This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Chess. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
If you’re going to be a jock, you will need at least a capitulatory stance on repetition. I still think darkly about the track across the street from West High School which, even though I had become a great evader of sports—my parents once intervened when they learned I was replacing recess with volunteering in the library—made itself unavoidable. Around ninth grade, for instance, the P.E. teacher measured our best time running a mile. I don’t remember what mine was; just that the task incorporated four revolutions. This seemed not just unpleasant but vengeful: “Yup, here you are again! Keep going!”
On weekends and school breaks my church young men’s group, which overlapped with the Boy Scouts, would go on fantastically ranging backpacking trips in the Utah wilderness. These had their good and bad points; it was an age of casual cruelty among boys, and being a bookish queer was not the laurel it is in East Williamsburg. But those epic hikes brought novelty and beauty and even a creative tinder, my brain firing musical overtures in time with the dusty march.
The same kind of ranging venue—a bike path along Santa Monica Bay, more than twenty miles long—later birthed a more purposeful athlete. The changeability of weather and light, and the sheer size of the path, were hedges against tedium. But still, it was the same path every day, and that started a process of acclimatization that continued when I moved a bit inland and had to narrow the scope of my rides further, to a loop through the holy waste of Griffith Park. During a three-week spell of rain—we used to think that was a lot in Los Angeles—I gave in and joined a gym. Struggling through 40 minutes on the elliptical machine in rhythm with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light felt like a trap of my own devising, but here I was.
Then, ominous brass crescendo, I moved to New York. Wintertime made the gym sort of inevitable, if for years a struggle. But even in the nicer months, if you wanted to avoid cars, some of the best options for biking were the three-mile loop in Prospect Park or the six-miler in Central. I’ve been here so long now that I think of these as capacious retreats; in fact they’re akin to the holodeck on Star Trek, simulations of larger worlds sandwiched in between whatever else you get to on the elevator.
Yet real life unspools in these dreamy projections. In Prospect Park, some friendly voice, my future self or a newly dead friend or the Holy Ghost, once broke in to my bike ride unbidden with the news that my life would be better than I expected. A week later I fractured my pelvis in three places and crossed into years of pain. But the voice turned out to be right, in matters of work and love and music and then also body, and it came back no less unsolicited last summer, a week before the professional shock that spawned this newsletter and upended everything else.
I raced on a frosty Saturday morning last month in Prospect Park. It was my thousandth time on that loop, my first as a runner. When I was most of the way through, churning out seven-minute adrenaline miles on beleaguered bones, the significance dawned on me—that I had looped back all these years later to the place where I’d heard, or felt, the voice. There could hardly be a more genial illustration of its prophecy than the Grecian beauty who lingered in the Nethermead, holding my coat and waiting for me to score him a finish-line Gatorade.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.