Tarmac Meditations #155: In Search of Lost Time (Apologies to Marcel Proust)

Finishing Napa Marathon 2009

Proust had his madeleine cookie and, 1500 pages later, he had his book (In Search of Lost Time).

I found a shot of me, taken by a good friend as I was crossing the finish line at the Napa marathon in 2009. I played with the image, made it black and white. As I did that some memories surfaced and I thought a Tarmac Meditation might be in the offing. And so it was. More personal than some of its predecessors but the words showed up and a writer has to go with what there is.

The day, race day, began two days before and included two anger-filled, sleepless nights and a relentless migraine (mine), random angry sex and Banshee-like yelling. I had made a terrible mistake in my reactions to my partner’s most recent choice to join me on race day as a fellow runner. I had, as the Brits would say, behaved very badly.

Napa 2009 Memory: “A steady rain falls over the hills east of the Silverado Trail, an augury of the internal storms to come for those here to run the 31st Napa Valley Marathon. Cold, wet, tired, migrained, 62, I am at a start line after an absence of three long years. The rain seems a messenger from on high, cleansing the earth, the road ahead, readying the bodies and minds of the faithful for the task at hand” (“Tarmac Meditations – Lessons I Learned at Marathon Camp.” Life As A Human, 2010).

So why am I remembering this now? I came across this picture taken of me as I was crossing the finish line at Napa.  The embarrassment came back in waves of regret, in this present-day context of having been able to do something then that I can no longer do. It has been, and is likely to be, my last marathon. Had I been paying attention to more than the run itself I might never have finished it.  It was, strangely, my best run in four years, and at the age of 62 I had every right to be proud of it and to immediately begin to plan the next one. I don’t see any pride in my expression. I see only distance, rain and exhaustion. I see the beginning of the “thousand-yard stare,” having just endured what marathoners refer to with overblown melodrama, as a “Death march,” one foot in front of the other, just dragging the all and everything of “what hasn’t been right today” to the conclusion to a tough run. It might also be referred to as a long day at the office.

From my present perspective, whatever else that day was, it was the last good one I have had since then in so far as my running and my health are concerned. My responses to the image are laced with poignancy and a drifting regret like the beginning of the first snowstorm of the winter. 

By the time race day came around, said partner had decided not to run and to instead be my support crew as we had intended right from the beginning. In other words, she had changed her mind. Much ado about not very much at all. As a note to anyone who has not run a long-distance race, the days leading up to the event are often filled with tension and terror. It is, after all, a long way to go and a lot of stress to put on your body, so a little fear is probably a good thing. In my case, my preparation in the days before took the form of going inside myself, wrapped in endless repetitions of Dylan’s “Knocking’ on Heaven’s Door,” sung by Bob Marley and/or Eric Clapton, in order to deal with this sense that I had that I was about to leave what I knew – my comfort zone, if you will – and go out into the “uncomfortable.”

I heard and saw the interaction between us as a great violation of our social contract – no, make that of everything that is holy. To hear me in those moments a person might have thought I was auditioning for the position of Director of Communications-Infidel Recruitment Branch during the Spanish Inquisition, which, to be fair, nobody really expected. I could’ve simply shrugged and asked her if she had brought her good running shoes. After all, what did it matter? The timing of the change was capricious and without malice and if a bit self-serving, so what? I still had miles in front of me and “promises to keep”; leaving her to her own dreams might have been a kindness as well as the best way out of my own self-destructive tantrums. I remembered all of this embarrassment when I first came across the portrait the other day.

I also saw in my face the beginning of the end for us. There was no kindness to be shared in victory is what I see. She was who she was and I, in my own way, was repeating some very flawed behaviors from my addict past. Selfishness on my part, invincibility and the over-whelming drive to be right. It is hard on a person to be like that and equally to have to put up with that, regardless of the intimacies which are shared. Twenty-six-point-two miles is a long time to think about all of that stuff. I see all of that in my face with a hint of regret when I look at my expression. Years later we came apart, mostly because of what we had both revealed in those days. We hadn’t changed very much and so it goes.

Napa 2009 Memory No. 2: “By late afternoon there was no evidence of the 2,500 runners and volunteers. No paper cups, no Gu packages. The sun came out and by nightfall the Silverado Trail was dry. The next morning all that remained was local traffic and the faint sense of something that had happened here. It, too, would be washed away by the morning rains, falling light upon the vineyards whose bounty was still months away” (“Tarmac Meditations – Lessons Learned at Marathon Camp,” Life As A Human, 2010)

I have begun to think about those days more recently as my own return to long-distance running has become some far-off distant glimmer that may or may not ever happen. The miles have been a part of my recovery from drugs and alcohol, as well as my best tool for staying steady in the face of aging and its attendant physical humiliations. The discipline of making a plan, sticking with it and executing on the day has been rewarding in countless ways. I have found a solace and a whisper of Grace in the solitude of the running. It had been my hope that after a year – make that two years – of scary physical, medical issues, I might finally be able to “get back at it.” Not so fast, Michael. It is going to take a long while to work through what is in front of me. It is possible and indeed likely that I will one day in the distant future go out for a double-digit run and not wind up in an ER somewhere. I am looking forward to that.

Image Credit

Photo by Bill Latter/longrun pictures. All rights reserved.

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