We celebrated New Year’s Eve with an amazing 11-course treat of a dinner at a restaurant called Gaetano’s in Batavia, Illinois. The Italian fare was strikingly flavorful and fine. Then we hopped over to the house of a friend where our regular Friday Night dinner crew was gathered for New Year’s festivities. Between the glasses of wine at dinner and the rolling offerings of booze at the party, it was time to quit drinking before midnight lest I tip into that zone of No Return. But then the champagne came out and we didn’t leave until 1:30 am.
Only we’re triathletes, and true to our multisport sleep habits, we awoke at 7:00 am, late for us, but insane by standards of actual sleep needed. Then we rallied. After a skillet of eggs and some coffee for Sue, we felt like human beings again. By noon we were ready to head over to the outdoor party my best friend annually conducts in his backyard, but the temps were below zero, so the bulk of the party was moved inside.
After some wonderfully made fried turkey, mushrooms and onions, I sat down on the futon couch feeling completely tired. The lack of sleep and addition of food made me groggy. Yet we were scheduled to drive downtown yesterday afternoon to see the BoDeans in concert.
Heading downtown
It took some concentration and a medium Coke from 7-11, but the driving went fine. 37 miles into the city on salty highways at 80mph. Just another winter day in Chicago.
Driving while tired takes concentration and a will to not get sleepy at the wheel. For me, some of the discipline comes from years of focus in endurance sports. You learn while competing tired to tune out the extraneous, focus on the task at hand and do what’s necessary to get through.
I wasn’t proud of drinking the Coke. <So many calories. So much sugar. > >So much more fat to consider as the sugar spreads out like sheets of drifting snow across the body.
Getting through
Sometimes you do what you gotta do though. I don’t like the taste of coffee. Any of it. Not Sumatra. Not French Roast. It all tastes like gasoline to me. When drowsiness arrives, a shot of caffeine is a fair response. So Coke is it for me.
I was also sick of alcohol after all the New Year’s imbibements. So we settled in to watch the concert in seats just off the stage. It was incredible.
I’d forgotten how long the BoDeans have been around. Their first hit played on the radio the summer of 1983, I believe. That was the year I moved into the City of Chicago to live with one of my best friends. The winter proved cold and raw. We hit temps of twenty-three below at one point. I still trained by running up through Lincoln Park to Montrose Harbor and back. One evening the waves blasted over the seawall and soaked me head to toe. It was fourteen below zero outside. Fearing frostbite, I tore home through the black night wondering if I’d lose flesh or digits.
Neither of those things happened. I sat in our chilly apartment glad to be out of the real cold. The landlord skimped on the heat. He was a cheap bastard who once also confided that he never allowed himself to ejaculate while having sex with a woman. “It gives them power over you,” he said. So you can see why he skimped on the heat too. He was a fucking cold-hearted bastard.
The world isn’t meant to be like that. Which meant the lyrics of the BoDeans music meant all that much more in the cold early 80s.
Well we don’t need no wine / And we don’t need no other stuff
‘Cause we’ll be doing fine / From being close and tastin’ love
So when the night set ends / We’ll close the curtains way up tight
And then will just pretend / That it isn’t day, but Still the Night
If I could Hold you tonight / I might never let go
For Sue, the music was a bit bittersweet. Her ex-husband was a big fan of the BoDeans. We all have music that associates itself with some prior love. Those songs come on the radio and we’re swept off to some other place in time, perhaps with an early love or a lost one. The song plays and we struggle to recover our senses, move back into the space we exist in the present, perhaps look over at the one we (now) truly love and think, “It’s alright. We all have a past.”
But Sue knew the band so well from having seen them multiple times. We were supposed to see them two summers ago and the concert got rained on, so we went home before the show started two hours late. Still, she wanted to know when and why the group split company with a singer named Sammy whose laconic voice was the hallmark of so much BoDeans music.
She looked them up on her phone on the trip back out from the city. “They broke up in 2011,” she reported. Turns out the lead songwriter for the BoDeans did most of the instrumentals on the records, planned the tours and the like. It was yet another case of That Thing You Do! Creative differences.
What do we expect?
But what the hell does the world expect from rock bands anyway? These people are married by circumstance. They find each other in some garage and play their way into world prominence only to find out they aren’t exactly meant for each other. Some bury it in drugs, others in road-weary anxiety. Finally the band falls apart like a Venetian blind left out in the rain to rot.
Carrying on
Thus is meant a ton to think about Kurt Neumann, the band’s heart and soul, working his way through a set of BoDeans songs last night. His style was workmanlike, but not without heart. He reminded me of an old runner who still knows what it’s like to run fast, but keeps the pace under control as a matter of respect for himself.
Neumann’s voice was tired from a New Year’s Eve concert the night before. He admitted as much, and at the end of the concert, feigned falling down onstage while the drummer kept time like a heartbeat. For a moment the crowd truly wondered whether the sixty-plus rocker had fallen over in a real incident. Then his fun-loving bassist wandered over to apply a line of deep notes as rock and roll medicine. Neumann climbed to his feet to finish with a rollicking guitar solo of his own.
Finding our way
We all find our way in this world somehow. We either learn to adapt to changing circumstance and make sanity from chaos, or drift into some space that feels like the last sector of a video game.
Reality is a much better place in any case. Even the pain of life does not need to suck it out of us; the compassion, the love, the hope. And when we consider the things that matter the most, it’s not a bad thing to consider the simplicity of those BoDeans lyrics: “If I could hold you tonight, I might never let go…”
Those words can take you a long way in life.
Sue and I trained at the Vaughn Center this morning. Her workout was rotating set of 2 X 200s and 1 X 400 times three circuits with 30 seconds rest. she rocked it. After the initial 200s, the first 400 was run at 7:20 pace. The rest of the workout went so strong that I turned to her and said, “This is fascinating running with you.”
During our workout the Fox Valley Park District staff was hauling bag after bag of inflated balloons into the field house. They stacked them in a big pile next to a plastic net they’d fill with the balloons and lift above the gym floor. It’s time for their annual New Year’s Eve celebration party! Sue and I could not resist walking over to take a selfie with such a huge pile of balloons.
We turned around to find the woman I’d waved to smiling at us. She pointed to the red flower in her hair and said, “I was one of thirteen siblings. Our mother used to send us all out of the house to work in the flowers before we went to school. We all hated flowers then. But we learned to love them, and that’s why I wear a flower in my hair every day.”
Yesterday at Home Depot while buying hardboard for my next painting project, I tossed a pack of Mixed Nuts on the counter to take back for a snack during work. I figured nuts are pretty harmless. Not many calories and no sugar. Safe snack right?
It must start with some calorie counting since I excel at ignoring what I’m eating in terms of calories and types of food. It’s time to download an app that helps me do it. I welcome suggestions, or tell us how you manage your calorie intake? Would love to share.
Basketball was once my favorite game to play. I grew up playing hoops from the time I was six years old. My scholastic career lasted until my senior year. That’s when I opted out of playing hoops in order to train for indoor track.
All through my 30s and early 40s I continued playing the game. We had a great Sunday night group with 25 or so players that would turn up at Harrison Street School to play from 6-9:00 pm. The games were always competitive and there were enough good players for the better players to match up, yet there were all levels of players and that was cool. All of us were married guys with kids back home. But our wives didn’t object to our absence on a Sunday evening once the weekend chores were done and the kids were pretty much settled down for the evening in front of the TV.
The death of Jake
Yesterday the temps were in the single digits and the wind chill ungodly. Had Jesus been born into this kind of weather, he’d have crawled back inside Mary and waited for the Holy Spirit to warm things up a little.
We also have a whole year to lose the fat we put on our bodies going into the holidays. It collects like dryer lint around our middle sections. We lose another belt notch and rue the sight of the next cookie knowing that it will only add to the problem. It can leave you feeling like Jabba the Hut. You may not be as fat as you think, but it’s all in how you feel.
I sat on the pool deck admiring their grace and power in the water. I thought about how hard each of those athletes has worked to get as good as they are now. I watched them swing to the left center of the lane as they approached the wall each lap, flipping with ease to come back up below the level of the next swimmer arriving for the turn. It all worked like some slick scene from a Disney cartoon.
Here at We Run and Ride, we received an invitation to share information about 
Yesterday was a strength day at the gym. I can feel when I have not been there enough. Things get loose at the joints and my hips ache from weak connections. It is amazing how much better I feel running when I’ve kept up with visits to the gym.
It’s a plan fact that one must embrace the slow and the hard and the seemingly worthless efforts to build the start of a foundation. Take heart: once you get going and go back to the gym with a positive feeling about the last workout you did, your confidence builds on that feeling.
When I was out riding my mountain bike on Sunday morning a calamitous thing happened. I was coming through a narrow section of trail where tree branches stuck out. One of them caught the right shoulder of my brand new Proviz 360 reflective jacket. The shoulder snagged on a sharp piece of the limb and the exterior fabric tore. Bummer.
Back home I showed the torn shoulder material to Sue. We were both amazed how clean the tear had been. “The material seemed so tough,” I told her.
The Proviz jacket is a bit crinkly sounding to run in. But after all, it is not really designed for running any more than it was designed for mountain biking. It’s my fault that I expect my gear to perform so many functions.
Yesterday my wife gathered family members for an afternoon of cookie-baking. I was out of the house finishing up a commissioned painting for a friend, so the merriment and smells did not rope me in.
But by the time I returned from the painting studio, the huge batches of cookies were already being parsed out and divvied up. That afforded precious objectivity. It wouldn’t do to short any bakers the wares they had created!
For decades we were told that eating fat was the enemy. That eating fat would make us fat. Turns out it is carbohydrates and sugars that are making us all round as baby seals. So it pays to run away from the Christmas Cookies if you don’t want to come out the other end of the holidays looking like a squeeze of that expanding home repair foam.
So my plan of riding more miles in the battle of calorie war got cut short. But I did enjoy pedaling through the gloom of the day while soaking in the matted down appearance of the open spaces. Pedaling across the gray landscape on a December day is to me, a real pleasure. I like the leftover shapes of snow in the weeds. The sagging heap of abandoned hay below tall power lines. The crackling sound of fat tires over limestone paths and riding so far out in the fields it matters to no one else but me. And that’s enough.
We Run and Ride 