool during his senior track season. Perhaps if he’d been prescribed orthotics to deal with the imbalances in his feet, his shins would not have suffered so much, and he might not have shattered his leg while jumping the last hurdle in the final meet of his career.

Sebastian Coe

Durkin worked with Sebastian Coe, one of the world’s most dynamic and exciting distance running talents in history. Coe was immensely strong, reportedly able to leg press 700 pounds. But his feet were basically flat, with no arches, and he kept picking up calf injuries as a result. Durkin met with Coe and his coach/father Peter to cure leg problems the athlete was fighting all during 1983.

Sebastian also became friends with Joe Newton. Leading up to the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles, Coe stayed with the Newton family in Elmhurst to train and acclimate in advance of the Games. That meant Durkin could also keep an eye on his most famous patient.

I visited the office one day while Sebastian Coe was in town testing out a set of new orthotics. “Cudworth,” Durkin barked at me. “Why don’t you take Sebastian out on a little run? And don’t go fast. This is just a test run. Two miles at the most.”

We ran slowly. Coe was focused on his running form and pondering how the orthotics felt in his shoes, so I didn’t distract him or try to make friends. I was nothing more than the guide horse to a thoroughbred that afternoon. It was daunting to think that I was running next to the man that set world records at both the 1500 meters and mile. “The fastest man in history,” I said to myself along the way.

Coe was not a large man, but he was strong, and also handsome. I had photos of him in my scrapbook back at home, and always admired his powerful stride and raw speed. Yet here he was, shuffling slowly along on a quiet day in the Chicago suburbs. If anyone had looked out the window of their home that afternoon, they’d have no clue that this was one of the fastest men in the world.

We returned to the office and Durkin went right to work. “How do they feel?” he asked Sebastian. I figured it was time for me to exit the room. There was high-level business to conduct, and the doctor-patient relationship is sacred.

World-class spirit

Durkin also treated Jim Spivey, the product of nearby Fenton High School and one of the smoothest runners I’d ever seen. I met Spivey later in life, and found him to be one of the most genuine individuals I’d encounter among world-class runners. Not that many of them were ever jerks. But handling fame is a tough thing for some runners, who can’t be bothered with certain kinds of fans. Not Jim. I saw him talking with a group of high school athletes once. It was evident that he really cared what they were learning. He went on to coach and share his talent in many ways. I’d also owe him partial credit for the fastest track 5K I’d ever run, as he led the race at an All-Comers meet at North Central College the night I ran a 14:47 behind his 14:00. He pulled the entire field to some of their best times that night.

I also met Craig Virgin along the way, and got to watch him work out at the East Bank Club in Chicago. Coach Richards had me leading my master’s protege runner in a noon workout, and Craig was blasting around the track doing interval training. I’m not sure how many people knew that he was a world-class runner, much less the world champion in cross country. Most of the guys on the track that day were more interested in catching up with a beautiful blonde jogging around in a skin-tight bodysuit. I had to admit that I admired her figure too.

Yeah. Something like this. She was clearly on the prowl for the “right kind of man” that day.

After that workout, I went to shower in the locker room and wound up standing between two other legends at the sink. On one side of me stood the tough-guy actor Robert Conrad. On the other side was tennis great Arthur Ashe. “Hey guys,” I muttered and commenced with re-wetting my contact lenses. What was I gonna do, make small talk with two world-famous guys in their bath towels?

The magnificent miler

Trent Richards also brought me to a meeting in downtown Chicago in which a potential race was being discussed. One of the owners of the building called One Mag Mile wanted to host a world-class mile. One of the dignitaries at the meeting was Irish runner Eamonn Coghlan, at that time still one of the world’s greatest milers. He shook my hand with one of the firmest grips I’d ever felt. Coghlan was there to represent the interests of the Irish tourism industry, and Chicago’s love of the Irish drew him in. But he was clearly uncomfortable with all the ego-tripping and corporate puffery going on at the meeting. He confided to me that he did not think the race would ever happen. His instincts were correct. The race never came together.

Heady times

Those were heady times with legendary characters swirling around my life as I struggled to make a living and keep my own running on an improvement track. During that same period, Durkin and Newton hired me to illustrate their upcoming book, a collaborative work titled Running to the Top of the Mountain.

Durkin handed me anatomy books highlighted with sticky notes designating which illustrations he wanted to copy for his own purposes. I sat in my home studio doing detailed drawings of muscles and bones.

One on one

At the same time ,we were putting Durkin’s principles to work through Trent’s company One-On-One Fitness. I learned how to measure and mark the angle of pronation or supination in the lower legs of his corporate clients. Some of those feet were a total mess, and Durkin won a few patients along the way. I’m not sure what the financial arrangements were between Dr. John and Trent, but they certainly had a few beers together along the way, and it felt like celebration. Both were making money. That much I knew. But me? Not so much.

I finished page after page of illustration for the book, but the book itself took forever for Durkin and Newton to complete. In the meantime, I did a scratchboard illustration of a mountain to place on the cover behind a photo of Sebastian Coe leading runners in the ’84 Olympics.

It would take several years for the manuscript to be completed. The book was finally published in 1988. Sadly, I later learned that a large chunk of the material in the book was plagiarized. The author whose work was stolen pursued compensation from Durkin and Newton and I think they had to pay it.

But, why?

That news struck me as odd, considering how original and driven those two men really were. Why did they feel the need to copy the work of others? The fact of the matter is that the pressure of publishing sometimes gets to people. Legends have egos, and some don’t work all that well together. Writing a book is hard work. Like training for a race, it takes discipline. They both found that out.

That said, the information they compiled was visionary in many respects. Durkin’s foresight about the impact of biomechanics in the sports world is now reflected in technology such as the pressure-sensitive foot and lower-leg measurement devices built by Aetrex. Those machines provide visual data about foot and ankle imbalances. I now use that machine at the Dick Pond Athletics store where I help customers on weekends. The Fleet Feet running shoe chain also tests the feet of every runner before fitting shoes. Those are the same principles Durkin taught us way back in the early 1980s. So while he was a bit forceful in some of his methodologies, his ideas were genuinely progressive.

He was in many ways a complex man, at once immensely caring and intuitive about the needs of so many runners and patients that he helped along the way. And yet, he was pragmatic almost to a flaw in other ways. I once overheard him discussing his financial interest in importing rare woods––compassionately or not––from Costa Rica or some other jungle nation in Central America. He knew that I was a big “environmental” guy at heart, but to him, the opportunity to make some cash mattered most, and he laughed it off.

John’s obituary from 2014 records a man who retired to a quieter life. “WEAVERVILLE – Dr. John F. Durkin, age 65, died on Tuesday, October 21, 2014. He recently moved to North Carolina after spending the first 60 years of his life in the Chicago area. He was the son of John J. Durkin and the late Mary Doughtery Durkin. Dr. Durkin had a long career at Roselle Podiatry and Sports Medicine in Roselle, Illinois, where he treated many world-class athletes. He and his wife recently relocated to Weaverville to be closer to family and to enjoy retirement in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina.”

Joe Newton later passed away at the age of 88, leaving behind a career worthy of a coaching legend, for sure. Runnersworld.com carried a story about his successful career.

One of Durkin’s fellow clinicians wrote a testimonial to Durkin’s proficiency in his work.

John Durkin, Jr., DPM “JD” was one of the most
successful DPMs treating big-time Olympic runners.
His dad John, Sr. was also a podiatrist and his
brother Mike, was a 2-time Olympian. JD graduated
from IL (now Scholl) College of Podiatric
Medicine, was board certified by the ABPS and a
Fellow of the AAPSM.

I shadowed JD in the last years of my training at
his practice in Roselle, IL. He taught me not to
be known just for treating runners; learn how to
treat all athletes was his advice. He said “treat
the coaches well, because they never get enough
respect.” He also said “don’t try to be a
millionaire off of patients, but if you do it
right, you will be.”

He saved countless bone scans and MRIs to diagnose
medial tibial stress fractures by just taking an
external oblique x-ray view of the leg, which I
call the “Durkin view.” JD pioneered the use of
the extended forefoot varus post, particularly for
those on their toes, which makes you look like a
miracle worker with athletes’ medial tibial stress
syndrome/stress fractures.

When others criticized him that it won’t work for
a forefoot valgus, he said “I don’t know what you
think happens when the forefoot hits the ground,
but when I push up, the 1st ray elevates, so I
don’t think a valgus post is going to help
stabilize at toe-off.”

Observing him create a temporary orthosis was like
watching a gourmet chef preparing a fine meal; he
was passionate about his work. When we had a
sports medicine track at the ACFAS meeting in
2003, he challenged us to push the envelope in
treating stress fractures by treating them with
methylmerthacrylate. He said no one but a
podiatrist will know anatomy, biomechanics, and
pathology of the foot and ankle better- that was a
challenge he was making to other professions.

He motivated you to be a better doctor, surgeon
and person. I know he motivated a few of his
patients to become DPMs, which I considered an
excellent sign of how good he was. He could always
crack me up; in fact my jaw was often sore from
laughing so much around him! He also made me proud
to be a DPM.

Amol Saxena, DPM, Palo Alto, CA, heysax@aol.com

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, cross country, injury, mental health, race pace, racing peak, running, running shoes, training | Tagged coach joe newton, coach trent richards, Craig Virgin, distance running, dr john durkin, in the company of legends, Jim Spivey, running biomechancis, Sebastian Coe, we run and ride, york cross country | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: Out of my league

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

A good share of my running during the summer of 1983 was done on the lakefront path. I’d run all the way down to the museum campuses from Lincoln Park and back up to North Avenue Beach. One warm morning I was zipping along the lakefront trail nearing the end of a run when a vision in white and turquoise appeared up ahead. She was young and about as fit as you can get.

I slowed my pace to avoid passing her, then slowed to a complete walk. I just wanted to watch her for a bit. But then I decided, why not talk to her? She’s just another person like me, right?

So I matched her pace and placed myself beside her and said, “Can I ask? Are you a dancer?”

She looked the part. Her thighs were strong and she had keenly accentuated calves. I’ll freely admit that it was her butt in a set of white shorts that first caught my eye. She turned to me and replied, “You might say that.”

Whoa. A bit of mystery to boot.

“I like dancing,” I told her. “And I’ve written about it some.”

“You’re a writer?” she inquired. “You might say that,” I laughed.

She smiled and kept walking. “I’d like to take you dancing if you’re up for it,” I suggested.

“What’s your name?” she responded.

“I’m Chris, and you?”

“Magda,” she said. And then, “Sure, I’ll go out with you…”

And that was that. I hadn’t stopped long enough to talk myself out of asking her on a date. What a miracle!

She gave me her number and I repeated it a few times so that I wouldn’t forget it. Then I fist-bumped her and took off running again, making sure that my form was good so that she’d be left with a good impression.

As to that, it’s important to describe my looks at that stage of life. I was 6′ 1.5″ tall and weighed barely 140 pounds. In other words, darn skinny. My face was lean and my hair outside my receding hairline turned a sandy brown after a summer in the sun. I still had a gray front tooth from the baseball accident when I was thirteen, but it hadn’t stopped me from meeting and falling in love with a girl in college, or for that matter, Linda, the woman I was officially dating that summer.

But a young man living in the city without a ring on his finger has a right to some leeway. At least that’s how I looked at it. I’d been harangued into a semi-engagement with the girlfriend from college only to see the relationship veer off into a ditch when she chose to split from me and marry someone else half on the sly. Then I’d dated a much older woman who gave no real indication what sort of relationship she wanted long-term, so I didn’t pursue it. Now I was trying to figure out if the woman I was dating felt like the person I wanted to marry. All while trying to find a new job and running as if my life depended on it.

Tight white shorts

So I was a loose cannon of sorts, and horny as hell most days. So the sight of a woman in tight white shorts and a closely-cropped turquoise top walking up the beachfront path on a summer day was a fantasy I wasn’t about to pass up.

I got a bit excited about the date later that morning and decided that I needed a new set of white pants to go out dancing. I took a $50 Traveler’s Cheque and visited a clothing store to buy a set of bright white dancing pants in my size, 30″ X 34″.

Late that afternoon, I pulled them out of the bag to try them on. To my horror, I realized they were not hemmed. There were at least two additional inches of material down at the cuffs. Actually, there were no cuffs at all.

I looked at the clock and realized it was already well past six o’clock. There was no time to rush to the store and return or exchange the pants. So I rustled around the house and found a box of safety pins that I’d collected from road race numbers. “You can never have enough pins,” I muttered, picking out the cleanest ones.

Carefully I folded the bottom of the pants up inside the cuff and pinned them into place. It took about twenty pins to get the job done. Then I ironed the hems to create a crease at the bottom. Then I stood in front of the mirror to see how they looked. “Meh: passable,” I said to myself. I put on a set of loafers and a tight-fitting patterned shirt and sonofabitch, if I didn’t look half bad!

The process of fixing those pants had taken a couple hours. It was getting late. I took another look in the mirror and smiled my best confident smile. In truth, I probably needed a decent haircut and my razor wasn’t that sharp, so my beard was sort of rough. But what the hell? I was going for it.

To be honest, I took a look in the mirror at my ass in those pants. “Okay…” I chuckled out loud. Then I trotted over to get my car parked on Stockton Avenue in Lincoln Park. It was nearing 9:00 pm when I drove up to her place a few blocks north. She climbed into the car looking radiant with her hair all shiny and her makeup perfectly done. She was stunning. I thought, “What the hell? What have I done?”

She was out of my league, for sure.

OOML (Out of My League)

No, I didn’t date Catherine Bach. But close.

I’d had at least one other date with a woman that was clearly out of my league. We’d connected while a group of us high school kids were driving back from the state track meet and started flashing each other. I’d seen her tits that day, and a fair bit more, and called her for a date, and she accepted. We wound up parking on a country road and we had some fun. But I know she expected a bit more from the encounter. What can I say? She was a bit more beautiful than I could handle, and out of my league.

My summer fantasy woman was something else again. We arrived at a bar and nightclub called Gingerman, and she knew the doorman. We got in free, with no cover charge. She knew exactly what she wanted to order, and the bartender knew her too. The music was pounding and so was my heart and frankly, everything in my body. I wanted this woman like nothing I’d ever experienced before.

We started dancing about nine o’clock at night, which in Chicago during the summer months is pretty damned early. But we drank and danced for an hour or two, then she said, “C’mon, let’s go somewhere else.”

The date seemed to be going pretty well thus far. She was indeed a great dancer, and her body was a marvelous thing to behold. The shirt she wore stopped just above her blue slacks, revealing a tight set of stomach muscles below a firm chest, which I’d gotten to survey during the one slow dance we enjoyed.

So we headed to another bar and she got us in without a cover again. This time, the bouncer gave me a lookup and down and turned away. I thought I saw him shake his head. Did he notice my pinned-up pantlegs? She stopped for a moment, and he lightly grasped her arm, plainly asking whether she wanted a score that night or not. Cocaine, I thought to myself. She does cocaine.

I’d never done coke, and if she scored any I would not have known how to snort it at all. I kept an eye on the doorman for a few minutes to see whether he was going to follow us into the club and offer her something in the way of drugs, but he didn’t I was relieved. “Want another drink?” I asked her.

“Nah, let’s dance some more,” she said.

Now, I was super fit at the time, with a heart rate in the low 40s per minute. But I’d run eight miles that morning and was sixty miles into a training week with speed work mixed in, so even my legs were getting tired. It was 11:30 at night but I had to admit that I was getting gassed.

There’s nothing worse than trying to dance when you’ve hit the wall. I was seven drinks into the evening and had only a ten-dollar bill in my wallet. Part of me was glad that she was done drinking because I would have spent that last bill, and then what?

So I decided to make my play after the one dance at the new club. But how does one change the direction of a date with an indefatigable woman that knows the doorman at every bar we visited?

“This is fun,” I said, trying to live in the moment. “But let’s head out after the next dance.”

“Sure,” she smiled. I mustered up a bunch of energy because the Roxy Music song “Love is the Drug” came blaring over the speakers. It was a club mix to boot, and there was no way I was going to let up at that point.

We waltzed into the night and she climbed into my Arrow and said, with a bit of objectivity in her voice, “Yeah, that was fun. But I’m tired.”

A personal accounting

Driving home I realized we didn’t have that much more to talk about. But I learned that she was an accountant studying at the Arthur Andersen accounting school complex out in St. Charles. “I know that place well,” I told her. “I went to high school in St. Charles.”

She was reverse commuting, she told me. “Do you get out there much right now?”

That’s when the thought of my girlfriend Linda first entered my mind that night “Oh yeah,” I observed. “I still have friends there.”

“Not much going on out there,” she told me. “We go downtown to St. Charles some nights, but the bars are kind of boring,” she said.

“Compared to here, yeah,” I admitted.

We pulled up to her place and I rather persistently followed her up to her apartment. We sat on the couch and she leaned back and pulled her shirt up to reveal a set of absolutely rock-hard ab muscles. “You asked if I was a dancer,” she mused. “Well, you got to dance with me, didn’t you? I love dancing, but this is kind of what I do. That, and study.”

I was 12:30 at night. I heard a sound from a room off to the side of the living room. “That’s my roommate,” she told me. “We better not wake her up, okay? This has been fun.” She gave me a quick kiss and stood up, and walking to the door, she pushed her hair back out of her eyes and smiled again, saying, “Thanks for asking me out.”

Okay sure. I didn’t get laid. But I considered the entire evening a success. For once I hadn’t let insecurity keep me from having the confidence to pursue a pretty girl. And while I was still a rube about city life, I hadn’t freaked when faced with situations where I was clearly the naive member of the party.

Just like my training and racing that summer, I was taking risks and running around with a faster crowd. It pays to push yourself in life, even if you do find yourself out of your league.

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, college, running, running shoes, women | Tagged 70s women, 80s dance scene, beautiful women, flashing, hot girls, out of my league, out of your league, short white shorts, summer fantasy | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: Unlimited

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

As the fall racing season wore down in 1983, I managed to race twice in November, a 32:08 10K on the 6th and a 32:26 10K in the Vertel’s Turkey Trot on November 20. The splits in that race indicated that I was reaching the end of the racing peak rope. 5:00-10:06-15:22-20:40-25:56 and 32:26. After six races that fall, I was tapped out.

Then an invitation to join the Running Unlimited Racing Team arrived in the mail. The agreement outlined the basics of being a semi-sponsored runner.

Qualifications: the criteria for becoming and remaining a member of the Running Untld. Racing Team are (loosely) defined as follows:

Frequently enter and complete races of middle to long distance (1/2 mile to ultramarathon)

Usually place first, second, or third in age-group competition in major races (i.e., races with hundreds of entrants.

2. Responsibilities of Running Unltd.

Running Unltd agrees to:

Provide the Racing Team member each year with a running uniform consisting of a pair of racing shorts, a singlet, and a Nylon training suit, each bearing the name, logo, etc of Running Unltd.

Provide running shoes as needed for training and racing at a cost to the Running Team Member of 30% less than the dealer cost including shipping.

Provide other running gear needed by the Running Team Member for his/her personal use at dealer cost.

Pay the Running Team Member’s entry fees for up to 10 races per year, mutually agreed upon in advance.

Pay automobile mileage charges, to and from, up to 10 races per year, mutually agreed upon in advance.

Provide shoes and running apparel for purchase by the Running Team Member, for the use of members of his/her immediate family, at 17% discount from Running Unltds/ usual retail price.

3. Responsibilities of the Running Team member

The Running Team Member agrees to:

Maintain (him/her) self in a state of fitness appropriate for high-level competition.

Wearing the Running Unltd. uniform, run a minimum of 10 mutually agreed-upon races each year, with emphasis on races in the geographical area primarily served by Running Unltd. i.e., the Northwest Chicago suburbs.

Purchase from Running Unltd, at the Running Team Member’s personal discounts defined above, only those items needed for his/her personal training and racing.

Share transportation to and from races whenever possible, to decrease the cost to Running Unltd.

4. Termination of this agreement.

Running Unltd. and the Racing Team member agree that this agreement can be determined immediately upon notification of one party by the other.

Ten races per year…

I didn’t think the ten races per year was an unreasonable expectation. I’d raced ten times on the roads in 1983 with good results throughout the year. I didn’t include the indoor two-miles I’d run in 9:29 early in the year or the Vertel’s Turkey Trot at the end of November, which I ran after making up this list.

We mutually signed the Running Unltd. document in January of 1984. The store owners Frank and Carolyn Gibbard welcomed many other exceptional runners to the team that year. They included Jukka Kallio, a 2:19 marathoner of Finnish descent, the Macnider brothers Jim and John, both D3 All-Americans from North Central, along with Rick Stabeck, Bill Friedman, and a few other quality guys as well.

The uniforms were Nike gear. I loved the blue and white theme, as it echoed my Luther College Norseman days. Going into the year, I purchased the best racing flats I’d ever known, the Nike AirEdge. They offered the best grip I’d ever felt in a road racing shoe. The white shoe material had a modest sheen with semi-iridescent Nike Swoosh logos that were blue on one side and red on the other. I absolutely loved those shoes. If my memory is wrong about the year I purchased and wore those, I apologize. Perhaps my love for that shoe spread too wide. But in 1984, I’d add a pair of Nike Eagle racing shoes to the mix, also red-white-and-blue.

I also purchased a set of Nike Pegasus training shoes, one of the first editions introduced to the market. They were gray with a blue swoosh, and went smashingly well with our all-blue Running Unltd. nylon warmups in blue and gray.

To say I was pumped going into the New Year was an understatement. I’d been studying my training from the previous year and learned a few things from the progression, and wrote in my journal, “Read some good articles on rest and mental attitude. The athlete who learns to accept pain, to maintain concentration in spite of pain’s distracting presence is the athlete who succeeds. I’ve failed mildly at that––in Sycamore, in Aurora. Those “places” don’t seem to matter during the discomfort. Actually the rationalization takes place going into the pain, not during it. The “depositioning” that occurs is an excuse for letting up––slacking the tempo is a grievous mistake. Instead of competing at this point––find a tempo and concentrate on matching it. You’ve never failed when the chips are there to be had. You always sprint, Christopher. Don’t just go for it, work for it.”

It would be four more years before the Nike slogan “Just Do It” would be introduced to the world. But I seemed to anticipate that philosophy in my 1984 journal. I guess you could say that when it came to a commitment to running, I was “all-in” for the Olympic year and everything that came with it. While my personal philosophy wasn’t on a par with the Nike campaign Just Do It, my motto going forward was indicative of my state of mind: “Sign me up.”

Posted in cross country, fear, mental health, PEAK EXPERIENCES, race pace, racing peak, running, running shoes, training, training for a marathon | Tagged Christopher Cudworth, just do it campaign, nike sponsored athlete, racing team, road racing, runner, running on the roads, Running unlimited, Sign me up | Leave a comment

50 Years or Running: The architecture of victory

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

Running to victory over 3000 other competitors in the Wright Run in Oak Park, circa 1983.

After winning the Run for the Money 10k in Arlington Heights, I turned my sights to another 10k, the Frank Lloyd Wright Run in Oak Park. That week I caught up to a guy while training in Lincoln Park. “Interesting finish with a guy named Mike tonight. One of those solid types who was cruising, chopping along at 6:50 pace in the dark., listening to his Walkman. He said several times, ‘That’s the thing about you guys, you don’t know what kind of pain it takes to just get down to that level,” meaning 31:40 or so. Hah, if he only knew. And when I told him I was running ten a day he exhorted me, “Ten a day? Really?’ To which I explained that I averaged ten a day. He was exonerative. “Your body needs time to recover, those muscles need rest and sleep.” And I concluded, “Indeed.”

Because I likely was still pushing it too hard. But that taste of victory at Run for the Money had me thinking about winning other races.

Yet that week a revelation also came about. I met and talked with my former Philadelphia Van Kampen associate Tom. “My intuitions turned out good in terms of my feelings toward Philly offices and my duties there,” I wrote. “Remember the frustration. Remember the confused efforts, the bittersweet paychecks, the constant justification of outlooks and jousting on where our work should go––and now that crew is seeing the light of my introspection. A new, new man on top.”

Tom was the one that warned me things weren’t going well in marketing when I worked in Philly. While the whole move out there caused a great upheaval in my life, at least after talking to Tom I knew that I wasn’t crazy in my suspicions about the aims and conduct of the department where I worked. It was a small consolation to realize that I’d been right, but I did feel vindicated in some way.

Later that day, I sat down to write in my journal and felt a peculiar aloneness in my state. I don’t know if it was my quote or something I stole from reading Ayn Ran, but I penned a phrase in my journal after hearing the observations about leaving Van Kampen. “Better to take a risk and bear the brunt of pure action than to live in a quandary and bear no strength.”

The Fountainhead philosophy

Mid-race in the Wright Run in Oak Park. I wore my tee-shirt from the Race of the Americas 10k (1/83) under the NB kit.

If it was from The Fountainhead that I pulled that quote, I’ll have to forgive my twenty-five-year-old self for falling into that black-and-white version of reality. While that novel was written in 1943, its hard-ass philosophy still holds appeal to the determined and immature mind to this day. Ayn Rand’s philosophy is still popular with political conservatives who view rational compromise as a disease to be cured rather than a tactic of healthy consideration and growth.

As an online book description cooly notes: “The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Russian-American author Ayn Rand, her first major literary success. The novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, is an intransigent young architect, who battles against conventional standards and refuses to compromise with an architectural establishment unwilling to accept innovation. Roark embodies what Rand believed to be the ideal man, and his struggle reflects Rand’s belief that individualism is superior to collectivism.”

As a distance runner, I was trying to win races. Other than sharing the pace at times, there wasn’t a ton of room for compromise in the sport. You either win or finish behind someone else. So it’s acceptable to leave others behind. At that age, I was trying to prove that I could persevere beyond all expectations and to hell with the rest of the world if they didn’t like it. That’s the whole point of a race. But that’s not how you can approach everything in life.

I had my troubles with collectivism, for certain. During workouts with the crew at the University of Illinois-Chicago track, I’d stalk around in a silent mood for the most part. That was sort of a passive-aggressive tactic, the silent treatment. It was no secret I wanted to beat everyone there, but not talking to those guys was clearly an asshole move. That’s now how I’d behaved back east in Paoli, and I’m not entirely sure why I acted like a sullen jerk for those first few workouts. Probably I was afraid of admitting how close to the edge of madness I was actually traveling. It wasn’t that running was all I had in this world, but it sometimes felt like it.

I finally did open up as time went by because I realized the guys and gals I ran among were great people and runners just trying to improve like me. Sadly, I didn’t choose to accept coaching counsel from Tom Brunick, the Athlete’s Feet shoe-testing guru who led those weekly workouts. I recall watching him review another runner’s workout journal and thinking that he’d consider me crazy if he read the things I wrote in mine. So, I kept to myself on that front, self-contained like a warped Howard Roark type, constructing the architecture of my running destiny.

Racing Frank Lloyd Wright

My photo of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in Wisconsin

That said, the training I did leading up to the Frank Lloyd Wright race was solid, including a 70-mile week after the Run for the Money win and another 67-mile week that began with an 18-miler covered in 2:00:00. I ran that distance out in the country with my girlfriend Linda and her friends Randy and Debby, who rode their bikes along with me. My pace averaged 6:30-7:00 per mile, proving I’d not learned much from the training tactics of the Philly boys, who ran their long runs at a far more relaxed pace. But I was charged up with the cooler weather in early October. Still, I admitted in my journal, “Pretty tired by week’s end.”

The weather shifted to cool and rainy in mid-October. I loved that kind of atmosphere because it made me feel mean and focused. I figured if other runners hated the weather, loving it gave me an advantage. That’s where being a country-loving birder and citizen scientist schlepping around in the rain and mud comes in handy. It doesn’t bother me.

That’s how the day dawned the morning of October 23, 1983. I’d stayed with Linda the night before, so we drove down to Oak Park in the dark with rain spitting on the windshield of my Plymouth Arrow. I registered to race, then left her in the car to jog three miles to warm up on the wet streets. I felt strong and the cool, 55-degree air on my face made me feel eager alive. At the starting line, I glanced up and down the front group to see if I recognized anyone. They were all strangers to me, but some of them did look fit and fast. I stood on my tiptoes to look back at the madding crowd. There were 3,000 runners back there. I wanted to beat every last one of them.

The Wright pace

I was conscious of doing everything “right” during the Wright Run 10k in Oak Park, circa 1983.

The gun went off and the front group formed quickly. I ran to the side at first to stay wide on the first few curves because the pavement was covered in puddles. I didn’t want to get my racing shoes soaked early on. At the mile mark, I felt super strong and did a short burst to test the rest of the field. No one came, so I took off.

From there, I raced through the streets of Oak Park with such focus it felt like every detail of the sodden day jumped out at me. I waved to people on the streets cheering us on and smiled at the kids. And then, from out of an alley it seemed, I was joined by a familiar figure running alongside me. For a moment, he seemed like a weird sort of vision or an apparition. Then I realized it was Ralph Van Kampen, the elder brother of Bob Van Kampen, the man that hired me for the graphic design job at his company. Ralph was the one that showed me around the loop in Chicago, pointing out his favorite architecture including a tour of The Rookery, whose origins sew together some of the greatest names in that city’s architectural history. “Designed by famous architectural partners Burnham and Root, the picturesque Rookery was originally completed in 1888. Adding to its impressive stature, Frank Lloyd Wright redesigned the stunning two-story, sky-lit lobby in 1905. Meticulously renovated and maintained, The Rookery stands as one of the most highly recognized addresses in all of Chicago.”

Little did I know that my life’s journey would intersect with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright in many other ways over the years. That would include tours of the Robie House in Chicago, a vacation trip to visit the Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob residences in Pennsylvania, and multiple tours of the famous Taliesin home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I also cycled the Wright Stuff Century in southwestern Wisconsin several times but wound up crashing in 2012, breaking my collarbone going 40mph downhill when my Felt 4C developed bike wobble. I literally could have lost my head that day if I had not slid under a half-inch weaved metal cable between two concrete stanchions in the ditch.

Wright now

All of that was far in the future. During the Frank Lloyd Wright Run in 1983, I only glanced at the Wright architecture featured along the route. That’s where my work friend Ralph ran alongside me for forty or fifty yards, cheering me on at the top of his lungs as his street shoes slapped on the asphalt and splatted through a puddle or two. I don’t recall if he lived in Oak Park or not, yet somehow his presence made me feel even greater that day. Ralph wasn’t a go-getter like his brother, but he was a refined man with a love of things done well, especially great architecture. As crazy as it sounds, we shared quite a moment that day.

As he tailed off behind me, I felt an even greater sense of purpose. I dwelled on what Bill Rodgers said about winning the New York City Marathon. During the race, he had a sense that he wanted to do everything right, even to the point of carrying his hands a certain way. SoI concentrated on my form and ran as relaxed and free as possible. Nothing was holding me back at that point except for the turns on the course and the wet surface of the roads. With a mile to go, knowing that I had it won, my stomach did act up a bit but as I wrote in my journal, “my legs never tired. Almost wish someone had gone with me.”

Always doubting myself

Finishing in first place for the second race in a row, I immediately wondered if I’d somehow chosen weak races where the big boys didn’t show up. Leave it to me to beat myself up for winning. Then again, I’d raced with purpose and intention, so there was no real need to apologize to myself or anyone else. I’d set my mind on victory and made it happen. While I wasn’t yet winning in the job hunt front, at least I was kicking ass in my avocation. Someday I hoped to transfer that excellence to other domains.

Looking ahead

The race went so well, and it felt so memorable that if I’d called it quits right after that, I’d probably have been satisfied that season. For some runners, winning a race that large might constitute a lifetime of satisfaction. But the very next week, after dropping my training mileage a bit to rest up, I showed up to race the Sycamore Pumpkinfest 10K against 1500 people and took second place in 31:25. That race is held in open country, often with cornfields stripped of crops, so nothing is stopping the wind. Fortunately, it was a clear and sunny day with just a breeze from the northwest. The photograph was taken by a race photographer as I topped the hill near the finish line. That image is one of my favorite all-time pictures and one of the few I purchased from the official race photography company.

The first segments of the course form three sides of a six-mile square going South, East, and North. There are two tough, longish hills to climb at the four-mile mark. Then the course enters a park and winds around as if it’s lost the way. That winding mile seems to take forever compared to the previous four. That wayward course proved confusing to the lead runner that day. With no one leading us through the park he ran straight across a patch of grass when the actual course was supposed to follow an asphalt path around a flagpole. It wasn’t marked, but I kept to the path while yelling at him, but he couldn’t hear me because of the wind. All told, running the right path probably cost me 15-20 more yards of distance and time, and I was angry about that but had to be honest with myself as well: he was pulling away from me before we hit that section of the course.

At the finish, I weighed telling the course directors that the winner technically cut the course. At first, I said something while coming through the chute, then bit my tongue because it seemed petty to complain. He was the one that pressed the pace the whole way and frankly deserved the win. I don’t think I’d have reeled him in even if he hadn’t cut the course. Besides, winning by calling him a cheat would not have felt good at all. The Howard Roark in me wouldn’t stand for that. Plus I think it was an honest mistake.

Besides, the season was not yet over. I still had a few races to go.

Posted in 400 meter intervals, 400 workouts, 5K, bike crash, bike wobble, Christopher Cudworth, competition, healthy aging, race pace, racing peak | Tagged frank lloyd wright prairie style architecture, frank lloyd wright run, race pace, run, running, Taliesin, van kampen merritt, wright run, Wright Stuff | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: Time to fly

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

Heading into the month of September 1983, I looked at the schedule and planned a three-week period of quality training to prepare for races. First I drove up to Luther College to have a go during the Intrasquad race. “Gonna go race in Decorah this weekend. Sneak up the back way again. Sunshine and hills, I believe. Training’s been going well. Left knee twinges from chronic pounding.” I managed to run a 21:42, not much better than I ran as a sophomore on the cross country team. But that race was a tuneup, not a target. Plus, it was always good to run amongst the Luther Blue.

The following week I stepped on the track and ran a workout of six 400s in 65-60-59-59-60-66. “Gritted at it,” I wrote in the journal. The week topped out at 67 miles. Even though the late summer heat still vexed me, I could sense the rush of fall racing ahead.

And still, the question of what to do in my relationship with Linda came up. “Really wrenching discussion with Linda,” I wrote in the journal. “She wants me there all the time. Woooman, I got to go…” We were like two birds circling in the sky. Connected in some way, yet part of me still felt the need to soar.

Connections

On September 6 I hooked up to run with the Lake Shore Track Club and got a dose of my own intense medicine. “Met a fired-up guy named Jim Terry,” I wrote. “A philosophy major/writer who just moved to Chicago from NY. Trying to make it on his own, it seems. Runs a 31:08 and a 1:04:00. I may try to go with him sometime. Invited me to join the Complete Athlete Club.”

The weeks kept rolling by and try as I might, no full-time job opportunities came through. Money was tight, and I kept finding small gigs to make the rent and buy food, all while pounding out letters to contacts and applying for jobs through the Tribune and other sources.

I’d written to a hopeful contact named Chuck at the Morton Salt company. He was head of the creative department and once offered me a job back when I was commuting to 208 S. LaSalle Street for Van Kampen Merritt. I’d turned him down at the time, but he raised his eyebrows that day and said, “Well, let me know if you ever want to talk.” But in 1983, the economy was still iffy, and hiring wasn’t exactly hot on the menu for many companies. That’s what Chuck told me too. “Stay in touch,” he advised. “Maybe something will open up.” So I kept on typing up job-specific resumes with my IBM Selectric. Sometimes I’d make copies, and send out bulk mailings in envelopes with stamps and cover letters inside. Sometimes I’d hear back. Sometimes not. It was such an archaic process back then.

The million-dollar bird lottery

Between job hunting, I dug into painting an entry for the Federal Duck Stamp contest. I chose to paint a pair of goldeneye ducks. While it was a credible effort, I struggled with the details for lack of reference material. Most of the top wildlife and duck stamp painters used highly detailed photography to copy in producing their art. I’d studied plenty of goldeneyes on the Fox River in St. Charles, and I knew how they flew and how they generally looked. But when it comes to choosing artwork for the Federal Duck stamp, the winning pieces often looked like glamorized photographs. The allure of the contest is that whoever won typically became an instant millionaire. But I wasn’t quite there yet as an artist.

Common goldeneyes, a Federal Duck Stamp Contest entry by Christopher Cudworth, circa 1983.

My entry did eventually place in the Top 100, which sort of qualified me as a sub-elite wildlife painter. In reality, I was the same sort of runner. Good enough to earn some respect, but not good enough for the Big Time. I was national class, but only on the back end of the pack. Still, I painted almost daily, making incremental steps toward the type of painter I wanted to be.

Time to fly

On the 14th of September, I cranked out another interval workout, running 65-66-65 in 400s, 2:21, 2:19 for two 800s, a mile in 4:59 and back down to an 800 in 2:24 before closing with a 64 and 65 on 400s. The classic “ladder” workout is ideal for testing both fitness and concentration. It steels you for racing conditions with the pace adjustments. And I had a support crew. Linda hand-timed me at the Geneva High school track.

After one more week of training, I entered a race called Run For The Money in Arlington Heights. It started near the parking lot of a bank at the corner of Algonquin and Arlington Heights roads. I was nervous at the start but feeling mean. That was always a good combination for me. Linda joined me that morning and I felt incredibly alive and strong while giving her a hug. She smiled and said “Good luck.” I smiled back and said, “Yes. I’m ready.”

The pace felt quick but manageable from the start. Then we passed through the mile point in 5:22 and a shot of surprise ran through me. The pace felt much faster than the time indicated. Feeling great as I did, I pressed forward…a few feet in front of the pack…to look around at who was there. Then I turned my attention to the road ahead, and took off. “Let’s see who follows,” I said to myself.

Making a commitment that early in the race was a risk, but I felt incredible. My shoes gripped the asphalt really well, as I recall. I felt in control and passed through the two-mile mark in 10:10. I had a few guys still with me, but their breathing was hard and I saw out of the corner of my eye that when I took a turn fast and accelerated, they struggled to catch back up.

At three miles I glanced around at the bunch. No one else had attempted to take the lead by that point. I knew that if I could press the pace the next mile, they’d be racing for second. I looked around one more time and gassed it again. This time I got a lead and passed through four miles in 20:35. Now I was really rolling, and feeling even meaner.

I hit five miles in 25:35, not slowing a bit. That was a five-minute mile in the fifth section of the race. A good sign. I wasn’t struggling at all. Then came some turns in a residential neighborhood and I kept the pace fast. Suddenly I was alone on the street with only the sound of my own breathing keeping me company. I looked back and could see the bunch trying to muster more speed, but arms were flailing and it wasn’t happening for them. “Tough shit,” I muttered and turned toward the finish line.

It’s a great feeling coming down a big avenue with nothing but blank asphalt ahead and knowing that you’re going to win a race. I’d done my share of winning over the years but had not won a single race back in Philadelphia. Looking up at the clock near the finish, I saw the time tick through 31:42 as I crossed the finish line. I was happy to win but disappointed at the sight of that time. It felt like I’d gone much faster. In fact, I knew I had.

A photo of my racing kit taken in the fall of 1983. I loved this outfit because it felt and looked fast.

Walking around to cool down, I gave Linda a thumbs-up sign and she called out, “Nice job, lover.” That was our nickname for each other. She had my sweats all balled up in her arms in case I needed them. But I was wound up from all that speed, and started jogging down to cool off. At that point, the second-place guy ran up beside me and gave me a big congratulatory slap on the back. “Nice racing,” he told me. “You really pushed the pace.”

“I felt good,” I told him. “Thanks.”

“You know,” he added. “We measured this course, and it’s like, really long. Like, 200 meters long.”

I looked over at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. “Seriously,” he continued. “We walked it with the wheel to see for ourselves. So, whatever you ran, take off, like, forty seconds or so.” He was still breathing hard, so his words came out in chunks.

Now that time made sense to me. I had probably just run my first 31:00 10K that day. But that’s road racing. You never know what you’re gonna get in terms of a course measurement when you step to the line.

The “other runner” that day was a guy named Bill Friedman. I liked him right away. We talked some more and had a laugh about some of the racing tactics. “You killed us,” he chuckled. Then he made an invitation. “I’m working with a running store in Arlington Heights to form a Nike-sponsored racing team. Are you interested?”

“Sure,” I told him. “What’s the store called?”

“Running Unlimited,” he said. “Let me get your address after we cool down and we’ll send you a contract.”

At the awards ceremony after the race, the organizers handed out all kinds of prizes, and despite the race being named Run For the Money, no real money was handed out. I was disappointed at that. Secretly I was hoping to take home a hundred bucks or so for winning. Instead, I was given a month’s membership to a fitness club in Arlington Heights. I was living in Chicago, and Linda lived in Geneva. That formed a perfectly impractical triangle. “How can I use this?” I laughed to her. I wound up giving that membership away to someone at the race.

That amusement with impractical prizes would become a theme between us. I would go on to win several races that fall, and it always seemed like the race winner seldom got anything as nice as what they gave out in the raffle drawings.

Such is life. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose out even when you’re the winner.

Posted in 400 meter intervals, 400 workouts, 5K, Christopher Cudworth, competition, cross country | Tagged Christopher Cudworth, complete athlete track club, cross country, distance running, eagles in the sky, federal duck stamp contest, hard training, lake shore track club, Running unlimited, soaring eagles | 1 Comment

50 Years of Running: Summer reckoning

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

Reckoning: the action or process of calculating or estimating something.

August in the City of Chicago is often literally and figuratively exhausting. That was particularly true because our apartment on the second floor faced Clark Street and Lincoln Park. With the front windows open, the sound of buses barreling down Stockton Avenue was perpetual. So was the smell of the smoke from cars and trucks and buses on the street outside our windows. On hot summer nights, we could sit in the alcove overlooking the street below and witness men in long black limos picking up elegant escorts for a night on the town. We’d also see them disembarking at the same spot in the morning. Those guys would often change shirts right on the street corner to avoid the smell of those other women on their clothes.

Our two-flat stood on the southeast corner of Menomonee and Clark, right across the street from Lincoln Park.

Up the block from our apartment stood the Hotel Lincoln, whose sign at one point actually was missing an E. I’d come back from long evening runs and smile at the sight of the HOT L Lincoln.

On August 8 I wrote, “Warm in this here Chicago apartment. Ran hard tonight. Should go slow but long in two runs tomorrow. Supposed to cool off. May go to U-I Chicago on Wednesday for intervals. May just do long miles, short miles in Lincoln Park. Body’s pretty tired. Pushups are helping. Plan for first fall race is Luther Intrasquad. Octoberfest half marathon might be a good one. Pick a race in Late October too and finish up with Vertels on November 20. Perhaps a 5-mile cross country race in between there.”

I’d only raced once the summer of ’83, a July 15K Elveloppet Run in Decorah. The Elveloppet course was a hilly monster, often on single-track trails up the bluffs. So the time wasn’t quick, but I finished well among my Luther buddies.”54:something. Fast last four miles,” I wrote.

The second week of August I cranked out 70 miles in the heat, capped off by a session of six 400s at 67-65-64-65-65-60. Earlier in the week, I’d run a set of three one-mile repeats at 5:02, 4:50, and 5:00. “Sore thighs on Thursday,” I wrote. That Sunday I ran 13 miles at 6:00-6:30 pace. I had the pedal down to the floor on some of those runs.

Job reckoning

All the while I was pressing to get a new job, and trying to manage relationships in the meantime. I bounced around from Linda to my friends and back to my pseudo-mentor Trent Richards, whose contacts and energy seemed valuable. Sadly, I received varying types of feedback about my persona. “Today, a study in other’s perceptions of me,” I wrote on August 10. “This inner confidence is the question raised again and again. Roomie in particular is suspicious of my job-hunting methods. He also doesn’t understand that my moods are as simple and profound as a dark day in summer. Seemingly gloomy, but mostly a break in the action.”

I was networking with many kinds of prior contacts to find a job. Yet like always with a job hunt, it was slow going. To work off the stress, between runs, I’d write all morning and paint all afternoon. One day my roommate came home to find me typing away in the bedroom. He was sweaty and hot from the commute back to our apartment from his job and arrived home frustrated and impatient with life. He stood inside my bedroom door, and blurted, “You know, self-indulgence is not the way to self-fulfillment.”

It shocked me, and I wondered: Was I being self-indulgent with all that running, writing, painting, and everything else? I saw it all differently. While I deeply recognized the need to find a new job, I was also working hard at my craft and selling work on occasion. Decades later, I shared his statement that night and he confessed, “Yeah, that was not a nice thing to say.”

Writing hopes

On the writing front, I was excited about the opportunity to produce for a new publication called Illinois Runner, a new magazine published by Rich Elliott. In the late 1960s, he was one of Illinois’ top high school runners and went on to a successful college and post-collegiate career. I designed the logo for his newspaper, and the October issue featured a photo for Greg Meyer finishing first in the Beatrice Chicago Marathon.

Rich wrote a compelling letter as the introduction to the publication. The running community in Chicago was really starting to build. It was actually an exciting time to be involved in the sport. The Chicago Area Runners Association blossomed into existence, offering a competitive circuit. I sensed something real and growing on the running front. Plus, I just wanted to see how good I could get at running. At twenty-five years old, I figured it was the one time in life that I had a chance to find out.

That was the tug-and-pull at that stage in life. Linda was pressuring me to get married. My roommate just wanted to pay the rent. My former coach wanted all kinds of help with his business but wasn’t super forthcoming about the compensation involved. These were hard reckonings for me.

Get out of town

The third week of August, Linda and I decided to head north to the Upper Peninsula for a camping trip. The weather was cooler up there, and I ran some miles on the backroads. I let up on the training for a week, and the north woods around Camp 7 were gorgeous. Linda and I made love on a beach next to a lake and listened to the coyotes howl after dark. We hiked and cooked out, and I spotted a bald eagle and a three-toed woodpecker, a lifer for my bird list.

The only sad part of the trip was the odd sight of some pine forests denuded of needles. A beetle of some kind infested the woods, and the sight of grey, dead trees was a bit depressing. If a flame got going in those barrens, the conflagration would have been great. So we kept our campfires low and slow.

Back home in Chicago, I jumped back into training and ran a fast interval workout of 4 X 800 at 2:25, 2:15-2:15 and 2:25. However, my stomach kept acting up after those speed sessions in the hot August weather. Part of me began to look forward to autumn. On August 22 I wrote, “The End is on television. Last time I saw that I nearly died puking after a national steeple in Grand Rapids. Came devilishly close together.”

To that point in life, I believed that competing in 88-degree temperatures that afternoon at Nationals was the cause of heatstroke and a pursuant night of throwing up twenty-seven times. Later in life, I had a reckoning of sorts upon realizing that the illness after that national meet was not heatstroke. It was food poisoning caused by the Pizza Hut pizza I’d eaten at dinner. I came to that realization after reading an article in an issue of Harper’s describing how many lawyers the Pepsico/Pizza Hut company employed to defend themselves against food poisoning lawsuits. I sat in the library after reading that article and said the words out loud: “Son. Of.A Bitch.”

Self-perception

It’s a strange thing when some belief that you developed about yourself––or some perception about an experience you’ve had––suddenly changes. For years after that horrific night of barfing my gut outs and almost dying from dehydration, I’d told myself that my body could not handle the heat. But once I thought through the events of that day, it dawned on me that we’d gone out to dinner that night and I ate almost an entire medium pizza on my own. By midnight, I was sick as hell. That’s a good reckoning about a bad event because I no longer doubted myself about running in the heat. So it was actually a relief to realize that running in the heat was not the cause of my suffering.

It’s so easy to find ways to doubt ourselves and create a narrative from our perceptions, even when they’re based on false assumptions. In some ways, that misperception about my body’s ability to “take the heat” turned out to be an apt analogy for other issues of flawed self-esteem and personal beliefs. That raised the question: What other inaccurate beliefs had I formed about my life? This much I did know: I was trying hard to prove (to myself) that I could succeed on my own terms. For better or worse, that motivation defined my actions going forward.

I reckoned that the best way to move forward was to keep on running.

Posted in 10K, 400 meter intervals, 400 workouts, Christopher Cudworth, college, cross country, Depression, God, it never gets easier you just go faster, race pace, running | Tagged bad pizza, barfing my guts out, dehydration, food poisoning pizza hut, misperceptions, pepsico lawsuits over food poisoning, race pace, self belief, self doubt | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: What is my real job?

Posted on February 4, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

As the Traveler’s Cheques slowly disappeared, I kept up the hunt for a job in the summer of 1983. Meanwhile, small freelance jobs kept coming my way. I drew up some ads for Vertel’s Running store, but the process was painful and my appetite for more work from them diminished rapidly, as did any notion of wanting to work there.

I also stumbled into a gig doing graphic design for Homer’s Furniture, a Chicago icon that wanted new sales tags for their stores. One little drib followed another little drab. “This is no way to make a living,” I admitted.

But I kept on working with Trent Richards and his forward-looking concept of the One-On-One Fitness company. He wanted a brochure themed in maroon and gray. I illustrated the cover with a runner moving past a grid, and the copy tone was a “let’s talk” brand of content.

As per usual, Trent was ahead of his time in thinking. His entrepreneurial spirit would one day land him a half-million-dollar return on an educational website he helped create. He was always thinking about the future. For example, his training techniques for us back during the indoor track season in high school involved a bunch of plyometric work; jumping on boxes, lunges, sideways strength work. These were all the methods used by none other than Sebastian Coe’s father in training his son.

So while Trent was a bit of a controversial character for some of his earlier behavior as a teacher and husband, he was maturing into a businessman, and his idea to promote fitness among corporate executives at the time was novel and visionary. He landed several longstanding accounts with CEOs of Fortune 100 firms that continued for decades.

As July slid into August, my mileage shot up into the 70mpw range but it was hot as hell that year, and my body suffered some ill effects from the heavy training.

I was also doing speedwork at the University of Illinois-Chicago track as well as the weird little cinder track with flat sides on the curves near the Northwestern Medicine facilities in the north loop. I loved running there and wound up leading workouts for one of Trent Richards’ clients, the leader of the international division of a famous Chicago advertising agency. He was an obviously brilliant man, a rapid conversationalist, and an energetic personality. I wanted to ask him to find me a job in exchange for pacing his running workouts, but I knew that was awkward. Besides, I knew that agency heads aren’t really in the business of filling slots in the lower echelons of the company. I didn’t understand much about the world in some ways, but even I understood that much about the work world.

So I kept my mouth shut for the most part, until the day that the name of a guy that I knew from the running community came up in conversation. I knew that he worked as a creative director on the domestic side of the agency, so I casually asked the CEO if could put me in touch with him. He said sure, and then we continued our series of half-mile intervals at his race pace of around 17:30 for the 5K. His big goal at the age of 40 was to break 17:00, a respectable time for a Master’s runner. That pace wasn’t hard to run at my level of fitness, but it was quite fun seeing him succeed over the weeks that I trained him.

I’d run three or four miles in the morning before those noon workouts. Then I’d lead him through a four-mile session noon, and sometimes run another 4-5 miles that night. To say that I was obsessed is putting it lightly.

About that obsession with running

On the subject of running obsession, it is worth pausing here to make an observation about my state of mind at the age of 25 years old. It would have been helpful if someone (people tried…but not comprehensively) had pulled me aside to tell me a few things. For example:

“Listen, here’s how your brain works. You have Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder, (ADHD) and always have. Those learning challenges you experienced early in school and all the way through college and into the work world are all a result of the way your brain avoids certain executive functions, especially the ability to focus when you’re bored. You need stimulation, yet you have an enormous capacity to concentrate on a single thing at one time. That’s one of the tarsnakes of your existence.”

I could probably have used this advice as well:

“You also have anxiety, which is often closely associated with ADHD. It makes you ruminate on thoughts that aren’t necessarily constructive. It can also lead to highly negative thinking patterns, including fear and dread of life itself.”

Plus: “And Chris, anxiety is basically the opposite side of the coin from depression. So your occasional mood shifts are the product of brain chemistry, not some personality flaw.”

Just as importantly: “Just so you know, all of these mental health issues are exacerbated by forms of stress in life, especially any form of verbal or physical abuse you may have experienced. There’s also grief, loss, or a lost sense of self-esteem caused by any of the above. You might just have a powerful need for approval as a result of your life experiences thus far. ”

And what about internal conflicts over sex and love? Any advice on that would have been helpful too:

“Most people are conflicted by some aspect of sex and love. You seem to have deep yet still naive interest in sex counteracted by feelings of early-age inhibitions, likely from your parents. Combined with your romantic notions about love, it’s no wonder you feel conflicted and perhaps need to work through some of these emotions.”

Add in my artistic qualities and it was no wonder my journey through the mid-20s of my life held plenty of challenges.

Here’s the rub

“But here’s the rub,” the kind advisor might have told me, “It’s really good that you became a runner, because it helps you manage the hyperactive side of your brain function, assists you in coping also with anxiety and depression, and frankly, that running and sex thing kind of balance each other out. Haven’t you always wanted to try to impress the girls? So you should probably keep up that running stuff, but be careful, because it can consume you.”

Yet lacking such good advice, my modus operandi was trying to leverage whatever I could to get a job and keep myself occupied in positive ways. I did reach out to that creative director on the domestic side of the advertising agency. We talked one day, but the subject rapidly turned to my possible contributions to their corporate running team. “We could use someone as fast as you!” he enthusiastically proposed. “Let me see what I can do!”

So he made some sort of internal inquiry about bringing me on somewhere within the firm, but the word came back that they couldn’t hire me just for that purpose. “But,” I weakly protested, “I’m a writer and graphic designer…” I told him. “I’m creative. Doesn’t that help?”

He went blank for a moment, then repeated. “We’ll see what we can do.” But I never heard back.

I went home that day confused by that encounter. While my running ability had gotten me partly in the door at a big advertising agency, the door got slammed shut for the same reason. It turned out that running could take me only so far in this world. What a lesson that proved to be. In some ways during those days, I viewed running as my “job” and getting to work as my avocation.

Posted in 400 meter intervals, 400 workouts, 5K, adhd, anxiety, Christopher Cudworth, competition, running, Tarsnakes | Tagged adhd, advisor on mental health, anxiety and ADHD, coping with mental health, creativity and mental health, entrepreneurial spirit, hyperactivity, mental health, plyometrics, Sebastian Coe, sex and mental health | Leave a comment

50 Years of Running: Moving experiences

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Christopher Cudworth

Chicago-style pizza. My roommate shoved his face into one of these when I refused to eat at midnight.

I felt kind of cheesy being back in the Chicago area after having been given a big sendoff party to hail my departure to Philadelphia just nine months before. Once back in town, I headed downtown to find the apartment I’d be sharing with a friend on Menomonee Street in Old Town. That little avenue is only a half-block running from Clark Street to Wells, where the running store Vertel’s Chicago sits. If I’d had half a brain, I might have gone straight there and asked for a job. Somehow it did not occur to me that working in the running industry would have been a good fit. Sure, retail money wasn’t that great, but it would have been something to get started in Chicago, and make connections in the running world. Sometimes the practical answers to life’s problems are staring you right in the face, yet you look right past them.

That first night in Chicago I was emotionally exhausted. So much change had taken place in the previous month, I sat around the bedroom that evening after going for a run in Lincoln Park. We were subletting the apartment from my friend’s girlfriend, who was off in Greece getting tanned from head to toe while riding around the Mediterranean naked most of the time. I did not yet know her yet, as they’d begun dating the winter before, while I was out in Philly. I had a beer and tried to settle my mind. The afternoon light grew dim as the sun sank behind the neighborhood building, and I dozed off on the bed.

Lab Rats and Wild welcomes

My roommate’s schedule was manic. He worked part-time at a downtown hospital while doing post-graduate research work testing the exercise physiology of lab rats. That meant he often didn’t arrive home until late some nights. That happened to be the schedule the day I moved in. I was sound asleep when he arrived home only to be awakened at midnight by the sound of him flopping a large pizza box on the bed next to me as he called out, “Let’s eat!”

I was so groggy my response was instinctive. “No, I’m too tired.” He proceeded to smash his face into the pizza, take a big bite and say, “Well I’m eating.” I burst out laughing, and that’s how we kicked off our life in Chicago together.

The next day, I received a welcome back to Chicago from my former track and cross country coach, Trent Richards. After a marriage breakup with his first wife two years before, he was living with a sweet belle named Marielle in a tall condo building on Michigan Avenue. I visited his apartment and we took a trip up to the roof overlooking the city. I have a native fear of heights, so I stayed away from the edge of the roof. Yet in typical fashion, daredevil that he was, Trent walked over to lean out and look down at the sidewalk below. “Great view, huh?” he asked. I reached over to touch something to give myself a sense of being grounded.

His advice that day sort of set the stage for my time back in Chicago. “You don’t really want to work for someone, do you? You should go out on your own.”

First takes

During our first run together in Chicago, my roommate and I trotted over to North Avenue Beach only to find that the wind off Lake Michigian was so stiff the sand blowing off the beach stung our bare legs. We turned inland and looped around Lincoln Park on a gorgeous, if windy, late-May day. The last wave of migrating warblers sang in the trees. We ran past the zoo. I’d been there once before, but the rest of Lincoln Park was new territory for me. I realized that I knew almost nothing about the city, its landscape, parks, or its streets. I was a stranger in a strange land. It was wonderful.

My first few days in town I went for daily runs along the lakefront. The rest of the day was spent typing happily away on my IBM Selectric. I was working on my novel Admissions. With the windows ajar in summer, a fine layer of grit covered my work each morning. I learned to cover the machine overnight to keep it from clogging up with fine soot from the roofing projects taking place nearby.

That was the smell of the city to me those first few weeks. Roofing tar and bus exhaust. I’d wake up to the sound of workmen hauling equipment around, then get dressed for a run and come back to write for the day.

In the meantime, Trent Richards hired me to do the graphic design on a brochure for his new company One-On-One Fitness. I got busy writing and designing it for him. Part of me hoped his company serving corporate fitness clients would grow enough for me to join him.

Somewhere over the rainbow

The month of June went by fast. Now that I had a better feel for the city, it was time to move my stuff back from Paoli to Chicago. I took a plane to Harrisburg where my brother picked me up from the airport, and stayed the night with him before heading over to my little apartment where I’d rented a U-Haul truck for the move back west.

A much fainter double rainbow I recently captured over our neighborhood in Illinois.

On the way back from the airport with my brother, a huge rainstorm passed over us. When the sun broke through from the west, a massive double rainbow appeared over the road ahead. My brother and I gazed at it in wonder. We pulled the car over to take a better look. Both rainbow arches were clear and full. We cried a bit because our brotherly adventure of living close together was coming to an end.

The next day, he drove over with me to Paoli and helped haul furniture down three flights of stairs. We loaded up the U-Haul until it was almost too full to close the door. “Damn, that’s lucky,” my brother said, as we slid the lock mechanism into place. Then we hugged and he drove away, back to Willow Street where he lived. Our Paoli Days were over.

Insecurity deposit

There was one last item of business to attend at my apartment. The landlord came upstairs to do the inspection and decide about the security deposit. In my head, it felt like an insecurity deposit. I knew so little about taking care of a house I hopefully assumed I’d be getting the security deposit or $500 back. It didn’t turn out that way. The landlord looked around the house and noticed that the tray below the stove was thick with grease. The entire oven needed cleaning. He also noted that the base of the shower wall was molding and about to shed tile. That really ticked him off. “You should have told me about this,” he snarled.

“I didn’t notice it,” I replied. That didn’t help matters any. “We’re keeping your money,” he told me. “This whole place is a mess.”

I was angry about that decision, but couldn’t do anything about it. So even though we’d gotten along great, even shared a dinner to two together over time, it wasn’t a pleasant goodbye between us in the end. I climbed into the U-Haul, started it up, and roared away from the temporary life I’d live. And good riddance.

U-Haul stall

I’d worked for U-Haul in a summer job during college. But I’d never driven a stick-shift truck, only manual transmission cars. It wasn’t too hard to handle by that time. With the back door locked in place to keep my stuff from flying all over the highway, I headed out of Paoli and drove onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading west.

At twenty-four years old, I drove right past my youthful Lancaster memories and headed toward the turnpike tunnels of western Pennsylvania. During a long climb up one of the mountain grades, I felt the engine in the U-Haul flutter and then stall out completely. The momentum at fifty miles an hour carried me a short way, but I quickly had to apply the brakes to keep from rolling backward. I shifted down into first, pushed the clutch with my brake foot and prayed that the truck would start up again. It lurched backward. I tried again, and this time the truck roared to life. “Damn,” I said out loud.

Out in Ohio I grew tired from the day’s packing and driving effort and decided to stop to spend the night outside Toledo. The hotel sat far out on a cornfield plain. I made sure the truck was locked before going out for a run in the summer heat. It was the Fourth of July. Dinner was a bag of Kentucky Fried Chicken and some beer. I sat on a big rock next to the hotel sign as the sun went down. Then fireworks burst forth in the sky over several nearby towns.

The next day I drove to St. Charles, emptied my belongings into my parent’s garage for temporary safekeeping, and dropped off the U-Haul truck at the rental place where I’d worked a few summers before. Soon my friend and I would be moving to another Chicago apartment. We’d found a place to live at 1764 N. Clark in Chicago, right next door to his girlfriend’s house.

We moved into the second floor flat in late summer. I rented yet another U-Haul, reloaded all my stuff from my parent’s garage, and moved it all downtown. I’d had my fair share of moving experiences by then.

We carried our collective furniture piece by piece into our new place. The queen bed I owned got jammed in the doorway and would not budge. For an hour we tried to jam it through. Exhausted and frustrated, we decided to go out to dinner and get drinks, then return. Fueled by alcohol, we gave the bed a massive shove and it flew out of the door jam into the hallway corridor. That was it. We were ready for life in Chicago.

Posted in alcohol, Christopher Cudworth, climbing, cross country, running | Tagged bus exhaust, driving the pennsylvania turnpike, IBM selectric typewriter, lake michigan beaches, living in chicago illinois, pennsylvania turnpike accidents, roofing tar, security deposit and landlords, Somewhere over the rainbow, working on a novel | Leave a comment

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We Run and Ride

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