brunswick nature park & chaim soutine.

the salomon shoes (still wearing last winter's mud), some classic punk, the smoke of leaves, the chocolate woodiness of hot coffee. a sub-70 degree run is as comforting as a fall hoodie.

a cool tuesday and an electric familiar pushes the body through brunswick nature park. . . an immersion of the sounds of pine growth, a deflated basketball of a turtle dragging his shell, heady smells of the damp earth, sweep of yellow necked thrushes, squirrels bouncing branches, sounds of shoes crunching the gravel road towards the kayak launch where the trail crosses perpendicular, cut left, following the creek's tarry bank along the oldest trail of the park before turning into the jerky undulations of the woods. an old paper trail. blood pushes into legs and eyes and core. the words “Cartilage sinew muscle & bone” chant behind nature's seminar of acoustics. A trail run is a burning meditation that engages all the senses.

coolness brings an atmospheric redemption, a body's willingness to move, an innate yearning to stomp out miles on earth's variegated surfaces and the mind bending serious to the hymn of movement. Its an instinct in the new coolness to move and to try to move lithely, to burn the muscles with joy, kicking across storm debris in narrow slices of trail by the black water of town creek which sleeps like midnight quartz.

it is the cadence of crickets and the still drift of white waterlilies and the pungent smells of decay as hurricane irene still lays tangled on the trail and the slopes. the catch of spider webs and their constant disregard. sun & mosquitoes on shoulders. at a corner I shock into two large deer, one darts out in perfect sine movement while the other pauses, her head posed and her eyes black as the creek behind, and she too turns to spring away.

an old man and his dachsund roam the trails and he laughs at me “well i can see you have plenty of energy!” the dachsund runs with me for a few meters and he licks the air and turns back. i pause. the man tells how he kayaks with his dog (jack) at carolina beach and he has the gentleness of the lonely and the aged as he mocks his 72 years. i am torn between the run and his story and i later feel a guilt of not being more present to the him.

Cartilage sinew muscle & bone. the body burns its own fuels of an abstract fire. soutine and his redred landscapes of soppy paint, of mud mingling against a hill's contour with mangled trees and limping architecture. i think of the pastry cook's melancholy. . . his butchery paintings, his trout, his rustic tables with sparse ingredients. Wirey-boned rabbits splayed for an oiled pan. The pigments of carcass, rawanimalpaint, gravy paint. (butcher's paper for his drawings?) the blur of periphery is where soutine resides, in the elusive catch of redemption, the vapid glory of renaissance, in the breakdown of muscle on bone and the depiction of such a thing. unjudged, unhaunting. the detachment with which turner depicted london like a nocturnal explosion. . . nero's firey violin bow or whateverthefuck he played while rome was devastated. Cartilage sinew muscle and bone and not much more to the whole thing, to this architecture of breath and idea and movement and infinity. layers of the aleph. soutine was poor as dirt as a man but his soul (and his soul's palette) was a cathedral. 

the cadence of legs becomes the momentum of mind, and the running season is returning with 15k at brunswick nature park and life is good with the tapping of typing after a trail run in september. Lungs gasp at psalms and miles and autumn may be the one true palette of the year. Like soutine, like a run, like a lunge of lust, a burn of things primed and respiring into winter.

excerpts of thought.

April 27^th. Morning of ny ing marathon lottery begins with six miles at 5h30am.  running in the early dark is an eerie thing, entirely different than running in late dark but still vulnerable and primitive and revitalizing.  raw. an interesting mantra cycle/ chorus of fragments: 
silver scythe cutting spring wheatsky.

Harvest a field of pthalo blue.

Kicks through an empty, echoless world.

May 3^rd. Ran nine at brunswick nature park in slow/fast clips hurdling horse-scat and roots and eventually (felt it coming) broke a quick bend to the right as a black snake raced beneath feet off trail and swiftly ascended a net of branch and vine, his climbing form like a heavy black rope pulled in strange jerks through the tangle of growth. Unlike anything i'd ever seen before.

lotus blooms in marshland of bnp

trail shot on bnp with new growth in may.

May 6^th. A dozen miles at carolina beach state park with the great punctuation- the pause, build and break of the momentum- being a large deer that surprised me on a bend in the sand-bermed turn. She jammed through the thick of trees as a quick-paced percussion of hoof, her form dissolving immediately behind pines and crag oaks. . . reminded me of running pennsylvania when a huge buck and two doe stood on a gravel farm road in early morning, within twenty feet, a shock of deer when a doe sprang sharply ahead and her hooves where eye-level in effortless power and ee cummings poem 'bout the lithe light deer the fleet flown deer but back to carolina beach on a hot friday morning when I kicked slow and meandering like a heavy thing falling down the trail to be mocked by nature's brutal if not ungentle wit.

Run for Ray Trail Half-Marathon, 2011.

February 28th, dernier jour du mois. . . . hoooowwweeee!

Line up before HM/10k. the strangeness of the trail runner.

Run for Ray 2011 passed in ideal weather Saturday morning at Brunswick Nature Park with 230 runners kicking across the optioned distances of 3m, 6m and 13m. Folks paced and sprinted the dirt roads beneath the full sun, dogs pushed paws into dirt, and families greeted arriving families.  A map showed two loops across the trail-system with two dirt road out-and-backs for the HM distance, 70% being on raw trails, coiled and switch-backing through woods alongside Town Creek on pine-needled single-track, fast footing interspersed with some rough & technical patches, a varied trail to work through, as well as some quad-bashing incline/decline areas.  Coffee and bananas, a timing mat for B-tagged number bibs, a fine payne's gray shirt with a print of Ray Underhill popping a backside air (complete with rail sliders), and friendly exchanges preceded the line-up horn. Serious runners with pioneer builds and appalachian beards in shirts reading Uwharrie 40 miler and Umstead trail marathon flashed smiles, were jovial and kind, a good field of local trail talent. Directions were given, the countdown, and the galloping beat down the dirt road.  The mad pace of the front runners jammed out as I boosted through the first out-and-back, before the single track, trying to buffer my midpack position, to be unforced in pace.  At the trail head we fell into the pines and followed the serpentine wind through about three miles of woods, crossed the road (by a nice kayak launch) where the trail is kinked and slower, about 1.5 miles and then a short dig to hit another entrance onto a new trail which ran 1.5 miles and then poured out against the second out-and-back.   My early push was punishing my legs, acidic cement in calves and quads and my calories were low, but the woods were wonderful and the volunteers were encouraging.  At one point I was head-singing (to the faint tune of an 80's song) “when the quad detaches from the bone.”  I passed through the first loop, saw ky and the wife, and kept up the effort for the repeated loop.

mid-point with finish chute to right.  My wife:  "you looked a little rougher than i would've expected."

The race was a fast one with a front pack battle driving the winner to a 6m 22s pace, 40 seconds faster than last year.  My time was 1h 43min, a 7m 48s min/mile, which beat last years time by about 30 secs/mile.  My position in the field of 47dropped to19th from last year's 17th. An encouraging improvement, though I could've done better with more patience in the opening sprint.  Ray Underhill decks were the trophies for top three finishers per race, and the organizers mingled and sought feedback for next year's run, throwing ideas for longer distances on these trails soon.  Very exciting prospects, and they get this race tightened down better every year.  My wife drove my wobbly body home and made pastas and coffee and let me move slowly with blisters like a fleshy mudslide on the balls of my forefeet before work at 3h30pm.

A bend in the form with caravaggio, bach, dizzy miles, sleeplessness, post surgery.

insomniac scribble interlaced with lucubration.

Brunswick Nature Park overlook just off trail.

I'd started an essay on carravaggio, his madness and rage and death and how that torment was the architecture for his high renaissance beauty, but promptly quit to Brunswick Nature Park for a run and the morning was spring-easy and bright, with an optimistic goal for the morning run of 24k (~ 15m). . . a gel, a clifbar, a quart of h20 and a pint of gatorade stashed in the civic after a breakfast of banana and coffee, yogurt folded with nut & pommegranite granola, and my energy felt full and lucid. Gulp of coffee at 8h40am, cut off marley's soul rebel, set the garmin, and began to loosen the legs toward the trail head.  I wanted to savor the run, to mill out a slow clip of 10min/m or so, feeling the weight of my movement on earth as earth pushed back, a strengthening pace, and as oral surgery haunted tomorrow morning, I just wanted to run until the leg-labors reduced me to meat and easy breath and then shower and bach's fugues worked against fluid drawings of a twisted dancer, look at some modigliani, more caravaggio or baselitz before the night's shift. . . rodin's black drawings, erotic and bruised, pungent of the oils of fingertips and sex, pushing the mixture of ink and charcoal into heavy-toothed pages, joan mitchell's canvases so poetic and profound, minimal like a visual haiku. . . . slowly the trail wound around the stubbed woods shouldering Town Creek, black and still with a reflection of the surrounding evergreens barely broken by a ripple along her long reach, smooth like a lady's arm. . . . smells off the brackish stew where the root-knobs rose from the shallows and a dragonfly jerked in flight. . . abruptly the run got blurred, eyes wincing as if in allergy or irritant, and slowly a dizziness crept up and stalled on me, and I found myself experiencing some degree of tunnel vision as if in full exertion approaching blackout, the shrinking frame of vision.  Slowing, I pulled the pace to a jog, short kicks along the side of the creek, stretching the various ropes in my legs, reeling long drags of the fermented wood and freshly upturned earth, and I finished the trail to turn back towards the car, to jog back to point A, blaming dehydration or progressive fatigue. . . beating myself for a failing run, knowing runs would be restricted for several days, blaming the long work week with valentines rolling through our tables like a barrage, wearing me down perhaps more than I suspected. . . . drank half-water, half-gatorade, and hung around.  I walked to the picnic area, quiet and serene now, a cool breeze against mud-splashed legs, and began to really enjoy my presence, a sanctuary.  between thoughts, I got my head and heart anchored, and back into the woods I went, this time enjoying foot-play and the flittering birds shocking me back into it, back into the air, then thinking of picasso and his savage thanatost, his brutal beauty, monet's wonderment and pleasure in his giverny gardens, contemplated the kindred love of a plein air painter and someone running the woods, wondered if saint francis or basho would blame me for wanting to just run in this, gulping it in under legs and the senses peeled back raw beneath effort, or would they tell me to slow it down brother, be still. . . . dharma bums & desolation angels. . . but running, exertion, its an exorcism, its the struggle  the push  the suffering, and it brings the Core back into focus, reads clearly the private language in the Landscape, the private calligraphy of long runs alone in God's land, and yet as I write this, re-experiencing the deep stomach horrors of hunger and narcotics, post-surgery blues at 4h43am, bloody gums adding ferric bite to my strongest coffee, the tastes of decay, and the narcotics back in the system is unpleasant even if temporary, to eat a pill first thing this insomniac pre-dawn, crawling out of the twisted bed, self-medicating, its all very depressing.  a moment of despair, of tears, probably the result of the narcotics themselves, and no sleep all night, laying beside my wife, who sleeps well and deeply while kyote coughs and I am trying to think interesting thoughts, trying to be okay, to let my body relax into sleep, to ignore the bloody belches, the headache, the medicine tastes behind the sour-iron breath, and i've had many days such as this, but not in a long time, not in years, and I wish I could run, reclaim this mess of a body, so quickly lost. The bend in the thing is purely temporary, and I reflect back to the run where my goal of fifteen miles distengrated into seven miles and struggle not to read it as some metaphysical layer, some metaphor, a horrible prophecy. caravaggio.

Follow the rain.

The storm beat furiously and now I am footslogging across the Brunswick Nature Park, a Tuesday morning solo run, and the trails are mired, tarred, full of difficult navigation. No jesus lizard footing, no skim-sole trick to it, drudging through slosh and slog. . . a pleasureless, laborious run.
The air has a vaporous sizzle carrying the sweet smoke of dead leaves. Beside the trail, Town Creek runs high and dark, lugubrious, with pine oils and winter paleness.  To watch the life of rainwater, to start seeing patterns in the rain and the earth, be in Nature is the point, the ideal of immersing oneself in nature and movement.  I remind myself to enjoy the run, to enjoy the journey of the run, to be present on the trail.  A visual meditation begins to focus on the way rain sculpts a trail, the natural berms of dirt on turns, the mild contours rolling with an easy cadence, the rivulets cutting veins into red clay, the rocks cleft into erratic rows by torrential runoff, and its a good time to study the footing dynamics of a trail, of my own footing.  I slow down, smooth it out, push from the ribs.  Footing is a universal meditation as we skim the various crusts of the earth and rain adds its own layer of concentration, of mindfulness, and also gives form to the narrative of a trail's deeper nature.  So regard the way the rain runs a trail, attempt to emulate that fluid ease, to follow with a poetic sensitivity, to run as the rain as you conform your efforts to the terrain beneath.

A bend in the form. . . . February and the Year of the Rabbit.

Less than two months until the Gator Trail 50k.  Forty Miles (and a mule) will get me to the finish, maybe, but my weekly total should be more like 60-70 miles and not 35-44. My endurance of mileage is making me nervous.

2.3.11 Lung Distance Logs & Pain Management: Brunswick Nature Park, ten miles. 

Blue Clay trails were closed again, making it the third time in two weeks, so a twenty minute drive had me pulling into the Brunswick Nature Park.  Originally a paper mill forest, this land was granted to Brunswick County to become the newest park to green-mark our coastal region map.  Situated in northern Brunswick County, the 911 acres display a magnificent variety of terrain everyone can enjoy, especially mountain bikers, day-hikers, or trail runners.  (Equestrian trails are in the works, and there are horseshoe prints on the road!)  My last visit was a year ago, Run for Ray 2010, so I drove around to get my bearings and see the recent work. First off: the land is beautiful.  Big improvements include: a. a sheltered picnic area, including a grill  b.  a permanent facility offers a shower and actual bathrooms, though they weren't open yet (meanwhile there are port-a-johns)  c. a new trail, running about 1.5 miles (thanks to SORBA and the volunteers), marked by a laminated sign which had been tacked up on a tree.  The new trail plus the existing system of fireroads, animal trails, and previously blazed trails makes it easily five miles of trail, interconnected to keep navigation slightly confusing, but making difficult any desperate disorientation.  

As the damp cold was leveling my motivation for the run, I grabbed a water bottle and headed down a gravel road towards the Town Creek, towards the new kayak launch where a trail crosses, allowing a left or right turn into the trail network. I made a left and ran through a picnic area overlooking the creek, where a few lazy sandwiches with Kyote and the Wife could be enjoyed.  The trail took a more serious breath as the first mile started burning the hips and abdomens, leaning into and out of turns and berms and trees-turned-pikes (careful y'all!!). . . x-slope reblistered both feet through jackrabbit turns, quick pitch shifts, root-knobs bulging obscurely through pine-straw and dead leaves, spear-ended spits pointing into the trail at every twist and turn (one damn near getting a nick on my neck on one of two falls). . . a massive pile of unidentifiable feces that, if I didn't know better, I'd call bear shit, distant choruses of angry dogs, sudden mud-slicks slinging legs multiple directions like a cartoon, and the sheer beauty of it all, running along the Town Creek river, her black surface full of resin and lazy drift. . . and while I ran slow and steady across the varied & unpredictable terrain, while I was pushing up root-riddled hills to sand-slides knotted by ropes and branches, the pleasure was erratic, intermittent, because, honestly, it was work.  Plain and simple work.. . keeping the legs milling and not crashing into the next pined corner, plain work avoiding the deep holes where trees were pulled up by their roots by unknown forces, plain work keeping eyes focused on the next ten feet of foot-falls. . . tunnel-vision trails. . . by mile six the wheels were coming off the wagon, felt like I got hacked down by a bushwhacker. . . thought to myself “holy shit” a few times. . . and my pace slowed until I was shuffling along, side-stepping the bear shit, thankful to stop and step aside for the four other mountain bikers out there, catch a breath, then resume into the sporadic lunges of pace along the new trail, bumpy and rooty, primitive and fun, over fallen trees with orange wood splintering, past with one heroic guy laying sand across stretches to “smooth it out for you”, and he was resting with a tin of pistachios during a lull, his empty wheelbarrow beside.  Another mile or so , a gulp of water and then to the car.  “So much depends upon a mountain bikers' wheelbarrow.”

2.4.11. Pain-management Run Number Two. . . Cold, wet slogging out at Poplar Grove. . . . four miles of wishing my wife could be running beside me, talking or not talking, just there. . . the weather was horrible, the run was rough, yesterday's run lingering, taxing the legs and knees. . . eyes cast down on the rivulets and trenches and puddles of rainwater, cast down blankly into footfalls, cast down on numb-hot legs. the highlight, a moment of pleasure for which I paused, was a wonderful blackbird cyclone spiraling onto long brown fields rolling towards unseen sea, their stark forms (individually, collectively) moving rhythmically onto the furrowed chunks of earth, searching for the worms emerging from the clay. . . . . rain dissolved the trees like an impressionist brush about a half-mile away, sfumati of the storm, the renaissance light of a winter rain in the woods, and rain pelted my jacket and legs and my legs burned red against rain and run, splashes of sand & cold on every step, sloshes of shoes and socks.  A pain management run, a weather-endurance  run. A run obsessed with the PCJ at the end, a medium tanzania (dark and bold, a slight roasted-nut note) and a delicious orange-cranberry muffin for the drive home, including some new song by the Decemberists before switching off to a late Beethoven piano sonata.