Untitled Document

21 April 2004

Running

There is no disaster from overseas this morning. At least nothing specific to comment on, except the Continuing Crisis.

I have my own little crisis. I have found myself having to rise from grim deliberations to stretch my leg. It is hurting almost all the time now, and not just with the weather.

I complained about it the last time I saw a physician. The Doc looked up at me at my retirement physical and told me I would be needing a knee replacement to stop the stabbing pain of the osteoarthritis that has been building in the joints over the last decade. It was the running that did it, that other mad passion of my life.

I ran on the flight decks of seven aircraft carriers, the black non-skid surface unyielding under my trainers, the wind fierce in the face going forward, and pushing on my back heading aft to the round-down. The sea was sometimes cold and gray and sometimes painted pastel under azure sky.

Sometimes on business I would get to run in Hyde Park, and once encountered the Queen's Household calvary in undress uniforms out for a spin, the jingle of their accoutrements resonating from another age.

But the best running was along the shore of the broad Potomac.

There was a place called the Pentagon Officer's Athletic Club- the POAC, pronounced "PO-ACK." It was located under the lawn of the ceremonial River Entrance, facing the lagoon they dredged to fill the swamp where the sprawling building now stands. It closed last month after sixty years.

It was a dank underground facility, dark and smelling faintly of mold and chlorine from the narrow lap pool. There were racquetball courts, and wooden floors on four half-court basketball venues, and machines of all manner and variation tucked away in nooks and corners. Free weights and steam rooms and endless warrens of lockers in the dimness.

It was a dump, no question. But it was the only escape from the briefings and point papers and endless planning that goes on in the five-sided colossus round the clock, seven-by-twenty-four, 365.

I had a locker near the Chief of Staff of the Army. He wasn't that when I first started changing there, but he was by the time I left the PO-ACK for the last time, hobbling. I lucked out. I drew a half-locker in a row near the front of the facility, in the "A" Locker area. If you got a good one, it was a precious thing the officers would keep for years, dutifully paying the rent even while on remote assignments.

Growing old with the same locker, I surmised, since there were pensioners who would still shuffle in daily for their work-out.

PO-ACK time was precious and sacred. Battalions of action-officers would be at the desks by 0600, or earlier, and not be able to escape until six or seven in the evening. They grimly called it the Pentagon half-day, only twelve hours if you were lucky.

There was only one sanctioned release from the regimine. PO-ACK time.

We would start furtively looking at watches and day-books just after ten to see when we might escape. An hour was not long enough, and two hours too long. The time could usually be found, at least for the mid-grade officers. It was a military obligation to stay fit, after all.

It was a marvelous liberation, shedding the uniform and pulling on a T-shirt with an irreverent logo, clipping the PO-ACK onto the waist of the running shorts, pulling on the socks and trainers.

I eschewed the fitness machines or organized sport, preferring the solitude of the outdoors and the tranquility of pounding up the paths by the Potomac.

The time available determined the course. If it was a short run, it was out the back door and across the asphalt of North parking. Then across Boundary Channel's wooden bridge and north along the River. Then east across the graceful spans of the Memorial Bridge. A lap around the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps, or the longer course up the Mall to conduct a circuit of Washington's proud white spire.

If there was all the time in the world, we might continue on up the great swath of green, past the museums and the Smithsonian Castle all the way to the pool below Capitol Hill.

That was the eight mile course. There were longer ones, and when I was training for the Marine Corps Marathon would pass by Memorial Bridge and jog steadily up to Rosslynn, down past the shiny new office structures and to the graceful spans of the Key Bridge. There were people there that had nothing to do with Intelligence or Defense, and some of them were quite pretty.

That might be one of the reasons I ran.

Across the river in Georgetown, the streets were filled with people of leisure. They lounged in the restaurants, windows thrown open to the soft breeze, or shopping at the boutiques. Once I was pounding down M Street there were choices aplenty. Cross the Rock Creek Parkway and down to Foggy Bottom, past Main State, looking at the more obscure monuments and the Bureau of Naval Medicine. Or down the hill,over the brown water of the C&O Canal and under the shade of the Whitehurst Expressway. There is no sun beneath it on the old waterfront. Then into the brightness again and south, under the Kennedy Center's imposing façade and the Saudi Embassy and back into parkland, past Mr. Lincoln in his marble house and the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial and across the vast industrial 14th Street bridge that carries the expressway downtown.

Below the bridge the Potomac rolls broad and placid, moving slowly now that it has fallen from the heights of land and approaches the Chesapeake.

Then a dart across the off-ramp, dodging hurtling traffic, and the long lazy loop back onto the Pentagon Reservation, and the parking lot and the shower and then back to the desk.

I got my thousand mile shirt at the PO-ACK, running the year round. And because I have the body of an interior lineman, crushed the cartilage into a merry mass of disassociated tissue in both knees.

Wouldn't have traded it for anything, though.

If we had stayed all day inside the Pentagon, we might have gone a little nuts. Got cranky.

And everyone knows, you do not want a cranky Pentagon.