Running with P-nut

He was a white chihuahua mix and he was a nervous dog. You could make him roll over and act dead like a cartoon dog just by staring at him hard enough. He was beta to our beta dog but he could love on you like no ones's business.

He had this thing where he'd walk behind you on the back of the couch and fall sideways so his back was pressed against your neck, curling into a tiny white ball of fur and warmth. He would stay there as long as you'd let him.

This is a running story though...

We were at the cemetary in Milledgeville Georgia visiting Flannery O'Conner's grave. We had all three dogs. And P-nut got loose. He tore off around that garveyard, stopping to pee on differant gravestones, looking back at us and running again.

I had never seen him run like that. He looked like one of those greyhounds racing after a rabbit, legs swung in and under, fast as lightening. It was such a shame when my wife finally stopped him. She just stood there and grimaced. Thats all it took. He stopped, looked up at her, rolled over and played dead.

Mostly P-nut was timid. He always had this whooped look on his face. You know it when you see it. You know it if you'd had it. Somewhere along the way he'd gotten beat and that never left his mind except that one day in Milledgeville.

P-nut died a few months ago. We came home one rainy night and found him curled on the floor. I hadn't paid him much mind all that week. I'd been busy. I dug his hole, tugged his ear one last time and buried him in the rain.

I'd like to remember him as that racing dog because I think he had big dreams just like I got. He just had less chance to try them out. He was mousy most days and awkward but that one time he was Emil Zapotek or whatever the dog version of fast and dangerous is. I think in his heart that's the dog he always wanted to be.

I sometimes think of all those "all or nothing" racers when I run but I end up backing off. I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid, if I just go for it, I might come up short. P-nut saw his chance and took it. I need to step up. I need to leave it all on the trail. I need to race like my boy P-nut.

Back Story: Red Hills Triatholon

I signed up for the Red Hills Tri too soon but the truth was I needed a real world goal. I needed a reason to be training. The RHT gave me a genuine sense of purpose and urgency. I even planned a victory trip to Paris to celebrate.

I ran a lot and swam. I swam a lot. I think swimming made me a better runner. I didn't bike so much. I don't mind biking but road biking, as a training paradigm, bores the ever lovin' shit out a me. I like trail biking. I like to see how much guts I have. I did that a lot. What I didn't do, at all, is an open water swim.

They say your first open water swim should never be the day of the event. The worst part is that I had three opportunities to do open water swims in the lake the tri swim would be happening in and I opted out. It was a training failure. It was my training failure.

The few days before the race, little things went wrong. First I lost my jammers and then I misplaced my compression shorts. I had to patch my bike tire. The morning of the race, which my wife refused to attend, was cold and like night as if the sun would never rise. I set up my gear and waited in the dark, slowly losing my grip on nerve, slowly losing the why of doing all of this.

They herded us down to the beach and we had wait as wave after wave bum rushed the lake water. My group, the geezers, was all that was left standing in our wet suits and yellow caps. I looked over and saw a guy with a snorkel and full face mask. They signaled us to go and even though I purposely trailed the herd, people ended up swimming over me and I got kicked in the face.

The dark green milky water was ice cold even with a wet suit. I had no visibility and 100 meters into the swim my body started vibrating and my chest felt like it was caving in. The kayak guy knew before I did because I looked up for a split second and saw him coming toward me.

He asked me if I wanted a tow in and I said no. I tried swimming three times and each time the terrible convulsions started. He towed me in and then once on the beach a race official immediately pulled my timing chip. I changed clothes and called my wife. And then I waited for my friends to finish.

I'm proud of the fact that I stayed. It hurt but my friends had worked hard for this. They had worked with me. They deserved congratulations. They deserved my support as much as I appreciated theirs.

I've been back in the pool this week and am remembering how much I like it. Steph offered to help me with my open water swim and I'm certain now that I have to take her up on the offer.

This time, I conquer the swim first and then I sign up for the tri. Maybe not Red Hills. Maybe Destin or Jax. Something to get the nerves to go fuck off. When I take the Red Hills to bed, it'll be to let her know who's house she sleeping in. I want this dirty bitch off my back.

Running with Neil

Its been raining for two days and I'm coming off a serious ankle injury and coming on to a major calf strain. And I show up at Neil and Steph's to find out instead of running with Steph, I'll be running with Neil.

And why does that matter?

Neil and I are friends but I'd never run with Neil before when it was just the two of us. We'd always run with Steve and Steph and it worked. Neil likes to bolt. I heard him say once, he has some speed and once in a while he likes to use it. And, I imagine, my turtle slow pace can get a bit tiresome. When we ran as a group, Neil could be way down the trail and I still had a runner partner.

Its a thing about running a lot of people don't get. I don't begrudge Neil his need to run fast. I'm always a little surprised when anyone fast wants to run with me. They're fast. God made them that way. They should go fast. When Neil is way down the trail I'm not hurt, I'm envious. I admire his ability. I respect it.

I don't mind getting left behind because I run to run. Its the friction of someone fast thinking they need to hold back for you and all I can think is how much it must hurt being tethered.

When I showed up at Neil and Steph's and Steph was curled up on the couch with a blanket and Neil was getting ready, my first thought was that Neil got stuck with the chore of running with me as a favor to Steph. It didn’t bode well as far as I could reckon. I would slow him down and he might push me harder than I could go.

I hate that I keep circling back on this but I have no illusions about my speed or gains or anything like that. Neil just out classes me as a runner. He’s younger, by 209 years, he trained most of his life and he’s got the body type. He's tall and lean and fit as hell. I'm a northern European viking type, barrel chested with skinny arms and I’m nervous.

Do you get how wrong this could go?

So we start running. Neil’s real quiet for what seems like forever and then he starts talking, actually asking me questions, where my family lives, what my dad does for a living and I’m having the hardest time hearing him or breathing for that matter. He has to repeat himself and I’m thinking, now he really has to be irritated.

Then we have this exchange where I mentioned how fast he is, how we've never run alone together and he seemed snappish and then I corrected him, he misquoted me, I didn't say he was fast but faster than me and that seemed to piss him off and I kept thinking this is such horrible mistake and then we got to the water.

At first, it was splashy puddles and what seemed like anemic drainage streams then rushing streams and vast sections of water where we had to run around them into the woods and he kept having to wait for me and then it started to happened, he started smiling. He gave me some pointers on how to manage the water. Step straight down and then straight up again. Bounding. Working the edges.

I started smiling and laughing. I stopped noticing how much I was holding us back and started running. Then came the red clay hill...

It was two stories of red clay piled up from construction and Neil had us run up and over and he just one two three’d up  that bastard but with the clay's tension was broken by the time I started my ascent. I seemed to almost instantly sink into the muck, struggling to find a path. Sinking, plowing, digging until I made my way up to the peak. I was covered in red clay almost to me knees and my shoes were like adobe bricks. We looked out over everything. And owned it all.

Neil took off and jump from anartificial cliffs half way down. He jumped hard and smoothly. I ran and half jumped and half slid. We headed down a granite strewn drainage bed back into the streams. I wasn’t even trying to stay out of the water now. The red clay was coming off my shoes in sheets but that wasn’t even why. It was just so damn fun not to care about pace or stride.

Neil used the word awesome. I get that but I reckon he meant awestruck. It was so easy, unbound from worry , my pulse pounding in my head as the water got deep, knee deep, hip deep, shallow and then not shallow and then Neil seemed to fall forward, splashing face first into the water.

I called out, You alright and he yelled back, Yeah. And I yelled, Is it deep? But never heard his reply when I hit that spot and dropped 5.5 feet into an eddying pool, the water swirling over my head.Neil yelled, Don't swallow the water and I grabbed a tree root to hauled myself out.

We ran out of the woods and up along Park taking both the big bad hill and its little brother. We ran those hills hard and as exhausted as I was from everything, I just ran harder. I wanted to give up everything I had left inside me. I had been to the wilderness just a little. Cars actually got swept away in this very rain we had been running in this very night.

We turned left into Neil’s neighborhood and headed home.

Running with Vince

Vince is nine years older than me and mentally handicapped. I’m not sure if that’s the right term for it and I don’t care. He’s a bit undercooked. He’s slow. He’s Vince. When we talk, Vince’s mumble-y Cajun drawl is hard to follow and I have to ask him to repeat himself which visibly irritates him.

I’ve taken to just saying uh-huh and hoping to put it all together later. It isn’t any less disrespectful than I’d be to anyone else. He seems to get most things I say and remembers well enough. He has a head for numbers and a profound sense of direction.

Vince tends to get a bit stuck on details and it seems can be found repeating them. I’ve always imagined it was a way to make them real having just been reminded that they exist.

Vince has been running for twenty years. He even ran the Philadelphia marathon once. His daddy said that they had to have people running next to him with water as otherwise he would have stopped running and never started again.

About ten years ago he stopped running due to shin splints and only in the last six years started doing 1 mile fun runs and cycling to get back into shape. A few months ago he ran a church 5k and will run another a few days after Valentine’s Day.

When we ran the Saturday after thanksgiving, he ran in jeans and a button down shirt with a fancy western cut belt. He wore a jacket and baseball cap. I can’t remember what was on the cap. I think an American flag.

I took him to Forest Meadows. We walked in about 1/2 mile to warm up and then started running. I kept checking with him. We’d walk when he needed to walk. I kept checking with him. We ran about 1.5 miles when Vince yelled stop and we did. He was panting, hands on knees like the whole time he was sprinting but to look at him running, he seemed composed, focus and steady.

We walked the rest of the way back in to the trail head and talked a bit about running.
He reminded me about his fun runs and his upcoming 5k. I said I knew some milers and they were pretty fast. He said he could do a ten minute mile. I mentioned I had a 1/2 marathon coming up. He said he had cousin who did 1/2 marathons. It went like that.

No great insight, just two runners making small talk. I stopped to pee on the way out and he told me he didn’t need to pee. He ran on to the truck.

We had breakfast at the Waffle House with Vince’s daddy Burke. I sat next to Vince so that mostly Burke and I talked. Burke said he liked things simple like the Waffle House. Waiters and cooks were all the same people.

Burke paid and then we went our separate ways.