The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

I had intended for today’s run to be an easy recovery run but when I got to the turnaround point on 81st St, I looked at the stopwatch and realized I was running at a better pace than I thought, I was feeling great, and I noted that the wind was going to be at my back on the way home. So I decided to push it a bit and ended up beating my personal best time on my little 4.1 mile route yet again, finishing with 6:45 miles.

However, that came with a price — extremely sore calves and a throbbing right knee. I knew I should have taken it easy after yesterday’s ten mile run, but I just couldn’t help myself. I mean, it has been such a struggle to get back into running shape and these little mental victories, the moments where running becomes complete and pure joy, are rare and much needed. I’m coming off the best week of running I’ve had in a very long time and it feels really good to be there. I ended up with a little over thirty miles for the week, ten of which came yesterday. I decided to just run down the East River instead of going to the park and trying to get the two laps again. I’ll still do that soon enough, but I’m not really as worried about it now as I was a week ago. But here I am straying away from what I had intended to talk about today. Let me get back on subject…

When I got home, I ran a super hot bath (it was all I could do to force myself not to reflexively jump out of the tub when I first got in) and dissolved a bunch of Epsom salts into the water to help relax my leg muscles.

As is often the case when I take baths, I started thinking back to the summer of my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and the months that I couldn’t walk. That whole summer, the muscles in my legs were contracted so tightly that I couldn’t straighten my knees. I think it was the summer between third and fourth grades, but I don’t remember for sure. What I do remember is being down in Phoenix at the Camelback Inn with the whole family and spending as much time in the pool as I could because that was the only place I could move around. The doctors never really figured out what it was — they thought it was a virus of some sort, but nobody was sure. Whatever it was went away after a couple months of hot baths during which I’d forcefully straighten out my knees by pushing down on them. As I was sitting in the tub today, I just thought about how different my life would be if that virus or whatever it was hadn’t gone away — if I had never walked again. All these issues and difficulties that seem so serious in my life now are so insignificant compared to the struggles that I would be facing if I couldn’t walk. I don’t know, I guess it just important to look at life through a different perspective every once in a while.

And that wasn’t even the last of the deep thoughts from the bathtub today — it was quite the philosophical soak… After reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore for an hour or so (by which time the pain in my legs had almost completely soaked away and my fingers had turned to raisins), I started thinking about getting old — certainly the narrative about Mr. Nakata had something to do with this — and tried to imagine what it would be like in fifty years when I am sitting in a bathtub somewhere looking down on my old, wrinkly toes poking out from the water in front of me. But nothing came to mind. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t form a mental image of what I would look like as an old man. I don’t know if there’s any significance to this. In fact, I doubt there is. I just felt that it needed to be mentioned.