The spirit is willing, but the flesh is dehydrated

There was a time, oh, a long long time ago before I had children, when I used to run several races per summer and with very little expectation.  I did them because they were there, because they were fun and challenging, because someone handed you water mid-run, and because other people were doing them.  If I did better than previous races, I was happy about that.  My ambitions were modest.

After I quit my paying gig and finished grad classes, running changed.  It became less of an incidental and more of something around which I centered my days.  I planned races in advance; I looked up or borrowed training schedules; I set goals and trained to meet them.  I used running to get me up in the morning, to get me through the day, the week, the season.  I am grateful to running for being that for me when I was in the otherwise landmark-barren wilderness of early motherhood.

The problem with false idols, though, is that eventually they fall over or crumble or get lost or stolen.  When it comes to athletic excellence, my spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak.  It gets pregnant.  It gets neuro-muscular dysfunctions.  Muscles get strained or pulled.  Joints swell up and get stiff.  It has limits far below what I am willing to endure.  And when injury happens, as it always does, it takes longer to recover than I expect, and I am sad and lost and isolated from the mists of early morning and the full force of the heat of mid-summer.   

Having just reemerged from the dark days of injury, uncertainty, surgery, and rehabilitation, I intended for this summer to be one of rejoicing in my recovered ability to get out and go, to push, to be outside in and part of the elements: to run in the rain and the heat, to go fast or far.  To appreciate. 

But somewhere in the midst of appreciating it occurred to me that I spent a good half a year getting most of my exercise in the pool and in the saddle of a bike.  And, on top of that, my foot was recovering more slowly than I wanted.  I couldn’t just jump back into the mileage where I left off.  Hence, I supplement with some bike rides and swims.  Since I cannot get in shape for a marathon this fall, and since even the half marathon seems like it will be a long-shot, I thought I ought to sign up for a triathlon.  For fun.  Because it's there and I think I can.  And because the goody bag includes a new bike shirt, and I need another one.  Why not earn it by doing something cool?  So I signed up for my third olympic-distance triathlon.

I signed up only a month before the event, which, even if I was going to be home and have tons of free time for the entire month, is just not enough to do a real training program.  Most plans take 8-16 weeks.  Plus, one of the weeks left to me will be family vacation: no bike, no pool.  And one of those weeks should be taper.  Hmm.  That leaves me, oh, this week to train.  Suddenly, the "I'm just going to do this for fun" attitude became a little harder to maintain.  Panic lurks just beneath my one-day-at-a-time exterior.  I got up in the middle of the night to write down a training schedule for the next week.

I meant to do a long run and a long bike ride over the weekend, but I realized I had not been swimming much for the last two weeks.  So Saturday I swam.  It was a good workout.  I couldn't run that day anyway, having run the previous two, and my legs were truly tired.  Sunday I did a 51 mile bike ride, which was also good, but it was hot, and I didn't feel like doing a brick long-bike, long run in that heat.  I was pretty much finished after 51 miles.  (Sort of dampened any thoughts of half ironman I had been secretly harboring.)  Yesterday was my kettlebell class, so I only had time for five miles after that.  Which meant today had to be the long run.  But now I haven't been swimming for several days, so I was going to do that mid-morning.  I had it all worked out in my head so that I was getting at least a little of everything. 

Alas.  I woke up this morning to windows that had not only steamed up on the outside but were also dripping.  I had read, only two nights ago, about how/when to modify running workout goals based on dew point.  Anything over 74 degrees, it said, should be written off.  The heat is just going to be too oppressive.  The dew point this morning was 76 degrees.  I had put the long run off for so long and for so many different reasons that I decided I had to just go for it.  I vowed to go easy on the pace and to reassess when it still made sense to turn around early.

I ended up going 11.5 miles, a little over two and a half miles more than my longest run of the last nine months.  My surgery foot was fine: only a little stiff and sore after I stopped and was stretching.  I can live with that.  My hip occasionally felt a little uneven, but I concentrated on form and never lost control, so I can live with that too.  I didn't even feel like I was really being affected by the heat that much, other than being thoroughly drenched and having squishy shoes, until I was already on the way home, and there was nothing much to do but keep going.  Those last couple of miles, which were mostly uphill, I was lamenting that 11.5 miles would feel so hard when just last year I was in shape enough that 11.5 was common.  Endurance is so hard to win and so easy to lose. 

Upon arriving home, I took a cool shower, but I was still hot and sweaty and was apparently acting unwell enough that Doug, who has left me home alone with a stomach virus and a toddler, asked if he should stay home from work.  Although I didn't feel it happening at the time, apparently I gave myself something akin to heat exhaustion.  Boo.  I lost a little over three pounds of sweat, which is almost 3% of my body weight.  I just didn't have it in me to do another workout of any quality, even one in a pool.

Another plan to get it all in ruined.   Another occasion to accept that I am naught but fallible flesh.  Another reason why this triathlon should be done for fun, for the finish, and for the shirt. 

Vacation From

We are home from a weekend of camping.  We left around noon on Friday and returned home around 6pm on Sunday.  Not a very long vacation by most standards, but it felt like we had been gone for a long, long time.  I was the first one into the house, and stepping into the laundry/mud room, usually a cramped place that torments me with its constant dirt and piles of shoes, I felt like I was stepping into the height of sterility and extravagance.  After dinner, I was so very excited to take a shower (!!) and to sleep on a bed with cotton sheets in a temperature-controlled room.  The sign of a good vacation, I thought: it makes you feel better about being home.   Deep, grateful sigh.

And then I paused.  Because it occurred to me that there is another kind of vacation:  in this world of well-off suburbia there is vacation from and vacation to.  There are people who vacation to all-inclusive resorts, where you pay for someone else to do the cooking and cleaning, where the towels are washed every day for you, where there are vast pools or hot tubs, even next to the ocean.  Where there is a menu selection for every meal that isn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Where Disney characters entertain your children while you sip an adult beverage.  Where the women are evenly tanned and wear mascara and expensively casual sandals.  Where you lie around all day and drink all night.  Or so I’ve heard.  There are probably more luxuries associated with those sorts of vacations that I haven’t heard about.  I have no first-hand experience. 

Suddenly, it struck me as strange that I have no first-hand experience with such a vacation.  I strained my memory to come up with something that might qualify as staying in the lap of luxury, and I couldn’t come up with anything.  As a child, vacation almost always consisted of a trip to a cabin in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.  The cabin had a small kitchen with antiquated and only questionably functional appliances: the toaster, for example, was a metal pyramid you could lean bread against and set over the burner on the stove.  And no, I am not 95 years old.  There was a similarly perfunctory bathroom with a mostly-functioning toilet and small shower.  There was one bedroom large enough for two double beds, one sleeping space short of what was needed for the five of us, so one lucky person got to sleep on the sofa in the kitchen.  We fought over that privilege because it meant not sleeping within feet of both parents, one that snores, and in the same bed with a sister.  The floor was always rather dingy and gritty with sand; the bathroom floor was always wet.  And there you have it: vacation.  We were near a lake, so we considered ourselves lucky. 

We did take a couple of trips to Ocean City during my teen years.  We did not stay in one of the fancy high-rise hotels with complimentary towels and beach umbrellas and drink services (and, strangely enough, pools.)  We rented a little condo a block or two from the ocean and used the public beach.  We packed sandwiches for lunch and hauled everything down to the beach for the day.  We sometimes went out for dinner.  We’d walk along the shore at dusk or go for ice cream.  It was, in my mind, all-out heaven.

Since then, my tastes for vacation have become increasingly more far-flung and adventurous: scuba diving in the Florida Keys, kayaking and hiking in national parks in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and Maine. The Galapagos Islands. Montreal and Quebec.  Death Valley.  Never once, even on our honeymoon, did we stay in a fancy-schmancy hotel.  We’ve stayed in some lovely places, clean and in great locations.  In particular, I love a hotel near a hot-spring, even if it’s so unmodern as not to have telephones or televisions or internet hook-up.  We have stayed in hotels we never saw in daylight, so the existence of pools and tennis courts and movie channels was not only unknown but irrelevant.

Since having children, our destinations have been closer to home, usually a rented condo or small cabin near a big lake.  And since having a child with multiple food allergies, our vacations have not even included much dining out.  Since last year’s job loss and ensuing examination of expenses, our vacations have been further reduced to $15 per night campsites in state parks.  And so….

Vacation, now, so far from the luxury hotel with impressive pool, involves multiple days in a row of sweating and getting muddy and bug spray and no showers.  The food is what we can make over a wood fire.  If a piece of it falls into the dirt, we consider for a moment whether or not we should eat it.  (We almost never do.  I am still me, after all.)  We use one small towel for all four us, shaking out the bugs and tree pollen between uses.  Gretchen’s hair did not get brushed between the time I put it in ponytails Friday morning and the time I took it out of the ponytails for her bath Sunday night.  Adam asked if he could wear the same shirt to bed he had worn all day and then wear it again the following day.  I considered for a moment and declared that if he really wanted to, why not?  I have been known to do that while camping.  We spend all day every day outside, and our schedule is reduced to one or two activities per day: a hike, a canoe ride, an hour or two of fishing. 

Considering this and contrasting it in my mind with what I imagine other family vacation are probably like, for a moment I was jealous.  I will admit that I thought I wouldn’t mind a bit of luxury.  But then I really tried to imagine myself lying beside a pool all day, caring that my bathing suit is faded and was purchased at Dick’s Sporting Goods some years ago, going to a fancy dinner and being late because I have to tame my hair.  And you know?  I can’t imagine that I would be any happier doing that.  At least, not after a day or two.  Because what I really love about camping is the shift that happens in myself and in my family.

When we are camping, I think we revert back to our best selves.  At home, I am furious that I have to spend my time cleaning up after other people, scrubbing mildew out of showers and trying to keep the house in a state that I imagine a house like mine ought to be kept.  My day is a series of interruptions.  I forget how to have fun, and I get bogged down with all of the stuff that hasn’t gotten done and never will get done.  I’ll confess that sometimes I run just to get away from the person I am when I’m not running.  When we are camping, though, I don’t worry if my hair is messy or my clothes are dirty or sweaty, and I really don’t worry that my shoes are unfashionable.  Nothing I do is weird.  In a campground, anything goes.  When there is a moment of downtime, I pick up my book.   While a child is napping and the other is playing a card game with my husband, I have nothing to do but read, and I do so without guilt, feeling, even as I get pelted with acorns from squirrels in the trees above, even as I swat away flies, even as I keep moving my collapsible chair to stay in the shade, that I am living a life of decadence and luxury.  Heaven.  We take walks to the toilet, and, if we are in a really deluxe campground, longer walks to the sinks and showers.  While we are camping, my husband is in charge, and when a plate of hot food is set before me (yes, I will admit that one of the perks of being vegetarian is that my tolerance is nevermore tested by choking down semi-thawed naked chicken nuggets,) I am truly grateful and appreciative.  When we roast s’mores, I don’t keep count of how many I’ve had.   Instead of trying to be in control of what everyone eats, how they are spending their time, and how much food has been dropped on the newly cleaned floor during the course of a meal, I deal with the genuine crises (bugs on dinner plates, scraped knees, bathroom emergencies, sudden rainstorms) and let the rest of what happens just happen.   The closer I am to the dirt, the less I worry about the dirt.  The scruffier we look, the less I care about appearances.  The less there is, the less I need.   When there is no schedule, interruptions never bother me.   While camping, life slows down and distills to its basic elements: eating, trips to the toilet, avoiding poison ivy, being still, being out in the real world: the heat, the rain, the bugs, the darkness.

I’m not saying that if someone offered me the chance to try out some luxury, I would turn it down.  But I don’t believe it’s a thing I will ever prioritize.  Even offered free luxury, I can’t envision myself enjoying it much more than a day or two.  I hope to camp in increasingly more interesting places: places out west, places up north, places with mountains and geysers and canyons.  I am yearning to travel and see the world that is out there and not visible from my Midwestern suburb.  I want to hike up to the top of creation and back.  I want to bump into elk and sea lions.  But given that neither free time nor money is abundant enough to squander, I don’t foresee myself ever valuing the accommodations over the nature.  I want to vacation to more places than I can possibly get to in a lifetime, but more importantly, I want to vacation from the person I sometimes become living in the midst of a shiny, clean, and well-decorated suburb.  Let’s be honest: it’s not really vacation if you have to worry about your hair.