Guest Post: Stewart Dutfield's Q1 Somewhat Running-related Diary

19 January. Six days ago, the "Recover from the Holidays 50K" started smoothly until, after a mere half hour, my right calf unaccountably began to tighten. It got slowly worse until, after a particularly uncomfortable downhill, I decided to go home early. Some deep tissue massage found the symptom but not the cause, and despite some remaining discomfort I was able to slowly run the hilly roads above Woodstock. Whether this will go away of its own accord, as such things sometimes do, is a cause of worry.

The Devil's Path of the High Catskills
Indian Head, Jimmy Dolan Notch, and southern tip of Twin

27 January. What to make of the news that the British government is making preparations, but has no plans, for martial law in the event of Brexit? A combination, perhaps, of Baden-Powell stiff upper lip with a flaccid "something will turn up". Meanwhile, life turns upside down as the British Broadcasting Corporation announces a move to Europe, while the so-called "European Research Group" wants to leave Europe as disruptively as it can: what will they call themselves then? Will Hutton warned, in 1995, of what could now be their manifesto:

• Perpetual austerity: "Swinging cuts in the welfare state could bring lower taxation."
• Low wages and job insecurity...though without immigrants, of course: "All inhibitions to the functioning of a free labour market could be removed..." 
• Take back control by abandoning controls: "There will be another round of business deregulation." 
• Martial law would be even better: "Any reaction to these measures could be repressed by intensified policing and an increase in the prison population."
• Toodle pip, Open Society: "The vestigial elements of public power lying outside the control of the state or the market could be removed."
• What has become the means to achieve everything else: "The country could opt out of all European institutions in order to better preserve the free market utopia."

30 January. Yesterday a New Statesman writer attempted to understand the Conservative Party's attitude to Brexit; they agree on five priorities, but disagree on their relative importance. Only two of the five, regulatory autonomy and an independent trade policy, are reasons to leave the EU; the remainder are simply containing the damage. So why does a broad church of Brexit voters, from Rochford to Rotherham, want to leave? A desire to poke the establishment in the eye does not explain the UK government's "red line" on free movement of people, which appears to be the cause of intractable difficulty regarding Ireland. A Guardian piece today leaves me considering a very reason for all of this: dislike of immigration, sometimes beneath a more genteel veneer of doing something about "those people".

4 February. In Albany's South End this morning, I was asked what I was carrying. 

"Snowshoes." 

"Don't you need snow for those?"
"There's more snow where I started out."

"Do they go fast?"

"No, I'm really slow on them."

"I guess if you were going fast on those things you'd whup your ass."

14 February. New Scientist reports a study on the health impact of post-Brexit increases in the price of fruit and vegetables: approximately 6,000 additional deaths by 2030, and twice that with no deal. A Kantian moralist in me discounts the numbers; those in the much-bruited 52% in favour of Brexit will simply experience the consequence of what they voted for, so we should lament only 48% of those fatalities. 

16 February. The Economist contrasts Shropshire's enthusiasm for Brexit with the risk of damage to its "traditional rural economy". Meanwhile, I have been listening to settings of A Shropshire Lad: poems much read in the trenches of World War I. A century later, it seems, nostalgia remains for a rural England that may never quite have existed and which one will not see in future. Over versions of "Is my team ploughing" by Ivor Gurney and Ralph Vaughan Williams I prefer George Butterworth's, if only because he retains the verses about football playing along the river shore. 

17 February. 45 years ago, the Albany Winter Marathon was one of very few events in the depths of a New York winter. It offered a last chance to qualify for Boston a couple of months later, but nowadays a "BQ" time must be in the books by the previous autumn. Having met the qualifying time for 2020, I may be one of the last; participation has dwindled and the Winter Marathon may be no more. Perhaps a hard-bitten few will run the course in future years, clock or no clock.

23 February. Though my right calf had not tightened in the marathon, the ankle on my other leg hobbled me for the next two days. Simply resting had little effect, so when I took my son and a friend to ski at Gore Mountain I gently cross country skied and snowshoed to see what would happen. Since nothing got worse, I resolved to continue being active and resorted to what runners typically do when things aren't working: buy new shoes.

2 March. After seven hilly Woodstock miles in the new shoes, my ankle stopped hurting. It felt better for the next 20 miles and the rest of the day. As muscles tightened after a long climb and steep descent, perhaps some imbalance in the ankle temporarily resolved itself.  

10 March. The Albany Running Exchange represents a buoyant younger wave of running in our area. At their "Tour of Guilderland" group run no-one appeared to be within 20 years of my age. It quickly emerged that I was also the slowest, though by running almost at full tilt I wheezed my part of a delightful conversation with someone out for an easy jog. After a detour through untracked inches-deep snow along the rail trail, I arrived exhausted at the organizers' house just in time for a gulp of prosecco and the last of breakfast. 

In the distance, taking the Helderberg to Hudson Rail Trail
photo: Josh Merlis

13 March. In a 2005 book, Jean Lipman-Blumen commends us to leaders who undermine our illusions. She suggests that, predisposed to feeling superior to outsiders or to those who disagree with us, we are susceptible to leaders who exhibit behaviours such as:

"Misleading... through deliberate untruths and misdiagnoses"

"Maliciously setting constituents against one another"

"Identifying scapegoats and inciting others to castigate them"

"Structuring the costs of overthrowing them as a trigger for the downfall of the system they lead"

These may not be shortcomings of Theresa May. Her twin illusions, of abolishing freedom of movement and of some ill-defined national autonomy, simply could not be reconciled with the Good Friday agreement: a treaty with other countries that has established peace in Northern Ireland for 20 years. The Prime Minister has failed by evading this "valuable inconvenience", though had she confronted it the country may yet have proven unready to listen. Pro-Brexit UK has had the leadership it deserves. 

21 March. Bicycling to work for the first time this year, I dismounted for a couple of patches of ice on the rail trail and on the roads in town avoided as best I could the accumulated grit, glass and potholes of a hard winter. Railway sidings beside the future course of the South End Connector trail held long trains of black fuel tankers: pipelines on wheels for transhipment onto Hudson River barges. Suspecting false representation on those labelled "Renewable Products Marketing Group", I deferred my indignation to discover that the trains carry light Bakken crude from North Dakota, tar sands oil from Canada, and ethanol from the midwest. Ethanol entails many problems when used as a fuel, but perhaps this particular labeling was accurate as far as it went; no-one had painted the tankers green with pictures of happy butterflies.

The HAT run trail, above the mouth of the Susquehanna River

Van Der Zee House, built by the grandson of Storm Brant who was born at sea in 1636

Guest Post: Stewart Dutfield's Final Thoughts of 2018

17 July. We took an anniversary bike ride down the river to Hudson, over Mount Merino and the Rip Van Winkle bridge to Catskill, and back on the other side of the river. Most of the roads we followed date back 200 years or more, but we returned abruptly to the present, riding amidst fast-moving heavy trucks by the Port of Coeymans. This former brickyard has become a deep water port, supplying raw materials to the neighbouring cement plant and constructing portions of the recently-opened new Tappan Zee bridge.

29 July. In July 1977, 22 runners set out on the first Escarpment Trail Run: 30Km along a wooded ridge, high above the Hudson River to the east, with three major climbs and no road crossings. Everyone learned something about this new venture, whether "never again" or the need to carry water next year. This was a good year for the archive, with frequent participants earning T-shirts for having completed 400 and 500 miles in the race over the years. There are runners who resolutely spurn the offer of a T-shirt for just one more completion, while others believe that this will be their last hurrah and have just fun enough to weaken their resolution.

More than 1,200 miles between the two of them

17 August. A creation myth of Thousand Island salad dressing holds that it originated on Grindstone Island, where fishing guides grilled the day's catch for their clients during the Gilded Age. Each summer I camp overnight with my son at Canoe Point; in the late 19th century the American Canoe Association held its annual camp and regatta here, and since then the island has changed little except that the ATV has supplanted the horse-drawn cart for getting around. Today I paddled to Canoe Point, and set off to run around the island: past farms and preserved lands, two one-room schoolhouses, the defunct cheese factory, a red truck with a tree growing through it—totem of rural America—and a field of Highland cattle, eventually to the Grindstone Island Winery and, with as many bottles as I could carry, back to the kayak.

Old road, supposedly closed but presumably only to ATVs

Canoe Point, 1885

10 September. How lovely to live in a community that values its open spaces and plans for their conservation amidst growing pressure for development. I used one of the planning maps to visit as many recreation areas and preserves as I could by bicycle, pausing at a trailhead or park entrance for every three miles or so of the 50-mile ride around town. 

27 September. Steve Chilton's "The Round" describes Chris Brasher's unsuccessful attempt at the Bob Graham round, his entourage joined at the start by a runner named Charlie. After 25 miles, Joss Naylor left the group in order to travel to London for dinner with Muhammad Ali. Brasher retired after another 16 miles or so, but Charlie ran on and finished the route in 22 hours, having told his wife the previous evening that he would be out for just an hour. This was before cellphones, but why she didn't call mountain rescue is not made clear.

View from the Wittenberg over the plain of Shokan

29 September. My head filled with stories of running 42 Lake District peaks, I started an eight-hour run of the Cat’s Tail marathon wondering how a mere four major Catskill summits would compare. The route scrambles along the ridge from Slide Mountain, almost a thousand feet higher than Scafell Pike: a classic Catskill trail, amidst the smell of balsam fir, over Cornell and Wittenberg Mountains. Joe reminded me, as we ran, that John Burroughs' 1885 "The Heart of the Southern Catskills" describes camping rough on the summit of "the Wittenberg"; from here is perhaps the best view from the ridge, over "the plain of Shokan": now the Ashokan Reservoir that gives water to New York City more than a hundred miles away.

5 October. In the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's holding "opposing ideas in mind at the same time", I read two contrasting books and emerged struck by their similar views of society's increasing dependence on large corporations. In The Company Citizen, Tom Levitt offers practical ways to align corporate self-interest with positive social outcomes. Peter Dauvergne's "Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?" sees corporations as willing for selfish reasons to lie, degrade the environment, and break the law. Both books are optimistic: one that corporate interests can be aligned with human values, the other that this will never reliably happen but activism and regulation will save the day once a great deal more damage has been done. Any political fuss aside, at issue seems simply whether corporate inputs—mission and purpose—are adequate to embody human values: or must we also insist on assessing the full cost of business activity and requiring corporations to compensate for any net negative effects? And if we must insist, will we do so strongly enough before it is too late?

13 October. I left hours before dawn for the Trapp Family Lodge, an Austrian-flavoured outdoor resort started as a music camp established in Vermont's Green Mountains by the "Sound of Music" family. The marathon consists of two loops on hiking and mountain bike trails. At the finish was Viennese lager, brewed on the premises. Fortunately, no alphorn were in evidence.

25 October. Cycling to work, I encountered the remains of a deer on the rail trail. I imagined a jurisdictional battle between the County and the Town Departments of Public Works, but whichever drew the short straw had the eviscerated mess cleaned up by the afternoon.

28 October. Don Ritchie's autobiography "The Stubborn Scotsman" describes his struggle with health problems, which it is tempting to associate with his many hard years of training and racing. Current research into long-term health effects of endurance sports may one day yield more reliable guidance. Meanwhile, my son's painful knee has been diagnosed as "fast-growing boy" syndrome; he has been learning to do physiotherapy exercises and about the sports and level of involvement that bring him joy. Today's delight in his new mountain bike suggests that this is an activity that might keep him happy and healthy throughout his life: something that I have been fortunate to derive from running.

4 November. The Batona trail travels the length of the Pine Barrens: a forest wilderness of blueberry and cranberry bogs and deserted villages, quite apart from the rest of New Jersey. A low-key run along the trail, started in winter a few years ago, now takes place amidst muted late autumn colours. At 43 miles, with the next aid station several hours of running away, refreshments included a nip of Lagavulin which I can almost still taste. The following morning at Batsto village, Joe was delighted to find a pile of bog iron left over from the smelting that took place from the mid 1700s to the mid 1800s.

11 November. When Siegfried Sassoon wrote that "Everybody burst out singing...the singing will never be done.", did he have in mind the soldiers of his Welsh regiment or the general popular celebration of the signing of the Armistice? Perhaps both. I experienced neither the horror nor the delight that it was over, but for fifty years have wondered what being thrown into it all would have been like. What comfort in a humanity that can condone Verdun, Ypres, the Somme, Gallipoli or the Eastern Front? As the singing surely did end, the horror drifted back to haunt generations to follow.

17 November. Gravel Grinding, a term for cycling over dirt roads, has arrived in the Northeastern US. We returned from the "Gravel Gobbler" to the S&S Farm Brewery covered in mud, and with fewer working gears than when we we started. We look forward to more.

30 November. Rereading Will Hutton's 1995 The State We're In during the buildup to the postponed UK Parliamentary Brexit vote, I found this:

Unless Western Capitalism...can accept that they have responsibilities to the social and political world in which they are embedded, they are headed for perdition. Paradoxically, the most likely consequences will be the closure of the very open markets that business most needs as societies seek to protect themselves from the destructive forces that unregulated capital can release...

Alas, our pragmatic management of the social impacts of globalisation has failed to prevent "that kind of breakdown", which now draws so many countries toward a populism of fear and exclusion.

12 December. What we now refer to as the Christmas Truce came early for some; in a book of World War 1 letters a 20-year-old describes from his "palace in the trenches" a case on December 12th. Under a white flag and led by an officer, Germans crossed no man's land to shake hands and smoke cigarettes with the French. The letter's author was killed a few months later.

Guest Post: Stewart Dutfield's Q2 Somewhat Running-related Diary

Seeing as how I'm basically a seasonal blogger myself at this point, I'm thrilled to have Stewart Dutfield continue to update his yearly diary on a quarterly basis.  ICYMI, you can read his 2017 year in review and his 2018 Q1 musings.  This current iteration may be my favorite so far.  It isn't all running-related, but then again, neither is life.

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6 April. To have spent four hours at the National African American Museum with a 13-year-old boy is to look forward to returning for a whole day, to take things in more slowly. In single file down a narrow ramp, we walked several storeys beneath ground, and then slowly up through the historical exhibit—from before slavery (and, it was suggested, even before racism) to Obama and Oprah—to emerge at the foot of a heavy spiral staircase. Bounded by tall black walls, it continues the journey upward, but we have arrived here understanding that historical progress is neither unambiguous nor even consistently forward. 

Clayton led us to the sports exhibits: Owens, Robinson, Gibson, Ali, Jordan. Most moving to me was the bronze statue of Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman (who afterwards was just as shabbily treated as the others) on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics. Harry Edwards, very much part of events leading up to Smith and Carlos's protest, appears in short videos on aspects of black sports: reminding us, for example, that racial integration of major league baseball destroyed black-owned businesses in the negro leagues. While taking a photograph of the monumental staircase from above, I was tapped on the shoulder and quietly told that photographs should only be taken from below. With mild shame and indignation I struggled to grasp what seemed an arbitrary and unstated rule, but left feeling that perhaps this was exactly the point. 

Descending Castle Point on a run through Mohonk and Minnewaska

28 April. In Carmel NY is a statue of Sybil Ludington; the story goes that in 1777 she rode 40 miles overnight from here to rouse militia in defense of Danbury against the British. Two centuries later, a 50K road race roughly followed Ludington's presumed route and has taken place every year since. This year the event was no longer based in the basement of the VFW—where the business portion of the men's urinal still bears an image of Jane Fonda—and followed a new loop course never approaching within a mile or so of the statue. As usual, new leaves gave little shade on the pretty, undulating country roads. Some well-established metropolitan area road runners showed up, a few still going in their 50s, 60s and 70s. With luck, though having departed from its roots in the dubious history of Sybil Ludington's ride, the 50K will continue as a no-frills footrace for old-school athletes.

6 May. Live audacity at the Egg in Albany where Brandi Carlile sang "Babe I'm Going to Leave You", a tour de force for a young, fresh-faced Led Zeppelin who had transformed the song from a Joan Baez recording of the early 1960s.

Refreshment at Kaaterskill Falls on a run from Olana to North Lake

2 June. The Piccadilly Line from Heathrow brought me to Boston Manor, where I embarked on a gentle walk through West London history; first along the Grand Union canal to the mouth of the River Brent, where Julius Caesar may or may not have crossed the Thames in 54BC. Tom took me to a plaque to commemorate where Pocahontas had lived; then through the fields of Syon Park—little changed for 200 years—to lunch at the London Apprentice, which was here when J.M.W. Turner lived in Isleworth and might have been his local. Then over the lovely Victorian painted iron of Richmond lock and back to Kew, where an afternoon cricket match was in progress. We had spent our afternoon amidst Turner's picture of Syon House and Kew Palace, swans and all.

The Thames at Isleworth

Loch Lomond, the low road.
Photo credit: Joe Brown

9 June. It was dark as the bus descended the steep valley past Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater to deposit us beside the falls at Ohiopyle, PA. From here we would run the Laurel Highlands trail northeast to Johnstown, which in past months has crawled with journalists trying to understand the 2016 presidential election results. For my part, in nearby Ebensburg the previous evening I had visited a new microbrewery with the slogan "Our beer is always coaled" (fortunately, it wasn't). The trail is marked by 71 mileposts, and follows a ridge where we were a couple of weeks too late for the peak of the mountain laurel. "Highway Patrolman" playing in my head, I started comfortably but, as the humidity undermined my appetite for eating and drinking, gradually slowed over the later more runnable part of the trail and finished, once more in the dark, less than an hour before the clock ran out.

Joe on the Highland Boundary fault, descending Conic Hill.
Photo credit: Fiona Rennie

23 June. Just behind Tesco's in Milngavie, a footpath sign indicates that Glasgow is 6¼ miles away. The nearby terminus for the commuter railway is also the start of the West Highland Way: 95 miles in the opposite direction, along the shores of Loch Lomond and through the West Highlands. After a moment of silence for the great Don Ritchie, runners set off at 1am through the town centre toward Fort William. Daylight roused me at 3am from sleeping in the van, in time to support Joe at 19 miles with coffee and a bacon roll. Stella later joined me as Joe's crew. Approaching Glencoe over the Black Mount, Joe began to struggle with the increasingly rough, granite underfoot conditions. He and I covered the last 25 miles together overnight, and ran not a step. As the race director had predicted, there was no weather this year by Scottish standards: conditions proved largely dry and fresh, keeping the midges at bay except where Stella slept in the van at Kinlochleven. After a grim night on the granite paths, Joe finished at 5am and took his turn to sleep in the van as we drove to our B&B.

Crews provide all food and drink to West Highland Way runners.
Photo credit: Stella Potter

26 June. I took Joe to the Scottish National Gallery to see the large painting of Niagara Falls, which was my introduction to Frederic Church long before I first visited the Hudson Valley. Among the Titians and Poussins hangs a large, jarring new work by Jenny Saville; in El Greco colors of grey, red and blue, it depicts and bewails child casualties in Aleppo in our own time—on our watch, so to speak. See it if you can.