Phoenix Riding (Or, Take Six!)

To the outside world it seems... He writes occasionally, we read occasionally, what’s the big deal? Heck, we didn’t notice he stopped writing a while back. He didn’t send flowers either.  Who cares? 

To the author it seems... Holy Bejeezus, I’ve been trying to write this column now for six months, no, make that nine! I’ve never gotten to a conclusion, and the world keeps changing. I wonder how long before Google locks you out of your own blog?

This is a running blog, but there’s scant little running going on here. Whatever. My small and anything-but-loyal band of readers know that besides dishing out amusing stories to compete for a tiny sliver of their time, my goal in this now dozen-year-long series of chronicles has been to provide some positivism, some uplift (and this year being Excrement Expo 2020, we really need positivism). Sure, there have been chapters where I’ve railed on various organizations or situations, but at the end of the day, I’m a moderately old guy who tries to keep at it, and in telling the tale of doing so, encourage others, moderately, very, or even not old, to do the same. When my unnaturally excessive activity light winks out, that will be a sad day. 

So world, let me say this: I’m not dead yet. I may have some flesh wounds, but I’m in decent shape at the moment, though that isn’t due to running. Or perhaps it is; not physically, but mentally. The running brain, perhaps the lizard part of it, but whatever, it just won’t let you hang up the active life and the desire to stay fit. So when one avenue is shut down, you find a different road. This new one (which really isn’t new at all) uses two wheels. 

For years I’ve weathered scorn from non-runners who insisted I’d ruin my [pick your favorite joints – knees, hips, feet, whatever]. And today I write with a diagnosed meniscus tear and unquestionably sore knees. So were they right? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if they were, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been a hella’ ride, and it isn’t over, as Bluto (Belushi) once said, till we decide it is. 

Yes, I have sore knees, but consider that before I started running, I couldn’t hike downhill without knee braces. Now, Adirondack Death Marches are a regular occurrence (including thirty-seven miles, five summits, and ten-thousand-foot-plus vertical feet over two days a few weeks back…which was a bit much, I’ll admit…so really, can I blame running for my woes?) I could point out other benefits, but the reality is, If I hadn’t been running for the last fifteen years, I’d bet good money that plenty of other things would hurt a lot more. Motion is lotion, as my most recent physical therapist likes to say (she’s right, of course). 

I’ve completed fifty-seven solar orbits, and when I look at my male ancestors when they were my age (at least the ones that weren’t already dead by then, which is most of them), they look, to be frank, what I think of as old. My beloved Uncle Joe, pictured at about a year younger than I am now, looked like someone approaching sixty, which isn’t a bad thing for someone who was, in fact, approaching sixty (and he made it to ninety-nine, smiling all the way, so he clearly did a lot of things right). But I look in the mirror and I don’t see the word sixty (I know, I’m not supposed to say that, you are, [gosh, thanks!] but I’m waxing philosophical here, so just go with it), nor do I see the appearance of true age in most of my active circle. Maybe it’s just my rockin’ fashion sense compared to Joe’s era (I hear you laugh uproariously) or failings of the photography of his day, but I’d like to think that our mutually-supported active life has staved off decline to the rocking chair by a bit, and I think Dearest Spouse and my clubmates would agree. A few wounds aren’t too bad a price. 

All that being said, the reason I’m in decent shape at the moment is largely thanks to inspiration from Dearest Offspring the Younger, who back in May, while she hunkered down with us for a three-month COVID-induced house arrest (and cooked up for us an incredibly creative menu and breads and desserts and…), suggested we go for a bike ride. Out came the trusty Trek 520, purchased for the princely sum of three hundred eighty-three bucks almost exactly thirty-four years earlier (with thanks to Wing-San for the advice on that life purchase). The same trusty Trek that carried me through Appalachian Mountain Club Vermont Green Mountain Death Rides in the eighties (said sled being held up by a cycling companion, name forgotten, in the pic, circa 1989), and more importantly, carried me on AMC Worcester Thursday night rides where on one fateful evening in 1991 I met a charming lady who would become Dearest Spouse. Yes, said trusty Trek emerged, and its tires, which I couldn’t even pin to a specific decade, actually held air. And now, nineteen-hundred miles later, I’m no longer feeling like a tub.

Cycling isn’t a new thing, it’s just been in hibernation for about a quarter century. And it arrived just in time. When that fateful return to the bike came around, I’d been trying to turn the running thing back on after a six-month healing break, during which, well, we’ll get to all the fun and games that went down during that time of silence in a bit. But truth be told, it wasn’t going so well. My pace was, by my standards, molasses-like, which really didn’t matter, but worse, my body was, by anyone’s standards, rebelling. Then those two wheels rolled in to bring me back from the world of the fitness dead. Not like Phoenix rising, but like Phoenix riding. Yep, there it is, that clever title tie-in. You were waiting for it, weren’t you?

Mind you, that six-month break produced a half-dozen tries to put out some sort of an update on how things just weren’t healing. But each time I came around to, “But things just aren’t healing, I’m not running, and my loving readers, they just don’t care,” and I’d put it aside for a few weeks. Then come back to it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Perhaps by this sixth try I’ll get it out the door. Heck, by now the article even has two titles! So, Take Six! 

 So, in rapid-fire succession, 

Take Zero (because you heard this already): The half-marathon I shouldn’t have finished, and the Cheese Storm Incident (also known as CSI: Marlborough). And… he’s down.

Take One: Death by PT! Which really meant lots of exercises that we hoped would make things stronger without breaking anything else. And sitting on the beloved (not) spin bike at the gym (which you could do, pre-COVID). And getting a bit pudgy. (Yeah, I know, not by societal standards, but still…) The plan was to do this until said knee plateaued for at least three months, at which point we might think about the nuclear option (wait, who’s “we”, I hear you ask? In this case it’s Dr. Triathlon and I, who made a secret plot to run the NYC marathon together… how’d that work out, eh?). And I wrote about it. But you really didn’t care. So I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Two: Where I prove to have the patience of a puppy. We opt to pull in our dates and jump to the nuclear option ahead of time. But Dr. Triathlon manages to break some of his own bones skiing (I ask him, “When an orthopedist breaks something, who do YOU go to?” He replies, “Me!”), so things get delayed, and next thing you know it’s time for my half-business, half-pleasure trip to Arizona where Dearest Spouse and I plan to hike the deserts after my conference. An unexpected traffic encounter (which happened to be in Phoenix; thus her recovery adds a sort of double entendre to Phoenix half of the title, you think?) puts an end to her hiking plans, but we wander the countryside anyway and I get one day of hiking at a really wild place called Chiricahua (the picture here doesn’t do it justice, you’ve gotta’ go there!), which I’d never heard of before, but which seems to pop up everywhere since. And I wrote about it, or started to, because it while the desert was cool (or hot), the whole trip experience wasn’t very uplifting (you might say it was impactful), so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Three: The nuclear option, PRP, or Plasma Rich Platelets (as opposed to the thermonuclear option, traditional meniscus surgery, which we’d decided is a bad idea for anyone who plans to remain very active). In this chapter, we extract some of my ether of life, centrifuge the daylights out of it in a really cool machine, and come up with a syringe of highly concentrated platelets – the component of your blood that induces healing. Dr. Tri refers to this stuff as “Miracle Gro”, as opposed to the sack of red blood cells left over, which will get you DQ’d for blood doping. Then we inject it into my knee and see what happens. Which, the first time, is not much. And the second time, feeling like a human pincushion, is sadly still not much. Well, you’ve gotta’ go up to bat, right? It was worth trying. And I wrote about it, but besides pictures of the cool blood machine, there wasn’t a lot compelling, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Four: It’s now pushing March and looking doubtful I’ll be able to keep my Boston Marathon streak alive. So I hatch a diabolical plan: Cook up a virus in my Level Four Biohazard Lab deep in the basement, unleash it on the world (of course, I had thought of this and started months earlier, because I’m diabolical), and make sure the nation is led by the most incompetent collection of liars, cheats, and morons we’ve ever seen. And it worked. Boston is postponed. Five extra months to heal. My streak might live on… And I wrote about it, but the O.J. Simpson “What If I Did It?” joke was truly tasteless even by my standards, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Five: Said virus forces Dearest Offspring the Younger, now an experienced chef, to abandon her upstate New York outpost and take refuge in Fort Home, resulting in the aforementioned orgy of baking and cooking and pastry the likes of which the world has rarely seen. I don’t believe we ate the same dinner twice. It was, what you might call, an expansionary time. Around the time when Boston was to have been run, I tried to get back out there. I logged about eighty-five miles over a month, not enough to counteract the culinary delights, and of course, the gym was closed. Things were getting desperate. And I wrote about it, but it was just another Oh Woe Is Me tale, so I put it aside, unpublished.

And then: “Hey Dad, let’s go for a bike ride.” 

Take Six: Phoenix rides. 

[Truth in advertising: Really that was Take Seven. The original Take Six didn’t make it out the door, either. I wrote about the cycling emerging, but wasn’t sure the it would stick, so I put it aside, unpublished. But Seven was pretty much Six, so I stopped counting.]

Once I glued my thirty-year-old cycling shoes back together with silicone caulk (since shopping the Age of COVID is a challenge) and refreshed my bicycle maintenance skills, the bike quickly became a habit, much like running. The first month was exciting, the second settled into a routine, but a good one, and by the third I’d ridden to towns I’d never driven through, not to mention all three neighboring states. It’s been a ride, literally; and one that my knees have been happy about. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do come November. 

Somewhere in the haze of quarantined days, Boston turned from postponed to cancelled to virtual, and that event comes up in a few days. I’ve run a grand total of two miles around the track in the last three months. But between the cycling and plenty of hikes ranging from those Death Marches to reasonable mountains to some amusing local stuff (triple points!), the summer has seen plenty of fitness restored. Whether it will let me jog a ludicrously slow virtual marathon is anyone’s guess. Whether I’ll even try is also anyone’s guess. Wagers, anyone? 

Truth is, this could well be the end of big running miles. Or maybe not, who knows? I have been and always will be a big proponent of running as a source of physical and mental fitness, but I never deluded myself into thinking it would last forever. If this turns out to be a transition, I might not spend much time running, but the running mentality won’t let me sit on my posterior, either. It’s just fitness OCD redefined to another medium.