Derby DNS

thanksgiving morning at 6h17am was cold at wrightsville beach, commencing a 10m circuit in longsleeves and skullcap, tapping an ipod to cypress hill grisman & bach (an eternal braid).  the kicks started swift with a wind in my back and an easy stretch of legs while the stride strengthened and legs find feeling, not good feeling but a feeling, and then legs pull into the knees, engage the hips, arms are swinging and the breath seems to swim between the slight thrust of shoulders and the body synchs from the forefeet up through the posture, arch to neck, and you just bend into the sound of breath between songs and let the muscle tear at the road, let the shoes push into the body's gait, finding that natural movement, finding a rhythm, innate and trained at the same time, a total refined motion.  headwind confronts pace-goals at the turn-around, immediate doubt, but into the wind you bend and strive because you know you have a meal to make.  the mind cycles thanksgivings past, images that haunt and images that remember and those that celebrate, and a gladness and stillness and gratitude hits and the miles fall away with tiny garmin chirps and only two other runners on the entire distance to shell island and the bird reserve where you see a pendulum of a far birdflock in abstract logarithm push and pull in masses of gradating shades and turning back into the sun and out of the wind the legs resume grateful work and you imagine the fine day ahead as an accomplishment founded on every day you've ever lived before.  9.7 miles in 1h06 mins and back home, to my family, stopping first for a bouquet of flowers and a bag of apples.

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getting the guts to start something, to commit to something, is difficult. keeping the guts intact- preserving the momentum- requires a brutality, a disregard of the absurd, a ferocity. It requires an absolute conviction. And at the end of a work cycle is that feeling of Achievement, glorious and brazen and affirming, a bloodrush through the body, a denial to the resentments & doubts stewing in the innermost rot of a person. A completed goal is a life complete, if only momentarily.

But sometimes life doesn't converge, things get garbled and deprioritized and muddied together in a mash of average. . . a cyclic erosion. And at a lowpoint of esteem, missing a goal is akin to bottoming out or failing or worse.
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From the get-go, i was wary of investing my hopes into the Derby 50k road race. however, I kept envisioning myself at the start line, toeing against an imaginary clock with a field of friends and talented runners. pastures and cows and a ribbon of 31 miles wrapping the landscape. My body felt strong, if anchored by thursday's feast. the comradery was off the chart with Mangum Track Club hosting the event. But, alas, work dictated a schedule that made the full distance impossible while my ego ridiculed any efforts at a lesser participation.  Despite my waning enthusiasm, I piled layers of clothing and printed maps, checked fuels and body needs, set the cell alarm. Friday's shift ended early and had me home at 11pm. Derby is a 3h drive so 4am was the wakeup with 4h20am being the latest departure time. Honestly, upon hitting the mattress, I was already resigned. A six hour round trip, fuel costs, work at 3h30pm that afternoon, and a general embarrassment allayed any desire to make it happen.  I considered a local turkey trot, a four mile trail run, but I felt too embarrassed/disappointed to run another race.

Derby 50k was a race i'd hoped to nail since the Mangum Shirt Run. I hadn't realized the depth of my commitment to the race, but missing it had a big impact. Subconsciously I had connected the race and my performance with some deeper self-esteem, some sense of self-worth, and to not even toe the line cost a great deal. I missed a gathering of kindreds, of friends, of fellow madleggers.

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whether signing up for an endurance race or laying paints on an old plank of gessoed plywood, sometimes we just get blocked from complete accomplishment. or we must redefine "accomplishment."

Meanwhile, winter light hits, its dark at 5pm with low clouds brewing storms, and the hollowness of late november light folds into itself like a theater of sleep.

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Arkansas (Occupy America) is gessoed with a few charcoal lines.  The cursor blinks across ebb/flow, the expansions and constrictions, the push/pull of this essay, this essay moving laboriously like a weak torso.  My road bike balances against the wall by the door, craving afternoon sunmiles.  Kyote saws an audible sleep.
Life is a complex layering of feeling and work, of nurture and harvest, of momentum and pause. frequently, a negotiation of anticipation.

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tuesday 11.29.11
y'day was 12 miles across the trails of brunswick nature park in 1h50mins, a substantially stronger run than my 20km run there one month ago.  rain and late november's flatgray nonlight dragged me through the first five miles before things became enjoyable and lucid and then roots and trees and the lilies and the stillness, the emptiness, the loneliness of the coastal rolls, the ohm of wind across tar-blackened waters and the cool weight of mud caking on calves, all sounds fishy i know, like some bad new age propaganda shoved into a runner's world, but running is something to be enjoyed, to be felt, to be absorbed.  running is a natural thing and the body, once it remembers the sensation, awakens to crave the movement.  to run in nature is an act of merging and emergence; it operates along a metaphysical hinge of body and earth. 

Mangum Track Club-- a run with kindred folks.

Mangum Track Club held their shirt run on saturday and I am now a proud member, a lifelong member, of the Mangum Track Club. What is the MTC and what is the shirt run?  

The MTC is a self-described rural running group that has no dues or fees, no endless emails and  nothing to prove to anyone.  A history can be found at http://www.etinternet.net/~runrbike/.  Many of the members are ultrarunners, several are canines who completed the necessary challenge, and some are casual walkers who enjoy the roads.  Some members win 50k or 100m or 12hr races, while others sweep up the loose back-pack of runners, but everyone is open and kind and passionate about soles kicking the horizon.  

Completing the shirt run is the process by which one joins the Mangum Track Club.  Its a point-to-point run that puts one deep in the rural NC piedmont for fifteen miles.  Saturday April 23rd found 67 runners clogging down a road known merely as a state abbreviation and a number. I was one of the 30ish newbies and this is how it went down.

Work finished at midnight Friday and I drove home, set the coffee pot for 4am, brushed the teeth and readied the gear.  At 4h05am I downed a hotdark cup of sugared java and grabbed my running bag to cruise carbonblack Hwy 74 for 2.5 hrs to find an obscure intersection on the outskirts of Ellerbe NC. Did I mention obscure-- the sudden surreal village of runners roaming the road to the left was not unlike a rainbow gathering or a gypsy caravan.  Rows of cars were parked on each side of the road.  Runners entered and exited the woods and sat in lawn chairs in the middle of the state highway.  I saw Mark, whom I'd met at the gator trail 50k and who orchestrates the group, and he introduced me to some folks.  I joined other runners in the back of a pickup truck to tear through the wet chilly grayness towards the start fifteen miles away.  Six of us huddled and curled against the cold wind and tight turns, an occasional wave/nod to a runner doing a “double shirt run” (out-and-back 2x = 30m), and the truck came to a stop.  Here was another obscure intersection with vehicles parked on the shoulder, runners milling and stretching, and several structures around including a house, a greenhouse structure, and a church.   A NC DOT green sign ahead read "Mangum" to note the location.

The first half of the shirt run is a pure exercise of faith.  

The fifteen mile run traversed the bending highway by various churches named after old testament stories, paced across cement bridges above deep rivers of muddy slowness, geared up long inclines that folded back from hardwood thickets into vast flat fields of perfect green reeves that sweep like fine bristles against the wind.  One could hear civil war armies marching across the fields into the pine-and-oak perimeters. One could hear birds and endless birds and maybe a turtle scratching against red clay and then the footsteps of runners spread through the countryside like synesthesia echo.  A white truck lapped the collective body of the mass offering water and we encountered few other cars.

A lively group in a steady groove ran the ribbon of asphalt and stories were exchanged.   There were stories of the mangum track club ranging from a naked runner to the origin of the group, brainstorms of reasons why we run, explanations of various routes we passed over that MTC coordinates into other runs (ellerbe marathon, boogie marathon or the boogie 50m, derby 50). A dozen miles passed like a glass of sweet iced tea. 

I had to keep a smooth, working pace to finish within my schedule.  Eventually I turned into a hill that glimpsed the parked cars as the double yellow line jostled beneath me to a stop-sign end.  Runners had resumed sitting in the middle of the road.  Mark handed me a fine trophy, the navy blue shirt with strong white letters spelling Mangum Track Club.  The shirt is traditionally paid for by the existing members of the MTC, and the generosity is a trait common to these people.  He gave me a few stickers, offered black olive pizza, and I shook some hands and changed shirts before returning home for work at 3h30pm.  

All in all it was a brilliant run in a beautiful part of the country with good folks.  Several will I meet again to kick up dirt and slap asphalt, and I look forward to it.  I am still reeling on my belonging to a track club and I am grateful to Mark and MTC for including me. The energies of those kindred folks and the fields and hills and rivers and the porcelain-white churches stay with me now as I write this, and I think thats a big part of being a Mangum Track Club member.