bike on stand, front room
32 minutes
Watched The Great North Run half marathon on YouTube while I biked. Love watching races when I’m biking. Then walked to the studio and decided to take an existing poem by someone else and turn it into a running poem. It’s fun (and often helpful) to use other people’s poems as a starting point for my own. Today I used Natasha Threthewey’s “Theories of Time and Space.” As a play on her title, I’m calling mine, Strategies for Hill Climbs and Pace:
Strategies for Hill Climbs and Pace
You can run there from here, though
there’s no easy way home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
with a hard hill to climb. Try this:
head north on the Mississippi River Road, one—
by—one street signs ticking off
another stretch of your route. Follow this
to its inevitable conclusion—a huge hill
after Franklin, the flats by the U where
the path is a black ribbon
next to a blue river promising a breeze. Run beside
the carefully controlled water, 2 locks and dams
have made it wider and slower—taming
the rapids that once flowed. Run only
as far as you think you can go—remember
you still have to turn around and climb the hill. At the bottom,
where you begin your climb, start slow,
your watch will track your pulse and pace:
the data—how fast you ran, how hard you worked—
will be waiting on your phone when you return