A Thousand Times No

The first winter after I took up running, the weather was unusually mild, even by the relatively temperate standards of the mid-Atlantic region.  I kept moving from December through April without a hitch, focused on working my way up to my first ten-mile event in the spring.

Long before the onset of the second winter as a runner, I had been tipped off by meteorology buffs that we would face heavy levels of snow.  Indeed, when the “Snowpocalypse” descended from New York to Washington, I was running my first ever half-marathon under kinder conditions in Georgia — a motivational carrot that I dangled in front of myself to continue training under more difficult winter conditions.  I celebrated by returning to Philadelphia and promptly running outdoors in the next snowstorm.

Which brings us to this winter, when I’m resorting to 42km of Italian carota to stay in motion.  I kicked off 2011 with a 12-mile run on New Year’s Day, but the next time I ran outdoors it seemed to revive the symptoms of a cold that had completely flattened me for a couple of weeks in December.

In the interest of keeping the cold at bay, I decided to run seven miles indoors on a treadmill a couple of days ago.  Which is sort of like a getting your teeth drilled.  Or having your tax returns audited.

So tonight I opted for seven miles outdoors instead — I doubled up on socks, strapped on extra shoe treads, and logged seven miles outdoors amid several inches of newfallen (and still falling) snow.  Unsullied and unsullen, snow always blankets the city in a serene hush, and sets the landscape under the night sky brilliantly alight.

Running in snowstorms has blessed me with some of the most glorious moments of safe and tranquil isolation that I have ever found in public spaces as a city dweller.

I’ll take that over a treadmill in a heartbeat.

In the back of my mind, I had been planning for over a year to run one particular race:  the 2011 Rome Marathon.

Now I’ve officially entered “Pinch-Me” mode.

Within the last 24 hours, I began the online race registration process, bought my plane ticket, and (mirabile dictu!) found an incredible deal on lodging that is within walking distance of the starting line for the race.

It’s been a long year, and a hard one.  I can’t think of a better place to be for the first day of next Spring.

When I was growing up, our family never had any four-legged pets.  If pressed, my father would remind us that he was allergic to both cats and dogs, so “regular” pets were out of the question.  We kept some tropical fish when I was in grade school, and also a few parakeets, but that was more or less the extent of our forays into the animal kingdom.

As I grew older, I started to question the severity of my father’s allergies.  “How come you never sneeze when we visit So-and-So’s house?  They have a dog,” I asked.  My father would explain that we had only visited for a few hours, so his allergies hadn’t taken hold yet.  But being around a dog for several days would pose a problem.

Later still, I discovered that having allergies to both cats and dogs was unusual.  My father assured me that either one would wind up making him sick.

Several years after I was old enough to realize that my father had no allergies and had been dissembling in order to dodge pet ownership, I confronted him.

“You’re not really allergic to animals at all, are you?” I said.  He smiled slyly.  “Why did you keep telling us you were?”

“If we got a cat, who do you really think would have wound up cleaning its box?” he replied.  “If we got a dog, who would have taken it outside in the wintertime?”  Not a trivial question in Minnesota.  We both knew the answer: Mom and Dad.  Having regular pets was hard.  Fair enough.

As adults, my younger sister and I both wound up sharing households with cat owners.  She often found herself doling out stinky servings of wet food for her landlord’s noisy, neurotic feline; I cleared plastic away from the ever-curious jaws of a howly, rail-thin black cat and her two plump, sheddy companions.

Eventually I took in one stray kitten, and then another.  A few years later, my sister started feeding a stray cat on her porch.  When my sister moved to a new house, the cat moved indoors with her, gradually forming a permanent, cat-shaped divot in my sister’s sofa, right at the edge of the picture window in the living room.

My sister put her much-loved cat to sleep this morning, after an extremely sudden downturn in the cat’s health that unfolded in less than a day.

Despite never owning a dog or cat, I suspect my father knew the truth all along:  The hardest thing about having a pet is no longer having a pet.

Farewell, Moochie.  You will be missed.

Tonight I booked a PhillyCarShare vehicle and picked up a trunkful of supplies for my pets.  As I struggled to carry an unwieldy 40-pound sack along the sidewalk and up the entry to my apartment building, I staggered past a woman who was out walking her Urban Retriever (more commonly known in other parts of the world as a Pit Bull).

“Hi, Buddy!” I said to the dog as he ambled past me.

His owner eyed the cargo in my arms, then cheerfully exclaimed to me as she continued down the block, “Oooh, my dog eats that exact same kind of food!”

Surprising, considering that I was hauling a massive bag of kitty litter at the time.

(Truly, there’s no accounting for taste.)

Today was the first Sunday in May.  In Philadelphia, this means it’s time for the world’s biggest 10-mile footrace, the Broad Street Run.

Mother Nature decided to provide an extra twist by throwing in record high temperatures over the weekend after April drew to an unusually chilly close.  By the time the starting gun went off this morning for the elite first wave of runners, it was already well over 73°F / 23°C and extremely humid.  The race coordinators had repeatedly emailed participants to warn them to take precautions against dehydration and overexertion in the heat.

Unfortunately, not everyone was listening.  For example, there was the set of runners standing next to us during the subway ride to the starting line, each of them clutching a Red Bull Energy Shot.  One young woman (whose bib was marked as belonging to a 27-year-old man named Bryan) polished off her entire bottle between two local subway stops.  My friend and I turned to each other, agog, as I quietly said under my breath, “That’s gonna hurt.”

We arrived in the starting area about a half hour before the race was set to begin.  In other words, with far too little time to navigate the porta-potty lines.  I eventually gave up and went to my starting corral, where a woman standing next to me wore an extremely disturbed expression on her face as she spoke with her friends.

“I just don’t understand how someone could do that,” she said, shaking her head.  As she continued to describe the situation, I learned why she was so put off:  someone had taken a dump in the Porta-potty she had just used…on the floor.   Eeeeew.

I reached into my race gear and offered her an antibacterial hand wipe, which she eagerly accepted.

It wasn’t until after the race that it dawned on me — if anyone gives a crap — that one the Runners of the Red Bull might very well have been the culprit.

Several months ago, I had the bright idea that I would try running a half-marathon in Minnesota while I was in town visiting my parents.  Fast-forward to this morning: exactly one month since my last long run, I was wandering around with my head poked through a garbage bag, trying to dodge the steady rain and still working on digesting the peppery dish that my mother made for dinner the night before.

Considering how badly things could have gone, I’m happy to report that there were no outright disasters.

• No bleeding or blistering of any sort.  A minor miracle, considering that every item of clothing on my body was completely soaked while staying in motion for several hours.  All hail the mighty BodyGlide, and a pair of bamboo socks that performed like champs.
• Nature called, and I was compelled to answer, just shy of the eight-mile mark.  My aversion to filthy portable outhouses is so legendary that future generations will read about it in the Library of Congress.  But I am in Minnesota, where the women are strong, the men are good looking…and the portaloos are utterly immaculate, praise be.  (BTW, can we just have a generic, non-brand name for these things?  In honor of Dr. Who, may I suggest “The Turdis”?)
• I broke one of the cardinal rules of racing — Nothing New on Race Day — and lived to tell the tale.  I converted a pair of women’s knee-length stockings into disposable arm-warmers by making holes in the toe area for my fingers and thumbs, but they were so comfortable that I kept them on for the entire run. I think this is the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship.
• Today was the longest run I had ever conducted in the flexy, minimally structured shoes that I normally reserve for shorter, faster practice runs.  Last fall I ran my right Achilles tendon into the ground, and reverted to more structured shoes for runs of ten miles or more.  But my feet and ankles held up today without complaint in the lightweight kicks, mile after mile.

Still, my endurance left much to be desired.  While slogging through the last part of the course, I kept repeating to myself that once I crossed the finish line, I would have a nice medal to remind me of how I pushed myself to get through the course on a wet and chilly spring day. After all, it was an online photo of last year’s medal, complete with its gear theme, that helped persuade me to sign up for the race in the first place.

When I crossed the finish line and made my way through the chute, I looked around for the people who were handing out finisher’s medals, but didn’t see any.  As I started asking volunteers where medals were being distributed, nobody seemed to know.  Finally, a volunteer in the food booth area gave me a definitive answer.

“Do we give out medals?  Sure, for the people who finish in the top few spots.”  So no finisher’s medals?  “You mean like the ones we give out for the kids’ race?  No,” he said, making a point to add that one of the local races he organized only gave out finisher’s medals for the 50K (30-mile) trail run participants, not the 25K trail run participants — because, by golly, the 50K runners had really earned them.  That’s when I realized that the photo I had admired actually depicted the medal in the children’s fun run.

Which, I suppose, explains why Minnesota has recently become so ascendant in the national distance running scene.  The women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the medalists are all way, way, waaaaaaay above average.

If you had to work that hard for hardware, you’d run a lot faster, too.

When I was in New York and pedaling up Sixth Avenue, I spotted Elmo as he stood by himself on the sidewalk.  I really wanted to take a photo of my folding bike with him, so I pulled over onto the sidewalk and greeted him.

After a few moments, it became clear that Elmo didn’t really speak English, except with a very heavy accent and a deep, adult voice.  And Elmo was carrying a red Christmas stocking which he was using to accept donations. (You can see it hanging from his left paw, looking a bit like a tail.)

But he seemed harmless enough, so I took a few snaps with my cell phone, gave him a tip, and headed for Central Park.  Let a thousand Elmos bloom!

I was getting ready to mail a large batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies to Europe when one of my friends pointed out that the suspension of air traffic due to the volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland meant that my baked goods would sit in an American post office indefinitely.  The cookies are now biding their time in my freezer.

In the meantime, here’s some lines to tide everyone over until the skies reopen:  “A Postcard from the Volcano” by Wallace Stevens.

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Love can make you do strange things, but it’s lust that hurtles you headlong into the unspeakable.

Which is how, just three weeks ago, I found myself carrying around an unmarked envelope stuffed with dead presidents, en route to a rendezvous with complete strangers in a pre-arranged location.

I will confess: lust made me do it.  Pure, unadulterated bike lust.

Naturally, as we have all come to expect in such situations, there is a video.

For years, I yearned to possess a Bike Friday Tikit.  The outrageously nimble folding.  The breathtakingly smooth handling. Ten minutes together made me giddy; one test ride and I was hooked.

But I held out, refusing to give in — until one day I simply couldn’t resist any longer.  When a secondhand Tikit in my size appeared on Craigslist last month, I finally succumbed and cobbled together the largest sum I have ever paid for a single bicycle.  All rolled into one giant wad of cash.

As is customary under these circumstances, I spent a considerable amount of time afterwards reflecting upon the implications of my clandestine activity.  With the benefit of hindsight, I would like to issue a sincere and candid statement regarding my recent conduct.

SO. WORTH. IT.

Why is this bike different from all other bikes?  A folder can go just about anywhere.  Let my Tikit recount its activities during a 24-hour span last weekend in New York:

Friday evening

– Emerge from the luggage hold of the BoltBus, near Penn Station.

– Unfold and cruise down Broadway on the way to Union Square.  Gawk at the fact that there is not only a bike lane demarcated by an enormous concrete island, but said bike lane also has has its own independent traffic signal.  Green bike = go, red bike = don’t move unless you want a speeding delivery truck to squash you like a bug when it makes a left turn through the intersection.

– Fold up and tuck into a nook next to the bar during dinner.  Speculate on which actors might emerge from the wardrobe trailers parked along the curb.

– Remain folded and accompany my rider and her host on the subway to Grand Central Terminal.

– Ride on the Metro North train out to Westchester.  Permit self to be lifted by an inquisitive train passenger, who wistfully recalls biking almost daily before moving from the Bay Area to New York.

– Turn in for the night in a quiet corner of our host’s kitchen.

Saturday morning

– Ride the Metro North train back into Manhattan. Unfold and fold again for the benefit of another inquisitive train passenger who discusses the relative safety of biking in France versus the U.S.

– Arrive at Grand Central, unfold, and cruise through the length of Central Park on the way to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

– Enter the cathedral sanctuary and receive a sprinkling of holy water from The Reverend Canon Thomas P. Miller as part of the annual Blessing of the Bikes.  Ring my brass bell along with the other bikes, which is our way of saying “Amen!”

– Wait patiently as my rider gobbles down two chocolate pastries from the Balthazar Bakery while standing in the narthex.  Refrain from pointing out that these so-called mini-croissants will go straight to her gluteus maximus.

– Cruise a few blocks to Le Monde on Broadway, fold up, and rest next to an outdoor bistro table while rider enjoys her potato pancakes covered with smoked salmon and slathered in Hollandaise sauce.  (Alors, she’s laying it on a bit thick with the French cuisine, non?)

Saturday afternoon

– Unfold and cruise over to the Hudson River Greenway, led by members of New York’s Five Borough Bicycle Club.  Swoon at the scent of all the cherry trees in bloom.  Continue down the entire length of Manhattan and around the southern tip of the island.  Climb up and over the Manhattan Bridge, then cruise through DUMBO past the long line at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria.

– Fold up and wheel around with a crowd of people through the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge Park.  Pause for photographs and viewing of Manhattan.

– Unfold and cruise through Brooklyn, with a pit stop at Uncle Louie G’s to refuel rider with pineapple gelato.

– Fold up and ride the IKEA ferry from Red Hook in Brooklyn to Pier 11 in Manhattan.

– Unfold and cruise through lower Manhattan to the Bfold bike shop to meet legendary shop owner David Lam.  Fold up and visit a whole store filled with kindred folding bikes.  Use mind-bending powers to persuade rider to purchase a squeeze horn shaped like a sumo wrestler.

– Unfold and cruise over to the Meatpacking District.  Fold up and roll into the Apple Store.  Quietly sit under the table while rider fiddles with an iPad.  Exult in the knowledge that she finds me far more irresistible.  (Take that, Silicon Valley!  Steel is real, baby!)

– Roll while still folded to an elevator for the High Line.  Ride the elevator with some talkative women from New Orleans.  Roll along the High Line for approximately a block and a half, until my rider is stopped because her companion is accompanied by an unfolded bike.  (Only folded bikes are permitted on the High Line.)

– Take the elevator back down to the sidewalk.  Unfold, and begin cruising back to Grand Central, past several Broadway theaters.  Contemplate breaking into song.  This is the life!

To recap the highlights of my Tikit’s first 24 hours in New York:

• Five modes of transport (bus, subway, train, ferry boat, and bike)
• Four city parks (Union Square, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the High Line)
• Three houses of worship (The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bfold Bicycles, the Apple Store)
• Two unsecret admirers
• One sumo wrestler-shaped squeeze horn

Complete and total success on the first big road trip out of the gate.

Maybe it’s love after all.

I spent this past weekend in the whirlwind that was the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  Since I was working as an official, most of my time was logged behind closed doors, working with scanners and tapping away on a tiny netbook.

On Saturday evening, however, the brilliant automated scoring tools created by puzzle constructor and tournament official Matt Ginsberg allowed us to catch up enough in the scoring to step out and join in the fun and non-crossword games.  In one music trivia quiz, I discovered, much to my chagrin, why I can’t seem to pile any more info into my old dog of a brain: space there has already been squatted by the lyrics to Jefferson Starship’s “Sara” and Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”

For “Listmania,” we split into 4-person teams and were given 15 minutes to complete as many answers on a set series of lists as possible.  We were asked, among other things, to list all the Secretaries General of the U.N., all the instruments in an orchestra, all the countries in South America, all the letter names in the International Alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, etc.), all the Harry Potter books, all the taxonomic ranks in biology, all the novels of Charles Dickens, all the musicals with music/lyrics/book by Stephen Sondheim, all the nations that have hosted the Olympics, all the U.S. Cabinet departments, all the ways to eat Green Eggs and Ham.  And more.

I found myself on a Dream Team — as in, I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I was awake and not conjuring up the whole thing in some big R.E.M. jam session.  Let’s just say two of them have appeared on “The Simpsons” and one of them works for the C.I.A. (the tasty, hands-on, non-Langley version).  And they’ve all created crosswords that have made grown people weep.

My main contribution to the mix was remembering every item listed in the song “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music (Doorbells!  Sleigh bells! Schnitzel with noodles!), and being able to name exactly 1/3 of the companies comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Far more interesting than the items we got right, however, were the holes in our knowledge and the points where we simply brain-cramped.

• When naming this year’s Best Picture nominees for the Academy Awards, we went 9 for 10, but forgot The Blind Side.
  “Ugh, I think I just blocked Sandra Bullock out of my mind entirely after All About Steve,” muttered the squad’s movie maven.
• We really, really remember Boutros Boutros-Ghali.  Just not at the time.
• We left out 3M from the DJIA.  Gah. Please let me back into the state next time I return to Minnesota.  Pretty please?
• We also left out McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.  Which I’ll totally blame on the influence of the C.I.A.
• I will also finger David Copperfield for the disappearance of Little Dorrit.
• Bolivia?  No marching powder for us, sorry.  Coke Stop Fail #2.
• Anyone Can Whistle, but Do I Hear a Waltz?
• No Romeo.  No Juliet.  No Commerce.  No Transportation.  Clearly, we all need a CB Radio refresher. Coke Stop Fail #3.

To give you some idea of the blistering amount of brainpower in the room, even while we were packed with ringers, we didn’t make the cut for the top four squads.  They were invited onstage for the live finals, where each player was asked in single-elimination turn to name something off even more difficult lists, including:

• Buyable spaces on a Monopoly board containing state names
• Winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture with one-word titles
  (to which one contestant, drawing a blank, said “Showgirls!”)
• Books of the Bible that end in the letter “S”
  (same contestant, same situation, same answer –
  at last, good justification for a “Showgirls” sequel)
• U.S. Presidents whose names begin with dictionary words of 4 letters or more
• U.S. states whose two-letter postal abbreviations are playable words in Scrabble

The final answer to the final question in the final round was “Utah.”  Which means you are probably asking yourself, “Ut?“  What is an ut?”

The Merriam-Webster’s Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary, 4th Edition defines “ut” as “the musical tone C in the French solmization system now replaced by do.”

All those note names you remember from “Doe a deer, a female deer” came from somewhere long before Oscar Hammerstein remixed them.  The most common explanation is that they come from the 8th-century Hymn to St. John by Paulus Diaconus, whose Latin lyrics are:

Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.

(So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John.)

Hence, “ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.”  The seventh note in the scale was not included in the progression of the original hymn, but when it was added into the solfege scale around the 17th century, the same hymn came into play. In many European countries, the note we Americans sing as “ti” goes by “si,” derived from the Latin initials of Saint John.

Since the syllable “ut” is trickier to sing aloud than all the rest, it was replaced along the way with something that rolls a bit more easily off the tongue, which many attribute to the first syllable in the word “Dominus,” or Latin for “Lord.”

…That will bring us back to “do”!

Now, where’s my cream-colored pony?