I had never been to Boston before last week, but I was excited to go. I was done with my own marathon training for the moment which gave me the freedom to take a little break from running and to focus on my cheerleading duties. Bill was trained up and ready for the 112th annual Boston Marathon!
We flew out of Bellingham on Thursday. We spent the afternoon in Boston on Friday, mostly at the convention center for the race expo collecting samples of energy foods and pamphlets for other interesting races around the world. Here we were able to check out the Antarctica Marathon trip and talk with travel company representatives about when their next openings will be to cruise from Argentina to the Southern most continent for a glacial running experience (I guess we’ll have to wait until 2010 – darn!). On Friday night, we drove West on the Massachusetts Turnpike to spend the weekend with friends from Seattle who had recently re-located to the East coast. For two days we enjoyed stimulating conversation and amazing homemade vegetarian lasagna (thanks J and R).
But by Sunday, pre-marathon jitters were starting to hit Bill. I don’t get these jitters the way Bill does. I get overwhelmed with terror that I won’t be able to finish at all and drown said terror with wine and cheese the week before I run (which may, in part, explain both my race times and the reason why I put on five pounds whenever I train for a long race). Bill, in contrast, gets a particularly physical experience of nervousness: upset stomach, inability to sleep, compulsive packing and re-packing of his race bag. When the jitters started late Sunday afternoon, I sent him to bed early.
I had my own worries about Monday’s race to contend with. I had to make my way by car, train and on foot to various locations along the marathon route to cheer for Bill who, in all likelihood, would not be able to distinguish my voice from the rest of the throng of cheering fans.
Let me pause and set the scene of the frenzy that is the Boston Marathon. More than 21,000 runners and their families had flown in from around the planet and descended upon the city. Patriots Day, a Massachusetts holiday for which no one seems to know the origin, is also called “Marathon Monday” (as decried by banners hung on lampposts all over town). Streets and subway stops were closed down for the event. Churches offered “marathon blessing services” for runners. And fans numbering over one million lined the course early with coolers and cow bells and megaphones ready to shout out to any runner who had taken the time to write his or her name on an arm or leg in waterproof ink. All this was just the beginning of the chaos. Helicopters swarmed overhead prepared to track the progress of elite and/or famous race participants, and thousands of police and volunteers stood guard over the marathon route ready to prevent fans from interfering with the runners. Reportedly (I never verified this), there was beer offered at at least one aid station and at another, young women offered kisses to sweaty runners who cared to slow down in order to partake.
As I took all of this in Monday morning, after dropping Bill at the start, I was flooded with concern – OK, panic – that I would not be able to negotiate the crowds and the trains and the convoluted instructions in Bill’s race packet about where I could watch him and how I could find him in this crazy sea after the race. The highway leading to the park and ride where I would catch my first train (to get to my first viewing point at mile 17) was backed up for miles. I waited for an hour and a half just to park the rental car.
When I finally parked, purchased a train ticket and boarded the train, I was greatly comforted to find at least a dozen other dazed travelers looking for mile 17. A woman from Ohio told me her husband should be coming through at noon. Another woman asked me where I was from and learning I came from Seattle (that’s what we say when we travel since no one has heard of Bellingham) pointed dramatically at me and shouted across the train to a bleary-eyed couple sitting near the back of the car, “Hey, this lady’s from Seattle too!” We meekly waved at each other, grateful to be strangers in a strange land from the same part of the globe.
“My daughter’s running,” one man offered into my elbow proudly.
“We came from Sweden,” the woman sitting next to him responded. “My son is running. It is only his fourth marathon.”
“You win,” I said. “You came the farthest of anyone I’ve talked to so far.”
But after we all tumbled out of the train and took a short walk to the race course and jostled for places on the sidelines where we might be able to see the runners, I discovered fellow fans from other places in the world including a woman originally from West Africa, now living in England.
I have to admit to being slightly baffled. Why were we all here? I just ran a “hella” hard marathon the last weekend in my own backyard. I think I could argue that the Whidbey Island course was at least ten times as hilly and difficult as this Boston course would be. And there had been probably only, say, 60 fans along the whole way for me. So clearly, I lamented, the difficulty of the feat has no bearing on how much glory one gets for the accomplishment! It’s just another example of how the marathon adventure, like so many things in life worth doing, has to be motivated by something personal and intrinsic and not by the accolades you may or may not get from others.
In any case, I was here to add my screams and praise to the mounting excitement of the crowd.
The thing is, it really is profoundly awe-inspiring to watch the elite frontrunners if you ever have the chance. In spite of all the time I wasted parking, I was at my post in time to see the women, who started early at 9:30 am, and then, not far behind, the elite men fly by. These guys came through so quickly that I didn’t have time to snap a picture of anything but the bicycles that protectively trailed them, but I had enough time to see the way their taught skin flexed over their perfectly sculpted muscles and to admire the way they seemed to perform each stride as if it were the most poignant step in an exquisite ballet.
After the pros came through, there was a break in the action and then the first wave of starters (with the blue bibs) began trickling past us. A woman standing next to me was receiving text messages announcing her sister’s progress in 10 K intervals. I’d never heard of this and wished I had signed up for this service so I could calculate exactly when Bill would be coming through. Bill was in the second wave of runners (with red bibs) that started at 10:30, so I knew I had a long while to wait. I used the calculator on my cell phone to figure out that he would be passing mile 17 at or around 12:45, so I settled in to enjoy the show.
A large group of people decked out in purple shirts and Dr. Seuss hats (the Doctor was born in Massachusetts) stood on a street corner to the right of me and chanted enthusiastically to every runner who came through wearing the trademark purple Leukemia Team uniforms. Before arriving in Boston for the event, I thought the only way to run in the marathon was to qualify, but as it turns out, there are also charity teams allowed to enter who raise funds for their various causes.
At about an hour and fifty minutes into the first wave, helicopters began swarming above us. “Lance must be coming,” the woman tracking her sister by text messages said to me. We had been trying to guess when Lance Armstrong would be coming through. I had read that he was going to try and run the race in 2:45.
“Then our friend, Jason, will be coming too,” I said. Jason had told Bill he thought he might see Lance on the route since he was shooting for a similar finish time. I blinked my eyes and when I opened them there was a wave of yellow sailing past me.
“There he is,” my new friend said.
“Where?” I strained to get a glimpse of Lance, but all I could see was an entourage of buff young men encircling something – or someone. And then I saw Jason, not twenty yards behind Lance’s posse. Jason and his wife, Laura were at most of the races Bill and I ran. We had had the privilege of watching both of their times improve with almost every run, but Jason’s PR to date was 2:59 – and here he was tracking Lance, looking like it took no effort at all to run four minutes a kilometer. “Jason! Jason!” I screamed. “You look great! Whoooo!!!” I knew he couldn’t make out my voice in the crowd, but I was thrilled. “I know him!” I told the woman beside me with pride, as if I knew Lance, himself.
Almost an hour later, having been on my feet for two and half hours (it’s hard to complain when you’re watching marathoners, but my back was aching), I saw Bill’s slightly bow-legged stride coming around the bend. I hadn’t remembered to look to see what color shirt he would be wearing or to take note of his bib number, so I was lucky to spot him in an unusually large group. He was running on my side of the road, and since I had recently nudged some observers out of the way so I could position myself against the guard rail, I had a good view of him. I started shouting his name and flailing my arms, “Bill!! You’re doing great! You look good. Bill!!” With a sudden intuition (he told me later he couldn’t hear me yelling his name) he turned and spotted me, waving back and shooting me a broad smile.
I thought this meant that he was feeling good. His knee must not be bothering him and he must be having a strong go of it.
Sadly, this is all I saw of Bill’s race – thirty seconds, a wave and his butt jogging away toward what the Bostonians call “Heartbreak Hill.”
It was time for me to leave my new pals and cram myself into a train and ride into the downtown area. Once there, I had to weave my way through six blocks of detours just to cross the street only to discover that I couldn’t get within a mile of the finish line. Then, I had to get lost among twenty thousand marathon finishers all wearing the same foil blankets and to fight an anxiety attack when Bill didn’t show up in the designated family meeting area even an hour after his race should have been done.
When he finally arrived under the letter of his last name in the family area, I was so grateful to see him that I cried. He’d had a good race time (3:42, which qualified him for next year’s race), but it had been a harder race for him than I had guessed. At 15 miles he had gotten sick and had to take a four-minute break at a port-o-potty (I didn’t ask what happened in there, but four minutes in an outhouse is never pleasant). And the hill had felt much longer than he remembered from the first time he ran the race in 2002. He had spent an extra long time in the recovery area stretching and rehydrating before making his way to the family area because he was still fighting a mild nausea.
I didn’t bore him with my navigational trials until much later when we both had a couple of drinks under our respective belts and his queasy stomach was just a memory. At that point I told him that I had concluded small races were more fun for fans and big races were more fun for runners. Bill agreed with me, of course. In the past eight days he’d gotten to be a fan at a small race and a runner in a big one – the best of both worlds.
We climbed in bed that night, both having earned our exhaustion, excited to wake up the next day and check finishing times in the paper.
Finishing times that interested us:
2:07:46 – Robert Cheruiyut – Men’s #1 finisher – from Kenya
2:25:25 – Dire Tune – Women’s #1 finisher – from Ethiopia
2:50:58 – Lance Armstrong – famous cyclist wearing yellow
2:56:02 – Jason – awesome runner – I know him!
3:42:28 – Bill – my #1 finisher – from Bellingham
In March of 2010, I completed my seventh continental marathon distance. Follow me now as I keep running and try to finish a marathon in all 50 U.S. States before I turn 50.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Uphill Journey - The Whidbey Island Marathon
Let me tell you about the Whidbey Island Marathon. Saturday, we took a drive down to the race expo to pick up my race packet and decided to drive the course so I would know where I was going in case, as in the Birch Bay run, the volunteer force was diminished by the time I came through and there was no one handy to show me the way. After getting lost or nearly lost in Prague, Mudgee, and Birch Bay, I’ve learned my lesson: Study the route.
As Bill drove, following the course map, pointing out the turns, I kept repeating, “Holy shit! Another hill.” The course was up, up, flat, up, down, up, up, up, down, up, up, flat, up, up and so on. I’d heard this course had hills, but every time I brought it up during my training, Bill would reassure me, “It’s no worse than Mudgee. You’ll do fine.” But now I was seeing with my own eyes that this race was much hillier than Mudgee. Bill continued to tell me that it would be no problem, even as we put the car in second gear up the mile-long hills I would have to traverse the next day.
Self-doubt is a tenacious little monster, isn’t it? A thousand other people can tell you you’re great, or capable, or smart, or strong – but ONLY your opinion of yourself can chase away self-doubt. I fought with that doubt as we continued to drive the route, vacillating between, “I’m trained well. I know I can do it,” and “You’re hosed. Those hills are going to kick your ass.”
“Well, I guess I can walk if I have to,” I concluded as we sped past Oak Harbor High School where the finish line would be. I would fall back on my motto: I don’t have to be good or fast, only committed.” So, although I had hopes of beating or at least matching my time from my last marathon, I could see it was unlikely, and I fell back on my belief that “doing” is more important than “winning” or, in my case, “not sucking.”
I managed to sleep on Saturday night and get myself up in time to dress, drive to Starbucks and order a double, short, sugar-free cinnamon soy latte and make it to the starting line ready to run for more than five hours. Bill caught a glimpse of Dean Karnazes, the Ultra-marathon Man, crossing the starting line just before I came through.
The course was beautiful (hills notwithstanding) with rolling fields and glimpses of the harbor, and the weather was at least partially cooperative, sprinkling only a little rain on me at about mile 17, but the highlight of the race was running with a man I met along the way at about mile 12 who, with his own determination and commitment to the marathon, took my self-doubt, crumpled it in a little ball like used foil and tossed it off to the side of the road. His name is Mel and he is seventy-five years old. Bill had pointed him out to me before the race began, so I knew a little about him when I caught up to him on one of the rare flat points in the race.
He ran with hunched shoulders and his head tucked down and thrust forward with determination. Mel’s pace was actually slightly slower than my own, but I was happy to reduce my speed to have a talk with him while I recovered from one of the hills we had just conquered.
“Hey. How’s it going?” I asked as we settled in side by side.
“So far, so good,” he answered.
“I heard this is like number four hundred for you.”
“No. Only three-hundred and thirty one,” he corrected. This didn’t change my awe. How, and more importantly, why, does anyone run hundreds of marathons?
“When did you start running?” I asked.
“I didn’t start until I was fifty,” he told me. It turns out that he had watched his father throw his hands up and let life go “down hill,” at fifty. Mel had decided that fifty was the time to start playing, and for him that meant running. “Yep. The first year I ran one marathon and hurt so badly afterwards that I told myself I’d never do it again.” I knew the feeling. “But I recovered. And so the next year I ran two, and the year after that four. The year I retired from work I ran more than twenty.”
I looked over at him. He wasn’t any taller than I, and he was of average build. His posture wasn’t great, and he was breathing heavily enough for me to worry that this could be his last race. But he wasn’t slowing down. The more we talked, in fact, it seemed to me, the faster he ran. “Last February,” he went on, “I fell out of a tree and hurt myself. Had to take some time off.” He had just started up running again in the past few months. The last week he’d run a race in Yakima, this week the Whidbey Island Marathon and next weekend he would do Wenatchee. The goal was to run without walking. This is how he would know he was back up to speed, despite the pain he had in the hip he’d broken falling out of the tree and the pain he had in the other hip from accommodating his broken side.
We ran silently together for a while. I contemplated the privilege I felt running next to Mel and made a conscious decision to put aside my self-indulgent worry that the hills on this course were going to make me miserable. Maybe they would, but I was just getting started in this life. The journey was hard for all of us, but if Mel could do it, with his chipped hip and his seven and a half decades of life, I would do it, too, and be grateful that I was on my feet.
I bid him goodbye and ran ahead on the next downhill. There is little exchanging of names during a race, I’ve noticed. People cross paths, just this once in their lives, during a brutal endeavor that takes every ounce of focus. Those of us who run slowly enough to hold conversations with one another do so in virtual anonymity. We want the camaraderie in the moment, but the commitment is to the task, not to the relationship at hand. Mel wouldn’t know who I was or how our discussion challenged me to stop my internal whining.
Most of the rest of the race I ran alone. I started to hurt at mile 21, a gigantic uphill that was followed by a steep, fast down before the beautiful homes and beachfront of the West Beach Road came into view. I took the downhill slowly to save my knees and when I finally reached the flat stretch that rode along the water, I saw Bill’s smiling face coming toward me in the other direction. I was thrilled and grateful to see him. He replenished my water and snapped a few pictures and, most importantly, gave me a push up the second to last hill before running ahead to meet me at the finish line.
When you run slowly, like me – or Mel – the finish line isn’t what it is for the people at the center of the pack. There are no crowds, little cheering, and sometimes, all the food has been eaten. The awards ceremony is over and the port-o-potties are being hauled away. This is the scene I saw at the finish line as I came in on Sunday. Even Dean Karnazes had departed the event, leaving the back-of-the-packers to ourselves.
You have to have an internal locus of celebration, I have decided. You have to let your own sense of accomplishment serve as the reward for the long journey you’ve just traversed. I crossed the finish line of the Whidbey Island Marathon at five hours and thirty-one minutes. I took my medal, grabbed a bottle of water and continued walking for about twenty minutes, stopping to stretch now and again, to prevent my legs from cramping. Bill was there to take my picture and offer a high five – and to drive me home, back to our lives.
I did it!!
I checked the race results on the web, by the way, and Mel came in at five hours and fifty-five minutes.
As Bill drove, following the course map, pointing out the turns, I kept repeating, “Holy shit! Another hill.” The course was up, up, flat, up, down, up, up, up, down, up, up, flat, up, up and so on. I’d heard this course had hills, but every time I brought it up during my training, Bill would reassure me, “It’s no worse than Mudgee. You’ll do fine.” But now I was seeing with my own eyes that this race was much hillier than Mudgee. Bill continued to tell me that it would be no problem, even as we put the car in second gear up the mile-long hills I would have to traverse the next day.
Self-doubt is a tenacious little monster, isn’t it? A thousand other people can tell you you’re great, or capable, or smart, or strong – but ONLY your opinion of yourself can chase away self-doubt. I fought with that doubt as we continued to drive the route, vacillating between, “I’m trained well. I know I can do it,” and “You’re hosed. Those hills are going to kick your ass.”
“Well, I guess I can walk if I have to,” I concluded as we sped past Oak Harbor High School where the finish line would be. I would fall back on my motto: I don’t have to be good or fast, only committed.” So, although I had hopes of beating or at least matching my time from my last marathon, I could see it was unlikely, and I fell back on my belief that “doing” is more important than “winning” or, in my case, “not sucking.”
I managed to sleep on Saturday night and get myself up in time to dress, drive to Starbucks and order a double, short, sugar-free cinnamon soy latte and make it to the starting line ready to run for more than five hours. Bill caught a glimpse of Dean Karnazes, the Ultra-marathon Man, crossing the starting line just before I came through.
The course was beautiful (hills notwithstanding) with rolling fields and glimpses of the harbor, and the weather was at least partially cooperative, sprinkling only a little rain on me at about mile 17, but the highlight of the race was running with a man I met along the way at about mile 12 who, with his own determination and commitment to the marathon, took my self-doubt, crumpled it in a little ball like used foil and tossed it off to the side of the road. His name is Mel and he is seventy-five years old. Bill had pointed him out to me before the race began, so I knew a little about him when I caught up to him on one of the rare flat points in the race.
He ran with hunched shoulders and his head tucked down and thrust forward with determination. Mel’s pace was actually slightly slower than my own, but I was happy to reduce my speed to have a talk with him while I recovered from one of the hills we had just conquered.
“Hey. How’s it going?” I asked as we settled in side by side.
“So far, so good,” he answered.
“I heard this is like number four hundred for you.”
“No. Only three-hundred and thirty one,” he corrected. This didn’t change my awe. How, and more importantly, why, does anyone run hundreds of marathons?
“When did you start running?” I asked.
“I didn’t start until I was fifty,” he told me. It turns out that he had watched his father throw his hands up and let life go “down hill,” at fifty. Mel had decided that fifty was the time to start playing, and for him that meant running. “Yep. The first year I ran one marathon and hurt so badly afterwards that I told myself I’d never do it again.” I knew the feeling. “But I recovered. And so the next year I ran two, and the year after that four. The year I retired from work I ran more than twenty.”
I looked over at him. He wasn’t any taller than I, and he was of average build. His posture wasn’t great, and he was breathing heavily enough for me to worry that this could be his last race. But he wasn’t slowing down. The more we talked, in fact, it seemed to me, the faster he ran. “Last February,” he went on, “I fell out of a tree and hurt myself. Had to take some time off.” He had just started up running again in the past few months. The last week he’d run a race in Yakima, this week the Whidbey Island Marathon and next weekend he would do Wenatchee. The goal was to run without walking. This is how he would know he was back up to speed, despite the pain he had in the hip he’d broken falling out of the tree and the pain he had in the other hip from accommodating his broken side.
We ran silently together for a while. I contemplated the privilege I felt running next to Mel and made a conscious decision to put aside my self-indulgent worry that the hills on this course were going to make me miserable. Maybe they would, but I was just getting started in this life. The journey was hard for all of us, but if Mel could do it, with his chipped hip and his seven and a half decades of life, I would do it, too, and be grateful that I was on my feet.
I bid him goodbye and ran ahead on the next downhill. There is little exchanging of names during a race, I’ve noticed. People cross paths, just this once in their lives, during a brutal endeavor that takes every ounce of focus. Those of us who run slowly enough to hold conversations with one another do so in virtual anonymity. We want the camaraderie in the moment, but the commitment is to the task, not to the relationship at hand. Mel wouldn’t know who I was or how our discussion challenged me to stop my internal whining.
Most of the rest of the race I ran alone. I started to hurt at mile 21, a gigantic uphill that was followed by a steep, fast down before the beautiful homes and beachfront of the West Beach Road came into view. I took the downhill slowly to save my knees and when I finally reached the flat stretch that rode along the water, I saw Bill’s smiling face coming toward me in the other direction. I was thrilled and grateful to see him. He replenished my water and snapped a few pictures and, most importantly, gave me a push up the second to last hill before running ahead to meet me at the finish line.
When you run slowly, like me – or Mel – the finish line isn’t what it is for the people at the center of the pack. There are no crowds, little cheering, and sometimes, all the food has been eaten. The awards ceremony is over and the port-o-potties are being hauled away. This is the scene I saw at the finish line as I came in on Sunday. Even Dean Karnazes had departed the event, leaving the back-of-the-packers to ourselves.
You have to have an internal locus of celebration, I have decided. You have to let your own sense of accomplishment serve as the reward for the long journey you’ve just traversed. I crossed the finish line of the Whidbey Island Marathon at five hours and thirty-one minutes. I took my medal, grabbed a bottle of water and continued walking for about twenty minutes, stopping to stretch now and again, to prevent my legs from cramping. Bill was there to take my picture and offer a high five – and to drive me home, back to our lives.
I did it!!
I checked the race results on the web, by the way, and Mel came in at five hours and fifty-five minutes.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The "Tail End" of My Training
Well, one week till the big event! Think of me next Sunday between 8:00 AM and 1:15 PM. I’ll be out there on Whidbey Island with hundreds of others willing my body to repeat the same motion for over five hours.
Send your thoughts, prayers, intentions, or whatever influence you have in the universe to the weather gods and insist on NO rain or wind, if you don’t mind.
I’ll be spending this week eating pasta, stretching, drinking water, peeing, drinking water, peeing and syncing my iPod. Saturday, Bill and I will drive down to the race Expo where, hopefully, I’ll get to meet Dean Karnazes (you know, Ultra-marathon Man). Of course, meeting Dean will be only one of hundreds of opportunities to feel inferior next week, but it will be worth it to get a real-life glimpse of his perfectly engineered physique.
I was reflecting on “physiques” this week and thinking about how the one thing you get to see at the back of the pack that you don’t get to see at the front is the variety in the human ass.
At the front of the pack you encounter only one kind of ass, really – the ass that is taut and muscular, that moves obediently in concert with the rest of the body. The gluteus maximus is fully engaged and flexed with each stride as the finishing touch after the calf muscles and the hamstrings have done their part. At the back of the pack we run differently and the renegade ass has a life of its own. The leg muscles do the work of moving the body forward and the job of the ass is to bounce, in its entirety, up and then down with each stride, so that the skin feels the impact.
From the back I have seen the behinds of many an interestingly shaped personage (and I can’t deny that my shape may be equally as unusual as some of those which have passed me, but, let’s be honest, there aren’t many runners on my tail). I have seen the wide, cellulite-laden bum, the flat but round rump, the breech of the well proportioned thick-stumped person, the bubble fanny, and the dangling duff, among others, all shoot ahead of me. At first I was alarmed by this. Should not fitness, size and proportion (or age, for that matter) bear some resemblance to one another, giving visual cues as to who should seed herself near the starting line and who should linger further back? Should not the skinny people move forward in the pack and the plumper ones meander behind? But this is not the case! Not only have I seen the larger variety of asses at the back, but the smaller and the lankier ones as well. Tall, elongated buns and tiny, compact tushes linger just in front of me near the back of the pack. What sense can be made of this?
By now, I have realized that shape and girth have almost nothing to do with speed and fitness level. We have been sold a bill of goods, taught to regard size as the measurement for, not only beauty, but health as well. As I plug along behind almost every imaginable variation of the human body in each race I run, I think, “Hogwash!” There is some other mysterious factor. Genetics? Training? Diet? Determination? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the longer I’ve been running, the greater admiration I have for the people who join me, some of them against their better judgment, no doubt, or against the jeers of friends or family who have said, “YOU, run a marathon? Ha!” Each ass that passes me has a story about how it got started and why it is doing this crazy thing we are all doing together – and yet alone. And those stories, when I get to hear them, inspire me to keep running. Usually people have emotional beginnings to their running careers. Usually, the meaning at our end of the race is not in the speed but in the completion and personal sense of victory (perhaps not unlike the asses at the front of the pack).
One more week until the Whidbey Island Marathon! One more week to get my ass in gear!
Send your thoughts, prayers, intentions, or whatever influence you have in the universe to the weather gods and insist on NO rain or wind, if you don’t mind.
I’ll be spending this week eating pasta, stretching, drinking water, peeing, drinking water, peeing and syncing my iPod. Saturday, Bill and I will drive down to the race Expo where, hopefully, I’ll get to meet Dean Karnazes (you know, Ultra-marathon Man). Of course, meeting Dean will be only one of hundreds of opportunities to feel inferior next week, but it will be worth it to get a real-life glimpse of his perfectly engineered physique.
I was reflecting on “physiques” this week and thinking about how the one thing you get to see at the back of the pack that you don’t get to see at the front is the variety in the human ass.
At the front of the pack you encounter only one kind of ass, really – the ass that is taut and muscular, that moves obediently in concert with the rest of the body. The gluteus maximus is fully engaged and flexed with each stride as the finishing touch after the calf muscles and the hamstrings have done their part. At the back of the pack we run differently and the renegade ass has a life of its own. The leg muscles do the work of moving the body forward and the job of the ass is to bounce, in its entirety, up and then down with each stride, so that the skin feels the impact.
From the back I have seen the behinds of many an interestingly shaped personage (and I can’t deny that my shape may be equally as unusual as some of those which have passed me, but, let’s be honest, there aren’t many runners on my tail). I have seen the wide, cellulite-laden bum, the flat but round rump, the breech of the well proportioned thick-stumped person, the bubble fanny, and the dangling duff, among others, all shoot ahead of me. At first I was alarmed by this. Should not fitness, size and proportion (or age, for that matter) bear some resemblance to one another, giving visual cues as to who should seed herself near the starting line and who should linger further back? Should not the skinny people move forward in the pack and the plumper ones meander behind? But this is not the case! Not only have I seen the larger variety of asses at the back, but the smaller and the lankier ones as well. Tall, elongated buns and tiny, compact tushes linger just in front of me near the back of the pack. What sense can be made of this?
By now, I have realized that shape and girth have almost nothing to do with speed and fitness level. We have been sold a bill of goods, taught to regard size as the measurement for, not only beauty, but health as well. As I plug along behind almost every imaginable variation of the human body in each race I run, I think, “Hogwash!” There is some other mysterious factor. Genetics? Training? Diet? Determination? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the longer I’ve been running, the greater admiration I have for the people who join me, some of them against their better judgment, no doubt, or against the jeers of friends or family who have said, “YOU, run a marathon? Ha!” Each ass that passes me has a story about how it got started and why it is doing this crazy thing we are all doing together – and yet alone. And those stories, when I get to hear them, inspire me to keep running. Usually people have emotional beginnings to their running careers. Usually, the meaning at our end of the race is not in the speed but in the completion and personal sense of victory (perhaps not unlike the asses at the front of the pack).
One more week until the Whidbey Island Marathon! One more week to get my ass in gear!
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