Fall can be such a conflicted season. With the weather changing from warm to cool, there are still hot days in September that fool you into thinking the weather is not really going to change. Just yesterday while starting out on a run, I encountered a woman walking her dog who turned to me and said “It can stay like this all winter and then just turn to spring.”
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? 68 degrees. Dew on the grass. Forever. Perhaps it’s like that down in South Carolina all winter. But probably not.
Here in Illinois we’ll still get six more weeks of pretty decent weather before the dank arrival of November. It’s like the Groundhog Day Reversal.
But that’s fine. By then we’ve been through the shiningly shorter days of October. The leaves have flared brightly and fallen. We crunch through piles of them and the season progresses. We brace ourselves for winter.
Change is a constant. Yet for some reason we also love to embrace the thought that some things never change. We love small little towns where the storefronts are still occupied with locally owned businesses. We cherish the discovery of a restaurant that seems like it remains locked in time. We have one like that here in Batavia, Illinois. It’s called Daddio’s. It’s a diner that’s a real throwback in time. And damned good food.
While driving around we love those little sections of landscape where the farmers rotate crops and there are no FOR SALE signs on the roadside beckoning developers. We cherish the hollyhocks growing by the mailbox. The farm cat that sits on the stump. The barking dog that will secretly stop and wag its tail if you talk nicely.
These are the places where things don’t change because no one is really trying to change them. These are the unincorporated sections of America.
There is a section of road behind our house that cuts through an unincorporated section of Batavia Township. The Welcome to North Aurora sign marks the end of that town’s grip on the landscape, and immediately the homes on that street go from cookie-cutter to eclectic. Old, low-slung ranches and half updated Colonials. Even a roughly treated former farmhouse being slapped with modern accoutrements. Because it’s unincorporated. People play by different, somewhat looser rules.
The road itself is some sort of calm black asphalt with no apparent relative roads anywhere in our county. It holds up well under plowing in winter, and isn’t bad for footing even when the snows and ice make other roads slippery. The few driveways that peel off the main road are typically black as well.
This past summer though, the road was splattered with the carcasses of frogs run over by passing cars. There was a massive migration of young bullfrogs from the local wetland. They headed out in all directions after a particularly heavy rain and many wound up smangulated on the unincorporated strip of Hickory Lane.
My wife and I were headed out for a run and I mentioned going up Hickory. “Ugh,” she chuckled. “It’s still covered with frogs.”
She was right. From a frog’s standpoint, it looked like crucifixion row leading into the City of Jerusalem after the Romans quelled a Jewish rebellion. But there’s no accounting for the ways and means of evolution. For every frog we spotted on the road, there were likely ten or twenty that made it into some wet ditch. Life is a numbers game. It is also a pre-existing condition.
So the unincorporated area near our home is not without its reminders of mortality and life passing us by. There are days when I run that road and it feels like I’m 80 years old. Then there are days when I feel good and race along at 6:30-7:00 pace and I could be 30 or 40 years old again. Instead I’m somewhere in the middle of all that. Grateful for the good days and respectful of those when I feel creaky, strange or old.
Sometimes I take the unincorporated path back from a bike ride and the smooth surface of Hickory Lane welcomes the thin black tires of my Specialized Venge. There are no tarsnakes on Hickory. No patches of black tar or long strips of rubbery, warmed up goo to make the rider anxious when bike tires sink into the grooves.
I’ve gotten to know some of the people along that stretch of road. I’m now “that runner guy” to many. I am happy to play that role. They wave and I wave back. Their dogs give a cautious yip or a bark, but I am no longer the odd threat I once was to the canines protecting their home turf.
One day there was an actual herd of goats wandering the roadside. They’d gotten out of their cage at a farmhouse somehow, so I yanked up some grass and placed it before their munching mouths. They happily chewed up the grass and nudged me for more. They smelled lightly of hay and dirt, because they’re goats. That’s what goats smell like. They have weird eyes, and I don’t trust them entirely. But that’s the beauty of unincorporated areas.
Down another unincorporated road near home there is a horse farm where I stop sometimes on a run or a ride to yank grass and feed the steeds and fillies. I didn’t used to care one whit about horses. But I visited a barn a few years back and one of the horses in the stalls seemed to adopt me. That big soft muzzle won me over. Now appreciate the look and feel of a nice horse. They are the ultimate unincorporated animal.
These sensations appeal to the unincorporated me. There’s a person in me that was raised on a farm in upstate New York. Who knew the smell of cow manure and did not find it offensive. Who caught frogs with bare hands and marveled at the sight of young barn swallows with yellow mouths begging parents for food.
The unincorporated you is the person who feels alive at such sensations. Who can forget the supposed sophistications of the phone and the news feed. Who watches the sun for a minute as it rises above a bank of gray clouds at dawn.
Embrace the unincorporated you. The one who rides without a bike computer now and then. Who lets the Strava fall away for the day. Who swims without counting laps, and takes a long shower outside if the occasion arises, and stands naked in a prairie when there’s no one else around.
The unincorporated you is alive within. Embrace the feeling, that mildly untamed nature of who you want to be. In control, but not absolutely under control. There’s a freedom of spirit there. Unincorporated.
There are four weeks until my wife’s Ironman in Louisville. Her training is going well. That is not to say it is going easily.
Parked at the Wilson Street entrance to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, I glanced up to find a cyclist dressed in an Army kit waiting for the light to change. Without stopping him to ask about his connection to the military, I cannot know whether it was his own service that engendered the kit, or one of his progeny.
There is a fog spread across the entire Midwest this morning. It is nothing more than a cloud come to earth. But it has the smell of fog. That wet, specific smell of fog that goes everywhere with you.
I recall a day that I lost nearly everything I valued. Coming off a job in Admissions at my alma mater, I had packed up all my important stuff in my Plymouth Arrow and detoured north to Minneapolis with a plan to visit my girlfriend. She was due back in town from her parent’s place on Saturday, but I arrived on a Friday night and arranged to stay with some friends from college. So I settled down for a night of sleeping on the couch and waited until morning.
Yet we learn from 
Watching the Grand Tours such as the Giro de Italia, the Tour de France or the Vuelta a Espana is an annual ritual for many cycling fans. But it hasn’t been an easy journey in many respects. With performance-enhancing drugs such an issue in cycling, many heroes have succumbed to penalties and even bans from the sport of cycling.
During this year’s Tour de France, cyclist Taylor Phinney was featured in a series of video vignettes in which he gave insights from within the race and on the team bus. His laconic personality appealed to a younger audience, but Taylor also had a dark secret to share. He nearly lost his legs to cycling a few years back.
That’s where the sport has some accounting to do. There are so many crashes in major stage races the sport is nearly as causally dangerous as the NFL. This past week during the Vuelta, the peloton compressed on a narrow road bordered on both sides by stone walls. Somewhere in the bunch, a rider got flipped onto his side and broke his pelvis.
A violent crash of some sort happens in every Grand Tour. Sprinter Mark Cavendish got blasted into the barriers by an intentional/unintentional elbow from Peter Sagan. Cavendish was all busted up and Sagan got banned from the Tour the remainder of the race.
Thus at some level, the sport of cycling has to protect the participants from themselves. Competitive fury at the level of world class cycling is hard to contain. Sprinters reportedly “have no fear” and do not think about crashing in the race for the finish line. The rules clearly state that a rider cannot veer off their line. Yet riders still do, engaging in just about anything to cut a competitor’s path to the finish. There are body slams and elbows and harsh words on the way to the finish line.
This morning while doing a leg workout at the Vaughn Center, I pulled out my phone between sets for who knows what reason. And I thought: What the hell? Can’t I get through five minutes of working out without checking my phone?
So much of life is built around distraction. For example, the NFL is short-attention-span theater. It’s like brain food for the terminally numb. Violence and sex, bright colors and shiny helmets. Blathering announcers and crowd noise like an electric vacuum left on for four hours. And it sells.
Native Americans had methods of dealing with distracted thinking.
Some ultra distance runners readily admit to “out of body” experiences during 100-mile races. Extreme cyclists are also known to go into a state of hallucination during cross-country events. Surely long-distance swimmers lose themselves at some point during the trek across a large body of water. There may be nothing that so closely resembles a near-death experience than the most extreme forms of endurance training and racing.
But think how good it actually feels to go through a bit of deprivation now and then. When your last water bottle runs out during a long bike ride, it takes real focus to get to the next water stop on the route. But you bite into the challenge. Make it yours. Own it. And when you make it through, there’s a quick sense of accomplishment. 
Which really is the more effective motivator? Powerfully positive words? Or honestly negative phrases?
Last evening while driving from home to my art studio for a painting session, the clouds to the east grew dark at twilight. Then the sun broke through from the west and caught the edge of the clouds. Up from the earth rose a segment of rainbow.
Ten years ago in the throes of caring simultaneously for a wife with cancer and a father who was a stroke victim, the emotional toil became too great. I met with my doctor who prescribed an anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication called Zoloft.
We’re all trained to follow doctor’s orders. And my long experience in athletics also taught me to be disciplined and try to see things through before quitting anything. A race. A job. A workout. A relationship. Tough it out until the outcomes are obvious.
These patterns are simply a much subtler way of “going nuts” but they are just as real. Our emotional health depends on understanding how our own brains function. All of us are susceptible to negative sources of stimulation. Emotional waves can function like storms that cross our minds, wreaking havoc and leaving devastation in their wake. That’s why big storms like Harvey and Irma make us feel all feel a little nuts inside. Storms are symbols for our own internal tempests.
We don’t necessarily need to “go nuts” in order to experience these things. We’ve all seen people go “off the deep end” in endurance sports. Some are in recovery from a life event that gutted them. Others might be facing some emotional challenge that needs to be worked off or blown into the karmic atmosphere. So they go nuts training to the point where people worry about them. Some achieve success. Win the day. Go social with their achievements.
This proved to be an extremely constructive way to “go nuts.” I’ve done it a few ways myself over the years.
We Run and Ride 