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I’m writing this during a brief bit of non-rain on Portland’s first real rainy day of the season. The first day of Fall was on the 23rd and we had a bit of rain almost immediately, but this morning was the type of insistent-yet-polite deluge that Portland is famous for, the kind of rain Fred Armisen would make fun of, maybe for a minute longer than he needs to. We don’t often get the sudden torrent that ends as quickly as it started, like on the east coast. Instead, our rain shuffles in with the quiet expectation of being known and seen and heard and smelled. Much like the hipsters of this city.

It’s September 25th, is what day it is. Yes, I am going to talk about running again. Yes, colloquially when I say “talking” I mean writing, but the sentence, “Yes, I am going to write about running again,” feels disconnected between me the writer and you the reader. If I say that I’m talking to you, it hits different than if I said I was writing to you. “I am writing you this letter” is something you’d hear at the beginning of a voiceover in a Ken Burns documentary. “I am writing you this letter to inform you that your dear nephew Ansel has pneumonia and is currently stretching his hands up to Heaven for God’s embrace.” People back then were depressed.

There’s a little over five days until I run 13.1 miles for a shiny medal and a beer before 10am. Yes, I bought a sticker. No, it’s not going on the back of my car. I told you, running is for me, not for you, which is why I’m writing to you ab—which is why I’m talking to you about it now. The sticker goes somewhere that I see most of the time. That’s the plan at least.

One of the interesting things about this whole process is that it is eerily reminiscent of rehearsing for a play. Training regularly, doing repetitive things over and over. Getting sick of it all and then, on another day, having an epiphany that makes the whole thing better. Currently I’m in the, “We just gotta get this in front of an audience,” part of rehearsal, when you’ve run the entire play so many times to no one that it’s almost frustrating. The director keeps giving you passive-aggressive notes like “Stand over there” and “Be better at acting.”

Hell, you’re even doing it with other people. With plays, everyone knows their parts and when you rehearse you become a cohesive whole capable of telling a two-hour story. With running, for me at least, we runners still all know our individual parts, but we’re separate, rehearsing for a play where we all do our own thing for an hour or two.

The wearing down is what helps negate the nervous energy. People still get nervous when they do a show, of course, but if you’ve rehearsed enough, then your nervousness slowly gets replaced with irritation. “I just want to do the show already!” you think as you make the same cross from downstage left to upstage right, where you then look at the flower pot poignantly as you say your line about how much you hate doors. In this example you’re doing a farce.

With running, the nervousness is about failure, about injury, about diarrhea. That sounds like a joke but it’s true. Every runner out there is worried they’re going to poop their pants on the run. Such camaraderie in that. Every runner knows that every other runner has worried about pooping their pants. It’s humanizing! If only we lived in a world where we knew that everyone was worried they were going to poop their pants, nuclear war would never have been invented. Oppenheimer would have been distracted, watching his scientists as they watched each other, all terrified of the Fart That Wasn’t.

But if you run, and you have a good routine set up, and you work hard, and build mileage, and maybe get a fiber supplement in every day but not on race day because if you get too much fiber it’s like the political horseshoe concept except both ends of the horseshoe are diarrhea—if you put in the work, then by the time you get to half marathon morning, you won’t be thinking, “I hope I don’t poop myself during the run.” Instead, you’ll be thinking, “I’m so sick of training for a half marathon, who cares if I shit myself, in fact I’m going to shit myself deliberately because I’m sick of training, I’ll be the goddamned GG Allin of this half marathon.”

And then before you know it you’ve already run the damn thing.

If you’re interested in following my progress, the Portland Marathon has a site that will track me: https://track.brooksee.com/track?h=pdx

I suspect there are mats at every mile of the course, so it won’t be real time tracking; instead, it’ll just let you know when I’ve reached various mileposts and at what time. I could set up LiveTrack on my Garmin watch but I don’t know how it works and I don’t really want to. There will be photographers on the course as well but my track record for getting a good photo of me during a race is pretty bad, so we’ll see if I end up looking majestic of majornstic.

Runs

Just a couple of races since last post. Blog entries if you wish to read them.

The final Parks & Rec 5k at Gabriel Park

CVIM (Clackamas Volunteers in Medicine) 5k in Oregon City

Nothing too exciting on this front, other than the half on Sunday, but that’s not in the past, that’s in the future! I’m a-gettin’ faster, little by little.

Punkins

I went to the Pumpkin Patch’s corn maze with my longtime friend and occasional argument-participant Missy last weekend. I got a free pass when I ran the Foot Traffic Flat in July, which started at the Pumpkin Patch. We saw the following:

• punkins

• corn

• small animals

• some other stuff

If you’re wondering if we got through the maze: we did. We ate pumpkin pie and two alright burgers and an apple cider float and two pumpkin spice beers and elote¹ and then wandered in a corn maze for an hour and then on the drive home I was a little concerned that I would poop my pants. See, I told you runners think about this all the time!

We tried to take creepy photos of ourselves in the corn:

I think Missy wins this one.

Glasses

In other news, I have decided, after six long years, that perhaps it is time to get a new pair of glasses. I am going through Warby Parker (#NotAnAd); the try-ons are in the mail. Here’s the thing, folks: I’m a big tall dude with a big tall head. I don’t dislike the idea of wandering through an eyeglass store trying on pairs, but the truth of the matter is, my head too big. My head too big and it’s just easier to get Big Head Stuff online. Even my current glasses, which I like a lot, were the biggest pair they had available at America’s Best back in 2017, and they still look slightly narrow on my face.

The problem with Warby Parker is that I hate the phrase Warby Parker. It’s the Lollapalooza of eyewear names. Warby? If I was a newborn infant and you said out loud, “Your name is Warby,” I would immediately grow several trillion brain neurons with which to articulate the word, “No.” Apparently the name is taken from two names from a Jack Kerouac journal, not even an actual novel. It’s a venture capitalist brand started by venture capitalists and I’ll let you guess if they were all rich white men or not. I’ll give you a hint: they all started the company with seed money from Wharton School of Business.

But what can you do. Nobody’s hand-crafting glasses out of reclaimed beachwood and coke bottles ground into lenses, you know what I mean? Or maybe they are. But it’s easier for my big head to shop online. That’s where it’s easiest to get tall sized shirts, for example. It’s impossible to do this at the store. Last time I went to the Target at Mall 205 the men’s section looked like a rabid wolverine went on a rampage in there. I couldn’t find anything. The only section that looked decent were the Hadrian’s Wall of jeans.

So anyway, expect a future post with possible pictures of future eyewear candidates.

50/90

The 50/90 challenge ends this week and I think I’m tapped out on songs. I got 25, 25 lo-fi demos for potential cultivation. Here’s another if you’d like to listen. It’s called “it ends all lonesome.”

it ends all lonesome
you think you should care
drop all your worries
cut off your hair

they tell you it's hard
the wine chilled in ice
it ends all lonesome
but it feels rather nice

you fight this feeling
all dark in your gut
the days escape you
you're stuck in a rut

but it's not all bad
walks through your neighborhood
you fight this feeling
but it feels pretty good

of course there's closure
a door's gotta close
peel out in the driveway
in those last little throes

you can cry all day
almost as if by design
of course there's closure
and it feels pretty fine