This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Visions. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I ran faster the other day than I ever have before. I was in a four-mile race in Central Park on Pride weekend. This result was a nice surprise: I just turned 40. My recent training has focused on endurance rather than speed, to prepare for a marathon in November. But most of all, I’m not a runner. I’m not supposed to be a runner. I can’t be a runner. Who let me into the B corral of the New York Road Runners? With all these runners?
Everything is preparation for something else, though, and for years my life has been preparing me to run. During the race, I thought about the hundreds of brutal cycling class competitions that—starting when I was most convinced that it was impossible, with hardware in both femurs, to run—conditioned me to spend 30 minutes or more at my peak heart rate. I thought about the many times I’d spun under the trees of the six-mile Central Park loop on a road bike, learning its slants and shadows and curves. I thought about the relationship I’d built with the music I was listening to, a Beethoven symphony, its taut geometry springing underfoot.
Then, two days after the race, I went to see the cardiologist. I have moderate tricuspid valve regurgitation, itself not much of a problem. But I get an echocardiogram every couple of years to monitor it. Taking my shirt off in a dark room and nestling up to a stranger as they take sonograms from various angles and listen to the swishing of the blood is a strange and sobering ritual. At some point my condition may progress, and my relationship to athletics have to shift; or my decline might be more generic. In any case, faster is all the more obviously a temporary state, a limited-term loan.
Yet preparation keeps accruing. It’s at work in other places, too, like the stack of it on my writing desk. It calls me into being another thing that I am not, a novelist, and promises that in that pursuit too lie delights which contradict my age—for how could they have lurked so long and so nearby without my knowing them? This I think is the thrill of getting older. Your eyes adjust, and you finally start to see the room around you.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram or Threads, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.