Running With Myself

Last Sunday I ran the RaceVermont Fall Half Marathon in Shelburne, Vermont. It was a beautiful morning for a long run—cold and crisp and clear. I don’t live in Shelburne. In fact, I live 275 miles away in New Haven, Connecticut. But I am trying to run a half marathon in all 50 states. Before last Sunday I had run in 8 of the 50. As I knock them off my list, I have to go slightly farther from home to find states I have not yet run in. That is why I was in Vermont on a weekend when there were closer races to be run.

This was a small race—limited to 600 people—and the course was really interesting. It followed roads and trails and it took us near the shores of Lake Champlain. There were a couple of medium hills and lots of pretty scenery. Some of the races I have run lately have been huge, with thousands of runners, so this felt intimate. We didn’t have chips to time us and there were no clocks on the route to let us know our pace.

I never wear a watch or any sort of Garmin—I have a Luddite view of running gear—so in this particular race I had no idea of my pace as I ran. I could have asked another runner, but a few miles into the race I decided I would rather run without knowing my time. I never run against the other runners, but I often run against the clock. This time I decided to simply run against myself.

At mile 6 the course started on a long downhill that ended at mile 8 and then turned around and went back up that same long downhill stretch, only at this point it was now a long UPHILL stretch. When I got to the turnaround point I felt strong. I knew I still had about five miles left, but I also knew there was a big hill staring down at me. I decided to push myself up that hill at the edge of my ability. The guy I had been running next to for a half mile said something like, “You gonna put the fast shoes on now?” I looked over my shoulder, said “Yeah, I think I will,” and chugged up the hill.

It went well and when I got to mile 10 the course left the road and turned into the woods. The organizers had decided not to put any mile markers on the stretch of course that ran through the woods; not only did I not know my pace, I also had only a rough idea of how much race was left. Again, I decided to run against myself and my own desire to turn it down a notch and catch my breath. I told my body to find its edge and keep it there—sort of like setting the cruise control on the highway.


(Me, looking pained at Mile 12.5)

It turned out that the trail stayed in the woods for two-and-a-half miles and by the time it emerged we were on the road only a half-mile from the finish line. Even here there was a point at which my mind wanted to coast a bit but my body overrode and pushed on, right at its edge. I finished in one hour, forty-two minutes, and fifty-six seconds for a pace of 7:51 per mile. It was my fastest half marathon ever.

Today I realized that in fact I wasn’t running against myself at all in Vermont. In fact, I was running WITH myself and that is what made all the difference. There was no clock, no mile markers for me to obsess over, and no goal other than to stay at my edge. And the company was good.

Jet Lag Medicine

I have been away from home a lot this month. I was in Montana for 10 days and I am spending a week in Italy right now. Being gone so long, especially with so many time zones in between for a person to get used to, can be hard. Personally, I try to get on the local clock immediately. When I land I commit to not going to sleep until it is dark wherever I am. I make myself not think about what time it is in Connecticut, because that only reminds my body of what time it thinks it is.

I also try to spend as much time outside as I can to let my eyes, brain, and body receive all the clues the sun and its angle give as to time of day.

Even with these measures, jet lag can still hit hard, leaving me tired, grouchy, and “off” a bit.

This is where I find running comes in handy. I have been a runner since 2002, when Erica and I decided we were going to run a marathon. We made the decision in the winter and by October we each actually made it 26.2 miles through the Wineglass Marathon in Corning, NY. Running that marathon was, for me, like going from zero to 120 MPH in 6 seconds flat. (Okay, maybe not 120. After all, it did take me four and a half hours to finish.)

I went from not running at all to running way, way too much. In fact, I almost killed my running habit in its infancy. I took a month off after that race and then started back again, slowly. A few years later I had to take another long break because of some herniated disks in my lower back. Now I am much smarter about my running. Mostly because I listen to my body much better than I used to.

I have settled nicely into a rhythm where I run three times a week—generally Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each of these runs is four miles. Then I run again on Sunday, anywhere from 6 to 14 miles. These long Sunday runs are the anchor for my week and they keep me feeling grounded and regular. They also keep me within striking distance of being able to run a half marathon whenever I find a good one that fits my goal of running one in every state. So far, I have run half marathons in 8 states and I am signed up for 2 more this year—Vermont and Delaware.

When I travel, often all of this regularity gets thrown out the window. But I make sure my running shoes get thrown in suitcase and as soon as I can, I put them on and try to keep to my pattern.

In Venice the past few days it was hard. In fact, I didn’t run there. The streets are narrow and full of people and I just didn’t make it happen. Now we are 18 miles from Venice in a town called Treviso and yesterday I finally made it out for a run. As soon as I did I could feel my body saying “YES! THIS is what we needed.” There is a familiarity to the process of getting dressed for a run, heading outside, picking a direction and then starting. Moving through the world that way is as natural and comforting a thing as I can do when I am far from home and way off schedule. It settles me right away. Running is medicine and meditation and magic and I love that I can do it anywhere.

Today my daughter and I are getting on a train to go back to Venice and see a few things we didn’t get to see earlier in the week. But tomorrow—tomorrow starts with a run.

The Perils and Pleasures of Being High

My life is lived mostly at ground level, in two dimensions. I look up sometimes, but I hardly ever consider the spaces much above my head as part of the immediate physical world I inhabit.

This weekend my world expanded to three dimensions for a little while as I was running up the highest point in New Haven. It is called East Rock and it is a 350-foot high basalt formation that, even if I am generous, cannot be said to “loom” over the city. It more-accurately “glances over the shoulder” of New Haven. There is a road that leads to the top and I like to run up this road most Sundays.

This past Sunday I was near the top of East Rock, running along the road that skirts the edges of a cliff in some places and offers a good view of the Mill River valley below. The drop from the road down to the valley floor is at least 300 feet. As I neared the edge, two turkey vultures blasted up into view mere feet ahead of me, riding an updraft from below and startling the poop out of me. It looked to me like someone had yanked an invisible string and pulled these birds up from the valley floor and high into the air in front of me.

I stopped and watched them for a while as they continued to rise without even a flap of their wings. Vultures are not known for their good looks, but these two birds were the epitome of grace as they made the tiniest of adjustments to their outermost wing feathers to affect changes in their drift and glide. Watching these birds reminded me of the third dimension I walk around in all the time. My wife skydives for fun, so she looks at the air above us differently than I do. She certainly sees it as another medium, like water, that humans locomote through. I just about never think of it that way, but watching those vultures made it clear to me that there is a third dimension—life is not just length and width. There is also depth.

As they soared out and away across the valley and toward West Rock I lost sight of them and continued my run.

And as I did it came to me that most of my relationships are also lived in those same two dimensions. There is a length and a width to them, but the depth is something I hardly ever recognize or explore. The times when this third dimension comes most reliably into focus are when I or someone close to me says something honest. Often the truth catches me by surprise and all in a moment reminds me of just how surface-y and full of shit most of my moments are by contrast.

Being honest and saying what is really there not only makes that third dimension in my relationships “pop” into focus, it also provides lift to reach some pretty amazing places if I am willing to stay in them. Choosing to love someone is a brave decision that loses much of its power if, over time, that love is lived out in two dimensions instead of three.

Reach the Beach 2010--I Learned a Lot

Exactly one week ago I was at Cannon Mountain Ski Area in the White Mountains of Northern New Hampshire, sitting through a safety briefing in preparation for my third running of the Reach the Beach long distance relay. I am a member of the team called the Rosie Ruiz Fan Club and Reach the Beach has become a major touchstone in my year. I love this race so much that I find myself looking forward to the next race from almost the moment the current year’s race ends.

Reach the Beach is one of those things that might sound like torture to an outsider, but is instead exquisitely pleasurable pain to the participants. It has many of the ingredients cult leaders use to brainwash followers: close quarters, physical challenges, lack of sleep, a brutal schedule, abnegation of self, and gallons and gallons of Gatorade.

In the past, I have been the seventh runner on our team of twelve. This means I have run the seventh, nineteenth, and thirty-first legs of the thirty-six-leg relay. Due to last minute changes this year I became runner number twelve, which means I was to run the twelfth, twenty-fourth, and thirty-sixth legs. I was going to be the runner who actually reached the beach, as the last 100 yards of the race cross the sands of Hampton Beach State Park. In spite of having run the race twice before and having a good sense of what to expect, this was the first year I have ever doubted my own ability to actually reach the beach.


To understand why, I should go back to Thursday night before we began the race. We stayed in a hotel in Lincoln, New Hampshire and I spent much of the night awake and suffering from a painful earache and sore throat. Once the sky lightened and day broke, I felt a little better, but I was already worried about what would happen if I got sick during the race. I tried not to worry my teammates or myself too much, so I kept a positive attitude and decided to hang out in the hotel parking lot, surreptitiously placing small magnets on the vans of other Reach The Beach teams.



Our captain, (and my wife), Erica had ordered hundreds of magnets that said “You’ve been ridden by Rosie Ruiz.” It was great fun to tag other teams’ vans with this little magnetic grafitto. As it turned out, several other teams had the same idea this year. One team, called The A-Team, had small magnets printed up with the image of Mr. T and the words “You been tagged, sucka.” By the time the whole team was up and we were having breakfast, it was clear to me that something was pretty wrong. My throat hurt like hell when I swallowed and I had what felt like a fever.

The rules of Reach the Beach are strict about what a team must do if a runner has to drop out. Rather than explain the process here, suffice it to say that everyone ends up with far more miles than they signed up for AND the legs they run are sometimes drastically different than what they are mentally prepared for. What I decided to do was take some Ibuprofin, find some throat lozenges, and buy an ear warmer. That, and wait to say anything to anyone until after my first leg was over.

Our first runner—a new member of The Rosie Ruiz Fan Club named Liz—started at Cannon Mountain at 2:00 in the afternoon. I knew that I would not be running my first leg until all the other runners on the team had done theirs—that gave me seven or eight hours to prepare. We got a late lunch, played Frisbee in a parking lot, and then started our legs when the baton got to us around 5:30. Being last to go of the six runners in my van, I didn’t start running until around 11:00 pm. So, tired, sick, anxious about the rest of the race, and worried about letting my teammates down, I set off alone down a dark stretch of trail through the pine woods of White Lake State Park. I wanted to go slow enough to have something left for my next leg, thinking I could at least finish two of my three—leaving my teammates in a small lurch rather than a giant one.

At this point in the race, teams are spread out pretty wide so there were only about five other runners in my 3.87-mile stretch of road. I kept what felt like a slow and steady pace and soon enough saw the flashing lights of the transition area up ahead and saw Liz waiting under the spotlights for the handoff. I gave her the wristband that acts as a baton and asked Erica for my time. She told me 29 minutes. I set off on a coughing jag that lasted long enough for me to do some mental math and came up with a pace of 7:30 per mile. Which is faster than I ever run.


Generally after a run it is a good idea to cool down by walking around a bit. But the rule for Reach the Beach is “Forget the cool down, get in the van.” So, I got in the van, coughed up half a lung, choked down a bottle of Gatorade, and settled in as we drove to a hotel 40 miles up the road. We had reserved two rooms to shower and nap for two hours before driving to our next rendezvous with our teammates from the other van. I took as hot a shower as I could stand, popped three more Ibuprofins, and crawled into bed, where I fell asleep wondering how on earth I was ever going to run my next two legs when I my right eardrum felt like it had been pierced by a rusty pin and my throat hurt so much I could hardly swallow.

The alarm went off what felt like two minutes later and we got up, got dressed, and got back in the van. I knew something was seriously wrong with me when I didn’t even want coffee. We drove to the next meeting point and our first runner, Christian, got out and headed to the hand-off zone. Our other van’s final runner, Damian, came up the hill and out of the darkness, handed the wristband to Christian, and disappeared into his van, off to get his own two-hours of sleep.

During this series of legs the runners in my van had some of their hardest work. Joe had a 9+ mile section with a 5-mile climb. Rodrigo ran an 8-mile leg with a short, steep climb that would kill a lesser man. Agata finished her leg looking strong and pumped up, (her tough leg had already happened her first time out.) Erica ran through a sore foot and managed a fast time for her leg, as well. As my turn approached I got out the course map book and took a final look at the elevation profile for my coming 6.87-mile leg. It was relatively flat with one 100-foot climb just before the end. The people in my van asked what sort of support I would need, and I asked them to drive ahead to mile 4.5 and wait for me with a bottle of Gatorade. That is exactly what they did and when I stopped for a moment to take a drink and hand Erica my long sleeve shirt, I knew that all I had left was 2.4 miles. Sure, there was that hill between me and the end of my leg, but 2.4 miles was something I could do even if I had a fever, you know?

Turned out the hill was not so bad. And because I had held a little bit in reserve in order to make it up a much bigger hill than I actually found, I was able to finish my second leg at a good clip. I came into Bear Brook State Park after 56 minutes of running and handed the bracelet to Liz, who took off for her final leg looking strong. I stood alone for a minute before my teammates came to me and in that minute I could tell that I had a fever. Shit. What was I going to do about my last leg? The second one passed at an 8:09-per-mile pace, which was still faster than I had wanted to go.

What I decided to do was stretch out on one of the van seats and try to sleep. Joe drove the van through some of the heaviest traffic those smalltown backroads of New Hampshire have ever seen and I managed to get a 45-minute nap. We stopped at a breakfast joint and got some food and coffee and used a VERY clean bathroom before piling back in and heading to the next hand-off point. All through the race the six runners in our other van ran faster than we expected them to and this time was no exception. Alex, Weldon, Liz, Tom, Tammy, and Damian were in the midst of their final legs and they were pushing hard to be done.



At some point in this transition from their van to ours I decided that I could hold it together long enough to run one more 4.09-mile leg. I knew it would be a long, hard, trudge, but I didn’t know it would turn out to be one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life.

To make it through, I broke the leg into many small chunks and then just tried to get through each chunk without stopping. At first it was something like, “Just make it to the next intersection up ahead in the distance.” With one mile left, when the course was running along the Hampton Beach Boardwalk, I was going from bench to bench, focusing two hundred feet at a time. As the course left the boardwalk and entered the sand I was down to just trying to make it from step to step. The people who lay out the course must have a masochistic streak in them to force runners across the sand after 208 miles and little sleep, yet this is what they do every year. When I hit the sand I muttered a foul word with every step.

When I crossed under the banner with the rest of Team Rosie escorting me in, it was all I could do to not collapse on the sand and break into sobs. It is certainly what my body wanted me to do. I had spent 40 hours keeping my shit together and my executive function was 99% depleted. There was no super ego and precious little ego left and my id had a fever and wanted to be home in bed. Yet I knew we still had a few hours at the beach to grab some food, take a dip, and celebrate a little before going back to our regular lives in Ithaca and Lowell and Boston and New Haven and Texas. Then there was the three-hour drive back to New Haven.

I managed to hold it together for a few more hours until Rodrigo, Joe, Erica, and I got into the van and started the drive back. I took a seat in the back and lay down curled up inside a sleeping bag. The other three were up front and they were talking and listening to music. Once I was sure they couldn’t hear me over the sounds of the van wheels and the music and their conversation, I gave up control and just let myself drop down into how utterly crappy I felt. It came out as tears and sobs and foul words and lasted a good while. When it was over and my swamp was temporarily drained I sat up and we pulled over to get a few vats of coffee from one of the several thousand Dunkin Donuts in Massachusetts.

The fever hit in earnest that night on the way home and lasted for six days, forcing me to miss several days of work. The doctor said it was the flu and laughed in my face when I told him about the onset of symptoms and how I had run 14 miles at an 8:21 pace AFTER realizing I was sick.

Erica and I have a euphemism for when an experience totally and absolutely sucks; we say, “I learned a lot.” In the particular case of Reach the Beach 2010, I can truly say that I learned a lot. As I say that, I am being only partially euphemistic. The camaraderie, challenge, and real joy of running Reach the Beach are as much a part of it as the pain, suffering and depletion. In fact, I imagine that if you ask me in a few months how the race was, I am pretty sure I will tell you it was great. And, honestly, it was.

I ran more than 14 miles at a fast pace (for me), met some great new people, helped set a team record by finishing in 26 ½ hours for a team pace of 7:35 per mile, and learned a lot about my own capacity for toughing out a hard situation. I held it together until I didn’t have to, and in a twisted way, that felt good. I learned a lot.




Link to more pictures on Picasa:

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Going Half Hog

I went up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire last weekend for a half marathon. It was part of a commitment I made to myself last year that I would run a half marathon every three months until I die. (If you’re going to do something, you might as well go whole hog, right?) Since the promise, I have run the Missoula (MT) Half Marathon twice, the Monson (MA) Memorial Half Marathon, the LOCO Half at the Hamptons (NH), and Boston’s Run to Remember Half Marathon.

Sunday was a beautiful day, so as I waited for the race to start I sat outside stretching in the grass behind Portsmouth High School. After a while I noticed an older woman standing not so far away and, because talking to strangers does not come naturally to me, I made myself walk over and start a conversation with her. Her name was Nancy and she was running the Seacoast Half Marathon as the final leg in her goal to race a half marathon in each of the fifty United States.

We talked for twenty minutes and her story impressed the heck out of me. She didn’t once talk about her times or her pace. For her it was all about being in the race. My conversation with Nancy ended when we got the “ten minutes ‘til start” announcement. We wished each other luck and shortly after, I lost sight of Nancy. Based on the fire and zest for life she showed during our conversation, I am sure she finished and made good on her goal.

While I was running through Portsmouth, my wife, Erica, was jumping out of a perfectly good airplane three times. These jumps were part of a commitment she has made to get licensed to jump on her own anywhere, anytime. (Talk about whole hog.)

After the race, during the 200-mile drive home, I got to thinking about Nancy and about Erica and about going whole hog. And I made up my mind right there on the spot—right where I-95 gets onto I-495 up in the northeast corner of Massachusetts—that I am going to do the same as Nancy. I am going to run a half marathon in all 50 states. I can’t yet put a timeframe on the deal, but I am going to do it.

I have five states down already, if you include the full marathon I ran in Corning, New York in 2002. If you don’t count the Wineglass Marathon, then I have four states down and 46 to go. [I guess this is one of the many technical decisions I will have to make along the way. Nancy was explaining that several of her halfs went through more than one state. She had to decide if those races counted as one state or more. (She decided to count those multi-state races as only one state.)]

Well, what the heck? Here goes nothing. I hereby commit to running a half marathon in every state in the union before I die. So help me, God. I think I will call it going “half hog.” I will keep you posted.

Running on the Hedonic Treadmill

One excellent benefit of being married to an academic who studies human behavior is I sometimes get to learn about fascinating theories and ideas of human thoughts, motives, and actions. Lately, I have found myself thinking a lot about one particular theory. It is Brickman and Campbell’s idea of the Hedonic Treadmill. Brickman and Campbell gave this name to the idea that humans develop a happiness “set point” early in life. This set point is fairly stable and it is the level of happiness to which we return after our temporary highs and lows fade away. Other researchers have expanded on Brickman and Campbell’s idea and now there is a Hedonic Treadmill Theory. It describes “the tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of major goals.

 

According to the hedonic treadmill, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.” (from Wikipedia) When I first started running, back in March of 2002, I wore Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops and struggled to go 2.3 miles. It hurt a lot. I slowly improved and by the summer I was upping my longest run by two miles every two weeks. I was training for a marathon and I began to look forward to my long Sunday runs. I got new shoes—shoes made for running. I can remember the first time I ran 10 miles. I was high as a kite, reveling in my accomplishment. I couldn’t really believe that I was able to run that far without stopping. 

The best training run I have ever had was one August morning when I stepped outside our house in Trumansburg, New York and ran across the rolling farmland and hills between Cayuga Lake and Seneca Lake and ended up 18 miles away in Watkins Glen. Eighteen frickin’ miles! It was amazing. And then that October I ran a full marathon—26.2 miles. Sure, it took four and a half hours, but I did it. You would think the net effect of having run a marathon would be pretty positive and would last a long time. I would have thought so, too. But you and I would both be wrong. The actual net effect has been one easily predicted by the hedonic treadmill theory. 

In the last 10 months I have run four half marathons, one twenty-kilometer race, and one 208-mile relay race through New Hampshire from the mountains to the coast. Yesterday I ran a half marathon in Boston. It was a beautiful morning, I was with friends, and I had decided not to focus on my time but instead to just run at whatever speed felt good and to be happy with finishing. And yet today, when I went to the Cool Running website to check the results, I had a palpable sense of disappointment when I saw my time. 8 minutes and 50 seconds per mile. Just three months ago I ran a half marathon a full 58 seconds per mile faster. God, sometimes being a human is so stupid. Why can’t I just relish the accomplishment of having run 13.1 miles? It is not easy to run that far—not easy at all. T

he odd thing is that while I was running I was truly and fully able to set aside my expectations of finishing in a certain amount of time. I really did simply enjoy the company and the weather and the people on the sidelines and the feeling of moving strongly and confidently in my body through the world. I was happy. Yet not even 24 hours later, the happiness has faded away and the one feeling I am left with is a vague sense of disappointment. Given its name, it really shouldn’t surprise me that the hedonic treadmill theory applies to my running, but sure enough, it does.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I have been running on the Farmington Canal trail through Hamden a lot recently. Isabel has gymnastics class several times a week and the trail is a short drive from her gym. This gives me two or three excellent opportunities in the midst of an often-busy workweek to get out and run four or five miles without feeling like I should be somewhere else, doing something else.

Since the New Year, I have seen the same hawk, perched in the same tree, each time I have run the trail. The time of day is always the same, the tree is always the same, and the bird is always the same. I am not really sure how I even saw it the first time. It sits so still and its mottled feathers match the bark of the trunk it tucks up against so perfectly that it is sometimes hard to spot, even though I now know exactly where to look.

I have gotten to the point that I now stop and say hi to the bird. (My daughter thinks this is slightly crazy.)

Each time I have run the trail these past three weeks, it has been cold and often it has been snowy. There have been very few other humans out there in that oddly beautiful little valley running through some fairly developed neighborhoods near some heavily trafficked roads. I have had a lot of time and space and quiet to let my mind wander the way it will during a good run.

Where my mind has wandered lately is to the idea of “change.” New Year’s resolutions are all about making changes. Barack Obama ran hard on the notion of making necessary changes. My wife and I have been contemplating what sorts of changes to make in our lives.

Yet, the status quo has such power and things can feel so frozen.

As I run through that valley and hear the stream gurgling through the snow-covered rocks, it feels like winter will not end. Actually, that doesn’t quite explain the feeling. Rather than winter not ever ending, it feels as if the changes the Earth and Sun need to go through to make winter turn to spring will never happen. It is not a feeling of hopelessness, but rather one of powerlessness. Spring absolutely WILL happen. There is just nothing I can do to make it happen any sooner. And as a result, winter feels like the permanent state of affairs.

A few days ago I thought about getting the hawk’s opinion on this idea but when I stopped to try, one look at him told me he would not understand. One look at him told me that he is patience personified, (or should I say “avified?) That hawk would not want to make spring come any sooner. That hawk is waiting. It is what he does. He waits. Spring comes.

High Plains Running

I went for the craziest ten-mile run of my life this morning. Six inches of cold, powdery snow fell two days ago and then a steady 25 to 30 miles-per-hour wind started blowing from the West. Sometimes after a storm, the wind comes down the East slope of the Rockies and out into the Plains, sweeping everything not tied down out ahead of it. 

The snow streaks across the roads and freezes into a super-slick layer of black ice or gathers into drifts many-inches deep halfway across the lanes of traffic. On a short drive from Billings to Laurel yesterday we passed at least five cars that had spun off the highway and into the ditches on either side of the road. 

I am signed-up to run a half marathon in New Hampshire on February 15, so I am on a training schedule that had me doing a ten-mile run today. It seemed like a good idea for me to get out into the cold and the wind—(mid-February on the coast of New Hampshire might just be the same)—so I put on my new Secret Santa running shorts from my cousin Nicole and an undershirt beneath my running shirt and out the door I went. I got on First Avenue and headed uphill, slowly running my way out of the valley. 

It was very windy and as the road turned slightly east of north, it struck me that the wind that was whipping me along from behind would soon enough be pummeling me from the front when I turned back for the return five miles. The snow from two days ago was still very light and powdery and the wind was such that the blowing snow never got any higher than six inches off of the ground. It whipped across the fields and across the road in a serpentine motion—looking more like smoke or steam than snow. The look of the blowing snow combined with the way it stung my ankles and lower calves to make me think of malicious spirits. 

I was reminded of Tolkein’s description of Ring Wraiths or the movie depiction of Voldemort in the first Harry Potter film—before He Who Shall Not Be Named has found a body to inhabit. There was one advantage to the relentless wind that I could not have predicted in advance of my run. Wildlife on the sides of the road couldn’t hear me coming until I was right next to them. In this way I managed to get within 20 feet of a bald eagle as it stood in the snow and picked at the frozen carcass of a mule deer. When the bird finally saw me it didn’t lurch or panic at all. It fixed me in its sharp yellow eye, held steady for a long moment, and then simply opened its wings into the strong headwind and with a slight change in the angle of its feathers it rose up and drifted away in a graceful arc to the east, out over a stumpy cornfield.

I watched the bird for a long moment and then continued my run. By the time I had gone another quarter mile up the road the eagle had circled back around and was once again tearing chunks off of the roadkill deer. Once I had gone five miles up the road, out of the valley and into the high plains, I had gotten into a rhythm and felt the impulse to just keep running and running and running. 

The land is so big and the sky so open and the morning so extreme that part of me wanted to be extreme, too. What would happen if I just kept going? How far could I go? My body felt like a machine and the motion was hypnotizing. What I really wanted was to be that eagle and be carried on the wind for as long as it would blow. I felt myself disappearing into the landscape—a tiny dot in the vast sage and scrub landscape. 

I had no sense of struggle, no awareness of the cold. I was simply moving and wanted to keep moving. Eventually I turned around, into the wind, and the run became work again. A friendly woman driving by stopped and asked if I wanted a ride back to town. She was apparently moved to pity by the crust of ice coating my lower legs and my beard and mustache. I politely declined her offer and made it back to Grandpa Andy’s house, glad I had made myself go out and sure that my half marathon would be better because of it. I am also glad that I have my memory of that eagle and of the feeling of self-erasure that running can sometimes bring.

Saved By Zero

Erica has been out of town for the week and as a result I have been living my days close to the bone. There is not a lot of wiggle room in my schedule, what with work and a daughter and a dog. It feels as if each moment is already accounted for before I even get out of bed. As a result, I have not had any time to run. No time to think, either.

Until today, that is. Today I made time for BOTH running and thinking. Isabel had gymnastics from 4 until 5:45 and I made damn sure to bring my running clothes with us. Her gym is near the Farmington Canal trail, so as soon as her bare feet hit the padded floor to begin warm-ups my sneakered feet hit the macadam to begin my six miles. It was sunny and cool and perfect for a relaxed run.

A few Fridays ago I stumbled into the joys of an end-of-the-work-week run and now I am hooked. I have never had a problem just letting my mind drift while running (see my most recent blog entry) so my Friday afternoon runs become a sort of moving meditation for me. Today was no different in that for much of the first mile my mind was noisy with static left over from the day. But as my body warmed up and I settled into a comfortable pace my mind became quiet…

…mostly.

Floating around through the quiet in a sinuous, twisty sort of way was the song “Saved By Zero” by The Fixx. If you know the song then you may remember that it was a hit back in 1983. I don’t think I have heard it since the eighties, but there it was today, providing the soundtrack to my run. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I liked the song back when it was a hit so its presence in my head was not UNwelcome. It was just a little surprising, that’s all.

Surprising enough that I snapped back to a more focused level of consciousness and tried to think about what may have invited The Fixx into my run. After a half mile it came to me. I remembered seeing an interview on MTV in the fall of 1983 in which the lead singer, Cy Curnin, was asked to explain what the opaque lyrics to “Saved By Zero” mean. (Please, please don’t even ask me how I still know the name of the lead singer of The Fixx—I just DO, okay?)

Mr. Curnin talked about being in a mental space where he could, in effect, cancel gravity in his brain and allow all the things on his mind to become weightless and just float up and out of his stream of thought until there was nothing--zero. He said that he could then pay attention to see which thoughts fell back into focus first and most insistently. It was a way for him to prioritize.

I hadn’t done it on purpose, but as I ran I had done the same thing Cy Curnin did. My mind had been full of competing concerns, each buzzing around, calling for my attention. But then by mile two they had all been thrown up into the air, where they were floating momentarily in zero-gravity while I just ran. And into the empty space (that had been so annoyingly full a mile ago) stepped my memory of Cy Curnin and his paean to meditation.

I decided to look up, (metaphorically), and see what was floating around so compliantly as I ran mostly empty-brained. I could see my students up there—each begging me to think about how their week had been and what I could be doing to challenge them more. I also saw my daughter and my worry that I had been on auto-pilot with her this week instead of really being with her. And there was my wife and my excitement for her as she explores where to take her many skills and gifts. I also caught a glimpse of myself and my growing anticipation for whatever will come next for me in life.

There was the Dow Jones Industrial Average off by 18% this week and all of the repercussions that has on our retirement “savings.” There was also Barack Obama with his growing lead in the polls and my growing fear that he will be killed before he can become President. I also thought I saw our roof and its leaks and its shockingly high replacement cost. Oh, and even though it was hiding behind all the other floaters, I am pretty sure advancing middle age was up there too.

Being able to examine them all dispassionately from a distance was a real gift. And it got me through three miles of quickish running with nary a thought of pain or shortness of breath. As I neared the beginning of the last mile I decided to let the thoughts fall as they would and just notice what came down fastest and first to claim my full, refocused, relaxed attention.

And there it fell, unnoticed amid all the weighty issues and the clamor and hubbub of events: What should I make for dinner?

Head in the Clouds

I went for a run yesterday morning. Tropical Storm Hanna was forecast to hit later in the day and I needed to get a run in before the weather came. It was humid. Steamy. Tropical, even. When I got to the top of East Rock the wind became slightly more insistent. The air seemed even thicker. And there were wisps of clouds below me. East Rock is only 365 feet above sea level, but it somehow seemed higher with a solid ceiling of grey above and smaller scraps of clouds blowing by below, between me and the rooftops of my neighborhood.
It reminded me of a time In Yemen when I hitched up out of the desert to a mountaintop village and then sat on the edge of the world looking back down 6000 feet at the sand of the Arabian Tihama. Huge birds of prey were riding the updrafts and I was absolutely convinced they were simply having fun in the wind, maybe having a contest to see who could rise the farthest without flapping her wings, (I still am convinced, in fact.)
I saw a tiny speck-of-a-cloud just above the desert sands far off in the Tihama. As I watched, this flimsiest wisp of water vapor blew inland and started to ride the wind up the face of the mountain I was perched atop. As it rose, it expanded and became more substantial.
It probably took about thirty minutes, but by the time it got to me at the mountaintop that tiny cloud had become a storm. I had seen it coming from miles away, yet still I just sat there and allowed the grey to engulf me. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in a minute, the wind picked up, and a fine mist soaked me to the skin. It is one of my favorite memories of my time in Yemen.


Hanna didn’t really live up to her advance publicity, but I do want to thank her for the memory.

Sweet, Sweet Suburbia

For Proust, it was a mouthful of pastry mixed with tea that opened the floodgates and brought his childhood back with so much detail that it took volumes to describe it fully in his magnum opus Remembrance of Things Past. For me it was nothing so literary, nor so tasty. For me it was a sweaty run on a humid summer Saturday.

I was in Delaware this weekend to visit my mom in the wake of her recent hip-replacement surgery. Her operation was five weeks ago and ever since I have been trying to find a time to go see her. This weekend Erica and Isabel were in Montana, so it seemed like the perfect chance to head out on a road trip with just me and Ginger, (the Vomitty Wonder GoldenDoodle) in our 1999 Volvo sedan. I mention the car here not because it affects the story in any way, but simply because Ginger and I spent eleven of our 36 hours this weekend in the car and it struck me as rude to leave the car out of the narrative entirely. Now that the car has had its cameo, I shall not mention it again.

Anyway, I got to Delaware early Saturday afternoon and sat with my parents as Barack Obama introduced his Vice- Presidential selection, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, to the world. My parents and I do not see eye to eye on politics. We don’t even see eye to bellybutton. So as we watched Senators Obama and Biden give their short speeches, we nearly came to blows. At one point I remember towering over my mom as she commented on the foreign-ness of Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s name. I may have even said something like, “Oh Yeah?!? Why don’t you grab your cane and STAND UP and say that? Old Lady!” The atmosphere in their living room grew a little testy.

So at some point in the back-and-forth about flag lapel pins and abandoned first wives, I decided I should go for a run. For some reason I was having a hard time making myself run last week. Last weekend I did a great 12-mile training run up East Rock and back, twice. But ever since, my enthusiasm for running had disappeared. So I took the impetus provided by a good political mud fight and turned it into the spark that got me out the door for a run around my parents’ suburban neighborhood.

After just a few blocks I found my feet had an agenda. They took me out of Foulk Woods, into Chalfonte, through Surrey Park and over to McDaniel Crest, and then into Fairfax. (In northern Delaware each subdivision has a name and, to those in the know, those names carry much information about the socio-economic status of the people who live there.) I went by Bonsall Park, Fairfax North Park, and Fairfax South Park. I ran by 228 Waverly Road and 113 Woodrow Avenue--the first two houses I lived in as a child. Between the two houses, I passed by St. Mary Magdalene Elementary School, where I was educated from kindergarten through sixth grade.

As it turned out, I was on a tour of my childhood without having planned any such thing.

I ran by our old houses and the houses of my old friends, and the McDonalds where they used to sell ten cherry pies for a dollar on Washington’s Birthday, and the Wawa convenience store where I used to buy baseball cards, and the park where I used to play Little League Baseball, and the other park where we used to build rock-and-clay dams across the creek to create swimming holes, and Chris Campion’s house where his dad had Playboy magazines hidden in his sock drawer, and Mrs. Quinn’s house where we used to earn a dime for every Japanese beetle we could pick off her rose bushes and place in a Mason jar with gasoline, and the even-other park where we took archery lessons and got to shoot arrows at helium balloons as they floated up at the ends of long strings. I ran by all these places and at the end of my run it was clear to me that I had one heckuva happy childhood.

As an adult I look at suburbia as a sterile place where cars rule and people don’t know their neighbors. But the suburbia I grew up in was different. To me it was far from sterile. In fact, it was fertile ground for imagination, friendship, and just-plain-fun. All the neighbors knew which family I belonged to. By the summer between fifth and sixth grades I could pretty much ride my bike anywhere in a 20-square mile area with our house in the middle. My grandmother and several aunts, uncles, and cousins lived in that same 20-square mile area, as did many of my teachers and all of my friends.

I felt free and trusted and powerful in a way I am afraid to let my daughter feel. She does NOT have the run of the neighborhood. She does not have family every few blocks where she can stop for a drink if she gets thirsty. She might never know the freedom I had as a child to just explore the world without thinking of it as a dangerous place. Growing up in suburban Wilmington, Delaware in the 1970s was a real gift for me. I developed an ease and comfort in the physical world that allowed me to feel alright about going away to college. My security in the world made it okay for me to join the Peace Corps and live in Yemen for two years after college.

The freedom my parents gave me on my bicycle left me with a strong desire to see what is around the next turn or over the next hill, or even in the next country. I never realized it before that run two days ago, but my childhood in Delaware set the stage for so much of who I am today. My run through my childhood could not have come at a better time in my life. It was a good reminder for me of a time when the future was all in front of me and the only limits were those I placed on myself.

By the time I got back to my parents’ house our political differences were long forgotten and I had a good visit.

Running is NOT a Metaphor

The website for the race said the course was "relatively flat and fast." I guess that was true--in the same way that the Rockies are "relatively flat" compared to the Himalayas. It was a ten-mile race and as I made a turn during mile-five, a white wall loomed up in the road, about a quarter mile ahead--right in the middle of the route. As I got closer it became clear that it was, in fact, not a white wall at all. It was a section of road angling sharply upward with bright sun shining on it, making it look white. I guess it was "relatively flat."

I am fully aware that humans have a built-in predisposition to overestimate the steepness of hills, especially when we are already tired from running. This was proven nicely by a University of Virginia Professor named Dennis Proffitt. Even given this predisposition, the hill I saw looming up before me had to be at least 2oo feet high and at 30 degree pitch.



I told the volunteer who was directing traffic something witty like, "Hills are stupid," and then put my head down and trudged up the alpine incline. To keep my mind occupied I set myself a challenge. I decided to think of a topic I could write about using running as a metaphor. Once I started thinking about running as a metaphor, my mind bubbled over with possibilities.

Getting a degree, writing a short story or a book, being married--all of these are analogous to running a long distance. It is easy enough to match up step-for-step and detail-for-detail how any of these activities, (as well as many others), are like running. There is the idea that you start slow and work your way into shape over many weeks and months. There is the reality that some runs are easier than others--and unpredictably so. There is the truth that any goal worth achieving takes commitment and work.

I got to the top of that particular hill, cursing myself for choosing to come out and run early on a beautiful Sunday morning instead of staying home and enjoying some coffee on the porch while reading the New York Times. I caught my breath and continued running when I came around a curve in the road and saw--you guessed it--another hill.

I laughed out loud. I felt like I was stuck in an Escher drawing. The racecourse was a loop that started at sea level and ended at sea level, yet somehow it went only uphill. It was at that moment that the truth of running hit me full-on: Running is NOT a metaphor. Running is just running and sometimes it stinks.

Missoula Half Marathon

Yesterday’s half marathon in Missoula, Montana was great. The race began outside of town on a road that descended for two miles through a heavily wooded area. It sometimes gets very hot in Montana in the summer, so race organizers scheduled a 6 a.m. gun, (or cannon, in this case). It was 52 degrees and the sky was clear and blue. Perfect running weather.
Erica and I ran the first five miles together and we saw a bald eagle carrying a fish back to its nest and another bald eagle perched in a treetop just over the race course, perplexedly watching 731 half-marathoners plod by, earthbound and sweaty.
I trained much smarter for the race than I have in the past and as a result I felt good the whole way. I am not a fast runner so I was hoping to finish the race in less than two hours. I ended up doing a little better than I had even hoped and finished the 13.1 miles in 1 hour 54 minutes and a few seconds. That works out to 8:43 per mile, which for me is pretty good. I was very happy with the result.
Next race is a 10-miler in Branford on August 3, then a 12.2-miler in New Haven on Labor Day, and then a 212-mile relay through New Hampshire in mid-September. It is called Reach the Beach and it is the reason I have gotten back into running lately. I am sure I’ll write more about Reach the Beach in future posts.

Endorphins Rule

“Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.”



I have started running again. For now it is just two days a week, but I will soon up that to three times a week and then to four over the next two months. I used to run a lot and then I hurt my back—two herniated disks down low at the same time. The pain was terrible and, needless to say, it put me off of running for quite a while. Swimming, sit-ups, and push-ups have improved my core strength and gotten me to the point where running is once again an option for me.
I saw the above report in the New York Times this week and it made me think about when I began running six years ago. It was during a long, hard slog through an Upstate New York winter. In February of 2002 Erica and I made up our minds that we were going to complete a marathon in the fall of the same year. We each had our own reasons for needing a huge goal to consume us and training for a marathon was just the right thing.
I can remember the first run I did in preparation for the marathon. It was a cold February evening and I didn’t own a pair of running shoes so I set out in my Chuck Taylors to run a 2.3 mile loop through our little town of Trumansburg. My lungs were seared by the cold air and my leg “muscles” hurt. I pushed into our living room and reported to Erica that “running is stupid.”
But I stuck with it and within a month my longest run had stretched to four miles. And then five. And soon enough I began to look forward to the long Sunday runs that were the heart of my training program. I was not aware of the endorphins flooding my brain, but flooding they were and I certainly did feel good about what I was doing.
Now that I look back at it all, there must have been a heck of a lot of endorphins in order to account for my behavior at the time. One stupid June Sunday I ran fourteen miles through a cold, windy rain. By that time I had running shoes, but because of the cold and the rain I made what turned out to be a BRD—a bad runner’s decision. I put on a pair of thick wool socks instead of my usual thin cotton socks and then went out into the downpour. My socks absorbed much of the rain that fell, causing them to swell up and fill my shoes too tightly. I won’t go into the gruesome details, but suffice it to say that the next day my two big toes were missing their toenails.
And I went out and ran five miles anyway. Endorphins kick ass.
In October of 2002 I made it through the Wineglass Marathon in and around the beautiful countryside of Corning, New York. It took me four and a half hours and even the endorphins were not enough to make that run anything but hard. But I finished.
Now, six years later I find myself needing a big goal again—something to help focus my energy and make me feel progress. I love what I do for work, but as a teacher I can’t always see concrete results from all the time and effort I put into my job. Running is different. I can see and feel progress from day to day and week to week. Four miles today felt far easier than four miles four weeks ago. But teaching a fifth grader how to use a comma appropriately doesn’t ever feel any easier. And there have been no studies so far to prove that teaching grammar to ten and eleven year olds releases any corresponding flood of endorphins. Unless and until teaching is shown to flood my brain with natural mood-lifters and pain-killers, I will continue to run. It works. Really. Dr. Henning Boecker proved it.