Mystery
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Traces. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Something I’ve loved about becoming a new triathlete in my late 30s is the sense, over and over again, of being out of my depth—of having to invent a way to shore. On Saturday, though, I crossed the finish line of my third Malibu Triathlon into a different feeling.
It used to be (two years ago) that I would wake at 4 a.m. on a borrowed bed and drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, much of it lit only by my high beams, and then follow one predawn instruction at a time from people waving neon around like a tarmac crew, until a few hours, 32 miles, and one sunrise later I found myself drinking official-sponsor electrolytes and dressed in a finisher’s medal.
But this time I knew exactly what to expect, down to the changes year over year to the route, and that knowledge was buttressed by three other triathlons this summer. I had a plan, which I could alter on a whim—Today I’ll park at the high school so I can leave for brunch before they clear the bike course. This was nice. It made me feel that I had learned something. But it also set off a warning. This thing has lost its newness.
Reinforcing the appetite for novelty, I guess, had been my trip to New Orleans just prior, where I recovered one of my favorite states—of not having any idea which way is which, of being uniformly lost. This is a fleeting but savory form of innocence, like when the bartender sets down your first sazerac.
The morning after the race I went to St. Thomas the Apostle Hollywood, the Episcopal church that I joined in the years after my severance from Mormonism. I love the language of the old Christian creeds, but whatever truth emits when I speak them out loud with the rest of the parishioners is a qualified truth, or a translated one, or the truth of one part of myself but not another. This is how I’ve always felt—I used to fear that I was dishonoring my fellow churchgoers, gliding up to the communion rail as a spiritual tourist—but nowadays I feel no conflict. To speak the words of a belief and enact its rituals, its mysteries, while protecting a tension in your own psyche, allowing yourself irresolution: I wonder what would happen, in general, if we didn’t assign this posture the slur of hypocrisy. One thing that has happened for me is that I still go to Mass.
To prepare for my next big mystery, the marathon back at home, I lurched out Wednesday morning through an improvised, comically hostile 17-mile run encompassing much of my old route to Costco, during which I imagined an art project of running along just those surface roads in Los Angeles that lack all pedestrian infrastructure. The least uncomfortable stretch of the attempt was a dirt horse path in Griffith Park adjoining I-5. I knew that over on the other side of that wheezing freeway was a bike path whose straitened course I used to follow day after day on my approach to a favored little mountain. Its thousand-foot climb defeated me once, my lungs subliming just shy of the crest; but never again.
I’m less than $500 away from qualifying for the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5 as a charity fundraiser. Please make a donation to the nonprofit Achilles International.