“Being a champion meant not quitting, no matter how tough the situation became and no matter how badly the odds seemed stacked against you. If you had the courage, stamina and persistence to cross the finish line, you were a champion.” - Dean Karnazes, in UltraMarathon Man: Confessions of an all-night runner
To me, Dean Karnazes, ultra-runner, is a hero. Certainly he is an extraordinary athlete – and for that alone I am in deep awe, but I admire him for more than that. Dean made a conscious decision in his early thirties to listen to what the sound of his own footsteps pounding on the pavement was saying to him. He bucked the corporate system, turned his back on simple definitions of success and embraced a lifestyle of personal authenticity.
That’s the kind of person I want to be. All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer and I’ve wanted to see all the continents of the earth. I’ve known this since I was eight years old. One weekend, my family took a trip to Ocean Shores, a town right on Washington’s coast. I’ll never forget my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean. I’d grown up on the Puget Sound, which is the Ocean’s water flowing into a large inlet, passed the San Juan Islands, all the way down to the inverted elbow that curves around to make the fist of the Olympic Peninsula. I’d looked across this water toward the Olympic Peninsula and its snow-capped mountain range every day that I could remember, but I wasn’t prepared for what was on the other side of those mountains.
There I sat, a tiny girl on a large driftwood log, looking at a body of water that had no end. I was frightened by it. The roar of it was thunderous to my tender ears. Where did it go? Why couldn’t I see any land out there? The wild, untamable enormity of it made me cry.
That night, by the luminescence of a flashlight, I wrote my first poem about the largeness of the earth and the formidable vastness of the Ocean, which defied my understanding. I’ve lost the original poem by now (probably in a house fire we had when I was eleven), but I remember that it was eight lines and it had an a/b/a/b rhyme scheme – as most first poems do.
When we returned from our camping trip, I started announcing that I was going to travel the world and become a writer. As you might expect, even though I was a very young child and nowhere near the point of having to choose a college major, some of the adults in my life hastened to enlighten me that writing was no way to make a living and that I’d eventually have to dream up other options for myself. “Cowgirl” and “movie star” came to mind, but fortunately I never shared these career ambitions out loud.
A few grown-ups in my life got on board. My great Aunt Margaret bought me a journal and my dad’s brother, Uncle Bruce, got me a subscription to The Writer Magazine. It was over my head, of course, but I knew it meant that he took me seriously, and I loved when it arrived in the mailbox each month as a reminder that someone had believed me when I said I wanted to be a writer.
As life marched on, I was indeed called upon to make some career choices and “writer” did indeed appear to be a rather less than practical option. I contented myself with becoming an English teacher and encouraging my students to write. Later, when that no longer hit the mark for me, I became a therapist who listens to my clients’ stories and helps them articulate and have the courage to follow their own hopes and dreams.
But this year, as I have been reading Dean Karnazes’ brave leaps of faith into living out his impractical passions, I simultaneously began writing about my life which, at the moment, is a lot about training for and running long distance races all around the world.
Dean’s story of moving from stuckness to adventure and personal risk have resonated with me. More than that, his story has shouted at me to seize each day and be alive. Just as there came a moment for him when he stepped out the door in his boxers and old sneakers to go for his first long run in more than a decade, this year I’ve made a commitment to myself to run and write and travel. I’ve decided to take the first steps to write about the relationship between the marathon life for a back-of-the-pack, non-athletic, trudging-along-and-finishing-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth runner and life in general. And as I go, I believe what Dean says is true: If you do it, hard as it is, and cross the line at the end, you’re a champion.
Feeling this connection with his story as I do, you can imagine my elation when Bill forwarded me a message from the Ultramarathon Man himself. I’ve never been one to chase after meeting celebrities, but I knew Dean Karnazes would be at the finish line of the Whidbey Island Marathon, and I hoped to shake his hand and thank him for writing his story. I missed him, of course, due to my late arrival at the finish line (see below). But unbeknownst to me, Bill had communicated by email with Dean, telling him of my disappointment at missing out on the chance to meet him on Whidbey Island. Dean graciously responded with the following note:
Dear Cami,
I am so sorry to have missed you at the Whidbey Island Marathon. When I heard about your endeavor to run a marathon on every continent, I am sure we are kindred spirits! Cami, you are a tremendous inspiration. Please, never stop! I look forward to the time that our paths meet. Until then, keep going strong!!
Warmest regards,
Dean Karnazes
I was delighted. Dean had taken the time to read my blog and then said we were kindred spirits! Naturally, during my run later that day, I floated easy on my feet, with the idea that I might be kindred spirits with a running legend like Dean. But as I think about it, it’s certainly not only the running that makes me feel connected to him. In fact, as is well documented, I don’t find running that easy. I’m not always in love with it, not often eager to get outside in the elements and work my body hard. It is in the desire to live life with guts and personal truth that makes me feel like a kindred spirit with him and with others who live out their crazy ideas of happiness.
Later that week, after getting Dean’s note, Bill informed me that Dean would be in our town for a new ultra-marathon. We decided to take a trip to the finish line and see if we could catch him and thank him for his kindness. We waited after the awards’ presentation for a long while, finally decided we’d missed him again and started to make our way toward our car. On the way out we saw him. I felt shy, but I introduced myself and thanked him for his message to me and for his book. Dean was gracious and encouraging to both of us.
As I’ve reflected on these encounters, one thought keeps arising. We all have opportunity to share our gifts with others, but only if we embrace them ourselves. Only if I follow what calls to me – running, writing, traveling – will the gift of my life be a gift I can offer others. Dean, I hope you know the gift you are to your readers and fellow runners. Thank you!
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.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Highlights from the Boston Marathon
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
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
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!
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Birch Bay International Road Race
Just now I sit on my sofa with my dogs. I’ve got Dancing with the Stars on the TV. Today has been a non-running day, a day off, and I earned it.
This weekend we ran the Birch Bay International Road Race 30 K (18.6 miles for those of us South of the Canadian border) on Saturday and then the “Take Back Our Trails” 5 K on Sunday (more about that later; it deserves its own entry).
On the way up to Birch Bay on Saturday morning (about a 20 minute drive northwest from our house), wet snow pelted the car and quickly melted on the windshield. Snow at the end of March is almost unheard of here, but there it was. Have I mentioned how much I hate running in the cold and the rain? Ditto for the snow, only more.
I must say that if I didn’t live in Washington State, if I hadn’t become used to, and therefore nonchalant, about our fjord-like waterways, evergreen forests, our dark, mysterious San Juan Islands and the quaint artistic communities that inhabit them, I would think of this place I live in as the most beautiful place on Earth. If I were a visitor, particularly in the Summer, and I visited the Puget Sound area on vacation, I would go home to the Midwest or California or wherever I came from, sell all my possessions (which I would need to do to accommodate the impending rise in my cost of living – it’s expensive here), pack up my family and move to the Northwest.
But I’ve been here all my life and, given to complaining and whining as I am, most days I think of this place of my birth as an overly cloudy, dark, frigid, sopping wet terrarium which intentionally persecutes me with chill and drizzle ten months of every year of my life.
Still, I work hard to appreciate the gifts nature has bestowed on us here and to see the land and the water through the eyes of visitors rather than through the eyes of Seasonal Affective Disorder. And that is why I can say that Birch Bay is one of the most picturesque communities in our area.
On this 30 Kilometer run we were about to embark on, we would take in the scenery along the bay, look across the water to get glimpses of Point Roberts, that little peninsula of America that you have to cross into Canada to get to, meander through Birch Bay State Park and pass Drayton Harbor and the resort homes that surround it. If the clouds lifted even a little, it would be a gorgeous route. I was committed to doing this race whatever the weather for three reasons. First, I needed the miles due to my failure the week before (see below). Secondly, the Whidbey Island Marathon is in two weeks on April 13th and it could still easily be pouring rain daily at that point. I’d better try to get used to it. And third, I really admire the Girls on the Run program, for which this race was raising funds, and wanted to show my support, not only by giving them my money but by being a Woman on the Run (not to be confused with a Woman who Runs with the Wolves)!
Bill and I arrived at the race start, collected our race numbers and timing chips and climbed back in the car to keep warm. We wouldn’t be running this race together but we’d start together, and he would run backwards to meet me at the end if he was feeling strong. That’s our new strategy, we run long races nowadays at our respective paces and then he comes to find me and offer moral support. This has been working well. My iPod is a good pace keeper until the very end of a long run when I feel can kill someone sooner than run another step or listen to another disco song. At that point, it’s great to have Bill’s smiling face come over a hill and hear his, “Hey beautiful. You look great.” I know he’s lying but it always effectively cheers me and gives me a little bounce back. So this was the strategy for the Birch Bay International Road Race.
At the appropriate time, we hustled up to the starting line and, when the race organizer gave the signal for us to start running, Bill and I waved goodbye to one another not to meet up again for at least three hours. By my calculations, this race would take me three hours and thirty-six minutes. The weather in Birch Bay proper was slightly better than it had been on the way up, so at least we didn’t have the heavy snow to contend with – nothing more than the cold and a slight mist off the salt water. I’d rigged a face mask out of a fleece scarf decorated with snow flakes that I wound around my neck twice and tied in the front. I pulled it up over my mouth to protect my rebellious crowned tooth as I started to run.
I jogged in front of two women who talked about the next day’s run to “Take Back Our Trails” in Bellingham. I listened intently to their conversation.
“It was ten AM on a Sunday morning when that woman was attacked,” one said.
“It’s crazy!” the other concurred. “You should be able to run at ten on a Sunday.” We all agreed. There should be rules. Ten AM on a Sunday morning is not the time to be attacked. When a woman has tucked her pony tail into her shirt so as to minimize her femininity, when she runs in the daylight on a well-traveled trail carrying her cell phone and her pepper spray, she has done her part. Did these attackers not realize they were breaking the rules, that if she had been running at ten PM alone on a secluded trail with her hair freely blowing in the wind, we would understand what she had done wrong. But on a Sunday morning!
I realized as I eavesdropped that it was absurd to be more offended by the attack because the runner had followed the woman runner’s code-of-safety-ethics, but we were. We wanted to believe we had the power to keep ourselves safe. Somehow we were forgetting, momentarily, that any attack at any time of day is an affront on a woman’s right to move about freely in her life.
I slowed and joined the conversation these two women were having and the topic shifted to which trails we ran in town and the precautions we each took to keep ourselves safe, further colluding in the illusion that there were ways of preventing being attacked.
Our pace was faster than I usually run. I asked them how far they were going and they said they were both doing only the 15 K. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up their pace for the whole 15 K, but I was glad of the company for the time being, knowing that I would eventually be running alone.
At the four K marker, our time was 24 minutes, which meant we were cruising along at about nine-plus minutes per mile. This being almost three minutes faster than I was accustomed to running, I could only keep up with them for about another ten minutes before I had to slow down. I bid them goodbye, exchanging names with one of them who lived near me so we might meet up and run together sometime. As I plunged forward, I felt my pace was still faster than twelve minutes a mile, but I was comfortable.
I had spent my week eating carbohydrates, laying off the wine, cutting back on coffee and cheese, stretching and drinking water. My body was happy with me and cooperating accordingly. The race course, on the other hand, was not as kind. I plodded on at a decent rate (for me) not knowing how far I had gone. I kept an eye on my watch and calculated my distance based on what I thought my pace was, but there were no markers on the course. Suddenly, all the runners turned into the Birch Bay State park. I followed, ready for a change in scenery. I should have been focusing on the beauty of the place, but as I rounded a corner there, one hour and eight minutes into my run, was the 7 K marker.
I started doing calculations in my head. At the pace I was going I should have completed a 10 K by now. Did they mean 7 MILES? But there was no way I could have run 7 miles in an hour and eight minutes, even with my first three at nine minutes a mile, was there? I knew I had dropped back almost to my usual pace after 5 K. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. The times weren’t making sense to me. As we all continued on and as I dropped to the back of the 30 K pack, the few K markers placed on the course continued to baffle me. When I finally reached the half-way point I sped up to catch one of the only four runners I could see, a woman in my age group whose pace was very similar to mine.
“Do your times seem right?” I asked her when I finally reached her.
“No,” she affirmed. “I looked at the map. We missed a turn at the State Park and I figure we added about 2 K by going around it instead of through it.”
“I knew something was wrong.” I pulled out my own map and studied it as we jogged along. “There was supposed to be a turn around and we never saw that,” I said.
“Yep. We all missed the first entry to the park, so we’re going to end up going 20 miles total, I guess.”
Oh my god, I thought. This was sad poetic justice after last weekend when I cut my run short by five miles and took a ride back to my car.
“Well, I need the miles anyhow,” I said, resigning myself to the situation. What could I do about it now?
“Me too,” she agreed. She was training for the Eugene, Oregon Marathon in May.
I ran ahead again to tell the couple in front of us what had happened. I’d overheard them talking about how their pace didn’t seem right. The woman confided in me that she was worried they would get lost since the foible in the course put us further back in the pack than they had expected to be. I assured them that both the woman behind us and I had maps and that my husband would meet up with me at some point and run us in. I had been either slightly in front of or behind them since the beginning of the race, so I assumed they would track with me the rest of the way.
During the second half of the run, I struggled. We all did. My iPod turned against me at the half-way mark and completely stopped working. And the energy of the crowd couldn’t help me because there was no crowed anymore. There would be a total of 86 finishers in the 30 K, which I now thought of as the 20 Miler, and we would be among the last four to cross the finish line. I set my mind on four hours and watched the minutes tick away. The man in the couple, now running several yards behind me, got a nasty cough and, not knowing how far away our next aid station would be, I gave him some of my water.
I should be able to report on the scenic detail of this run, since I had so much time to look at it, but my mind was elsewhere – wondering if the aid stations would close down before we came along, wondering if the race organizers might even take down the finish line, wondering if I had missed the turn onto Semi-Ah-Moo Parkway while I was wondering about other things.
But my worrying was all in vain. With the exception of one deserted aid station, there were attendants at each of them and someone following us in a van to give us directions. My knees started to smart on the last major down hill, but I knew I was going to make it. Somewhere in the last four miles, I pulled ahead of the rest of my tail-end cohort and was only able to see the lone woman runner far in the distance.
I told each of the aid stations that there were three people behind me and I entrusted my fellow runners to the race organizers and volunteers. This was a mistake, it turned out.
Bill met me with only one K to go. He’d had a hard run and confirmed that most runners in the race had taken the wrong route. We ran in together and, because all the volunteers had gone home, Bill awarded me my medal as I crossed the finish line and heard my ankle chip beep. Victorious and exhausted I raised my hands in triumph, grateful to be done and sure I could pull off the Whidbey Island Marathon in two weeks (well, we’ll see, won’t we).
The race organizers congratulated me and patted me on the back as I crossed the line at 3:51:26. Panting and on the point of collapse I said, “There are three people behind me!”
“We’ve got’em,” one of the organizers told me. “We’ve been tracking with you.”
We waited as the other woman with the map came over the finish line. Bill awarded her the medal with little fanfare besides a high five from me. Next two women came around the bend together. Again Bill awarded them their medals, but I was confused. I didn’t know those two were behind me. Where was the couple I had tracked with the whole race? We waited. Nothing happened.
“There are two more,” I told the organizers as they started tearing down the tents and disassembling the timing clock.
“No, they’re all in,” someone said.
“No, they aren’t,” I argued. “There is a couple, about forty-ish. A woman with a long grey braid down her back and a man with a curly pony tail. There’s no way they came in before me.”
“We haven’t seen them.” I kept insisting that they were still out there and eventually, the race organizers took heed.
Several of us hopped in our cars and drove the course and all the possible routes this couple might have taken if they had missed a turn. No one was able to locate them. Bill and I spent almost an hour driving and re-driving the course looking for any sign of these two lost strangers.
Today, the race results do not reflect this couple’s times, and I’m still worried that they’re roaming around out in Birch Bay in search of the finish line. I know what it is like to get lost, to know you are last and to wonder if anyone takes you seriously back there, working your hardest to find your way in, knowing the awards ceremony was completed before you were half-way through. Being last is like an empty water bottle when you are thirsty, like the hunger for a missed meal. You’re longing for something that is out of your reach any time soon. I know what the fear of being left for dead smells like. It smells like the dust kicked up from others’ running shoes as they pass you, like empty power gel packets, like exhaust when the course opens back up to traffic.
If you’re out there, fellow back-of-the-packers, and somehow you read this, don’t give up the dream of the marathon you told me you were training for. Don’t let a disorganized race take the wind out from under your wings. Keep running!!!
This weekend we ran the Birch Bay International Road Race 30 K (18.6 miles for those of us South of the Canadian border) on Saturday and then the “Take Back Our Trails” 5 K on Sunday (more about that later; it deserves its own entry).
On the way up to Birch Bay on Saturday morning (about a 20 minute drive northwest from our house), wet snow pelted the car and quickly melted on the windshield. Snow at the end of March is almost unheard of here, but there it was. Have I mentioned how much I hate running in the cold and the rain? Ditto for the snow, only more.
I must say that if I didn’t live in Washington State, if I hadn’t become used to, and therefore nonchalant, about our fjord-like waterways, evergreen forests, our dark, mysterious San Juan Islands and the quaint artistic communities that inhabit them, I would think of this place I live in as the most beautiful place on Earth. If I were a visitor, particularly in the Summer, and I visited the Puget Sound area on vacation, I would go home to the Midwest or California or wherever I came from, sell all my possessions (which I would need to do to accommodate the impending rise in my cost of living – it’s expensive here), pack up my family and move to the Northwest.
But I’ve been here all my life and, given to complaining and whining as I am, most days I think of this place of my birth as an overly cloudy, dark, frigid, sopping wet terrarium which intentionally persecutes me with chill and drizzle ten months of every year of my life.
Still, I work hard to appreciate the gifts nature has bestowed on us here and to see the land and the water through the eyes of visitors rather than through the eyes of Seasonal Affective Disorder. And that is why I can say that Birch Bay is one of the most picturesque communities in our area.
On this 30 Kilometer run we were about to embark on, we would take in the scenery along the bay, look across the water to get glimpses of Point Roberts, that little peninsula of America that you have to cross into Canada to get to, meander through Birch Bay State Park and pass Drayton Harbor and the resort homes that surround it. If the clouds lifted even a little, it would be a gorgeous route. I was committed to doing this race whatever the weather for three reasons. First, I needed the miles due to my failure the week before (see below). Secondly, the Whidbey Island Marathon is in two weeks on April 13th and it could still easily be pouring rain daily at that point. I’d better try to get used to it. And third, I really admire the Girls on the Run program, for which this race was raising funds, and wanted to show my support, not only by giving them my money but by being a Woman on the Run (not to be confused with a Woman who Runs with the Wolves)!
Bill and I arrived at the race start, collected our race numbers and timing chips and climbed back in the car to keep warm. We wouldn’t be running this race together but we’d start together, and he would run backwards to meet me at the end if he was feeling strong. That’s our new strategy, we run long races nowadays at our respective paces and then he comes to find me and offer moral support. This has been working well. My iPod is a good pace keeper until the very end of a long run when I feel can kill someone sooner than run another step or listen to another disco song. At that point, it’s great to have Bill’s smiling face come over a hill and hear his, “Hey beautiful. You look great.” I know he’s lying but it always effectively cheers me and gives me a little bounce back. So this was the strategy for the Birch Bay International Road Race.
At the appropriate time, we hustled up to the starting line and, when the race organizer gave the signal for us to start running, Bill and I waved goodbye to one another not to meet up again for at least three hours. By my calculations, this race would take me three hours and thirty-six minutes. The weather in Birch Bay proper was slightly better than it had been on the way up, so at least we didn’t have the heavy snow to contend with – nothing more than the cold and a slight mist off the salt water. I’d rigged a face mask out of a fleece scarf decorated with snow flakes that I wound around my neck twice and tied in the front. I pulled it up over my mouth to protect my rebellious crowned tooth as I started to run.
I jogged in front of two women who talked about the next day’s run to “Take Back Our Trails” in Bellingham. I listened intently to their conversation.
“It was ten AM on a Sunday morning when that woman was attacked,” one said.
“It’s crazy!” the other concurred. “You should be able to run at ten on a Sunday.” We all agreed. There should be rules. Ten AM on a Sunday morning is not the time to be attacked. When a woman has tucked her pony tail into her shirt so as to minimize her femininity, when she runs in the daylight on a well-traveled trail carrying her cell phone and her pepper spray, she has done her part. Did these attackers not realize they were breaking the rules, that if she had been running at ten PM alone on a secluded trail with her hair freely blowing in the wind, we would understand what she had done wrong. But on a Sunday morning!
I realized as I eavesdropped that it was absurd to be more offended by the attack because the runner had followed the woman runner’s code-of-safety-ethics, but we were. We wanted to believe we had the power to keep ourselves safe. Somehow we were forgetting, momentarily, that any attack at any time of day is an affront on a woman’s right to move about freely in her life.
I slowed and joined the conversation these two women were having and the topic shifted to which trails we ran in town and the precautions we each took to keep ourselves safe, further colluding in the illusion that there were ways of preventing being attacked.
Our pace was faster than I usually run. I asked them how far they were going and they said they were both doing only the 15 K. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up their pace for the whole 15 K, but I was glad of the company for the time being, knowing that I would eventually be running alone.
At the four K marker, our time was 24 minutes, which meant we were cruising along at about nine-plus minutes per mile. This being almost three minutes faster than I was accustomed to running, I could only keep up with them for about another ten minutes before I had to slow down. I bid them goodbye, exchanging names with one of them who lived near me so we might meet up and run together sometime. As I plunged forward, I felt my pace was still faster than twelve minutes a mile, but I was comfortable.
I had spent my week eating carbohydrates, laying off the wine, cutting back on coffee and cheese, stretching and drinking water. My body was happy with me and cooperating accordingly. The race course, on the other hand, was not as kind. I plodded on at a decent rate (for me) not knowing how far I had gone. I kept an eye on my watch and calculated my distance based on what I thought my pace was, but there were no markers on the course. Suddenly, all the runners turned into the Birch Bay State park. I followed, ready for a change in scenery. I should have been focusing on the beauty of the place, but as I rounded a corner there, one hour and eight minutes into my run, was the 7 K marker.
I started doing calculations in my head. At the pace I was going I should have completed a 10 K by now. Did they mean 7 MILES? But there was no way I could have run 7 miles in an hour and eight minutes, even with my first three at nine minutes a mile, was there? I knew I had dropped back almost to my usual pace after 5 K. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. The times weren’t making sense to me. As we all continued on and as I dropped to the back of the 30 K pack, the few K markers placed on the course continued to baffle me. When I finally reached the half-way point I sped up to catch one of the only four runners I could see, a woman in my age group whose pace was very similar to mine.
“Do your times seem right?” I asked her when I finally reached her.
“No,” she affirmed. “I looked at the map. We missed a turn at the State Park and I figure we added about 2 K by going around it instead of through it.”
“I knew something was wrong.” I pulled out my own map and studied it as we jogged along. “There was supposed to be a turn around and we never saw that,” I said.
“Yep. We all missed the first entry to the park, so we’re going to end up going 20 miles total, I guess.”
Oh my god, I thought. This was sad poetic justice after last weekend when I cut my run short by five miles and took a ride back to my car.
“Well, I need the miles anyhow,” I said, resigning myself to the situation. What could I do about it now?
“Me too,” she agreed. She was training for the Eugene, Oregon Marathon in May.
I ran ahead again to tell the couple in front of us what had happened. I’d overheard them talking about how their pace didn’t seem right. The woman confided in me that she was worried they would get lost since the foible in the course put us further back in the pack than they had expected to be. I assured them that both the woman behind us and I had maps and that my husband would meet up with me at some point and run us in. I had been either slightly in front of or behind them since the beginning of the race, so I assumed they would track with me the rest of the way.
During the second half of the run, I struggled. We all did. My iPod turned against me at the half-way mark and completely stopped working. And the energy of the crowd couldn’t help me because there was no crowed anymore. There would be a total of 86 finishers in the 30 K, which I now thought of as the 20 Miler, and we would be among the last four to cross the finish line. I set my mind on four hours and watched the minutes tick away. The man in the couple, now running several yards behind me, got a nasty cough and, not knowing how far away our next aid station would be, I gave him some of my water.
I should be able to report on the scenic detail of this run, since I had so much time to look at it, but my mind was elsewhere – wondering if the aid stations would close down before we came along, wondering if the race organizers might even take down the finish line, wondering if I had missed the turn onto Semi-Ah-Moo Parkway while I was wondering about other things.
But my worrying was all in vain. With the exception of one deserted aid station, there were attendants at each of them and someone following us in a van to give us directions. My knees started to smart on the last major down hill, but I knew I was going to make it. Somewhere in the last four miles, I pulled ahead of the rest of my tail-end cohort and was only able to see the lone woman runner far in the distance.
I told each of the aid stations that there were three people behind me and I entrusted my fellow runners to the race organizers and volunteers. This was a mistake, it turned out.
Bill met me with only one K to go. He’d had a hard run and confirmed that most runners in the race had taken the wrong route. We ran in together and, because all the volunteers had gone home, Bill awarded me my medal as I crossed the finish line and heard my ankle chip beep. Victorious and exhausted I raised my hands in triumph, grateful to be done and sure I could pull off the Whidbey Island Marathon in two weeks (well, we’ll see, won’t we).
The race organizers congratulated me and patted me on the back as I crossed the line at 3:51:26. Panting and on the point of collapse I said, “There are three people behind me!”
“We’ve got’em,” one of the organizers told me. “We’ve been tracking with you.”
We waited as the other woman with the map came over the finish line. Bill awarded her the medal with little fanfare besides a high five from me. Next two women came around the bend together. Again Bill awarded them their medals, but I was confused. I didn’t know those two were behind me. Where was the couple I had tracked with the whole race? We waited. Nothing happened.
“There are two more,” I told the organizers as they started tearing down the tents and disassembling the timing clock.
“No, they’re all in,” someone said.
“No, they aren’t,” I argued. “There is a couple, about forty-ish. A woman with a long grey braid down her back and a man with a curly pony tail. There’s no way they came in before me.”
“We haven’t seen them.” I kept insisting that they were still out there and eventually, the race organizers took heed.
Several of us hopped in our cars and drove the course and all the possible routes this couple might have taken if they had missed a turn. No one was able to locate them. Bill and I spent almost an hour driving and re-driving the course looking for any sign of these two lost strangers.
Today, the race results do not reflect this couple’s times, and I’m still worried that they’re roaming around out in Birch Bay in search of the finish line. I know what it is like to get lost, to know you are last and to wonder if anyone takes you seriously back there, working your hardest to find your way in, knowing the awards ceremony was completed before you were half-way through. Being last is like an empty water bottle when you are thirsty, like the hunger for a missed meal. You’re longing for something that is out of your reach any time soon. I know what the fear of being left for dead smells like. It smells like the dust kicked up from others’ running shoes as they pass you, like empty power gel packets, like exhaust when the course opens back up to traffic.
If you’re out there, fellow back-of-the-packers, and somehow you read this, don’t give up the dream of the marathon you told me you were training for. Don’t let a disorganized race take the wind out from under your wings. Keep running!!!
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Hitting the proverbial wall
Today the rain is coming out of the sky with a vengeance. I despise running in the cold and rain. But I live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in a place that ranges between 38 and 48 very wet degrees for the better part of ten months of the year. When I run in this weather, I bundle up with several layers and don hat and gloves and rain gear. The one thing I cannot figure out how to keep warm is my face. Several years ago I had a crown put on one of the molars on my left side and a teeny, tiny bit of the root was left exposed in the process. When I run in the inclement weather, as is inevitable around here, the cold hits my face and gives me a whopping ice cream headache that will not quit. Once this happens, I have to complete my run with something like a Charlie Horse pounding behind my left eye socket. Nothing warms it up and stops the throbbing except a hot shower.
Fortunately, this weekend I had the foresight to look at the weather forecast and chose to do my long run yesterday when the temperature was at the upper end of that ten degree range and the sun was shining. The conditions were nearly perfect for what I expected to be a 21 mile run – my longest single run before the Whidbey Island Marathon (which is Sunday, April 13, by the way). I could have wished for it to be a few degrees warmer, but this would be a futile waste of brain cells. We may not see 60 degrees around here until June.
So I strapped on my running belt with all my supplies securely in its zippered pouch and started out for four and a half hours of pounding. The beginning of the run was actually fairly pleasant. I took the same route I had run on my last final pre-marathon training run. Starting at the Squalicum Boat House near where the local whale-watching cruises depart in the summer, I ran past the harbor and took in the hundreds of sailboat masts and fishing boats advertising fresh salmon for sale. Most of the first four miles were in the sun and were populated with walkers and dogs and bicyclists and other runners. This is the best part of any run for me – the part where other creatures join me in seizing a moment in life, breathing in the same cool air that gives me a headache and using the same trails that take me out there and back here every week.
Bill met me after I had traversed into the woods and had been running in the shade for about one mile. One month ago, a woman was abducted and raped on one of our trails in the north part of our city. The running community has been shaken by this. We’ve always felt proud of how safe our extensive trail system is, how well-used and welcoming, even to lone women runners. The terrible violation of this woman runner has scared me and made me adamant about not running the more lonely parts of my training without companionship.
But Bill’s presence, along with a sense of safety, also gave me the perfect “out” when I hit my wall. We ran for an additional 5.5 miles on the Interurban Trail, which runs parallel to the shoreline looking out at the Puget Sound. To our right was the magnificent jutting Lummi Island, green and wooded, and the blue of the water, smiling at the unfamiliar sunshine that shimmered on its surface. To our left stood expensive, majestic homes built into the hillside with their super sized windows and towering chimneys. This part of the trail, as you can imagine, has vast charm, but for me, the overwhelming feeling was the drop in temperature as we progressed into the deepening shade.
By the time we hit our turn-around point in the parking lot at Clayton Beach, my left eye was throbbing and my energy was suddenly, completely depleted. In spite of the two energy gels and the granola bar I had consumed in the first ten and a half miles, I felt sleepy and sluggish. I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I could have lain down, nestled against the unthawed earth, and fallen asleep.
My car was more than ten miles away at that point, but I hatched a plan to “see how I felt” when we reached Bill’s car, which was only five miles away. Naturally, the closer we got to his vehicle, the more sure I became that I wouldn’t go one step further than I had to. The wine and cheese from the night before, the cold air, the option of stopping early and (I later realized by the dark yellow color of my pee) some slight dehydration, all weighed in and convinced me to throw in the towel and let Bill drive me the extra miles back to my car.
Demoralized, a half hour after reaching Bill’s car and our 16 mile mark, I stood in the shower and tried to justify my actions. Everyone hits the wall once in a while, after all. But I really needed those miles. I needed them to know I can do 26.2 in three weeks. I needed them to know I actually possess the psychological and physical endurance to complete that Whidbey Island race. I’ve run the marathon distance before, but my doubts about my running abilities are not assuaged in the least by this fact. This is a different time, a different course, a different continent. I have to be sure I can do it.
Next weekend I have another chance to string together more than 21 miles (though not all in one day). Saturday, we’ll run an 18.6 mile race in Birch Bay to support Girls on the Run, a local club that encourages girls in the third through fifth grades to start running and to run in 5K races around our county. I support this program and wish I’d encountered this kind of confidence building opportunity in my own childhood. Maybe I wouldn’t be so doubtful about my athletic capabilities now if I had. Bill will be running ahead of me in this race and his car will not be available to rescue me before the finish line. In order to get back to where I started, I’ll have to finish.
On Sunday we’ll run, along with many others in the city, a short but important 5K organized on the trail where that woman was raped. We’ll “take back our trails,” the newspaper says, and with any luck (okay – and determination) I’ll take back my miles.
Fortunately, this weekend I had the foresight to look at the weather forecast and chose to do my long run yesterday when the temperature was at the upper end of that ten degree range and the sun was shining. The conditions were nearly perfect for what I expected to be a 21 mile run – my longest single run before the Whidbey Island Marathon (which is Sunday, April 13, by the way). I could have wished for it to be a few degrees warmer, but this would be a futile waste of brain cells. We may not see 60 degrees around here until June.
So I strapped on my running belt with all my supplies securely in its zippered pouch and started out for four and a half hours of pounding. The beginning of the run was actually fairly pleasant. I took the same route I had run on my last final pre-marathon training run. Starting at the Squalicum Boat House near where the local whale-watching cruises depart in the summer, I ran past the harbor and took in the hundreds of sailboat masts and fishing boats advertising fresh salmon for sale. Most of the first four miles were in the sun and were populated with walkers and dogs and bicyclists and other runners. This is the best part of any run for me – the part where other creatures join me in seizing a moment in life, breathing in the same cool air that gives me a headache and using the same trails that take me out there and back here every week.
Bill met me after I had traversed into the woods and had been running in the shade for about one mile. One month ago, a woman was abducted and raped on one of our trails in the north part of our city. The running community has been shaken by this. We’ve always felt proud of how safe our extensive trail system is, how well-used and welcoming, even to lone women runners. The terrible violation of this woman runner has scared me and made me adamant about not running the more lonely parts of my training without companionship.
But Bill’s presence, along with a sense of safety, also gave me the perfect “out” when I hit my wall. We ran for an additional 5.5 miles on the Interurban Trail, which runs parallel to the shoreline looking out at the Puget Sound. To our right was the magnificent jutting Lummi Island, green and wooded, and the blue of the water, smiling at the unfamiliar sunshine that shimmered on its surface. To our left stood expensive, majestic homes built into the hillside with their super sized windows and towering chimneys. This part of the trail, as you can imagine, has vast charm, but for me, the overwhelming feeling was the drop in temperature as we progressed into the deepening shade.
By the time we hit our turn-around point in the parking lot at Clayton Beach, my left eye was throbbing and my energy was suddenly, completely depleted. In spite of the two energy gels and the granola bar I had consumed in the first ten and a half miles, I felt sleepy and sluggish. I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I could have lain down, nestled against the unthawed earth, and fallen asleep.
My car was more than ten miles away at that point, but I hatched a plan to “see how I felt” when we reached Bill’s car, which was only five miles away. Naturally, the closer we got to his vehicle, the more sure I became that I wouldn’t go one step further than I had to. The wine and cheese from the night before, the cold air, the option of stopping early and (I later realized by the dark yellow color of my pee) some slight dehydration, all weighed in and convinced me to throw in the towel and let Bill drive me the extra miles back to my car.
Demoralized, a half hour after reaching Bill’s car and our 16 mile mark, I stood in the shower and tried to justify my actions. Everyone hits the wall once in a while, after all. But I really needed those miles. I needed them to know I can do 26.2 in three weeks. I needed them to know I actually possess the psychological and physical endurance to complete that Whidbey Island race. I’ve run the marathon distance before, but my doubts about my running abilities are not assuaged in the least by this fact. This is a different time, a different course, a different continent. I have to be sure I can do it.
Next weekend I have another chance to string together more than 21 miles (though not all in one day). Saturday, we’ll run an 18.6 mile race in Birch Bay to support Girls on the Run, a local club that encourages girls in the third through fifth grades to start running and to run in 5K races around our county. I support this program and wish I’d encountered this kind of confidence building opportunity in my own childhood. Maybe I wouldn’t be so doubtful about my athletic capabilities now if I had. Bill will be running ahead of me in this race and his car will not be available to rescue me before the finish line. In order to get back to where I started, I’ll have to finish.
On Sunday we’ll run, along with many others in the city, a short but important 5K organized on the trail where that woman was raped. We’ll “take back our trails,” the newspaper says, and with any luck (okay – and determination) I’ll take back my miles.
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