Living in Oblivion

We are spending the weekend at my parents’ house in Suffolk County, Long Island, since our contractor is running woefully behind on our bathroom renovation and we have no facilities to speak of.  Considering this, the 300 cubic feet of rubble occupying my dining room, and the stress my job is adding to my life right now, I suppose it’s easy to understand how I long for oblivion: a dreamless sleep, a drunken stupor, a spiritual rapture, or a hard, pounding run.

Little did I know (suspect, yes) that the suburbs offers its own brand of oblivion.  Everything here has a buffer zone, making it so easy to forget there’s actually anything on the other side of that buffer.  Kind of like the house, the car, the neighborhood are each wrapped up in wads and wads of Charmin.

The neighbors who live to the right of my folks have been there for decades.  I’ve been sent over more times than I can remember for the proverbial cup of sugar, and have doled out the same to their kids on similar errands.  Their family stories are part of our family stories, each dad having their signature tale of humorous indignity to share at backyard barbecues. They were guests at my wedding.  But, specifically, these neighbors are significant to Pigtails Flying because they were runners long before anyone else I knew was a runner.  I’d see them go by the house in all kinds of weather, wrapped up in gray sweats or decked out in those teeny shorts with the white trim.

So, this afternoon when it was time for me to head out, I had two options.  I could spend 15 minutes on gmap-pedometer pecking out a route, or I could call the neighbor and get his routes.  I broke through the Charmin and called next door.  He says, “When I do my five-milers…”  Just right there, when he said five-miler, I was happy. There’s a runner next door! He gave me his route, which was basically two 2.6-mile loops, and I set out, wondering what it must be like to do the same 2.6-mile loop of the neighborhood for more than two decades.  Surely, it must alternate between mind-numbingly boring and sublime.

There was a snowstorm here in New York yesterday, so the roads were clear but everyone’s yard was sparkly white.  I prefer running in the cold weather, and even though I hated the snow yesterday (when it prevented my planned outdoor run), I loved the snow today.  It lent a blank uniformity to the landscape (even as dotted with houses as it was) that helped me on my way to my sought-after oblivion. It could have been emotionally jarring to run through the streets where I grew up, but since I have no memories of ever running on them before today, this run, at least, was angst-free. 

There were three good hills in my neighbor’s route (so, six, altogether) and one little girl, sent out to collect the mail.   Those were the highlights.  I felt slow as molasses, breathing hard the whole time, and I thought, surely this is because I am so stressed out my body is depleted.  I was grateful, though, for the distraction.  Nothing to think about but pumping my arms and maintaining my effort.

Well, as it turns out, I was breathing hard the whole time because I wasn’t running, I was racing.  I finished the 5.15 miles in 45:37.  That’s an 8:51-per-mile pace.  That’s my pace when I’m chasing some skinny bitch through Central Park, in one 10K race or another. Not when I’m out for my Saturday training, in my hometown, trying to bury thoughts of demolition debris, project deadlines, and marketing presentations in that snowdrift over there.

Clearly, the more I’m running from, the faster I go. And the faster I go, the more apt I am to find my 8:50 oblivion.