I just thought of a smell that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Winter sweat. I was thinking about how I wanted to start exercising and that I would ride my bike to work, all one mile of it and how I would maybe smell or be sweaty when I got to work and how my dad used to run miles and miles every day on his lunch break and then shower and be back to his day, refreshed, exercised, like a horse. When he ran during the winter, he wore wind pants and a long sleeved t-shirt, some shwag from the last marathon he had run, a knit hat of nuetral color (but not cool nuetral like khaki or chocolate, usually just grey or navy) and those small one-size fits all gloves that stretch over your fingers and reach just to the veins of your inner wrist. Running was the only time I saw my dad where a hat. He was and is a very functional man with a thick head of wavy hair that in the seventies grew long and very Michael Landon-ish but in my child hood was cut short, not buzed but short so that he had a perfect rippling helmet when he brushed his hair back after taking a shower. Baseball hats or flat top old man hats or winter caps for their fashionable or bald spot covering function had no practical purpose for him so the only time he wore a hat was to cover his ears while running in the winter. Saying that he ran in the winter implies a certain commitment to his craft, we lived for nine years in upstate new york where every winter we had snow drifts so tall that we dug forts out of the side of them, not rolled up into a pile, dug out of from the sidewalk or the road with intricate rooms. Granted, I was small at the time, but these were large snow banks. Large like you couldn’t see our Winnebago parked in the drive way from the side, snow banks. One winter, we had such a big storm that all the electricity went out and our heat must have been electric because we all had to sleep in the living room in sleeping bags around the fireplace and when we woke up and the TV flashed on, the news was saying that the Challenger had exploded and we were all very sad and cold and snowed in.
We also lived in Minnesota where temperatures are judged by the actual and feels like, both usually in double digit negative numbers. My freshman year of high school, the governor (Jesse Ventura the ex-wrestler mind you, no sissy politician from the city) called off all schools in the state because wind chills were going to reach -65 degrees. My dad ran in the winter in Minnesota too. In fact he trained for the grandma’s marathon in Duluth, the last marathon he would run through the winter, running the mile and a half to the community center and then running about 897 laps on the indoor track and then running the mile and a half home to cool off.
And when he came home, I remember this from the very first memories I have, he smelled like winter sweat, a different, more pungeant version of sweat that hung in the air around him like the cold air itself, thawing in the indoors and becoming more potent. He grew a beard every winter and the condensation of his breath would freeze into icicles on his beard making him seem like he had come in from another world, very supernatural and Narnia like.
I wonder often why this running thing, I guess you would call it a passion or a talent, didn’t run in the family, no pun intended. I have never had the inclination for nor the ability to run. I realize that running long distance takes conditioning and training. But it just would not take. I tried. When we first moved to Minnesota the summer before my freshman year of high school and I started to go by Kate instead of Katie and went on the first diet of my life (something having to do with grapefruit and bacon) to have a fresh start and be the funniest, most stunning person anyone had ever met, I started to run. I ran on the beautiful trails surrounding our apartment complex, past a lake and a few churches, through lovely peaceful woods and serene backyards…and my lungs nearly seared themselves through my chest when I finally stopped and panted and clutched my right arm as if anticipating a heart attack. I had run a half a mile. I started again the next day and would try all manner of distractions from singing favorite songs (obviously in silence, I couldn’t pant frantically and sing at the same time) to replaying particualrly vexing moments in my recent life and figuring out the best, most witty and cutting thing to say to achieve my goals. Nothing worked and I gave up quickly. I started high school with an awkward hair cut that was ment to look like Meg Ryan in IQ and the same extra pudge that had hung with me since childhood. Running was not my game.
I think perhaps that my dad has always run as a process of renewing, of coming back to something paced and kinetic. He had run track as a kid, in fact it was coming home from a track meet that he had walked into his kitchen and heard that his father had had a massive heart attack and was dead. My dad had been running when his dad dropped dead. There must be something to that. He had placed in two events that day. Maybe he returns to running every time to get back to before the sky came down, before his mom taught sewing classes in their basement to keep food on the table and they saw less of his dad’s raucous family and had a lot less fun. Maybe running has always been something that he has been good at. He won two ribbons that day and no matter what happened later in life, he could beat his mile pace; he could find a new trail and clock it with the car and run it in a loop. I ran to accomplish, to be thinner or be able to eat more. I think my dad thought these things too. I mean his dad died of a heart attack at 43, a short life of whole milk and not enough exercise. So he ran to be healthy but he also ran to pound out stress or process through things. He was happier when he ran regularly.
I thought all of this in some form tonight while I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, how maybe I should write it down, the memory of winter sweat and how the writing it will make it more permanent, a history instead of a flashing rememberance that I will not remember tomorrow but that will leave a bit of a pang because I knew it was a good thing that I had remembered. So I write it down, for what it will accomplish but also for the process of remembering and I am happier for articulating it, for pounding it out on the keys. Writing it makes me put the thought into a sequence and make sense of it. And I know that my writing, whether I make anything of it or not, is like my dad’s running. We return to something we know to put reason back and find the peace in the pavement or the clarity of the document.