When I was fourteen and forced to take Phys Ed, my Grade 9 gym class had to run around the outdoor gravel track eight times (two miles, total), and, since I wasn't exactly sure that I'd be able to do it, I decided to run in the Blossom Festival Race down in Niagara Falls that my brother and father were already going to be competing in, just because it would be good training for me, for my gym class, and for my self-esteem.
I ended up running it with my friend from Fort Erie, Mike, and we actually did pretty good. Not top-ten, mind you, but okay. Decent. Respectable. (Meaning, we finished without puking -- always the barometer of success, in my opinion. In racing and in life.)
This was in May 0f 1990 (pre-Internet, pre-CSI, pre-Pauly Shore), and I ended up running all summer, just for the fun, the novelty, the exercise. It was something different than reading comic books and Stephen King and watching movies. It was a little bit of alternative exercise, this pounding on the pavement was, since hockey season finished around March and I usually didn't do jacksquat in the summer. I soon realized how, well, difficult it was, this running thing, this exercising-on-a-regular basis gig I suddenly had going on. (As Mallory's dim-witted boyfriend Nick said to Alex so eloquently on Family Ties, talking about school, but the sentiments of which apply equally to running: "It's a lot harder than sitting around doing nothing.") It took me out of myself and into the streets of my city. Initially, I thought that if I could just make it from the driveway of my house to my old elementary school (Pine Grove) and back, that would be something; that would be an accomplishment of Olympic proportions. That was my barometer, that two-mile jaunt.
I didn't talk about my running much, because my brother was a really good high school runner, and my dad had run a couple of marathons, and who I was I to talk, anyways?
Somewhere in the course of the summer I decided to go and run cross-country in the fall. My school didn't have much a team, being an arts-and-music school, but that was fine by me because I wasn't much of a runner, either.
At the starting line of my first race, I figured I had an advantage over all of those other guys; after all, I'd been running all summer. How hard could it be? I had heard from my brother who the top runners were; I figured, what the hell, I'll just try to keep with these dudes.
To express how clueless, ignorant and utterly over-my-head my fourteen year old self was is redundant.
But sometimes, as they say, ignorance is bliss.
Long story short -- I stayed with the front pack and ended up finishing in the top ten. My brother was stunned. He thought I'd just been bopping around all summer, jogging here and there. (Which I kind of was.) After that race, he realized that he'd have to be my coach.
In order to qualify for the Ontario cross-country championships, I had to finish in the top three in the qualifying race. Near the end of that race, at Queenston Heights, I was tired. Wiped. Finished. One of my brother's school's teammates was up ahead of me, in third. If I beat him, I would go to the provincial finals. As I ran, some anonymous supporter on the side of the course yelled out at me: "C'mon, you can catch that little guy!"
Sometimes, I wonder: Would I be where I am if not for that dude, if not for his random comment? Because he yelled at me, and I figured, what the hell, I'll try and catch the guy, and I did, and I finished third, and I went on to OFSAA, the provincial championships, were I finished 21st, I think, out of a field of a couple of hundred.
After that, I trained. My brother trained me. I ran outdoor track the next year, reaching the provincial finals in the 1500 metres and the 800 metres, and the next fall I won the Southern Ontario cross-country championships, made top-twenty in the all-provincials, then ran track the following spring, making it to the provincial finals for the 3000 metres, then ran cross-country the following fall for the final time, once again lucky enough to finish in the top-twenty.
That January I was in the middle of a race in Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, when I felt a twinge in my leg, and I dropped out of the race, and that was that. I didn't run another high school race, cross-country or track, for the rest of high school. Injuries, rehab, the whole deal.
What a wild, chaotic blur those two and a half years were! At one point I tried to transfer from my high school to my brother's school, St.Catharines Collegiate, because they had a really stellar team, but I found out that if I transferred only for athletic purposes I would have to give up a year of eligibility; I wouldn't be able to run for a year. So that option went out the window. I had considered, too, trying to get a running scholarship to a school down in the States -- I'm sure somebody would have taken me. (One of my main rivals, Andy Bosak, got a scholarship in America and did really well down there.) That also went out the window when I was injured and missed my senior year.
Ah, the glory of the faded, has-been athlete, eh?
But not all was lost.
I ended up recovering and eventually running on the cross-country and track teams for York University during my junior year, which was a real highlight, a real joy, especially since I had trained so hard the year before but had been unable to run because I got a stress fracture in my right foot (the pain of which still lingers to this day.) It was nice to run just for fun, really; nice to be part of a team. (We did alright, too -- placing third at the Ontario finals, but not too well at the nationals in Montreal, or at least I didn't, anyways, finishing at the back of the pack.)
Oh, and incidentally, it was very, very instructive, being both a Creative Writing major and a member of the cross-country and track teams, because the smartest, craziest people I've ever met have been either writers or runners. I've found that elite runners are either straight-arrow honor roll students or complete kooks. (Same goes for writers, actually). To go and pound your brains out on the pavement is a little nuts; to sit and create imaginary worlds out of symbols on paper is also a little kooky. To be someone who does both is, well, interesting, if not recommended. Caused a kind of schism, actually, because I thought that you couldn't be both, a writer and a runner; that you had to choose. No wonder that I identified so much with the title character in John Irving's brilliant The World According to Garp. I was young enough to believe that life is either/or. Of course, I won't speak for my former teammate and Creative Writing alumnus Brian Gibson, who was a much better runner and writer than me, anyways -- check out www.bleedingdaylight.ca for more info...)
You never want to get somebody talking about their days as a high school or college athlete, because they'll never stop. (My apologies. Thank-you for your patience...) The achievements of our adolescent selves remain primal and authentic; they shaped who we are and what we do. And these benchmarks, however transitory they proved to be, were founded and forged via a mysterious alchemy of sweat and stamina, of cool autumn afternoons running through the wilderness and hot spring mornings sprinting around an oval circle. Maybe the resonance can be explained by the fact that, in the madhouse that is modern-day adolescence, athletics allow you to win. You can conquer, stand proud, clearly and unequivocably know where you are, if only for a day, if only for a moment. (The rest of life doesn't offer such certainty.)
Running has been a steady, constant benchmark since I was fourteen; it's taught me everything I know. How to transform myself, believe in myself, push past myself. How not to allow others to limit you or your perceptions of what you can do. It's allowed me to put on weight and then take it off. It's given me the ability to amaze myself again and again. It's spiritual, is what it is; it's redemptive.
Running's a lot like writing, actually. Every time you do it, it's different. You have an idea of where you're going, but you never know what's going to happen along the way, what detours will pop up. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The longer you stop doing it, the rustier you get. They're both internal odysseys that lead you back into the self.
When I run, I'm connected to that fourteen year old kid who was just starting out; when I write, I'm connected to the child who would watch Star Trek, then make up his own stories.
So, my fondest wish for you is: Run. Many people say that they've tried to do it before, and they're weak, they have no stamina, but the great secret of running is: nobody has stamina starting out. You do a little bit today. Two minutes. Then the next day you three minutes. If you do this for a month, you'll be at thirty minutes. And so on. It isn't easy -- no, I can't bullshit that -- but it is possible.
The greatest thing about running: You go from here to there. You go out, and you come back. Your route is clear and defined and visible, every step of the way. Within that simplicity lies the essence of life.
Believe it. Try it. Slap on some shoes. Open the door. Take a breath. Take a step.
You have the ability to amaze yourself.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
ECLIPSES, OVERLAPS, AND WHAT'S LEFT BEHIND
You stub your toe. You curse your teacher, boss, lover. You swear at the Lord up above (or below) for your misfortunes.
What comes out of your mouth?
Words?
What kind of words?
Bad words.
Where do they come from?
Well, they...come. They emerge. They exist. They are. You don't question their source, shape, texture. An emotion is triggered; a feeling is born. You need a way to express that feeling, preferably quickly, preferably now.
Out comes the word.
I think language is wild. We take it for granted. We are born with it, raised with it, live with it. It expresses who we are and what we want. It gives voice to those primitive, primal impulses that dwell within our hearts and souls, lurking, begging to be released.
But what is it? Language itself, in all it's manifestations?
It's strange symbols on a page that are no longer strange (at least to us), and sounds emerging from our mouths.
That's all.
I like words. Love words. I think when you grow up with a love of reading, you don't pay attention to the lanuage too much -- you're in it for the story, the high, the kick that you get when you come to the end of the tale. (Not realizing, of course, that it's the language that makes all of this possible.)
Comic books helped me to read. When I was twelve, I discovered Stephen King, and, literally, read everything that he wrote, one book after the other, until there were no more books left to read. (I know, I know -- he published, like, a book every six months back then, but still -- six months is a long time to wait for a twelve year old.)
But I liked his brand of horror and humanism, terror and fantasy; I wanted more. And I noticed that his name could often be found sprawled across the backs of other books by other authors, one of whom was Peter Straub, a fellow fantasist, and so I read his books, and they were, well, harder. The language and storytelling was more layered, more intricate. You had to work a bit more.
And thus it begins -- the life of a reader. You start to pay attention to the language. You start to identify authors by the way they do things with the language, deciding that Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert, being Brits, have a distinctly formal way with the language that somehow particularly suits the gothic nature of dark fantasy, while Stephen King and Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury have a flowing, American looseness to their prose that somehow suits what they do well, while, in more lit'ry circles, Joyce Carol Oates has a manic, go-for-broke pace that never compromises the story she's telling or the way she's telling it, and Norman Mailer has a muscular solidity to his style that creates a wonderworld of a phrase every page or so, and Elmore Leonard's style is so transparent that it's almost invisible (which is usually the hardest kind to do, this type of 'effortless' writing), and Toni Morrison has a simultaneous grace and resoluteness to her prose that makes it dense, and Alice Munro has a way of telling a story that never allows language to intrude on her themes, her emotions, even though you do notice, now and then, the way she handles a phrase, the wisdom in the phrase, and you gotta give her some props for that.
In other words, you respond to the writers you like based on the way they jiggle and shake and piece together the words, the letters, the English.
And then I moved to Japan, avoided studying Japanese the same way I once avoided Full House reruns, for two whole years, before finally giving in and taking three-times-a-week, ninety-minutes-per-session- group lessons at the Association for Japanese Language Teaching (www.ajalt.org) in downtown Tokyo, where I slowly, incrementally started to get off on the fundamentally bizarre strangeness of acquring (or trying to) even the most rudimentary basics of another language.
You start off as a child, basically. You don't know how to read, write, speak. Then, eventually, you begin to see how it is that we learn language, how it is that we start to build vocabulary.
In the beginning, for example, if I was excited in Japanese, or angry, or dismayed, well, there were no words for those feelings inside of me. There was no outlet in Japanese.
Then you pick up a word here, there, everywhere. You listen to the radio. You eavesdrop on schoolgirls' conversations on the last-train-home. You begin.
It's fun and fascinating and frustrating and just downright cool, this learning of another language (even if I've forgotten a lot of what I learned). I believe, now, that you are missing out on something fundamentally human if you only speak one language. You are exempt from the shades and tones of perception that another language allows you to possess.
Those same 'shades' are what make Japanese such a fascinating language, a maddening language, a complex language. I have the utmost, super-duper respect for the dudes and dudettes who translate Japanese literature into English, and vice versa. They don't get enough credit. Even beginning to learn about why and how different languages express emotions and ideas in different ways has been an experience for me; as someone who loves to read, who can read some (rudimentary) Japanese, even imagining what it would take to shift back and forth from one language to the next, trying to preserve the author's original integrity, is mind blowing.
One of the translators of Marquez put it much better than I can: That when you translate, it's like looking at an eclipse; the English word and the Spanish word for 'horse', for example, each share a similar meaning, but there's another aspect, a slight nuance, that is only available in the original language, that they don't both possess. There is an overlap between the words, but there is always something left behind, too.
If nothing else, being aware of ideas like this, being conscious of other languages, trying to utilize them in your everyday life, simply gives you touchstones, moments of connection, that you can't find in your own language. Six months ago I stood on a streetcorner here in Phnom Penh, chatting in Japanese with my Cambodian Japanese teacher, when I had a sudden, almost out of body experience: Me, this Canadian kid in Phnom Penh, talking in Japanese, with a Khmer.
Life (for me) doesn't get much weirder than that, friends and neighbours.
(Unless, of course, I started to study Khmer in earnest. But it seems so hard...)
What comes out of your mouth?
Words?
What kind of words?
Bad words.
Where do they come from?
Well, they...come. They emerge. They exist. They are. You don't question their source, shape, texture. An emotion is triggered; a feeling is born. You need a way to express that feeling, preferably quickly, preferably now.
Out comes the word.
I think language is wild. We take it for granted. We are born with it, raised with it, live with it. It expresses who we are and what we want. It gives voice to those primitive, primal impulses that dwell within our hearts and souls, lurking, begging to be released.
But what is it? Language itself, in all it's manifestations?
It's strange symbols on a page that are no longer strange (at least to us), and sounds emerging from our mouths.
That's all.
I like words. Love words. I think when you grow up with a love of reading, you don't pay attention to the lanuage too much -- you're in it for the story, the high, the kick that you get when you come to the end of the tale. (Not realizing, of course, that it's the language that makes all of this possible.)
Comic books helped me to read. When I was twelve, I discovered Stephen King, and, literally, read everything that he wrote, one book after the other, until there were no more books left to read. (I know, I know -- he published, like, a book every six months back then, but still -- six months is a long time to wait for a twelve year old.)
But I liked his brand of horror and humanism, terror and fantasy; I wanted more. And I noticed that his name could often be found sprawled across the backs of other books by other authors, one of whom was Peter Straub, a fellow fantasist, and so I read his books, and they were, well, harder. The language and storytelling was more layered, more intricate. You had to work a bit more.
And thus it begins -- the life of a reader. You start to pay attention to the language. You start to identify authors by the way they do things with the language, deciding that Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert, being Brits, have a distinctly formal way with the language that somehow particularly suits the gothic nature of dark fantasy, while Stephen King and Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury have a flowing, American looseness to their prose that somehow suits what they do well, while, in more lit'ry circles, Joyce Carol Oates has a manic, go-for-broke pace that never compromises the story she's telling or the way she's telling it, and Norman Mailer has a muscular solidity to his style that creates a wonderworld of a phrase every page or so, and Elmore Leonard's style is so transparent that it's almost invisible (which is usually the hardest kind to do, this type of 'effortless' writing), and Toni Morrison has a simultaneous grace and resoluteness to her prose that makes it dense, and Alice Munro has a way of telling a story that never allows language to intrude on her themes, her emotions, even though you do notice, now and then, the way she handles a phrase, the wisdom in the phrase, and you gotta give her some props for that.
In other words, you respond to the writers you like based on the way they jiggle and shake and piece together the words, the letters, the English.
And then I moved to Japan, avoided studying Japanese the same way I once avoided Full House reruns, for two whole years, before finally giving in and taking three-times-a-week, ninety-minutes-per-session- group lessons at the Association for Japanese Language Teaching (www.ajalt.org) in downtown Tokyo, where I slowly, incrementally started to get off on the fundamentally bizarre strangeness of acquring (or trying to) even the most rudimentary basics of another language.
You start off as a child, basically. You don't know how to read, write, speak. Then, eventually, you begin to see how it is that we learn language, how it is that we start to build vocabulary.
In the beginning, for example, if I was excited in Japanese, or angry, or dismayed, well, there were no words for those feelings inside of me. There was no outlet in Japanese.
Then you pick up a word here, there, everywhere. You listen to the radio. You eavesdrop on schoolgirls' conversations on the last-train-home. You begin.
It's fun and fascinating and frustrating and just downright cool, this learning of another language (even if I've forgotten a lot of what I learned). I believe, now, that you are missing out on something fundamentally human if you only speak one language. You are exempt from the shades and tones of perception that another language allows you to possess.
Those same 'shades' are what make Japanese such a fascinating language, a maddening language, a complex language. I have the utmost, super-duper respect for the dudes and dudettes who translate Japanese literature into English, and vice versa. They don't get enough credit. Even beginning to learn about why and how different languages express emotions and ideas in different ways has been an experience for me; as someone who loves to read, who can read some (rudimentary) Japanese, even imagining what it would take to shift back and forth from one language to the next, trying to preserve the author's original integrity, is mind blowing.
One of the translators of Marquez put it much better than I can: That when you translate, it's like looking at an eclipse; the English word and the Spanish word for 'horse', for example, each share a similar meaning, but there's another aspect, a slight nuance, that is only available in the original language, that they don't both possess. There is an overlap between the words, but there is always something left behind, too.
If nothing else, being aware of ideas like this, being conscious of other languages, trying to utilize them in your everyday life, simply gives you touchstones, moments of connection, that you can't find in your own language. Six months ago I stood on a streetcorner here in Phnom Penh, chatting in Japanese with my Cambodian Japanese teacher, when I had a sudden, almost out of body experience: Me, this Canadian kid in Phnom Penh, talking in Japanese, with a Khmer.
Life (for me) doesn't get much weirder than that, friends and neighbours.
(Unless, of course, I started to study Khmer in earnest. But it seems so hard...)
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