In praise of running

Running gives me everything.  Running gives me a supportive community of comrades who are both more competitive and more altruistic, as Christopher McDougall points out; maybe because we can viscerally connect with each other’s pain, pride and perseverance.  Running also gives me the chance to be alone, moving through the mist of ever-shifting thoughts and needs and grudges, grinding them down mile after mile into dust, leaving me clean.  

Running is my meditation, helping me check in and focus on each body part, the aching ankle, the wonky knee, the tight hamstring, the lazy glute, bringing me to empathy and gratitude for this miraculous body whose tissues and structure reflect my genetic inheritance, psychological makeup and everything else that has shaped me.  Running is elemental: each step grounds me, like Antaeus, in the replenishing energy of earth; each breath is a deep drink of air; I soak in the salt ocean of my sweat.  Running gives me a feel for the health of my lungs, my blood, my heart.  Each race I run is an objective gauge of my fitness, my level of energy, my excessive intake of muffins.  Running helps me stay truthful in a world where it is too easy to lie. (Which may be why so many runners reacted to Paul Ryan’s little fib about his marathon time; a harmless exaggeration to a non-runner, but a basic betrayal of the runner’s code, revealing so much about the politician’s unreality.)   

Because I run I get to fall for all these other gorgeous runners of every shape, size, age, race and gender, to like them and wish them well with all my being, even if it’s just through eye contact as we run past one another.  If I were ever paralyzed I would hope to make contact with others with the same heart-felt intensity.  Some people talk about running as a spiritual practice, but I can’t speak to that.

You can probably tell this was written after a great run.  Running gives me the summery shimmer of endorphins, thank goodness, on a cool wet fall day.

The Empress has no (s**t)

Warning/Avertissement: If you are an Anglophile visitor enchanted by the mystique of red double-decker buses, green lawns and ivy-covered hotels, or if you are a Victoria local who at least once a day likes full-heartedly to exclaim how lucky we are to live here, now would be a good time to stop reading this post. And if you should choose to continue, kindly refrain from hateful comments along the line of "Go back where you came from" because that is not really an option.

I don't really want to be a muckraker, a shit-disturber, but sadly I have no choice but to point out the obvious: Victoria has a problem with shit. Defecation, if you prefer medical terms, kaka if you verge on the infantile, merde in our other national lingua franca.

I'm not even referring to our little local controversy over sewage treatment. Only in Victoria, pristine capital of the greenest province in the great white north, will you find prominent environmentalists who are convinced that it is perfectly all right to flush untreated waste (filtered through a coarse mesh, it's true) into the narrow strait of Juan de Fuca separating our fair city from the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The fast-moving cold currents in the strait make for a perfect natural latrine, they argue, and the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to treat all that poop are better spent on other good causes.

Those good causes do not, however, include the maintenance and upkeep of public toilets. The City of Victoria has proudly installed public urinals in the "night-life district". (See: http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2011/02/07/CoolPublicUrinal/) However, this charming installation isn't particularly useful for women or people with disabilities. But then again, they should probably stay at home. Likewise, the homeless. Out for a run this weekday morning at 5.30 am, the facilities on Dallas Road were definitely shut down; at 6 am, I was thrilled to bits to find the public toilets locked up at Willows Beach; and at 6.30 am, further along the lovely Oak Bay waterfront, the washrooms were not open for business at Cadboro Bay's Gyro Park. I considered popping into the nearby Starbucks but was deterred by the sight of a pair of balding burly teletubbies sitting solemnly outside with their morning coffee, contemplating a leaf-blower loudly whooshing away any sign of human or vegetal life from the parking lot.

Oh, you know, the homeless, they make such a mess. They leave needles, trails of blood, puddles of urine, piles of feces, bio-hazards that suburban middle-class families shouldn't have to encounter. No wonder we have to lock up our public toilets at night. Why don't they just do their business at home? So what if they are homeless and Victoria has almost no affordable housing? Why don't they get a job... or just leave?

Another disclaimer: I am not a homeless person. I am an absurdly over-privileged middle-class middle-aged male.

I also happen to be a runner. Little known fact: running gives you the runs. The digestive system becomes more sensitive, peristalsis more insistent. The moving body seeks to expel all unnecessary materials.

Runners are out and about at all hours. We use public toilets because what's the alternative? Dive into the bush? Carry around latex gloves and little plastic baggies like the ubiquitous dog-owners proudly picking up after their animal surrogates? The tragedy of the commons in absurd miniature: every man, woman, child and pet with his, her or its own porta-potty.

Ever since Mohenjo Daro and the Romans, great cities have been built on the shared foundations of public infrastructure: viaducts, drains, roads. But to keep our toilets open, Victoria and its adjacent municipal fiefdoms, genteel Saanich, rich Oak Bay, upwardly mobile Colwood, ambitious Langford, would have to admit that Victoria is actually a city, and not just a quaint little preserve of retired English expatriate gardeners.

We might have to actually admit that we have bowels and bodily functions and that our collective body politic is suffering from a serious case of constipation. We would have to wake up from a pleasant Dickensian fantasy in which every doughty Englishman had his own little castle, replete with moat, and recognize that it's not enough to build ever larger suburban dwellings with multiple bathrooms which we spray with deoderant chemicals after every evacuation. We would have to step out of Queen Victoria's large shadow and let go of our fixation with the comfortable diaper of the mother complex that keeps this city and its residents in what has been called a 'velvet rut', the idyllic paralysis of infantile compliance with authority and the denial of libido.

Queen Victoria's bloomers were auctioned off a few years ago, to a Canadian apparently. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2008-07-30-victoria_N.htm) No word if there were stains on the Empress's underclothes.