Bay Area Trip

Heading up to the SF Bay area today. My wife's cousin is getting wed. He and his bride are a nice athletic couple. Hopefully, their shared love of soccer and cycling will carry them through any rocky times ahead.

Last evening's Night of Fine Drinking was a festive success. Coach Katie's my neighbor and graciously drove me. Items were raffled, drinks consumed; loud music blared making most conversation pointless. It was like trying to chat on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Afterwards, Katie went to get the minivan while I waited outside the bar on my crutches. This is in the middle of fashionable Old Town Pasadena. Busy foot traffic. After a few moments, I realized no one was making even cursory eye contact with me.

I looked around. At the end of the street, a guy on crutches was hitting people up for money. They must've thought I was part of a double-header.

All the best to my teammates, who will be running a faux 10K at the Rose Bowl this Saturday.

I'll be performing a 1/8K reception-line hobble.

On Your Fete

In LA, spring is awash in a whirl of fashionable Team in Training fund-raisers guaranteed to please any palate. (Note the overuse of alliteration, a hangover from my magazine editor days.) As fund-raising deadlines draw near, teammates turn up the creativity and unleash a spate of special events:

1. Lisa and Dave present: A NIGHT OF FINE DRINKING!
What better way to battle leukemia and lymphoma than with flaming cocktails? Hoist hot or cold beverages with the Team this Thursday, April 20 at the 35er bar in Pasadena. Ten dollars gets you in the door and puts a raffle ticket in your palm. Buy more raffle tickets for a chance to win items such as season Dodger tickets, jewelry, and $200. The party starts at 7:00 PM. Click here for the location.

2. Nick presents: NICK'S VERY OWN FILM FESTIVAL!
He films as fast as he runs and that's pretty quick. Having just wrote and directed an entry for the Howard Stern Film Festival, Nick's turning on the town to his cinematic efforts by screening Booey Parts: From Bobby to Booey. Wear your hippest black to Pasadena's Bodega Wine Bar on Tuesday April 25, starting at 9:00 PM. Pay ten dollars at the door and let 'em know you are there for the TNT fundraiser/screening. Find Bodega here.

3. Wendy presents: BUY NICE THINGS!
Ready to lose the Queen poster and stop drinking out of Flintstone jelly jars? Wendy's home will host representatives from Private Quarter and Southern Living at Home. See their spring collection and upgrade your space with fine items ranging from glassware to accents. Drinks, lite snacks and a few bonus drawings (including a little something from The Simpsons) round out a fun evening starting at 6:30 PM on Saturday, April 29. Click here for Wendy's Glendale locale. Check out an "Early Bird" showing from 4:30 to 5:30 PM.

All you Angelenos head out and support these events.

There's an old saying that those who can't run, write promotional copy. In any case, broken foot or not, I'm glad to plug my teammates' effort in raising money to fight blood cancers.

Live long and perspire!

Boston Marathon Update

Our San Gabriel Valley coaches ran the 110th Boston Marathon today.

Jimmy: 3:17:34 (7:32 pace)

Kate: 3:30:54 (8:03 pace)

Katie: 3:26:50 (7:54 pace)
The United States made its best showing in years. And while 1st and 2nd place fell to Kenyans, U.S. Men grabbed 3,4 & 5, claiming five of the top ten finishes.

A new course record of 2:07:14 was set today.

In the Women's Division, no daughters of Uncle Sam finished in the top ten. A Kenyan won here as well. Eastern European and Japanese women perch atop female marathoning, but Kenyan women dominate Boston, sweeping three in a row and six of the last seven. Today's race was a nailbiter with the Kenyan surging for the win, holding off a late charge from a Latvian who finished 10 seconds behind.

I'm not sure who won the wheelchair division.

Or the couch-bed division.

But someone did.

Injured Runner Blues

My arms felt so tired this morning I wanted to stay in bed. This cast/crutches stuff is real, whether I like it or not. And today, I don't like it. I'm sore, sluggish, every movement a chore. My ankle bone hurts from rubbing against the inside of the cast.

This morning TNT was out doing 16 miles. Our coaches, the Kates, and my winter team coach, Jimmy, are all in Boston, running the big marathon on Monday.

Last night, our fundraising captain, Dave, emailed me that I'd won a TNT sweatshirt for suggesting blogs as a supplement to our individual TNT websites. Blogs are indeed a dandy way to update folks on your training progress — or, in my case, temporary lack thereof. In any event, winning said sweatshirt was a spot of color in an otherwise drab day.

I have a script due early next week. It's for a joint BBC /Australian TV production that will probably air on PBS. The client ordered episodes before the creative team figured out all the characters and situations. It's a bit like launching an unfinished boat and attempting to build the hull at sea.

You might make it.

Broken Bone Notes

A friend who suffered broken legs playing tennis and baseball said my "crutch form" needed work. I shouldn't be resting heavily on the top part. I should lean — as in running — and use gravity to propel me forward.

If you are not wide awake when you go to the bathroom at night, you will be by the time you return to bed.

The doctor who set my cast was peevish and bitter. He pretty much said he'd seen one broken foot bone too many. I wanted to tell him to quit that day and go chase his dream: design fighter aircraft or cathedrals; paint bridges; be a mime, whatever.

But I'm glad I didn't speak.

He was enjoying his misery too much.

Broke At Santa Anita

After three days, my underarms are tender. I've put pillows over the top of the crutches for cushioning. I wear a satchel around my neck so I can cart books, etc. from one room to the next. Stairs are a pain, but I'm learning.

My 5th metatarsal, the long bone on the outside of the foot, sustained a fracture on Saturday. A cast for at least three weeks, then, perhaps, a walking cast. No running for two months. So long San Diego Marathon.

This sucks large. But there's nothing to be done but get better and try again.

To those readers who planned to donate, please do so. I understand I can slide your donations forward to another TNT event. (I'm thinking Long Beach in the fall or Arizona in January 2007.) The money still goes to fight blood cancers, but it will be credited to an event I'll actually be running in. (God willing.)

In any case, having a broken foot has improved my writing. I'm no longer in a position to wander away from the computer when I should be cranking out an assignment.

I'll keep posting on the fortunes of the San Gabriel Summer 2006 TNTers.

And I'll head down to San Diego in June to cheer them on.

I should be walking just fine by then.

Injured In A New Exciting Way

Approaching Mile One at yesterday's Santa Anita 5K. I'm running as planned, eight-minute pace. The course turns off Baldwin Avenue into the LA Arboretum. As I follow the other runners, my right foot hits a hole and twists inward. Ouch!

I go from running to run-limp-to limping. I limp through the Arboretum into the hay district of Santa Anita race track. Bales and bales of hay lay stacked up in large open "barns." I follow the course as it flows through a tunnel that emerges up in the infield. From there I turn onto the race track: loose sand chewed up by previous runners. I run-limp across the finish line.

Doctor's tomorrow for x-rays.

After fighting back from a knee/tendon injury in February at Pacific Shoreline I figured I'd used up my damage quota for this marathon. But there are no guarantees in running or life.

I guess I'm lucky not to be a horse.

Team in Training would have to shoot me.

Running Shoe Annoyances

As we enter intense training, I realize I need another pair of runnning shoes. Two pair, actually. One to break-in for the marathon and one to rotate with my current shoes. I'm partial to Brooks. They're a comfortable fit. Naturally, Brooks has stopped making my brand.

This really frosts me. I'm not interested in shoe shopping all over again.

Now I must.

What swine these shoe people are!

A Wet Fourteen Miles

TNT mileage increases. Yesterday we covered 14 muddy miles in and around the Rose Bowl. As I drove to practice, I saw other groups coping with the morning's downpour. The Korean-American Running Club — most noted for their lime, day-glo jerseys that can be seen from outer space — today wore fifty-five gallon trash bags. A most disposable rain coat. They looked like giant, jogging plums.

Trails were a mess, churned up by other runners and hikers. One of our mile markers is a support post under the 210 Freeway. Someone graffittied, "TNT. Go Team! 2006." A childish frame-up. Obviously, no real TNTer spray-painted that. If so, there would've been a URL or address where you could send money.

The deluge stopped, leaving a cool pleasant day — perfect distance-running weather. The various pace groups ran, walked, slipped and splashed our way up past JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories: they send things into space to photograph Mars and the Korean-American Running Club), into the Angeles National Forest, up to the Elmer Fudd Bridge (it's Elmer Smith but "Fudd" resonates), then back down the trail to the Finish Line in Parking Lot K of the Rose Bowl.

Next week is another 3.1 mile race ala Emerald Nuts. Saturday we'll be at the Santa Anita Derby Days 5K. In keeping with the race track theme, several of our faster runners will wear weights and at least two must carry small men on their backs.

More as details unfold.

Swami Dearest at Venice Beach

When relatives visit from out-of-state I always take them to Venice Beach. The sights and sounds fulfill all Southern California stereotypes: The guitar-playing swami on rollerskates; gang members with more tattoos than an old sailors' home; fortune tellers, sleeping bums, artists and street performers, motorcycle hoods; hot-looking chicks on roller blades, conspiracy theorists ("Bush Killed My Turtles!"), pumped-up weight lifters, blaring rap music, Tibetan gongs and sea gulls wheeling overhead..

At least that's the way it used to be.

I hadn't been to Venice in many years. That gives you some idea how often we're visited by out-of-state relatives. Nevertheless, my niece came out and we took her down to the beach. Everything seemed pretty much the same, but a lot more orderly. Even the sleeping bums appeared to have been arranged by a landscaper. But I really wanted to see the guitar-playing swami. I'd promised my niece. My wife grew up in nearby Santa Monica and said the swami mostly works there nowadays, rollerblading along the fashionable 3rd Street Promenade.

Perhaps I should've checked with his agent first.

He has one.

Inkling Charles S. Williams

Somewhere I read that March 25 corresponds to the Shire calendar day when Gollum and the Ring of Power toppled into Mount Doom, thereby unmaking Sauron and freeing Middle Earth. Sauron's kingdom was later auctioned off, becoming the Mordor Pitch and Putt. (For a proper Trilogy send-up, I suggest the Harvard Lampoon's 1969 "Bored of the Rings.")

In any case, I've had Tolkien and his peers on my mind for the last two weeks, ever since a member of my writing group lent me a book on "The Inklings." The Inklings were a mid-20th Century literary group in Oxford. Very distinguished. Among others, the Inklings featured J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles S. Williams. Novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, though not a member, hung with the Inklings and is said to have dogged Charles S. Williams until he explained Dante and Beatrice to her. Zany cut-ups, these English writers.

Tolkien, of course, wrote "The Hobbit" and the "The Lord of the Rings." C.S. Lewis wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia." And Charles S. Williams wrote some strange spooky fiction. (He also wrote numerous plays, poems, and critiques, but they weren't all that strange and spooky.) Williams took genres such as detective fiction and wove in heavy metaphysical elements. For example, "War in Heaven" opens like a murder mystery but we learn the Holy Grail has been discovered in a small English church. A race is on as various parties seek the Grail for its supernatural powers. (A bit like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" only 51 years earlier.)

Williams' books are dense as a neutron star. But there is something eerie and compelling in his work, as if he were able to part the veil and render events beyond our temporal senses. The closest comparison I can make is to the film, "The Others." Charles S. Williams leaves you convinced there's more to life — and death — than you'd normally care to dwell on.

His novels never really sold. But they're still in print. Williams, who worked as an editor for Oxford Press and taught classes in literature, died in 1945 at age 57. If I get through more of his books, I'll let you know.