NO MORE FREEBIES
In 2005, I ran a 5K with no training apart from a weekly run on the treadmill. Time: 27.24. Over the last year, I've done nothing except walk the dog. But puppy-wrangling consists of 90 minutes a day of brisk walking/occasional jogging: how out of shape could I possibly be?
Cue Fantasia, in which dinosaurs die to the discordant Rite of Spring. This weekend's race: 29.19.
No analogies were required. I was lapped by life and, even worse, by college trixies who never stopped prattling. At Mile 2, I was passed by a nine-year-old and his effortless coach/Dad.
I wasn't one whit more fit in 2005, of course. I had but captured one last moment of easy, when not everything need be earned. Such is the 50's transition, a bridge to a dry land of hard work. No retreats: the bridge once crossed then crumbles into a precursor of the great abyss.
I suspect that the end of easy is dire news indeed for those things that can arrive in your life only in the form of gifts. No diligence earns an intimate human relationship, contrary to gym memberships and Lexus ads.
Better, I suppose, to thus dwell on those equations in which work still multiplies. On to ignominious basement sweats and actual street training. And perhaps -- because age isn't the only unfair bitch --some anonymous Little League fliers for the nine-year-old.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
Ah, I don't think it's ever really the end of easy. Things still fall into my lap, even at 51 :-) Though I take your meaning. No so many free rides, not so many un-paid-for excesses.
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