Run instead of walking.

Decadent nights. A late birthday party. The end-of-year affair for the residency program. I have consumed more calories in the past two nights than the past two weeks. I exaggerate. But not by much.

I spent five hours cleaning the house today. And it remains clean! God, I remember back in the day, when we would clean the house ... and then after the party there would be beer all over the floor, and cigarette smoke in the air and all of the fabric of the house. Today was so nice, most of the party took place outdoors.

Even the outdoors is nice. Things work out well. We are good.

Distance: 3.20 miles
Duration: 29:30
Pace: 9:12
Route: Forest Hill Loop
Temperature: 71°
Climate: sunny & HUMID
Mood: weary
Stretches: yes
Bandage: yes

Farewell, Nike Flight headphones, we shall never meet again. This discontinued headphone got me through the NYC Marathon and so much training since, but seriously. I got these secondhand online and they worked fine, until today. Always the wires next to the input. The shortest lived phones I have ever owned. So, suck it.

Can anyone recommend decently priced Bluetooth phones? It's time.

1970 Playlist
Your Song - Elton John
I Think I Love You - The Partridge Family
Cecilia - Simon & Garfunkel

I was unaware of Your Song, until a girl wrote the lyrics to give to me. To me. It is my song.

Anyway, the phones went out and I tried running to the sound of my own breathing but it was a little difficult to take. Very humid today, very bright. Then I remembered I was holding an actual phone.

The Current
Tumult Around the World - Titus Andronicus
Ophelia - The Lumineers
Boozophilia - Low Cut Connie

That's right. Turn on the radio, and I get two Shakespeare references.

Baseline: 179.5 lbs.
Today: 172.5 lbs. (+0.5)
Goal: 170 lbs.

At the back of my mind I think I'm winning.

Thank you, Prince Be.

Exercise is happening. Every other morning I get up and do ten minutes, sometimes fifteen. Also, drinking an entire glass of water first thing, wakes you up and clears your system.

Every other other morning, I run.

1992 Playlist
Television, the Drug of the Nation - The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
Model - Balanescu Quartet
Higher Power - Jonathan Richman
Suck - Nine Inch Nails
Disappointed - Electronic
I'd Die Without You - P.M. Dawn
Steam (Oh, Oh, Let Off Steam Mix) - Peter Gabriel
I Love You Goodbye - Thomas Dolby

When the first mix tape you create for yourself after getting married is in memory of past girlfriends, you need to take a hard look in the mirror.

Distance: 3.65 miles
Route: Forest Hill Loop
Temperature: 29°
Climate: cold
Pavement: crusty with snow
Mood: all right

Stretches: yes

Baseline: 178 lbs.
Today: 175 lbs. (-1.0)
Goal: 175 lbs. Achievement Unlocked.

Last night I had popcorn for dinner. That's it. Popcorn and beer.

Hi there!

Sledgehammer was released a little over thirty years ago, on April 25, 1986. In a year that was recently - scientifically - determined to be the worst in popular music history, I was astonished and thrilled by this song. Awesome horns, excitingly syncopated guitars, a funky, funky bassline, that slippery percussion, and lyrics that playfully extend absurd and absurdly obvious metaphors for fucking.

My interest in his work had started with his last complete album of original work, Security, and in the intervening years (1982-86, my entire high school career, actually) I has absorbed pretty much everything he had ever recorded, on his own and with Genesis, including their justifiably difficult to find first album, From Genesis To Revelation, which is really, really, really bad.

But I bought it.

And that was kind of the point. While I enjoyed delving into early 70s prog rock, and had piecemeal discovered that a great many tunes from my preadolescence for which I had a deep, subliminal affection (Solsbury Hill, for example, or Follow You, Follow Me) came from the same interconnected ensemble of artists, by my senior year in high school they were all a bit passé, weren't they? And you couldn't dance to them, and that was extremely important.

Listening to Sledgehammer for the first time, driving in my car (well, Mom's car) cruising down the highway from visiting my new girlfriend downtown, I was first struck by the fierceness of the attack, and immediately recognized the vocals, and that was so exciting.

A new Peter Gabriel album! A new girlfriend! These two events are intricately connected.

Distance: 5 miles
Duration: 40 minutes (or so)
Route: Boulevard-Noble Loop

The album So was released on May 19, 1986.

I have always found it gratingly ironic that an artist who had championed the end to apartheid long before most of his contemporaries lost out on the Grammy for Best Album for this record to a man who exploited the effort and talents of numerous black South African musicians to create Graceland.

So alternates, track by track between funky and upbeat - Sledgehammer, Big Time - and dour and downbeat - Don't Give Up, Mercy Street ... which I have chosen not to include in my running playlist, not because I don't like them but because I came to run, not brood.

Visceral and ethereal. He loves doing that, sliding back and forth, striving to represent his idea of godless, earth-bound spirituality. Peter Gabriel was thirty-five when he recorded this one. Once upon a time I might have thought that was when a man was at his physical strongest. Maybe some are. Not me.

Long before the movie Say Anything (1989) the song In Your Eyes was that summer's signature tune for walks on the beach, crazy-long make-out sessions, and basically any time the evening stretched on well past that point you know you really have to begin driving home because she has to be back by ten and you have to get up for school tomorrow, but five more minutes doesn't really make a difference at this point, right?

Temperature: 57°
Climate: The light! The heat!
Mood: I am complete.
Weight: 164.5 lbs.

Well. Today would have been a good day to run a half marathon.

So - Peter Gabriel (1986)
Red Rain
Sledgehammer (Extended Dance Version)

That Voice Again

In Your Eyes
Big Time (Extended Version)
This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds) ft. Laurie Anderson

Once I ran to you.

The last time I ran so many times in January was 2013, when it was above freezing almost every single day, often in the 50s and 60s. That's what we had gotten used to until the deep freezes of 2014 and 2015.

Working in the attic I found a cassette of singles - vinyl 45s I had transferred to tape. I listened to these same songs, over and over again, lying in a hammock in Maine in 1981.

This is significant to me because I remember this was the summer I turned 13. It was the first summer I didn't really wish to be out of town for the summer. In late June I had been to a summer camp where I had made new friends, after a year of watching all those friends who I'd had through my elementary school years fall away from me, or was it the other way around?

At this camp I had also, somehow, started a relationship with a girl who I'd had tried flirting with in sixth grade, in the only obnoxious, eleven year old way I knew how. Somehow I had become somebody she actually liked to be around. We held hands the last night of camp, and that was nice. As we approached her cabin he rather swiftly said goodnight and dashed into her cabin, because she was afraid I might have tried to kiss her, and I may have, I don't know. I was happy just to have been given so much attention.

Our dating relationship would have to wait, however. Over Fourth of July weekend I met someone new, and she kissed me first.

These girls and everything else went through my head as I lie there, hour after hour, listening to this tape on my Walkman. I wanted to be home. There was no communication with either of these girls from that place, just me in my head, going everywhere.

I won't tell you what was on the cassette. It doesn't matter, it was music, and music is where I live.

Distance: 3.58 miles
Avg Pace: 9:02
Duration: 32:18
Route: Forest Hills Loops

A week from today, my daughter also turns thirteen. Coincidence? Oh, I think not.

Temperature: 25°
Climate: cold with bright sunshine
Pavement: drifts of snow

1981 Playlist
Under Pressure - Queen ft. David Bowie
I'm Not the One - The Cars
One Step Ahead - Split Enz
Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On) - Spandau Ballet
Tainted Love - Soft Cell
One World (Not Three) - The Police
Hungry For You (J'aurais Toujours Faim de Toi) - The Police
The Tide Is High - Blondie
Flexible Strategies - The Police

Weight: 161.5 lbs. (-0.5)
Mood: better

Every mother's son's romantic.

Last year it was 10° outside. Today it is considerably warmer.

Recently I uncovered an old notebook of mine, I kept poems in it, on and off, for a few years, starting in 1985. It was a book for poems. Yes. Do not be afraid, I will not be sharing any of them here.

However, recognizing the book my first instinct was to throw it away but instead I opened it and discovered, yes, what I was expecting, my high school poems, and they were not merely as bad as I had expected them to be, they were much worse.

It's not that the writing is terrible - it is - it's what I am expressing through those words which is so awful. And it's not because I am pathetically trying to express my young adult feelings of romance or jealousy or anger, it's not simply because so much of it is sing-songy, rhimey-whimey doggerel.*

It is because it is entirely false, superficial nonsense. There is nothing there. I am impersonating my idea of what a poem might sound like, I am not in the least bit trying to capture any kind of real emotion, at all. And I know I had emotions, big emotions, but they aren't here.

There is perhaps one actual real emotion, one poem I wrote at one time about one event which, while arguably still very uninteresting writing at least cuts to something real, some deeply held pain I was yearning to express, not pretending but actually presenting.

This book was also used to collect the writing of others, other people's poems that I liked though admittedly most are song lyrics, not poems, and at least two are by Phil Collins which should invalidate the entire exercise right there.

Also, I included poems I found in our high school literary magazine which I liked, one or two even by my brother which, while not necessarily deep are at least well-crafted and fun to read.

And then, at last, are the poems written by one of my girlfriends. There are several of those by this one person. These took me by surprise. Because they are good. They create pictures, brief stories, the impression of a thing without spelling out the exact thing itself. They made me remember something in me which I thought I knew but had forgotten.

What it most shamed me to remember was that she wanted to be a writer. That she was a writer, and a good writer. How can believe you once have loved someone and yet forget a thing like that?

Distance: 4 miles
Avg Pace: 7:44
Duration: 31:00
Route: Forest Hills Loop

1985 Playlist
Everything She Wants - Wham!
Raspberry Beret - Prince And The Revolution
Stop Dead - The Cure
Faron - Prefab Sprout
Close To Me - The Cure
Trouble and Strife - Everything But the Girl
What You Need (Extended Mix) - INXS
Have You Ever Had It Blue (12" Version) - The Style Council

Perhaps my very favorite of the annual playlists, and such a great day out. Considered pushing it further, but there is much, much to do. Alas. Tomorrow, they say, the winter begins.

Temperature: 52°
Climate: warm
Pavement: wet

Yesterday I ate what my son would call a "crap-ton" of fried things for lunch - for both lunches, actually, when you think about it, one at school and another after - I just skipped dinner. But seriously. Bad food, and two beers in one day. That's how that happens.

Yogurt and granola for breakfast and we'll see how well I manage at Karl's birthday party tonight. (sigh)

Weight: 165.5 lbs. (+3.5)
Mood: good

*Redundant, yes. I know that.

With my mind she runs.

Dog In A Bathtub

This is how this happens. For three weeks we have been rehearsing the residency program, and there has been a lot of sugar and fat in the rehearsal room, and I have been eating it. My weight has not increased, but that is not the point. My sugar intake, that which I had been so carefully keeping, has spiked. I have gone from complete control, to more casual, to complete lack of control.

Yesterday was a our first day in schools. Not including meals, here are the items I consumed that are heavy in sugar:

One large coffee with flavored creamer, one large coffee cake muffin, one frosting topped mini-cupcake, a McFlurry (Oreo & ice cream), two small eclairs, three cookies.

Yes, a McFlurry. I stopped at MacDonald's after work for a treat. A treat. As if I were the one who had been on my feet teaching all day instead of sitting and watching people teach all day. And I still felt entitled to dessert twice after that.

So. We have had our fun. This morning, without a run first, I weighed 160 lbs. I should weight at least that much, but the weight should consist of better things.

Today, I was good.

Distance: 3 miles
Duration: 23:30
Avg Pace: 7:49
Route: Boulevard Loop

Been writing lately. Expanding on a piece I began last year. Taken me long-forgotten places, like that dream I had this summer. Today I had to visit a school on the near west side, GPS took me down a side street I had been down in nearly thirty years, one I describe in this new work. That was odd in its timeliness.

Temperature: 64
Climate: cool and humid
Weight: 159 lbs.
Intake: tater soup, with bread and butter
Hydration: yes
Water Stop: no
Stretches: no

What's That Lyric?
Golden Brown - The Stranglers

Chasing, relentlessly.

NYRR: Cold-Weather Running Tips

Following a very challenging quarter in late 1988, I returned home to Bay Village for an extended holiday break from school. In those days, O.U. shut down from Thanksgiving to New Year's. I had a job helping out at my friend's dad's place, but was otherwise without a girlfriend or really much else to be happy about.

Freshman and sophomore year I was confident about my abilities as an actor -- too confident. Fall quarter was extremely challenging and I was not up to the challenge. I was not mature enough to survive living off-campus, and just didn't know who the hell I was or what I was supposed to be.

On Thanksgiving I had an epiphany, where I realized that I needed to be more pro-active, and not merely re-active. I began running, I ate more carefully, I read more books. For a while there I learned how to successfully calm my troubled head by just stopping, stopping and breathing. I was not happy, but I ceased to be so terribly angry.

That New Year's Eve we were at Erin's. The gang was there, the old gang. The same old gang. The high school gang. It was okay. We drank a toast, said Happy New Year, kisses on the cheek, and then home. The next day, Sunday, January 1, 1989, I didn't even wait for break to end. I had an apartment (albeit a hideous cavern of an apartment) which I could access before those with campus housing could return. I got the hell out of Bay Village and returned to the place which, in spite of everything, was feeling more and more like home.

That night I went to Lucky's (formerly CJ's) and it was like a family reunion, members of the school of theatre were returning -- some had never left. We greeted each other like dear old friends.

And she was there, that one, the one who I had tried so pathetically to get into bed the past spring. Okay, saying "one" gives the impression that I had only tried to get one person into bed the past spring, what I mean is she is one I had failed to get into bed the past spring. And it was because of this fact that I was in love with her.

Her main excuse at that time had been that she was engaged to be married, which was not a deterrent and besides, it wasn't something which made any sense to me. Regardless, it made for an exciting spring, and a very challenging fall when we were cast in a show together with another young woman whom I was supposed to have been dating during that same spring, but perhaps due to my inconstancy, was no longer.

That was difficult to write, which goes further to explain my autumnal unhappiness.

She, this one, was very happy to see me! I was happy to see her, and I was happy she was happy to see me. I was happy to see everyone! Six weeks of self-meditation, and I was prepared to give the world another chance, if it would do the same for me. We sat in a booth, theater majors swirling around us. We had drinks, I told her a bit about my new outlook on life, and she! She told me all about how great last night had been!

It had been a very unhappy holiday season for her, as well. Her fiancé had broken it off on Christmas Eve, and rather than wallow in misery, came back to school several days ago. And what did she find? Apparently Court Street fairly hops on New Year's Eve.

She went from bar to bar and from party to party, at each one finding more friends who had returned early, or perhaps had never left, and each party was better than the last. She reached across the table and lightly touched one of my hands.

"I was really hoping I would find you at one of those parties," she said.

Sweet Jesus. I should have gotten laid on New Year's Eve. I vowed then and there never to spend New Year's in Bay Village ever again.

The next year was quite different. I was dating someone new. I had a different apartment in Athens, and asked her to move in with me. She was from Athens, and we were celebrating New Year's Eve at a house there, a de-facto Athens High reunion, though those apparently happen all the time here.

She introduced me to her "alternative" friend, the one who lived in NYC, with dyed black hair. We talked, she smoked, we were flirting even if we would never admit it. And that is how, by fate or design, my wife and I have spent the past 25 New Year's Eves in each others' company.

Temperature: 21°
Distance: 4 miles
Climate: drifts of puffy snow

Wow. Okay, four miles on New Year's Day through piles of snow. That was a bit exhausting. Passing through Cain Park I was surprised to see only one team of kids sledding, what's up Heights parents? Get out of bed!

Kids spent the night at a friends house, now it is time to head to the annual Bagel Bash and load up on carbs. Then later ... sledding?

2013 Playlist
Pop Danthonolgy - Daniel Kim
Come & Get it - Selena Gomez
Clarity - Zedd ft. Foxes
Chocolate - The 1975
The Fox - Ylvis
Get Lucky - Daft Punk ft. Pharrell
Walk Us Downtown - Elvis Costello & The Roots
My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark - Fall Out Boy
Crazy In Love - Bryan Ferry Orchestra ft. Emili Sandé
Came Back Haunted - Nine Inch Nails
 I Love It - Icona Pop ft. Charli XCX

So begins 49 Playlists for 49 Years.

As this is to me, then so to you is something else.

"I've been reading your blog for a while now, and I still can't figure out why you run. 

I get the sense it just makes you miserable." 

- Karen, whom I dated in high school

Maybe it has something to do with the picture of myself in anguish at the top of the page, but it is true, lately it seems like it is all ugly. Because I'm tired. Very, very tired. 

But the running doesn't make me tired, if anything the running gives me energy. I do not know where I would be -- or what size I would be -- without it. 

It's my exercise, it's exercise I can get excited about. I have tried yoga. I have tried weight machines. For maybe three seconds I have considered teams sports. Can't excite me. Running, however, is thrilling. It is a dare. And it is a surprise.

Yesterday, for example, I complained that I got suddenly hungry in the middle of the run, which was just stupid and poor planning on my part. That is an example of a bad surprise. However, quite often I feel wretched when I start out, and gain energy and happiness as I go along, and end feeling so much better than I started.

The problem with this blog (I am taking your comment seriously, Karen) is that I am writing around all the other things, the before and after things. I try to remember the charge I get at certain points during the run, but have often forgotten them by the time I return, and then I need to get on with my life.

But then, I once wrote an entire play about running, about why I run. Martin Denton of nytheatre.com had this to say about it; "What I wanted was to understand why running is so fundamentally important to Hansen. But this show never really gets us to that place." It appears I have failed to properly communicate this fact more than once.

I am going to make a point of reflecting more on the running itself. That might change your mind about it ... or at least make reading these posts less onerous.

Temperature: 34°
Climate: mostly dry pavement, with as yet unmelted ice patches
Distance: 5.15 miles
Weight: 175 lbs.

Some reasons why I love running.

Breathing - While I can complain of being tired from time to time, I am not spent. I do not gasp, I do not pant. I breathe freely and deeply, and feeling myself breathe as I run is a joyful celebration of life. (I am trying to be tactful here, Cris, but she did ask.)

Also, for someone my age, my heart-rate is entirely awesome.

Thinking - Getting out and running is the only time I have when I absolutely no obligations to someone else, and so am free to think about anything at all. My mind wandering, I have directed entire plays, written entire scenes, developed perspective on issues which trouble me.

Outside - It is a fucking gorgeous day today. I may never have learned that until I stepped out for 5 o'clock rehearsal, and then it would be too late to enjoy it. This is a major reason why I have little to no urge to get a gum membership again, even when the weather is miserable. In fact, it has made me engage the horrible weather, instead of merely complain about and hide from it.

Neighborhood - Like a dog walker (except without all that horrible talking to other dog walkers) I know more about the state of my neighborhood and my city than most other people. I never learned the geography of my adopted town until I began training for my first marathon.

Muscles - I have extremely attractive calves.

Those were the positive thoughts I put together on today's run. Perhaps I have stated some before, but they are worth repeating. You know. For Karen.

1984 Playlist
Relax (New York Mix) - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
William, It Was Really Nothing - The Smiths
Shake Dog Shake (Live) - The Cure
Fuck Art, Let's Dance - The Adults
Strut - Sheen Easton
Cue Fanfare - Prefab Sprout
Me Ship Came In! (177 bpm)  - The Style Council
High Energy - Evelyn Thomas
Welcome to the Pleasuredome - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
You're The Wish You Are I Had - XTC
Skakin' To The Beat - Fishbone
99 Luftballons - Nena