Marathon of Hypnotized Chickens

Out running a marathon about mile 14 or 15 or 16, ole Iggy Pop came into my headphones by way of my iPod. Iggy was singing about heroin they say, that concoction of chemicals that creates an imbalance of neurotransmitters, like you might get from extreme physical stress. Endorphins and dopamine are addictive ya know?

Lust For Life, Iggy Pop

Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs

And the flesh machine

He's gonna do another striptease

Hey man where'd you get

That lotion? I been hurting

Since I bought the gimmick

About something called love

Yeah something called love

That's like hypnotizing chickens

Well I am just a modern guy

Of course I've had it in the ear before

Cause of a lust for life

I couldn't help but giggle inside, because I was too tired to giggle outside, that all these people were in almost pain as me. Some less but some more so. That's like hypnotizing chickens. Cause of a lust for life.  

The basic stats for this sucka are that it starts at Sandy Beach in Douglas and goes to Outer Point Trailhead in North Douglas, whips a U-ey, and goes back to Sandy Beach. It’s 26.2 miles but you knew that. It’s Juneau’s only marathon and it was my fourth time running it. I ran with my daughter Sydney or at least we stayed together most of the run. We didn’t die or break down or even suck that badly. I finished in four hours and 28 minutes and Sydney finished in four hours and 41 minutes. All day I could see my breath. It was July 29th. I don't like climate change. Most places get hotter but more heat in Juneau brings  more evaporation and more rain. We don't need it.

The beginning of the run.   Yes, that is as far as my leg will bend. I need to work on that.

 

At mile 1 in front of the elementary school Sydney attended.

Mile 12, near the Douglas boat ramp. Mendenhall Towers in the background

Syd mile 11. 

A marathon is a head game. It doesn’t seem so as it seems almost exclusively like a leg game. Either your legs hold up and you finish or your legs don't hold up and you don’t. The stronger the legs the stronger the finish. All of that is true but your head tells your legs what to do. Furthermore, the brain in these conditions sends an array of thoughts and sensations that eclipse reality as we know it any other time.

Sydney and I may run another. marathon, Just like hypnotizing chickens.

I don't actually know how to write about the head game that plays out because I think you have to experience the sensation of neurotransmitters gone haywire to understand it. Thoughts entered my chemical injected head that I thought were profound to the point of changing the world important only to later determine they were either mundane and/or total bullshit. Other thoughts entered my head that were only deep because neurotransmitters raging through my veins branded them to neurons in my cerebral cortex.

I kept thinking, “People can do so much more than they think do.” I didn’t think this solely or even primarily in the context of running. Even then I knew that my marathon was a meaningless act to anyone than me. I started at Sandy Beach and ended at Sandy Beach, effectively going nowhere. But I can do more than I think I can do in lots of ways that don’t have diddly squat to do with running or climbing or playing the guitar. 

Every few miles there was an aid station handing out Gatorade and goo. 

About mile 16 Sydney's boyfriend David showed up and started running with her. At that point I  left Syd to run with David. As it turns out, David was wearing flip flops and hadn't planned on running. Syd finished the race alone and so did I. I think she preferred it that way.  Sometimes it's better to go solo into dark spaces.

About mile 18. Sydney later said she didn't know where she was and that she just thought, "I'll keep doing this."  Apparently, she kept going.  Mount Stroller White in the background

I finished  

I wasn't wrong, the human species can be better than we are. It’s not an unusual thought but the degree that it was branded in my neurons was unusual. At mile 15, I thought I could finish this marathon and tell people that the human species can be better and they would listen to me. I started to cry it was such beautiful thought. I was that deluded. I only believed myself for two miles. By mile 17, the thought occurred that people can do better but we aren't going to. We are going to kill each other and treat each badly long after every person running this marathon is dead. We are going build walls to keep out Mexicans or whoever we deem as “other” because we will always need somebody to scapegoat our mistakes or punching bags for our frustrations.  We are going to have wars and more wars until some numb-nut president or emperor drops the nukes and ends life on planet earth. I started to cry and if anyone saw me they surely thought it was pain in my legs. It was too. My legs were killing me. 

Syd finished 

Evonne tracked us the whole run giving us water, a concoction of lemonade and chia seeds, and whatever else we might need. It was nice knowing there would be somebody to pick me up off the highway if I were to collapse. I mean that a lot.  Evonne took all these photos and Aubrey showed up with flowers that she grew in her yard. I almost cried. We ate a burger, potato salad, barbecued salmon, drank a beer, and then we got a pizza and another beer. I went home and took a bath and took a nap. I slept 10 hours that night.

The Sandy Beach picnic area. 

It was really, really hard. While running a marathon you can cry in public and nobody thinks you’re a baby. You can become overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity and callous cruelty of the human species and people will think it’s the weight of your legs. In a way it is.  You can shit your pants in public while running and get a pass on etiquette. I haven't done that. Yet. Alternatively, you can have the thought that maybe the human species has made better art and shown more love than any one person can wrap their mind around. We have the capacity to bomb a neighborhood or lift it out of poverty and we have done both.  The choice is ours but mostly we do some cool stuff as a species.  We can even make great music, even punk songs that compare heroin addicts to hypnotized chickens.  Cause of a lust of life.