Run On

When I first talked with my husband about my interest in training for the LA Marathon, he encouraged me to get an iPod. We’d had an early model that succumbed to one of the bugs since purged from more recent incarnations. As anyone who runs knows, for most people iPods are as much a part of serious running as decent running shoes. But I declined. I didn’t want running to be like everything else.

My life is full of life. Kids, work, house, car, phone, text, blog, read, talk, think, shop, plan, coordinate, do. Endless stuff inhabiting brain and physical space. Some some good, some essential, some pure junk. Most of the time I succumb, moving along with the current without putting up much resistance. Usually that’s okay, part of the pattern and demand of living, though once in a while I sense a simultaneous withering and winding at the center of things. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if running provided an antidote? At the very least, I didn’t want another contributor to the mental noise.

During the week, when I run on my own, I run in the dark, before and into the dawn. This time of year it is cold and quiet. Though the cold here is never really cold (see my Chicago run) and is in fact great for running, anything below 50 degrees and the number of fellow runners drops. Today, in the course of 45 minutes circling the Silver Lake Reservoir, I encountered only four other people. The roads were quiet too. The cold, plus the holidays, make this perhaps the quietest week of the year.

What is so great about the quiet? It makes running a sensory act. All aural stimulation comes from my own breath and bones -- every creak, pop, gasp, pant and shuffle. It makes me both more reflective and more aware. I see what is inside my head more clearly, but I’m also more attuned to my surroundings, to other runners, to raccoons at their morning ablutions.

I was pleased to learn – after I’d decided to run music-free – that the program I’m training with through AIDS Project Los Angeles bans all personal music devices during training (they’re also banned by the marathon itself, but that rule is widely ignored).

When Coach Scott told us of the ban, no one in my group complained. Above all, he explained, it’s a practical matter. The courses they design for us have us running in the street a fair amount (which I never do when I’m alone), and ear buds make it harder to tell if the drivers are honking in support when they see our yellow AIDS marathon jerseys or anger at our impingement on their right of way. Coach Scott explained that the organizers also want us to bond as a running group. The more we feel beholden to one another, the more likely we are to drag ourselves out of bed on Saturday mornings, week after week, and subject ourselves to mile of brutal pounding.

The silence of alone-ness and the silence of a group are two very different animals. One is fundamentally internal. The other is social, even in its lack of verbal communication. In our group we inevitably start out talking, catching up on the news of the week, delighting in these fresh, unfettered friendships. But by mile 8, 9, 10, the talk fades and the sound reverts to its natural rhythm of thumps and sighs.
In this way our running group is a throwback, an unplugged form of socializing that relies on neither Internet nor any other form of electronic stimulation to connect. Nor, at times, does it rely on talking. Sounds good to me.

Posted by Sara Catania at 11:42 AM | Permalink

1. It’s raining.
2. It stopped raining, but it might rain again.
3. The rain made the ground slippery and I don’t want to fall.
4. The rain made the ground muddy and I don’t want to ruin my shoes.
5. It’s too cold.
I have to:
6. Decorate the tree.
7. Hang the big snowflake out front.
8. Find the cookie recipes.
9. Bake Christmas cookies.
10. Get stamps.
11. Write Christmas cards.
12. Make something for Secret Santa.
13. Go to the mall.
14. Volunteer at the shelter.
15. Make a holiday CD.
16. Help my daughter make dream catchers for her school fundraiser.
17. Help my son learn the songs for his holiday pageant.
18. Clean the house.
19. Cook.
20. Eat.
21. Work is really busy right now.
22. I’m too tired.
23. I’m too full.
24. Everyone else is quitting. I don’t want to make them feel bad.
25. The baby Jesus wouldn’t like it.
26. I’m giving up running for Advent.
.2 I’ll start again in January.

Posted by Sara Catania at 6:58 AM | Permalink

When I signed up to train for the LA Marathon back in September I expected a few things. I expected to raise money for AIDS Project Los Angeles. I expected to buy running shoes. I expected to run a lot, mostly by myself, but once a week with a group of other trainees at Griffith Park. What I didn’t anticipate was the company I’d be keeping on those ever-longer Saturday runs.

I’ve already written about the giving spirit of my co-runners. There’s another thing about my running group that makes me really, really happy: its racial diversity. If that sounds race-centric, it is. As a child of the 60s and 70s who grew up in an experimental community that was created in part to promote integration, I am ever-conscious of race, and rarely comfortable in a group where everyone looks and thinks like me. It feels like a failure—a failure of community, honesty and humanity. I choose to live in Los Angeles in no small part because of its racial mix. The generic labels Asian, Latin American and African American don’t begin to express the city’s rich underlays of food, culture and intellectual perspective. Yet in my day to day life, that diversity exists – at best -- in the abstract. My social peers, my journalism colleagues, my students at USC, are –by and large –white like me. I’ve been lucky in my work as a journalist to dip into LA’s sea of difference, and I’m always grateful for the visit. But most often that’s what it is: a dip, a visit, a glimpse.

So it gives me no small joy to run every Saturday morning with a group that gathers under a common goal – to run a marathon while raising money for people with AIDS – but that could not look more different from me. Of course it’s not just our skin color that is varied, but also geography, life experience, work background, marital status and political stripe. Among the group are an African-American film maker, a Chinese-American from Philadeliphia who works for Disney, a Latino couple who work in property development, a Korean acupuncturist and a Latino in her 20’s who grew up in Watts. And, of course, plenty of white people.

Running long distances creates lots of time for talking with one’s co-runners, and each week I look forward to the conversations with the runners in my group. We talk about books, art, sleep, running, food, urban planning, the environment, politics – whatever is on anyone’s mind. The conversation is rarely about race, but I always leave the run feeling like I’ve exercised not just my body but my mind.

The election of Barack Obama has brought race to the forefront of the national conversation, and there seems to be a general optimism about its value in bridging our nation’s many racial divides. But my marathon experience keeps bringing to mind the much-touted 2007 study by preeminent political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in which he shared his finding that familiarity with others races breeds not compassion but contempt. How can that be true, I keep thinking. That is not my experience at all.

I came across this assessment of Putnam's study by Gregory Rodriguez, published in the LA Times in 2007. He posits that pushing people of different races together is not enough. People must come together for a common goal, a shared experience. In the past, he observes, organized religion played that role. (Though my perception is that churches of yore were often quite racially stratified). Could it be that my running group – a self-selected group coming together for common cause -- represents a new paradigm for racial communion? I hope so.

Posted by Sara Catania at 2:18 PM | Permalink

The world’s best place to run is around the Silver Lake Reservoir.

The world’s best time to run is to begin pre-dawn, 5:45 a.m., and proceed into the day, ending just before 7 a.m.

My conclusions are not scientific. In my two-plus months of marathon training I have run in exactly five places, three of them in LA (Griffith Park, the track at the Glendale Recreation Center, and the reservoir) and two in and near Chicago (the boulevards of Humboldt Park and the concrete loop around the fabricated pond near my dad’s house in the Northwest suburb of Buffalo Grove). During my training I have run at exactly five times of day (pre-dawn, late morning, early afternoon, pre-dusk and after dark).

But just as supermarket checkout magazines anoint some random celebrity the most beautiful man or woman in the world (with zero regard for the doe-eyed waiter at Say Cheese, or the ineffably exquisite bartender at Edendale Grill), I declare these universal truths, based solely on what I know.

My Griffith Park runs are weekly sojourns with my official pace group, organized by AIDS Project Los Angeles. These are often long runs, lasting two hours or more, and while the social aspect is invariably delightful, by the time we’re done the day is hot, sweaty and complicated. My runs around the track in Glendale are purely utilitarian. My son gains soccer skills and I run. It’s tedious and monotonous.

The reservoir, on the other hand, is a near-perfect place to run. Before dawn it is quiet, sparsely trafficked, dark but well-lit and cool but not cold. The reservoir offers a comfortable running surface (at turns gravel and asphalt) and a varied terrain: a few curves, several hills, a water feature and an active wildlife scene. I’ve witnessed a crane swooping overhead, seen a raccoon family foraging for breakfast and heard a chorus of waterfowl caws. The only imperfection is the portion of track that pushes foot traffic onto the street and into the blinding, speeding traffic that regards that particular stretch as a sort of mini-Autobahn (a protected path is scheduled to open in ’09). I avoid that part. It is only when running around the reservoir, in that pre-dawn moment that takes away only from sleep and not some other thousand obligations, a time that is not dependent upon anyone or anything, that I fully submerge in the experience.

I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend in Chicago, which provided me my first attempt to run “away.” I was curious to see how running in the dreaded cold and grey of late fall Chicago would compare. I didn’t expect to duplicate my home running experience in Chicago, and I was more than a little tempted to forego all physical exertion and succumb to a tryptophan stupor. But I knew I couldn’t skip running on all those days, or I’d lose ground with my training. My biggest concern was the cold.

I was born and raised in Chicago. I know about waiting for the bus, helpless against a stabbing lake wind. I know about the hollow chill that traps itself inside your ears and stays there half the day, and about snow that insinuates its icy, wet way into in every exposure.

The extremes of LA are far more forgiving. In LA, you can avoid the heat by running in the dark. In Chicago, when it’s cold, it’s cold all the time. And so you run in the cold.

The temperature for my first run was in the high 30’s. I hit the streets of Humboldt Park in borrowed, lined running pants and an insulated pastel blue shirt. Chicago and LA are different urban animals, so I can’t offer an exact equivalent of the Humboldt Park neighborhood. It’s European ethnic turned Puerto Rican turned ever so slightly gentrified (two of my sisters live there with their families), but mostly not. East LA might be an approximation.

It was late afternoon, just beginning to get dark, and the temperature was falling. People were focused on getting home. No one was milling about, no one was strolling, no one was engaged in recreational jogging – in a shirt that looked like an Easter egg, no less. I got some curious looks and a couple of mildly hostile ones. I was traversing a route suggested by my sister Amy, a major boulevard that would presumably steer me clear of any unsavory types who might consider me an easy target. The sidewalks were wide and mainly empty, which was lovely, as were the massive old churches and the big brick houses with ample porches set back from the street. But the traffic was loud, so loud that I couldn’t hear the chirping of my pace-keeping watch. And I was really cold.

When a body is cold it wants to move to generate warmth. I was running much faster than usual and tiring much more quickly. I was also overcome by a familiar fear that I was lost, or would be soon (I get lost easily). The run was short, quick, loud and mildly panicked. Not the meditative, methodical experience to which I’d grown accustomed.

I ran twice more while in Chicago, both times in the suburban development where my dad lives, in the suburb of Buffalo Grove. Of course there are no buffalo there, but the neighborhood does boast a large population of geese, who were on the move to warmer climes, as well as a significant number of Russians, who seemed completely unbothered by the cold.

During my runs, the Russians were the only people I saw who were not in cars. They would bundle up, in long, dark coats and heavy hats, and walk purposefully in groups of two or three or four, talking in serious tones. Mostly they ignored me, but occasionally I would get a look that suggested they considered theirs a reasonable activity -- walking and talking, while appropriately attired against the elements – and mine, running and freezing in tights and mittens, as just plain silly.

I could see their point.

Posted by Sara Catania at 9:45 AM | Permalink