Ice Cold

The Saint Louis air was frigid and dry on Sunday morning. I exited my apartment just before dawn broke and I exhaled a visible plume. I quickly wrapped my arms around my torso and shivered.

The run was through Simpson park, my first run in the area. I noted a river glinting silver to one side of me. The desiccated and barren trees made it seem like something crucial in the park was missing.

I was on a group run but somehow still lost in thought. My mind traced back to a night terror I had several nights prior.

In the dream I was swimming in a mysterious river’s dark waters, against current. Storm clouds gathered suddenly and my stroke rate accelerated, eager to escape the river. Eventually I made it to some shore, where a group of parents stood vigilant.

“Where are the kids?” One of them asked me.

And suddenly in the dream I was a coach, and I was supposed to be leading a team upstream as part of a workout.

The rain pelted everything. Thunder roared. Shadows stretched. Panicked, I jumped back in the river in search of the athletes. One by one, I started to find them. I woke up wracked with guilt.

I don’t know what the dream meant, if anything, but I find it interesting that I’ve had several memorable dreams about rivers over the past few weeks.

I finished the group run feeling fresh, which was a surprise. The day before was the longest run I’d ever completed: 16.9 miles (27 km). The fresh feeling in my legs was a good signifier that I’m adapting to longer distances.

Looking ahead, I am signed up for a running event on Saturday, a 15k run. I have it in me to run faster than I ever have before if I choose to push myself, and that’s exciting; improvement usually is. I’m not sure, however, that it’s competition that engages me with running. I think I’m running because it has been some sort of act of self-healing. I’m feeling steadily more rejuvenated. Through the act of running I see potential longevity.

There is something about the imperfection of an outdoor run that makes it perfect. It’s always too hot, too cold, too windy, too rainy, or includes too many hills. I realize through outdoor endurance exercise how little control I have over the universe. My lack of control is somehow freeing. A surfer can’t catch anything good by fighting against the current, but rather has to take what is given, even if it’s almost nothing. Similarly I can’t have a good run by exerting beyond my limits, and I can only fight snow and ice so much. It’s a game of patience. There’s a brief period of time in the day for some runs, and then a whole lot of waiting between the gaps.

Life happens between those gaps.

Nerve-Shaken

“Nerve-shaken, over-civilized people really are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains for life.” - John Muir, 1901

Morning cycling temp: 6 degrees F (-14 C). -8 F windchill (-21 C).

Just me and the wild turkey and geese that haunt the Mississippi this morning. No living homo sapien is near. The path is strewn with bird crap because only the birds dare tread over this trail at these temps. The birds dominate the cold and they show it by crapping over everything and everyone.

The cold is absolutely blistering. My hands go numb within 30 minutes and my feet follow about 30 minutes later. I keep pedaling forward. The sun’s about to break to my right, a little solace. To my left, a near-full moon’s lambent glow haunts a navy sky.

“Push through pain,” I keep thinking. “Comfort is your enemy.”

I return home and the warm shower water seems to scathe my toes. My feet are beet red, with small patches of blue and black here and there. Ouch. After about an hour that discoloration fades. It’s not frostbite at least.

Gazing out my window, I see someone chowing down on a burger in his car while waiting at a stoplight.

No one else in this city of over one million was able to bike this morning (maybe someone else was, but no one in my vicinity; I basically had the world to myself). Only a select few dare the winter. This thought gives me fuel.

In the wilderness your senses heighten. My ride got me closer to the wild, but admittedly not fully there. You feel every rise and drop of temperature. You hear the prey animals in hiding and the mating calls of the birds that nest above. Far away, as dawn hits, people are snapping photos of their corporatized lattes.

That ride was certainly a misogi.

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.