jonathan giles

Recent Posts - page 2

• Goner

  By Jonathan Giles on September 19, 2015 • ( 4 )

  The small plane was above us, loud and sputtering. We kids, Holly, Charley, Allison and I, heard it immediately upon getting off the school bus. We raced across the highway and ran down our lane to the house. Something was… Read More ›

• Holly’s Horse Ginger

  By Jonathan Giles on August 31, 2015 • ( 7 )

  The farmer backed the horse out of the trailer. I stood beside Mother and Allison as it loomed larger and larger before us, a big reddish-brown rump of a horse. I wondered what we were going to do with it…. Read More ›

• Instantaneously

  By Jonathan Giles on July 31, 2015 • ( 1 )

  She races from phantoms  and me. Hides in the strangest places.   She sees.  Faces me.   Woohoo! I say. Woohoo! Woohoo!    There she goes chased by demons. Eluding me.   Now I’ll never find her. (So she believes.)  … Read More ›

• Mean Old Willie

  By Jonathan Giles on June 28, 2015 • ( 2 )

  No, I wasn’t the bumbler in the family. Even though Mother said I was – I wasn’t. We all knew, actually, who was the bumbler in our family. On our farm, deep in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains, Daddy… Read More ›

• Delilah and the Rocket Band

  By Jonathan Giles on June 8, 2015 • ( 2 )

  Hey Ho! Rocket Band — Thrill us forever. Delilah, dance and play Let’s be lovers. Be joyful today. Never find another. Hey Ho! Twirl and sway! Live and wonder!   Hey Ho! Rocket Band — Flames fly higher. Delilah, feel… Read More ›

• Boston Marathon

  By Jonathan Giles on May 25, 2015 • ( 3 )

  You have got to be kidding me!  I am at mile eighteen of the Boston Marathon and the foothills that began around mile sixteen are turning into the Himalayas. It has been raining throughout the race, but now, suddenly, here… Read More ›

• Pheidippides

  By Jonathan Giles on April 13, 2015 • ( 3 )

  I know no rivers, no forests, no fields. I know pavement and concrete — and how hard fulfillment feels on my feet, my back, the sun, the heat as temperatures rise. I know the relentless wind, drenching rain, and numbing… Read More ›

• The Box

  By Jonathan Giles on March 21, 2015 • ( 4 )

  It’s a rainy day and we are dressing and undressing Barbies in Allison’s room. I am seven or eight and am sitting at the foot of Allison’s bed. Allison is nine or ten and is happy I am with her…. Read More ›

• Boston

  By Jonathan Giles on February 9, 2015 • ( 1 )

  “So, you’re alive.” Shaun, my old mountain-climbing friend, the guy who had a heart attack way back when, is standing over me as I try to do sit-ups at the gym. “Barely – ” I make a feeble attempt at… Read More ›

• New York City Marathon, Part I

  By Jonathan Giles on January 16, 2015 • ( 0 )

  Pre-Arrival, Three Days Before. We are passing through; we are in rural Adams County in south central Pennsylvania on our way to New York City. We spend the night on a farm on the Eastern slope of South Mountain. We… Read More ›

• New York City Marathon, Part II

  By Jonathan Giles on December 22, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Sunday, The Day Begins. I am delusional. I think I am in a race in New York City, but, in fact, I am in a warm bed in an old farmhouse with the branches of thousands of apple trees embracing… Read More ›

• New York City Marathon, Part III

  By Jonathan Giles on December 6, 2014 • ( 6 )

  Sunday: The Race. I read somewhere that sometimes they shut down the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge due to the force of the wind. Running the two-mile suspension bridge that crosses between Staten Island and Brooklyn and with the open bay and Atlantic… Read More ›

• Myrtle Beach

  By Jonathan Giles on November 8, 2014 • ( 0 )

  “You’re fucked!” My friend Shaun is standing beside me in the weight room, and we are both staring at ourselves in the large mirror on the wall. Behind us are all sorts of weight equipment, benches and treadmills. Shaun is… Read More ›

• Take a Magic Bean

  By Jonathan Giles on October 1, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Take a magic bean. Beans always work for me.  Take a bean, feel better.  Wasn’t that our motto as teenagers? This is an exercise in futility, I am afraid – no bean will get me ready for the New York Marathon in… Read More ›

• Predator

  By Jonathan Giles on October 1, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Out here. seeking a date. tonight   it’s late. I want You to feel   just right, fulfilled, alive. It’s time. ****  

• When They Kiss

  By Jonathan Giles on September 23, 2014 • ( 0 )

  She averts her head, like she is suffering and the touch of their lips will pass his lies and neglect and sordid thoughts between them.   They kiss as light  as the flick of eyelashes in the wind. To her,… Read More ›

• Branded

  By Jonathan Giles on September 13, 2014 • ( 2 )

  My brother was mean.  If I was willing to play baseball or football, Charley could be a wonderful older brother.  The two of us would ride our bikes for miles to other farms in the area for pick-up games, and,… Read More ›

• Recovery

  By Jonathan Giles on August 30, 2014 • ( 10 )

  He wasn’t sure why he felt his best days were behind him.  He had driven to Gettysburg for the day to visit the town and see his two sisters and decided at the spur of the moment, as the late afternoon… Read More ›

• Lonely are the Brave

  By Jonathan Giles on July 28, 2014 • ( 2 )

  As a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with the Somerset movie theater: I loved the movies but hated the hoods hanging out there.  The old movie theater was located on our side of Somerset and took only twenty minutes… Read More ›

• Falling

  By Jonathan Giles on June 23, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Fuck! Fuckfuckfuck!  I can’t believe this!  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck!  Oh, Fuuuuuuuccccckkk!  Now I’ve done it.  I was running in the forest and fucking tripped over a fucking root and fucking yanked my left leg forward to stop my fucking fall and, fuck, I heard a… Read More ›

• My Life Before I Became Boring, A Documentary

  By Jonathan Giles on May 25, 2014 • ( 2 )

  I have decided, enough is enough; enough of this writing business; writing, writing, writing all of the damn time, month after month, year after year.  I need a new pursuit.  Something not so boring.  Who reads this stuff anyway?  Maybe I should be a… Read More ›

• The Road to Somerset

  By Jonathan Giles on April 30, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Being next to the youngest in my family was not always a good thing, especially during the seven-year period on the farm when I was between the ages of five and eleven.  From my vantage point, then, with no information to… Read More ›

• Sophomore Letdown, Nazis, Miss America’s Boobs, and the New York City Marathon

  By Jonathan Giles on April 10, 2014 • ( 1 )

  My wife wants to know why I consider this my sophomore season when I have been running for three years.  At the moment, though, I am lying in my running clothes on the long-end of a sectional couch.  I am staring… Read More ›

• Notes from the Field: Coto Brus, Costa Rica

  By Jonathan Giles on March 30, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Costa Rica.  Back from a day spent in the Coto Brus canton, the county in which our Las Cruces Biological Station is located.  We sit in the dinning hall of our field station discussing the insights and ramifications of what we… Read More ›

• The White Whale, with a Nod and a Wink to Melville

  By Jonathan Giles on February 19, 2014 • ( 2 )

  Aye, mates, gather ’round, and I’ll tell ye my tale: t’is the story of a doomed crew that sailed to the ends of the world to capture and kill a terror of the sea, the White Whale.  Barkeep, hand me… Read More ›

• Relapse!

  By Jonathan Giles on January 25, 2014 • ( 0 )

  Oh, Life is not worth living.  Full of horror and death.  Struggle and degradation.  Pestilence.   Why bother, my brothers and sisters.  Why bother. Oh, how I am suffering!   The weight is back and back with a vengeance.   Why have I allowed this… Read More ›

• The Big Six

  By Jonathan Giles on December 29, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Okay, so who doesn’t contemplate running a half-marathon on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.  Clearly I had gone over the edge and was living in an alternative universe.  Why else would I be standing in drizzling rain with a group of two… Read More ›

• The Chicago Marathon

  By Jonathan Giles on December 4, 2013 • ( 0 )

  National Anthem.  Seven-thirty Sunday morning and it was time to get started.  Thousands of runners had converged on Grant Park in the city of Chicago and were ready to go, shaking their legs and rubbing their arms, waiting patiently as the Mayor said… Read More ›

• Madness

  By Jonathan Giles on November 14, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Madness.  There is something about marathons that produce a madness in people.  Not just the runners and spectators, but everyone associated with the event: families, friends, colleagues at work, people you don’t even know.  Even the city, itself, the one hosting the… Read More ›

• Nutrition

  By Jonathan Giles on October 31, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Changing my diet only made sense when nothing else made sense. As much as I wanted to lower my weight, I had reached a point where it rose and fell like waves in a rolling sea.  It was my wife, Karen,… Read More ›

• Racing, Part II

  By Jonathan Giles on September 30, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Immediately after my “ship-listing” 10K in November, 2012, I determined I would run religiously every Sunday until reaching the half-marathon I had set as a goal for myself the following spring, keeping my eye squarely on the race date coming… Read More ›

• My New App

  By Jonathan Giles on August 29, 2013 • ( 0 )

  I downloaded a new application for my smart phone that’s a doomsday or death app. Interestingly enough, my friend Shaun, the mountain climber, told me about it while we were lifting weights at the gym.  Ever since his heart attack, he… Read More ›

• Racing

  By Jonathan Giles on August 15, 2013 • ( 0 )

  It’s always the next damn race.  Such tests of endurance are supposed to be over by now, but racing has morphed me into a monster.  Now I am training to die. Back in February, Helen, my daughter living up north near the… Read More ›

• The History of Running, Part II

  By Jonathan Giles on July 6, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Lived with cross-country runners my first two years of college. Not sure I was the best person to land in their midst.  Haven’t seen them since. After high school, could have joined the Army and fought my way through Viet Nam… Read More ›

• I Have Come to Realize

  By Jonathan Giles on June 19, 2013 • ( 0 )

  I have come to realize that if my weight-loss plan is to exercise, then it is imperative that I follow the plan and exercise.  The only way this plan works, I have discovered, is to do it, to exercise, to burn… Read More ›

• The History of Running

  By Jonathan Giles on May 19, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Never ran until after grad school.  Ran in my mid-thirties to lose weight. Waited so long saved my knees.  Many others now have knee problems due to the pounding they took back in high school and college. Tenth grade in… Read More ›

• Gods and Garbage Men

  By Jonathan Giles on April 28, 2013 • ( 0 )

  My week starts at my old gym, the Health and Fitness Center, where for three nights I am “killing” off the past versions of me, the endless images of me’s exercising around me, the gym-geezers and obesity-bees of me, all… Read More ›

• Albert from Hell

  By Jonathan Giles on April 7, 2013 • ( 0 )

  Sitting in my old jeep in a brightly paved parking lot outside a boxing gym located in a new, brick-and-glass storefront building – one of many, mostly-empty storefronts – within a large, postage stamp of a shopping center that has… Read More ›

• My Black Cat Moon

  By Jonathan Giles on March 24, 2013 • ( 0 )

  My black cat Moon with yellow lunar eyes has crawled up beside me.  Moon often joins me when I am on my easy chair, so she knows exactly how to get comfortable, snuggled between the armrest and my thigh.  Moon… Read More ›

• Quantum Enigma

  By Jonathan Giles on March 16, 2013 • ( 0 )

  I am such a simple guy.  My thoughts are not on wars, or political struggles on Capitol Hill, or even bad weather events that seem to dominate our lives.  No, my attention is squarely on calories, and, most recently, what… Read More ›

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