The Long Run

Saturday was my longest run to date: 17.75 miles (28 km), with about 30 minutes of it at my goal marathon pace.

The mind, like the body, can wander to distant places during a run of this duration. I found my own thoughts bouncing between old memories and an acute attention to the present moment.

I ran along the Riverfront Trail and noticed that although the trees are still barren—they stand like an endless army of crooked dead things lining the Mississippi River—there are some animals returning. This is a precursor to spring. I saw some American robins hopping around in the grass, for example. I haven’t seen those little birds in that area for several months, though I’m sure they’re elsewhere in the city.

The second half of this run was against a harsh wind that blew northward. I ran directly south for almost 9 miles to return home. In times like this I suspect it’s less fun to be tall.

I felt fresh at the end and finished my run with plenty of energy remaining in my tank. I try to finish most runs feeling this way. If you deplete your system too severely, you may sacrifice too many future workouts for an exercise to be worthwhile. At times that may be okay: you have to cross your threshold to know your own boundaries. I’ve been beyond those boundaries enough times to have a good balance now. Still, I do find myself willing to cross it on occasion. It can be a nice reminder that I’m alive.

One thing that keeps me running is my appreciation for the running community. Events can barely feel like a competition between people because most runners tend to support one another. I’ve often seen runners who’ve finished ahead of me remain at the finish line, cheering for me and the others as I complete my own journey.

I really enjoy being a part of this sort of culture, especially as someone who primarily runs and bikes for the sake of longevity. It is a competition that elevates everyone and is a far cry from the stereotypical “cutthroat” American work culture competition, in which every victory must come at the expense of another (running is, at its heart, a sort of spirited rebellion against the adult status quo).

This mutual respect and desire to see everyone succeed also makes participation in running events more sustainable, which is exactly what I’m looking for: something to keep my adventures active for decades. Who wants to finish an event feeling both crushed and beaten? Running a distance event is itself a significant victory. Most of your coworkers probably couldn’t dream of walking as far as you just ran. As far as I’m concerned, you are a champion.

While peers hobble around with first-world conveniences and wax nostalgia for “youthful” days in which they moved with vitality, endurance runners seek the most treacherous mountain yet.

I suspect many runners are on similar journeys to me. I see mutual fighters against mortality, people seeking connection with an ancient part of human DNA. A long run therefore stretches to the extremes of past and future. It might be a search for answers to questions that can’t be articulated, and that’s okay: the odds of finding the answer were impossible anyways.

Poison

In honor of Alice Cooper’s 75th birthday, Powerwolf released a cover of his hit song “Poison.”

I’m glad the track is more uptempo than the 80’s original. It doesn’t add much more than some additional speed, but I still enjoyed it.

“I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison.” Damned if that isn’t my thought every time I smell fresh-baked cookies or pizza.

Another random thought when I listen to “Poison” regards the wellness industry as it exists today. They say there’s an industry born from every problem posed. This is true in any capitalist society, and companies are inventing problems at breakneck speed. To have their industry thrive, they must convince you that something in your everyday life, which you assumed to be benign, is actually poisonous. It might even be your natural body that must be cured.

These companies really thrive when they’re able to convincingly exaggerate the danger of the problem.

I’ve seen recent advertisements tell me that tap water isn’t safe, and therefore I must buy some egregiously expensive purifiers. But that’s not enough because the purifiers strip water of all minerals. So, I also need to buy minerals to put back in the water. Well what is the point of living in a developed nation if decent water is only for the aristocrats, and must be paid for with subscription?

Likewise you need air purifiers and various scents because you are constantly breathing in poison too.

There are admittedly places where this is true. There are certainly countries where I wouldn’t recommend going outside without a well-filtered mask, nor would I recommend drinking the tap water. And it’s also true that tap water often contains fluoride and chlorine, which when consumed in large quantities can be bad for your health. But how bad?

A multitude of skincare companies tell us about how harmful the sun is. Stay inside, they say! Or if you dare to venture out, buy their cream and lather it all over yourself first! It’s a matter of life and death.

It is true that the sun may induce cancer into the sedentary office individual who dwells under fluorescents all day (and all too eager to fry at the beach for a week’s vacation). But we somehow survived for thousands of years with a fraction of the sun cancer we see now, and I suspect it’s because we absorbed sunlight in more reasonable daily amounts.

How did we ever survive beyond adolescence before these companies existed?

My point to all of this is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decipher the real poisons from the fake ones. Then again, at the end of the day everything is poison if overdosed on, and it’s also true that modern society is causing a lot of individuals to suffer horribly, especially in their later years.

But still, isn’t a better solution to modern maladies to shift culture instead of to simply buy more products?

I’m still convinced that one can live well in a modern developed country at a reasonable budget… if one can decipher truth from the BS, and if one can engage in a healthy community.

Too Much, Too Soon

5 am. A steady rain pattered the concrete around me as I embarked on a morning run. A haze crawled through the downtown area and only the street lamps provided halos of illumination.

I was supposed to perform a 12 minute all-out effort after a 15-30 minute warmup. The day before I felt decent, but had a slight ache in my left knee and felt what could be a nascent shin splint in my right leg.

After a mile of warm-up I realized the pain was only worsening. The shin splint stabbed inside my leg. My left knee was visibly swollen and barely bending. I attempted a few 80 yard accelerations, but was unable to gain full-speed on any of them.

As I attempted one final burst of speed in my 12 minute run, I felt an additional twinge of pain in my collarbone (the one that broke). I knew that I was toast for the day. The body had enough.

In short, I reaped the consequences of attempting too much, too soon. I walked about a mile back to my apartment in the rain, completely unable to run.

How did this happen? Well, I was essentially bedridden for a month, and had attempted runs of one hour or more for 5 days a week immediately upon being cleared by an Orthopedic to run again. Obviously, this was not feasible at all.

It was a difficult experience for me; before the collarbone break I ran almost daily for 8 months with almost no issues. Suddenly it felt like my body was crumbling.

In a sense my body was crumbling. A collarbone break affects a wide range of upper body movements; I’m still severely limited in what I can do with my upper body. The lower body, unable to perform strength exercises, lost a lot of whatever adaptation to running I had accumulated.

By attempting too much running too soon, I invited a host of issues into my lower body. I have no choice but to take a step back.

I’d say that this is a lesson learned, but in truth I’m not sure. Time well tell. It has historically been my nature to overdo things. The blog title is “Maximal Matt,” not “Precautionary Matt.”

Sometimes I wonder if the end of me will come from an attempt to overdo an activity. Maybe it will be a 90-year-old attempt at an ultramarathon or a 100-year-old attempt to bike across the United States. This would be one of the more virtuous ways to go out in my opinion. The way I’ve always seen it is that you don’t truly know your limit until you’ve crossed it.

I crossed my limit the last two weeks; it hurts because as much as I want to attain the distances I feel that I’m capable of running, I know that this phase of running will have to be a slow build from a much smaller starting point.

When gloomy, I look for inspiration in runners who know how to always find joy in the experience. Camille Herron, the 100-mile world record holder for women, always seems to be smiling, even 80 miles into a treacherous trail run. Joy is possible, even in the suffering of it all.

Maybe I can’t run one hundred miles tomorrow, but I can still potentially enjoy the one that I can manage.

An Object in Motion…

An object in motion stays in motion. The opposite is also true.

An inert object struggles mightily to move. The longer the object remains still, the more difficult it becomes to get the object moving again. A rusty old train will cough and wheeze smoke before its slow and lurching movement forward.

I’m finding this to be relevant for myself as I rehab my collarbone. Exercise for me has always been reliant on momentum. Because I always exercised, I always found “maintaining motion” to be relatively easy.

After a few weeks of being sidelined while waiting for my collarbone to heal, I’m finding the thought of movement to seem increasingly tiring. Wouldn’t it be easier to just sleep in?

The body and mind hate changing what they’re accustomed to. I can now see how dangerously easy it would be to forfeit exercise altogether. There’s always an excuse, after all. Work, family, appointments, and life stresses are legitimate reasons to not exercise daily.

I feel a sense of urgency to resume exercise. One can revert the habit of daily exercise surprisingly fast. The human mind will always prefer the easier option. I had never told my mind that an easier option exists, but now it knows that comfort exists in the land of avoidance.

The most difficult part of rehabbing a bone break is waiting to be healed. There is little I hate more than waiting. Days spent waiting for something in the future feel like wasted days. I know I’m close to healing though. Basic chores that were excruciatingly difficult to perform during the first weeks are now becoming easy again.

Hopefully, when I visit the orthopedic on Friday, I’ll be given the “ok” to rid my sling. I’ve been tempted to rid it regardless of the doctor’s orders, but I’ll continue to wait.

I think of the movie Snowpiercer, and the train that continuously races across the world for all of eternity, never to stop, forever on sleek tracks that roar forward. If it stops, its inhabitants die. In some ways I want to be that train.

Genetic Disposition

I have a proclivity for dangerous activities. It’s probably somewhat genetic. My brother had a serious brain injury via a high-speed longboarding crash. My dad has broken the same bone that I just broke several times via waterskiing and high-speed falls.

I remember learning to snow ski when I was young. After my first lesson, I was supposed to attempt the beginner-level slopes.

“What’s the most dangerous hill here?” I kept asking. “I want to try that,” I insisted. And despite protests, I kept insisting. “Give me a slope that’s steep.”

So I dragged my dad to the top of an advanced slope. Give me one for the pros. Now this will get some speed, I thought. Then I proceeded to crash and roll down the entire course, top to bottom. And I enjoyed it. I finished covered in snow and bruises.

Even at amusement parks I cannot ignore the greatest thrills. I insist on the rollercoaster with the most flips in spite of my own severe motion sickness.

Each of my bikepacking trips ends with me asking, “Now how can we top that?”

A broken collarbone comes with the territory. If anything, maybe I’m lucky to have as few breaks as I do.

I had a difficult moment this morning in which I wanted to take a quick walk outside, but could not physically put my jacket on due to the collarbone break and sling that supports it. I stared, defeated, out my apartment window as a light snow flurry fell and powdered the streets with white.

I was in the same situation last year. I tell myself now that I have to be more vigilant, and I will be. I don’t want to spend every winter in rehabilitation from a crash. I’ll be more wary, I’ll gain more skill, and I’ll hope that this is the last bone break or muscle tear.

Ahead lies more cycling and bikepacking. Colorado is on the horizon. So is Utah. They are magnetic for me because of their sheer unpredictability. Trails that wind both vertically and horizontally, that cut through both mountains and wilderness.

At the end of the day, there is no fun without risk.

A proclivity for danger isn’t always a bad thing… in fact, it only sucks during rehab.

Slow Healing

It’s a bit challenging to sleep well with a broken collarbone. That probably goes without saying. Every little twitch and turn during the night wakes you up.

I somehow managed about 7 hours of sleep last night, which is pretty good with all things considered. I can’t say the bone feels any better or worse than it did on Sunday. It might be that way for awhile.

I am still hopeful to be running again within a few weeks time. But, we’ll see how it goes. I missed the mark by months on my foot injury last year. To an extent, a recovery timeline is out of your control, especially with something such as a bone break.

My bikes remain on their racks in my living room. Because I’m housebound right now, I see them almost every waking moment. I want to visualize myself cycling again and enjoying it. I think that I will eventually, but the experience will be different. I’ll probably be intentionally slower and more vigilant.

That’s sort of how it goes with age in general. We try to repeat the thrills of the past, the adventures that exhilarated us when we were young, and to an extent we can. Yet we don’t have the same cells in our bodies, nor do we have the same minds, to experience those adventures. So we go through the motions, and it’s mostly the same… but it’s a little different. Maybe the once-vibrant colors our eyes saw long ago are now dulled or our emotions are a little more subdued. Maybe we miss the element of surprise or the delusion of feeling invincible.

Healing is also a lonely process. Your pain is uniquely your own. The entire right side of my body remains bruised and bloodied. It has been two days of ripping bloody bandages off of my right side.

To the outside ears, it was a “bike crash.” That has little meaning without feeling. To my own nerves feeling the pain, it is constant misery. Your physical pain cannot be shared; it is monogamous, and clings to you for life. It also sucks. Still, I believe that pain is a necessity. Life and death are painful, so you might as well get used to feeling pain.

In time I will be back. How many times have I said that?

Fear of Finality

The morning after Halloween, I rode my Giant road bike along the Riverfront Trail as dawn broke.

The faint sun was veiled behind a dense sheet of clouds. About thirty minutes into the ride, a fog drifted in and choked out the environment. I could see nothing but gray. The animals, the trees, and the river seemed to no longer exist.

I found my mind drifting like the fog around me. I thought about Halloween and what scares people.

I think at the core of what scares people is the fear of finiteness, which is entwined with the fear of death. That one’s existence and consciousness can be wiped out in a moment is what keeps people up at night. It is what has helped conjure various religions and the stranger superstitions such as astrology and tarot cards. Their purpose is to deny this fear from being. We want to believe there is purpose for our existence and that we will continue for eternity. What is it like to not be?

I see this fear played out in every facet of the world.

Corporations and governments, like all organisms, want dominance, but empires come and go.

Modern young adults like to speak of building legacies. They expect their life volumes will be in print forever, but said volumes are quickly lost in the library archives. This reminds me of the ending to Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. The city’s greatest gangster, who spent his entire life vying for power and control, is buried in the city. Then, over the course of a hundred years, we see nature steadily ruin his grave until it is barely perceptible to the human eye at all.

Money, like the tide, ebbs and flows.

Things fall apart, and things cease to be. But, this is only scary if it is denied.

It is not “ceasing to be” that scares me a fraction as much as something else: wasting the time in which I am.

Thoughts by a Windowsill

The winter elements bring to my mind the word “desiccated.” With Mother Nature having stripped all green from the maples, oaks, and brush, I mostly see skeletal branches above and beside me. These spindly things are like brown and dried-up arteries running over the pale winter sky.

I look at my windowsill and the plants that rest on it. Exposed to the elements they would die quickly. In the artifice of my apartment, under my control, they are in a constant state of growth and comfort. We like to believe we control the fates of ourselves and the things around us. To helplessly watch the things we see in our day-to-days wither away, more victims of time, reminds us of our own mortality.

We don’t have as strong a concept of mortality as we used to. That’s what I suspect. A disease of yesteryear would wipe out a third of us, and it would scare many of us, but the modern compulsion to control and reign in was not so much a part of the process. Now we’re more prone to believe that immortality is just a matter of politics or “supporting the better science” or “having the best retirement plan.” I suspect that death for the delusional is an especially terrifying matter.

I’m listening to a song I first heard in 2017 and finding myself in a poignant and melancholy mood. I love the song, but I’m not sure if I love the song because of the melody or because of the place and time it takes me to. I wonder if this fusion of memory and melody is what aging does to music. With each passing year we feel a more turbulent maelstrom of emotions from our old songs, not because of the brilliance of the composition, but because of the memories that the songs stir.

I observe that as people get older they tend to stick to the songs from their youth. Maybe this is where their most vivid memories reside. Maybe this is where most change and most significant events occurred.

May the song I seek always be the one I hear tomorrow.

Thankful: Negatives and Positives

Zero negatives in life do not necessarily compute to a net positive.

How many people seemingly have nothing going wrong but still feel so empty?

In fact, mathematically speaking, if you’ve had more than three negatives in your life (and you’ve likely had innumerable negatives), you are net positive.

What is the cliche? A diamond in the rough; they’re shaped by pressure.

Maybe we (I?) should embrace the negatives.

For example, 11 negatives computes to a net positive of 4. How? If two negatives become a positive, the total sum is 5 minus 1. I’m in net positive territory, if I choose to believe it.

Our negatives have the potential to strengthen and embolden us. Over time, they solidify like clay and transmute us into something new entirely.

If this is true, it’s better to have a lot going wrong than to live in a painless vacuum.

Our negatives give us potential to change. They are what pave the trail ahead. And it’s better to journey forward than to languish in place.

I’m thankful for my negatives today, and the list runs far longer than the first things that sprout to mind:

• For often feeling overlooked as a young age group swimmer.

• For failing my first few leaps in ballet.

• For all of my innumerable rejections, which span a wide gamut of endeavors and attempts.

• For being told my first resume was crap during my first internship interview.

• For being disliked at my first full-time job.

• For being told my teaching was terrible in my first training school session.

• For failing to get a presidential award at the middle school shuttle run.

• For being out-touched at the finish in my final NCAA 200 yard freestyle race.

• For being hit by a car and walking myself home on a torn ankle as adrenaline surged through me.

• For dealing with any and all consequences of the things I’ve said that were wrong.

Each of these in some way led to a net positive.

Today I’m thankful for my failures and the people who were part of them. I’m also thankful I’m still around; I’m ready for the next adventure. And of course, I’m thankful for the positives, and the people who were a part of those!

And I’m thankful for you, because by reading you’ve shared a connection with me.