Running Thoughts

So many great and powerful thoughts come into my head while I’m running. If I could just run all day I would become the next Walt Disney or Bill Gates. It’s not that the thoughts are all that different, it’s the emotional wave they come riding in on. While running, the thoughts are powerful and complex as if I have drilled down into a deeper substrata in my brain; and what comes out is pure and accompanied by real time emotions, even if the events remembered are from long ago.

Last Sunday, while running alone in Peters Canyon, through one of the harder, hilliest routes, my first 10K poured into consciousness. That race was a life altering event for me. It was in Century City on June 21st, 1981. This was during the height of the running boom, and prior to becoming a runner, I was not the type of person, a healthy person would want to hang with. If it was bad, I probably did it, or smoked it. Somehow I started running. During the early 80’s in West LA, there was little difference between a runner and a rock star. When people found out I ran, it was non-stop questions, “What races have you done”, “Have you run the Santa Monica race? My brother did that one”, “How many miles a week do you run?” I half expected paparazzi during my track workouts.

I have always been an athlete, but like most kids, most of my exposure to sports was on the playground at school. The playground can be a brutal place. You where either good or you sucked. If you sucked, kids are not shy about helping you know how much you suck. You were either an athlete or you were not. You either won or you lost. What I learned on that hot, sunny morning, with two thousand other runners, was that in running none of that matters. There was such an electric esprit de core during that race; everyone was pulling for you, no one more so than the guy running right next to you. We were all sharing the same pain, you knew exactly what everyone else was feeling. Joy and pain. Hell, I probably came in 1,856th place, but I had the biggest smile on my face. I was hooked.

Those sparkly magic fairy dust days of running are long gone. There are so few races in Orange County and the running generation all have bum knees and plantar fasciitis (that’s not a good thing.) But some days when I run, I am still running down the Avenue of the Stars, past the Century Plaza Hotel, with two thousand of my teammates, “Looking good buddy, we can do this.”