Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real


Consider the letdown over. Paris – despite the picture at right, the moonrise over Notre Dame – is no longer at my fingertips. In some respects, it’s been hard to be back home. The working life, the lack of open endedness of our days.

It’s summer and although my mind is a beginner’s one, one that seeks flow and as M and I have declared, “The Summer of Stories,” the excitement and possibilities that come from creation, from new work, I’ve also returned to responsibilities: salary work, finances, family obligations, etc.

On running, I’m often asked, how do you keep it up? How do you keep it interesting? I can understand it with team sports, like soccer or softball, even individual sports like tennis, but how do you pick yourself up and got out for a serious run as often as you do?

“Rock of Ages,” starring Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, is a musical-farce, rock-concert of a thing (think Tower Records as Celluloid Cathedral). At its heart rock god Stacee Jaxx seduces/confides in a Rolling Stone writer that he is on a never-ending quest for the perfect song: rock ’n’ roll secular salvation.

In my case, I run. And some runs, some races feel near-perfect. But I’m not there. It’s like some reverse Doomsday Clock. Joyce has Bloomsday: a near-perfect fiction that is immortal, a work to plumb and plumb some more.

Running has some of that for me. Runes-Day. A kind of magic charm.

I say reverse Doomsday Clock because it turns the How It Ends http://bit.ly/MC5nP0 thesis on its head. That during a run, or while inside a Joyce sentence, the concept of end, for a moment, in a burst of ecstasy, ceases to exist.

It is, as I used to say among friends in high school, about keeping it real. When we – all of us – still believed that we could not only have dreams but we could live them too.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head