3 miles
trestle turn around
54 degrees
13 days until the marathon!
Overcast, cool. A steady stream of cars. I was planning to greet the Welcoming Oaks, but I forgot. Encountered many runners, walkers, someone (I think) was heading to the rowing club, and at least one roller skier. I noticed a few streaks of red and yellow, but mostly everything is still green.
Since I ran 20 miles on Sunday, today I only did 3 miles. My legs were slightly sore, but not too bad. I’m pleased with my recovery. I was especially pleased that I pushed through the moments when it felt a little harder. To keep my heart rate below 170, I chanted in triple berries in mile 3: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry.
10 Things
- in the first mile, encountered a woman’s cross country team — a core group of 12? then pairs of slower runners trailing behind, one final runner at the very back — as I passed them I could hear their labored breathing — they were all running fast!
- happy, excited voices rising up from the rowing club
- a car pulling out right in front of another one at the top of the lake street hill — the second car honked once, but no yelling or repeated honks or crash sounds
- click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles
- in the third mile, encountered the team again — still fast, still jagged breaths
- no sparkle on the water, flat featureless blue
- running south, I could feel the faintest outline of my shadow — was I imagining it?
- more spray paint on the path — bright green and orange, looking sloppy
- the sharp crack of an acorn hitting the asphalt
- above the ravine, at the wooden fence — all thick green, no view, one of the fence slats had been pushed away from the others by a leaning tree
Before and after my run I listened to a recording I did this morning of myself reading 4 of my water poems. I’m proud of them.
Watched a short video with Hanif Abdurraqib while I at my breakfast (peanut butter toast). I love this definition of writing:
I think about writing as being in the pursuit of beautiful language to extract or shake out a curiosity that’s been long haunting me in a pleasurable way. And I’ll do as much as it takes and seek out as much language as it takes to get there.
Windham Campbell Prize, 2024, Haniq Abdurraqib
I want to remember an idea I encountered in an explanation of yesterday’s poem of the day on poets.org. The poem was “Villany” in LA by Gabrielle Civil. Here’s their explanation:
About this Poem
“More than just rendering something in another language, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries remind us that translation is ‘the process of moving something from one place to another.’ What better way to signal that than a poem about public transit? In their book Villainy, Andrea Abi-Karam moves love and grief for those who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship [warehouse] fire in Oakland to me [as I’m] riding the train in Los Angeles. As with most translations, I move my reading into something else: this time, a new poem, which receives the original and carries it like a holy relic into a different city.”
Gabrielle Civil
I’d like to think more about translation and this movement and how I might play with it in my writing about running and swimming and my running/swimming-as-writing.