Stepping forward

I went to the track workout tonight (I say with casual offhandedness, as if it hasn't been nearly two years since I've posted anything on this blog — just go with it for a moment).

GO!

I've been going to the track off and on for eight years now, sometimes going every week for months and sometimes not going every week for months. As it's happening, I'm never aware of the precise reason why I'm switching from "on" to "off" or vice versa, but with the clarity of hindsight, generally speaking "going to the track" has meant, for me, a lust to push my life forward, while "skipping the track" has meant a metaphorical level of exhaustion has set in and it's time to rest. Both transitions are ultimately rooted in frustration with the status quo, and both, when they happen, do so with seemingly little input from my conscious self.

Alas, for the time being, I'm in track mode (just along for the ride).

When I got home tonight, I was thinking about how the workout went (rough) and how I wished I'd written down my times from the past two weeks because as bad as tonight felt, I knew that even the three short weeks that I've been going have resulted in some improvement. And then I thought about the things that I'd written on this blog about the track workout, and so I read back through some of them, and in the process, I was both heartened and annoyed by the wisdom of my younger self.

For these past two years, I haven't been writing publicly, but I have been journaling extensively. The upside of journaling is that all the grit and reality gets thrown in, no concern for putting on a good presentation when you know no one's going to be reading the end result. The downside of journaling is that (unlike blogging) that lack of filter rarely leads to the sorts of carefully conceived insights that prove themselves most useful later in life. (Like coming to the realization that the track workout fades in and out for me on a rough schedule, and isn't something that's entirely random.)

I don't know what the future holds in terms of my public writing. I have a real job, a career even, and with that comes responsibilities of maintaining a level of public privacy (if that makes sense). The world has also changed (a lot in the twelve years since I started writing online, but even more in the past two years alone) and so much of this just isn't fun anymore. And then there's that I think a part of growing up is realizing that there's a time to express yourself and there's a time when just thinking your thoughts and then letting them go is enough.

But then there are also times when you look around and you think that things are going fine but there's an urge somewhere deep that's pushing you.

So you start going back to the track workout.

And you wait to see what happens next.

A look back: My first marathon

I wrote this for the Memphis Runners Track Club magazine nearly five years ago. I still like it. :)

I knew I was in trouble at Mile 9.

Masking discomfort during a difficult run is an acquired skill – a skill that got me through eight miles of smiling and waving at every familiar face on the sidelines. But at Mile 9, when a friend of mine yelled from the crowd, “Becky!  How’s it going?” the truth was out before I could stop myself:

“Awful!  This whole race I’ve felt awful!”

The first mile I figured it was nerves. By the third mile I had graduated to a legitimate concern about throwing up. By Mile 9, I was angry at every single person in my vicinity who looked like they were having fun. This wasn’t fun. This was awful.

Mile 10. Mile 11. Mile 12. And there was the turn-off for the half marathon. Taunting me…making a really good case for me to peel off and try this marathon thing another day…a day when I wasn’t on the verge of emptying the contents of my stomach all over Poplar Avenue…

******

Five years earlier, in January of 2007, my friend Megan announced that she had an idea and I was the only person she knew crazy enough to do it with her.

“We should run a marathon,” she said.

Megan had read that a person was at peak physical potential at the age of 25, and it was this that made her start thinking about running. The two of us were, at that time, mere days away from 25 and in the worst shape of our lives. We were sitting at the Flying Saucer, downing pints, and complaining about our jobs, mine requiring sitting at a desk forty hours a week and Megan’s involving roughly that much time in her car.

2007 St. Jude Memphis Half Marathon

Despite our clear need for physical activity, my answer to the marathon suggestion was a flat, unequivocal, are-you-kidding-me “no.” Though I’d run some in college, I’d never progressed past running a couple of miles on the track a few times a week. That, to me, seemed about as much running as a person needed to do.  

But by the time we’d downed a second pint, she’d talked me into a half marathon. (“You can do just half of one?” I’d asked.)

Eleven months later, we walked the St. Jude Memphis Half Marathon, having spent the previous year taking our training about as seriously as I had taken running in college. Our goal was to finish in under three hours. When I crossed the finish line, my watch read 3:05.  

Well, I made it, I thought.  But I’ll bet if I tried that again, I could do it better.

******

The next year, we decided we needed help, and became the only half marathon participants in local running store Breakaway Running’s new St. Jude training program. We were indebted to owner Barry Roberson, who ran with us at 6:00 a.m. most Saturday mornings. He was there the day we ran an hour without stopping for the first time (five doggedly-slow 12-minute miles). He stuck with us when we skipped all our weekday runs because we were “busy,” and when we missed a Saturday or two because we were “tired.” He kept on us, he encouraged us, and when we ran ten miles for the very first time, he was there to tell us what an accomplishment that was.

That year I crossed the finish line in 2:52. I repeated the process the following year, took it just a little more seriously, stopped skipping runs, and finished in 2:27.

******

In 2010, I lost my job. My first book flopped. My best friend died. It was a hard year. Running stopped being something I did half-heartedly and started being something I did to keep my focus and regain my balance. Again I trained with Breakaway. I also started going to evening group runs. I even showed up to Paul Sax’s track workouts at the University of Memphis on Tuesday nights.

That year, I finished in 2:14. And I felt good about it – good enough that, for the first time ever, it didn’t seem like an unattainable feat to run twice that far.

I broke the news to Megan, now living in Texas, over the phone: the impossible had happened. I actually wanted to run a marathon.

******

Most runners I know have never taken four years to talk themselves into running any one race. Then again, most runners I know have a more noble reason for starting to run than “I was sitting at a bar and let someone else talk me into it.”  

For me, a runner of no discernible natural talent and slow to the point of embarrassment, committing to a full marathon was not something taken lightly. When July rolled around, it was with genuine pride that, as the sole remaining original member of the Breakaway training group, I finally moved up and stood amongst the full marathoners. I trained through heat, through illness, through rain, through hangovers (well, okay, just one…that was a lesson learned quickly). I had my requisite injury freak-out after pounding a bone out of alignment in my foot during an eighteen-mile run…but I bounced back quickly.  

I ran twenty miles like a champ. Twenty-two miles like I could have kept going… My training went so smoothly that my confidence going into the marathon was at an all-time high. As someone who not that long ago considered a 35-minute 5K undoable, I could barely believe my progress.  

The night before the race, I wrote in my journal just three words:  “I’ve got this.”  

******

Except maybe I didn’t.

How annoying that after five years of building up to it and five months of sacrificing my Friday nights for early morning Saturday runs, arguably my worst running day of the entire year landed on the day of the 2011 St. Jude Memphis Marathon.

And there was the turn-off for the half, staring me in the face. It was decision time.

Feeling defeated

I did a mental check; my legs were all right, so whatever was plaguing me wasn’t related to my physical ability to move my body forward for 26.2 miles. And I thought that maybe once I got past the mental hurdle of the turn-off for the half (which I knew like the back of my hand after four years), I might feel better.   

So I kept going.

And I felt better.

But not better enough to stop me from doing something I hadn’t done during a single training run: taking a walk break.

There’s an adage that the way you run reflects the way you live your life. In my case, that means relentless, consistent persistence (some might say orneriness), for I can think of no other way to describe my extraordinarily slow but strangely steady climb from sedentary beer drinker to marathoner. That being the case, it felt like a devastating setback – a huge step backward – to have to walk at Mile 14. It had never even crossed my mind that I would be walking at that point. 

It took me three miles just to shake off the shock of it.

Though I finally felt better (what was wrong with me to begin with, God only knows), walking that early meant saying goodbye to my goal of finishing in solidly under five hours. Seventeen miles into even a good run, it’s hard to think clearly, but now I had to completely reassess my strategy for getting through the next nine miles.

Make that eight miles. Seven miles. I was still going. Six miles. Five miles. At Mile 22 there was beer, and I knew I was down and out when I realized I didn’t want any. But I was still going. Not only that, I was marveling at all of the people around me who were going through this with me.  

There was something primal about sharing the pain and the pride and the pure mental (not to mention physical) exertion of willing yourself forward when there was absolutely no logical reason why you should.

Finish line in sight

Mile 23 was another mental hurdle because it marked the furthest I’d ever gone on foot. I had previously found it intimidating (and occasionally irritating) to hear other people’s marathon horror stories, but as I kept putting miles behind me, I kept running into people I knew, and kept telling them my own marathon horror story.  

“I’ve been sick this whole time!”

“I’ve never felt so awful!”

“I’m going to have to walk the rest of this!”

And then I’d find it in me to run a little more. Walk/run. Walk/run.

Mile 24. Mile 25. And there was Autozone Park… With point-three miles to go, I caught the eye of the guy next to me, someone I’d never seen before and will likely never see again.  But someone who, in that moment, probably understood what I felt like better than any other person on Earth.     

“Come on, let’s do this,” he said. “Together.” And we started running…

******

In conclusion, I’ve decided that the Me from Five Years Ago should be given her due credit for her hesitancy to take on a marathon. The experience was, to be completely honest, pretty brutal.

But it’s possible for something to be terrible in a wonderful way. Trite though it may sound, the girl who was sitting at the Flying Saucer all those years ago didn’t have a clue what she was capable of, and I’m glad that I gave myself the opportunity to prove to her that I could do this. Regardless of ability level (or prep time), it is an enormous test of self-discipline to make it to the finish line of a marathon.  

For me, getting there took a little longer than it takes most people. About half a decade, actually, give or take.  

And when I arrived, I looked at my watch.

5:06.

Well, I made it, I thought. But I’ll bet if I tried that again, I could do it better…

Becky goes to physical therapy, gets a reality check

Friends, your esteemed author has not been herself ever since she tragically fell down one step in her darkened apartment one night late last year and destroyed the tendons and ligaments of her left ankle, along with her dignity. (Kidding on that last part, of course. We all know I have no dignity.)

After months of babying my foot and never running more than 10 miles in a week, I amped up my mileage a couple of months ago with the hopes of running a half marathon at the end of May. Very quickly, however, I ran into problems.

I've run one race since my injury; it went better than my face suggests.

See, I was supposed to go to physical therapy back in early December. But I didn't. I thought that (even though I was in a fucking boot for two weeks) physical therapy was overkill, and I thought that I was strong enough and wise enough to ease back into my running routine without a licensed professional guiding me through it. But that routine never returned like I felt it should, and one Monday about a month ago, I had to turn around during the Salty Dogs run and go home early because the 5-mile run I'd done two days previously had left my ankle too sore to run on.

It took a few weeks (and one apologetic phone call to the doctor's office for being such a shitty patient) to get in for my physical therapy assessment, but today, I finally had my appointment. I was nervous going into it, because maybe this was it for me. Maybe by not doing what the doctor told me, I had ruined myself and would never again be able run like I once had. He had, at one point, said the words "we don't want permanent damage," and they had stuck with me, crawling inside my psyche and feeding and growing until there I was, at the physical therapy office, anxiety-ridden while a woman I'd never met wrapped a tape measure around both of my feet in turn.

She was nice about it. She asked me a bunch of questions, had me do some things while standing and sitting, and then, in the absolute most understated way imaginable, told me that what? After injuring myself and then jumping back into it without bothering to ice or take anti-inflammatories after running, I occasionally had pain that lasted a day or two after five miles or more in one go? No shit, Sherlock.

She sent me home with a bunch of strengthening exercises and the request that I call again in a couple of weeks if I felt that I wasn't making progress on my own.

You know, it was like the root canal. I hadn't been there before, so I didn't know. But now I do.

So if you don't have the fetish I do for learning everything the hard way, please learn from my mistake: If the doctor tells you you're injured enough to need physical therapy, you probably do.

That is all.

Thursdays

When I was at the run last Thursday, a newcomer commented to me that everyone in the group was so fast. Later, she asked how long I'd been coming to that run, and it was with mild incredulity that I heard myself respond, "Almost six years."

"But most people haven't been coming that long," I assured her, thinking back to her earlier statement about the fast people. I looked around the room and saw very few fast people. Most of them are gone now, so it's not really a fast run anymore, though I didn't want to tell her that; even after six years, I haven't forgotten how big of a step it was for me to show up to my first Thursday night.

For a couple of years prior, I'd been running with Breakaway on Saturday mornings, with their full and half marathon training group for St. Jude. I had some tough years in there socially, and for a long time, those Saturday runs were my primary means of interacting with people outside of the older women I worked with. When I lost my job and no longer had even those women, Saturday mornings were sometimes the only times I saw other people all week outside of strangers at the grocery store. Strange as it sounds in hindsight, I had a very real and true fear that I was legit turning into a recluse.

That's why I started going to Thursday nights in August of 2010. This is what it was like back then:

Unlike the Saturday morning crowd, where any interaction I had was brief and with runners of my own pace/level of fitness, Thursday night was a mixed bag – a place where men and women with magazine-worthy bodies stood half-dressed next to people who looked slightly more mortal, all equally part of the group and all glowing with the success of a hot summer run. Everyone had worked hard; everyone was enjoying the alcoholic celebration of his or her success.

There was a lot of laughter, and the picture as a whole offered a glaring contrast to the dark world I was living in, where most of my free time was stuck behind a computer, looking for jobs or trying to promote my book via a blog that was testing my psychological limits.

The obvious outcome is that I soaked it in, loved it, and came back with fresh determination the next week.

A big crowd at the old store on Union

Except I didn’t. In reality, I was almost paralyzed by the feeling that I didn’t belong. I went home overwhelmed. A runner who talked to me that night had given me incomprehensible advice, still ringing in my ears. He’d told me I should start coming to the Tuesday night track workout at the University of Memphis to work on my speed. As if that was something I could just do. As if it were nothing to show up to yet another frightening group run full of people I didn’t know, except this time in an arena that broadcast my primary shortfall as a runner (speed), and which had no beer afterward to dull to the blow. There was no way. It had been hard enough to get through what I’d just done.

I came home, and I processed, and I wasn’t ready to try that again by the next Thursday.

But I was by the Thursday after that.

The crowd changed over time, because the crowd was always changing, but when I started, the majority of the people I was running with were hardcore. I wasn’t just at the back of the pack; I was substantially behind the next-slowest person. There was a mental aspect to Thursday nights, too, because everyone started out on the same path and that path looped back on itself; i.e., roughly two miles into the run, everyone saw everyone else and could gauge how fast they were going and how many people were ahead or behind them.

Though our speeds and abilities may have divided us during the run itself, back at the store we were all equals in the eyes of the beer. There was a keg every week, and a donation glass nearby that never had quite enough money in it to cover the cost. The regulars all had glasses that they brought in and left at the store, and though it felt like I had walked into a long-standing tradition, the popularity of the run was new, and coincided directly with alcohol being offered at the end of it.

It always seemed to me like the store was overflowing with people. I’d guess there were thirty or forty runners each week back then, and I was in awe of every last one of them. They all seemed to do not only running but life better than I did. There's a vitality that emanates from people who are committed to an athletic lifestyle, and they were radiant with it. Not only that, everyone appeared to be financially successful, professionally accomplished, and more emotionally level than I was.

Impressing them was beyond the scope of my imagination - me, with my atrophied social skills, cotton T-shirts, and slow, over-pronating gait. They all seemed so far ahead of me in so many ways I couldn’t fathom a scenario in which “impressing” was a plausible outcome.

But I did see them as people to observe and learn from, for they all seemed to be good at exactly the things that I wanted to be good at.

Playing hookie on a Thursday night

Shhh! Don't tell! I'm not at Breakaway tonight. I'm skipping because my social muscles are still tired from Tuesday's Mardi Gras pub run.

Earlier, I was sitting here, right where I am now, and I wrote a post about Valentine's Day. It was pretty damning, which was fine, but it was also out of character, which was not fine. I started to upset myself as I was writing it, because the things that I was writing were not me. There's no good that doesn't come with a little bad, so allow me to share a couple of downsides related to my job:

1. I'm around people all day, which means my introverted self does not have enough time between a Tuesday pub run and a Thursday regular run to fully recharge.
2. Most of those people that I'm around, all day and every day, have lived, and continue to live, much more "normal" lives than me. Far from being immune to social pressure (which is how I like to portray myself - don't buy into my bullshit because it's bullshit), I'm very susceptible to it. When I was younger, it wasn't so much that I succumbed to that pressure as I masked my insecurities through defensiveness and complaint (here is an excellent example of that). I assumed I had grown out of that aspect of my personality...but alas, no. All I needed was to insert myself into a new group of people to fruitlessly compare myself to.  

So instead of sharing the mess that came out of my fingertips tonight, I'm going to share something much nicer that I wrote about Valentine's Day a few years back, on a night when I didn't skip the Thursday run...

I wasn’t sure who all would show up when Valentine’s Day fell on a Thursday in 2013. There were several couples, and yes, several lonely hearts, but overall, it wasn’t all that different from any other Thursday night. And yet the occasion seemed to instill in us all an extra push to express our appreciation for being in each others’ lives.  

The first Valentine’s Day I was with Breakaway was 2011; it fell on a Monday and the Salty Dogs hosted a run/social. Initially, it was conceived as a simple group run followed by a meet-up at Bardog (no different from any other Monday). Then a scavenger hunt – done in teams – was thrown into the mix. And then somehow it turned into everyone showing up in their underwear.

I did not attend. (Running around in your underwear and then drinking afterward did not sound like Valentine's Day to me. It sounded like the month of August.)

A year later, in 2012, it was a Tuesday; I went to the track workout and it was a light crowd. I wound up at a bar around the corner with two guys, chugging pitchers of beer, and left feeling bereft in a way I never would have had I gone directly home.  

But 2013 was a night I needed, filling me with a calm appreciation that this truly was a secondary family for me. Sometimes we fought and sometimes we got sick of each other and sometimes we needed a break, but we also looked out for each other and were pleased to see each other and legitimately wished each other well in our respective metaphorical and literal journeys.  

The psychologists were right. It really is wonderful to feel part of a group. And that night, I did. I felt as if whatever else in my life was going on, there was at least consistency here, in this cluster of like-minded people. Sometimes it’s enough just to show up, just to do the same thing that other people are doing, and to be able to smile at the end of it because you belonged.

As I stood surveying the room, [a friend] walked in from his run, stopping to give me shit about politics, and as I did my duty in refuting him, I thought back to the days when I first started coming here, wondering if I could have ever envisioned that I would be here now. That I would have such affection for these people. That I would stand next to [this guy] and talk about politics on Valentine’s Day. He reached over and grabbed my arm as he made his way to leave.  

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” he said, and I smiled at the purity of it all. It was okay. Everything was okay.  On this day when no one was supposed to be alone, none of us were.

There was peace in that.

The view from the sidelines

I have never been a spectator for the St. Jude Memphis Marathon Weekend.

Since 2007, the first year that I cared, I have run either the half or the full each year (with the exception of 2013, when there was a minor ice calamity that shut down the race). I have had good races, I have had bad races, I have had races where I left the course with a sunburn, and I have had races where I drove home seriously concerned about hypothermia. But I have never not raced.

Until today. As you may or may not have picked up on via the endless stream of blog entries in which I mentioned it, I sprained my ankle a month ago, and for the first time in my completely unremarkable running career, I was forced to sit out St. Jude because of injury.

Oddly enough, despite this being my longest running break since I started, I haven't missed the actual running part that much this past month. What I have missed is the stress relief and the feeling of strength that comes after a good run. I don't get a runner's high that often - a handful of times a year, at most - but I do get a feeling of accomplishment that I can't quite put into words. Even more importantly, I get well-defined leg muscles.

And maybe it's because I'm more attached to the side effects than the running itself that I wasn't too concerned about missing today's race. I stood in Overton Square, outside of Breakaway Running, just ahead of mile marker 10. And I was fine. And then, after thousands of runners had already gone by, I started to see the people who were running around my pace. It was then that I finally started to get a little emotional.

A big part of that emotion came not from suddenly wishing I was out there (although I did) but from learning something I maybe didn't need to know: by the time runners of my speed came along, a lot of the spectators had already moved on. I came away with a huge and newfound appreciation for all the people who have still been on the sidelines of any distance race I've run when I finally came shuffling by.

It's been a shaky few weeks for me, and not just because my routine was thrown out of whack. I'm a little off-balance right now. (Life pro tip: The best way to tell if I'm off-balance is if I start writing Zen-inspired and/or philosophical posts.)

But I watched a hell of a lot of people today who were pushing through all levels of pain, both mental and physical, to get through the extremely arbitrary goals of 13.1 or 26.2 miles. And some of them didn't even know that half of the people on the sidelines had left before they got there. And regardless, a smaller showing of support didn't stop a single one of them from moving forward.

Some things I've got together and some things I just don't even freaking know...but I have an ankle that's ready to (slowly!) ease back into it and an unused race bib that's already beckoning me to redeem myself next year. So speaking both of running and of life in general, it's time for me to get moving...

What if I just kept posting old Breakaway things?

When speaking marathon-speak, you have to act like it’s not weird at all to be talking about traveling on foot the kinds of distances most of the rest of the population only uses when describing how far away the next town over is.  This, above all else, is key.  It’s not weird.

Aside from that, marathon lingo is easy to pick up because most of the key phrases are comically self-descriptive.

Your long run is the run you typically do on the weekend to build up your mileage.  This is the bulk of your training and most likely your longest long run will be twenty miles, though Breakaway’s plan went up to twenty-two.  Used in a sentence: “Hey, man, how was your long run?” or “What’s your long run this weekend?”  

A drop-down week is a week in which your mileage is less than the week before.  Though your overall progress is upward, toward longer runs, your body needs time to recover, and thus the typical cycle is to increase your mileage for a few weeks and then drop down for a week, meaning both a shorter long run and a smaller overall weekly mileage tally.  Drop-down weeks result in paradoxical statements, such as, “Yeah, it’s a drop-down week so my long run’s only 14 miles.” 

An ice bath is what you take after your long run.  Because your legs are put through quite a bit of stress and pounding during a twenty-or-so-mile run, you will have likely done enough harm that you will be in pain for the next day or four.  To minimize muscle damage, it is advised to follow your longer long runs by (no, I’m not making this up) soaking your legs in a bathtub of cold water and ice for ten to twenty minutes.  This is infinitely more torturous than the run itself; you’ll be hard-pressed to find an ice-bather who can’t top his worst bad run story with an even more awful description of what it’s like to sit in an ice bath.  (Note:  Not all marathoners take ice baths.  Your author takes “cool water baths” because she read online they’re just as effective and really, she’s fine believing that even if it turns out that’s not entirely true.) 

A foam roller is a foam roller.  You roll your muscles over it to work out stiffness and kinks.  This hurts worse than an ice bath.

Splits are the times for your individual miles, or mile-increments, during your run.  Your aim is to have a “negative split,” meaning you get faster as you go.  For instance, if you ran twenty miles in two and a half hours and your first ten miles were in an hour and twenty minutes and your second ten miles were in an hour and ten minutes, then congratulations, both on your negative split and on being faster than I’ll ever be.

Gu is the brand name of a flavored, gel-like substance that you swallow mid-run to deliver nutrients to your body because you are not physically capable of storing enough energy to keep yourself going through all those miles and your body will start digesting itself if you don’t eat (or something like that).  The word “Gu” is used generically as a term for any gooey substance sold in one-serving packets, much the same way people use the word Kleenex to mean any facial tissue.  It comes in assorted flavors and you’re advised to “shoot” one Gu packet every forty-five minutes during exercise, although I would ask that you bear in mind that recommendation comes from the people who make Gu.  You can use your long runs to test your Gu needs (and flavor preferences), but be sure to complain a lot about having to eat it, even though it’s quite tasty.  (Oh, please, like you’re not hungry enough to eat damn near anything after 16 miles anyway.)

And lastly, the most important word in any marathoner’s vocabulary is gossip.  Because when you’re training for a marathon, if you’re running with other people, you will be in their presence for hours with nothing to do except put one foot in front of the other.  It’s best to come equipped to talk about other people’s secrets; if not, you’ll be spilling your own.  Some of the most revealing conversations I have ever had have come in the middle of grueling umpteen-mile runs, when physical duress had stripped away the mental defenses of both me and the people I was running with.  

A friendship forged through marathon training is unlike any other friendship, for, as they say, it is during long runs that shit gets real…

Hello, darkness, my old friend

Last night, I ran down the stairs without turning on the light and...missed the last step. The *pop* my ankle gave as it turned under was substantial enough I was concerned I'd broken myself. But no. Just a sprain. The swelling has dropped from grapefruit size to golf-ball size in the past 24 hours, but I'm still hobbling around at a slow-walk, cursing the dark and the stupid winter season it brings with it.

In an effort to shut myself up, here's something that I wrote a couple of years ago that's much more generous toward the darkness that comes with this time of year...

That winter, I started running at night, after the sun had gone down.

I liked it because it was easier to be alone that way, and running was an “alone time” activity for me. Yes, I lived alone, but in my apartment, there was my phone and the internet, not to mention the alluring distraction of television or iTunes, and people could get to me. On a run, I was liberated. And after years of feeling liberation in the early morning, I discovered something even more enticing awaiting me at night.

I couldn’t see as well in the dark (obviously) and that was what made it so nourishing. There was no temptation to read every street sign, or to look ahead to see how far I had until the next turn. When I couldn’t see everything that was ahead of me my runs were less cerebral.  I didn’t narrate to myself as I went or worry about offending someone walking a dog if I passed without offering a greeting. Personal interactions are different in the dark, at night. We know this from more intimate exchanges, but it’s true of fleeting encounters as well. In the daylight, there’s a pressure for vocalization that doesn’t always exist after the sun sets. If a runner passed me at night, I could feel that shared connection to humanity merely by silently recognizing the presence of another member of my species being in proximity to me. That same runner in the daylight needed a “hello” or “how are you?” and the forced smile that went with it; the connection was reduced to shared social etiquette.  

Liberation came easier when I wasn’t making eye contact with every driver who came barreling down the road I happened to be running on, too…but I stayed off busy roads anyway. Not just because even in reflective clothing and wearing a flashing arm band a night runner risks being hit by an oncoming car even more than a daytime runner.  

But because a busy road is a constant reminder that the darkness is only an illusion, and you’re not nearly as hidden as you hope you are.

Five years of Tour d'Esprit

Tour d'Esprit is a 24-hour foot relay that benefits Haiti Medical Missions of Memphis. It's held every October and funds the clinic for the entire year. Breakaway has two teams each year: the race team (which is serious) and the fun team (which is more about having someone moving on the course for the full 24 hours). I have been a loyal fun team member since 2011.

October 8, 2011 (from Breakaway journal #1):

Friday night I did Tour d'Esprit from 9:30 - 10:00 p.m. (3 miles), randomly at the same time X was running [for the race team]. Talked a little to Y (he seems really nice), met Z (he seems really creepy), and overall had one of the nicest evenings I can remember having with running people. It was quiet and dark and everyone was serious about running and it was good. Instead of being too riled up to sleep, I came home relaxed and was able to go straight to bed.

The next day, Saturday, I came back for the grand finale (X was still running) and watched Breakaway['s race team] break their own record. 242 miles in 24 hours. Wow...

October 7, 2012 (from Breakaway journal #2):

It was 80 degrees this year when Tour d'Esprit got underway at 3:00 p.m. About 7:00 or so, a front pushed through, bringing strong winds and heavy rain and much cooler temperatures. By the time I showed up at 8:30, the few people remaining at the Breakaway/Speedy Cats tent were crouched and wet under lowered tents. 

Miles was running for the fun team through the front...

S. showed up to hang out and he let me borrow a jacket to run in. And thank God. It only rained on me the first mile and a half or so, but I seriously think I might have gotten hypothermia if I hadn't been wearing it. I did 8 miles total, in roughly the 9:00 - 10:30 slot (I think I started a little late).

Afterward, 2013

The run was good. Chilly, but peaceful. I like doing Tour d'Esprit at night. There was a fire going when I got done, and more people had shown up now that there was a break in the rain... I chugged a beer, then returned to the tent to put on some more clothes before heading home...

I came back after lunch on Saturday. Olaf and Cameron were trading miles [for the race team]. Bill and Faith were running for the fun team. [I was scheduled for 2:00 - 2:30, and] at 1:45 it started raining... For the second time in 18 hours, thank God for S.'s jacket.

I did 3 fast miles in the rain, then handed off to Miles, and Allie ran the final 3 for our team (she showed up late just to watch, but took one for the team and gave us a strong finish). The fun team wound up second among the co-eds, and the race team creamed the competition with an incredible 238 miles - only 4 fewer than last year's record-setter, and with fewer runners and intermittent downpours. (Cameron put in 23 sub-6:00 miles.)

October 4, 2013 (from 2013 daily journal):

7 miles (+ 3 walking) --> Tour d'Esprit. Was supposed to be at least 8, maybe 9 [as my last long run before the Chicago Marathon], but A. decided to pull me out after 5 and stick Mason in my place in an attempt to beat the Journeymen team. The shit hath hitteth the fan. We had it out, but she doesn't get it.

October 5, 2013:

2 hard miles --> Tour d'Esprit. The fun team was decimated by Journeymen, but we almost caught up to Fleet Feet in an inspiring last-ditch effort as a team (I ran an 8:42 mile; A. offered to run but she was drunk). I am exhausted from the past 2 days... 

October 3, 2014 (from 2014 daily journal):

8 miles --> Tour d'Esprit. Longest run without a walk break (7:30 - 9:00 p.m.) in...ages. And it was hard... Had an hour to catch up with Allie before she ran... COLD when the sun went down.

October 4, 2014:

...he called and we discussed our weekends, and he talked me into spending a farm day solo [rather than going back to Tour d'Esprit], which I did...  

October 2, 2015 (from 2015 daily journal):

3 miles --> Tour d'Esprit. I am SO TIRED today... I left right after my slot, which was supposed to be 7:30 - 8:00, but was pushed to 8:00 - 8:30. N. was drinking his thirteenth beer when I left, with a goal of 32, and why are we celebrating this behavior?

October 3, 2015:

8 miles --> Tour d'Esprit. 8:00 - 9:30 a.m. and my legs were already tired when I woke up! No walk breaks, though. Came back (after a shower, food, and attempt at a nap) for the 1:00 - 3:00 slot, but didn't have to run (whew!)... COLD and DARK day but really nice time around the fire, drinking and talking. Race team won with 202 miles. Strange, lightly-attended year this year, with several on the race team running solo instead of trading off, and a pregnant woman running the last hour. N. drank 38 beers and did 32 miles in 24 hours. And he drove home...

Status update

Every Monday morning at work, I submit a status update, telling my successes of the week before and priorities for the week ahead.

In the spirit of corporate accountability, here is my

Personal Status Update for the Week of April 6

Highlights (last week):

Depiction of the author, were she a male stock photo model

Blogging:  One entry written but I couldn't post it.  The premise was promising - Cynthia Lennon's death and a man catcalling me on my lunch break melded into a psychological exploration of the meaning of life.  Then Lester Holt reported Cynthia's death on the nightly news without mentioning Yoko's name, and just trust me when I say that collapsed my argument.

Book-writing:  Last week I transferred about 4,000 more words from an earlier draft to my current working draft of The Breakaway Book (italicized to give it authority).  The time period I'm working on is late summer 2011, and HOW DID I LIVE THROUGH THAT.

Socializing:  Saw a friend I haven't seen in many years, (separately) spent Easter at a bar.

Running:  I'm too ashamed to write down my weekly mileage tally, but I did return to kettlebell class on Monday (cross-training).  It was Thursday before I regained full use of my arms.

Reading:  Slowly making my way through a book on quantum physics while simultaneously reading a mass market paperback that sold a trillion copies but is written worse than a bad Harry Potter fanfiction story.

Other:  Got a lot done at work, listened to a lot of Gwen Stefani.

Priorities (this week):

Blogging:  Come up with a blog entry that's actually publishable, even if it's a blog entry about coming up with a blog entry.  If possible, avoid hashtags.  (#meta  #youarereadingitrightnow)

Book-writing:  I'd like to smooth out the section on summer 2011 without getting too wrapped up in the emotion of reliving the drama.  ALSO, I'd like to smooth out the section on summer 2011 without thinking too much about how much more exciting my life was in summer 2011.

Socializing:  My specific goals this week are to not strike [xxx], to not talk to [xxx], and to drink beer with Molly.

Running:  Run more than one day this week, do kettlebell again, act like I'm contemplating going back to the track workout but put it off at least another week.

Reading:  Finish books mentioned above and start reading about the extinction of passenger pigeons.

Other:  Wear silver eye-shadow one day this week, learn how to trim my bonsai, renew domain for jakewatch.com for another two years, write blog entry about "change" and "feeling old" after renewing said domain and then deem it unacceptable for publication.

LIFE = SUCCESS

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Three years ago, when I turned thirty, I made the conscious decision to “work on myself.”  It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t happy with my life (though I wasn’t), but that I wasn’t happy with the way I dealt with my life.  “Highly reactionary” is the phrase that comes to mind; a born storyteller, I could weave drama out of approximately anything.  But what makes for the best story doesn’t always make for the best life.

It was a year in which I tried being the kind of the person I’d previously mocked:  someone whose breakfast was squeezed out of a juicer, and who skipped parties to stay home and watch Wayne Dyer specials during PBS pledge week, and who wrote affirmations to herself and taped them to the bathroom mirror.

And I was someone who adamantly rebelled against the notion that the pleasures of running should be connected to the time on a wristwatch.  I ran my second – and most enjoyable – marathon that year, after a training season in which I greeted each 6:00 a.m. Saturday run with calm determination and a pointed thank you to the rising sun.

Change had come so swiftly and so effortlessly that when a friend I hadn’t seen in a while asked me how I’d been, with neither hesitation nor the slightest self-consciousness, I replied, “I’m very enlightened now.”

And I really thought that I was.  I thought that I was on my way to Buddhist-monk levels of inner peace, and that I would never again be rattled out of myself by the behavior of other people, and that through the magic of simply learning to stop and breathe, I had discovered, among other things, the key to perpetually satisfying running.  I had found the answer.

***

Except I hadn't.  (Or if I had, I let it slip away.)

***

I have a confession:  I don’t love running.  I like it an awful lot (well, most of the time), and we get along well enough, but deep down, neither of us is fooling the other.  Ours is a relationship of convenience.  I give my time and my energy, and in return I get an adequate level of fitness and, a couple of times a year, a runner’s high.  

Running and I are entering our ninth year together, and sometimes I look at what running gives other people and compare that to what it gives me, and I feel a little betrayed.  Like, after all this time, I should be getting more out of this deal.  I wouldn’t even ask for much. Maybe just a new 5k PR without having to kill myself over it or something.

But then I think about how I spent a year of my life believing I had unlocked the key to keeping my running fresh, and that I came to that conclusion not through diligent attention to my exercise regimen, but by listening to nothing but new age music for twelve months, and that’s when I have to be honest with myself.  Running gives me no more or no less than it should.

***

January is a bleak month - the weather is shitty, everyone's mood is shitty, the enthusiasm of the new year and all its promises starts to fade, and spring - that endlessly-hyped beacon of renewal - seems just far enough in the distance that it might never come. 

Today, as I write this, I am not sad, but I am saddled with the anxious feeling of being ready for the next chapter.  I feel it, all the while knowing it is the anxiousness, not the present moment, that is the problem.  

How to get through?  I will strive to run deliberately, and attempt to do so expecting nothing in return. I mean that literally, but I mean it even more metaphorically.  I am not racing the clock...

...I am racing myself.

Picture source.

Few times I've been 'round that track...

So my emotional landscape is rocky right now.

Wait.  No.  Stop.

So my emotional landscape should be rocky right now.  And at times it is...  But most of the time I can't take it seriously - like, the fact that I'm even going down the path of pain is ridiculous.  The whole thing is ridiculous.  It could be that I instinctively know something that I cerebrally do not.  Or it could be that I was simply more diligent with my emotional hygiene this time around.

What I haven't been diligent about is maintaining my running at the level that I've been accustomed to for the past four years.  The last time I went to the track workout was July 1.  Twenty-one weeks ago.  Five months ago.  (I can only blame six of those weeks on Tiki Tuesday over the summer.)  I didn't stop going for any reason.  I stopped going because I stopped going.

Today, all day, things were not ridiculous; things were rocky.  B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  So I went to the track workout.  In which it was was cold and difficult and not fun.  Perfect conditions, you see, for a track workout.  To quote Steve Carell on 60 Minutes a few weeks back, "It wasn't fun, but I enjoyed it."

I did not run fast, I did run well, and there were people who cared I showed up, and among wheezy chests sucking in cold air and layers of clothing slowly being shed between reps, I was not alone.

(This my shit.)

Picture yanked from here.

The (Infamous) Breakaway Quoteboard (It does exist!)

Back in college, exhibiting a personality trait that would later become a full-fledged neurosis, I used to keep a quoteboard of things said by my group of friends.  One of the first websites I ever built, in fact, was a digital archive of those quotes.  (I would link to it, but a couple of years ago the host company deleted it.  hashtag-screw-you-Bravenet)

I always felt that Breakaway also deserved a quoteboard, but aside from scrapping together a few notes here and there, it wasn't until this year - really this summer - that I started getting serious about recording the things the people around me said.

I call it the "Breakaway" quoteboard because most of the quotees are Breakaway runners, but the overwhelming majority of things said thus far were uttered at (of course!) the Slider Inn.  My morning-after-Slider ritual is to first drink huge quantities of water, and then second to open up the little notebook I keep in my purse and read what I chose to write down the night before.

About half of the time, what I wrote was idiotic and not funny.

But the other half goes on the quoteboard.

Full of in-jokes and things that couldn't possibly be amusing to anyone on the outside (not to mention unapologetically biased toward me, since the only real requirement for making it on the list is that I was there when it was said), I offer here, for the first time outside the small group who helped me start it, the ever-being-updated Breakaway Quoteboard.

Once more, with feeling!

Though I was a month late joining the group, today I went to my first Breakaway Saturday morning training run for the 2014 St. Jude Half Marathon.

2013

The first year I ran with the group was the first year Breakaway did a Saturday morning program, back in 2008.  My friend Megan and I were the only half marathon participants.  Today, there must have been over a hundred people running the same four-mile loop that I did, and that many again running seven in training for the full.

This is the first year since 2010 that I have not been part of the full group.  In fact, this time last year, I was deep into training for Chicago - the Overton Park 5-mile Classic is next weekend, and I remember last year getting up and running ten miles on my own before finishing up with five miles at the race.  That was hard.

I'm glad I'm not doing that this year.

I found, though, as I was running this morning, that I was keeping to myself - not what one typically does during a group run.  I also found that as I passed people (or people passed me) and I picked up snippets of their conversations, it could have been any of the past seven years of Saturdays.  More people, different people, same stuff.  Same wondering about the next water stop and talking about mileage for next week.  Same boasting of new Garmins and discussions about goal paces.  It was the same view in front of me:  a sea of tech shirts, water bottles, and compression socks.  And it was the same route, same pavement, same one-foot-in-front-of-the-other...

It wasn't a bad run by any stretch, it's just that my heart wasn't quite in it.  

I need to find peace with why it is I'm training (again) this year.  Because even for "just" a half marathon, many, many miles lie ahead of me...

Turn, Turn, Turn

St. Jude Marathon Weekend was canceled this year because of weather-related issues (ice).  I was signed up to run the half, but unlike the majority of those I know who were going to be running with me, I wasn’t disappointed on Friday night when the official announcement was made.  The emotion I felt was relief.  Standing in a seven-degree windchill waiting to start, knowing I’d be fine during the run but spending the rest of my day trying to warm back up, anticipating those hills on Poplar while knowing full well I wasn’t trained up enough to run them the way I'd like…if I’d been running the full, or if I hadn’t run that half several other times, or if I’d been working hard toward a specific time goal, then I would have been disappointed.

But seeing as how none of those things applied this time around, all I could think about was how nice it was going to be to sleep in on Saturday morning.

***

You want to know something I don’t like?  Winter.  I don’t like the cold, I don’t like endless days of

1994

gray, and I don’t like the end of the year.  I don’t like the way everyone gets sad thinking about all the missed opportunities of the previous twelve months, and I don’t like the way everyone tries to hide it.  I don’t like the onslaught of materialistic Christmas ads on TV, I don’t like the way it’s dark before the 5 o’clock news starts, and I especially don’t like seven-degree-windchill temperatures.

And yet all of this is the price we must pay, via tradition and custom (not to mention the rotation of the earth), to get to that fresh, renewed feeling of a new year.  To get to the promise of spring.  To get to the lengthening of days.  To get to the reemergence of the sun.  It’s the cycle of human existence – you have to do this to get to that.  More abstractly, you have to experience this to appreciate that.

That’s what I felt when that damn race was canceled:  I have to be burned out right now to reclaim my love of doing this.  And I had to once love doing this to know this feeling of being burned out.

It’s the cycle starting over.

***

1994

I didn’t lose electricity when the ice came, which was my primary concern.  Like all Memphians who were alive in 1994, I remember the ice storm of that year, and the weather this time around (thankfully) paled pathetically in comparison.  I’m currently reading Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, in which he talks about “constructive paranoia,” or fear that seems illogical to outsiders but is based on locally-relevant life experiences.  I have a constructive paranoia about losing power and also about plummeting core body temperature after a long run in the cold, as both are things that have given me ample discomfort in the past.

All told then, my weekend was one of incredible luck.  I dodged all sorts of uncomfortable things.

***

A lot of people I know ran the race anyway, whether it was the half or the full they were signed up for.  They converged at the starting line, all bundled up, and ran the course without any official support.  I also know people who braved the elements to hand out water or cheer along the route.

Sometimes, depending on where your mind is, the greatest discomfort there is is in not being out there.

That’s not just a running thing, that’s a life thing.

Another weekend, that might have been me, pounding out my 13.1 on the empty streets, or losing my voice, along with feeling in my fingers, shouting for friends along the way.

But it wasn’t me this weekend.

And that’s okay.

I’ve been there before…I’ll be back there again…

That Willpower Business

In terms of willpower, it took every ounce that I possess to get through the Chicago marathon a week and a half ago, a race I knew from my first training run I was not passionate about running, and a race I knew at the starting line was going to be a long one.  But I made it.  In fact, I not only made it, I matched my PR.  (My PR is nothing to brag about, but nonetheless!)

My thoughts on running the Chicago marathon.

I don't think I looked up from the ground from about Mile 19 on - I've never in my life been in such a fog.  Sometimes I reference the "altered mental state" that a person can enter during an endurance event, but I'm pretty sure I didn't know what the hell I was talking about until Chicago.  I went somewhere really fucking deep there toward the end.  Glad to know I can get there if I need to but, er, I'm maybe okay with not pushing myself to go there again any time soon.

Marathons!  They are such an arbitrarily large number of miles...

A big psychology thing that I keep reading about is how willpower is a depletable resource, and when you pour a lot of it into one thing, you probably won't have much left over for anything else.  I took great comfort in this theory when trying to rationalize why I put so little into training for this marathon in the first place, and decided that the epic meltdown I was having in the rest of my life lent credence to the idea that I only had so much energy to go around.

So I was just waiting for the fallout from the intense concentration it required to get through the race itself.  It took so much out of me, and then I just kept going - visited family while in Illinois, came home, visited my brother who was in Mississippi on a break, commemorated Kara, did a couple of runs to loosen up, had a busy weekend, got caught up on all the odds and ends I'd been putting off because training (even the half-assed variety) was taking up so much of my time...by earlier this week, I was starting to sag.  By yesterday morning, I kind of just wanted to sit quietly by myself in a corner for a while (but couldn't, because I had to attend my last grant-writing class, an exercise that in and of itself has taken extreme willpower to get through), and then today, I...well, you may think that I'm going to say that I finally relaxed, but no.  Today the illness I've been warding off for the past week hit me hard and I got sick.  Because that's what happens when you don't give yourself the rest you need:  your body will revolt on you.  And apparently a week and a half post-marathon was as far as my body was willing to take me before forcing me to stop.

Message received!  Time to breathe.  (And get well.)  It's been an incredibly busy time in my life, across the board.  But clearly I need to take a few days for myself to just not do anything.

(It's also maybe time to take a break from full marathons.  HALF marathons - now those are doable!  And the distance is still respectable!  I will be doing more of that business in the foreseeable future.)

Phoning It In: Audubon Park Edition

On Saturday, I ran the Overton Park 5 Mile Classic, as I do every year.  Unlike every year, I ran ten miles before the race; I’m training for the Chicago Marathon and my long runs are up to 15 miles already.

My heart has not been in my training this year.  I’m getting through it – and I don’t hate it – but eh. Whatever.

My schedule only called for four miles yesterday, which…eh, whatever.  I made it three and then walked the last one.  I did all four at Audubon Park, which is where I used to run all the time before I started running with Breakaway.  The park has a paved, one-mile loop weaving through it that I would circle until I practically got dizzy.  But before yesterday, I hadn’t been back there in ages.

A more dedicated runner than I.

On my second lap/mile, I caught up to a man who had been running when I started.  He was going about my pace and purely because I could, I sped up and passed him.  To my annoyance, I could hear him right behind me for about a mile, but I finally lost him as I picked up the pace yet again to finish my third lap.

He passed me, still chugging along, on the mile that I walked.

“Good running!” he told me.

“Yeah, you too,” I said halfheartedly.  To be honest, it made me feel sad and dejected to be caught shuffling through my final lap.  I ran fifteen fucking miles on Saturday and two days later, less than a fourth of that seemed like too much to deal with.

He caught up to me again as I wound my way back over toward the parking lot.

“You’re still running!” I said.  He was smiling so hard it was infectious.

“I was only supposed to run ten!” he said, stopping to jog in place while he talked to me.  “And I wanted to tell you that I didn’t stop because of you!”

“Ten!  Are you training for something?”

“The Detroit Marathon!  I run it every year!  And I was supposed to do ten, but I saw you and I thought, ‘I’m going to do three extra!’  This is my last lap and it’s because of you!  I saw you and I knew I could keep going!”

Me and my pathetic, uninspired three (four) miles, that I didn’t want to do and didn’t particularly enjoy while doing them, turned out to be the catalyst to extend someone else’s amazingly good run.

BAM!  Proof from on high that there really is merit in doing things half-assed.

Be lackluster; inspire strangers.  Truth.  Peace.  Out.

Picture.

Boston.

I haven't had a good track workout in several weeks, but tonight, my body was working with me.

Frequently (I dare say usually) I walk off the track feeling moderately pathetic and somewhat dejected.  But I go back most every Tuesday because I'm chasing the days like today, when the longer I run, the faster I run, and the stronger I feel.  I finished well tonight.

I likely would have had a good workout no matter what (I was overdue), but tonight I had a couple of things working in my favor:  1) There was a new girl there who was trying to keep up with me for the last quarter and fuck that shit, and 2) a friend of mine gave me the flattering assertion that in the wake of what happened yesterday at the Boston Marathon, my voice was one that should be heard here in Memphis.  On the surface, these are two antithetical statements, the first being one of competitive individualism and the second being one of community support.  But that's running for you.  It's both things.  It's a loner's haven and it's an exercise in group cooperation.  It's every man (and woman) racing him(her)self and yet it's also every person on the course sharing the same experience and looking out for everyone else.

I have a hard time sometimes reading/listening to people's operatic odes to the act of running itself, not only because they're such clichés, but because, in a lot of ways, I don't feel that I belong to that club.  Running isn't who I am; it's something that I do.  It's not part of my self-definition; it's simply part of my life.  I don't call myself "a runner" any more than I call myself "an eater."  Or "a sleeper."  Or "a reader."  Running is just something that crops up in my routine on a regular basis.  Much like writing.  And showering.  And going to work.

And yet yesterday proved, to myself if no one else, that the mere fact that it's a part of my life means I'm a piece of something slightly separate.  Everyone abhors a tragedy.  Not everyone knows what it feels like to see the finish line of a marathon (and thus the true horror of having that euphoria desecrated).  Not everyone knows someone (much less multiple someones) who was running that race.

I'm going to take it on as a challenge to write something for our local running magazine to describe the feeling of familial concern that has enveloped us in Memphis in the past 36 hours or so.  Our community here was lucky.  None of us were hurt or killed, though many of us will be coming home with awful stories.  But we came together anyway.  We'll be coming together again on Thursday when Breakaway holds a fundraiser/2.62-mile run/Slider Inn party to honor the achievements of our local Boston finishers and memorialize the tragedy.

What we won't do is let any of this change anything.  We're all a bunch of idiots, you know, deep down.  No one in their right mind would do to their bodies what we do to ours, all for the sake of an elusive high that hits infrequently and erratically.  Or bragging rights that mean nothing to anyone but ourselves.

But there's something to be said for the sheer number of us that do it.  We feed off of each other.  We push ourselves to run brutal track workouts, like tonight.  We run for three, four, five, six hours at a time just to prove to ourselves we can do it.

I hope the girl I beat tonight comes back to the track.  I hope I do justice to our camaraderie when I write my article.  But most of all, I hope that yesterday doesn't discourage a single person from ever running a marathon.  People do terrible, terrible things for the stupidest of reasons.

But they also do wonderful things for the stupidest of reasons.  Running 26.2 miles is one of those things.  Hundreds of thousands of people have run Boston in the 117 years that marathon has been in existence.  One person turned it into a calamity this year.  To quote myself from above, fuck that shit.

My heartfelt sympathy goes out to each and every person affected by the bombings, and yet in the wake of not really knowing what to do about it, I'll be out there for more nights like tonight.  Just living my life.  Which includes running. 

This changes nothing.  And maybe that's my point.  This was a hideous, terrible thing.  But anyone looking to demoralize a group picked the wrong target in runners.  We don't know when to quit.  And when faced with a potential setback, the cold, hard truth is that it only makes us run harder...

These Are My Friends

They make me laugh. :)

And SCENE!

The low point came at Mile 12, when I felt bad in a way that I’ve never felt bad before, which scared the living daylights out of me.  But I took a walk break and the feeling passed – and along with it went all the feelings of anxiety and pressure that naturally crop up when it’s finally that one day you’ve spent the past six months of your life working up to.

There I was, twelve miles down and fourteen-plus yet to go; clearly not in a position to run a better time than last year (what with walking that early in the game); but with no limits, restrictions, or obligations either.  All I had to do, the only thing I had to get done the entire rest of the day, was get through those fourteen miles.  That’s it.  And I asked myself if I was going to do it, or if I was going to fucking do it.

Thus began the most fun fourteen miles I’ve ever run in my life.  

I wound up besting my previous time in spite of myself, and went the whole 26.2 without any real pain (unquestionably a first for me).  And I was smiling at the end.  So my second marathon this past Saturday was successful by every standard I had set for myself and then some.  I’m so happy that I did it – that I gave myself the opportunity to do it.

And now I’m likewise happy that it’s OVER.

It’s been my line all week that it’s a good test of my self-discipline to train for one marathon a year, and an equally good test of my sanity to be able to take a step back when it’s over.

A lot of energy went into training for this.  It’s time for me to rechannel some of that toward other things for a while.  No more forty-mile weeks for me…

…or at least not until this time next year… :)

Mile 7, courtesy of Breakaway Running.  This is the only shot of me from last Saturday to show up so far; I know there are many others out there, but I can't imagine any will capture the day better than this.