Leatherwood Mountain Ultra, Take One.

Meditations on leatherwood mountain 50 miler.  Four days until line up.

Seven years ago, I began jogging with my girlfriend.  She was training for a marathon and I was trying to get clean. 

She'd run pre-sun hours on the wooden slats along the cape fear.  I'd follow.  I'd follow and I would foam at the mouth, gasp air into my beet-face, stomping and barking through dawn.  My stride was a heavy, broken cadence, a struggling thud & plod.  My sweat was a gelatinous ooze, a cold murky petroleum of stale drink, drugs.  But, every run, she’d drag me across her miles, talking music, talking poetry, talking water and sky, until I was gasping out a 13 minute pace and feeling the accomplishment of a morning run.  Grab some coffee & a smoke, try to hold out the cravings.

The running escalated and the other shit diminished, albeit slowly and arduously.  Goals evolved, gradually expanded.  I began jogging alone because I wanted to jog.  Sobriety and running wrestled and conspired against each other. Passing the Barbary Coast, panting and ridiculous, I might stop, enter, order a beer and another.  The next run, I might set a goal to get past the bar, to get to Chandler’s Wharf, run repeats on the hill by the governor’s mansion... and I may or may not make it past the bar on the way back.  But I was earning progress. 

I embraced the meditation of movement, the medicine of movement.  My thoughts opened, free-roaming the poetic space of things, sometimes coherently, sometimes wildly hinged like a monkey in branches.  I still had the delirium of evening, cravings, but there may be a pause, a softening.  I might observe something interesting: the quirks of light, an unusual face, a formation of birds, a boat on the river, a handwritten note on the ground.

I noticed the runs easing up, a settling of body, the presence of rhythm.  Miles of nostalgia, mood and memory, self-confrontation.  The run, the act of a run, appeared an organic and ever-evolving thing, akin to a drawing or a language.  I learned that a run could be an artful expression of the mind and soul.

Eventually I bought running shorts, read Dr. Noake's The Lore of Running.  Kupricka, Roes, Koerner… ultra-runners, 100 milers, fifty milers, Western States, Leadville... I learned basics, I worked nutrition, I dropped from 200 to 180 to 175.  My constitution improved, my spirit found grounding.  

Eventually I distilled the ultimate image, the pinnacle, the goal-vision of myself, that I’d run on the power of my own body through the trails of magnificent mountains.  That I would have the freedom, the strength of body, the command of mind, the consistency of effort to endeavor such feats enthralled and intimidated me.  That I could be powerful enough to run up a mountain, healthy enough to enjoy it, spiritually sound enough to be present in the act... I did not need to be a lithe Kupricka bounding through miles and rock faces in bare feet.  I wanted to be a reborn man, running through and with the Land.  The vision was a reclaiming of body, a reclaiming of the mountains I'd always loved, a rebirth of belief.

The journey has been a powerful process, exploring my darkness and my light.  Now, I face a 50 mile trail run in the mountains right beneath my second home, Boone NC in the Appalachian mountains. Boone, where much of my chaos found an opening.

The runner girl is now my wife and crew.  She's seen a few ultra races at this point, and she'll be crewing the Leatherwood Mountain ultra in four days.

I am nervous. My pre-race agitation is as wild as a wolf under a full moon. 

an effort at a poem (& paint) during an april storm, a week before leatherwood 50 mile mountain trail race.

Horse

Gallop

Heart

And the heavy gray vines of line.

4/12/13 at 9:02am.

Bad brains & surya

Namaskars, thirty & a bow.

The staccato percussion of a

sky-collapse storm. 

Meanwhile.

Burnt bone black on field of flake white,

it is earth of raw canvas,

Music & movement against/within

An open mouth of thunder. 

Dust of charcoal rolls a broken line,

Echo of a lazarus body.

It is image-jump,

 Wild

surge of mind,

horse gallop heart.

It is haste and the colours of mood.

A frenzied visual jazz,

paint is rope, muscle, language and psalm. 

Paint and her dance

Is perhaps a brute’s

version of

a long-gone

elegance.

my first entry, from three years ago. an ego retrospect.

I am not a fast runner.

I believe that work and physical activity is natural, and is a natural pleasure of being. the pleasure of physical motion, of movement in any form, is the soul’s expression of joy in the clay of our bodies. i am an average runner, maybe a little less than average. i grew up playing soccer, which was 80% running/ athletic endurance with perhaps 20% ball handling skills (charlotte soccer in the mid-eighties was not yet an elevated sport.). beyond that i ran a few miles each week, and that slowed until running was a false memory behind a cloud of cigarette smoke in my early thirties. three years later i’m an active runner, running 4-5 days at an average of 25 - 35 miles each week.

i shot dope and drank from waking to passing out daily for fifteen years. i traveled from detox to rehab as my primary forms of recreation and socialization. physical activity fell into the background, though my sense of belief in physicality did not. it was only replaced by narcotics and alcohol, synthetic endorphins. . . . the belief in the physical experience, the corporal experience, was merely subverted to a drug experience. otherwise i served tables in a large, formal dining room, which forced a certain amount of swift activity weekly. that is, when i was employed.

so is it possible to retrain the body to excel physically, of its own strength and endurance, and to drive the endorphin production back into a normal range? is it possible to literally out-run one’s active addiction?

I am not a fast runner. I run for love of motion. I run in love of my body, it’s ambitions and achievements, its potentials and its limits. I respect my potentials equal to my limits. I run in love of music I sometimes enjoy, trees and bird-formations I frequently pass, the psalm of foot-falls and breath and the work of the body all in synch and whole in form & function. . . . . I am not a fast runner, but I run my angers out. I run my joys out. and then I savor the rush after a five miler, an eight miler, a thirteen miler, an occasional eighteen miler. . . . I run not for numbers, but for the journey of the miles. I run through landscapes and hopescapes and mindscapes and memory-fields and mathematics and painters’ histories and their work. I run through bach and mingus and mahler and modest mouse. I run through French and English and german and sometimes I run through zen koans and zen silence and digeradoos. I run through traffic exhaust and the frozen moisture of my breath and the windchapped lips and the drenching salt-lines on my clothing and shorts. I run through holidays and mornings and afternoons and I run with my son, sometimes with my wife, but mostly alone. sometimes alone in a crowd however. . . . .


Christmas day—running gear and a book, murakami’s what I talk about when I talk about running. . . . . went running, as necessitated by goals and gifts, though a brutal rain in a miserable wind in otherwise mild day brought an edge to the experience. . . . somehow hardcore, running at night, in good new gear, against wind and rain storm, four miles deep in determination. then thai food for dinner on a well-earned appetite.

jan 4 2010

2h44pm.

the winter has arrived in Wilmington, at least for a week. it is newly 2010 and my coldest run ever was yesterday, sunday, the day of my long run, with only 9 miles kicked out, but in a freezing air against a bitter Direct Wind that left me fearing frostbite on my face. just the other day I was mocking the cold gear at the local sporting goods store, especially the sports scarves, and there I was, on the far end of my loop, turning into the frozen tears of the unknown distance back home. so I just kept running, eastwood blurring then blinking and blurring again, as into mayfaire plaza I turned, thinking the road was windtunneling and running into the sun a few minutes may warm my face back up. but there the wind was again, like a scoffing demi-god, like a nemesis. and I ran. it was after all the only way to get home.

bitches and fugues.

running is a meditation painting music running cuisine. . . . . all connected. running connects the peripheral, the lost, the scattered. . . . . . paint fills in the maps legs discover. and legs will generate contour maps, will uncover internal and local networks simultaneously. . . . . really quite spectacular, even if quiet and private. . . . . of course, introspect is not always the case in a run. sometimes it is “good god how much longer do I have to run.” sometimes it is a pure mental blankness, sometimes static, sometimes colors, sometimes fugues of quietude or fugues of bach or fugues of odd memories that lap erratically against the back of the mind. . . the run is the vehicle of the mind’s transformative journey—a concentrated mental alchemy. legs and tired mind the lead of lab.

jan 10th. ran six miles and dreaded every step. I’ve hit a wall and it hurts to even pull a two mile lap. . . . . but of course, if I set up a two mile run, or a five mile run, come the last half-mile of the distance I am swift, effortless, deer-like. . . . but that ease only comes in the final blocks of the rounds: so a psychological block on physical exertion. . . . ? the cold weather is also defeating, even with my new cold gear.

jan 13th

Haiti was hit by a serious trauma last night. registering a full seven on the scale, the earthquake devasted the entire area of the capital. there is no way to count the deaths or to track the emerging corpses, but it is a start to say that all surrounding shanty-towns are rubble and many are but sloped graves now—children women men. . . . .

January 15th. a warmer day in upper 50’s and the beach was filled with runners, walkers, cyclists, and a few tourists. ran six miles following my eight mile run y’day and feel a bit spent. but the weave of other active bodies, their machines or lack thereof, their ipods and beer bellies and tights and brightly colored hats and the shimmer of sun on the seemingly new ocean and the intracoastal swaying in sailboat breezes beneath the bridges of Wrightsville beach and foot falls echo the miles approaching and receding and it is the final swoop of breath, almost warm but certainly January bitter on throat-lungs and the whole experience of running burns the diamond of the mind.

and I am not a fast runner, just a body moving ahead on both legs. . . . . I push my body, feeling air across cheeks and knees and hair falling heavier with sweat and I do not question the difference between jogging and running and I do not seek the approval of others, but I am enamored by the communal sense of the Public Run. . . . the public run. . . . while a bit bizarre, it occurs to us runners (many environmental and worried bout carbon footprints and now green races like the bi-lo marathon are more and more common) but we crawl into our vehicles and drive somewhere to run. we arrive and sweat and nod and stretch and drive back home to shower and sip hot cocoa or energy drinks but the irony is obvious to me: to drive to run. . . . . and speaking of green, now companies are putting out green shoes, meaning the soles (gels, insoles, inner shoe) are made of organic materials. this was, apparently, not at all the case before the new awareness. there are tons of various running shoes absorbing oil and milk and coffee grounds with diapers in every landfill of every populated area. . . . . . I had no idea. many donate shoes to causes and poor countries and even inner-city charities, and those are wonderful options, but still we drive to paved landscapes to pursue green activities in rogue-material shoes. . . . . and tech shirts and the little sweatshop hands that frequently make these clothes are a whole other issue. . . .

MVI. four miles with little man. . . .

a total of 63 miles this year as the eighteenth of January reached 63 degrees. . . . a wonderfully warm day with kyote and myself circling the neighborhood, Marley on the ipod (which hooks into a dual speaker system on the jogger stroller), pulling our strides long and easy on some “easy skanking” which ky enjoyed much. a run this saturday of 9.3 miles.

wednesday and January the twentieth and the southern sun bleaches the day into the pale-brick and graying asphault I love so much. . . . no run but a brisk jog-walk (powerwalk to the elite practitioners I suppose) with ky ‘round the block. . . . sometimes moving is enough.

Haiti experienced an aftershock today, eight days after the massive earthquake that has killed an estimated 200, 000 people, and once again brought the capital port-au-prince to its bony, dusty knees.

new iron and wine cd, as well as violent femmes original 1982 release on cd. both are enjoyable, runnable. . . . .

"This may be difficult."  

Paintings by Jay Edge.

Hosted by The Upstairs Gallery at Caprice Bistro, 

November 15th 2012 through January 2013. 

 Opening will be held on Weds. November 15th, 6pm - 9pm.   

a trail run in october.

Juking through the trail, the trees & roots of blue clay, its not fast but i'm working, running, midmorning october, orange leaves under long blue shadows, jarred horizons push and pull, merge and blur like a rothko, hips shift in quick tag of earth and eyes root to the trail, the mud-spine switching back against ankles & knees, lumbar and shoulders, and i'm aiming for a rapid cadence that smooths the work, shortens the stride, less jar to the kicks, a smooth roll of thrust/lunge, thrust/lunge, and i'm keeping the shoulders rolled back, neck is long and throat is open, breath steadies to fill the chest, the mind is even and quiet and tuned in.
thin layers of breath move with heat from chest into muscle, exhale steam, a fugue of moves, symphonic.

it's my creative act to articulate a trail well, to immerse myself in that work, to grind down the whole being over a distance, to emerge from a passage of earth exhausted, quiet, fulfilled, its an act of artful expression.  this is where i find my core, in raw nature, this is my honest primal place... when running, the world's noise can straight fuck off, fall away, dead october leaves fueling a fire... when i run, i can burn the world from the inside out, my own private anarchy, my own graces and brutalities.
catharsis and meditation, the falling of leaves, the nature that shares an infinite spectrum of moods, the rothko-thin layers of thanatost and libido, glazed into a whole form of a man, an illusion possibly, a body, succumbing to nothingness and everything, moving through it until the bones fall away from the soul.

A Run in the Uwharrie Range.

...in pursuit of some moving ecstasy, in liberation of mind and spirit, as a private act of rebellion & anarchy, there is a run, something primitive in the act of running a trail. it was time to move through some of god's good land on the momentum of my angst, on the power of legs, on the remaining keenness of mind and near the land of my birth, the familiar rolling pastorale of my formative years, is a range of mountains that carry my youngest memories.  they carry the cathartic and carefree remembrance of running the wooded acres behind my grandparents house, a boychild moving in new earth. it feels good to be back home, in the piedmont of nc, good to be in the ancient land of the uwharrie.

i.  the medicine: a few hours of solitary running in a gnarly stretch of woods where i can feel self-reliance, where i can move into intuition, in the movement of the soul, where i can ascend and descend mountains that carry the history of their birth and formation and the archaeology of use, where unknown generations of Indians ran on leather soles chasing animals and children and women and each other, not knowing the game was timed.  to fall into that trail, wholly immersed, you mark the blaze and fucking run until the breath is lost, the body is wrung out with salt crystallizing on the bellies of muscle and the vision blurs and the landscape fades to a deeper space, a world beneath the mind, at a bodyless vortex, mud of body and mud of earth, river of mountain, river of body, cuts of blood and bone and the primitive stoneface steep against october mountain, clashes of body-wood through narrow chute of limb and branch, endless spiderweb entanglement (like a beekeepers hat on head), the pale green mosses of rockface thrust, the diagonal cuts of limestone and the irregular face of granite, low pyramids of white quartz like some ephemeral timekeeper, the sienna and ochre carpet of fallen leaves and the secret surface beneath, a rare splash of yellow-orange on a branch, wheatgrasses brushing leg in low meadows, the dull light beneath a still thick canopy of hardwood leaves, the undulating horizon from which streaks of sun pour down to splash trail bright, a strobe effect of light and shadow, slope of space, the ever bending horizon the everbending body the jut of leg and the pistonhammer feet ache on stone protusion and the gut churns at the prospect of being waterless and the mind just burns on, an endless light fueled by a Divine spark that exists here, in this space, on this trail, in this mountain, and is, for this moment, Yours. an absolute moment of Existence, an absolution.

(ranger warned me that "the snakes are out right now, moving, and the rattlesnakes are moving, seen a few in the past two weeks, rain brings 'em out, and they are ill-tempered, yeah, ill tempered right now...be careful")
... and to be IN the acoustics of the motherearth, to be present and alive in the land... had driven 3 hours to arrive here, had driven anxious and energized, music blaring the whole way, and here was the quiet of ancient mountain woods, containing me in my traverse, shirtless with thin-soled shoes, two bottles and a sweat-blotched map that was (literally) dissolving with each paused orientation, a thunderstorm moving in from the northwest, black and bleak, but the day so far was sunny and clean-aired though the trail was puddled with overnight rain and the rocks and downed trees were as slippery as polished cement beneath a pickup truck oilpan and that ideal weather ended two and half hours in when the sky shot down raindrops, the size of golf balls, a cool but muscled/fisted rain, and i found a service road to runrunrun back through a hunting camp and up/down until being deposited back at the parking lot.
aww man & oh boy! soul was revved and language and cherokee and twombly and the rip of land beneath the kick of foot restored the ache to be alive, the will to be a part of this lifething, the mad courage to go forward and to do.  proud to be here, alive, and able to offer something, if only a body and the language of legwork.

ii.  and thirty minutes up the road came a clearing of clouds and morrow mountain state park and i decided on a quick loop across fall mountain trail where fire had devoured part of the landscape and left strange charred forms, previously tree trunks, now a surreal display of natural sculpture, and somewhere two miles in i lost the trail and descended a rocky scramble to the shore of Pee Dee River and, realizing my errant direction, backtracked, pawed up the scree past what looked like a dismembered still and back onto the red mud/blackened soil surface and craggly oaks and the flat rocks like stacked iron pans reaching off of the shallow summit and ended that run with a sink-bath before heading to salisbury for a thai meal.  all in all, a 17 mile day in the uwharries, three hours of good wholesome running...

iii.  and thats that.  and what is that?  an exjunkie kicking miles in ancient wilderness earth, shirtless and proud and burning the body open... the power of movement, the power of body: a grateful thrust of his entirety.

labor day run in remnants of isaac.

... gotta get behind the mule again, shoulder plow into hard earth, bend to the wind and start the work of miles and pigment.... early morning run, grayblack day like soot dusting dawn, the torso arches into moderate pace, the heart leads, a pulse feeling fires of late summer, coals of burning lungs, fatigue in the launch of leg... an arrhythmic event of muscle versus mass... when, now, like a promise broken or fulfilled, storm collapses onto land, the vast flat land, bending on asphalt, empty windows of resting homes become shallow and pale... rain applaudes itself as a bleak black horizon pushes down on earth... shoes absorb puddles to swell heavy, eyes sting, lips collect the rain, shoulders and back cool and the body opens, kicking fluid into inhale, feeling length in stride, a body in push, and the back arches like a bow, an arrow of effort jamming into the blind courage of distance... regardless of mindcloud, the questions, despite clouds of exertion rolling through mind and muscle, riding blood, the histories of this moment building like a cacophony in mind.... the continuum of habit is a history to be admired.... bending back tall as pushing heart into rain, churning legs, churning wind and rain, fury of it all, something staged or hollywood with lightening and thunder, naked chest pounded by tiny fists of rain, the body's gravity, the breathlessness, the soul heavy in solitude of the rain run, the ridicule of such an act, raw arrogance and fuck it all-ism, the angst of the legs. . . . fury of it all, solitude of it all, kicking like a mule in a storm-rattled stable. . . . and then the paint, the paint is dry and the runner is wet, irony... the vigor of yearning, the proof of form, the time-starched hopes of charcoal and burnt sienna and red oxide, ochre and cerulean, the burning of a figure silhouetted by rain and angst and cloud, raging against apathy, charred lung and brilliant whiteheat light... a clay sag in the rain. . . . the work is the love, the work is the meaning, the work is the nexus.  the work is the bones in this heavy sack of clay doubt, the work is the pursuit... paint, ecstasy, illumination, equanimity... work is anything that brings you love.  work is the proof, is the gift, is the expression of god.