Bourbon Chase Relay

                                                                                                    

This past Saturday, Cheryl ran into a couple friends at the gym who were complaining about the weather. After all, we don’t tend to have loads of tornado warnings and monsoon-like rains in October. But, so far, this fall has been “special.”

“Well,” said one friend, “at least we’re not running across the state of Kentucky.”

“Really,” said the other. “What a bunch of lunatics.”

“Um. Excuse me,” Cheryl responded. “Tanya’s doing that.”

Apparently, there was some derisive laughter that followed, but as far as I know, no one recanted the “lunatic” comment.

As this conversation transpired, I was sitting in a van with six other people near Midway, Kentucky. The van smelled of old socks, a chilly mist was blowing, and I was grimly watching the line of people growing longer at the port-a-potty as I worried about whether or not I’d be pooping before my final leg in the relay.

It had been a long day/night/day.

We had left Nashville about 24 hours earlier en route to the inaugural Bourbon Chase Relay, a 200-mile trek through Kentucky’s “Bourbon Trail.” This was a race that would wind past famous distilleries and old battle fields, through horse farms and crossroads, around town squares and over train tracks. Twelve team members would run three legs each, averaging 15-18 miles of racing in under (we hoped) 27 hours.

Generally, I look as though I might enjoy a wheelchair in the hours that follow a race, so the thought of running three races roughly six hours apart was both terrifying and irresistable. In the days leading up to this, my first relay, my thought process was: How bad could it be? It could be bad. It won’t be any worse than a marathon. Marathons are bad. What if I don’t sleep at all? Where will I brush my teeth? What if I have gas? Will my headlamp give me a headache? For crissakes look at the weather forecast. How bad could it be? It could be bad.

This was not what I would call positive visualiztion, but as soon as we got on the road, I began to feel better.  This was due almost entirely to the energy of my teammates. Our team was divided into two vans, and in our van was:

Diane (driver and stats keeper), a woman who has run a million marathons and relays and who had to have had the patience of Job to put up with six nervous Nellie runners who were yammering questions, worries, directions, and outbursts over her shoulder for 500 miles. Personally, I would have driven off a cliff. Intentionally.  

 Grady, who at 61 can still kick most people’s butts at 5ks. Plus, he can repair anything with duct tape. Once, he made a pair of running shoes out of duct tape and an old box.  Laugh if you must, but his duct tape fixed 4 things before we even got to Kentucky.    

Edward, who I’d never met before, but he ate a double cheeseburger, fries, gumdrops, pop tarts, a Krispy Kreme, 3 root beers, and 2 giant Yoo Hoos throughout the trip and still raced awesomely. Four days later, I’m still speechless with admiration.   

 Theresa, a top masters runner who pummels me into a sad little poof of dust at any race, at any distance. Just recently at a 15k, I was vastly relieved to see that, like me, she couldn’t read her race number listing without reading glasses. Just as I was thinking, heh heh heh, she blew by me in the first mile to disappear into a distant speck. Sheesh.    

Matt and Andrea, the two 25-year-olds stuck in the geriatric van. The other van was full of 20/30-somethings. I’m sure that van was oddly void of chatter about linament, hair loss, reading glasses, and grandchildren. Still, Matt and Andrea were polite and good-natured in spite of their grave misfortune of being placed in the Rest Home on Wheels.

The legs for our van began at the Maker’s Mark distillery in Bardstown. It was still light out, but sprinkling steadily and growing cooler. Naturally, to ward off the dangerous chill, several of us visited the bourbon tasting room. Is that wrong during a race? Who cares. Our first runner was off, and we piled back into the van (which, incidentally, already looked like someone had picked it up and shook it really hard) and zoomed to the next exchange.

Two legs later, it was my turn. And it was pitch black. And we were on a remote 2-lane. Somewhere, a dog howled. Excellent.

8.1 miles with only the greenish glow of my headlamp lighting up the 10 feet in front of me. Somewhere behind me, I thought I heard footfalls, but when I turned my head, I couldn’t see a headlamp. Maybe it was just the wind. As the shouts and whistles from the exhange point faded, all that was left was my own breathing. Every now and then I could hear water rushing in the ravines on either side of the road. Once I heard something running quickly alongside me in what sounded like tall grass. Twice, I heard coyotes.

It was too dim for me to read my watch. Suddenly, I was just running with no sense of time, surroundings, or other runners. Sometimes I sensed I was going up a hill, but I never saw it coming. I was racing, but there was no race around me. Somewhere, behind or in front of me were hundreds of other runners, but on that first leg, in the middle of the night in rural Kentucky, I never saw a single soul. Eerie and unforgettable.

When our van was finished with our six legs, we had a space of about 4 hours to sleep. I mean, to “sleep.” Seven stinky people (well, Diane wasn’t stinky) trying to get all comfy in a van that might be big enough for 4 people to get crabbily comfy. Grady slept on the floor wrapped around a cooler. I slept in the driver’s seat with my foot crammed under the accelerator. I think Theresa and Andrea stretched out on seats with seatbelts jabbing their protruding coccyxes (an earlier conversation topic). Cozy!!

When the entire van went silent, I had the overwhelming urge to crack up. Then I had the urge to belt out the old 80s gem, “Here in my car, I feel the safest of all!!”  But I resisted these temptations and spent the next 3 and a half hours alternately looking at my watch and listening to the wind howling. I might have slept 15 minutes. Somebody slept, because I heard some disgruntled snoring and a smattering of flatulence (it wasn’t me). But mostly it felt like everyone was laying stock still and staring hard at the darkness.

3:30 a.m.!! Rise and shine!!

Round two of our runs seemed to be the hardest. Personally, I felt like there were parts of my legs that I’d like to unfold but couldn’t. I ate half of a pulverized Luna bar and began mentally preparing myself for 5.8 miles just before dawn. This mental prep mostly consisted of “oh no” and “shit.”  Thank God for teammates. Everyone was encouraging without being too Polly Sunshine everyone’s-a-winner!! about it. There was a lot of joking. Grady even offered me a type of linament that’s used on horses. There was a  picture of a horse’s leg on the bottle, and that was good enough for me. I used it, and damned if my legs didn’t come unfolded.

Is the darkest hour just before the dawn? Why, yes, in fact, it is. The quietest, too. It felt like even the blades of grass were sleeping as I raced through the farm roads that led to the Four Roses Distillery. This time, I could see the blinking tailights of other runners ahead of me, but when they turned corners or went over hills, I was alone again. Just as I was being lulled into the dreamy hypnotic pace of it all, one of the most frightening moments of my entire running life occurred. Dog attack? Screeching car? Scary person? No….

COCK-A-DOODLE-DOOOOOO! 

A freaking rooster, unseen and about 2 feet from me bellowed out his wake up call, and I just about soiled myself. This was at about mile 3.5. I’m here to tell you that that damned bird provided a level of adrenaline no pre-race overload of caffeine has ever provided. I careened like a mad woman to the finish, passing 4 other runners,  lurching blindly into the Four Roses parking lot, and hurling the wristband to Theresa. I even managed an ear-splitting “YOU GO!!” as Theresa bulleted out of view. I love that rooster.

As I staggered back to the van, I noticed that there was a lot of chatter about roadkill. Some teams had even gone so far as to write “Roadkill” on their windows with hash marks underneath. In general, life was surreal at that point, but I did think that this obsession with squashed animals in the road was a tad mental. Diane jogged over with her clipboard and cheerily asked, “How many roadkills?” My God, I thought, What is wrong with you people? Does the flattened possum I saw at mile 3 really bring you joy?  It wasn’t until some time later that I realized “roadkill” referred to runners passed. Thanks to my friend, The Rooster, I managed 4 roadkills within 2 miles!

Some time after my leg and just as the clouded sun was rising, I thought I saw a man standing in the middle of the road. He was young with a moustache and wearing a grey hat. Not a runner. As our van approached him, I said, “Hey. There’s someone in the road.” But at that instant, the curve of the road changed, and what I thought was a person was just a trick of light.

“Oh. Okay. I must be really tired,” I said.

“No, I saw him too,” Edward said quietly from the front seat. “Not a runner. Some guy with a hat.”

A ghost? A shared optical illusion? Later, Grady admitted that he had seen something too. But it had faded into the fog the same way. The Ghost of the Bourbon Chase. No one mentioned him again.

As the day grew brighter, glaringly bright even, our final runs loomed monstrous and unthinkable. I tried jogging around the lot where we would meet up with van #1 to take over the legs to the finish line. Even deathly slow jogging felt like a loud funeral dirge in a horribly minor key.  And I was supposed to race again in a couple hours? Hilarious. I put on some more horse stuff and walked down to the exchange area.

Somehow, our team had moved into the top 20 or so teams out of 150. A few more roadkills and we might move into the top ten. I had a little rush of adrenaline. Not rooster level, but close. Now I had to figure out a way to race even if my body was pissed at me and my legs were folded into origami swans.  I think everyone was feeling the same way. This was it.

Unbelievably, Matt ran his fastest leg yet. Youth, I reasoned. But then as I paced in the handoff area, waiting for Grady, he came barrelling around the corner–a good two minutes faster than expected. Cripes! As I slapped the armband around my wrist and took off, I primarily felt panic. I only had 3.9 miles to run, but it would have to be faster than either of my previous legs if I wanted to maintain our place.  I heard “ROADKILL!” merrily chanted behind me as I headed around the town sqaure and out to the horse farms. No pressure or anything.

Race Day Magic. Who would ever have guessed that this mysterious and wonderful phenomenon could happen in race #3 in 18 hours on dead legs with no sleep and scary food? Since there were no mile markers, I had no idea what my pace was until I saw the One Mile to Go! sign.  I was at 21:15 at 2.9….It didn’t seem possible. I was so excited that I yelled an obscenity at some cows (I think they liked it). The final stretch was downhill, and I could see my teammates waving and shouting for nearly a quarter mile. Blurry, getting clearer, there’s Theresa, slap the armband into her hand, she’s off. And I’m done. 18 miles in 18 hours, ghosts, roosters from hell, friends, bourbon for breakfast, roadkill, rain, living in a van, magic, mania. Done.

In the end, we finished 12th overall, well under 27 hours. Not too bad for a team that “just wanted to have a good time.” The finish line and post-race party in downtown Lexington was seriously glorious. The sun almost came out for about 15 minutes and there was a sea of free bourbon tastings. Our finishers medals were groovy. There was a reggae band playing. Who could ask for more?

Much later that night, we pulled into the parking lot in Nashville where we had all met up only 35 hours earlier. Diane noted that most people would be stunned to think that we all actually paid money to do this. “That must seem really crazy,” she considered.

Yeah, running across Kentucky in the rain. What a bunch of lunatics.

More Things to Complain About!

Hi everyone! I haven’t written a blog in 3 months! Did anyone notice? Anyone? Trent?

I felt like a brain break from running. Not an actual break from running (horrors!), but a space of time where I couldn’t care less about thinking/blogging/facebooking/logging/tweeting/bragging/advising/arguing about running. As we all know, running is stupid. I’m the first one to heartily endorse wasting untold hours of time on stupid things (hello, the Swamp), but every now and then it is refreshing to step away from one’s own stupidity. (That sounded stupid.)

Anyway, I’m totally looking forward to returning to the wringing of hands and furrowing of brows over the maddening complexities of putting one foot in front of the other. IT’S IMPORTANT!

It’s been a while since my original “Extremely Inflammatory Topics” blog, but boy oh boy, that was a gem. I got to both vent and piss people off, and, really, isn’t that the whole point of blogging? Therefore, I’d like to present another group of petty and unimportant issues to crab about. These are presented in random order with no cohesive form. Enjoy!

Hi! Newbie Here! How can I can get faster without having to actually run? LOL!!  :)

I am, like, SO serious. I mean, there must be an easier way. I like the idea of being a runner and all, but the running isn’t always fun!! Sometimes it’s uncomfortable!! LMAO!  But really, think about it. Everything has been made easier—Everything! Why not running?

For example: look at that Smuckers pre-made PBJ sandwich thing that looks like two bleached spleens that have been stapled together. I’ve never had one, but all I can say is THANK God someone invented an instant peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Having to make one of those things is just exhausting! First off, there’s all that hauling of jars, pulling out of bread slices, and, oh, the utter languor that sets in just thinking of having to pick up a knife and spread stuff. And then, as if that whole ordeal weren’t enough, you’re forced to lift the two laboriously-prepared sides and smash them together! Think you’re done? Think again! If you can keep your eyes open, the final death march involves cutting the sandwich in half.

Anyway, I think I’ve proven my point. LOL! Any tips on how to improve my running without running would be appreciated.

I’m Training for a Marathon and GAINING Weight!!! What GIVES?

Every spring and fall, this ultra-lame topic gets bandied about like so many Hostess Cupcakes in a fat kid’s lunchbox. There’s a lot of boo-hooing about how it’s just NOT fair, followed by some defensive chatter about genetics, slow metabolisms, and being big-boned. Next comes some group back-patting while weighing (pun!) the benefits of being a tub-ola marathoner versus an anorexic elitist prick. Finally, once the group is feeling safe in its mutual flabalanche*, there’s some truly jolly chatter about everyone’s favorite teensy marathon training treats.

Here’s a tip, sister: 8 slabs of bacon on an egg and cheese explosion, a quart of Yoo Hoo, 37 Chocolate Blowout gels during the run, and 5 Super Pixie Stix for extra energy may possibly, possibly, have something to do with that confounding puzzler of weight gain.

Remember! Running a zillion miles is NOT an excuse for eating to excess. It’s an excuse for drinking to excess. Geez Louise.

Damn it! I Just Updated Facebook about My Running for The 20th Time Today! Somebody Compliment Me!

Let’s face it (pun central!), Facebook is basically a tool (heh heh) for making ourselves appear popular and terrifically busy every living second of our boring little lives. As runners, this is a dream come true. After all, we’re better than everyone else to begin with since we dedicate 5-10 hours a week to doing something mindless and self-involved. Clearly, our friends need to be notified about this semi-hourly. If we can’t make others feel bad, what’s the point of running at all?

 Getting ready to go to Kroger to buy some epsom salts to soak your disgusting feet in? Tell everyone you know! Tried to run three miles and only got to 1.8 because you had to poop? Why, I think every person you’ve been even remotely acquainted with since the 8th grade needs to hear about that!  Had a hangnail on your little piggie toe that tore and bled all over your new shoes but you’re just so darned stubborn that you kept running anyway and then it started hailing frogs, but, determined and crazy trooper that you are, you didn’t stop and then you got lost in Siberia and had to run an extra billion miles and then…

At this point, if there isn’t a sprinkling of  thumbs-up “likes” thingies and at least 7 responses of “YOU GO!” and “Woot!” and (most treasured), “You are so incredible! I could NEVER run like that!!”  then the poster’s computer will begin to slowly melt into a multi-colored puddle of steam and bubbles.

Runners: Don’t Forget to Bring Your Own Fluids Tomorrow…and a GUN!

I don’t know if this is just a Tennessee/Southern thing, but every few months there is an entirely serious debate on a local running message board about whether or not to carry a pistol when out for a run in “questionable” areas.

WHAT?

Young ladies are particularly encouraged to haul firearms along. It has been recommneded that one’s bazooka be swaddled in bubble wrap and positioned carefully in a fanny pack so that you don’t blow your own ass off when transitioning into a fartlek. (I’m not making this up!). I’m guessing that when a threat is perceived, like someone waving at you, you can defend yourself by stopping, turning the pack around to your front, unzipping it, carefully lifting your piece out, unfolding the layers around it, repacking the wrap so as not to litter, and aiming.

Now that’s what I call safety!

And where are these “questionable” areas? I’ve run alone everywhere from a mall parking lot in Yonkers to an abandoned trail in the Yukon and never felt threatened. One time a guy with a laughably small weenie flashed me in Golden Gate Park. Another time, some dork with his shorts pulled up to his chest ran behind me yelling, “Just checking out your stride! You oughter shorten it!” 

No, the only areas that seem “questionable” to me are the fancy pants neighborhoods full of manic bubbas on cell phones behind the wheels of overblown SUVs. I have felt threatened on a regular basis in these areas. And, typically, these are the areas that house the people who own the guns who raise the alarm about those “other” questionable areas.

Isn’t life one big wacky circle of irony?

 

And finally:

Caster Semenya

I don’t care if she has a penis growing out of her ear…She grew up, trained, and competed as a woman. She’s a woman.

 

 

* “Flabalanche” is a MikeyMike trademarked term. Used by permission. Well, not really.

Did Not Finish/Did Not Hurl: A Stellar Weekend of Racing!

 

Part One: Did Not Finish

 

Twenty-four years ago, I never really kept track of mileage, followed training “plans,” or worried about things like, say, a stabbing pain in my ankle that could make my hair stand on end about 30 minutes into a run. I just liked to run a lot and lump all injuries into the Shin Splints Zone, a catch-all container full of “They’ll Get Better If I Keep Running!” ailments. So far, that approach had worked (ah, youth). However, in the fall of 1984 when I decided that it would be okay to run a 15-mile race in spite of the fact that it felt as though my right ankle might snap off at any moment, things didn’t work out so well.

It was a beautiful autumn morning, I was wearing my groovy Bonne Bell 10K shirt, and “99 Luftballoons” by Nena was cranking out over the loudspeakers at the starting line. What could possibly go wrong? This was a race in my hometown that I’d run every year since 1979, so I knew the course well. I knew I’d see friends and family along the way and at the finish. The final half mile was downhill. It was going to be delightful.

Then, about 8 miles into the race: CRACK!  I’m not just writing that word for dramatic effect. I actually heard my ankle bone crack as I headed into a lonely, unpopulated stretch of the race. For a moment, I thought I could keep going. Maybe my ankle had just needed to crack (you know, like knuckles) these past few weeks, and now it would be all better. Even now, I have to admire that desperate and moronic attempt to ignore a serious injury. However, I quickly realized I couldn’t run, chiefly because I couldn’t walk. I hopped a little bit, then sat down on the curb and stared intently at my watch. There was absolutely no reason to be looking at my watch, but I couldn’t bear looking at all the people hurtling past me and occasionally shaking their heads in sympathy. I just wanted everyone to get on past.

When you’re pissed, humiliated, and in pain, 10 minutes seems like forever. Why the eff are so many people running this stupid race?  Pick up the pace you #%^@&* slobs! I sat down like three days ago!  I knew that a couple vans would follow at the end to pick up all the wretched DNFs along the way. Finally, the last runners tottered by, and I shamefully flagged down one of the vans. Since neither of the vans had any runners in them (more shame!), and we were already past the halfway point, the van I was in just turned up a side street to take me back to the start. Yep, just me and this huge chick who looked suspiciously like the driver of the school bus I rode in the 7th grade.

“Done wore out, dintcha? Eight miles! Whooooeee! I’d be plum tuckered,” she announced merrily while popping bubble gum incessantly.

“No,” I replied gloomily. “I didn’t wear out. I think I broke my ankle.”

“Like you sproinged it while stepping off the curve wrong or something?” she asked in all seriousness.

I was pretty sure I had a stress fracture, but the thought of trying to explain this to someone who had just asked if I had sproinged my ankle on a curve was too much to deal with.

“Maybe so,” was all I said.

“Git you one of them Ace bandages,” the driver offered knowledgably. “And don’t run for a few months,” she added with an authoritative flair.

“Okay.”

Finally back at the start/finish, I hopped and staggered over to where I thought my parents might be. I leaned against a light pole and waited. The winning men came in, then the first several women. Then I heard my mom behind me say, “You’re already back! Wow! You must have run your fastest time yet!” Then she hugged me, and I burst into tears.

Fast-forward to the 2009 RC Cola and Moon Pie Festival 10-mile race in historic Bell Buckle, Tennessee. This is one of my all-time fave races. Held in the midst of Southern summer heat, the race itself is not unlike a Moon Pie: it may not be good for you, but you want it anyway. And when it’s over, you feel kind of gross, but you don’t regret it.

For the week leading up to the race, I had been pleasantly ignoring a tightness in my left groin muscle, thinking It’s my groin, for crissakes. “Groin.” Ha ha hahah ha ha. But by mile one (one!) I knew I was in trouble. I turned to a friend who was running alongside me and told her that I felt like I had a rock in my groin. She gave me a look that was a cross between “TMI” and “That can’t be good.”

It wasn’t good.

Close to mile 2 I began trying to decide if I should slow down and just jog 8 more miles or give it up. Sharp pains right at the 2-mile mark made up my mind  for me.  My second DNF  in 31 years of races. It’s an eerie feeling to quit a race…kind of nightmarish, as though, certainly, this couldn’t be happening. Sometimes I’ll dream of races that go through houses, up staircases, through tiny windows, and ultimately to insanely narrow dead ends where I’ll finally just have to quit. Then I’ll wake up, fall back to sleep, and forget it.

However, what followed out on the rural roads of Bell Buckle was something I’m assuming I’ll always remember. As I turned around to do the Walk of Shame back to the start, the tidal wave of runners flooded toward me on the other side of the road. Once walking, I really was in no pain, but I kept a semi-agonized expression intact just so that no one would think I was, you know, plum tuckered at only mile two.  

Anyway, every few minutes or so, someone I knew would shout to me, “WHAT’S WRONG??” and I’d have to bellow back, “MY GROIN!!” while pointing at my junk in front of hundreds of strangers. Ah, yes. Good times. Distinctly memorable.

                     Part Two: Did Not Hurl

A mere 32 hours after the Moon Pie debacle, I was scheduled to do my very first Beer Mile.

One may wonder: Is it wise to race around someone’s slippery, twisty, and hilly back yard under the influence of four beers while sporting a groin injury? Of course not! So, then, what better reason could there possibly be for barrelling ahead with this event? Plus, how utterly attractive might it be for me, a woman pushing 50, to lurch drunkenly around while belching in front of relative strangers? I wrapped my groin and headed across town.

Hard as it may be to imagine, I’ve never chugged a beer, run a quarter mile and then repeated this activity 3 more times. In thinking of what my “goal” would be for this “race,” I decided that simply not hurling would bring  a certain sense of pride and idiotic superiority. Roughly, I estimated taking 3 minutes per beer and running an 8-minute-mile: 20 minutes total. If I could break 20, well, I’d probably have to have another beer to celebrate.

For anyone who imagines that the Beer Mile is just one big hardy-har-har, I should point out that some participants used Garmins to get their beer/run splits and looked tremendously serious prior to the starting gun. There was some definite consternation as to whether one should start one’s watch before cracking open the first beer or after. Nail-biting angst over the fact that some runners had wide-mouth cans abounded. Last-minute panic over the fact that Bud might, in fact, have been a better choice than Miller created a colon clutch or two.

Finally, however, we were off. Or, should I say, we were standing still. Gathered around the tables, with our 4 beers marked off in squares, we drank quietly until the first thunderous (literally) belch blasted through the pleasant suburban back yard. Birds erupted from trees and children playing in neighboring yards ran in terror. Miles away, dogs cocked their heads and narrowed their gazes.

 Men are lucky: they can merely envision burping, and the burp arrives.  My first beer took just a little over 2 minutes, which I was inordinately proud about, but I could NOT crank out a belch. Admittedly, I feigned a few burps to psyche out the competition (burping is critical to successful Beer Miling), but they were lame imitations. I ran the wacky quarter mile up the hill, around a pool, down a driveway, corkscrew turn, a figure-8, through a sprinkler, and back down the hill in about 2 minutes. But still, no belch. Slight panic. Beer # 2 was not going down nearly as smoothly…and then….KA-BOOM! I’ll admit it. I was frightened by my own burp.

Honestly, I don’t remember too many specifics after this point. More beer. Slipping in the mud. What groin? More beer. My blurry watch. Laughter. Belch-o-rama central. One more lap…16:45 final time. And, tears of pride, no hurl!! I think I was briefly troubled by the fact that I could actually drink 4 beers and run a mile all under 17 minutes. Apparently not troubled enough to not have another beer.  Some time later, I think I recall telling one of the guys that he looked like he was wearing mascara. I jumped in the swimming pool in my clothes.

Yes, all in all, an outstanding weekend of summertime racing. One race I’ll never forget, and one I’ll never quite remember.

Excellent.

Play

A few weeks ago, I ran a 5k race with a 6th-grade girl (“Erin”) as a volunteer with the Girls on the Run program. Like most of her classmates/teammates in the program, Erin was totally uninterested in the foolish concept of running for the sake of running. But if the running was connected to something fun like, say, a game of chasing and screaming or a cupcake at a finish line, she and her teammates were all about it. Once as we were all jogging laps around the dirt field that the girls had to use for their practice track, Erin asked how far a 5k was. When I explained that it was equal to about 15 times around the field, Erin stopped and looked at me.

“For real?” she asked suspiciously. “No way.”

“For real,” I said. “But it won’t seem that long.”

“Huh uh,” Erin said as an exclamation of disagreement. Then she added, “Better be something good at the end.”

“Well, the finish line is always good,” I explained.

“Whooo,” Erin said, shaking her head. “Better be something better than the finish line is all I’m gonna say.”

Two of the main objectives of the Girls on the Run program are to teach the girls to believe in themselves and, in turn, believe in their teammates and support them. Running is truly secondary. Maybe even thirdary. Though it was a few billion years ago, I clearly remember being in the 6th grade. It was the scary gateway year into the land of self-consciousness and sudden awareness of all the difficulties involved in being a girl. It was the eerie tug-of-war world of playing tag while worrying about whether you should be shaving your legs yet or not.

And so it was gratifying to see the girls, as the semester went by, become comfortable and secure in their circle of teammates and coaches. It was nice to see them run like maniacs around the field while shouting and flailing their arms for no apparent reason. It was good to see them play with running without worrying about speed, competition, being judged, or failing. Feeling good about themselves was enough.  I suppose this was particularly important for some of the girls; not all of them came from homes where parents encouraged them. In fact, some girls lived with daily discouragement.

I found out on race morning that Erin was one of these girls.

“This is my dad,” Erin said, dragging her father by the arm over to meet me. Dad looked totally bored with everything. He looked almost too bored to be alive. The fact that there were a hundred screaming girls in matching shirts all wearing race bibs seemed to bring him neither joy nor amusement. He wouldn’t make eye contact, and he just shrugged when I mentioned how much Erin had been running during these past few months.

“She’s lazy. She’ll never be fast ’cause she don’t want to work,” was all he said as he gazed stonily past me.

Erin punched her father playfully to make it look like he was just kidding, but I could tell she was embarrassed. She fiddled with the number pinned to her shirt and coughed a few times.

“Well, it’s not really about being the fastest,” I began. “You know, it’s more…”

“It’s a race, ain’t it?” her dad said with a bark kind of laugh. Then he looked at Erin and said, “Don’t you be playing around out there. This isn’t for fun.”

I had approached this race with the idea that Erin could run it under a 15-minute-per-mile pace. In the practice 5k a few weeks earlier, she had taken about 50 minutes. It had involved a lot of skipping and flouncing, then stopping to look at clouds, then doing a dance routine with two friends, then running a bit, then screaming about imaginary snakes, followed by dramatic huffing and puffing, then a moment of running, several more dance numbers, flouncing, skipping, laughing too hard to walk a straight line, and a final manic burst across the finish line.

When we had finished, Erin had noted that 5ks weren’t that hard at all. She was actually looking forward to the real race. She thought she could “run” it even faster next time.

But now, as we gathered near the start, I was bound and determined not to give a flying rat’s ass about Erin running any faster. I hoped she would dance and shout and flounce and laugh her way right into an hour-long 5k. At first, Erin was clearly upset about what her father had said, and she stood with her arms folded glaring at the back of the girl in front of her as we waited for the start gun.

“Don’t you want to take your jacket off?” I asked her. Even though it looked like rain, it was already 70 degrees. Erin was wearing a jacket with a hood over her head.

“Not ’sposed to let my hair get wet,” Erin replied gloomily.

“Well, if you get too hot and change your mind, I can carry it for you.”

“Whatever.”

Then, just as it does for all of us dorkwad competitive runners, everything changed when the starting gun cracked. With the bang! every single girl, including Erin, shrieked ear-splittingly and took off like serious bats out of hell. There was no earthly way I could keep up with Erin for that first quarter mile. As I ran behind her in a wacky goon-like fashion, she kept turning around with a huge grin and shouting, “COME ON! I thought you said you ran a lot!!” Good grief. Gone are the days of fast twitch stuff. (Oh. Wait. Those days never existed.)

Not ten minutes into the race, it began to pour. As expected, this created another paroxysm of glee among the girls. At this point, Erin had fallen in with a couple of her friends. They had all slowed down considerably (i.e. they were walking) and were singing a pleasant little tune called “Stanky Leg” and the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. As the rain came down harder, the girls tried to drink the raindrops, their heads cranked back as far as they would go. The hood of Erin’s jacket fell off without her even noticing, and ten minutes later she threw the jacket at me so that it covered my face. I ran along with a jacket over my head for a moment until I almost fell. This was a big hit.

Two miles into the course, we encountered tremendous puddles. Of course, every girl had to stomp through each one. At one point, Erin and a friend just stood in an ankle-deep puddle alternately kicking water at each other and bellowing “DO THE STANKY LEG!!” at passing runners.

 Around 2.5 miles, a woman of seriously rotund proportions wearing a jogbra and no shirt passed us. Erin looked at me to see if I might laugh. When I didn’t, she watched the woman thoughtfully for a few seconds and then said, “Damn. She’s working it.”  This is not really something you expect to hear from a 6th-grader, but I agreed that, yes, the overweight woman was indeed working it. This seemed to inspire Erin to pick it up a little, but then there was suddenly a lot of duck poop (we were running around a lake) right in the middle of the road. Naturally, this required a lot of springing around and screaming and pointing out that duck poop is green.

Then the finish line appeared about two tenths of a mile ahead. Erin and I figured out a point where she would begin running as fast as she could so that she could have a big finish. Some of the other girls who had already finished, spotted Erin and began cheering for her, so any boring adult-like finish line strategies were suddenly tossed out the window, and Erin took off like a shot. As with the beginning, there was no way I could sprint that fast, so I flailed behind Erin and said a lot of lame things like “Yay!” and “Woo Hoo!” and “All right!”

As Erin put her finisher’s medal around her neck, several of her friends ran over to congratulate her. She was soaked, muddy, sweating, and her hair was an absolute disaster. She looked the happiest I had seen her look all semester. And, for all her playing during the race, she had still bettered her practice 5k time by nearly five minutes.

Then she walked over to her dad who had just been standing near the finish kind of shaking his head and looking disgusted.

“You are slow,” was the first thing he said. “There’s old ladies out here that finished before you did. Hell, you were almost last.”

Erin looked at her father for a moment. In that moment, I thought about all the things the girls had been taught that semester about self-esteem, believing in themselves even when no one else did, and supporting and encouraging their friends. I wondered if that would make any real difference in a situation like this or if it was just a lot of blah blah blah that zipped right in one ear and out the other.

“Well,” Erin said, looking at her medal carefully and then back at her father. “I wasn’t last. Plus, I was faster than last time, and…” Erin seemed to be thinking of some kind of serious zinger to conclude with. “I had FUN.” With that, she bounced back over to her circle of friends who all continued to pat her on the back, dance around, and tell her how fast she was.

And that, I thought, as I watched 100 girls all supporting and encouraging one another, was exactly what Erin had hoped for even if she hadn’t known it. That was something better—way better—than the finish line.

http://www.girlsontherun.org

 

A Terrifically Circuitous Race Report

 

Some eons ago, I used to run now and then with a group of women in the Bay Area. The abilities in the group varied wildly, as did the temperments. But it was good to have the camaraderie of other female runners in an age where it was becoming more and more popular to (erroneously) believe that if a woman wanted to run fast, she had to train with men. Mostly, I think we got together to talk about what had or hadn’t worked in a race. There were a few women who were supportive and eternally positive to the point of being entirely and enthusiastically unrealistic. Bad race? Oh, cheer up and go shopping! Stress fracture? Well, good heavens. Just take a day off!  Today, I imagine these women wear skirts to races.

However, this was balanced out by a few women who were always relentlessly and depressingly realistic about everything—from that last quarter you just ran one second too slowly to that truly ominous wear pattern near the toe of your shoe. These women scoffed at excuses, and they would have kicked the asses of every single Running Message Board Blowhard who thinks s/he is an authority because s/he has read Daniels Running Formula and Once a Runner. If anyone had handed them a packet of Pace Tats, he or she would have pulled back a bloody stump.

One of these, shall we say, less laughy daffy women had actually qualified to run at the ‘88 Olympic Marathon Trials that spring in Pittsburgh. This woman (let’s call her “Lauren” for the sake of not dropping names and for the sake of me not remembering her name) could always be counted on for reminding the rest of us lame asses just how truly average we were. This wasn’t done in a direct or rude way. Typically, it was done by her just showing up at a race.

There were a handful of us in the group who ran around 39 minutes for a 10k, and we totally thought we were all that. (Well, not “all that” since that meant nothing back in 1988. I suppose we thought we were bitchin’. Good grief.) Then Lauren would show up and blast out a 33-something and look no more fatigued than if she had just filed her nails. It was maddening and impressive. However, it put things in perspective.

And, then again, it took them out of perspective. Because sometimes I wondered super-secretly if I could ever be that fast. Could I? And if I could, how would I get there? If I could get there by doing the same training Lauren did, couldn’t we all get there? Or would I always just be a B-level, only remotely talented slob because that’s as far as I could go? Was it talent or work? Sometimes I would lay awake at night worrying about all this, popping out of bed now and then to look at pace charts and get uptight.  

One afternoon during a group run, one of the 39-minute chicks was chatting with Lauren about qualifying for the trials. And then…

“Do you think I could qualify?” she asked. Pins could have been heard dropping throughout Golden Gate Park. 

Lauren ran on for a while, thinking. Then she just shrugged and said, “Not unless there’s some box you haven’t unlocked yet.”

What?

At the time, I thought that was her sidewise way of saying,” No, you idiot. You’ll never be as fast as me because that’s the way it is.” After all, we all talked about how we trained and what we could do to get faster. Granted, Lauren trained harder than we did, but not that much harder than some of the barely sub-40 10k runners. She was simply fast. We weren’t. There were no magical boxes to unlock. It was what it was.

Or was it? Because over the years, when I get back into racing, I keep looking for that next little box of perfect training that I haven’t unlocked yet. In my mind, the boxes are scattered through the years, and they get tinier and tinier like Russian Matryoshka dolls (yes, I had to google that), and harder and harder to get open. But, at the same time, what the boxes hold become increasingly more valuable.

Along those lines, I think the first box that someone new to racing opens is huge, and the key is practically hurled at your head. Out pops something like the dopey giant gingerbread man from Shrek who stomps about saying, “Yup, yup, yup, run some miles! Okey dokey, lose some weight! Oh my word….Running shoes aren’t sneakers!”

Sometime later, the box has a padlock, and the key is somewhere in your backyard. Maybe.  And when you open it, maybe you realize that you wish you hadn’t, because what’s inside requires a lot of attention. Some boxes get tossed, others get lost. But you keep looking for the next one.

Which brings me to the 10k I ran last weekend.

2007/2008 had been a great couple years of racing. Before 2007, I had totally gotten out of racing shape. Naturally, when I made up my mind to return to some semblance of a runner, gargantuan boxes with training gems in them were dropping in front of me left and right. Everything I did worked. It was PR Central (masters PRs, anyway) for nearly 15 months—Not because I was all that, but because I had been all nothing for a number of years leading up to my return to racing. It was like beginning again. Complete with the dopey gingerbread man and everything.

Then, things began leveling off in late 2008. As I had done exactly 20 years earlier, I began to wonder, “Is that it? Is this as fast as it gets? Or is there a box unopened?” I tried a few different things and then, nightmare of nightmares, my times actually began getting slower. Then I entered the manic zone of trying 3 billion things at once. I hit rock bottom when I performed surgery on one of my shoes, followed by dabbing essential oils on the sleeves on my running jackets to give me energy.

Nothing seemed to be the box.

Finally, I did something insane. I just ran. More. A lot more (for me). With absolutely no major goal race or plans for a marathon. Half the time I didn’t wear a watch. Of course, I’d always heard that more miles equals faster times, but I had convinced myself that that was not necessarily true. I mean, I’d known some fast people who never ran more than 35-40 miles a week. Basically, that was one of those boxes that contained something that required a lot of attention. But now I’d opened it.

The race (“Purity’s Moosic City 10k Dairy Dash Run/Walk.” Nashville is all about giving races baffling names.) was known to be a fast course, so I hoped to finally get a PR. After all, the only other 10ks I had run in the past couple years were both serious 10ks from hell. One was run on a course that resembled a non-stop roller coaster. The other was typically held on the most oppressively hot weekend available in Middle Tennessee.  This course was flat. The weather was cool. Let’s see what happens.

It’s hard for me to break down races and give the ever-tedious Race Report, because so much of any race is run in a state of utter unawareness outside of my little universe of increasing pain and a watch. I could give intricate details of my 20-minute warmup run (exciting!), but not so much with a race. I vaguely recall being happy/worried that my first mile was not too fast. Then there was a lot of wind around mile 2. Some guy with a tremendously huge Garmin began running beside me near mile 3, and I became preemptively pissed in case he tried to chat or give me advice. Around mile 4, it occurred to me that I was in a rhythm…something I’d been missing in races for nearly half a year. Unlike my past 2 races, I had not fallen into the “I just want to finish” zone. I felt like I was racing. It had been a while.

At mile 5, I was oddly comforted by the fact that Big Garmin dude was pacing with me. I don’t know why. Only the day before, I had made derisive comments about people pacing other people in races. For nearly half a mile, I considered how often I’d been wrong, incorrect, blundering, overly-opinionated, ignorant, stubborn, blindered, mule-like about training and racing. This was a truly exhilirating epiphany. If I  remained only 57% as pigheaded and unpleasant in the future, think of how much I might improve!

At mile 5.4 I actually asked Big Garmin how much further we had. He told me quickly and said nothing else. It occurred to me that he had wanted me to keep my big trap shut just as much as I had wanted him to do the same. Then at about 5.9, he said, “Corner’s coming up. Then you’ll see the finish line.” It was exactly what I wanted to hear. At 6.0, he began his finish kick, but turned back to say, “Thanks so much!”  He was thanking me? I was actually sorry to see him go. I had no kick left, but felt stronger than most finishes. Hard to explain. And there were the mats, the clock, my watch. A blur. Across. Then, *click,* I’m back…awake from the race. Blink and look around. 44:45, a 90-second PR.

In thinking about the race this week, it struck me how similar this experience was to the 10ks of ‘88. In the end, I was only the 4th place female masters last weekend. Like Lauren, the top 3 masters hadn’t just beaten me—they’d blown me away. Two of them, in their 50s, ran the 10k times I ran in my 20s. How?

And so, two decades later, I wonder super-secretly if I could be that fast.  Could I?

And if I could, how would I get there?

Fun Conversations with Non-Runners

Did he just say “a 5k marathon”? Aaaagghh! My ears!!

A YEAR OR SO AGO, Cheryl and I were out having 5000 margaritas when we ran into a client of hers (finance world…just writing the word “finance” has already bored me too much to describe what she actually does.) He was a convivial little fat man dressed in the Look-at-how-HUGE-my-stomach-is! fashion that is ever-popular in the South. This is a look achieved, first, by wearing a t-shirt that is roughly two sizes too small. Next, the shirt must be tucked into the pants. Finally, while one might feel that the resulting accentuation of abdominal atrocity is sufficient, it is not; a belt must be cinched to hell just beneath the gut so that the end result is not unlike a 10-pound sack of flour hanging over a thin fence rail.

Anyway, this man (let’s call him “Bob”) chatted pleasantly with Cheryl about stocks, flow charts, unrealized gains, and……………………………………Oh, sorry, I just nodded off.  After an interminable expanse of time (5 minutes) spent discussing unimportant things like money, the subject somehow shifted to the fact that I had a marathon coming up. (I really can’t imagine how that topic shift happened.)  Bob said the word “marathon” carefully as though it was a newly discovered subspecies of the common cockroach. He gave me a long, unimpressed look, and then suddenly got a dreamy, faraway expression on his cherubic little face.

“I ran a 5K marathon back in the nineties,” he said with great authority. “Oh boy, is there ever a story about that marathon!”

I’m not sure I can accurately impart to you just how rapidly I ordered another margarita.

“Yep. Think it was ‘95, maybe ‘96,” Bob continued, patting his belly for emphasis. “Went out and ran one of those three-mile marathon deals without ever training at all. But, you know, I used to  bowl a lot, so I was in pretty good shape and all. Anyway, you all are not going to believe how fast I ran that first mile.”

The vision in my head was of a siphon attached directly to a monstrous tank of tequila and the on/off switch at my disposal.

“Well, I just took off as fast as I could go. Whoooo!! I was FA-lying!! So I come up to the one-mile sign and I had run it in under four minutes.” At this point, Bob’s eyes looked like they were about ready to pop out of his head. He looked directly at me and said, “that’s pretty durn fast, right? I mean, have you ever run the first mile in a 5K marathon that fast?”

I could feel the waves of  Don’t be rude, he’s a client..Don’t be rude, he’s a client… emitting from Cheryl and slapping me upside the head. Still, this was just too staggeringly classic to leave alone.

“No. No, I can honestly say that I’ve never run a mile that fast in a 5K marathon. Four minutes. Wow. That is fast,” I  agreed dramatically. “So, I’m guessing there were no other runners with you when you reached the one mile marker, then?”

Bob looked confused. He glanced at Cheryl for support, but she was suddenly fascinated by the chip bowl. “Well, no, there were other guys ahead of me. You know, the real fast guys who had probably trained and stuff. But I know it was four minutes,” Bob added sullenly. “I looked at my watch.”

“Hmmm,” I responded. “So what was your finishing time? I’m guessing you must have had a pretty good time what with doing the first mile in four minutes and all.”

Bob cheered up at this. “No, that was the craziest thing about it! My overall time was like 40 minutes. So I guess I really slowed down in the other two miles. That first mile just drained me.”

Poor, wretched, confused, belt-cinched-to-hell, Bob. I had to say something.  A more pleasant person would have just let the idiocy of it all pass by with no more ire than one might have when a 3rd-grader insists that he is growing a tail. But, as I have taken painstaking care to patiently point out throughout these blogs, I’m simply not that pleasant.

“You know, I’m wondering if either the mile marker might have been off or your watch was broken.”

Large silence loomed while major huffiness gathered and mulitiplied. Hints of steam appeared outside Bob’s ears.

“I only wonder that,” I added nonchalantly, “since the world record for the mile is about 3:45.”

I think it was at this point that Cheryl excused herself. Probably to go to the bathroom and sadly delete Bob’s  info from her business contacts on her cell phone. Bob briefly looked as though his head might blow right off his shoulders, leaving only a charred nub. Then, just as quickly, a superior, epiphany-like expression crossed his face.

“I didn’t say I ran a world record for the mile. I said it was four minutes for just the first mile of a 5K marathon. Geez. I’m not that fast.”

ANOTHER INSPIRING CHAT I had with a non-runner occurred at a Mapco station not far from Bucksnort, TN.

Yes, really.

I was just finishing getting gas when I heard the person getting gas behind me burst into an airhorn-level paroxysm of coughing. I turned to see an old guy simulataneously hacking, balancing a cigarette on his lip, and pointing to my car. (I’d like to take just a moment here to fondly savor all the times I’ve seen people smoking directly over a gasoline nozzle, the magical gateway to 15,000 gallons of flammable, explosive fuel!) He was wearing a cap that had a picture of a bass (the fish, not the instrument) on it with “Kiss My Bass!” in jaunty scripty letters beneath it.

“What’s that there mean? I seen those everywhere!” he said pointing to the (here, I must shamefully and publicly admit to having a….) 26.2 bumper sticker on my car. “That some verse from the Bible, ain’t it?” he asked without the slightest shred of sarcasm.

Is it wrong that I was moderately tempted to just say, “Yes. Definitely a Bible reference. Very biblical,” wave and smile and drive off? Instead, it went like this:

“No, it stands for miles in a race.”

“Race? What kind of dang race only goes 26 miles? Hell, that’s like only 50 times around Bristol.”

“Oh. No. Not a NASCAR race—a running race. Like with people.”

There was a pause of disbelief and then a growing chuckle that resulted in another ear-splitting bout of extended coughing. All the while, he continued pointing at the bumper sticker the way a child might point at a monkey riding a bicycle. I really had no choice but to stand there smiling idiotically until the hacking spree ended. Finally, he regained composure and looked at me, shaking his head.

“Now, that just don’t seem healthy,” he said, lighting up a nice new Camel. ” Not a speck healthy a tall. Why would you want to go and do a thing like that anyway?”

“Well, you know,” I said, desperately trying to think of any decent reason to run 26.2 miles that would not come across as abject hilarity to Camel Man. “Just to see if you can do it.”

He doubled over. He gripped the side of his car to steady himself as his shoulders shook with helpless laughter. Several blasts that sounded closer to a foghorn than anything else came from him. When he looked up, he pulled a hanky out to pat at his eyes. He continued to keep a grasp on his rearview mirror in an effort to avoid collapsing from the sheer humor of it all.

“Ma’am, I have got to tell you that there’s a heap of things I wouldn’t try to do that I might or might not be able to do just in order to see if I could do them.”

I really couldn’t argue with that logic. More specifically, I couldn’t understand what he meant.

I was getting into my car, and thought I should offer one more argument for running 26.2 miles, and so, naturally, I said the lamest thing possibly imaginable. “Well, it’s fun. You should try one some day.”

For a second Camel Man looked as though he might pass out. I started my car and was just getting ready to leave when he came over and tapped on my window.

“What’s that extry point two miles for?” he asked when I rolled the window down. “Twenty-six miles ain’t good enough?”

I sighed. “They added an extra 385 yards in the original marathon so that the runners could finish in front of the king and queen’s royal viewing box.”

As I drove off, I could see Camel Man reel backward and grab his chest. He sprawled across his car and smacked his fist repeatedly on the hood, foghorning and laughing away.

The “Just Finish” Boom….

 

 

Originally, this was going to be a blog about Resolution Runners. You know, the ones who trot out and buy $900 dollars’ worth of running gear, sign up for 17 races, buy a gym membership, and then flail away on the treadmill maybe 3 times before concluding that running is downright dangerous and, gosh darn it all, not even half as much fun as eating a McRib sandwich. But then I considered my own pathetic attempts at past resolutions (drinking 70 ounces of water every day…HA ha HA HA HA!!! )  and just how much I’d enjoy having someone point out my personal lack of persistence. It just seemed rude.

But, perhaps more importantly, it didn’t seem quite rude enough. It didn’t have the potential to irritate and rankle new runners en masse in the way that a more carefully-chosen topic might. Further research revealed that the Festering Angst Du Jour involves the topic of brand-new runners setting their sights on the marathon after one jog around the block. Why build up to the distance? Why run those little candy-assed 5ks? No one will be impressed! I want my marathon and I want it now!  I don’t care if it takes me 23 hours to finish. When I cross the finish line, I will be A Marathoner.

This is, of course, a dead horse topic that crops up on running message boards nearly as often as debates about how to lose weight (or, more popularly, “loose” weight) or whether or not one experiences chafing (popularly: “chaffing”) due to wardrobe errors or simple excess blubber. 

Invariably, a new runner will post something along the lines of : Hi! I’m another newbie. LOL!!! I’ll never be fast ’cause my knees just can’t take it and it causes chaffing :( and plus too I don’t care about speed. But I would like to just finish a 26-mile marathon. Right now I run 10 miles a week and have been running for 3 weeks. Can I be ready for a marathon (a 26 mile one) in 2 months? I’m so psyched!!! LOL!!!!  

This will be followed by a lot of Go for it! You can do it! Everyone’s a winner! Slow and steady wins the race! You go girl! WOOT! sunshine being blown up the original poster’s ass. Then, somewhere in the midst of this Pollyanna-palooza, a longtime runner comes along and rains on everyone’s marathon parade by having the gall to suggest that the newbie race some shorter distances first. Maybe even do something drastic like actually prepare for the marathon over the course of (uh oh) …..AN ENTIRE YEAR.

And then…..

 Sides are taken, lines drawn in the sand (whatever that really means), and suddenly, anyone who can run faster than a 10-minute mile is an elitist a-hole snob who resents those who are merely enjoying a sport and trying to loose a little weight.

I try to see both sides of the debate. Sort of.  A little.  Well, actually, I turn a blind eye to any withering shred of compromise and mock Instant Marathoners mercilessly.  Anyway, what always baffles me is how utterly impossible it is for the Just-Add-Water-a-thoners to understand why their rushed quest to check a marathon off a life list might annoy longtime runners. After all, why should we care if they want to strap on an overnight bag and take an eternity to cover 26.2 miles (or 26.9 according to their Garmins)? What difference could it possibly make in our ectomorphic little lives if  their achievement gives them the privilege to wedge the word “marathon” into most conversations at cocktail parties? Why should their bright purple tattoo of “26.2!!” surrounded by butterflies and winged feet trouble us?

Allow me to present a possibly lame analogy to the Insty-thoners.

Imagine that you’re a painter (pictures, not walls). You’re not the best, but you’ve worked at it for years, and you’re proud of the dedication you’ve put into becoming a decent painter. Not that many people paint, but those that do have a nice, nerdy bond. They get all geeky and emotional about it, and, let’s face it, they’re kind of difficult to be around when they start blathering about all the dorkwad details of painting.

Anyway. For whatever reasons, painting becomes THE thing to do all of a sudden. Instantly, thousands of people want to paint something they can hang on their walls. Does anyone want to take the time to learn how to paint well? Of course not! I want my painting, and I want it now. For crissakes, just give me one of those paint-by-number Dogs Playing Poker on velvet deals. Before long, everyone’s mincing around in berets and cranking out paint-by-number masterpieces. You have friends who invite you over to see their Sistine-Chapel-in-a-Day murals and the ever-popular Mona Lisa on a Pie Crust or Degas on a Dartboard. Part of you is genuinely pleased that painting has become so popular.

Look! I’m Van Gogh!

But a larger part of you is just a little bit cranky with all the Instant Artists.When you suggest to a friend that he might actually take the time to learn real painting, he flings his beret at you in a huff and bellows that he is a real painter. Look–there’s Les Tuileries on a Toilet Seat, for the love of God!  He’s quick to point out that you, sir, are a painting snob and that, after all, he and loads of other people don’t care about style and form, because it hurts their elbows to practice it. He and his pals just want to finish a painting. Get off his back, you elitist Real Art prig.

Well, something like that.

As far as I know, no one has a problem with anyone getting off their cans and going for a run. The last I heard, crabby longtime runners still love seeing new runners joining in this batty pastime . But seeing marathoning reduced to an item on a checklist, a tattoo, a veritable paint-by-number project to be hung on a wall and forgotten….Well, that can tend to lead to some serious chaffing of  the longtime runners.

The One. The Only. The Monkey.

 

About two and a half years ago, I was 20-25 pounds overweight, I had just run a half marathon at an all-time embarrassing pace, and I hadn’t even whispered the word “marathon” in nearly half a decade. Nonetheless, when Cheryl came across a website for The Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon, a marathon pleasantly described as, essentially, something only a mentally disturbed person with a death wish would attempt, she thought it might be just the kind of thing I’d be interested in. (Hey. Wait a minute…)

Anyway, I took a gander at the specifics: 26.2 miles of non-stop hills. 3500 feet of elevation gain/loss. A dandy mile-long climb at mile 19. Serious threat of flying monkey attacks. A moderately insane race director. I laughed out loud—a bitter, derisive laugh of scorn—and stomped around the house barking out all the reasons why marathons were stupid and why this particular one would win the Big Stupid Marathon Award of the Century. I pointed out that training for such an event would be selfish and wasteful and possibly unhealthy. I mocked the course. I questioned the veracity of the flying monkey myth. I sneered at a picture of the RD with his oversized calves.

Then, naturally, I sent off my application.

Heading into my 12-week training plan, I assured myself that this would my last marathon. What better way to hammer that final nail into the coffin of past running than to run an entirely unreasonable and horrific marathon? If I secretly harbored any desire to keep running marathons, this should obliterate it I figured. Then, something totally unexpected happened: I became a runner again. The weight came off, the miles became more effortless. Frighteningly, I actually found myself too excited to fall asleep some nights before long runs. I gazed longingly at pace calculators. I dug out race times from decades earlier and wondered where the spark had gone. I wondered if maybe I could get it back.

Under 5 hours. That was my only goal going into the first Monkey in 2006. The last marathon I had run years earlier had been a 4:05, so I figured around 5 hours was reasonable on such an idiotic course. And I’ll admit it: the course scared me. Living only 2 miles away from where the race is held, I got to practice on it a lot. This is supposed to give one confidence, but it generally just gave me the willies. Still, it was an excited kind of What-In-the-World-is-Going-to-Happen?? fear. I couldn’t wait, and yet I dreaded the day.

The first Monkey was mainly a blur of impressions. Cold. Fear. Mile markers. Suddenly at mile 13 well before I thought I’d be. Up a horrible hill (x16). Check watch and estimate that I could run 13-minute-miles and still finish under 5. Feeling good. Feeling bad. The vile little hill at mile 23 that is one step away from being something one might consider a good spot for rock climbing. Two miles left. Adrenaline and nausea. The last turn before heading out on the grass that will lead to the finish. Voices, cheering. The clock. 4:15.

The moment I crossed that finish line, the spark was totally back. My very next thoughts were What’s next? How much faster can I get? Where’s the next marathon?

And so, of course, now I must run the Monkey every year. Aside from the fact that it is the race that brought me back to racing, it’s also a beautiful (if hellish) course in the Tennessee hills and, as is promised in the race’s description, there are no crowds, no bands, no chip timing, no pace groups, few spectators, the threat of winged monkeys and pumpkin pie made by the RD at the finish (not the threat of pumpkin pie. I mean, unless you’re afraid of it).

Plus, people are afraid of the Monkey. And that’s cool. This year’s Monkey was, in my opinion, the most feared yet. Well in advance, loads of extra-lame excuses from typically competitive people for why they might not run very fast began piling up. The most popular excuse was: “It’s a wacky course that I can’t PR on, so I’m just going to run for fun.” There was also the ever-popular broadcasting of “I hadn’t planned on running fast. This was just a training run,” after the marathon was over and one hadn’t done as well as one had hoped.  *sigh*  Whatev. Fear, fear, fear. Big, fat, monstrous fear.

Anyway. I’ve enjoyed a completely different kind of fear each year I’ve done the Monkey. The first year was, as I mentioned, the Oh my God. What am I doing? fear. Last year, I had just run a 3:42 six months earlier, so my fear was Cripes. Can I actually race this course?  fear.  As it turned out, I could (anyone can…it’s actually only about 2-3 minutes slower than a normal course. It can even be a PR course, though it’s blasphemous to say it…). I finished in 3:44, coming in 3rd woman.

And so this year’s fear was the much-dreaded Can I do as well as last year?  fear with the added terror of You should be able to do even better, you self-absorbed blowhard murmuring incessantly like so many winged monkeys atop the hickory trees at dusk.  I trained on the course, as always, trying to mentally envision running well in the race. Instead, I wondered if I’d have to (shudder) walk up Golf Course Hill this year. I stared warily at Luke Lea Heights. Once, I even got teary on 9-Mile-Hill.

In the end, I psyched myself out well before the morning of Novemeber 23rd.

As much as, I’m sure, everyone is sitting on the edge of their seats now waiting for yet another mile-by-mile description of an average runner’s experience at this marathon, I’ll just say that I essentially wussed out and gave up at mile 15. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just kind of sucked that day. Who knows? I threw around some admirably pathetic excuses at the finish (“I was tired.” Oh, for crissakes, who isn’t tired in a marathon? “My achilles was hurting.” Blah blah blah. Oh, boo hoo.).

At any rate, as I approached the mile-15 water stop where Cheryl was working, I stopped for a gel, sputtered a few excuses, and asked if there were any old hags ahead of me. Hearing that there were not, I re-adjusted my goals to (hopefully) finishing under four hours and (maybe) winning the Master’s. I gave up. It was not entirely unpleasant at the time, but it was lame. I had been running 8:30 miles up to that point. Then I got scared of how hard it might be to maintain that pace. With all my training leading up to this race, I think I’d forgotten just how mental the marathon is.  In the end, I squeaked in at 3:57, winning the Master’s, but I was disappointed in my abject wussiness.

Some 2 and 1/2 hours later, as many of us were on our 4th (um, right) Yazoo beer and 3rd mountain of finish line food (I’m telling you, this marathon RULES), along the hilltop that winds down to the finsh appeared a runner that many of us knew. It was her first marathon. She was not what one might call “adequately prepared” for the distance. She had not run many hills, and her long runs were…well, short at best. She struggled with whether or not she was even a “real runner” at all. She had had a serious case of the Oh my God! What am I doing? fear that I remember so well.

But when she crossed the finish line, her expression of amazment, excitement, and euphoria was priceless. For lack of a better way to describe it, it was the look of a dream come true.

And as the post-marathon dust settled in the following week, as many of us bickered, bragged, brooded, celebrated, and snarked over our races (or “training runs” as it may be), this particular runner simply asked, What’s next? How much faster can I get? Where’s the next marathon?

Sparks are cool. This marathon is the best. I’ll never miss it, even if I’m 80 and using a walker. And I’ll always race it, even if my race blows.

 

***(Possibly trivial addendum: JK [totally random name] beat me by 14 minutes with nearly the same time I ran last year. Just prior to the start, I asked him what he was shooting for and he said, “Just trying to break five hours.” Excellent tactic. Hate him. Hate, hate, hate.)

Stick Man, 1969

 

Back in 1969 when I was 8 years old, our family lived in a tiny apartment in Ann Arbor while my dad was in grad school at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!! or whatever). Those were groovy times. Hippies for days all around the campus,  war protests every fifteen minutes, the Summer of Love (really important to an 8-year-old, I’m sure), flower power, and three freaking Monkees posters on my bedroom wall.

I shared “my” bedroom with my 10-year-old brother, Tom. We spent a truly admirable amount of time arguing over just exactly where the invisible line was between his side and mine until our parents put a huge bookcase right in the middle to shut us up. After that, we halfheartedly threw marbles and Matchbox cars over the top of the bookcase trying to hit each other, but it wasn’t nearly as gratifying as our old argument. Once, Tom drilled four small holes through the bookcase and, using a pencil, pushed books on top of me in the middle of the night. That was pretty cool.

At some point during the summer of ‘69, I began waking up just before sunrise every morning, something ticking quickly and steadily in the back of my head and then fading just as rapidly as soon as I was fully awake. I ignored it the first few times it woke me, but on the fourth day, I hurled a Matchbox dump truck over the bookcase and bellowed, “What are you doing!?” at my brother. To my surprise, Tom just answered quietly, “Have you been hearing that too?” That kind of freaked me out, so I peaked through one of the holes he had drilled and saw him sitting very still, his head cocked to one side, listening. He wasn’t joking.

“Well what is it?” I asked. And then randomly added, “You’re in trouble,” for effect.

“I think it’s footsteps outside. But really fast footsteps,” Tom replied thoughtfully. “And shut up.”

Tom and I made an agreement to wake the other one up if we heard the footsteps again. And the very next morning, I woke up to Tom standing by the window and saying, “Wake up! Look! Look! What a weirdo.” I stumbled over to the window, and as the footfalls faded, I could barely see the outline of a tall, skinny man running down our street beneath the streetlights. Tom and I sat there quietly for a minute, contemplating the strange vision we had just seen. Then we burst into the snorts and giggles of an 8- and 10-year-old.

In 1969, no one ran. Sure, athletes ran on tracks or in crackpot races for freaks like the Boston Marathon, but nobody, certainly not your normal, everyday person, tore around the neighborhood before sunrise on July mornings. My brother instantly dubbed him “Stick Man” because he was so thin (ingenious, I know), and we rushed to the window every other morning to catch a glimpse of him, practically falling on the floor in helpless laughter as he faded away. The idea of someone just running down the street for no apparent reason at all was almost too hilarious to bear.

As the summer wore on, Stick Man started running later. Sitting on our front steps on the weekends, I’d watch him go by in the mid-morning, a serious expression on his face and his long stick legs moving in smooth strides. Now and then, he’d wave at me, but I’d only continue to watch him warily. My amusement had gradually changed to curiosity. What is wrong with him? I’d wonder. Sometimes I’d see him run by twice a day. That was, of course, particularly troubling. Perhaps he was insane.

One warm September day, I had set up a lemonade stand (yes, I was that dorky). Business had been exceedingly slow, and I was right in the middle of an experiment that involved seeing what happens to ants when you pour lemonade on them, when I heard Stick Man approaching. He dashed by, grinning at my stand, and then he stopped. Stopped! This was understandably terrifying since I’d never seen him do anything but run. Pulling a sweaty five-dollar-bill out of his pocket, he leaned over and said, “Two, please.” I watched him cautiously as I poured the lemonade. Up close and still, he looked like an old man to me. Lines and wrinkles covered his face, and his beard stubble was grey. His eyes were sad and dark. He looked so much younger when he was running.

As he stood there drinking, I summoned up an immense amount of courage and finally blurted out, “Why do you run? I mean, I just wonder. Where do you go every day? Why?” in one big stream of words. Stick Man smiled and looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I don’t really go anywhere….just one big circle. And I guess I do it because it makes me feel better.”

I stared at Stick Man incredulously. As time had gone on and Stick Man had continued running faithfully, I had begun to assume that, at the very least, he was running somewhere every day for some reason. Running in circles to “feel better” was a tremendously confusing bit of information. For lack of anything better to say, I asked, “Okay. Um. So…do you feel bad?” Stick Man smiled at me again and simply said, “Not when I’m running.” With that, he set down his two empty cups, said, “Keep the change,” and with an oddly sad wink, took off. I watched him run down our street and then turn left onto Huron. Briefly, I wondered how big a circle he ran. Then I went back to pouring lemonade on ants.

Twenty years later, everybody ran. Including me. Sometimes for no particular reason at all, and more often than not in big old pointless circles. To see entire herds of people stampeding through one’s neighborhood at 5 a.m. was no longer an oddity. Running twice a day had become something to brag about, as opposed to being a valid reason for questioning someone’s mental health. Children were about as fascinated with skinny men running down their streets as they were with unrealized gains and stock dividends.

During the summer that year, I was home visiting my parents who had moved to South Carolina after my dad had finished school in 1971. As we sat on the front porch one evening, a tall, thin man ran by. Though I hadn’t thought of him in years, Stick Man popped into my head.

“Do you remember that guy that used to run all the time back in Ann Arbor?” I asked my dad. “You know, back before anyone ran. He was kind of skinny.”

My dad thought a while and shook his head no. But a few seconds later, a look of recognition crossed his face. “Okay, yes. You must be talking about Dr. Weiss.”

“What? You knew him?” I asked. It seemed impossible to me that my dad had actually known Stick Man, a memory that had morphed into a blurry childhood memory myth. It was jarring to think of him as a real person with a name. 

“Well, I had him for one class early on. He only lived a few blocks from us, so I’d run into him now and then. So to speak. I do recall seeing him out running on occasion.”

On occasion? I looked at my dad to see if he was being sarcastic. In my memory, Stick Man was running by every other time I looked out the window. But my dad’s face was serious. Then he looked even more serious.

“Poor Weiss. Now I remember. His son was killed in Vietnam in the summer of ‘69. It was his only child. Somehow he managed to keep it together and even continued teaching his summer class. I can’t imagine how he did it.”

Much later that night as I was trying to fall asleep, I thought of Stick Man and all those big circles he had run in the summer of 1969 in an attempt to feel better. No watch, old tennis shoes, no goal. Before dawn, late in the afternoon, once in a terrible thunderstorm that ushered in a tornado. Running, and then running more. I hoped that, in its small way, running had helped Stick Man.

As I grew sleepy, I wondered if he had continued to run…if he still ran now as a very old man.  And just as I drifted off, I thought I heard something ticking quickly and steadily outside, approaching, approaching, and then, just as quickly, fading into the distance.

But Enough About Me. What do YOU Think About Me?

“That’s great, Echo. But get a load of this!”

This may come as a real shock to some of you, but believe it or not, some of us runners enjoy talking about ourselves. Incessantly and dramatically. Particularly immediately (and I mean instantly) after a race. I recall with fondness, and still just a hint of ire, the festival of self-absorption that I participated in following that memorable and yet tragic Smyrna Parks 5k (for lots of Me! Me! Me! details, see the blog from 9/3).

 JK (entirely random name) and I were so enraptured with the stunning fact that we raced in a race that we felt compelled to break down every freaking second of the 21 minutes of it to anyone within earshot. Somewhere around the tenth time that I was describing, in poetic slow-motion, the way I looked at my watch at mile one, I noticed Cheryl’s expression. She had the glazed-over smile that says: “If I have to maintain this fake smile of interest for one more second, my entire face is going to crack into a million pieces and blow away in the wind.”  And so, to be fair, I asked her about her race. I remember her mouth moving and some sort of sound coming out, but I have no idea what she actually said as I was, of course, thinking about myself. 

Once, after the San Diego Marathon, I was trapped next to a middle-aged man who had written his hoped-for mile splits all the way down his left arm. We were riding the very long (I can not impart to you how lengthy) shuttle bus back to the start. The man–let’s call him Mr. Splits–was making a fairly large production of stretching his arm out so that I would notice his mathematical ornamentaion, but I kept my head firmly locked at a 90-degree angle, staring out the window raptly at nothing. Finally, when Mr. Splits had done everything but punch me with his big old math arm, he struck up a conversation.

“SO! How’d you do?” Splits asked jovially. This question translated: “SO! I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about your race. I want to talk non-stop, until your eyeballs are hanging out of your head on little strings, about my race. Every fricking detail. Right now.” This is, in fact, an excellent technique for luring unsuspecting runners into one-sided, get-a-load-of-me! race chat. I should know. I’ve enjoyed using it for decades! To use this technique successfully, however, you must (and this is critical) either tune out the other person’s response entirely or cut him/her off mid-sentence with a “That’s great!” before launching into the riveting minutiae of your own race.

“Well, it wasn’t my best race. I think the heat and…” I began.

“That’s great!” Splits boomed, using the often-overlooked combination option which, frankly, I had to admire. “Let me show you a little trick I’ve devised that got me my PR today. All you need is a Sharpie and your own arm!”

From there, the fantastic journery of the Inaugural San Diego Rock-n-Roll marathon according to Splits unfolded from elbow to wrist. I stared blindly at his arm wondering if there was a bar in the hotel, if that was a bad blister on my foot, whether frijoles would be a wise choice that evening, how many socks I’d gone through since 1979, whether “tabby” refers to female cats or is just a general description of the coloring of cats, and why the Vlasic Pickle Stork sounds like Groucho Marx. Naturally, I didn’t listen to Mr. Splits at all.

So in light of this longstanding tradition of the post-race ego-fest, this past weekend’s race was somewhat remarkable: there was an utter lack of braggadocio. Maybe it was the free ice cream, possibly the ear-shattering Dixieland jazz band, perhaps the cold wind that froze everyone’s faces (not that that kept anyone from continuing to shovel ice cream in them. By “anyone,” I mean “me.”). In any event, people were genuinely talking, enjoying conversations, and sharing (!) race experiences. It was….eerie.

I watched our local national-level 67-year-old wonder, Margie, crank across the finish line of the 5-mile race in 39:09. Let me repeat three items here: 67. Five miles. 39:09. That’s a state record! And yet, when I went over to congratulate Margie, she shrugged it off as though she had just pushed a stroller in a one-mile fun run. She looked around and said, “What a really beautiful day. That’s a great course, don’t you think?” Then she looked at Cheryl and said, “How did you do? I’ll bet you’re fast.” When Cheryl claimed that she wasn’t fast, that she’d only begun running a while ago, Margie smiled pleasantly and said, “Well, I bet you could be fast.” With that, she left to get some water. Stunning.

Next, a friend who is about as much younger than I am as Margie is older (confusing, don’t you think?) and who had beaten me in the final quarter mile seemed all but mortified to talk about her accomplishment. (I don’t think this had anything to do with me saying, “I must kill you now,” as she passed me, though, in retrospect, perhaps it didn’t help.) She had stayed right behind me for three miles and then pulled ahead of me and two other women near the end of the race to move up from 6th to 3rd overall. It was a pretty bold move, particularly for someone who had just begun racing a year or so ago. I figured she’d want to blather endlessly about it. I mean, I would have.

But when I walked over to congratulate her, she seemed entirely indifferent about her race. Embarrassed, even. WTF? And later that evening, she sent an email virutally apologizing for passing me. She was concerned that she was breathing too loudly behind me. She worried that she had ruined my race. She wondered if she had practiced poor race etiquette. The fact that she had set both 5k and 5-mile PRs seemed secondary.

I scanned the email to the end looking for a “Ha ha! Just kidding. I beat your sorry ass, you old hag!!” addendum, but there wasn’t one. She was serious. And a funny thing happened on the way to the bizarre oddity of post-race modesty. I actually wanted to hear her story of the race. And I wanted to hear Margie’s story of her race. I had no desire to talk about myself (blasphemy!). It was, understandably, an unsettling and funny (not ha ha funny) feeling, but not entirely unpleasant.

So, what is the moral of this long-winded story? I have no idea. But it was a nice change-of-pace to be surrounded by modest runners for one morning. Vaguely frightening in a parallel bizarro universe kind of way. But nice.