Early morning freezing rain made the roads slick for running today. I got out the door by 6:30 a.m. and immediately found my daughter scraping away the thick crust of ice on her Honda windshield. She’d gotten through the top layer of ice but the visibility was still zero through her windshield. I stopped to take the scraper for her and ground away as the ice turned to powder and fell like little bits of snowstorm on the now-bare window. It turned from black to white ice before our eyes.
That was all I needed to learn about the conditions outside on the roads. The footing was not going to be great.
It took quite a bit of concentration to keep my stride even as I made my way down the back streets. I wasn’t worrying about how fast I was going. My plan was to just keep going and see what the morning would give me.
The route I chose was along Orchard Road where the salt trucks had already traveled past. Under the glow of the traffic light ahead, one could see a clear line between black ice and the wet road. Different kinds of shine.
I ran mostly flat-footed, not quite forefoot-striking. I used the pad of rubber for gripping all I could on the alternately slick and sodden road. That meant my shoes sometimes skritched from the crunch of salt and squeaked as rubber met wet asphalt. It was a very tactile experience, running in such conditions.
Days of ice dreaming
This was certainly not the most extensive ice storm I’ve ever seen. There was a massive ice storm in Pennsylvania when I was a child. It laid down a coat of ice an inch thick even on the streets. It looked as if the entire world was encased in rippled glass, as if the world had been cloaked in some sort of icy dream.
We lived next to a golf course, yet the first thing I saw while dragging my sled out toward the sledding hill was an older neighbor who could ice skate gliding up the center of the small street behind our house. Then he stopped, stepped over a chunky snow bank and skated away across the fairways of Meadia Heights Country Club. The world was one giant skating rink.
Making the grade
I was in third grade or so when the ice storm hit. There was no school for several days, so we were free to explore the icy world at our leisure. As an experiment, we took our red Coleco sleds out to the head of the practice range of the golf course. There was perhaps a 2% grade leaning toward the creek in the valley. We didn’t know what would happen when we pushed off from our spot on Niblick Avenue. To our surprise, we quickly gained spiraling speed as our sleds whipped across the ice layered on top of snow. The sensation was was both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. Had we chosen a steeper grade, we could easily have been killed by losing control of our sleds and running into a tree.
As it was, we slid down the entire length of the 400-yard practice range, picking up speed as the incline increased toward the creek. Fortunately we’d aimed luckily and wound up spinning our way down a wide open fairway. It finished with a long cascade downhill. Our sleds roared across the ice down toward the valley until we bottomed out and went slinging up the other side. In summer that hill was a steep one to run up or climb. But in icy conditions, the physics were ideal for us to come to some sort of sliding, sideways halt. We lay there on our sides laughing and somewhat out of breath. I think my friend and I had both been holding our breath for most of the run.
White ice fever
We’d covered close to a half mile on what amounted to white ice. But then came a long, slippery trudge all the way back home. “That was fun,” I said to my friend. “But let’s not do it again. I’m exhausted from walking back.”
After a couple days, school beckoned and the streets finally melted after multiple applications of salt from snow trucks. But even after we returned to school and life got a bit back to normal, talk around school centered on all the cool things we had done. The sensation of being freed from normalcy stuck with us a while. Even the teachers indulged us in conversations about the ice storm that had changed the world for a few days. We all had white ice fever.
Back to reality
Thoughts of that ice storm ran through my head as I ran 4.5 miles on the slick roads this morning. I treasure those memories about the ice storm in Pennsylvania. Then it struck me that they date back five full decades. Yet they still contribute to the sensations I still feel today. How miraculous and wonderful is that?
Admittedly, I have grown much more cautious when it comes to encounters with black and white ice these days. I learned some hard lessons over time. Twenty or so years ago while out running on a cold morning in February, I got frisky and elected to hurdle a low-hanging chain blocking the entrance to a forest preserve. Unfortunately, on the other side of the chain there was a large patch of snow drainage that had frozen overnight into a layer of clear black ice. My lead foot went out from under me and I crashed to the ground. In trying to catch myself during the fall, my hand and wrist jammed into the hard ground. That resulted in a sprain whose effects lasted for a full year.
So I took no chances while out running this morning. Even stepping up a curb level was risky business, so I stuck to flat sidewalks and where possible, ran on the crunchy snow left over from yesterday’s snowfall.
The world is a slippery place in both literal and abstract terms. The dangers of black and white ice are not exactly yin and yang. They can combine to make danger and turn the world into a grey and dangerous place.
A near silent hiss of granular snow had fallen overnight. This was a surprise to see as I opened the blinds to peek into the pre-morning gloom. “Huh, snow,” I muttered to myself.
It turned out to be the perfect solution on a brisk morning with a north wind pushing icy crystals of snow southward. The street was covered. Only one set of tire tracks circled round the cul de sac. That was the newspaper delivery truck. The track of the skidding paper slid up the driveway. Later I’d come back to find the thin tracks of mourning doves around our bird feeder, and the clean lines of the primary feathers of a bird that lifted off the ground when I approached.
Behind me, as I stepped up to our porch and the front door, the lights of the car dealerships blared behind into the morning sky. They were diffuse, so different than the illusory images of fluorescent lights reflected on the glass of my office window as I turned to leave work last night. Those were crisp and defiant against the darkening sky. This light thing is all a game. An illusion of self and perception.
Thirty years ago sportswriter Kenny Moore published a compilation of his best writing about runners for Sports Illustrated.
My personal best 5000 is essentially two minutes slower than the world record. I ran 14:45 in the year 1984. That race was an all-comers meet at North Central college. The gun did not go off until midnight, but we all raced as hard as we could. The personal triumph of my PR was essentially my own to share except for a female friend that had come back to watch me race. I thanked her for that. It always meant a lot.
There’s a chance I could have run a bit faster with other opportunities to race. But likely not by much. We all have limits to our natural abilities. I honestly feel that I ran as fast as I could that evening, and every other race in which I competed. If I ever dogged it on purpose, I cannot recall.
I grew up in a four-square house south of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I loved that home for a million reasons, but mostly because our family was all together when I was 5-12 years old. Flawed as we were, there were many joyous days.
The period of my elementary to junior high school days was a time of great change in children’s toys.
New kinds of rubber were being developed from space research and material experimentation. These included the first amazing Super Balls that bounced so high and far it was easy to lose them in the weeds if you couldn’t catch up.
To go out and play, we all wore tennis shoes or “sneakers,” as we called them.
Taking photos of ourselves is a patent form of truth-telling or self-revelation. Way back in 1979 I snapped this photo of myself in a mirror with my Olympus OM-1 camera. I wore white cutoff jeans and a blue running tee shirt. My hair was blonde from the summer sun and my thighs tanned from hundreds of miles running in the short shorts of the era. I thought I looked pretty good. 6’1″, 140 lbs.
That young man in the photo is my son, Evan Cudworth.
He tried moving to Cleveland after that, but despite the Cavaliers winning the NBA championship and finding a decent place to live in the Lakeland district, he still craved more from life.
“Had a pretty scary experience yesterday, and want to share what it gave (and took from) me.
He called to check up on me again today and I asked him again if he had a damage assessment. He was hesitant to say, but when he gave me the figure I gasped—it was almost exactly the same $ I won playing roulette in Vegas this week. I had planned to use those winnings to pay down some of my massive credit card debt, but hey. After talking a bit more, found out he was a line cook at a hotel bar I’ve frequented.
He also explained to me how he won the money playing roulette in Las Vegas during an electronics show he attended for the company where he now works, 
Thanks for all the well wishes and I hope my bike crash story can bring some caution and compassion into the world this week. Helmets are sexy!
A really good rocket would shoot from five to ten feet through the air and then lie smoldering on the sidewalk or somewhere in the grass. It is a wonder we never caught anything else on fire. That didn’t happen because we were smart enough to know that any accident would mean a permanent end to our fun. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that.
That doesn’t mean I’m benign to problems. I sense them well enough when things get loose or weak or the chain rattles. Parts wear out. Things get stretched. We depend on instincts in many cases. It isn’t rocket science.
The principles at work in all this are maddeningly consistent. It’s always a question of weight versus propulsion capacity. It’s true with our bikes. It’s true with our running. It’s true in the pool. It’s all weight versus propulsion.
We’ve been spending some good time on the indoor track, seeing results in our efforts. As a specific result, my wife Sue is learning the beauty of speed training and how it makes your base pace and even your race pace feel more achievable.
Which is why I laughed in disgust yesterday after doing a 4.5 mile training run outside. It was cold, just under ten degrees, and a ten mph wind was coming from the west. But I traipsed along with a quick leg turnover to cover the miles. Granted, I ran much slower on the paths of a forest preserve during the run, so in essence that was a period of jogging.
We all have this challenge of translating speed from the treadmill or indoor track or pool to the outside world. Open water swimming can be quite the vexation for those accustomed to doing laps in the pool. You have to swim straight, for starters. And you have to negotiate other people, on top of that. There might be waves to consider or even current. In the Louisville Ironman that Sue did last October, the swim starts upstream in a channel of the Ohio River. Then the swimmers get out into the main body of water and the current pushes swimmers out toward the middle of the water. Even the overall direction of the water doesn’t help if one goes with the wrong flow.
Our home backs up to a wetland. There is a pack of coyotes that frequent the wilds back there. They feed on rabbits and other furry edibles. Recently, they also snatched a neighbor’s poodle.
There are plenty of ways to look at that event. It’s a dog-eat-dog world… is one of them. We all know the world can be a harsh and cruel place. Whenever I watch one of those World War II movies set in Poland or France, I think about the desperate people bombed from their homes and wandering the streets with nowhere to go. I think of the soldiers marching through with weapons raised, the untold mission or more mayhem in mind. In some circumstances, they can’t stop for anyone. Orders must be followed. People are left like poodles in the rain. Or worse.
Looking at trees this way makes sense of the “why” , in which a given tree exhibits a certain shape. It’s a dance of sorts between the limbs of the tree and any other source of change that comes along. When trees grow together in a forest, they both exploit and respond to this constantly shifting feedback of light and shade, moisture and wind. And that’s only what we see above ground. But when people speak of being “grounded,” they refer to this idea that for all the things going on around us, we still know how to find our place.
