Easy - yesterday, on the way to work.
It began when on the way to work I passed a slower car, which then promptly sped up, passed me and then pumped the brakes. You can see where this story is going: things devolved pretty quickly, with me yelling Oedipal epithets and flipping the double-bird (not to worry, I was steering with both elbows safely on the wheel). The lowest point was when the other car shot past me on the shoulder of a freeway interchange ramp because I refused to speed up or slow down past a semi, and at that point I reached for the revolver I keep in the glovebox began shooting.
No - actually, I took the high-powered assault rifle I keep in the passage and riddled his car with bullets through my own closed passenger window, deafening myself in the process.
No - actually, I followed him off the road and into a Safeway parking lot where I angrily confronted him, struggled over a knife which I wrested from his grasp and then stabbed him repeatedly.
The point being that murder starts in the heart. And the real story is that at the point that he decided to pass on the shoulder of a ramp while driving at highway speeds, I finally came to my senses, dropped back and followed him from a safe distance until he took an exit - letting go of hatred also starts in the heart. The ability to let go of your anger, dissipate your anxieties, think clearly, all of that is a matter of grace, doing things with ease and positivity. Not being dispassionate, but not allowing those passions master you. And this being a blog about running means that I have to contrive some application, but I'm serious! running well is running gracefully. One may protest that this way of being smacks of passivity, but that ignores the overarching fact that one is running after an objective - you can be in the process of hunting something down, but it's all about the style with which you reach that goal.
There is a piece of videotape out in the world that, if ever it was found, would scuttle any chance I had to run for the U.S. Senate; it is footage of me running in high school. Like Al Bundy, I played high school football (unlike Al Bundy, I consider selling ladies' shoes a passion rather than an occupation), and in one of the two seasons during which I played, the coaches took slow-motion films of us running so we could analyze our form. It was quite a thing to see: I'm wearing white cleats, maroon short-shorts, and a grey cotton mid-riff t-shirt (for such a purportedly masculine sport, they sure made us dress like nancy boys - ah, the 80s), all shot in dramatic slow-mo like Jaime Sommers-style, and I remember being quietly astonished at how graceful my usually oafish teenaged-self looked, how easy my running style was, how fluid one could look even if it was just a matter of falling forward and catching yourself first on one foot, then the other, lather, rinse, repeat, the very picture of surrendered ease.
I need to learn to drive like I run.
Suburban Housing Track (and Trail)
5.27 mi. 41 min.:38 sec. 7:54 pace.
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