The inner light

Does anyone else have those sort of “turning point” moments in your life? The ones you can point to and say, “when that happened, everything changed.” I don’t mean the intentional decisions you make that lead to change - getting married or going to college can drastically alter the direction of your life but you can sort of see those coming. I’m referring more to the sort of serendipitous events - sometimes even bad events - that change things, and you don’t always realize that something has changed right away until the passage of time gives you the opportunity to look back. When I think of the path my life has taken since I graduated high school I always end up thinking of the first half of 2007 as the turning point, where things happened that really started to change the person I was in high school into the person I am today.

In February of that year my longtime girlfriend and I broke up. It took me a long time to realize that this was probably for the best (she was the one who made the decision to end the relationship), but after it happened I stopped going back to Michigan to see her. I’d sort of fallen ass-backwards into college. My high school grades were not good so my options were limited. I chose a little liberal arts college outside Chicago simply because they had good cross country and track teams - at that point I really had no idea of what I wanted to major in. Even after I was accepted I was reluctant to go because I didn’t want to be so far away from my Michigan girlfriend, and I went back to see her at just about every opportunity I had. I’d drive or take an Amtrak train to Detroit and we’d spend a weekend together going to the same places we had in high school, seeing the same people we had in high school. Going home was a safety blanket. Any progress I’d made in growing as a person in college was wiped out in a weekend when I could go home and regress to being a high schooler again.

When she called it quits the umbilical cord was cut. Of course we still talked and argued for most of the rest of the year but after February I really didn’t want anything to do with Michigan and didn’t go back unless it was absolutely necessary. I started to think of myself as a Chicagoan and as I begun the long and tedious process of rebuilding my life post-breakup I did so with Chicago people and places in mind. It’s not like I matured overnight or that there still wasn’t progress to be made in the coming years but once I let go of my old life in Michigan I finally stopped feeling so stunted in my personal development.

And then that spring, at the conclusion of the track season, I was called into the coach’s office and informed that I would not be on the cross country team in the fall. Instead I was being relegated to something called “fall track” - basically a training program to get in shape for the indoor track season while skipping cross country entirely. The team had not done well the last two seasons and the coaches were raising their standards; only those who had demonstrated the right work ethic and passion for running the past year would be toeing the line in the fall. I had not made the cut. In hindsight I couldn’t blame them. After an injury-riddled freshman season I came into my sophomore year completely out of shape and subsequently got hurt again after only two weeks of hard workouts. I missed the entire cross country season and most of indoor track as a result, and even though I was once again healthy for outdoor track, my races were pretty disastrous. I was slower than even my sophomore year of high school and after each pathetic effort on the track I’d mentally given up and started to seriously consider quitting altogether.

“Don’t take it personally,” my coach said after I expressed my disappointment. “We just looked at track performances and based them off of fitness.”

I started to resign myself to my fate but then looked again at the sheet of cross country/fall track assignments and noticed my roommate’s name listed under “cross country.” He’d been injured since the conference meet and the previous day I had jogged with him on his first run, two miles, in almost a month. He was completely out of shape.

“You’re putting Kyle on the cross country team?” I said, trying not to sound offended and incredulous but managing to sound like both. “He can barely run around campus right now. I’m in better shape than he is.”

My coach exchanged an uneasy glance with his assistant.

“We think he’ll be an integral part of the cross country team in the fall.”

I was pissed, it was a personal decision. They knew that Kyle would be ready to roll come September. They did not think that same of me, even though I had a massive head start on him in terms of overall fitness.

My first instinct was to just throw in the towel. You’ve given college running a shot and it didn’t work out. Two years with zero success is enough to know your limit. But I was indignant. I felt like I’d been wronged by being shoved against my will into the fall track program. For weeks I wrestled with what I should do - quit, go through the indignity of fall track, or train my ass of all summer in the faint hope I could somehow earn my way back on the cross country team. I talked with my friends and teammates, the coaches again, and my father who had run for the same team under the same coach. I decided I’d throw everything I had at one last shot at running cross country.

The last two summers, my weekly running mileage gearing up for cross country had been around 40-50 miles a week. My first week in the summer of 2007 was 71 miles...followed by 77, 80, 84, and then 90. I ran twice a day, seven days a week, through thunderstorms, temperatures over 100 degrees, mosquitoes, humidity, fog, up hills, through forests, splashing through puddles. I ran on vacations, stumbling groggily out of my tent at 6:00 AM on camping trips to get a few miles in; I ran through unfamiliar cities, relying on a stopwatch and my navigation skills to avoid getting lost.

Before then I’d lacked any intrinsic motivation to run on my own just for the sake of running. I had no skin in the game. In high school I ran what my coach told me to run - nothing beyond that because it wasn’t asked for. When I got accepted to college and went out for the cross country team I was told that freshmen typically put in 40-50 miles a week in the summer, so that’s what I did. After I arrived on campus, we were told that the five mile run every morning was optional, so I stayed in bed every morning. I didn't think I was lazy - when I went to mandatory practice I put as much effort in as anyone else, but I relied on the coaching staff to tell me what they wanted from me. I didn’t want it on my own. There was no inner drive to improve, no inner standards of my own to reach. I was only preoccupied with reaching standards set for me by others. Then in the summer of 2007 that changed. I didn’t care about how I fast I would run during the season, or who I could beat, or anything else like that. I simply wanted the opportunity to be allowed to toe the starting line with my friends. To get there I had to prove to the coaches that I wanted it and that I wanted it more than anything else.

I arrived on campus in the best shape of my life and demolished the first fall track workouts. On tempo runs I could not only keep up with but even drop people who had been out of my league in previous years. During our first workout of mile repeats I averaged thirty seconds a mile faster than I had ever run before. These were still fall track workouts but my performances did not escape the attention of the coaches. At that point it didn’t matter if made it on the cross country team - I was feeling so good in practice and workouts, dumbstruck at how fast I could run that I already felt like I’d justified my summer of running myself into the ground. At the midway point of the cross country season I was finally allowed the opportunity to put on a uniform and race.

It was a hot day, far hotter and humid than it had been, and by mile three of the five mile race I was starting to feel the effects of heatstroke. I stumbled across the finish line, muttering incoherently as my teammates and the athletic training staff ran up and started pouring water over my head. My skin was pink, I was so dehydrated that I’d stopped sweating, and I don’t remember anything of the last two miles of that race but I’d still covered the five mile course nearly two minutes faster than I had the last time I’d run it as a freshman.

Through the remainder of that cross country season and into track I crushed nearly every personal record I had over every distance from the 800 meters up through 8000 - three seconds off 800, 19 seconds off a mile, 58 seconds off two miles, 1:23 off of 5000, and a whopping three minutes off of 8000. The summer leading into my senior year was even better but a stress fracture put an end to my season after two races. I was disappointed but not disheartened - I would have gladly traded four years of injury-free mediocre races for that one year, my junior year, where I felt completely unstoppable.

That drive, that work ethic, that feeling that I had something to prove bled into every other aspect of my life. My grades steadily improved throughout the rest of college and into graduate school. I went from being barely academically eligible to participate in sports in high school to graduating magna cum laude from graduate school. In work and marriage and friendships I’ve strived to go above and beyond what is necessary to get by. I realized as 2007 drew to a close that up to that point my life had been the culmination of two decades’ worth of low bids. Keep your expectations reasonable, stay out of the way, try not to get hurt and you’ll never be disappointed. It wasn’t until I got dumped and really started to pour myself into running that I came to the conclusion that that philosophy would lead to nothing but disappointment.

With a wife, a house, and a full-time job my life is more rounded today than it was when all I did was run, but in the past two years I’ve still found the time to run a marathon, two half marathons, and bunch of 5ks. There are no coaches watching over me anymore but at this point I don’t need them anymore. They lit the fire inside me and I’ve kept its embers glowing ever since. When I think about the kind of person I was before 2007 I hardly recognize him. Every now and then I come across some reminder of that person - and old notebook, a shirt I got from a concert I attended with my ex, and I consider these ghosts of yesteryear for a moment before putting them down and remembering how far I’ve come along this path. The boy who didn’t listen, the boy who only gave the bare minimum to get by, the boy who was too wrapped up in a girl to realize that she was holding him back is gone and has been gone for a long time. He can tag along on a run with me if he wants to find out why.

Happy Father's Day

Today is Father’s Day and I’m thinking about my dad and feeling very grateful. The fact that he lives in Michigan means we don’t see one another all that often anymore but that won’t stop me from wishing him a happy Father’s Day. They say that all men eventually become their father and in my case I’m well on my way to becoming a carbon copy of mine. Some of our similarities were intentionally crafted on his part - at a very early age he introduced me to his love of books and music, and now they make up about as big a part of my identity as they do of his. Other commonalities just sort of happened as a result of me looking up to him when I was a kid. My dad ran cross country and track in high school and college, and while he’d hoped I too would be a runner he never pushed me to become one. I did anyway - after a childhood of hearing his running stories and looking at his medals I just sort of assumed that’s what I’d end up doing. I was by no means as successful as him in running but it’s another one of those things that’s become an integral part of my life for which I owe him.

In addition we’re both early risers, we both drink copious amounts of coffee, we both like microbrewed beer, and we’re both highly introverted. We do have some differences - he’s never understood my love for hockey and while he pulls for the Chicago Bears every football season my team has always been the hapless Detroit Lions. But by and large our similarities outweigh our differences. At this point I’m basically just some gray hair and a case of high blood pressure away from becoming my father, and that’s okay with me.

Bartomelo and the buzzing of bees

Yesterday my worst fears were realized when I came home from work. I pulled into the driveway, got the mail out of the mailbox, and fumbled with my keys as I went to the front door. Everything was going well until I happened to look up as I unlocked the front door. There, near the edge of the gutter and almost directly above the doorway hung a hornets nest.

My fear of bees stems from childhood. For some reason I was terrified of being stung, even though everyone I knew always insisted that it didn’t hurt that much. I managed to make it through my whole childhood without a bee encounter, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I got stung for the first time - I was out on a run and a yellowjacket got caught in my shirt and stung me in the lower back.

“Are you allergic?” My cross country coach asked with concern.

“Uh...we’ll find out,” I said. “I’ve never actually been stung before.”

It was an unpleasant experience but it wasn’t too painful and it turns out I’m not allergic. Despite this my fear of bees still persists. At this point it’s become ingrained in my psyche. I can try and rationalize it away all I want, but when a bee flies in my direction I will still panic and run away, arms flailing like one of those inflatable tube men you see outside car dealerships. I’m a big fraidypants when it comes to bees and I don’t care who knows it.

The nest on my house wasn’t big, maybe the size of a baseball, but I was dumbfounded that it had escaped my attention for so long. I’d noticed a surplus of bees around compared to last summer but I assumed that was because the neighborhood is more suburban than my old neighborhood in Troy. It didn’t occur to me that they were actually building something, freeloading by attaching their house to mine.

Now that I’d discovered the nest, I decided I had two options:

1. Burn the house down. Sure, I’d lose all my possessions, but that seemed like a small price to pay to teach those bees a lesson.

2. Leave and never come back. Of course I’d leave a note for Court:

“I saw a hornets nest on the house today so I had to run away forever. I’m sorry but you knew when you married me that this was always a possibility. You can finish the rest of the ice cream in the freezer.”

There was a third option that I didn’t even want to consider: getting rid of the nest. Myself. I called Court to tell her I was running away and/or burning the house down but she calmed me down and said she’d pick up some hornet spray on her way home. As night fell I went back outside with the spray and stood at the base of the steps, my arm shaking as I lifted the can and pointed it at the baseball-sized sphere of terror. I’d like to pretend I was resolute in my destruction of the nest, standing with a wide stance and a hand on my hip as I sprayed the nest and said something like, “Bee-ware, hive got a surprise for you,” or, “Get the fuck off my house.” And that’s what happened as I drenched it in hornet spray...right up until one emerged from the hive and I ran away, whimpering.  

I felt strangely empowered after eradicating the hornets. I had faced off against one of my biggest fears and won. I didn’t get stung, the house didn’t burn down, and I only cried, like, a little bit. Progress sometimes comes in baby steps - I know my phobia of bees certainly isn’t gone but I feel like I’m working in that direction. On my way out of the house this morning I stopped to look at the now abandoned hive above the door. I took a moment of self-satisfaction at having killed all the hornets...and then a bumblebee appeared and I ran to my car. Like I said, baby steps.

There are no free lunches

Today most of the rest of the office is packed into the conference room, standing in line for pizza, salad, and a can of soda. I’m at my desk, reading a book and eating the lunch I brought. There are two reasons I’m skipping the festivities - first, the pizza they order here kind of blows. Second, the meeting following the pizza has almost nothing to do with what I do here, so I didn’t feel like eating in bewilderment and boredom while gazing at PowerPoint slides irrelevant to my job. Lunch meetings here are almost always a mad dash for crappy food and then sitting in a hot room for an hour while trying to stay awake. No thanks, I’ll stay here and eat my sandwich in peace. In general there’s not much I’m interested in waiting in line for. Were it “Free Ice Cream Day” or “Punch Rush Limbaugh in the Face Day” without a meeting to follow then I might stick around. Not today, though.

A personal voyage through the Cosmos

Here’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write - after watching the final episode of Cosmos last night, I went to bed and cried. I cried not just because the series is over, although I enjoyed it and will greatly miss it, but also because of what it’s meant to me these past few Sunday evenings. When Cosmos premiered back in March I was still living in the apartment in Troy, and since then, between all the tumult of packing, talking to the bank, closing on the house, moving, and all the work we’ve done on the house since, Cosmos and Neil deGrasse Tyson have been there every Sunday. I will freely admit that I get overly nostalgic about some things and I do not handle change well. Even though the distance between the apartment and the house is a whopping 13 miles at times it’s felt like a whole nother world. I’m a creature of habit and everything about that was turned on its head - different route to work, different routes for running, different restaurants, different schedule, and I couldn't find any of my stuff because it was still mostly in boxes. Through the transition I knew that every Sunday I could escape for an hour, that Cosmos would take me back to a place where I didn’t have to worry about things changing. It was one of the few things about my weekly schedule that stayed the same after we moved, and it was a science-themed beacon around which I tried to restructure things in my new surroundings.

Now it’s over and I’m still sad but it’s probably for the best. The transition period is coming to an end. The floors are done, pieces of furniture are starting to take their respective places, and I finally feel like I’m organized enough to where I know where (most) everything is in the house. Change can be scary, but at least I know I can make it through the coming Sunday nights without crying. Thanks, Mr. Tyson.

The hero Schenectady deserves, but not the one it needs right now

When I first arrived in New York, driving a car crammed with everything I owned, I knew very little about the Albany area. I knew for instance that there was a city nearby called Troy but I had only been there once, briefly, before signing an apartment lease near downtown. It wasn’t until I started work at my current job and told people where I lived that I learned Troy had a reputation for being kind of a dump. But when I added that I lived downtown, the negativity was usually tempered: “Oh, that’s a good area,” or, “I hear downtown Troy is coming back.”

It was only 2011 but a lot of downtown Troy’s biggest draws, like the Lucas Confectionery Wine Bar, Bombers Burritos, Dante’s Frozen Yogurt, and a bunch of other shops and restaurants didn’t exist yet. Dinosaur Barbeque had only just opened. The Frear Building, Proctor’s Theater, Trojan Hotel, Chasan Building, Dauchy Building, River Triangle Building, and the old Nellick’s furniture store were all empty - some had been empty since the 1970s. All have since been renovated or are in the process of being renovated. In the month since we left, Troy has welcomed a microbrewery, a deli, and there are plans in the works for at least two more restaurants.

I’m very happy to see Troy on the rebound. While I bitched a lot about suburbanites coming into town and taking all the parking spots, it was genuinely nice to go for a walk during the farmers market or Troy Night Out and see the streets full of people, people enjoying the city, my city.

Through local sites like All Over Albany I quickly learned that there is sort of a constant pissing contest between Albany and Troy about which is the “better city,” (culminating in the tongue-in-cheek “Troy > Albany Tour” in 2012). And then there’s Schenectady.

Outside of what’s playing at Proctor’s Theater downtown, Schenectady didn’t seem to get a lot of attention in the local culture sites and that’s really too bad because it has a lot going for it. It has a nice downtown area that is not as far along as Troy in terms of “reawakening” but it’s certainly on the right path. Architecturally I’d say it also lags a bit behind Troy but I would still put it on par with Albany, and that’s not in any way an insult. It has a fantastic city park, called Central Park (Wikipedia says it’s an Olmstead park but I have not seen anything else to confirm that), the aforementioned Proctor’s for Broadway productions and something else few cities have these days in their downtowns - a movie theater showing first-run movies.

Schenectady also grapples with a lot of bad things - high crime, burdensome taxes, and a monumentally staggering poverty rate, but these again are not unknown in Troy or Albany. When I tell people I live in Schenectady I get either a blank stare or a look of revulsion. Even when I explain where my neighborhood is, that it’s quiet and safe and pretty suburban, the reaction is still tepid: “Ah, well okay then.” There is no, “I hear Schenectady is coming back,” or, “Hey, that’s a nice area, your neighborhood.” For whatever reason the city has a bad rap compared with its two siblings, and I think that’s unfair.

What this city needs is a booster, someone like Duncan Crary in Troy or Maeve McEneny in Albany, someone ubiquitous both online and around the city to refute the claims that their town is a dump and to do so with passion and excitement. I’d nominate myself were it not for my penchant for being an anti-social recluse. It has its problems but Schenectady deserves more than just scorn and indifference. People talk about Rust Belt cities in the past tense - Detroit was, Youngstown was, Cleveland was - but they’re all still here, people still live in them, people still love them. Schenectady didn’t end when the factories closed down. It’s sick but it’s not dead. It never was and never will be a Chicago or a Miami or a Las Vegas but it’s not hard to get a cup of coffee at one of the cafes and take a walk down the pedestrian-only section of Jay Street and stop in some of the bookstores and boutiques and gaze up at the gold-topped cupola of city hall and think, “This is a nice place.” 

I’m sure just about every maligned city has people who try and get others to open their eyes and see the good as well as the bad. Some will see only what they want to see - they’ll point at burned-out houses and boarded-up storefronts and draw their own conclusions from there. But others will see the businesses and restaurants that are still there, the people who frequent them as they go about their lives, their joys and tragedies and the other minutiae as they go through life in cities that everyone else seems to have passed off as dead and defeated. Schenectady is alive and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. If you don’t believe me come see it for yourself.  

Have burrito - will travel

If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about something serious today: burritos.

How I love them. For me there are few food experiences as satisfying as watching meat, cheese, and vegetables get wrapped into a bundle the size of a small baby and then eating it as if I were channeling Joey Chestnut. Those of you who follow me on Facebook know of my ubiquitous visits to Chipotle, but really my love for burritos goes back to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican* restaurant in the Chicago suburbs called Los Burritos Tapatios, known colloquially as “El Tap.”

El Tap was a favorite of my college classmates, mostly because it was cheap, fast, and open until 4:00 AM which made it a perfect destination after a night of heavy drinking. I didn’t make my first visit until my junior year of college - as hard as it is to believe, I’d never really considered myself a fan of Mexican food before then - but one visit was enough to hook me. My first visit quickly turned into something of a weekly ritual, even during the period of nearly a year when I abstained from drinking. If anything, my visits became more frequent after I sobered up. I owned a minivan at the time so it became customary for my intoxicated roommates and friends to stumble into my room and pull me out of bed at 2:00 AM and drive them to El Tap because I was: a) the perfect DD, and b) I had a car big enough to seat them all. As payment for my burrito taxi service, one of them would buy food for me and I received a guarantee that there would be no vomiting in the car to or from the restaurant.

After college I lived briefly in the suburb of Glendale Heights, which is heavily Hispanic and overrun with little burrito restaurants and taquerias. I tried them all and liked nearly all of them but El Tap has always been my gold standard for the perfect burrito. They had another location in nearby Glen Ellyn and during my grad school days I would stop in on my way home after class. It was usually close to midnight but the place would be full of people working the night shift - truck drivers, nurses, policemen, and so forth. I usually avoid eating by myself in restaurants - something about it makes me anxious - but El Tap is the only place I’ve ever felt comfortable eating alone.

When I moved to Albany my burrito focus shifted to Chipotle, mostly because there aren’t that many other options. I like their burritos but I think that my ramp-up in visits might be sort of a comfort food thing. I ate at Chipotle a lot in Chicago too, and out of all the places I used to frequent out there (El Tap, Portillo’s, Potbelly’s, Giordano’s) it’s the only one that has locations in Albany. When it seemed like my entire world was changing it was soothing to know that I could go to Chipotle and the flavors would make me feel at home again, even if it was just for a few minutes. Nowadays Albany feels more like home than Chicago does but I still go to Chipotle almost religiously because, like I said, I think it tastes good.

Apart from Chipotle, the area burrito scene is pretty sad. We have Moe’s, another nationwide chain (I go there on occasion but if I’m ever given the choice between Moe’s and Chipotle I’ll always pick Chipotle.), and a regional chain called Hot Harry’s which I have not yet visited, mostly because I think their name sounds unappealing. Albany just doesn’t have the Hispanic population to support much in the way of burrito places. There are a handful of sit-down Mexican restaurants but they too “nice,” the type where you go for dinner and margaritas as an evening social event, not to scarf down a burrito at 1:00 AM. The closest thing I have found to El Tap is actually just a few blocks away from my house, a tiny restaurant and grocery store called La Mexicana that according to local food bloggers is by far the most authentic place around. Their burritos are good, excellent even, but they lack something I can’t quite put my finger on. The taste is there, the consistency and ingredients are there too, but I don’t think it could ever be a true replacement for El Tap. It’s Pepsi instead of Coke, U2 instead of R.E.M., a Camaro instead of a Mustang - the first things are all okay in their own right (well okay, Pepsi does kind of suck) but once you try the second you really don’t want to go back. If there are any other burrito places around there that I’m missing, please let me know. Until then, I’ll be at Chipotle. 

*Before anyone from the Southwest (ahem, Ashley) chimes in, let me say that I don’t really care whether or not my burrito experiences are “authentic.” I like them because they taste good, and I’m fully aware that what I eat may bear little resemblance to anything found in Mexico. It’s like American Chinese food - I know that the nuggets of unidentifiable fried meat covered in neon red sauce, canned pineapple, and white rice we call “sweet and sour chicken” is about a Chinese as lederhosen, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking it’s delicious.