However, it's taught me a lot about pushing through boundaries, and I've gotten to be able to do the 25 minute track, up around Stow Lake and back, without stopping, just varying my pace and intensity. And in fact, the other day I did a 45 minute run, stopping only once, which was a lot for me.
But in Sacramento, the twenty minute course was too much for me to do without stopping several times. Is there less oxygen in the Valley? One thing is that the cold is different there than here, dryer and more penetrating, so my muscles did not seem to warm up and stretch out like in S.F. Be that as it may, the subjective experience was of hitting a wall that I couldn't get through.
My last run, on Christmas morning, I went past the horse stable, which this morning was horse-less, and down through what, in my adolescence, was the mansion neighborhood. Now they look like slightly upper-middle class ranch homes, analogous to how the Snake Canyon-like creek that Corey jumped over on his BMX bike looked, as I ran past it as a 38 year old man, like a little muddy rivulet. Then past the corner where I used to be picked up by the bus to being another traumatic day at junior high school, and down to the corner where, if you take a right, you'll start on the path that took Corey and I out to the wilds of Folsom Reservoir. But I turned left, taking me past the road where my friends Mike and Pat used to live, when I was 19. I contemplated going to look at the house, but didn't, for probably a layer cake of reasons. That was where I had my brief fling with drugs and alcohol, an important, but thankfully short time. Both of them are still living in Sacramento. Pat is a visual artist, and Mike is going on 10 years since his fall from his parents roof that damaged his brain and has put him permanently into a wheelchair. For many years I had dreams in which he showed up, as good natured and slovenly as ever, saying nonchalantly that they'd found a cure and he was fine now.
Then I turned back towards my parents' house, down a road that used to be blocked off to through traffic, past the trailer park where, when I was in junior college, I would deliver Pizza Hut pizzas the the same young guy, usually around 11pm. He, as I remember, tipped well. This was the last stretch of the run, and where that familiar wall arose, which shows up as my mind starting to kick out "Stop!" messages. It begins to feel like I'm running on fog. No just through fog, but on it, and trying to lean into it. It's been an ugly feeling.
Now, Heather and I went to see a film called The Fountain a few weeks ago (which has been, unfortunately and unjustifiably, panned...which I went along with till hearing a review by Stuart Davis). The protagonist, through three incarnations, progressively understands what death offers and stops fighting it; the ending sees him, facing dissolution into a supernova, ecstatically proclaiming, "I'm going to die!" He's realized that though he's facing the same loss of small "s" self that he's fought against in the previous two lives (as conquistador and scientist), this time he's dying into something, something more comprehensive, expansive not diminishing.
This scene came to mind as I ran down this street, and close to where I had crashed my bike, jamming a handlebar into my gut at age 13, I realized that the same logic applies to this runner's wall. That the my reaction to the fogginess was a reaction to what felt like both a loss of control, and a meaningless dissolution of self. Instead of going with that story, I found some faith that in this experience of breaching my own boundaries, there was something into which I could break apart. The rest of the way home was colored with joy, not bleakness, and the whole experience of fogginess was transformed into the happiness of connectedness and potential.
