Met my running goal for the first week of 2024 yesterday, so today I biked. Again, no problem with my left knee, which is great. I’d like to do more with the bike this winter — maybe try to bike for a little longer? Watched the tokyo triathlon mixed relay. I don’t remember what I thought about and I don’t remember hearing/feeling/seeing/smelling anything while I biked — oh, one thing: a strand of my hair was out of my ponytail and it kept touching the nape of my neck — irritating.
When I am stuck, I walk. I don’t wear earbuds or headphones when I walk, nor when I travel by train or bus, because I want all of my senses to be centrally alive to what’s around: the music that lurks in the crevices of city sounds, forest sounds, desert sounds. I am reminded of John Cage’s art pieceA Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, a map with colored lines and vectors that reconstruct the city transversely from without in the layering of aleatoric drift over cartographic direction. To this end, unstructured walking, the pure derive of walking, can become something like a divinatory practice, chance-based yet ritualized.
4.15 miles bottom of franklin hill (short) 32 degrees
Another Saturday run with Scott. Last night, we got a light dusting of snow which made everything frosty and a little slick at the start. Scott talked about the latest mash-up he’s arranging with the theme from Taxi and Green Day’s Brain Stew, Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4. Then I talked about my latest focus on doors and windows and how it is allowing me to engage with things (poems, essays, ideas) that I’ve collected previously but were buried in a file folder or a log entry.
As we ran down the hill I mentioned something I had read in an essay by George Orwell, Why I Write. He describes how when he was an undergrad at Berkeley* he wanted to be an intellectual, but when he was supposed to be reading Hegel he would always be looking out the window, admiring the flowers instead.
*Scott didn’t hear anything after I said Orwell went to Berkeley; he was confused, believing that Orwell never left England. I checked the essay when I got home and realized that there were two versions of “Why I Write” in the document, one by Orwell, one by Joan Didion. The reference to Berkeley was from Joan Didion. Sometimes I get frustrated with Scott’s attention to details, but he’s usually right and I’m grateful that he caught this mistake (which was my fault, but not totally; the essays were placed one after the other in a document that was not well marked. His almost always being right can be irritating, but that’s more my problem than his, I guess.
Here’s the quote:
During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral.
Why I Write/ Joan Didion
I love her mention of the peripheral. That’s where I spend all of my time too — literally and figuratively.
10 Things
stretches of the trail were slick and my feet slipped a few times
the knocking of a woodpecker — the sound echoed through an empty field
the ice chunks on the river yesterday had melted and were replaced with swirls of foam
the quiet thuds of a faster runner approaching from behind
after he passed us, he kicked a big branch off to the side (we were grateful and impressed that he was able to do it while running fast down the hill)
there was a thin layer of snow on the top of the concrete wall next to the river
the suspended path on the other side — in the east river flats — looked inviting — I’d like to run it before it’s closed for the winter — maybe it already is?
passing by the ghost bike hanging from the trestle
the curved fence above the big sewer pipe was easy to see below us — no more leaves blocking our view
passing a guy walking a dog on the sidewalk, saying good morning — realizing it was not morning but afternoon — 12:30 — we went out for the run a little later than usual
At the bottom of the franklin hill, Scott used my phone to take some video of the foamy, fast-moving water. Here’s a short clip:
fast moving foam / 5 jan 2024
Here are two passages from Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting that include windows and doors:
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell–like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
—
That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comfortingto feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door
5.15 miles bottom of franklin hill turn around 30 degrees
Yes! A great run. A brief runner’s high around mile 4. At the beginning it felt cold, but almost early spring-like: chirping birds, soft shadows, humid air, clear paths. In certain spots the path was dotted with ice.
Passed a group of 4 or 5 runners twice. Smelled cigarette smoke. Watched a car driving over the I-94 bridge. Listened to the group of women laughing, cars passing, ice sizzling heading north. Put it Billie Eilish essentials on the way back — maybe I’m, maybe I’m, maybe I’m the problem.
Something to try today, from Richard Siken: one image
The heart of lyric poetry is music and image. Music is hard to talk about but image is easy. It’s not too late to start an exercise. Write down one image every day that was striking. It’s good as a resource to pull from for writing or just for remembering. Date them. >
Today’s image: sizzling ice on the river chunks? sheets? just starting to form, floating on the surface. I took a video:
ice on the mississippi / 5 jan 2024
Standing there, holding my phone, the ice was moving slowly downstream and sizzling. In the video, I can’t see it moving and all I can hear is the traffic from the I-94 bridge just above. I wish I just kept the phone still; it’s moving around too much. The sizzle sounded like the sizzle I heard in my head after I fainted last week. A sizzle or crackle or static-y sound. The movement of the ice was slow and gentle and persistent (or insistent?).
windows and doors
Yesterday, it came to me: windows and doors. That’s what the theme for January should be. Will it stick? Not sure, but today I begin by thinking about windows and doors as I ran. I held onto a few thoughts and recorded them into my phone right after I finished my run:
Windows as in the frame and how often I see what’s just outside of the frame because I feel it off to the far edge (mainly because of my heightened peripheral vision).
A door as being open — focus on what’s through the other door, the room on the other side, as opposed to the door as framing what you see. Whereas the window is about the frame and about this thing in between you and the is/real. The frame is language, our access to the real. The framing of something as a useful limitation, helping to focus a form. The window is a form where the energy goes, where it’s held in, so the poem still has heat.
I’ve collected door and window poems before on this log, so this isn’t a new idea, I’m just adding to it. Here’s a door and window poem for today — actually, an excerpt from an amazing poem by Victoria Chang:
Feb.10.2022 Today the river is in crisis, no horizon dares to go near it. Today my father is in a small jar. At dusk, I went into a painter’s studio, saw his stretched canvas on the table, white, empty. What are we without those who made us? May his memory be your blessing, people emailed me all week. The artist was painting a series of doors, which were so real that I walked through the one that was slightly open. Inside the room was my breath that I had held since January 13, an eyelid, a loose eyeball, the knob the eye fell on, the girl’s hands that tried to catch him, which were charred and still waving.
Feb.11.2022 The white truck went from one frame to the next and I thought of the time when someone lied about me. How day and night I cared so much about the lie that it split into two, one part went out the left window frame, the other out the right. Like the blue car that disappears at the same time as the white one, yet I can see both at once. When they burned my father’s body, I wondered if the eyeballs spread so far on each side that they could see Wyoming, these two panes, me on a small brown chair, looking out the windows, waiting for oblivion to travel through with its eighteen wheels and truth.
Feb.12.2022 At the beginning of our family tree was hope. Or maybe it was just an owl.
Feb.13.2022 The same wind was blowing here eighty years ago, always snapping families in half.
Feb.14.2022 If I keep the window closed, I am stuck inside with language as it buzzes back and forth, trying to get out and start wars.
First, so much of what she writes here (and in the rest of the poem) is echoed in other things I read earlier today and yesterday by Viola Cordova and Jake Skeets. Wow.
On January 4, 1966, On Kawara began his Today series, or Date Paintings. He worked on the series for nearly five decades. A Date Painting is a monochromatic canvas of red, blue, or gray with the date on which it was made inscribed in white. Date Paintings range in size from 8 x 10 inches to 61 x 89 inches. The date is composed in the language and convention of the place where Kawara made the painting. When he was in a country with a non-Roman alphabet, he used Esperanto. He did not create a painting every day, but some days he made two, even three. The paintings were produced meticulously over the course of many hours according to a series of steps that never varied. If a painting was not finished by midnight, he destroyed it. The quasi-mechanical element of his routine makes the production of each painting an exercise in meditation.1 Kawara fabricated a cardboard storage box for each Date Painting. Many boxes are lined with a cutting from a local newspaper. Works were often given subtitles, many of which he drew from the daily press.
In the article, I also found this classroom activity suggestion:
Subtitle Your Days
Many of the Date Paintings have subtitles. Some of these titles record personal anecdotes, such as “I played ‘Monopoly’ with Joseph, Christine and Hiroko this afternoon. We ate a lot of spaghetti” (January 1, 1968). Others record current events, some of them momentous, such as the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Still other subtitles refer to the Date Paintings themselves; one reads, “I am afraid of my ‘Today’ paintings” (May 29, 1966). For this activity, challenge students to record a subtitle for each day of the week for two weeks. These subtitles can be personal, historical, or even arbitrary. What is it like to capture a day with a subtitle?
I like the idea of combining Siken’s suggestion of an image a day with Kawara’s date poems and Chang’s reading of the date as a door into somewhere else. A date as door, an image as door.
A nice day, not too cold and with no snow, but I ran a 10k yesterday and I’m trying to be responsible with my training and not overdo it. But, after feeling frustrated when my password wouldn’t reset and overwhelmed by my haunts obsession, I knew I needed exercise. So I biked in the basement. It felt good, and my left knee didn’t hurt like it did last year. I feel much better now. While I biked I watched an old PTO triathlon race and forgot about my frustration.
Is there a word for experiencing frustration when something won’t work online? It’s not an overall fear or hatred of technology or computers, but a temporary breakdown/panic when I can’t get it to work, or when I need to resubmit a password but can’t find it, or when I know there’s something I haven’t filled out in an online form, but I can’t see what or where it is. It’s also anger at how poorly designed online forms are or how the user experience (UX) doesn’t consider enough people’s differing abilities — especially older people or young-ish people like me, who can’t see very well — or, as Scott just mentioned to me, how UX can be designed to direct people in ways they don’t want. This last thing is called dark or deceptive patterns. An example: a site makes it confusing and almost impossible to unsubscribe or cancel online.
Maybe reading this site, Deceptive Patterns, could give me some better words.
Before — or maybe it was after? — I was derailed by passwords, I came across an interview with the writer/philosopher/nature writer/climate change activist, Kathleen Dean Moore.
Here’s how I got there:
Thinking about water and stone and air I remembered something I read in a beautiful essay by Jake Skeets, My Name is Beauty. Skeets is quoting another writer, Viola Cordova and her essay, “Language as Window” — they’re both talking about moving (swimming) through the world, not walking on it
I searched for that essay and found that it was in a collection by Cordova, How it Is (I was able to check it out from my public library!), which was edited by Kathleen Dean Moore
A link for Moore’s site came up and I was intrigued by its name, River Walking, so I checked it out, and in the media section I found a great interview, Why I Write
I miss the days of wandering through libraries, from shelf to shelf, following footnotes and bibliographies to new ideas and friends, but I’m grateful for the internet and ebooks, especially as my central vision deteriorates.
Anyway, here’s something I just read in the interview about forms of thinking:
everybody – should have an education in three kinds of thinking:
Critical thinking. The essential art of reaching reliable conclusions on the basis of evidence; the ability to defend yourself against flawed arguments or deceptive assumptions. This is the foundation of a rational life.
Empathetic thinking. The art of putting yourself in another’s place, seeing the world through their eyes, and asking what you would believe and do in their situation; the art of asking questions about why they believe what they do and make the decisions they do. This is the foundation of justice and compassion.
Hypothetical thinking, the “if, then” art. The ability to entertain an idea; the ability to consider that things might be different from the way they are now; the art of following a chain of possibilities beyond those immediately apparent. This is the foundation of imagination.
Hooray for great winter runs with clear paths and strong legs and lungs! Yesterday I spent 6 hours in the car — dropping FWA off at college, then going home, then turning around again and going back with a forgotten backpack. Today I’m happy to be outside moving. On the first trip back, as we drove beside minnehaha park I noticed how beautiful it was with the clear view across to the VA home and the open river and the gnarled bare branches, and I thought, I want to run here tomorrow. So today, I did, and it was beautiful. Oh, that river! I hovered above it on the edge of the bluff, and admired it through the bare trees.
My IT band hurt a little, so did my back, but mostly I felt good. I picked up the cadence at the end and sprinted for 20 or 30 seconds — could I call that a “stride”? Thought about how my legs and form felt better after the speed work. Maybe I should try to incorporate this into one of weekly runs?
10 Things
small slivers of ice sprinkled over the path
orange orange everywhere, 1: rusted orange leaves still on the trees
orange orange everywhere, 2: park or city workers in orange vests doing something with a hose near 44th
orange orange everywhere, 3: a compact car in Dukes of Hazzard orange — I stared at it again as it drove north to make sure that it was actually orange
roaring falls, churning bright white
running by the furnace for the old WPA quarry — today I noticed its door, on the other side, a little farther down the bluff
open, flowing, dark gray creek water about to fall over the limestone ledge
a runner running with a big fluffy white dog
the light rail’s recorded bells ding ding dinging
the steady, strong rhythm of my feet lifting up up up up up off the ground
Writing that last item, I remembered something I thought about: how running combines flying (or hovering or floating or flowing without resistance) and striking down hard on the ground (solid, sturdy feet make contact with the surface). As I thought this, I also thought about flying = water and feet striking = stone. Does that work?
Camisha L. Johnson’s wonderful poem, Disclosure, came up on my post for jan 3, 2020. Today I was struck by her explanation:
About this Poem
“A person bumps into me on the street and I instinctively reply, ‘I’m sorry.’ Seconds later, I regret it. I notice the same compulsion towards apology as I navigate the world as a hard of hearing person. What does it mean to feel compelled in this way, to ask forgiveness over and over for interrupting other people’s comfort? Through this poem, I am grappling with what’s happening beneath the surface of those exchanges, the cost of all those apologies, and, ultimately, the unnamed cultural demands of the hearing world.”
—Camisha L. Jones
a fun challenge
Yesterday I used the word supine and remember my beloved high school vocab workshop book. I found it on my bookshelf and had an idea: why not randomly pick a word from each day and spend time with it (ideally, write a poem about it). Yesterday’s word (found after I asked FWA to pick a number between 1 and 162 while he waited for his doctor’s appointment): kudos
Here’s a poem inspired by the clinic waiting room:
Kudos Tuesday you’re off to a great start a crowded waiting room everyone masked deep coughs a long wait for urgent care a confused woman with a respiratory infection uncertain whether or not to wait in this stuffy room for 2 hours — should she stay or should she go? her daughter arrives and says, let’s sidebar for a moment and I don’t care what they decide I just want to know if this is how lawyers talk all the time or she’s just watched too much law and order
4.5 miles minnehaha falls and back 24 degrees 95% snow-covered
Today Scott and I are signing up to run the marathon on October 6, 2024. I believe that the third time will be the charm; I will finally show up to the start line.
Today’s run was a good way to start the new year. Last year had its terrible lows (Scott’s dad dying) and some wonderful highs (being nominated for a pushcart prize). What will 2024 bring? I’ve decided not to be scared or to spend too much time dreading next year’s election. This year is about running and poetry and finding new ways to connect with the world, words, people, a place.
The path was almost completely covered with a thin layer of soft, dry snow. Not slick, but a little difficult in the spots where the snow had covered the potholes. The trick was to notice where the snow was thicker, whiter: that’s where it had accumulated in the potholes.
Greeted a lot of other runners and walkers, noticed the steel blue river — open, no ice, listened to soft crunch of the snow, cars passing by, random voices, the collar of my jacket rubbing against the ear flaps of my cap.
Heard a runner say the number 27. Also heard a noise under the ford bridge that I couldn’t quite identify: brittle clacking which could have been ice or frozen leaves being moved by the wind. Heard the falls rushing over the limestone ledge and at least one kid being obnoxious.
Earlier today I was remembering words related to glitter, like glint and glisk, which is a gleam of light through a cloud. As I ran south, nearing Locks and Dam no. 1, I felt a glisk above me.
I don’t remember any bikes or birds or skiers. No squirrels or music. A few dogs.
Oh–right above the falls I noticed a person with a walker in a bright red coat. I almost called out, I love your red coat!, but I thought better of it. It’s quite possible that the coat wasn’t red but some other color. A strange side effect of my vision: the more wrong I am about something, the more likely I am to announce it to others. Why? I’m not sure.
random thing for future Sara to remember: Over the holiday, there’s been a series of cycle-cross races in Europe, which is biking on a looped course that involves mud and hopping over bumps and carrying bikes up stairs and ruts and steep hills and extremely tight turns. They keep coming up on youtube, and I keep watching them. Very fun to watch. I can’t imagine ever being able to do one of these races. So scary and technical and demanding!
one more thing: I had to return a few hours later to this log to add something I forgot. Geese! In my last mile, running on Edmund, I heard some honking so I stopped running and looked up. A few seconds later, a vee of geese high in the gray sky. A car passed as I stood there, on the edge of the road. Did they wonder what I was doing?
Sometime last night, my left leg/knee started to hurt, then it snowed and left slippery sidewalks, so today I decided to be cautious and bike. Watched a replay of the Kona Ironman from 2017 while I biked. At one point, they interviewed 6 (or 5?) time Ironman winner Natasha Badmann. I remember her! She had an amazing perspective on one of the toughest parts of the course: the energy lab. She saw it as giving her energy, not taking it away — the energy of inspiration from the powerful waves off in the distance. Wow, to be that present when you’re 6 or 7 hours into a tough race is impressive. As I biked, I thought about athletes and the different ways they try to overcome the strong desire to stop, give up. I find Badmann’s approach to be a helpful lesson in letting go — not trying to control your thoughts or getting rid of your pain, but releasing them and shifting to another way of being — a way in which you’re not centered, but witnessing something beside yourself. Does that make sense?
Before biking, I had a good morning filled with ideas: 1. creating a series of short poems in which I use my favorite lines from other poets by fitting them into my running/rhythmic breathing form: 3/2 and 2. using my 3/2 form and writing poems that are one sentence long.
I also watched an amazing talk by Ed Hirsch on poetry, the poem, and the reader:
I wish there was a transcript. If there is, I can’t find it, so here are some of my highlights:
Poetry exists to inspire the reader not to inspire the writer, that the purpose of poetry is in the relationship between a poet, a poem, and a reader. And it’s in that connection between them.
Talking about his teacher at Grinnell told him:
You have the gifts to be a poet, but what you’re writing is not poetry. It’s not even close to poetry. What you’re writing down are your thoughts and your feelings but you’re not trying to craft anything, you’re not trying to make anything. You’re not writing in relationship to any other poetry. You’re not reading poetry and so you’re not really a poet right now. You are a person who writes poetry. You have to read poetry and connect your poems to what you’re reading.
He discusses reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and feeling a profound connection. It spoke deeply to him and he wanted to know/study how Hopkins could achieve this.
Holy shit, this thing’s a sonnet? You mean, he’s not just writing out his poems the way I write out mine? He’s actually making it rhyme and everything? That seems generous to me. I want to do that. I’m going to try and make something for someone in the future so that they can feel about my poem the way I feel about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem.
Then he talks about how Hopkins’ poem was so distanced from him by time, location, experience, yet it spoke to him more than anything else he had heard. He realized that poetry can communicate more deeply than social conversation.
Celan: a poem is a message in a bottle, not guaranteed to reach anyone; a poem is sent out to some future person
Poets are people who, not so much want to express themselves, but feel so encountered by other poems that they want to respond in kind. That’s why Emily Dickinson calls the poets she reads, “her kinsmen of the shelf.”
The reader plays an important role in the understanding of poetry. The message in the bottle only finds its life when it’s activated in you. When you become the secret addresse.
There are a few poems you read and you go, I feel almost like I’ve written the poem to which I’m actually only responding to.
poetry: the gift of privacy and participation: It gives you interiority and it also gives you connection.
Poetry as stored magic that can’t be paraphrased
Poetry exists in the relationship between the poet who wrote it, the poem which encapsulates the experience, and the reader who reads it.
His discussion here reminds me of an interview I read and posted at some point in the last few years:
We are not diminished but enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a verbal record. We need poetry to help us transform the oceanic depths of feeling into art. Poetry rises out of one solitude to meet another in recognition and connection. It companions us.
And, yes, poetry is connected to contemporary life, but it’s also always connected to other poetry. We need an archive of eloquence and response.
3.1 miles 43rd, north/32nd, east/river road trail, south/42nd, west/edmund, north 29 degrees
My first run since last Sunday, partly due to travel, partly feeling sore. A great winter run. Cold, with layers, but not too cold. And no ice or snow or bad trail conditions. Before we went out for our run, Scott put together his marathon plan for this year — we’ve decided to try again. My goal: to make it to the start line next October, healthy. Should I come up with some sort of a plan? If I did, I imagine it would combine running, walking, and poetry.
As we ran, we talked about how the river road stops being red at certain points where the county or city or state (I can’t remember what Scott said) takes over. In those spots the road is black asphalt. Then I mentioned that we had had a very similar conversation 2 or 3 years ago. Then we talked about time looping and repeating yourself and when it’s ritual, when it’s being stuck in a rut.
10 Things
open, brown river (no ice or snow)
a scratching noise — not roller skier poles but the drum beat on a rap song that 2 white women were blasting as they ran by — wow
one or two patches of ice on the sidewalk by edmund
a runner in a bright orange sweatshirt or jacket, glowing in the gloom
a light grayish-blue sky, everything darker — not feeling like day or night, but some in-between time
a few flurries
pothole 1: what started as a small hole has gotten bigger and deeper every year. 2 years ago they tried to patch it, but it didn’t work. The orange spray paint they used to outline a few years before that has faded, near the oak savanna
pothole 2: at the spot where the bike and walking paths separate, less a pothole, more a deep gash 3 or 4 feet long. Every year they circle it with white spray paint — the shape of paint resembles a tube sock
passing a woman who swung her arm out awkwardly like Dave — wasn’t sure for a minute — could it be Dave? no
looking down at the floodplain forest, pointing out the clear view of the forest floor to Scott. He said if he looked he might faint: vertigo
The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.
From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.
I like the focus on winter colors in this poem and the idea of snow as flamed and flowing and shift from sun-brown and summer-gold into spiritual glinter and how his looks are soft-going. I might need to use that expression for how I see: soft-going.
Warm enough to run outside, but we just got back from our trip and I fell and jarred my neck two night ago and I’m very sore, so I’m taking at least one more day off from running and biking in the basement instead.
Of course there’s more to the story, and because I’m pretty sure future Sara wants to remember, I’ll add a few more details: I fell because I fainted. I fainted because of low blood pressure. I had low blood pressure because of a reaction to ingesting a small dose of an edible — pineapple express. Some reasons I might have had a reaction: pineapple express is a sativa (stimulant) strain and I didn’t need to be stimulated; we had just completed the Hot Ones challenge and I was feeling very ill; I hadn’t eaten much all day and had been standing for hours; I had drank 2 beers; I was seeing family member I hadn’t seen in years and confronting loss; Scott had taken the other half of the gummy and his highly stimulated reaction was too much for me; I should have sat down, but I was walking around because pacing helps me to feel better.
Here’s what happened: Right after we finished the last hot sauce for Hot Ones — which was spicy, but didn’t bother me nearly as much as my stomach — I started feeling strange and off and like I might throw up. I started walking around the apartment, which is what I often do when I feel sick. I felt a heaviness in my body, like a wave of something dropping down from my head and settling in my feet. The last thing I remember is hearing voices talking (probably everyone in the other room) and then a loud smack. Suddenly Scott was calling my name and I was on the floor opening my eyes. Everyone was standing in front of me, staring. I saw FWA first and was struck by how much he and everyone else looked like a still from a film, posed for a dramatic moment. My hand and wrist hurt; so did my butt. I felt overwhelmed and angry that they were all staring at me. Scott’s perspective: He heard a loud smack. When he got to me I was passed out on the floor, twitching. He thought I has having a seizure. He shook me gently a few times before I woke up. Scott walked me to a bed and after some convincing I sat down. He left and I could hear his agitated voice in the next room (he was feeling the effects of the gummy too). He yelled-whispered, I’m really worried about her; I don’t think she’s okay. I responded by yelling from the bed, He’s tripping! Don’t listen to him. I’m fine. And, mostly I was.
“He’s tripping,” might become the new line that RJP and FWA will affectionately (and mockingly) utter for the next year. Last year it was “the fries make it worse!” when Scott tried eating a fry to help temper the heat from that year’s hot sauce challenge.
what I think happened when I fell:Either I instinctively braced my fall, or my hands were already up by my head because when I feel especially sick/anxious/bad, I gather my hair and tug at the roots. This saved me from really knocking my head hard on the floor. I still hit my head, but it was after I fell. I think I might have mild whiplash, judging by the soreness of my neck. This is the first time I have ever fainted in my life — at least that I can remember. Strange and fascinating and unsettling.
Anyway, that is why my neck has jarred and why I’m taking another day off from running.
While I biked I watched (not for the first or even second time), a replay of the women’s triathlon at the Rio Olympics. Go Gwen! I felt strange a few times and thought about what would happen if I fainted while on the bike. But I was fine and kept going and will work hard to not add fainting and falling to my list of anxieties.
3.1 miles edmund, south/river road trail, north/32nd, east/44th, south 52 degrees
52 degrees! Shorts and one bright yellow long-sleeved shirt! Wow. Scott and I couldn’t pass up the chance to run in shorts in December, so we went out for a 5k. It really doesn’t feel like Christmas.
We talked about the terrible meal we had last night when we went out dinner (Scott’s fish was completely raw) and the double half marathon (a 1/2 in minneapolis one day, in eue claire the next) that Twin Cities in Motion is advertising for April and the time I was running up the hill and a barefoot kid raced me for a few seconds.
Other things I remember: the river was blue and open, the sidewalk on 32nd was in bad shape, the floodplain forest didn’t have any ice, there were a few stones stacked on the big boulder, the colors — rusty green — on the wet boulder near the bench.
Here’s poem I encountered this morning. I love the brevity and the title and the magical moment of hope that it captures.
& the caramel sticks to my hands & my hands stick to my cheeks & everyone marvels at my choux pastry magic & no one asks what I am going to do with my sad, sorry life