Tag Archives: Massachusetts

One for the personal record books

Last year, when I set an arbitrary goal to train run a sub-19 minute 5 km race, I wondered about beating my old personal record of 18:26 that I set on 15 October 2000. That record wasn't a huge weight on my shoulders, but I hate to see past me being more capable than current me.

I have a habit when I race at 5 km. I like to start near the back, let the other runners go crazy for the first one or two kilometers, then reel them in. The good runners are still good runners. They start fast and finish fast. But the masses start fast and finish in a haze of regret. I like the psychological boost of passing them. It's the best.

In today's Good Times Series Run, I started near the front line. Completely different. I avoided the clogging that occurs at the beginning. I started faster than usual, but it was not outside of my capabilities. Starting slow so I could pass was always an excuse -- fear of burning out and slowing down like the rest of the crowd.

This time, at the 2.15 km mark, I was sitting in tenth place instead of my usual twentieth. I clicked my watch to get my split at this point. This is the high elevation mark of the race, followed by a slight downhill for 300 meters, then a slight uphill to the Oullette Bridge -- slight only to the unfatigued mind.

The inflection between the downhill and uphill is where the crowd pulls up. It's the third quarter of the race. It's time for the questions ("Why am I doing this?") and the self-diagnostics ("I think I'm more out of breath than usual.") and the self-destruction ("I can't do this.")

This is my favorite part of the race.

Here I slipped from no man's land to the group runners ahead of me. (Later one of these guys referred to me at the bar as, "That guy that always passes me at the two mile mark.")

After the Oullette Bridge, it was me and two other guys making the 270-degree turn onto the riverwalk. This section of the course is a 1 km "straightaway" -- it's mostly straight, but it has some some curves and kinks in the sidewalk that keep it from being an all out bombing run to the finish. You have to slow down for the kinks unless you want to eat the guard rails. On one hand, this messes with your brain because you can't see the finish line until the last 200 meters. On the other hand, if you know the course, you can slice the last 1 km into sections with their own personalities. If you get to know the personalities the course becomes your friend and you have an advantage.

The start of the riverwalk at Lawrence Mills is constricted, so it's difficult to pass. That's fine. When the sidewalk expanded, I dropped the guillotine on the trailing runner. I burst past him, tried to make him doubt himself that he would fall off the pace, tried to cut the race down to me and the other runner. I was doubting myself, so I needed that burst, too. On that straightaway the mind has a convincing way of asking the body to take it easy, enjoy the finish, don't exert too much, etc. You have to tie yourself to the mast and ignore it.

The remaining runner didn't give up any ground. Damn. We passed the remaining kinks in the riverwalk. 300 meters to go. And something rare happened, the moment you wait for in sports, where your mind and body gracefully, quietly do their jobs. No more translating information from lungs and legs to see what they could handle. No more convincing the conscious brain to go, go go, ignore everything, and go. Like floating. There is exertion and pain, but it is somewhere else, far away.

After the race, the guy I chased said he could hear me breathing behind me, and that he didn't know if I was going to get him. I didn't know either. I dropped it into low gear and passed him on the right. I didn't think I was going to fend him off for the whole 300 meters. Then the finish line clock came into view, and it was still showing 17:xx. It's deceptive. You're still 20 or 30 seconds away from it. You have to avoid letting up, feeling satisfied with the time you see but haven't accomplished yet.

No matter. 18:19.8, 7th overall. That's no incredible time, but I'll take it.

I'd like to be done with these 5 km races, but I know that time is the frontier. Pushing to and past the frontier is uncomfortable, to say the least. Maybe one more time to beat 18 minutes...

Exploring the museum in my backyard

I like living in Lowell. I really do. But I'm accustomed to living here now and I rarely look around. The buildings are less... exotic. I mean, they're not strange or different anymore, or otherwise worthy of notice. Each building, each street, each canal is now just an unnoticed landmark on my way to and from work or the grocery store or the train station. What a shame.

I suffer from a disease known as localitis.

This disease is not terminal. If the person who has contracted the disease can not cure himself simply by concentrating more, then external remedies are required. Specifically, entertaining a visitor often does the trick.

My cousin David stopped by today. Hooray. So I showed him around a little, walked up and down the canals, went to the museums. Most of the remaining textile mills are in good shape. The rest had already burned down, fell down, or were knocked down years ago. There are a few along the Hamilton Canal that look like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie.

I live at Boott Mills, which is the center of Lowell National Historical Park. (Hooray for the National Park Service.) That is, I basically live in a museum. I look out my window, boom, there's a museum. But I had never visited the museum itself. Without standing up from the couch, I can see the museum out of my window. Is that laziness? Not exactly. I like having something nearby that I haven't explored yet -- something to look forward to.

I visited the museum today. Inside the Boott Cotton Mills museum they have one floor of working looms. It's an interesting touch -- not just static machines on display behind a sheet of glass, but the real machines still being driven by water power, still spinning cotton thread into textiles. Below are a few pictures and a video of the action on the first floor.

Loom at Boott Cotton Mills from Kirk Kittell on Vimeo.

Boott Cotton Mills Boott Cotton Mills Boott Cotton Mills

Knocking on Thoreau's Door

Last week, I took a flash business trip to Tewksbury, a Massachusetts suburb tucked halfway between Boston and the New Hampshire border. Selected photos are posted on Flickr.

As it turns out, I had four free hours before my flight was scheduled to leave from Boston. Naturally, in a strange place, I was going to try to make the most of it. One of my favorite things about the northeast is the American history that is represented there. The place I really wanted to find was Concord, location of the first battle of the Revolutionary War.

I wish I had picked up that map at the rental car office. Or maybe I'm glad I didn't.

I couldn't find the battlefield, which I now know is Minute Man National Historical Park. But, on the road into Concord, I learned that this is the home of Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden.

Walden Pond Panorama

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon.

--Chapter 2, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"

I bought Walden in Missoula, Montana, as I was passing through on my way from Mojave back to Illinois. I tried to read it once, failed after about 50 pages. Tried to read it again, maybe 20 pages this time. Gave up. It's one of those classics that you understand you're supposed to read for some reason or another, but why? It's clunky and Thoreau is pompous. I put the book away and forgot it.

Sometime in spring 2006, I picked it up again. This time it was different. I flew through it this time. Thoreau was still pompous and stuffy, but I followed the thread of the story more than the way it was told. I packed the book with me when I went to France, finished it there in Strasbourg, then performed what I consider to be the greatest compliment: I gave the book away to someone so that they could read it. (Natalie, did you finish it?)

Walden Pond

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

--Chapter 17, "Spring"

Someone asked me what Walden was about. I told her it was about eliminating the junk that we quietly shovel onto ourselves every day. Thoreau went to Walden to figure out what unnecessary weight was hanging around all of our necks. There's a ton of it. You don't see it because it's familiar. You don't feel it because you don't remember what you felt like without it.

I've had my time alone in the desert and in other places, albeit in shifts. It's good to get away if you can manage it. But, on the other hand, it's good to look into those away places through a window like Walden, instead of wandering out there ourselves. Not all of our load can be dropped responsibly in order to get away to the outskirts. You don't need to get away to have perspective.

Read Walden. I recommend it. You won't agree with all of it, but it's a welcome change in perspective; in that regard, you need it.

Walden Pond from Thoreau's Cabin

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.

--Chapter 18, "Conclusion"

Mike, I offer those last lines from Walden to you as an explanation for why Ed Abbey could -- needed to -- transform from Ed of The Desert to Ed of The City. Maybe you need to step outside of the frame to appreciate what lies within it.