Sweltering

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop." - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland  

Trying to make order of my day....

It is seriously hot here in Southern California right now. At just a little after eight, the temperature is already well on the way to climbing into the high 90s -- the same place it resided all weekend. I'm writing at the kitchen table, with the window open. I can smell the sunburned lavender from the garden and hear the chirp of a hummingbird hovering low over the big green leafy shrub with the orange flowers whose name I can not remember. Beyond that is the honeysuckle-covered slope leading down into the canyon, where a trail is calling me to run. The boys are already off to school, and upstairs I can hear the shower as my wife gets ready to begin her day. Yesterday I made the offer that anytime, for as long as we live, if I am in the shower, she has the right to step in and join me and to perhaps assist me in the showering proceess, no questions asked. This offer was unsolicited but somewhat generous on my part, or so I thought. She didn't think it was such a revolutionary idea, since I've stated some form of this offer several times during our marriage. Nevertheless, sometimes you just have to put stuff out there in the ether to work it's magic. Think of it as love in action.

But I digress.  

Alright. Making order of my day. First things first. The Training Ground got a stellar review in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. Good to get one under the belt, particularly a nice one. I promised myself I wasn't going to get back in the habit, but as with all my books, I am doing what many authors do, and compulsively checking my Amazon ranking. The WSJ review worked wonders in that regard, as the book's rankings spiked from somewhere around 17,000 down to the low 200's. It will yo-yo up and down for the next few weeks, and I will get irritated with myself for allowing a convoluted sales/ranking matrix to affect my sense of well being (seriously, if you want to watch an individual experience emotional highs and lows, look no further than the author with a new book out, checking his hourly amazon ranking). But for now, it is all good clean fun, and the book is doing well enough that I am thinking about the next one. 

Onward. There will be no Tour de France in summer this year. It will be strange not to be there, and I know that when July rolls around I will feel a powerful Transatlantic tug. And I will especially miss the Pyrenees and the Alps, and that tranquil sensation of throttling through the south of France at high speed with Tour stickers on the windshield. But the deal between Competitor and Velo which would have given this year's coverage a little extra oomph failed to materialize (my style of coverage and Velo's style are about as far apart journalistically as two style can be), and so I will stay here. It makes a little sad, but it also is a reminder that maybe it is time that I move on to a new challenge. The Tour will be there. I can always go back. Or maybe I could just go for one week this year... do sense the ambivalence?

Not sure what that has to do with making order out of my day, but maybe processing all that is meant to be part of it all. 

If not at the Tour, July will definitely be spent coaching my cross-country team. On that note, my track team gave me a nice present at our awards banquet last week. The Gigantic Book of Running Quotations is a wonder, filled with great aphorisms about running.  At almost 800 pages it's thick enough that I can leaf through it for an extended length of time without coming across the same sentiment twice, and slightly addictive that way. For every bit of treacle (I am thinking in particular of a bearded and self-important running magazine editor who seems to have a way with stating the innocuous), there are gems like Steve Prefontaine's, "Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it"; and John Treacy's simple description of racing tactics: "Get out well, but not too quickly, move through the field, be comfortable." All of it has the desired effect of reminding me that even though we all have days when running might be uncomfortable, there are few other things I'd rather be doing. So in just a few minutes I will slip away for an hour of quality sweating somewhere down in the canyon. I will take with me thoughts of the weekend's NCAA lacrosse tournament, the new movie that we are making, a pondering of what book I want to write next, and the slight lament that my wife will be away by the time I return and step into the shower. Only then will my day feel like it has some order. I don't know why workouts have that effect, but they do. 

I'm out. Have a great day.

Keep pushing... always.