River to River 2023: Pass Me That Baton

Right before one of my runs this weekend, a teammate asked me if I was nervous. I did an internal check because my initial response seemed wrong: no, not nervous. Just happy. So happy to be about to take the baton.

I went into the whole thing sort of nervous. I’ve done River to River, an 80-mile, eight-person relay, four times before. It’s always been a marvelously wonderful time. But the last time I did it was in the before-times, April of 2019. Since then, I’ve run very few races at all. Partly that was from a hip injury, and partly it was Covid. For me, everything is still Covid-tinged to some extent, particularly large events that will put me in contact with large numbers of people who may or may not put effort into not spreading Covid. I was nervous about being in a van with people for three days. And then, to make it worse, I have a sore hamstring. I wasn’t sure I could finish the distance with any integrity. I was, frankly, worried about the pain. Also, I figured that doing the relay might finish off my running for the season. I decided, though, that I was going to do it poorly and with pain if that’s what it took. I preemptively lined up an appointment with a doctor who has helped me with running injuries in the past, and I asked for the leg with the easiest runs first and the only big hills at the end.

I was nervous about what to pack. The weather reports shifted so many times: warm and partly sunny, cold and raining, everything in between. And, to be fair to the weather forecasters, all of those things could be simultaneously true over an 80-mile spread in April in Illinois. So the clothes were, of course, hard to pack efficiently. Efficiency matters when there are eight people with the gear and food needed for everyone to run three races over the course of 13 hours. And the food is a thing too. What and when does one eat when she gets up at 3:30am and then runs three times before finishing at 8pm? My friend JJ calmly reminded me of some things I already knew, so I stopped by the grocery store and bought too much and stayed up too late packing and repacking food and clothes and got myself ready.

After meeting up, loading the van, driving, going to the packet pick-up, finding dinner, and going to the race meeting, we finally arrived at our rental house in time to go to bed for a few restless hours before rising at the aforementioned 3:30am for a 4:15 departure.

Driving to the race through what was still night to most people, I had one of those peak moments, one of those moments when you metaphorically stop at a high spot in life and pause to look around. I looked back at all of the experiences that had brought me to be in that passenger seat in those running clothes looking up at those stars in the National Forest. I thought about how as I was going to be running a relay that I love, my son was going to be initiated into his fraternity. It was going to be a big day for him, too. It was going to be a day that had nothing to do with me and in which I did not have a role, and so it was perfectly--even wonderfully--good that I was doing something I loved. My daughter would be waking up in a few hours to run in her own relays for her high school track team. I didn’t know then, but she was about to achieve the goal she set weeks ago: to run the mile in under six minutes. I knew that everything I had done, either well or poorly, had somehow gotten me to this moment where my children and I were just where we wanted to be. I knew that anything could happen, either good or bad, in our day or the days ahead, but we were right at that moment right where we were supposed to be. The past and the future were just the past and the future, and the present was the only and the perfect thing. I was free from both regret and fear. It was a moment of perfection.

Moments, by definition, pass, but that sense of combined wonder and rightness stayed with me for a while. The morning was still chilly as I stood at the first exchange waiting for the baton. I was not nervous.

When I started to run, the sense of wonder and rightness expanded to fill me. My hamstring was not yet sore. My legs felt fresh and powerful. My segment of the race was in a valley filled with the soft yellow light of the just-risen sun and, ahead of me, a great glowing cloud of rising fog. The fields around me were sprouting and the trees in southern Illinois were already covered in either blossoms or tender green. Everything around me was starting anew, rising, beginning. I ran a little harder than I had planned just because I could. I ran until I started to feel my breath shift, and then I held that pace, perfectly balanced between ease and effort.

Here, I break up the beauty with a dark but interesting touch of reality. As I was still running past the vehicles of other teams in the exchange, I saw a small group of people looking down at something in the road: a flattened armadillo. Huh.

The first round of runs was such a delight. The second runs were, of course, harder. We were a little tired from our first races, most of which were hilly. The coffee we had started to sip at 4am was gone and worn off. The third round of runs, though, is always really rough. Everyone is very tired and possibly sore in some joint or muscle. People start getting headaches from the sun or fatigue or some unmet nutritional need or just because they do. This year, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped, and we were cold standing in the exchanges cheering each other on. Given my pending hamstring injury, I had requested a leg that has the easy segments first and the hardest run last, thinking that I’d just give whatever was left in me at that point, and if my injury was terrible at the end, then so be it. It would have been worth it. Obviously, though, it’s a challenge to run the hardest segment already tired and sore and ready to be finished.

My last run was shaped like my leg overall: easy at first and hard at the end. What the elevation chart could not show, though, was the wind, which was at our back for most of our afternoon runs. My run, however, turned just when it started to go uphill, and yes, it turned into the wind. So, in the last half of my last leg, I looked up into my steepest climbs and the wind blew me back down. I passed a woman who seemed to be committed to power walking the whole hill. The guy who had blown past me in the flat miles stopped and walked and never caught up to me again. The guy in front of me walked every now and then. I started to gain on him. The hill was steeper in some places than in others, and a couple of times I stopped and walked for 20 seconds—long enough to settle my breathing just a bit—and started again.

I had told my teammates that my goal for the last run was to be fully there—to see it and feel it completely. When I was out there, though, what I thought about was my teammates. Several of them had never run any relay much less one that is pretty much all hills. And yet, knowing we needed to meet a time goal for our race to count (the finish line closes at 8pm,) every one of them pushed themselves to go a little faster than they thought they could. Every one of them faced the big hills. The hill I was on wasn’t anything more than what everyone else had already done that day. I was inspired by the calm and cheerful steadiness of the woman who had handed me the baton and the stoic courage of the injured woman who would take it from me. I was inspired by my teammate who had really only run 5Ks in the past. I was inspired by my teammate who agreed to be runner six when I got injured and said I couldn’t—she’d done it before and so could do it again. I was inspired by my teammate who will be running an ultra in a few weeks and so agreed to take an extra segment if needed. I thought about my teammate who faced that first big hill in leg five and just…did it. That is what one does when one is on a hill. You move each foot and then do it again until you get to the place where your friend can take the baton.

Partway through the day, just when we were all feeling incurably grumpy and tired, just when the wind was picking up and the temperature was dropping, my husband sent me a text that my daughter had earned her “sub 6” shirt in her mile race, and he sent a picture of her standing on the track waiting to take the baton in her relay. In the picture, the track is covered and the air is filled with hail. Then he sent a picture of her running with the baton. Again, the track is covered and the air is filled with hail. Her legs are stretched out in full stride and neither foot is on the ground. Her gaze is focused, and the baton is in her right hand. She looks strong and fast and beautiful, and she looks stronger and faster and more beautiful because she’s running in hail.

After the race, after marveling at the luxury of the running water at the Chill and Grill by the finish line, I thought about why we do something that is very hard and tiring and sometimes gross and often painful. And more than just doing it, we rejoice in it. We look forward to next year. I suppose we all have our own reasons, but this weekend, I was acutely aware that the relay offers me a moment to appreciate my own life and makes me brave. There are hard things all around me—parenting, teaching, work politics, politics politics, scary changes, growing older—but the relay reminds me that we can enjoy doing hard things. When I am halfway up a steep and/or long hill, I know I can keep going. My teammates have done it before. I have done it before. And what’s more: I WANT to keep going. Life is hard, but it’s also so beautiful. The hills and the hail actually make it even more so. Sometimes the wind blows against you or it starts to hail while you’re waiting for the baton. Sometimes the sun rises and shines on the spring blossoms and the flat armadillo on the road. So be it. Pass me that baton.

When Your Life is On Fire

My work is hard to the point of being objectively impossible. It's my job to keep trying even though I am totally powerless to do what I'm trying to do. For example, in one class today, 45% of the students never showed. 45%. Of those there, I could only tell that ONE (ONE!) student even started the reading. I do not not know if anyone else read a single word. And since this class almost never responds to questions and doesn’t reliably turn in assignments, I won't know the next time we meet either. And yet I work all day and into the night just in case that one student might learn something. Just in case. Today I was feeling exhausted and defeated. My day was so full (there isn't even a pause between classes) that I didn't get to eat lunch. That's not totally true. I had a little over 45 minutes at 1pm, and then I had meetings again until 3:15, and then my daughter had an orthodontist appointment, so it was my only 45 minutes of daylight to run, and I chose a run and a protein bar over lunch. I quickly changed, mentally planned my route, and left.

When I got one mile into my run, I turned a corner and saw that most of the rest of my route was ON FIRE. Literally on fire. 10-foot flames, and dark, opaque billows of smoke. Not something you can run through. So I rerouted. I did, on my modified route, get to see the workers starting the fires--it was a burn of the prairie. That was really cool to see, and I don’t regret that experience. I'm always so tired by Thursday that those runs are always mere-survival-slogs, and this one was too, but I did it--on an unexpected out-and-back route. I got back for my meeting eight minutes before it started and was sweaty but wearing real clothes again. 

So there's a metaphor. My plans of every sort--vacations, holidays, teaching, shopping, eating, family, sports--are ON FIRE. Burning to the ground. 10-foot flames and dark, opaque smoke obscuring the path ahead. So...reroute. I might feel like crap, but it'll be...enough. I'll be ugly at the end but still here. Of course, partway through my on-line department meeting later in the afternoon, the wind must have shifted because my house filled with smoke and we couldn't see the houses across the street. My daughter went outside to see whose house was on fire. Opening the door was...not a great idea. Our house smells like a campfire, but there are worse fates.

But back to my job. Tuesday, I tried to warm up that same group of seniors that doesn't fully arrive or speak much. I always start class with a non-academic sort of personal question just to get them used to interacting. Tuesday, I asked, "What was your biggest kitchen fail?" No one talked for a LONG time. I told them about the time I sliced into my finger, pulled the knife out, and had to ask the guy fixing my roof to drive me to the ER. No one responded. In a real classroom, I would never give up on something I knew they could do. I'd stand there in awkward silence until someone cracked and spoke. I can endure awkward silence better than your average person. In a pandemic, however, I think kids just walk away from their computers when it gets uncomfortable, so I was about to reroute and move on to the lesson when one person talked. Then a second person told me that when she was seven, she and her cousin put a mitten in the toaster and burned her house down. "Like, all the way?" I asked, mouth agape. All the way. They had to find a new house, which is how she came to live here. Oh.

I guess sometimes your life, well, burns to the ground. And then you reroute. And it's ugly. But here we are. Alive. Sweaty. Tired. Together, sort of. Smelling oddly like smoke. And HERE.

The one in which both of my kids beat me in a 5K

Tonight my kids and I ran a 5K at Mooseheart (in the dark because it showcases their holiday lights display.) I haven't run much the last three weeks because of my hamstring, and it's back to not feeling good after going from stand-still to somewhat race pace. I finished in 25:37, which in a small race was good enough for 6th place woman. I am grateful that I can do that and grateful that instead of beating myself up over how I'm slower than I once was, I can be grateful that I'm faster than I was more recently. It's a respectable time. But what I'm more grateful for is when we were walking to the starting line, and my kids walked off together to start near the front of the pack, talking, looking strong and fast and completely in control of the situation. (As it turns out, they were and they weren't. Neither had run since the end of their respective seasons, which was almost a month ago for Adam and almost two months ago for Gretchen, so neither ran as well as they thought they would. Afterward, Adam said that if this had been at the end of the cc season, he could have won. He got 6th. G did, actually, win 1st girl in the 12 and under category and was 4th woman overall. At the end of her season, she still would have been 3rd, though.) Both kids beat me. This is beautiful to me not because they are stand-outs--they aren't--but because they are just good enough to feel empowered to walk up to the front of a race, to run until they hurt (G was hurting pretty badly), and to see themselves as runners. I feel, perhaps foolishly, that identifying themselves as runners will, to some degree, innoculate them from some dumb decisions in their teen years. Not all, of course. But if you see your body as a thing that runs, you don't put really bad stuff in it. If you see your body as a thing that runs, it doesn't matter what the opposite sex says of it. If you see yourself as part of a team, it doesn't matter if there are other crowds you aren't part of. I am also grateful that running brings them closer together.

Both of my kids can run faster than I can. Tonight I'm grateful for my own running, but I'm just as grateful for theirs. 

One run

 I am so very grateful for my run today and for being well enough to run again and for what running has been and is in my life. 

Today I ran at dusk on a warm(ish) November afternoon. The light was soft and grey to start and faded to softer and greyer until it was almost gone by the end of my run and my path was illumined by streetlights and headlights. I ran on the Fox River trail from St. Charles to Geneva and back up the other side. I was the only one on the trail, and it was silent. There wasn't anyone to respond to or care for or even be polite to. It was just me and the silence and the river. I didn't run fast or far, since it's possible my hamstring is still healing. It was effortless. Like floating, but better, because I was running. It was my body, my breath, my feet making it happen. There was a twinge on the back of my knee on the previously injured leg, and it was just enough to keep me vigilant. My left foot was striking a little differently from my right. It was perfect in its near-miss of perfection. It was like coming home, but better. Like I imagine it will be to rest in heaven. Not boring, like rest. But a full body welcome. The place I was designed to fit. I was grateful for every previous run on that path and for every path that led me to that particular one on this particular day. Everything that ever happened to me brought me to that run, and that run redeemed all of the moments before it. It made everything that happened all day insignificant but also vital. The run would not have been what it was if all of the things that came before weren't exactly what they were. 

There are a few moments in life that I can return to at will, and I will that that run be one of them. That when I am old and can no longer run, I will be able to close my eyes on life and for just a moment relive that run.

If I could be the world's mom

To me, it feels like the world is throwing a huge high-stakes temper tantrum turned into schoolyard brawl. No, noone I know has shot anyone--yet--but apparently it’s only a matter of time. We are posting mean things about each other’s ideas, each other’s fears, and each other’s priorities and passions and griefs. We are watching human tragedy unfold and our response is name calling and blaming and casting around anger and scorn and despair. I don’t like it. It’s inappropriate and injurious, and it’s beneath us. If you are doing this, I am heart-broken at your behavior. But here’s the thing: I have claimed you as my own. I love you. I love you even if you are being mean to the other kids, but I also don’t want to let that go on. I believe you can do better, and I show you less love by letting you be a little jerk because that’s just who you are. You don’t need to be the mean kid. Eventually, a world filled with people who behave meanly in small ways fuels the fire that consumes us in large ways. I want to make this world a better place, and the only way I know how is to be a mother.

I want to do this: I want to be the mother for a little while. I want to pull the world into a huge, restraining hug.  I want to let the world scream into my stomach and smear snot and tears on my shoulder and even punch me and struggle against my embrace until it gets tired, until it begins to settle down. Then I want to send the world to its room--not as punishment but because I think some of us have not yet learned how to be civil in the presence of someone with whom we do not agree. Name calling isn’t the answer in elementary school, and it isn’t now. Shoving and punching were not the answer then, and they aren’t now. Sometimes the best course of action is to, metaphorically, take a time out. Even for adults, that might mean stepping away from the social media for a little while. If something makes you gloat, if it feels like it’s going to really smack down your “enemies,” leave it alone until you can consider that maybe the schoolyard is full of other kids, not enemies. Maybe smacking is the precursor to things more violent. Maybe “they” are a part of “us.”

But a time-out is temporary.  If we all walk away and sit in our rooms forever, that doesn’t solve the world’s problems.  When the world is ready to discuss rationally, as the world’s mom, I want to sit down and discuss what is a helpful way of talking to others. How should you deal with people who want to draw rainbows when you want to draw trucks? How should you deal with the girl who always insists upon being line leader even though she was line leader every day this week? What might be happening in her life to make that so important to her? Can you let her? Can you? How do you deal with the kid who, when he loses at soccer, body checks his opponent when contact could have been avoided? How do you deal with the kid who won and is rubbing it in? How should you deal with someone who rides a bike on the trail when you want to run on it or vice versa? How can you talk to someone who passionately believes in owning a gun when you passionately believe they should not? Is it ever EVER going to help you or them to ridicule and name call and taunt? What is really going to happen if you do that? Do you think making someone an enemy is going to win him or her over to your way of thinking?  I don’t think it will. What could you do instead? How could you tell that girl or that boy that you disagree with him/her but still care about his/her well-being? How can you tell him or her that you are hurting in a way that makes him or her reconsider rather than lash back? If you go at someone with knives, might they not use knives to defend themselves? Before speaking and acting, let’s think about the kind of world we want to live in, and then let’s show others how to make that world real.

I’m sorry life is hard, world, but it is. I’m sorry people disagree, world, but they do. I’m sorry people mess up, but they do (and so will you. Remember that.) But think about if you really want to be the mean, selfish, self-righteous kid before that’s who you become. You can be angry and hurt and confused. I am. But try to make the world a better place rather a worse one. Just try. Then try again tomorrow. I’ll try too. And I’ll have this talk with you again tomorrow if you need it.

Go get a drink of water. Then go do better today than you did yesterday. I know you can.

Running into the Sun

My son is sick. I'm not sure what he has, but since he's already on antibiotics from the ear infection he had last week, I'm going to guess it's a virus and we just need to wait it out. He missed his wax museum performance. Poor kid. After he was sent home on Tuesday with a fever and sore throat, I put in for a sub on Wednesday and stayed home with him. Staying home with a feverish Adam is not a hard task, and, as a bonus, it meant that I could run at 6am with the sunrise. As I was running up a hill on a grass trail with the sun directly in front of my face at the top of the hill, it seemed like life was just about perfect. 

But life isn't perfect--mine or anyone else's. I was there because my kid was sick. That's not perfect. I can no longer run as much or as fast as I want to, and I'm facing the fact that this is a permanent condition. I have degenerating vertebrae, and they aren't going to grow back. I'm only going to get older. Older, if my grandmothers are any example, means dementia and total loss of mobility. Then there are other things about life that aren't perfect. I have students with unpleasant attitudes and even worse home lives. I have more to do than I could possibly accomplish even if I didn't sleep at all for the next three weeks. But at least I have my job. I know people who have lost their jobs and people who can't get jobs in the first place. There are people who have lost their homes to debt or disaster. There are people born with physical deformities and mental disabilities. There are people with terminal illnesses and people who are paralyzed in car crashes. There are people who lose their children in tragic accidents or from horrible childhood diseases. I could list thousands of horrible things that people endure, but the short version of what occurred to me as I was running down the other side of the hill is that every morning when you wake up, you have no idea what is going to happen. Is this the day you lose your job, lose your beloved, make a bad decision, survive a tornado, die in a car crash, or suffer a stroke or a freak heart attack? It seems like the list of terrible things that might come out of nowhere is greater than the list of wonderful things. And yet, I thought, as I rounded the corner to overlook a small lake, I am happy to be alive and to see what I can see. 

I am willing to wake up every morning, even knowing that anything could happen. At the very least, life is pretty interesting. And so in spite of all of the ugliness and pettiness and brokenness one is sure to encounter sooner and later, it still seems worth the risk to get up every day and keep an eye out for the beauty. Just in case. 

And then, a good 250 yards from the lake, I started running through piles of fish. I'll just leave that there.

Falling Off the Trail

Our first campground in New York was at the top of a hill/mountain in Watkins Glen State Park. (The hills in the finger lakes are much much bigger than ours, but I don't actually think it was an official mountain.) On Tuesday I decided to run down into the town, which was on the lake shore, and try to find a way to run by the lake. The lake is something like 50-60 miles around or some such distance I couldn't possibly manage. On my way out of the campground, I found a little semi-hidden trail, so I decided to take it. It took me down (literally) to the entrance to the part of the campground we were staying in. Then I took the road to town which was windy and down down down. I had only gone two miles or so when I reached the town and the bottom, so I tried to find a lake trail (there wasn't one) and explored the town some. After I had run another mile or two, I realized I had better start back up. Up was harder than I thought. I was glad I had done the small hill at Johnson's Mound a few times the week before. Two miles of steep incline is more than I am used to, and I was thoroughly done and very satisfied when I finished. I had that pleasant exhausted muscle buzz the rest of the day.

Because I sincerely intended all along to be extremely cautious to protect my meager running gains, I took Wednesday off. I had found a way that the tiny trail out of my campground area connected with the rim trail of the gorge which we hadn't hiked yet. (We did the more exciting and treacherous and popular gorge trail to see the dozens of waterfalls.) Thursday, I decided to explore the trails. Of course, since my tiny trail went down and down, the rim trail, which went to the top of the area, went up and up. I had my Garmin watch, so I could see that between the incline and my cautious trail running, I was going very slowly. For a moment I contemplated turning around and repeating Tuesday's run, but then I decided that I don't often get to trail run in the woods up a gorge rim and that I could always go easy on the trail and hard on the road the next day. Good plan, I thought. I ran the rim trail, being cautious, and came out at the top in less than two miles. Boo. Not long enough. I started down the road I found at the top, and only a few minutes later, I passed a little sign that labeled a "punchbowl extension" trail. I decided to take it. It took me straight down into a little clearing by a large pool of water, maybe the river just before the falls? I don't know. It was clearly a planned trail but very little used. I hadn't seen a single soul on the rim trail either, but this place seemed even less traveled. From the clearing, I spotted an even smaller trail (perhaps my definition of cautious is a bit stretchy,) and I started down it. I hadn't gone even a quarter mile around the edge of the "punchbowl" when I tripped on a root or a hole or something. It happened so quickly. My left ankle twisted and then slid off the trail towards the pool, and my right side--all the way up to my right cheek--hit the trail. Moments later, when I had time to reflect, I was rather impressed by my body's survival instincts. Although I haven't run on a trail in a couple of years at least, and even then I only had the chance a few times a year on vacation, my body knew what to do. I live in a flat part of the world, so I don't ever practice falling off of a precipice. I didn't think about grabbing hold of the vegetation on the side of the slope or digging my fingers into the trail, but I did those things. When I caught my breath, I pulled myself up on the plants and the roots, hoping I hadn't grabbed a strong vine of poison ivy in the process, and regained the "trail." "Well," I said to myself, "I guess that's the end of that run."

The problem, of course, was that I had a short, steep climb to get up to the main trail, and then a longish trek back to the join with my little campsite trail, and I had clearly sprained my ankle. The steep incline was rough, but I found another trail with roots and things that I could use to pull myself up with my arms, mostly. Then on the main trail I told myself it was not so bad. I could definitely make it. I had been reading Into the Wild, so my head was full of stories of people who have done crazy things and survived against the odds. (Of course, the main character survives for quite a while and then makes a rather small mistake and dies from it, but I chose not to focus on that part of the book.) A less than two mile hike on an obvious trail in a state park didn't seem that extreme, even with a sprained ankle. But it was slow going, to say the least. I felt like I was not moving, and the longer I walked, the worse I felt. I considered sitting down and crying for a while, but I talked myself out of that decision. I could be sitting there for hours. I had at least managed to get myself onto a real trail, but no one had taken the trail yet, that I had seen. I decided that really my only option was to gut it out and get myself back. I confess that I did cry a few times, but I kept going.

I was watching my Garmin to judge how much longer I'd have to hold it together. I knew I'd be back by mile four, since I had fallen around two and had taken a short-cut up from the bowl. When I had been walking for about a mile, I saw a glint to my right, away from the gorge. A car? A road, then? I thought a road would be much easier to walk on than a trail, but then I wouldn't know where I was and might end up walking even farther. I stopped and stared. I decided that it was not a road, but a campsite! I figured it must be somehow connected to the campground I meant to find--at least part of the same state park. I decided to leave the trail and walk through the woods to the campsite and figure it out from there. Again, I must marvel at a fortuitous turn of events. Not only did I not fall all the way off the trail when I fell, but when I did leave the trail on purpose, I walked into the only campsite with an awake camper. A woman was sitting in her sweats having coffee and doing a crossword. I came up behind her and apologized for startling her by crawling out of the woods and then explained what had happened. She said she had a map of the campgrounds in her car, which she fetched, and we determined that she and I were camping as far from each other as was possible. She said she would drive me back. I generally hate to impose on people that way, but I had to. I thanked her profusely and got in her car.

As she drove, we talked a bit about running. I said that I had, to amuse myself, asked myself if I had been in a trail race, would I have tried to finish? I concluded that I could not have finished. She said her boyfriend had recently sprained an ankle in a trail race and did finish, which she thought was a stupid thing to have done. She, it turned out, was an ER nurse practitioner! My guardian angel maybe dozed off a bit when I was down in the punchbowl, but she worked hard afterwards to make up for it! The nurse reminded me to stay off the ankle as much as possible for at least 48 hours and to take it very slowly after that. She reminded me that a sprain takes much longer to heal than a fracture (grrr) and could bother me for up to six months and that the worst thing I could do is push it before it's ready. As she was talking, the pain, which I must have been keeping at bay with adrenaline or desperation, started to climb. I could barely tolerate the jostling of the car on the rough roads. I felt myself going into that sort of semi-consciousness that happens in labor and other intense pain situations.

When she dropped me off, my family was all still sleeping, so I called out for some help. The nurse asked me if I needed help making it to the picnic bench on the far side of my campsite, and I said no, I had just walked a mile, and someone would come help me in a minute, but then my vision blacked over and the world tilted and I got hot and cold at once. I grabbed for the car and held myself up, and she dashed out of her seat and caught me. By then Doug was out of the camper and the two of them carried me to the picnic bench, where I laid down. The nurse commented that she probably could have just carried me herself, and I should have said I was going to faint. She said to lie down for a while and whenever I felt faint again to lie down with my foot up.

We put ice on my ankle for 20 minutes at a time, and I started to shake. It was a chilly morning, and I was wearing a tank top and shorts. Doug gave me a blanket and some towels to cover up with, but I couldn't stop shaking and shaking. I shook for about two hours. I should have eaten something, but I was too wrapped up in my pain and too light-headed to think of it. Finally my family got up and ate, and I ate too, but I couldn't stop shaking. Was it from cold or pain or fear? I don't know. I kept replaying in my head the moment around the fall and the scenarios of how that all could have ended differently. I decided it was always going to end up OK, one way or another, but it certainly could have been much worse than it was.

Twin Lakes Triathlon

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for Twin Lakes Triathlon because back in January my friend Jen signed up for a women’s tri in June.  She was nervous, but I was excited and maybe a little bit jealous.  To encourage her training, I found us an indoor triathlon to do in February, but when the time approached, my back was too sore, and I didn’t know if it was a return of all of my problems.  She did it alone.  I was sedentary. Then in May, when I was feeling better again, we did a brick workout, and I told her everything important I could remember about the day of a triathlon.  I told her about setting up the transition area and walking through the entrances and exits, about being dizzy after the swim, about the 300 lb woman who was near me in transition at Lake Zurich and wouldn’t let any of us other women help her because she needed to prove to herself and to the world that she could do it.  Oh, lots of things.  As we biked and ran and biked and ran, I put myself back in my triathlon days and gave her whatever seemed valuable. It was her first triathlon so the things I left out were the things about winning, the things about specific pace strategies.  I focused, for her and in my mind, on how fun it is to swim and then bike and then run.  By the time the morning was over, I was thinking, “I just did Jen’s brick workout no problem.  I believe in her.  She is ready. So why would I not believe in me, too?”  I didn’t think Jen was going to win the triathlon, and that didn’t affect my excitement for her in the least. She was going to have a great day. Why was I letting unrealistic expectations hold me back? Didn’t I really and truly believe that it was wonderful that she had signed up, that she would be awesome for finishing, and that a day spent swimming, biking and running is a day well spent?  I thought about it, and I decided that signing up is about being brave, finishing is about celebrating where you’ve been, and all the rest is about joy.  I am brave, I’ve had a long, heart-rending journey where athleticism is concerned, and I am ready for some joy.  

I missed the glut of early June triathlons, and I am unavailable for the mid-July triathlons, so I settled on a sprint in Palatine in late June. That didn’t leave me any time to really train, but I had been riding my bike and swimming and running a little, and thanks to Jen, who did great in her triathlon, I knew I could finish. Plus, I’m still recovering and still trying to figure out what that recovery means.  Training, real training, training to win, is probably not a good idea for me at this point.  The soonness of the triathlon made true training impossible.  Perfect. 

Last weekend, I decided it was probably past time to get out my road bike.  I hadn’t been on it in almost two years!  When I bought it, I simultaneously bought the bike shoes that snap into the pedals. The first time I tried to get on, I fell over in the street in front of my house.  I thought I probably shouldn’t repeat that performance in T1. On Saturday, I rode maybe 6-8 miles (my odometer wasn’t working) to practice clipping in and out of my pedals. Last Sunday a friend and I did the 62 mile route of the annual Swedish Days ride. My speedometer still wasn’t working, but for most of the ride, I felt like I was flying.  I was, in fact, moving faster than the birds flying along the side of the road. Oh, it felt good. I didn’t start to feel tired until maybe 50 miles in, and I managed to not fall off my bike, even when in the second turn of the ride a peloton of crazy riders passed me on a turn and the leader wiped out from the fast turn on gravel. I took it as a cautionary tale, not that I needed it. I am always cautious on turns.

For some reason, I didn’t get all keyed up the day before this triathlon, maybe because I didn’t take any days off.  I swam easy on Thursday and rode easy on Saturday.  I spent the day Saturday shopping and having lunch with my sister, and getting together the stuff required for a triathlon seemed like an afterthought after the kids were in bed and the house was quiet. Maybe I didn’t get keyed up because I didn’t have any expectations for myself other than to finish. Maybe it’s because in spite of my beliefs about bravery and celebration and joy, I was a little uncertain how I felt about getting back into the sport and not looking like I was any good at it. Boo to me for those thoughts. Unfortunately for me (or fortunately, since it didn’t allow me much time to freak out?), I didn’t open all of the e-mailed documents about the swim, bike and run courses until Saturday evening.  I had been aware that the swim was going to be 750m rather than the more common 400m for a sprint triathlon.  I somehow had missed, though, that the run was not 5K, as I had been counting on, but 4.5 miles.  That’s 150% of what I thought I’d be running. My heart sank.  If someone had asked me some years ago which of the three sports was going to be my weak link, I never ever would have predicted it would be the run, but Saturday night, I was sure it was the run.  My longest runs now are six miles, and they are a struggle for me.  4.5 is quite close to that.

At 3:30am on Sunday I woke up to torrential downpour. Boo.  I hated the thought of packing up all of my stuff in the pouring rain.  I hated the thought of driving for an hour for no reason.  I also, I admit, didn’t love the idea of doing the triathlon in a downpour, if there was no lightning.  But I ate a bowl of oatmeal and put my bike and my other stuff in the car, along with an extra towel, and started out.  

I had printed out the directions, and I thought I was following them, but something confusing must happen with the exit from I-90 to 53. I thought I took the exit, but when the next road never appeared, I realized I was somehow still on 90. I am thankful for Siri, who told me to keep driving to the next exit, which was, unfortunately, 8 miles away, and turn around. My poor navigation luck struck again when the entrance ramp back onto 90 was closed for construction, so I had to drive ten miles back the other way to another entrance. With those added detours, Siri told me that instead of arriving around 5:15am, when packet-pickup began for those who didn’t pick up in advance, I was going to arrive at 5:52, eight minutes before packet pick-up ended.  Yikes.  Then, when I arrived, the parking lot was full.  The race organizers had warned of limited parking and said that later arrivals would need to park on nearby neighborhood streets and walk into the park through a side entrance.  The problem was that I didn’t even know where the nearby neighborhoods were, and Siri just isn’t that smart.  Luckily, I drove around for a bit and found a road lined with parked cars with bike racks.  The park with the triathlon was probably less than half a mile down the road. The lovely check-in women told me I could calm down: I had made it. Plus, it had stopped raining.

I had my arms and legs marked, set up my transition, put my number on my bike and my race number belt, went to the bathroom, and then it was time to listen to the opening announcements.  The first wave started a few minutes later, just as a brilliant sun emerged from the last of the rain clouds. I started my triathlon ten minutes after that, in wave five. 

The swim waves were determined, I believe, by predicted swim time.  In the pool, I can do 100m repeats at around 1:50, so I signed up, feeling I was being optimistic, to finish the swim in 14:00-16:00.  I had agonized over that for a few minutes but finally decided that even if I was fudging down, so would most people. Before we were released into the water, I looked around at my fellow wave fives.  Few were wearing wet suits.  The water was supposed to be 77 degrees, so maybe they had wet suits and decided the time gained with them would be lost in transition, and they weren’t needed for temperature.  There were several women wearing bra tops.  The wave was more women than men, but there were some men too.  One woman standing near me didn’t appear to have goggles.  I thought of my friend Rachel who, two years in a row (!), forgot her goggles at the Batavia triathlon.  “You don’t have goggles?” I asked the woman near me.  She said she didn’t because she didn’t really know how to swim freestyle, so she just does breast stroke with her head above water.  Hmmm.  I do have a friend who did backstroke in a triathlon, but he never would have signed up for under two minute pace on the swim. I asked about that.  “Oh, I’m planning to finish the swim in about half an hour, “she said.  Huh.  So it must not be assigned by predicted finish, I remarked.  She said that she put down a faster time on her registration.  Clearly.  “You’re planning to do 16:00?” she asked.  “Maybe I’ll just try to stay with you,” she said.  I agreed that that would be a good strategy for her, but I didn’t have much confidence that she would pull it off.  It reminded me of the woman I talked to before my first Olympic open swim, gazing out into a largish lake almost to the point of the horizon where there was an orange cone and saying, “Where are we swimming to?  That will take us less than hour, right?”  Both women made me feel like I was at least more prepared than they were, no matter how much I questioned myself.

Even as my wave was called down to the water’s edge, I didn’t feel nervous.  No one put him/herself at the front, so although I meant to be hanging back, I ended up only a few people back from the front and center of the wave. I resigned myself to having to either battle it out in the water or just outswim my wave.  Surprisingly, even as the whistle sounded, I still didn’t feel that nervous.  We plowed into the water for about a meter, and then the bottom abruptly disappeared and we were all swimming.  I don’t remember the swims in previous triathlons being so crowded except maybe in Bangs Lake.  There were people around me constantly: people I had to swim around, a few people I accidentally kicked, and then kicked again and again, people not really swimming, people swimming but slower than I was.  I didn’t feel like I was swimming super quickly.  I was just swimming a nice strong pace. On top of that, I was swimming freestyle for a few strokes and then breast stroke for a few strokes to keep myself oriented and find holes in the crowd to swim through.  I had my obligatory open-water panic, but I had prepared myself (and Jen) for that feeling, so I rode it out and kept swimming.  The swim was a long loop around a little island. Once I turned and was heading back, the swim felt less crowded and less long.  I did more freestyle and less breast stroke.  A lovely hole opened up and I had a couple hundred meters of unimpeded swimming.  It was marvelous.  The sun was blazing a couple of feet into the water, and I could see little green seaweed pieces and the sparkle of bubbles. My freestyle felt effortless and smooth. There was another thick crush of swimmers as I neared the end, most of them wearing caps in the color of the two waves ahead of me, so I figured I must have done OK on the swim.  The ground appeared beneath me only a meter or so before the shore, and I climbed up and crossed the mat into T1. 

I had forgotten to start my watch, so I had no idea how long I had been swimming.  In T1 I asked one of the few people there from my wave how long he had been swimming.  He said 12:45, so I thought I was probably faster than I had planned to be. I found out later that my time was 13:44, a 1:43 pace.  Nice. Even before I knew that, though, I felt good about the swim.  I felt strong.  Plus, almost all of the bikes from my wave were still racked.  I sat down, swiped at my feet with a towel, and put on my socks and bike shoes.  I jogged my bike over to the mount line, clipped in without falling over (yay!) and biked off.

I felt great on the bike too.  I passed a number of people who apparently swam in faster waves, and there were maybe three or four people who I passed multiple times and then they would pass me later. I am conservative on the corners, and there were about 30 turns, some of them more than 90 degrees, in a 14 mile course.  But on the straights and up hills I would zoom past people.  Of course, there was one moment when I looked down at my speedometer, saw that I was at 24 mph, figuratively slapped myself on the back for being awesome, and then was promptly passed by a guy who must have been going close to 30mph.  Oh well. I felt strong and fast and confident.  It was a wonderfully good time.  The course was through beautiful neighborhoods of expensive houses much of the time, and I got to ride down the center of the street as quickly as I wanted.  I ended up averaging 18.8 mph, even with all of those turns. What is more fun on a sunny Sunday morning? As I reentered the park on my bike, I was told to be cautious as there were still some bikes exiting. I surveyed the sparkling lake and smiled at a volunteer who cheered me on.  My eyes filled up with tears, and I choked up a bit. I was beyond joy. I was two-thirds of the way through a triathlon. I hadn’t thought I’d ever get to do such a thing again.

I dismounted without falling down and jogged back to my transition area.  I was one of the only bikes back from my wave.  Awesome again. I hadn’t bothered to buy speed laces for this tri, so I sat down again to change shoes and tie laces. Then I started to run. 

I remember from past triathlons that it’s extremely hard to judge pace at the beginning of the run.  I felt like I was not moving at all.  I felt, again, like running has become my weak link, and maybe it has. Of course, I told myself, it’s possible that I just felt so slow running because I had spent the better part of the last 45 minutes at 20+ mph, so even my best run was bound to feel slow in comparison. I also became very aware that I had been breathing hard for about an hour.  I hadn’t wanted to let up on the swim when it seemed like I was getting ahead of the pack.  I hadn’t wanted to slow down my breathing on the bike because I wanted to keep riding hard and speeding through the course.  I was having too much fun to prioritize something like breathing. On the run, though, I wished I could slow down, but my background, in spite of appearances, is running, and it just feels wrong not to be pushing a running race.  So I kept at it.  

The run was hot and steamy, as the morning’s rain was evaporating off the hot pavement.  I never could tell how fast I was running, even after the weird bike-to-run feeling wore off.  I wanted to stop many, many times, but I didn’t.  I told myself over and over, “I will just keep running.”  I decided that victory, for me, was not about pace but about not stopping. I never stopped.  The last mile was rough, but I ran it. I don’t know how the splits worked out, but I averaged an 8:23 pace.  That’s about as good as I could expect given the distance and my paltry training.  I’ve been running that distance (or often less) at between 8:30 and 9:10 pace, so an 8:23 meant I was trying.  With a bit of surprise and sadness, I will admit that the run was the least fun part of the race for me, but even so, I am nothing but grateful that I could do it.  I have a lot of blessings that I got to put to use. It was a morning wonderful beyond my expectations, both my recent short-term expectations and my long-term expectations as I’ve been down for so long with bad injuries. 

When the results were posted, I saw that I was 18^th woman.  I scanned for others in my age group and saw that I was fourth in the 35-39 category, but the overall winner was also 39.  Just in case she was therefore subtracted from the age group awards, I stuck around to see if I would get third.  I did. I am nothing but happy.

Something I Know About What I Do Not Yet Know

I posted this on my Facebook wall yesterday: “If one hopes to become good at something, one must first be willing to spend some time being not-so-good. If one wants to be strong, one must begin in weakness.”  I wrote it from a position of weakness, of not-so-goodness, and of hope.

Wednesday night I set out to run for 30 minutes straight.  I had recently run 20 minutes non-stop.  I had run 30 minutes total with brief breaks.  But 30 minutes without stopping was going to be a milestone.  It was hard.  20-some minutes in, I really wanted to stop.  In hindsight, I probably should have stopped.  My calf was bothering me some, but that was only part of the problem.  The other part was that I was tired.  I felt like I had been running for a very, very long time.  Uninvited, the thought popped to mind that not two years ago I had run for a little under four hours when I ran the Lost Dutchman Marathon.  I have twice run Chicago in around three hours and forty-five minutes.  I have run, therefore, for more than 220 minutes on multiple occasions, and yet, running for half an hour felt like an eternity. The contrast felt demoralizing.  Now, two days later, my right leg still has not recovered.  I have fallen so far.  I am still broken.

But yesterday was the ten month anniversary of my spine surgery, which means that a little less than ten months ago, I was struggling to walk in circles around the first floor of my house for a few minutes at a time.  When I was finally able to walk for more than ten minutes at a time and graduated myself to the walking track at the gym, I had to relearn how to use my right leg and how to keep my right foot pointing straight ahead of me.  I had to relearn how to use my right calf muscle and then to regrow that muscle, a process that seems still to be in progress.  And I am definitely not done regrowing the nerve that controls the outside of my right leg and foot.  I have made enormous progress.  I have been persistent and patient and brave. It’s all a matter of perspective. 

To distract myself from my tiredness and calf pain, I thought about a book I recently read called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.  The first section of the book focuses on the biology of learning a skill, specifically the myelination of nerves that occurs when they are fired repeatedly.  Each firing causes a little more myelin to grow and each layer of myelin refines and speeds up the nerve impulse.  The book proposes, therefore, that all great talent begins as not-great talent that has been refined by hours and hours of practice.  Current research shows that “expert” status at any skill is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice.  The most powerful moment in the book, for me, pointed out that in order to be great at anything, you have to slog through thousands of hours of being not-great at that thing.  Everyone who is good at something now was once not good at it.  Ability is not something we are handed on a silver platter. Ever. 

Of course, the book was not at all about people who have nerve damage or a perpetually broken foot, but it speaks to me in many other ways.  It’s OK to spend a long time learning how to run again.  More powerfully, it reminds me not to be afraid of other pursuits either. I haven’t written anything of note because I just haven’t put in the time.  The Bronte sisters, according to Coyle, spent decades writing complete crap with hokey dialogue and stolen plots before they wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Just because I have never become good at piano does not mean that someday I might not still take it up again and, after a long, long, long time, be good at it.  I could, in theory, start either of these practices tomorrow.  The reality is that I won’t, given that I don’t even have time to sleep lately, but the possibility is always there.  I can become better at cooking, better at teaching, better at singing, better at anything.  So can my students.  So can my children. The future is bigger than I can imagine and full of possibilities, some of which I don’t even know to consider yet. I need only be willing to be not-so-good, to be weak, to be wrong, to make mistakes, and to keep trying.

Enjoy the Walk

This weekend was the two week anniversary of my back sprain.  The physician’s assistant who diagnosed me refused to give me a timeline for recovery, but from my subsequent internet exploring I learned that a sprain generally takes from two weeks to two months to heal.  Clearly I am not on the two week plan.  On Wednesday, I tried running in 30 second intervals, but my back couldn’t make it the full 30 seconds.  Oh well. 

The truth is—and hopefully this confession does not disqualify me as a “real runner”—that I have been enjoying walking.  Every so often I see someone running and think, “Oh, I’ll do that again someday,” but really any agitation I feel from being downshifted to walking is more about the events I’ll miss because I won’t be in shape for them.  I meant to run a 5K this weekend, but this is obviously not going to happen.  I meant to run a 10 miler in May.  Also not going to happen.  Triathlons in June are probably out.  These things make me sad.  (And of course it makes me crazy that I can’t do the things that I see need doing: a trip to Costco, gardening, mildew cleaning.  Honestly, I don’t particularly love to clean bathrooms, it’s just not having it done that annoys me, but that’s a rant for another day.) 

The background truth, again at the risk of losing my runner status, is that I’ve been slogging through my runs for a while.  I knew I ought to be enjoying them, but my hips were sore all the time.  I did stretches and leg lifts and hip hikes all day long.  Nothing seemed to make it any better.  My body felt  heavy and slow.  I have been feeling unreasonably fatigued.  When I tried to fix the sluggishness by doing some speedwork, I found I didn’t have any speed.  I just plain ol’ could not get myself around the track quickly, and that was demoralizing and depressing, even though I wanted to be able to shrug it off and just appreciate that I could run at all.  I was frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t keep up with my running groups.   I was embarrassed that I was so slow and so easily worn out.  I maybe should have hung it up for a while at that point, but that’s not my style.  Instead, I figured the only solution was to try harder, to run more, to start doing speedwork again, to try a new lighter “natural” running shoe.  And that, my friends, is how a person sets herself up for something like a sprained back.

I’m not going to abandon running.  I am mentally prepared for a long slow road back to health.  I’ve been here before.  Several times, actually.  There will be weeks of short easy runs then months of base building.  If I’m lucky, I might be ready to do some races again by late summer or fall.  The reality of that timeline makes me feel a bit impatient in advance, but in the meantime I am surprisingly content to walk.

Last weekend I decided to have a goal to walk about 20 miles this week.  So far, I’ve walked 26 miles in six days, averaging about four miles a day.  Of course, it takes me almost twice as long to walk four miles as it would take to run it, but for some reason, I’m OK with that.   This is one of the ways that walking is healing me.

Walking through my injury forces peace upon me.  I do find peace in running, but often my running is about, well, running.  Even when I say I don’t care about my pace, I still notice it.  I’ll come clean: I had said I only wanted to finish the Lost Dutchman Marathon and that if I had to have a time goal, it would be to finish in under four hours, but then when I did finish in under four hours, I was still disappointed in myself.  Yes, that was a “race,” so maybe it invites those types of emotions, but for me, so did group runs.  I too often cared who was running ahead of me; I cared that there was a whole world of people with whom I just couldn’t keep pace.  I told myself not to care, but I did.  Even when running alone without a watch, which I almost never do, I felt slow and sore and therefore disappointed in myself.  More: even when I felt great, the running was about running.  Putting forth a sustained effort takes some mental as well as physical effort.  The ease of walking, in contrast, allows me to pray, to notice more details—in the last two weeks I’ve seen three Eastern bluebirds, wild turkeys, a toad, baby killdeer, several hawks, and some wonderful spring blossoms—and  to work out some internal tangles.  Being injured, being a walker, I also find that I am far easier on myself.  I am not bothered when people run past me.  I don’t even keep track of time, other than to make sure I get back home when I need to be there.  I walk with the time available, and whatever distance that happens to be, I accept.  I’ve never once calculated my walking pace.  I have tried, in the past, to have that attitude about running, but it’s difficult.  Being relaxed about running is its own kind of effort, an annoying oxymoron.  There is always a little corner of my mind where I store a speck of panic that somehow I am falling behind, that I’m not running far enough or fast enough.  Enough for what?  I couldn’t tell you, exactly.  Perhaps I’m chasing down the runner I used to be, or maybe I’m chasing the runner I wish I could be.  When I walk, I’m not chasing anything.  I’m never behind.  I’m always just outside, moving, being alive and glad of it.

More importantly, walking has helped me regain some perspective.  On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of walking with my friend Joe, who is also a downshifted runner, having had bypass surgery last summer and a heart attack this spring.  His running suspension is a bit more serious than my discomfort. I had just told him that although it had originally been my plan, I probably won’t be signing up for the Philadelphia Marathon this fall.  It seems not to matter how many 20 milers I put in beforehand, something about the marathon seems to beat me up to a level where I can hardly recover.  It’s happened too many times to be coincidence.  I’m not going to be well enough to do another one this November.  At that moment, Sasha and Elena ran past us, the first of the running group.  They had just run the Boston Marathon a week and a half before, and Elena had placed third in the 50-54 age group, beating Joan Benoit Samuelson.  And back in February, one week before I ran my marathon, Elena WON a marathon.  Not just her age group, THE MARATHON.  As in, she was the first woman to cross the finish line.  Pointing to Sasha and Elena I asked, “Why can they do it, and I can’t?”

“Do you think Cassie ever sees you and asks that?” he replied.  “You play with the hand you are dealt.  That’s all you can do.”  Good point.  I can never trump the Cassie card.  We walked.  “You know about Bruce, right?” he asked. 

A man from our running club, someone around Elena’s age, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  I was silent for a moment.  Bruce is a great guy: joyful sense of humor, world traveler, proud father of three.  “There’s no getting over that, is there?” I asked.  “It’s a death sentence,” Joe replied.  Worse, it’s not an easy way to go.  The news silenced me.  I hadn’t known about the diagnosis.  What I did know was that Bruce had recently walked a marathon with Joe and that they had signed up to walk another one in the fall.  He’s living the life he has.  On facebook, someone had posted that Bruce is his hero.  Mine too.

Wednesday was a beautiful evening for walking: clear, cool, with trees all covered in their tender new leaves, a green that only exists for a couple of weeks mid-spring.  Living where we do, we have the blessing of seeing, repeatedly, mercilessly, undeniably, that it’s OK to break down, to come to a halt, and to start anew.

Yes, Elena is one of my running role models.  I’ll never achieve what she has because I’m not starting with the same body, but what inspires me even more than her national-level rankings is that she is setting marathon PRs in her 50s.  I want to think that my best running years might still be ahead of me.  I’d like to think that with time and determination and my love of running restored, I’ll someday be able to keep up with more of my talented running friends (but not Elena.) For now, though, I am content to keep walking.  It makes my sprained back feel better: loosens up tight muscles, helps me to straighten out my sore spots.  More importantly, it’s been helping me straighten out some things that matter more than muscles and ligaments. 

Even when we were both running, Bruce was never faster than I was, but it turns out that he, too, is one of my running role models.  Yes, I’d enjoy being fast, but if I had to choose one, I’d rather be courageous.  I’d like to know I could keep up with the winners, but rather than lament what I am not, Bruce reminds me to live out the life I have.  Eventually we will all slow down.  Sooner or later, the bodies of even the fastest runners will shut down, will crumble, will break.  This needn’t be the case with the spirit. 

There isn’t anyone, fast or not fast, who doesn’t have to live with mortality and make peace with it.  If you’ve been given a today, and if today you can still put one foot in front of the other, at any pace, consider this a blessing.  Enjoy the walk.