Grooves

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Design. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

There’s the new thing outside you, and the new thing inside. We’re in the low, close, tight season. In a steady orbit, watching the energy supplies. Adventure is proximal: What curiosities lie in my own mind, in this book, in this all-purpose internet-connected device, in these isometric exercises? What can I cook? What can I consolidate? In brighter days we’ll look outward, we’ll venture to strange places in the bravery of warmth. This is the season of the cave. (No objection if you don’t feel that—I’ve never been much of a “let winter be winter” guy, and it’s been settling in slowly, an exploration too.)

I wrote last week about my project of pulling back on training this winter. But we’re more than a month past the solstice now, and the NYC Half is coming. I’m adding a fourth, “medium” day of running so as to grow the Sunday longs slowly and keep the other two short. The half-hour run is one of my favorite things. It’s real work—plenty long to pull you out of your head—but it’s also spritely and playful, a bit of a poem. It’s good for getting to useful places, so it weaves quietly into everything else: Leave on a run, come home with groceries.

Any street grid puts an infinity of different routes in easy reach, but a half-hour run originating at my apartment tends to follow one of a few familiar grooves: out to the water of the East River and back, or up into the many-treed Greenpoint neighborhood and back, or on a loop taking in pieces of each. A half-hour run is something you don’t have to plan; you don’t need snacks or water or even really your phone. You just step outside and follow the groove.

This is my fifth running season, and some of the grooves are getting deep—as is true of life in New York City in general. It’s actually sometimes a relief to get back from the exterior novelty of somewhere else to the interior novelty of the city, which is constantly refactoring its code, finding new faces for its antiquity. A groove is what’s familiar, but it’s also a study in change. For years, one of my favorite places—to run, to be, to drink too many Negronis on my birthday—has been Domino Park, on the Williamsburg waterfront, where I could almost promise you the same people never appear twice. (A perennial question for the New Yorker: Where do all these people come from? Where do they go?) For most of that time the park was cheek by jowl with a massive construction site, which has now become a rather chic reinvention of an old industrial zone. My gym moved in, with a lap pool soon to follow. Should fortune ever open a broad smile, the 37^th floor of the all-new building next door is where I’d like to live. Just over two decades ago, people there still made sugar.

My running and biking grooves, illustrated.

There’s an app that compiles your workout history into a map, with the boldest lines where you’ve been most often. We talk about living in a place, but we’re more tightly bound to some pieces of it than others, and a schematic of that is revealing. Where your body has been, how often and in what state, is some of your soul’s most indelible history. I don’t remember where I came across this quote from the Lebanese poet-artist Etel Adnan, but it hit me so hard back then that I printed it out and hung it on my desk at The Times: “Maps are not about shapes but about energies flowing in and out of places. They are about directions and obstacles. The circulation of the blood. The blood of cities. The blood of a territory.”

If we are among those who can move freely, we render some of our purest acts of agency in the grooves we lay down. A decision made once can be defining, certainly, but it’s likelier to be the ones engraved through repetition that form our substance.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.