Training for Brazil: Trial #2

As I write, I’m in a little cabin in Tennessee outside of Knoxville. I came here to visit my friend, Wendy, and to get some writing done. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and I’ve had trouble finding time to settle down and get my writing completed. This has been a whirlwind of a year.
Soon (tomorrow actually – it took me a while to get this posted), Bill and I leave for Brazil. We are about to run a marathon on our SIXTH continent! I can scarcely believe it. This has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

As I took a run along a rolling road beside farm houses and log cabins, catching the scent of honeysuckle in the air and watching for snapping turtles on the ground, I let my thoughts fly free in a stream of consciousness.

It went something like this:
Ooh this is a bigger hill than it looked last night when we drove this course…. I hope I don’t get tick and end up with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever…. I wonder how the dogs and Bill are doing back home…. I hope I’m ready for this race in Rio…. I hope my Aunt S is OK…. What if I can’t get on that boat for Antarctica next spring????

And there I stopped (thinking, not running). I needed to focus on the scenery around me and breathe deeply into the moment or I was going to move into “panic mode” and my run would be derailed.

Just before I left for Tennessee, a couple of things happened. First, my dear Aunt S went into the hospital and was in ICU for more than a week with a tube down her throat. I went to see her once she was awake and stayed in touch with my cousin by phone on a daily basis, but I was terribly worried about her, and about my grandmother, for whom my Aunt and cousin do most of the care-giving. My family is aging, as are we all, and I worry if everyone will get what they need when they need it to keep their lives comfortable in the process.

Just as my Aunt S was stabilizing (she’s home now, by the way, and on the mend) and my anxiety was abating, I got an email from Marathon Tours, the company that runs the Antarctica Marathon saying I wouldn’t be on the 2010 trip. Maybe, they said, I’d be on the 2011 boat to Antarctica. This crushed me. As you know, I have a book contract to write about the effects of this 7 continent journey on my life and all my chapters, including the one on Antarctica, are due next year! Bill and I have spent a lot of money and time and effort to make this whole seven-marathons dream happen. And I’d been told earlier this year that as people were dropping out of the 2010 trip because of the economical decline, I would most certainly be moved from the waiting list to the real list by May. But when no one called me to confirm this, I finally got in contact with the company and found out I’d been jilted (apparently they had to cut back to one boat and cannot guarantee my participation even in 2011). Now what?

Actually, I have some hope. Bill and are getting creative. If we can’t elbow our way onto that boat in 2010, how will we find our way to Antarctica?

Ah, once I get to the idea phase of “panic mode,” I know I’m out of the worry woods. Back on track with a strain of thought I could follow constructively, I kept running and started brainstorming. What if we charter a private boat and just show up for the race? What if we take a helicopter to one of the islands and run 26.2 miles as charted by our Garmin? What if we plug in a treadmill at one of the research stations on the continent and run until we’ve completed the marathon distance?

Now my thoughts were coming fast and, just as I was getting to some pretty absurd schemes, I found myself back at where Wendy and I had agreed to meet and I put my ideas on pause.
So now I’m writing my readers just to say, I’m off to Brazil on June 13th (tomorrow), but I’m in search of creative input from anyone who has a thought about running a marathon (official or unofficial – it doesn’t matter to me) on Antarctica.

If you have any ideas of how to get to Antarctica (contacts for cruise ships, info about which islands have runnable terrain, the address of a friendly penguin), send them my way! I’ll do anything it takes to get us there (safely) and back in time to write my last chapter and turn my book in.

I’ll try to post while I’m in South America, but I’ll most certainly post a race report once I’m back.

See you in early July.