I’ve been trying to work on my running speed without much progress. Every weekend a group of menopausal women passes me going super fast. I know they’re menopausal because I can hear them laughing and chatting about vaginal dryness and hot flashes from the time they’re a quarter mile behind me until they’re a quarter mile ahead of me. They zoom past, yukking it up and they’re not even short of breath. And they’re old. I want to be like that when I’m old so I’m working on it. I could just run later in the day on the weekends so I won’t run into them anymore, but it’s getting kind of hot out now and sometimes I think the heat might make me die. My goal is to at least quicken my pace to the point where it takes them longer to pass me and I keep them in my line of vision for longer before they disappear on the horizon. It’s a lofty goal, believe me.

I do well on my “speed work” days, but then on  my regular runs, I go back to slow. I don’t know how to get the feel of a certain pace, so I just go at a pace that doesn’t hurt very badly. When I started running a few years ago, I used to listen to music, but then I found that once I listened to certain music while running, it was impossible for me to listen to it in real life. It made me feel weird so I started listening to a combination of audio books, “This American Life,” “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” “The Moth,” and “RadioLab.”  And my speed has suffered. I really get into the stories and I find myself pretty much just shuffling my feet with my mouth hanging open from time to time. It’s a wonder that I don’t veer off the trail and run into a tree every now and then.

But Dawn introduced me to these podcasts that are organized by beats per minute, so all I had to do is figure out what BPM will keep me at the pace I want. And it’s all house music or club music or whatever the kids are calling it these days. I don’t listen to that in real life, so it doesn’t ruin any music for me! And it doesn’t have words, so I don’t get caught up in the story! I do sometimes get distracted, “Is that a cat yelling? I wonder if that’s a foley artist effect or if it’s somebody’s cat? What did they do to get the cat to make that sound? I wonder if they gave it some kind of designer club drug. I wonder what the new designer club drugs are called these days. ‘Ecstasy’ was just about the best drug name ever. If I hadn’t been afraid of man-made drugs, I totally would have taken something called ‘ecstasy.’ That’s just good marketing.” And sometimes,, because it’s club music, I think about Bryan’s former co-worker in Michigan who showed up to work one day with a tether bracelet on her ankle. Bryan asked her what she did to deserve that and, with complete nonchalance, she said, “Shot up a club.” (He didn’t press for details. Can you believe that?) And then I snap out of it and find myself off beat (I like to keep the beat with my right foot), so then I do a little stutter step to get back on beat, which means one day I will probably fall down and take a stick to the eye, but for now it’s working.

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