FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #5

Removed by author

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #4

Nowadays, with the economy doing belly flops, several people have asked me, “How do you pay for these trips you take to run marathons all over the world?” It’s an excellent and fair question.

Let me tell you how we do it. If more people were willing to see the world the way Bill and I travel, many people who think they can’t pull it off could afford trips overseas. Bill and I are not rich. We’re just cheap (or smart, depending on how you look at it). Here’s our advice for a traveling life-style.

1. Live to travel: To start with, traveling is a huge priority for Bill and me. We choose to live in a small condominium instead of a big, expensive house. This way, we have very few home repairs, low mortgage payments and reasonable utility bills. We also own our own old cars. My Honda has 125,000 miles on it and I plan to keep it until it’s got twice that. I credit most of our daily financial prudence to Bill. He’s a coupon-clipping, sale-watching, bargain-hunting kind of fellow – and it pays off. (It also sometimes irritates me, but that’s another blog entry.) Basically, we filter our every-day spending through the sieve of how it will impact our travel.

2. When you travel, stay close to the culture you're visiting: We almost always stay at hostels or guest houses. Most hostels have private rooms for couples. Some even have toilets and showers in the room like your run-of-the-mill motel room. The great thing about hostels and guest houses is that you usually have access to a kitchen. After we arrive at our lodgings, we go shopping. We don’t eat out every night. We buy our wine and food at the neighborhood grocery store. It’s fun to shop with local people and learn to eat what they feed their own families. I have also discovered that in a pinch, if I hate the local food, I can live for at least two weeks on peanut butter, crackers and fruit.

We always use public transportation in every location we travel to. If we’re in Chicago, we use the “L.” If we find ourselves in Berlin, we figure out the busses. This way, we rarely rent a car, or if we do, we cut the cost of gas by traveling cheaply for as much of the time as we can.

3. Look for bargains and make friends: When we go site-seeing, we work hard to look for the deals. Almost everywhere in the world, you can find a bargain if you look. If you wait to buy your theater tickets until after 3pm, for example, you might get them half-price. Or if you visit a museum on a certain day of the week, it might be free. We do a lot of research before we leave home, and we ask advice of locals once we arrive. We don’t often take official tours that cost a great deal of money, we borrow the self-guided tour pamphlets at the information desk of the museum, instead.

And we make friends. The young people who backpack around the world and stay at youth hostels are masters at saving money. They are our best resource for free deals and cheap thrills. Every friend you make when you travel is an open door to a rich experience. When we were in Australia, we made friends with the woman who drove our wine tour bus. She came back to our little motel with her own car later in the evening and took us around the county looking for kangaroos and telling us about the region. She would accept nothing from us but thanks (though we offered to buy her dinner and drinks).

If we didn’t travel the way we do, we could not possibly make our way around the world and see all the exotic places we’ve experienced. Basically, for the price of one week’s worth of gas, groceries, entertainment and espresso drinks at home, we can live in another country (minus the cost of lodging). All we have to do is get there.

Blood, Sweat and Tears: Mixing metaphors at the Adidas Panama City International Marathon

I've removed the contents of this entry for a while. Some of the text will be re-worked in my book. I'll post a revised version at some point....

Coming soon - Panama City race report

Stay tuned for a full report on the marathon. I only have a moment at a internet cafe just now. I wanted at least to report that Bill finished in a little over 4 hours and I finished in 5:11:52 (that's my PR, people). The weather was warm (too humid for Bill) and at 4 hours into our race it RAINED (DUMPED)!!!!!! But it was one of the most amazing adventures of our lives. I'll give you the details when I have more time at a computer or when I get back.

Peace.

Greetings from Panama City, Panama. Bill and I arrived at 10PM local time Thursday night. We've spent the last couple of days getting oriented to the city and acclimating to the humidity.

Those of you who have followed my winter complaints (aching teeth, frozen hands, runny nose) will be relieved that I will NOT be complaining about the heat now that I am here in deep Central America. No, I'm quite happy to be warm for a change and look forward to a nice long run in 90% humidity tomorrow morning at five AM.

As always, we have learned some quick lessons about the country we are in. We've learned, for example, that in Panama City, traveling by taxi is by far the most efficient way to get from point A to point B, and that taxi rides are not for the faint of heart. In fact the whole traffic scene, even for the pedestrian, is a trip! Yesterday Bill advised me regarding the best method for crossing a street (and those of you who know us well will recognize Bill's advising me on street-crossing as a recurring theme in our relationship) saying, "Tuck yourself behind some locals and let them lead the way."

Since information on the marathon is in short supply, we don't know if the traffic will be re-routed during the race or if we'll spend the whole 42 K tucking ourselves behind locals to make it to the finish line.

I've also learned that many of the roads don't have signs. For me, as a back-of-the-packer, unmarked roads can prove to be very troublesome. If the course isn't marked or if the volunteers are not plentiful and/or helpful, I may need to find my own way on the course.

Today I started to worry about how, with my limited Spanish I would be able to find my way to the finish line if I find myself alone on the course. To assuage my concern, Bill suggested we create a "safety plan." When you run slowly in a foreign country with a language barrier, I have learned from unfortunate experiences that a safety plan is crucial.

Here is my safety plan for tomorrow.

Along with water and energy gel, I will carry:

1. A map of the course, for what it is worth,
2. A list of locations (such as our hostel and the address of the finish line) with phonetic spellings beside the actual spellings of all words,
3. A list of Spanish phrases that will help me communicate with passers-by or volunteers,
4. Five dollars for a taxi.

Tomorrow morning at what is three AM for my friends on the West coast, Bill and I will be starting the Panama International Marathon. About five hours after that, with any luck, I'll be crossing the finish line. Send us your good vibes (and a good sense of direction for me) and stay tuned for the race report. If I'm not too trashed, you'll get it tomorrow night. If I'm over the edge with exhaustion, I'll post it when(ish) we get home on August 18th.

Peace!

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #3

Q: Which continents have you already done and where are you going next?

A: This is, of course, the most common question I get regarding the seven marathons quest we’re on. Our first continent was Europe. Five years ago, Bill asked me to take a three week trip with him to visit the Czech Republic. He’d made some contact with distant relatives and invited me to tag along and, oh, how about we run a marathon while we’re there???

I insisted on a walk/run routine for that first marathon in Prague. It hurt like hell anyhow, and I wasn’t convinced I’d ever “run” another marathon. Four years (two dogs and a marriage license) later, Bill called me at work and suggested we divert our summer vacation plans to Australia so we could run a little race with only 31 participants. I’d always wanted to go to Australia, so I agreed. It was while I was training for this Australian marathon that I really got on board with the idea of running seven marathons on seven continents. I still wasn’t in love with running (that’s only started to happen this summer), but I started to get the hang of it, to see and appreciate the ways it was teaching me about myself and about life. That’s why, shortly after we got back from Australia, I started training for a marathon on North America and writing about the Seven Marathons project. Bill had already completed several full marathons here at home, so he supported me in my training for the Whidbey Island Marathon, which I completed a few months ago (as chronicled below).

As I said, this summer I’ve had a shift in my running. Even after the Whidbey race, I still felt that I would enjoy the traveling more than the marathoning. I also felt that, although I knew I would be a runner the rest of my life, I would probably only do the seven full marathons and then I’d stick to shorter races and running on the trails around my home. This summer, however, Bill and I decided to take a trip. We wanted to spend some time on a beach someplace inexpensive and warm, so we started to look at Central America and guess what? Panama has a marathon in August!

I took a look at the map and tried to barter Panama into South America, but it wouldn’t go. Nope, Panama is Central America. That’s not one of the continents – and yet I found myself wanting to run there. So I started to train and found that my pace had quickened and my legs were strong and I was looking forward to my morning runs. We’re off in a few days to Panama; we run on August 10th. It’s the rainy (and hot) season there now – should be an interesting experience.

As for our other races, we have a tentative plan to complete three of the four remaining marathons in 2009. On January 25th, we plan to run the Tateyama Wakashio Marathon in Bellingham’s sister city in Japan. Then in June, we’re hoping to take a whirlwind trip ticking off two more continents: The Mt. Kilimanjaro Marathon in Tanzania in mid June and either Rio de Janeiro (at the end of June, 2009) or the Sao Paulo Marathon (at the beginning of June) in Brazil. The exact dates on these marathons are yet to be announced. We’ve chosen these races based mostly on their likely or proposed dates and because they’re in locations we’d both like to visit.

As you might imagine, planning this kind of international travel is a huge undertaking, and several things need to fall in place for us to be able to pull it off. We’ll have to get time off of work, squeeze a bunch of money out of a tight budget, get Yellow Fever shots and get into damn good shape. But what fun! What adventure!

Now, you’ll be counting on your fingers at this point and you’ll shortly realize that I have named only six continents (plus one extra marathon in Central America). So the next question is always, “What’s the deal with Antarctica? Is there really a marathon there?” And the answer is yes, but it’s not a simple yes. As far as we can tell based on our research (and if anyone out there has more information, let me know), there are a couple of tour groups that organize marathon experiences on the great icy continent and they aren’t easy to sign up for because they book up quickly. They’re expensive, too, so we’re saving Antarctica for last, but I promise to keep you posted when we have firm plans.

Next question?

Frequently asked question #2

Q: So do you lose a lot of weight when you train for a marathon?

A: I get asked this question often. We are a culture obsessed with weight and weight loss, after all. I don’t know what other people experience, but for me the answer is no.

I was raised on a diet of macaroni and cheese and sugar corn pop cereal by parents who didn’t have any kind of regular exercise regime in their own lives. I wriggled out of PE classes anyway I could while I was growing up (mononucleosis in Jr. High, driver’s education in high school) and started to see the scale creeping ever closer to the two-hundred mark by the time I was twenty.

Since there is a lot of obesity in my family, I was getting scared – certainly by the way I thought I looked, but mostly by what I saw were the effects of the struggle in my family. I’d watched my grandmother go through a gastric bypass surgery so she could drop a hundred pounds only to suffer from numerous other physical ailments I’m convinced were due to lack of nutrition. I’d watched my sweet aunt suspend aspects of her life because the person she was on the inside was weighed down by obesity and constant physical pain. I didn’t want this for my life, but I didn’t know how to stop it from happening. In those early years, I had made only a vague connection between food, exercise and body weight. I mostly connected food with comfort and ate to fill up empty spaces inside of my heart, not so much to nourish my body.

Then, in community college, I took an aerobics dance class because I needed a PE credit for my associate’s degree. In one quarter, I watched myself shrink by ten pounds without changing my eating habits in the least. I also felt my energy and joy increase. The next quarter I took another class. It turned out that I liked to dance and I liked to move my body. During this second quarter of aerobics, I added a meal schedule to my efforts. As opposed to skipping meals all day and binging before bed, I began eating exactly four times a day: morning, noon and evening, plus a snack. Fifteen more pounds disappeared without any suffering or hunger on my part. By the time I graduated, I had dropped from 175 pounds to 133 pounds.

And that is where I have stayed for more than twenty years. Some of those years I’ve been more fit than other years, but my weight has remained the same (with a brief increase in grad school and a brief decrease during my divorce).

I am five foot six inches tall. I wear a size six or eight – depending on what time of the month it is or where I buy my clothes. Occasionally, I gain or lose one or two pounds, but always bounce back to 133. I’m as average as they come.

At times, I admit, it has actually felt discouraging to work as hard as I have worked to train for these long races and scarcely lose an ounce. Everyone says, “Muscle weighs more than fat.” Yes, but I’m sure I still have enough fat to lose to displace the weight gain due to muscle increase. I’m not immune to thinking that being skinnier and skinnier is what the goal should be. I’m no different than all the other women I know who wish their butts were less jiggly or that their thighs were more shapely. In my case, it’s my stomach I wish were flatter.

Still, in this running process, I’m working toward being content with my body as it is. I don’t want to eat less than I do. And I don’t want to run so I will LOOK better. I run for a hundred complex reasons that have to do with who I AM and how it makes me FEEL. If I lost ten or even twenty pounds I might be lighter on my feet – maybe even increase my running pace a bit. But I’d also have to cut back on my calories, not eat when I’m hungry or cut out some of the things that make my taste buds feel happy. Instead, I want to work toward striking a balance between using food as a comfort to my heart and as a way of nourishing my body. I believe that our bodies rather than fashion magazines should guide us as to what is healthy for each of us. This is where my body wants to be – at 133 pounds.

Now, there’s no doubt that I could add more grains and fresh veggies to my diet. My digestive process loves it when I get my roughage. I’m not giving myself an excuse here not to continue to improve the way I care for my body with nutrition. In fact, a few weeks ago, I visited my naturopath and was advised to cut cheese out of my diet altogether for a while as an experiment to see if dairy is clogging me up (and I’m thinking about it). I’m only saying that, as I get older and as I run more miles, the weight loss isn’t my measure for health and well-being.

A lot of people do lose weight when they train for a marathon. I applaud them if that’s their goal (as long as it’s healthy and not obsessive). I stay the same – and tentatively, a little more every day, I applaud that, too. I want to run because running is power – an invitation to dream and breathe and feel alive with visceral knowledge of self – not so I can look better in my swimming suit or have a smaller waistline. I want this for everyone. So if you can run, just run and let your body find its happy place. If you can’t run do whatever makes you feel alive and let your body find its happy place.