Heh. Well, it was by far the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done, and I didn’t at all have my A game like I did in my triathalon or the half-marathon. I got thrown from the start—I ended up behind my pace group and got caught in traffic and had to run the first couple miles over 10 minutes—then came the first hill, which was fine physically, but threw me mentally because by the time I crested I was already three minutes off the 4-hour goal I had set for myself but didn’t want to tell anyone about lest I jinx it.

I picked it up from here, but I wasn’t enjoying myself like I did the half-marathon. Mile 4 and 5 were my fastest of the race. By mile 6, I’d emptied my water bottle and tossed it, thinking the water stops would be enough for me—big mistake. Around mile 10, I passed the 4:15 pace group (they seemed unusually speedy) and could see the 4:00 pace group in the distance. My splits were frustrating—I’d do a sub 9er and then get a 9:20 the next. It didn’t seem like I was speeding up or slowing down, just sort of pacing with the people around me, but nonetheless. I hit the half-marathon mark right at 2:00:20, and got a lift from making it halfway, but I could feel some muscle soreness already, and knew the hydration thing was off, and then, well, I started longing for the next water stop, which turned out to be a mile down the road…

By mile 15, I knew I wasn’t going to break 4:00, and started thinking more about survival. I had dry mouth already. I slowed down at the mile 15 water break and made sure I drank a good bit of water, but it’s hard to stop and gulp properly, and TOO much water would mean cramps. So then I started up the St. John’s. Not bad really, I had a good time on it, got over, was stoked when I crested, did the downhill fairly fast. And then I turned the corner onto Willamette…

Mile 18: Suddenly I felt like I was in the Sahara. If I’d had any sense I would have stopped for a full minute and pounded a 32-ounce Gatorade. I had hot-flashes. My muscles were on fire. I had to take a leak but the Porta-potties were all taken and I refused to stop and wait. My pace slowed down to a 10:30, then an 11. I started raiding the lemonade on people’s lawns. Mile 19 was my slowest of the race-11:30—I found an open Porta-potty and rejoiced.

While I was suffering, a part of me was laughing about the dynamics of the race. To the right of me were the zombies--people limping with capsized muscles and vomiting on people’s lawns. In the middle were the ghosts, speechless hordes white as sheets, suffering through at a slow jog (me being one of them). On the left were the living—human beings jetting past me, having conversations about the fineness of the weather, the wonderful crowds, how fun it was to be running…

Mile 20: The family, some friends, and merciful me, a fresh water bottle and a Clif bar from Andrea. I gave them the thumbs up—never show them the pain… Not long after, came the Portland Fit cheering section. Not long after, Jan, a gal in my Portland Fit group who runs a similar pace to me, passed me. She’d paced herself properly and looked sharp. She told me to stay positive and hold my head up. All of the moral support helped--I still felt queasy, and my pace was completely determined by the max I could do without passing out or having my calves cramp up, but I steeled myself. Mile 21 passed by…

Mile 22: Downhill, my specialty. Running amongst the living. Pass Jan. Pass lots of pukers. The only problem? I thought mile 22 was supposed to be mile 23. My math is going all haywire. Ten minutes is passing by in an hour. My God, when will it end?

Mile 23 & 24: Uphill to the Broadway Bridge. Jan passes me with encouragement. The 4:15 pace group passes me without encouragement. I’m checking my watch too often, counting down the minutes. Praying that my aching muscles will make it somehow to the finish. I’ve finished off the water bottle already…

Downtown and in familiar territory. I grab four cups of water and dump them into my water bottle—a tactic I should have used the whole race. Confident in my hydration, I try not to become a calculator, but that’s what I become. 20 more minutes, 19:30 minutes, 19 minutes. Every step I take, I’m thinking about my muscles seizing or how woozy I feel. I’m running pavement we ran several times, though, in training and that feels good. I pour some water over my head, that feels even better…

Mile 25. I’ve managed, somehow, to get the 4:15 pace group back in my sights. Jan is running with them. Gil, this dude I ran into at 5 AM on the MAX passes me. He’s 64 years old. It’s his 36th marathon and he needs a 4:15 to qualify for Boston—go Gil go, I shout. “Shit,” he says. My spirits are high for the first time since Mile 4 really. Front Street is jampacked. Spectators are criss-crossing the street in front of me—I imagine myself tripping over some 4-year old and blacking out. Gil and Jan, who haven’t met before, are chit-chatting. They’re my lifeline to Mile 26…

Mile 26. And yeah, I’m hauling ass. Gil & Jan & the 4:15 pace group & people going nuts & the second-to-last corner all a short-distance in front of me. I turn it and the thought that I refused to have over the last 5 miles comes into my head—I’m really going to make it. My heart rate monitor reads 175. Spectators. Cheering. I pass the mother-fucking 4:15 pacers. I pass Gil. Go Gil go. I round the last bend. I put it in a gear I don’t know I have. I fist pump. I trip on the little bump that marks the finish line, stumbling, and a volunteer catches me.

4:14:42

Fast finish, the volunteer says. A little too fast, I say. We both chuckle. And then I can’t walk. And I have the chills. They put some mylar thing around my shoulders. I congratulate Jan and someone snaps a photo of the two of us. Someone hands me a Yoohoo chocolate milk. It’s gulped. I grab a banana. Can hardly peel it. Eat it. Find Gil. He’s made it with a 4:15:04. (Apparently, they give you 59 seconds, so a 4:15:59 qualifies a 65-year-old.) It takes me 15 minutes to walk a block. The family arrives after a considerable delay (I’m so dazed I don’t care) and we go out for a burger and a beer. I go home and pass out under the covers next to my son (it’s his naptime.) I shiver like a leaf.

Then for three days I crawl up the stairs and eat Vicodins like their vitamins…

Labels: marathon running

Two weeks ago, I posted an entry entitled On the Wearing of Hats, Part 1, in which I discussed the raison d'ętre for my daily wearing of a shit-brown-colored truckers' hat. The entry sounded noble, but missed the entire point of my wanting to write it in the first place, which wasn't to explain why I wear the hat, but rather to talk about the strangeness that has crept upon me ever since I took to wearing it.

I was born and raised in Irving, Texas, a giant, sprawling suburb of Dallas, Texas, whose claim to fame, something emblazoned in huge signs as you entered the city limits on any of its major freeways, was that it was the home of the Dallas Cowboys.

From my earliest recollections, I hated it.

I hated things about it that as a kid I couldn't articulate, but still knew I hated. I hated its flatness. I hated its lack of consequence, criss-crossed the way it was by six-lane interstates full of people trying to get through it as quickly as possible. I hated the women, plucked and caked and fake-boobed. I hated its over-abundance, the way everyone owned a mansion with a giant lawn and a swimming pool way too large for the small families inside. I hated the glass buildings, shiny and polished and cold. I hated the emptiness of the streets, the largeness of the properties making walking impossible. Dallas was L.A. without the stars. Dumb people making dumb money from dumb oil.

(The one thing I didn't hate, and this is utterly incongruent, was the Dallas Cowboys. I loved the Dallas Cowboys. I still love the Dallas Cowboys. It's actually an anomaly common amongst arts-oriented Dallas, Texas-escapees. We all love the Dallas Cowboys. Go figure.)

The yang to my Dallas-hating yin was California. As early as I can remember hating Dallas, I can remember loving California. My father was born in Long Beach. He had pictures of himself, standing tall next to a ten-foot longboard, in lengthy surfer-styled swim-trunks (unusual to see in the 80's, the days of short shorts), tanned and smiling with the ocean as backdrop. He seemed loose in a way that you never saw in Texans. I wanted that looseness.

I'd never been to California, and my imaginations of it were much different from its reality, but by the time I went to high school I knew I'd end up there and began prepping for it. I never wore cowboy boots, or big belt buckles, and I even wore blue jeans that weren't the normal shade of blue. (Lighter-colored blue jeans were considered alternative in Dallas, Texas.) More importantly to this story, I began paying careful attention to my language--I dropped ain't and y'all and yep from my vocabulary and started inserting like whenever appropriate. (I got my California-speak from the movie, Valley Girl, popular at the time. This ended up leading to some confusion concerning my sexual orientation, as my metaphors tended towards the theatrical, but that's a story best left for another time.)

I left, of course, and never looked back. I went to college in Northern California, lived in San Francisco for a decade, and eventually made my way up the coast to Oregon, where one could live a West Coast lifestyle on less dime. Everything's been peachy since, at least from a geographical-comfort perspective, and no one's ever questioned my West Coast status.

Until lately. Until I started wearing the truckers' hat.

Before the truckers' hat, it had popped up in my speech every once in a while, my gumshoe Texas accent. My speech would slow down when I would speak to my Dad on the phone—I'd slip into the sort of shit-giving, making-light-of-the-serious that Texans are known for. "Yep, pops, you're like the Terminator with that pacemaker and them artificial hips." Cops, too. Every time I would speak to a cop the Texan habit of playing it stupid would come out. "I didn't see no stop sign nowhere, officer." (Incidentally, playing it stupid with cops is completely self-defeating. Not once has it worked.) And once, in the midst of a sexual tryst I was having with a girl I'd flown in for the weekend—while I was self-sequestered in bum fuck, retiree Arizona to write the great American novel—we spent two days over-exaggerating Southern accents to diner employees, just for kicks. "You got somethin' to swat these here flies with, miss? I can take a lickin' to 'em for ya, if you don't mind."

Like I said, it crept up on me. In addition to the truckers' hat, I've grown long sideburns, almost mutton-chops, and when it's sunny (which isn't too often in Portland, Oregon), I tie it together with a pair of brown-lensed, aviator-style sunglasses. In my head, it's a Hunter S. Thompson thing, but to most of Portland, I look like a slightly mental Southern transplant.

I honestly can't say how it happened, if my ensemble created an expectation, and if the expectation subconsciously changed my speech patterns, or if the hat-wearing just happened to coincide with my becoming a parent, and the reversion of yourself as your own father that happens when you do so (although my Dad never really spoke like a Texan himself, so that can't be it), but ever since I started wearing the hat, I can't stop talking like a Texan. I call my daughter missy. My son boy. I use the word rill as an adjective. "That's rill strange." I even act like a Texan. When my wife gets on me (see, I'm even writing like a Texan!), I chew on the inside of my cheek a little, and answer her real slow and thoughtful-like, as if she were a cow.

It's so… weird. Parents at my daughter's school come up to me and ask me where I'm from. And I have to tell them. And when I tell them, they NOD.

I think it's time to switch to a beret.

Labels: accents, Dallas Cowboys, Hunter S. Thompson, truckers' hats, Valley Girl, wives as cows

Every morning for the last couple of years, not long after I get out of bed and look in the mirror, observing that, yes, it is indeed another bad hair day, I have slipped on my head a trucker's hat that reads, in shit-brown lettering, Stop 'N Shop, Leland, MISS.

The mesh on the hat is a particularly unusual shade whose color I can only describe as swamp--its original shit-brown, in coordination with the screen-printed lettering, having greened from overexposure to the sun. The green is sort of iridescent, like a fly. The foam front of the hat is a fleshy tan. The bill is more of the shit-brown, creased from much use.

If one knows me, one would immediately look at the hat and assume that sort of irony that my particular generation is known for. I am not a trucker. I will never be a trucker. In fact, by wearing a particularly ugly gimme cap that even a trucker might eschew, I am somewhat making fun of truckers, which makes me a sort of passive-aggressive prick, another trait my generation is known for.

If one knows me even better, like through the years knows me, one might also know that I have something of the late David Foster Wallace's need to contain my brains in my head. DFW was rather infamous for his trademark bandana, something he wore as a means of containing the verdancy of his intellect. (His more self-deprecating quote was, I believe, "I'm just kind of worried that my head's gonna explode.") My intellect isn't so much verdant as it is scatter-shot, but I associate with the urge. (Incidentally, he also wore the bandana because he perspired a lot, another similarity we shared.)

Neither of these assumptions, though, about why I wear the Stop 'N Shop trucker's hat does complete justice to its ever-presence in my wardrobe. You see, the hat (or rather hats, as I currently have three of the original five, the other two of which were retired by my wife) was given to me by Bill Yee, my wife's stepfather, and the owner of the Stop 'N Shop in Leland, Mississippi for over thirty years. My hat wearing is a show of respect.

When my wife and I were married, Bill, whom married my wife's mother long after my wife had left home and whom I had never had occasion to meet prior to our wedding, handed us one of those ubiquitous red envelopes that those of Asian descent are known for giving. It contained a completely uncalled for sum of money, the magnitude of which, having been given to the household of a son-in-law who was essentially a stranger, indicated that he was a man bound by tradition and duty. My wife and I having both lost our jobs in the recent dot-com crash, and having a bun in the oven, the money was much appreciated.

While Bill is not a poor man, he would not be considered rich either. He's retired, lives within modest means in a small house in Leland, and escapes to the Mississippi River to fish five times a week. I imagine that the money in that red envelope took a goodly amount of time to save, given the lousy economy of Leland, Mississippi, and the extreme competition his little Stop 'N Shop faced from the chain groceries. His success hinged on living a life of fourteen-hour work days and vigilant thrift.

When I wear Bill's hat, I think of all the work that went into the contents of that red envelope. I think of the shoplifters and the holdups and the prejudice that his little band of Mississippi Delta Chinese had to fear on a daily basis. I didn't deserve a penny of his cash, but I know enough about Chinese tradition to know that what goes in a red envelope must be accepted.

I also know that when one receives a red envelope, a sign of respect must be returned. Every morning, I throw a swampy thing on my head. It keeps me humble. It reminds me to work hard. There's less irony in it than you think.

Labels: corner stores, David Foster Wallace, headgear, Mississippi Delta Chinese, truckers

I just finished Haruki Murakami's book on running, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," which is actually a book about novel writing, disguised as a book on running.

What struck me the most about it, was that as you read it, not once is there a single moment where Murakami enjoys running, at least in the traditional sense where you have a big smile on your face while you're doing something. The entire book is about pain management and self-discipline, which sounds terribly dry and unenjoyable. It's also a book about failure, about the countless events Murakami enters and doesn't do quite as well as expected. (And where he gets kicked in the side by competitors, and where he hyperventilates, and where 18-year-old Harvard girls with ponytails speed past him.) Unless you're a novelist (or a marathon runner, for that matter), and you sort of get it, any sensible person would be less inclined to take up long-distance running or novel-writing than before reading the book.

As a novelist, though, and as someone who has participated in a triathalon, not to mention the countless hiking and mountain biking "adventures" I've put myself through, I kind of get what Murakami is saying. When you're on mile 19 of a marathon, or when you're deep in concentration on a novel, you literally are not there to enjoy it. The part of our weird human split-brains that can analyze a task while performing it doesn't exist. You are literally one with the writing or the running--there isn't a you to feel any sort of emotion towards what you are doing.

Like I said, there's no enjoyment while this is taking place. If an outside observer were to take a look at your face while you were experiencing this, they would observe that you have a grimace on your face, and look like you're deep in thought.

And yet, when you're done and you come back to normal reality, where the left half of your brain splits off with your right half, you feel, well, there's no other good way to put it--laid.

Labels: Haruki Murakami, marathon running, Writing Process

Labels: Writing Process

After almost five years, I've finally managed to pull together all the threads of the novel. The last three chapters that I wrote brings me from the beginning of the novel all the way to the end. I still have to tweak the final 75 pages (and hopefully shorten them) but all the fear that I'll never get it right has finally vanished. It's so awesome to be here...

Labels: Writing Process

Too many words...

Labels: Writing Process

I'm pretty much three-quarters done with the novel, but it's going to be nearly impossible to finish it up in two weeks. Looks like I'm going to be out at home plate.

Labels: Writing Process

Sigh. I went through several rewrites of the next chapter. Hopefully, I won't have to do this too many times with future material.

Labels: Writing Process

No, this is not a diatribe about the Bush Administration, although the fact that the years of which I speak coincide is not entirely coincidental. This is about my personal failure, about the incredible waste of time that has been my writing life from the autumn of 2000 to the present.

I don't want your pity for this. I'm not going Morrissey. I am depressed about it, but the depression is tempered with realism, with the bare facts. I've produced nothing publishable in eight years, despite constantly being at work.

I have a three-hundred page novel manuscript called Silver, which devolved into a long instant message conversation between a guy and his gay college roommate about the sad state of American politics. I'm also on the ninth draft of what would have been a rather prescient novel, had I published it in 2004 when I first intended to complete it. It revolves around a preacher with an uncanny resemblance to like Rev. Wright, who bears an uncanny ethnic background to Barack Obama, whose brought to fame by an artist and zinester who shares Shepard Fairey's propaganda mentality (the artist who generated Obama's famous Hope logo). If I had published the book on time, I'd be considered some sort of prophet, which is also ironic, given that "Prophet" is part of the manuscript's title.

While I have nothing to show for these eight years, I have not been left without wisdom. I know where I've gone wrong. There are going to be those Anthony DeMello new-age, mind-over-matter types who will argue with me, but I know myself and what makes me happy, and there's only one way for me to write a novel, and that's the Proustian way: I can only write about life when I'm not living it.

For the last eight years, I've tried raising two kids, consulting for my wife's business, and writing a novel. I've had time to work—plenty of it—babysitters and daycare and a hard-working wife, but my focus always seems to be elsewhere, and without laser-focus my writing has an airy quality, as if the writer isn't fully there. On top of that, I've been miserable (and making my wife and kids miserable in the process), always berating myself for not getting anything done.

The majority of my first novel, World Leader Pretend, was written when I left an active social life in San Francisco, and moved in with my parents, who lived in a retirement community in Northern Arizona. I wrote like mad, mountain biked all over the Prescott N.F., and more importantly, was more at peace with myself than I've ever been in my life. Recently, I've taken trips to the Oregon Writers Colony, where I again, wrote like mad, took long walks on the beach three times a day, and felt reunited with my muse, who I hadn't seen in a long time.

The conclusion I've come to is this: after I finish this novel (and I'm going back to the Oregon Writers Colony in order to finish it) I'm not going to write another without giving it my complete attention. It may be years before I can do that, but at least I'll be living life in the meantime.

It may have been eight years of failure, but hey, I still have hope.

Labels: Writing Process

Labels: Writing Process

And much trimming was done...

Labels: Writing Process

Labels: Writing Process

Last night's finishing word count is awesome. Have to try and maintain the pace today.

Labels: Writing Process

I managed to link the new material I've been writing to older material, and at least for a little while, should be able to sail through a little faster. The end of today's count.