Table Rock Ultra, a study in red clay, rock outcroppings and good ol' fashioned downpours.

Picture credit, Lonnie Crotts.

Table rock 50k sept 26 2015. Leg One.

(as yet incomplete and it reads well enough in this state and i may or may not finish it later. pulp aesthetic is the new varnish.)

what we didnt see in 2015, as seen in October of 2014. Photo credit Lonnie Crotts.

Friday morning.

My wife had attached a Disney poncho as a last minute addition to the outside of my pack. It was flimsy and shredded at the seams and I vowed to never use it.

In pursuit of a rain shell, I stopped at a local outfitting company before starting the drive to Morganton NC. Wilmington has a couple of shops and I chose the newer, more expensive spot to begin. They had a beautiful Marmot for 100 dollars that I liked and posted everywhere were signs advertising “25% off storewide” and I was excited, asked the attendant if the jacket was discounted.

“No, I’m sorry. That one’s fresh in the door.”

I left empty handed, hit I-40, and within 20 minutes I hit rain.

Friday evening.

Six hours later I hit Morganton's historic downtown. I pulled into a puddled parking spot alongside Catawba brewery for packet pickup and proceeded  to pickup my packet where peter piper picked a pepper .... never mind.

The drive had been a grueling, rain-blind thing with multiple wrecks and a helluva lot of stop and go traffic. Stressful driving, white knuckle hours.

I was glad to arrive but the rain persisted and the light-fade of evening was not far off. I drove the final 30 minutes to the camp and put on my Disney poncho and walked around the marshy land of Steele’s Creek Campground to find a spot where my tent might find a slight lift of perch above the collecting rain. Found a spot, near my choice from last years much dryer affair, and set up quickly the tent, moved bags and a cooler into the vestibule. Set up the stove, cooked up my wife’s wonderfully rich and filling meatsauce pasta. A bit of a tradition, Kas almost always makes me my pre-race meal and it never fails to warm me up, relax the nerves, and start the mind thinking about the distance ahead.

My fine rain-protective Nemo tent making its stand on the banks of Steele creek.

I sporked the last of the sauce into my mouth, collected and consolidated race things, opened Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan to the continuing thump of rain.

Being absolutely alone on a rainy night with the mountain-dark of night beginning to prey on one’s mind can be unsettling to me. I was alone, I had no service, and the looming depression of previous weeks began its work.

I fucking started to tear, to cry, then to sob. Terrible feelings  and self-doubt and the hauntings of my anxiety began to rip at me deeper.

I drove out for a call to Kas, said hello, heard a quick NPR story which faded to static as I pulled into my campsite. A few pages of the book, a brushing of the teeth, a check of the battery powered alarm clock, and I was as close to sleeping well as I ever have been while camping before a race.
It may have been a perfect catharsis.

Saturday, 2:30am.

Some nearby 50 milers are up chopping wood. It is loud and intrusive and 3 and a half hours before the race. Appalled, I work to reclaim sleep despite the hacks and bass thuds of logs splitting, rain spitting against the rain shell of the tent.

Saturday 5am.

The 50 milers are roaming and calling out to one another. Cars begin pulling in from hotels. Runners sit in cars and stay dry. The rain has picked back up to a decent pace.

5:30am. The lights of the starting area go up and an announcement. Wheres my Disney poncho?

I crawl out of the tent onto a saturated and pooling earth. Bathrooms are always a problem at races the morning of but Table Rock was different. There was no line, just a wait for the current occupants to finish. Ultrarunners and their clock-tight bathroom rituals. And all the homemade pastas of the world converge the nervous pacing hours before the starting horn. Yet everyone sat in their cars listening to radios.

5:44am. Alarm hits and I lay. Repeat three times. Campstove and instant coffee, hot oatmeal, half a banana, Vaseline in all the right spots, race bib, and a relatively calm morning before removing my Disney poncho and heading 125 yards to the start.

6am. Announcements are made and people gather in various layers of speed ambition, the fastest moving forward. I worry that I’m underdressed for the rainy day as everyone wears a rain shell. Im wearing a sleeveless singlet and a neckerchief. Am I fucked? I’m fucked. I’ll never finish this. If I get in trouble im in the middle fo the fucking woods. God help me I’m fucked.

Brett runs up and announces himself literally seconds before he is dq’d for not being present . My spirits lift. He’s wearing a rain shell. I should’ve brought my Disney poncho. Its gonna be cold at the summit some 20 miles away.

“START!”

Brett and I bid each each good luck and strong legs and off I go with the head pack. Hanging in behind the morning hacks and wheezes and the swishing trample of trail shoes on wet mountain grass that is such a wonderful sound, we cross the bridge over Steele’s Creek and began to move through the darkness towards the mountain that we cannot see.

First wrong turn happens about mile 1.5 and it is the head group that makes it. Brief, but a reminder that these things upset many a race effort.

First miles were easy miles. Passing double track fs road that leads into the first single track and the churned, chewed red clay of Appalachia. Running on it was sketchy, like running across red clay that a potter wets, prepares as slip. Grassy roads then roll and build towards the deeper hollows and higher launches of stone and wood, the mosaics of rock outcroppings and fallen leaves.

It was light by the first creek crossing and it was a knee deep cross that got the shoes good and heavy and the mind reinvigorated. The rain was a patter and one almost anticipated a break in the clouds, a false hope, but a real one.

AS 1 was 4.8 miles in. everyone seems to have looked at a course map and knew when to expect these things. I had not. I was a little lackadaisical about these things.  Fucked.

A mile later would prove the more worthy crossing. One scaled a rock face and across the corner stood Brandon, the co-RD and a helluva mountain runner himself, who had hoisted a rope across the gushing rapids. The roar of the water was punk loud and I stepped in up to my thighs. I was tight, slow, but I held the rope and kept moving across the fairly strong mountain rapids. For a flatlander, it feels way perilous to make blind steps across river stones, and it was not a brave or athletic crossing. Frankly I felt a slight wave of embarrassment as I landed on the other bank.

The course ran across the river banks and had some fun push-pull of body, climbing and walking, a little running, and the everpresent beat of rain on head and shoulders. The temperature was mild, not warm at all, but it was just cool enough to keep my questioning the cold of the summit and how that intense climb would affect my body.

Another few crossings of Steele Creek, a continued downpour, a coupl’a GU gels later, my legs felt good, the quads alive but not struggling, the core churning a bit strange but whatever, the mind in a fine meditative space. The day was shaping up to a nice performance. Not competitive, but an enjoyable push.

We ran up a bit of road and an out-and-back that led eventually to the upper point of a gravel road. AS 2 was maybe mile 9. And there was much rejoicing.  The volunteers looked at me with concern when I asked where to go next … I guess there’s this expectation for a runner to look at a course map before heading into the woods. I turned and started heading back down the mountain road, gravel crunching every step of the way, enjoying the fact that I would soon cross the half marathon point.

I don’t remember many specifics along the way here. I remember stopping alongside the road and relieving my stomach and cleaning myself with a handful of leaves, but that’s for another time.

Halfway mark came just around 3 hours. I was making my goal time and I felt good. The next coupl’a  miles were a brilliantly challenging trudge up gravel road to the next AS at the base of the real profile trail.

Photos by Daren Wilz,Composited, mile 26ish of 2015 Table Rock.

Achieving the summit, but in 2014. Still love the spirit of the picture.

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.

preparations for weymouth woods 100k and a winter solstice.

Skatellites & ongoing preparations for a 62 mile run at Weymouth Woods

i haven't had much time to write because i've been running and cycling and doing a fair amount of what I should call “trail diving.” another apt description would be busting my ass.  i've tasted the earth several times, drawing blood and making the effort an actual experience.  miles are taking a toll on the accuracy of footfalls, perhaps. luckily i remain only bruised and battered, nothing serious. don't fret dear reader.

i have fired various guns of 9mm and .40 caliber, watching some 250 rounds separate into plumes of paper and metallic clinks of flying jackets landing around me.  i've spent hours with family and work and self.  i've started stretching two small square canvases, but i haven't finished the actual stretch.  but the canvas is draped across the frames, ready to be stapled and primed.  ideas, plans, as intact as any modern mind.

Meanwhile the tired sun begins a lame gallop across a foggy day. Balmy, wet air. stillness.  far from a winter solstice-type day.  but its a belly full of coffee, before your legs get going, a few fast songs to get the head anchored to movement, a pocket of gel (for fear of bonking) and you kick easy at first, warming the tension out of the muscle.  a jog jostles the muscle mass, pumping the hardened lobes laced against bone, and the muscles must soften because the earth will not and so the legs give and start working, softening to pliable. as the feet start feeling the run and find their dig on that packed earth trail, skirting a field of smokey pale light, watch the sun burn into that heavy drift of night's residual breath, wet and already working the lungs as inhales get deeper and exhales move from the shift of hips and you cut into the trail's obscure opening in a wall of pines as the sun begins to slice sharper across the sandhills on the northwest side of blue clay trails and the light carves roots and rocks out of the sloped earth and keeps the feet moving with some accuracy of foot placement and a skullcap absorbs new sweat into salty residual stiffness and a chest heaves easy into the pace, the speed feels right and perpetual, feels innate and unlabored, feels smooth like a body moving within its own free form and yeah you carry spare pounds (your wife remarked on your pouch just before you left the house) and yeah your temples carry some gray and you get your hair cut more frequently than you'd like because you work a job that you respect enough to compromise certain things but you gather something else as the skatellites pick up an allegro pulse that the legs fall easily against, metronome, milling, and time falls away but for the chirp of miles and the mechanical splash of a passing mountain bike and thirst pushes the body into a reserve of power and there is the stasis through which one eases as the fifteen miles burn through the annals of the mind and the force of muscle.   there is the start of a vicious process of enduring the mind when the body cannot endure the work.  it is a zen movement, a holy vacancy, a winter space with a spring sun.

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.

**********************************************************************

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.
***********************************************************

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.

************************************************************

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.

************************************************************
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.

*************************************************************
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. 

an essai conveying the layers of a morning.

i

Chronicles of a (self/or\portrait) who fell out of painting into running. A drawing of parallels between the energy of painting/creative work and the freedom to move across a cut of earth on one's own power. Olson (the momentum of a verse if verse were a mile) or Burden (crawling barechested across 50' of broken glass; getting shot in the arm in a ny gallery: events, documented) or Serra's oilstick drawings & etchings (viewer's innate response to nonobjective images-- unconscious languages scrawled in primitive gashes. Early signifiers. Pushing the viewer's role into that of co-creator. Art is, as an evolved thing, a conspiracy of fashioning, a private propaganda.). Che & Castro moving from ideal to Act in armed rebellion (violent confrontation is the highest form of Idea-Expression besides sex, which is still a confrontational involvement. . . .natural progression from previous state of art-as-propaganda.).

Running is expressionistic- there are moods in the body's movement. Long miles are philosophically engaging, physically enpowering (unless drab and long and static).  Late miles can become absinthe, elation, delirium, synethesia, distillation. Movement conveys the projective energy of language infused with idea, paint vivid with elan vital. . . I appreciate the act of running as a physical-aesthetic process, a burning happening, a continuum of motion passing through a psycho-spectral Self.  Primal and elegant like music. A certain Slant rhyme.

ii

Home. Home is the work, home is the drive, home is the source of work. Home is a transient space, a moveable feast, a Present embraced. An infinite now. Anything else is a rut, a false space: Death of an individual. a habitation.

iii

mouth of smoke and tongue of cat, hand across chest (breast pushing breath), farm decaying beneath autumn sun. steinbeckian sex dream-- beginning of october. She wore a heavy sweater knitted with gray yarn and a heavy scarf of muted earthtones. the ridges of her sweater rolled like corduroy beneath work-hardened hands. We looked out across fields of corn drying to leathered barbs. . . a dismal field, morbid and limp. Dogs ran in and out of woods and an old car rusted behind us. There was a basket of peaked vegetables wrapped in pale cheese cloth.  Heavy bread smelled of burnt wood and hot stone. When sex was survival, you remained a goddess.

iv

And I was running the stonejut spine of massanutten mountain debating the notion of home while remembering derelict dens where mahler and mingus played, narcotic tirades quiet and internal like the rotting of teeth. Tobacco-stained canvases stacked against wall on stacks of books. Montaigne and jung and wittgenstein and whatever wordswords I was reading in the white house on the eigth block of nun street. . . hardwood floor obscured by pages of drawings smeared with linseed oil modeling paste coffee&ashes shopping lists. Letters painted over, smoked up behind soft graphite. Destruction of the evidence of destruction of the evidence of. . . a fruitful time of work. Creativity thrives in depravement.

Trails cut into earth through spills of rock that bruise arches as miles accrue with shirt absorbing rain and sweat and the mists of limestone and slate obscure the surrroundings but heighten the focus. . . a scale or a balance. A distant ridge is barely knifed out in the palest of bluegrays.  The charcoal diagonals of trees drag the sky like a twombly drawing.  (Home is where the familiar still captivates.)

The fog of a mountain trail six miles deep, the fog of broken mind and a body starved, the lack of something essential. . . mind builds the grandeur of spiritual lucidity, embodies the myth of soul when body (the craving is the soul's voice, not the condition of lucidity perhaps. Craving is more emphatic than satisfaction.). . . . broken body/mind craves an intact soul and a broken soul might crave an intact body/mind. Evidence of the destruction.  

Running the pink-blazed sidewinder trail across the ridges of a mountain is the pinnacle of my philosophies-- an act that is aesthetic, explorative, simultaneously refined and primitive, necessitating self knowledge and honesty while pushing the boundaries of that knowledge, expanding that knowledge, brutalizing and healing that self. It is a pure act, private and self-sufficient.  Volatile.  It is a prayer that does something and goes somewhere and still loves when it is done.

cartilage sinew muscle & bone ii (unfinished)

A meditation on the unrefined. . . the sublime & the vulgar. Autumn. Picasso. Trails. Rome. The richness of the raw material-- the infinite of the unfinished. The majesty of the mad space-- the cathedral and the mind, each extending to gather space, vacancy, fullness, layers. . . psalms.

fifteen miles into autumn & the run was the work of feet clocking packed clay beneath low clouds, a cool gray day. . . the trail was bulge and recess, scarred by storms and stones and raincuts. the sky was flat, wide and vacant like cotton duck, ancient and flecked with birds. Sepia. Air was push and pull, kneading into the vocabularies of language and image, the legwork of a runner or a painter. the holism of the exertion pushed into a quietude, an alignment. craved a neatness of thought: a combing of mind. a unity and continuum. a process intact.

Autumn embraces harvest & death, is kerouac's roman candle, is blake's tiger, it is rimbaud's afrique and van gogh's absinthe. It is a burning, cherished thing. the old trees of the southern landscape newly stripped and bare: burnt umber bones that thrust from the ground like a child's alphabet. The wet smells of jagged granite in the blue ridge burn the breath, lapsing into gray. Stone & bone. Primeval. Autumn is the lure of the rabid vixens of les desmoilles d'avignon. Autumn is curse & promise. Autumn is wiccan and voluptuous and fleshy and lushlife. Autumn is promise and betrayel and the slip of the spring's veil to smoke and ash. Autumn is paradox and threshold.  smoke, stone and bone.

picasso's bulls, his hooves of ink working into bark and pine needle and dirt, images spun from picasso's “bootblack” paris years onward into the war oeuvre. . . saltimbanques et les paysages cubistes, les guitars ou le journ. . . les assemblages. . . bathers and cassagemas and the shades of blue and the late miles evoked my early inspirations: degas, van gogh, duchamp, cezanne, miro, rothko, rembrandt, de kooning, but picasso was the mark and the centrifuge. . . an enigma of a man infinitely reworking himself. Picasso was deeply modern: horrified by failure, suicide, poverty, sex, cellibacy, communism, guernica, women, stature, compromise. contrasting the depth of his horrors was his degree of self-love, unbound. but whether a tyrant or a gracious soloist, he was nonetheless a canon of modern creativity. Picasso was the carnivale of libido, (the carnivore of libido?), a fact emphasized by his longevity.  picasso and his bulls.

(motherwell's elegy to spanish republic series, probably a direct diatribe or praise of picasso, declares "i am the bull.  i am the picasso.  i am the knife of oedipus.")

Autumn is the potential of the raw and the unrefined, the kinetic contained within the inchoate. gesture and underpainting and stain and brief pours of dead leaves. Its the way a landscape can burn, ravaged, blaze, beautifully, raptured. And I was thinking about meola versus rostropovich or even dvorak. . . cellos and their bellow. . . i was thinking how schnabel was the archetypal 80's painter, filled with rage & ego and greed and a need for space. schnabel's canvas dwarfed even motherwell's larger canvases. . . (equally large was richter, scully, rauschenberg, rosenberg.) but schnabel's canvases were colossal and scale was the grandeur of the 80s art scene (a throwback to renaissance frescoes).  schnabel might be the contemporary picasso, the american version.

michelanglo's nonfinito sculptures-- the slave series, what donatello called the sculpturi nonfinito, a term vasari later adopted. . . referencing the waking slave, atlas slave, st matthew, et cetera.  the slaves contain the points of drills & chisels, of hard sanding, cross-hatching, chunks of coarse marble hammered to show the pock-marred stone of carrera. michelangelo preserved his birthplace in the stone, preserved his process, made the act part of the art.  the documented process became a natural inclusion, a visual history. The postmoderns evolve from this point of the high renaissance, the inclusion of self and the neurosis of that self, the constant movement of the self. . . constant breakdown and recycling towards wholeness.

elaborating momentarily on soutine, i had guilt that my previous impressions were processed, though i gave no images but only language associations. soutine, schnabel, picasso. . . their images remain distinct.  to write about visual art is an irreconcilable thing, to remove the innate by funneling into words words words => Processing.
endurance is the grandeur of idea no matter the mode of expression.  idea and its energy must remain prime and lucid, honest.  To include the Process.  To refuse processing.  its the trick.

laying brick or paint, cooking or running a trail, undisturbed by the barbs of existence while strobbing on the unrefined and arrowed towards a nondestination. . . yogis or shamans or poets or roman janitors. . . every act can be a transcendent act.  anything can become sacred. but the question is always there: What is the prime state of expression?

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.

a catch up of things, 6.19 to 6.23.

6.19 sunday was a nine mile kick across summer rest and the loop and the shorter run left a long morning ahead to chill with the family. restful hours, re-creativity and leisure, they rejuvenate and rebuild things, burn out the debris to a clean working space, push the mind out of the miles. 

lazy afternoon flipped across a scratchy color documentary on de kooning. . . interviews, clips of his studio, the man working against canvas and pigment, de kooning in old age sweeping a liner brush into final melodic ribbons of color as his own mind-knots unraveled. Paintspattered overalls. Alternating color and b&w shots. Stills & moving images. Sag harbor and the door paintings. The charcoal and pastel drawings. The transfer sheets. De kooning's thin toothed smile, smoking into bent fingers.

Eventually all minds fade to music or paint or quiet.

The mileage is struggling against the heat and I am torn down by a 40 mile week that should be more manageable. Aside from the physical work, mental preparations begin to buffer against the travail of the grandfather mountain marathon. The angst that cancers into efforts comes earlier and harder and the endurance escapes the legs via negative self-talk.  Exertion is lost to unwillingness. To continue the legwork is a process of transcendence, and it is a process of being present, a fugue of self. 
meanwhile a six miler at blue clay today with my native american blood going and I felt playful, felt dialed in, hopscotching roots with bursts of speed (smooth but short passages), a fun run, slow and easy, shade and the stillness of the woods, breath, the metronome of things. Was refreshing to just run, turn the garmin outta sight, feel my body doing the work again, to be the center of a moment, the center of a movement. To run with the freedom that started the passion.  

unaware of the numbers.

*********************************************************************************
A fantasy.

One day I will live in rome and I will bicycle from modern districts to ancient ruins and I will have a notebook in my pants where thoughts and images collect.

Rimbaud never did this and as commemoration of my 37^th year I am running umstead for 37 kilometers which translates to 22.9 miles and it will be slow and easy and gnarly and miserable.

Ash, smoke, charcoal & the aesthetic of franz kline.

37y, 37k (rimbaud never did this.) a writeup regarding a long trail run in umstead park. . . .

well it was an alarm at 4h44am then abrupt silence but for the sound of percolating coffee and then two hours through dark and dawn to umstead park, and it was 7h34am on sal's branch trail and it was a running narrative of promise and voltage and impact and smooth running, fueled and wholly into the act, and then I searched out the head of the preplanned loop beginning with sycamore loop trail and wrapping the guts of umstead with company mill trail and sycamore trail was a beautiful thing of roots rocks river banks where granite piled like broken plates and little trickles of water entangled with the thrusts of squirrels, clouds of dragonflies, and then the run evolved towards a narrative of solitude, of blues, of bees, and the trail jutted quartz and exalted a young buck chewing air and wrapped hills and the terrain sort of reminded me of the runs in georgia and certainly one of the most engaging trails i've run and the loop knotted back into itself at an intersection of graylyn trail and north turkey creek trail and while reading the trail map I realized I was swarmed by bees. . . true annoyance became anger as those fuckers kept up for at least two miles, new troops added occasionally as one beelines my neck or shoulder or just levitates in my face, eye contact with a thousand eyes, and I was trying to read my now-soggy map and my run became a narrative of lost miles and disorientation and anxiety, of ongoing lost miles and then it was the mad-dash of another trail runner bringing my sluggish quads to a crushing awareness of fatigue, despair, thirst as i'd intended on refilling my bottle at the nowlostcar and the next two miles were plodding along, speed-hiking at its worst, unnerving and hollowing. But back to the blues and man I was thinking of the blues of my life as this was a birthday celebration run and thus retrospect was due and the blues came to mind starting with picasso's blue period, my tubes of pthalo or french ultramarine (red or green) or cobalt or cerulean blue and the minimalist palette of poverty and frequent uprootings, and then m. davis blues, kerouacs smokey blue word-notes, mingus and his blues and roots, monet's false blues as water lilies spin beneath light-flecks of sky, a chapbook I wrote fifteen years ago called “bluesin it in deep winter gray,” the blue of yves klein, the pasty blue extremities of freud's figures, the blue eyes of previous lovers, the blue eyes of a wife, the blueblack cheeks of sleepless years, blue horror of struggle and insomnia and terror and the blue book. Back to the bee swarmed intersection, the bee swarmed intersection now bee-free as they were spread all across my route like the bread crumbs of fables and I now know where the world's bee population has concentrated itself, but turning into the trail with my bearings intact, i kicked 'til i reached the car, grabbed a yogurt and gulpedgulped water and caught back up to my body's needs, eased back into the woods for one more three mile loop on sal's branch and that was that as driving home through raleigh traffic and dead kennedy's and marley and the pleasant fatigue of 17 miles behind me with who knows what ahead other than a shower and the evening's shift and I can honestly say that my efforts on the run held poetic parallel to those of my life, that the run served as a physical metaphor for the endurance of my 37 years, and in just being there, in the woods, running alone against mind and body and soul and time and running with Nature and God and Shewolves and Life and Mooncycles and noise and running just felt right and natural, a place where work is grateful.  And getting to a point where my life feels natural, aligned, synergized, has always been the goal.   

prelude to a shirt run and a snake like a boschian corkscrew in the morning.

Saturday april 23rd is the 15 mile t-shirt run for the mangum track club and i hope to participate despite easter concerns and busybusy shifts ahead for that weekend. Running with these guys would be a marker of sort for my running, not unlike finishing a 50k.  A brilliant thing-- to be part of a running group so involved in nc ultrarunning and the long-distance running subculture for 20+ years.

Sunday april 24th.  An Easter sunday hike with the family brought the first water moccasin sighting for the year, and he was a fat one measuring ~2.5 feet and laying across the trail in abbey nature preserve.  My dog spotted him first, and we were thankfully leading kas and ky when maya paused- cocked ears-  lunged into the space ahead.  Only then did I see the charred vine slicing off the trail into a pile of fallen wood where he perched himself, nose in the air.  Still and wary and fully alert but now eight feet away, his hieroglyphic body was the color of burnt wood with black-beaded bands framing areas of dull ochre. his neck was gold stretching around swollen jaws with patches of dark stain. He was a beautiful animal whose eyes were bottomless sockets, like shark eyes, primordial.

you can't really see him, but he's there.  lurking. 

This is my third snake sighting in two weeks, with the most recent being a yellow rat snake at the nature preserve thursday on the same trails.  Southern snakes act on the runners mind with a bifurcating effect, the slippery diagonals cut the trails in half-- the first half being the free easy-moving trail before the snake, the second half is the paranoid searching of the trail's tell-tale scurry after the sighting.  A run can never be restored to a pre-snake condition following an encounter.  Heads up y'all.  (or heads down, 'cause snakes are on the ground, in the trees, eye-level and groin level.  Consider road running for the spring.)

a literary run and a splash quite unnoticed.

brueghel's depiction of the fall of icarus is anonymous & tragic, nearly private and asinine.  wcw's poem launches from this image and it was his language which kept passing through my mind as I ran poplar grove plantation.  I was doubting my fitness for the 50k and thinking that my icarus may land in lake waccamaw and then began debating whether icarus's final descent occurred in an intercoastal salt marsh, a reservoir, a lake.  Of course icarus is everyman and the water-tomb is symbolic 'cause its a sad clown-fate that awaits all ambition but you just keep legging on and looking and thinking and trying to capture something lucid and glowing and bright, trying to abate the private clownface brutality, trying to ignore the tightrope absurdity ferlinghetti spoke of.  Another level of endurance we must constantly endure.

meanwhile spring brought a red-headed woodpecker of fair size with a white ring around his neck, a brilliant bluejay chasing a slightly dulled female, many cadmium red cardinals and huge squirrels.  turtles were crowding a log in the middle of the lake, basking easy.

rumi came to mind, his name laden with associations like cole barker and unc and the moment the book was given to me and the passions of poverty and the ascetic's joy.  there were no lyrics, only a moment of admiration for his ecstasy, his psalms, the idea of the poem-psalm, a holy song of the everyday.

pictures are winter light in january, a false representation of today.

Two running narratives. . . legs & language.

1.6.11

Thursday morning at Carolina Beach State Park, a gray coolness, a faint sun, hidden & dull behind clouds; a winter run on a winter day.
Ky and Kas left and I finished my coffee and a muffin.  Pulling into shorts and a warm top, I plugged in some Antibalas and faded into a strange sadness while driving to the park, a heavy gravity that I can only correlate to a family member’s surgery (achilles tendonitis). . . . maybe the winter funk that ebbs and flows like a collective melancholy is to blame.
The park was quiet in a flat lusterless light as clouds rolled in on cooler temperatures.  Rare sun moments layered the winterscape on mostly empty trails as my legs pumped across the blue blaze that connects the main office with Sugarloaf Trail. The sand was thick with strong, wet grips yanking at my shoes, shins splashed in cold mud as I stomped through puddles collected from the earlier rain.   The mood and conditions were challenging the very idea of the run.  The trees seemed dwarfed, brittle, elderly, hanging in the air like black smoke burning off of the ashen coals of the exposed sand. An inevitable eventuality, the state of the trees.  Eventually, slowly, my legs loosened and my eyes relaxed into the landscape.  An interesting pale, spongy moss sprouted along the side of the path, and looked for evidence of pitcher plants or venus fly traps (which I believe are warm-weather perennials). My ears zoned into the morning stillness and the cool air sizzled in my lungs and face.  A few dead ends forced abrupt turnarounds, but I allowed myself to run in new directions and follow sand roads and unmarked trails, trying to experience something organic, unmeasured, wild.   Something fresh and open, like a moving satori.  But mostly I found myself running, just running, the hoof-digs pulsing against strained breath, thoughts dispersed and fractured.  Sugarloaf was a nice reprieve though something nostalgic filtered the landscape, remembering states passed in which I viewed that landscape.  The sand mountain.  The poetic dynamics in the act of Erosion.  I looped the trail a couple more times to add up to seven miles, hitting no brilliant times nor any exceptional insights.  Ultimately, just a run, the work of the run, and sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes it is not.

1.7.11

A run at the beach. . . . today was a good run at the coast, returning to one of my favorite seven mile out-and-backs, from Landfall to the Loop including Summer Rest Trail on both legs.  I ran with my lungs open and my mind reeling, avoiding pace concerns, avoiding expectations, and trying to be engaged in my run.  Few people were out on the sidewalks and roads, though Starbucks was packed with folks. WB park was vacant. Two ducks were busy searching for fish, diving beneath the bridges, and they were amusing and serious.  Pelicans pushed heavy beaks into the wind above a choppy ocean chewing the shore.  A moment of sadness descended as I passed the shell of the retirement home, recently closed, along Summer Rest road.  The sun brightened as I sprinted my way to end the 52 minute run at a 7.2 minute pace before a two mile walk with my very grateful dog and some GlobeTrekker on public television.

What was I doing one year ago?  I was starting this blog.

lung distance logs ii. georgia blue ridge.

november 29th 2010. clarkesville georgia. chattahoochee forest national park, panther creek trail.  lung distance logs ii. Knee is healthy and the mountains are in my window.

I barely had time to find the beastie boys cd and drink a half-cup of coffee on the nine minute drive to the trailhead of panther creek trail. the route was well-marked, making a trailhead in the middle of nat’l forest georgia easy to find. Three dollars for a parking permit, a stop at the rustic but private facilities, and across the highway, i began the run and pushed into the depth of forest which is the chattahoochee forest. just wonderful.

Panther creek trail is a ~7 mile out-and-back run on mostly packed red clay with plenty of ankle-grappling, foot-contorting rocks knotted with gnarled roots and varying x-slope, grinding the legs at every click. The trail follows the panther creek, making harsh cuts through the woods, climbing juts of stone and jaggedrock cliffs, crossing the water four times (twice on rock and twice on foot bridges) and then pushing up burley root-steps and limestone slopes to eventually bomb into a flat area at the base of the panther creek falls. The trail has some fast sections, but mostly it is technical and makes for a pleasurable pace to absorb the many smells, images, and the interesting landscapes.

across seven miles, my footfalls were flat a total of one mile, maybe, and the rest was rock-kicks, root-juts, contortionist ankles and leg tweaks. iron and wine was in my head (from great heights, the slow release) when I relaxed from focusing on the ten feet of trail before me. thick with autumn smells, the morning was a cool 41 degrees with spritely air in the nose. . . . occasional animal smells provoked a higher attentiveness, but never a visual on any animal, neither bear nor bobcat nor panther nor dogs. . . a few birds flitted along, and I remember thinking they seemed very small. The trail was entirely void of human beings, adding another dimension of appreciation for this trail. . .

December 2nd. Tallulah falls state park, ga. I quickly filed my paperwork for a backcountry permit at the state park offices, paid a five dollar parking fee, (parking is free at ga state parks on wednesdays, the one day I didn’t run) mixed a watery g2 mixture and started the stoneplace trail. The trail is a 10 mile out-and-back route that cuts through the mountains surrounding tallulah gorge & falls, emptying out into a lake at the bottom of a strange mountain cradle. The trail is entirely primitive, with softball-sized and larger rocks ALL across the trail. I mostly followed the narrow path in the middle of the trail, cut by the torrential rains of Wednesday, a single-track rough the heavy layers of leaves and exposing the rocks and roots.

At about mile two, I’d found a gravel road (via a wrong turn-- blaze markings are sparse on stoneplace trail), venturing into a strange community of stacked multiplexes. Sliding down the valley’s slopes like archaic condominiums were six or seven “residences” composed of trailers and wooden structures, a hunting cabin with a cooking shelter ten feet to the left, and one smoking chimney of an unknown structure– maybe a still. Truck campers were roughly balanced on wheel barrow boxes, and two old pop-top campers butted against rustic wooden shacks. Rebel flags hung high beside rusted drums, and one unseen dog barked. An old chevrolet, a 70's sedan, was stuffed with fake flowers across the front seat and the back seat, probably in the trunk too. I knew hunting lands bordered the trail, and while I was wearing orange and yellow attire, I didn’t want to risk totally losing the trail. So I backtracked and found a blaze and kicked it back up the red clay. (While I don’t want to sound like a stereotyping asshole, the film Deliverance was filmed here, and I was totally alone and a touch nervous for a minute. That is confessional and non-PC, so take it as you will.)
The beauty of stoneplace trail is well-preserved, is ungroomed and natural, but it is not postcard vistas. The smells are of red clay, decaying leaves (molasses and distant smoke), wisps of pine, wet stone, and fermenting cedar. It is rough mountain growth with massive trees decaying in the spot where they fell years ago. Steep descents allow a creek to babble up here and there, but there are few water features except at the turn-around point. There, a lake sleeps, tranquil and dark, fed by a few small creeks webbing in. An unpaved road snakes in from the west, blue-n-gray gravel, steep, gouged by sliding car tires. The lake is a recreational center I suppose, unremarkable but for the juxtapose of a lake cradled by mountains. The run back was acrobatic and fun, with fairly visible blazes on trees, and one open-face wooden shelter for camping. The trail strikes me as a very masculine energy, a powerful space to force one's self through.  Moments of joyful work accompanied me, and this was another wholly solo run.

December 3rd. Panther creek trail remix. Wednesday's massive rains eroded and resculpted much of the trail, also causing slippery crossings on limestone faces. But I was confident in my feet and legs, loose, if a bit tired initially, and had a a tight run. One terrifying image haunted the first mile, a strange tyler-durden-splice of a figure in wet black trenchcoat, an older male face, deep dark eyes, classic horror face staring down the trail as I ascended the ledge. I swallowed my heart, stopped (entirely baffled), breathed again and resumed the run through the apparition’s vapor. Strange. 

The bulk of the run, the middle section, was the same as before, but with a more heightened sense of terrain variations.  Nuanced dips where water pushed around rock and root brought concave spoons of mud, loose ropes of hemlock root grabbed for toeboxes, and at least two more fallen trees crossed the trail.  The smells were primal. The water was rushing and loud as water can be.  It was a wholesome experience. 

Towards the finish, I found some deep (but not huge) paw tracks, with claws, directly under the 441 bridge at around ½ mile point. I smelled nothing, but six miles into the run and nearly done, my pace was certainly boosted.

this trail is cleansing and focusing. pay the three dollar parking fee and run yr fucking heart out. The good work puts you in a state of glowing ecstacy. And its unpopulated status (on my two trips) makes a superior experience. It is not a long run, but it is aerobic and quick-footed as well as quick-minded, and leaves you energized and lucid, the reason for it all.

December 5th. mud and muck and miles. A cold wind seemed to face-off against me every step of a ten mile run, home again, Sunday, and thick in the post-vacation decompression. Weaving through the traffic of three major wilmington/ wb churches as they let out, I craved the mud and smells of the georgia foothills. Someone honked and yelled from a while tahoe. Mayfaire mobs collected at intersections like alligators waiting for a parade of chickens. I was back home. I bowed my head and kept running.