I’m a little late getting to the 2015 WUS awards.  So many achievements, so many Wussies.

Aaron displays his run-in with a labrador

Best blood: Aaron S.

Best new event: McNulty’s Halloween run

Best nickname: JoCo and Cricket (tie)

Best ultra debut: Cricket, 4th place JFK

Best Wussie road trip: Manitou’s Revenge

Best new impersonation: Aaron S. (of Jared)

Best performance in providing a check within 30 minutes of when the Wussies would like it: Fat Petes

Best performance in the oral demolition of donuts: JLD

Best performance (consistently) in the opening mile of a WUS run: Matt T.

Best performance in dating up: Jared S.

Best performance in snow shoes: Joe C., SnowShoeFest IV

Best performance in post-run gymnastics moves: Sheila V. (round-off flippy thing)

Best performance in returning to WUS after a 5-year drought: Sean A. (DROC)

Trevor finds joy in cheez-itz during Hellgate

JLD storms to the DROC victory with a dozen Krispy Kremes in the belly

Best new Wussie blog: Trevor B.’s Lot 23A

Best new running book of 2015: Fast Girl, Suzy Favor Hamilton

Best Wussie foreign interloper: Czech girl

Best WUS real estate upgrade: Daniel B.

Most memorable WUS run of 2015: the night of the frog plague

Worst never-ending debate question during a WUS run: ‘Is a tadpole a frog?’

Best quote of 2015: ‘I’d repeat the shit out of that hill.’ (Joey C., Potomac Heritage)

Most improved: Joey C. (all because of WUS, nothing to do with the hill repeats)

Joey lives up to his quote

And some Wussies strategically left some room for improvement in 2016.

Worst Wussie decision of 2015: Boots, for giving Jennifer a beer; Keith, for starting Sundays in Park at 8am (tie)

Worst utilization of a corporate sponsorship hookup for the benefit of all Wussies: Todd

Worst whine: Martha, when Trevor made her take the canal route during PH instead of the trolley trail

Overall performance leaving the most room for improvement in 2016: Aras, DROC (of course, he gets bonus points for witnessing the JLD donut-munching monster and not immediately bursting into tears)

After being the dead weight in the stroller and only eating 1/10th of a donut, Aras made sure he didn’t cap out in 2015’s DROC

Finally, we would like to give a WUS Lifetime Achievement Award to Boots, for keeping WUS alive through the transition period from 2711 Woodley.  Boots may go MIA when she’s diverted by road running and yoga from time to time, but in the crucial time, when it was possible that WUS might sunset, Bootsie stepped up in a big way.

When a historic snowfall is hitting DC, time to hunker down in WV

There are few things as frustrating as trying to keep up with Aaron in snow.  And most of them involve Sean Andrish*.  For me, hacking my way through snow feels like wading through cemented sand.  Somehow Aaron seems to flutter through like a jackass Snow Fairy, his spindly little legs too lacking in surface area to be encumbered.

I have a term for the moments when Aaron’s snow-floating 20 feet ahead of me, as I’m wildly poling to catch up, fogging up my goggles with my perspiration.  I call it ‘Lyming me,’ in reference to the old days when Aaron was stricken with Lyme disease and I’d sometimes run ahead as his gait deteriorated to a slow-motion hobble.  The purpose of the term is to remember that sometimes one person’s pace is just naturally faster, and when Aaron goes ahead I shouldn’t take it personally.  Or have a meltdown.  Or sweat my eyeballs out trying to keep up with him.

Breaking trail is hard

So it was awfully nice to have PJ snowshoeing with us on Saturday, to see that someone far bigger and stronger than I was equally mystified by Aaron’s unearthly ability to snow-float 20 ft in front of us.  In this case, in over 2 feet of freshly fallen snow, PJ and I quickly learned that there is a major advantage of having a Snow Fairy along: breaking trail.

You know that it’s a tough day of trail-breaking when there’s still a sizable difference between being the 2nd person in line and the 3rd person.  For most of the day, PJ and I were happy to let the Snow Fairy lead.  But going up the hills we did a 3-person rotation, peloton-style.  Even the Snow Fairy needed back-up.

Fortunately, Whitegrass does groom many of their main tracks, so we got some hard-packed respites.  With all the climbing out of the way, we got a nice downhill through Springer Orchard.  Now, all I’m sayin’, you know that it’s a heckuva lot of snow when it’s still hard work to break trail going down hill.

Yay for #snowzilla! Yay for Dolly Sods Wilderness! #theta360 – Dolly Sods Snowshoe

This was all Aaron’s idea

Aaron and I pride ourselves on being lazy bears.  And after a tough Saturday of serious trail breaking, you might have thought that we’d be down for a mellow Sunday.  Little woods, little football…..But I know I’m in for it when Aaron starts quoting the start of Tina Turner’s Proud Mary:

But there’s just one thing,
You see we never ever do nothing
Nice and easy

Aaron’s dream

I should’ve seen it coming.  Lately Aaron’s been showing me a lot of clips on YouTube of the Great Vasaloppet 90k in Sweden, the Boston Marathon of world xc ski racing.  A couple WUSsies ago we ran with a Norwegian guy training for the 50k Birkie in Wisconsin.  Must’ve got him thinking.

‘We gotta start somewhere,’ Aaron stated, encouragingly.  The Mountain State Marathon 25km ski race was at least a very low key affair.  But I had not yet been convinced that a 25k ski race of any kind was a better way to spend a day than a lazy jaunt through the woods.  I could in fact think of several reasons why the whole thing was a very bad idea:

(a) I’ve never done a ski race before
(b) We were wiped from breaking trail yesterday
(c) No other women were doing the 25k (there was a 10k option)
(d) I hadn’t actually been xc skiing yet this winter

But I recognized that it wasn’t just about doing the Mountain State Marathon here in West Virginia.  It was about taking our first step on what will be a long road to the Swedish forests of Vasaloppet.  Now the idea of cross-country skiing in a swarm of 8,000 is only marginally less terrifying than an open water swim was a few years ago.  And I’ve seen how careful Europeans are with personal space and ski poles in the free-for-all chairlift lines of the Dolomites.

Nurmi set 22 official world records at distances between 1500m and 20 km, and won 9 gold and 3 silver medals in his 12 events in the 1920, 1924, and 1928 Olympic Games. At his peak, Nurmi was undefeated at distances from 800m upwards for 121 races.

And for all the folks who have tried to get me to run MMT….or JFK….or Hellgate, you know how good I am at declaring Marmot OUT.  But something rouses my blood about returning to my native land to participate in their national sport.  I’m half-Scandinavian (Swedish grandfather, Finnish grandmother).  I know the repertoire of the Swedish Santa Lucia Christmas songs by heart (‘Natten går tunga fjät…’).  My great-grandfather, Onni Palonen (1894 – 1932), was a Finnish miler in the 1920s, in the heyday of the ‘Flying Finn’ Paavo Nurmi, an era when Finns were today’s Kenyans of distance running.  Onni died of tuberculosis at the age of 38, after immigrating to Norwood, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, an enclave of Finnish immigrants.  His brother, my great-grand uncle Laurie, was one of the early runners of the Boston Marathon in the 1930s, back when only ~200 men ran it.  Laurie believed that his brother’s illness was related to immunosuppression caused by the brutal training required of Finnish distance runners.  (Nurmi is famous for saying ‘Mind is everything.  Muscle – just pieces of rubber.  All that I am, I am because of my mind.’)  Heartbroken, Laurie quit running altogether.

Onni died a half-century before I was even born.  I wasn’t even aware of his or Laurie’s existence when I laced up to run the mile at the Maryland state championships as a high school freshman.  I still didn’t know about Onni when I  chose running over soccer as a college junior in the New Mexico desert.  It was only years later that my grandmother starting pulling out silver pieces that her father had won at races, whispers of a long-lost legacy of distance running in my bloodlines.  One Christmas my grandmother astonished me with a present of a  diamond engagement ring that Laurie had given to his wife.  My cousin Claire opened a box of towels with a bit of dismay, to which my grandmother clarified that Claire ‘had a boyfriend to give her jewelry.’   Sometimes on a long run, when the woods are still and my mind is quiet, I fumble with the little ring wrapped around my fourth finger and think about the curious ways that families are linked across generations.

My great-grandfather Onni Palonen

A side of me wishes that Onni knew that his great-granddaughter, a century later, would also be winning races. Onni’s death left deep scars in my family.  He left a widow, another Finnish immigrant (Martha), penniless, and with a daughter (my grandmother).  My great-grandmother Martha scrubbed bathrooms to make ends meet.  Onni also passed the TB to my 12-year old grandmother, and she spent over a year in a sanatorium watching everyone around her die like flies from the disease.  She managed to survive, as you may have surmised from my existence, but still, at age 96, talks of those dark times.

My grandmother holds a sign for me near Heartbreak Hill during my 1st Boston Marathon in 2006.  ‘Sisu’ is a concept at the heart of how all Finns view themselves: having the endurance, tenacity, bravery, and an inner resolve to overcome adversity.

Whitegrass’s Mountain State Marathon was as low-key as promised, a small hodgepodge of a dozen or so ski racers of varying ages and apparent ski experience.  There were a couple of women but they were all doing the 10k option.  The best part of the 25k course was how varied it was, looping far up the mountain through the fir trees and swooping down through the open meadows of Springer Orchards.  It was dark in the forest, but in the orchards sunglasses were obligatory, with the sun glaring off the snow sheets and the bright blue sky.

coming in for the finish!

My approach to the ski race resembled my approach to the swim portion of a triathlon: complete recognition that I was entirely undertrained and underqualified, but a determination to cover the distance, no matter how conservatively.  My newbie-ness showed early on, when I totally bit it on the first big downhill and landed on my back in a (fortunately very soft and thick) bed of snow.  Not the easiest thing to pull yourself out of several feet of snow while wearing skis, but I got myself back on course and worked my pizza pie on the rest of the downhills.

Another challenge was eating.  If you think it’s hard to eat while you run or ride a bike, imagine trying to take off your mitten, reach into your back pocket, remove the wrapper from your rice krispy treat, and shove it in your mouth, all while poling with one hand awkwardly grasping two poles.

My arms were jello at the end.  I’m not sure when my hip flexors will function normally again.  But I learned an important lesson out there on the course: I did actually like cross country skiing.  When I’m not trying to keep up with Aaron, I can just relax at my own pace, and get a little bit of a rhythm and a glide.  I finished DFL, but only ~20 minutes behind Aaron (2:06 and 2:29).  And, yes, I was the only woman to go 25k.

Time for those Nordic roots to kick in

They had a very low-key award ceremony inside the lodge.  Aaron and I came away with some good schwag — a mug, a headwarmer, a picture of Blackwater Falls.  But most of all we came away with confidence: that next time I have to travel to Minneapolis for work we can go ahead and plop ourselves in a ski race.

Footnotes

* It has been made apparent to me that my reasons for using Sean as a standard bearer for all these frustrating is not entirely obvious to everyone.  Sean is a wonderful friend but let me explain why he makes me tear my hair out from time to time.  I grew up the daughter of an economist.  That means I lived in a world where children could not always be expected to be purely rational (‘I want to eat the whole apple pie myself!’), but they were expected to listen to rational lines of argument and accept if there were efficient and reasoned ways for behaving differently (‘Eating the whole pie will make you throw up.’)  Sometimes having a conversation with Sean is like pretending the Enlightenment never happened, and we have to fall back into the pre-science dark ages where people used humors and alchemy as their guide.  As an example, Sean and I ran together in Woodley park on Wednesday nights.  For some reason (ostensibly related to bad humors) Sean didn’t run Tuesday night WUS with us.  So every week I’d finagle my schedule (and the schedules of others trying to spend time with me that week) so that I could keep Wednesday night clear for the Sean Run.  At least once a month when I called Sean to tell him I was coming over, he’d say he couldn’t run that night.  I’d probe.  ‘I have to do my laundry.’  Now I’m a regular world-traveler and I understand the art and necessity of doing your laundry before a big trip.  But a trip is not something that arises unexpectedly at 6:30pm on a Wednesday night.  A trip is a fixed event where you can do your laundry the night before and set aside your non-essential running clothes Wednesday night (you know those shorts with the little hole in them you save for just those occasions).  The WUS house was also stocked with these magical things called LAUNDRY MACHINES and automatic dryers that would actually soak and spin and wash your clothes for you while you ran for an hour with your friend.

Eric ‘Ned’ Nedeau missed going to the Olympics by a crushing tenth of a second.  At the 1996 US Olympic trials for the 1500m, he finished 4th in 3:44.11.  The 3rd and final Olympic slot went to Jason Pyrah, who edged him in 3:44.03.  In 1997 Ned accepted the head coaching job at Amherst College for the men’s and women’s track and cross country teams.

Ned (in front in black)

Ned was revered.  The track team wore shirts that read Ned, 3:16.

According to Mark Lech, Erik Nedeau “was one of the fiercest competitors I have ever seen, certainly that I have ever had the privilege to coach. His greatest asset was his tenacity. He got every single ounce of performance out of himself. When he lost a race you knew it was just because the person who beat him was more gifted, but that he certainly was not out-finessed. He was able to get more out of himself than almost all of his contemporaries. This is not to say he was not talented; certainly he is one of the most talented athletes to come out of the State of Maine – his records speak for themselves. As a person, there is none better. He is a stand-up guy and I will forever be grateful that I had the chance to work with him and call him my friend.”

There is a great advantage to having such an accomplished athlete as your coach.  Ned was exceptionally knowledgable about how to train a body.  He had long-term vision about how to build base, hone speed, and hit your peak at just the right time.  He had ample personal experience in how to thread that micro-thin line between hard training and body breakdown.

Just three weeks after joining the team, I was breezing through workouts and Ned started inserting our young assistant coaches into my intervals to push me.  Ned asked, ‘The qualifying time for Nationals for the 1500m is 4:44.  Think you can do it?’  I didn’t hesitate.  ‘Definitely.’

Running was an all-consuming enterprise for Ned.  Maybe he had some secret pastimes beyond running.  Maybe he lapped up German philosophy in the evenings and drove to Boston for esoteric French film screenings.  But to our knowledge Ned’s life revolved around three activities: running, coaching, and thinking about running and coaching.

I had left Stanford and come to Amherst for the explicit purpose of having a liberal arts education and a balanced student-athlete life.  Stanford was the kind of place where you had to be subsumed by a single passion.  At Amherst, students weren’t penalized for pursuing multiple interests simultaneously.  It was like summer camp.  I spent mornings throwing ceramics on the wheel at U-Mass.  In the afternoons I studied molecular and evolutionary biology, Russian literature and language, art history, religion, and creative writing.  Twice a week we had formal team workouts at 4pm, but otherwise I squeezed in a trot when I could.  Some evenings I rode horses over fences with the Amherst equestrian team.  On weekends I had athletic events (track/cross country meets, soccer games, or equestrian competitions).  My ceramics professor gave me a key to the studio so I could go in on weekends and use the wheel on my own.  I loved going into the studio on a Sunday when it was just me and the purr of the wheel and the radio.

Ned and I remained on very good terms for most of my first season of indoor track.  I fulfilled my vow to qualify for the NCAA National Indoor Track & Field event in the 1500m, shedding 20 seconds off my time as the season progressed.  When a chick from Springfield spiked me from behind during a 1500m race and sent me flying into the infield, it didn’t escape Ned’s notice that I popped my bloody knees right back up and whirled around the track, passing runner after runner until I finally beat the girl that tripped me.  Perhaps I had the talent and the fire.

When I felt like running, I had more fire than anyone else.  In order for our cross country team to qualify for Nationals, we needed a top finish at Regionals.  As we sat on the bus the morning of the Regional meet,  I looked out at a field filled with women trotting around in different colored track suits warming up, face paint on their cheeks, ribbons in their hair.  I growled out loud, We’re gonna end all those girls’ seasons today.  That kind of statement wouldn’t bat an eyelash on the soccer field, where taunting and scraping each other up came with the territory.  But it wasn’t part of the running culture.  Everyone’s jaws dropped.  Ned’s eyes lit up, and he declared, That, that is the quote of the day!  I PRed by 30 seconds to help our team qualify for Nationals.  At Nationals I ran so hard I thought I’d made a terrible mistake and was going to blow up after just one mile, but held on and ended up slicing another 30 seconds off my PR to finish All-America.

But when I didn’t want to run, I was the immovable object to Ned’s unstoppable force.  Maybe my hamstring was bothering me.  Maybe I had my period.  Or maybe my legs were just sluggish and hadn’t recovered from the last workout, and it didn’t seem like a workout would accomplish anything other than setting my recovery back further.

It all came to a head on Saturday, September 15th, 2001.  It was a beautiful sunny day at Williams College.  It was my second collegiate cross country meet.  And I didn’t want to run.  There was nothing physically wrong with me.  No injuries.  No bugs.  But I hadn’t been able to run since Tuesday’s 9/11 attack.  I’d skipped the Thursday workout.  I’d barely trudged to class.  Tuesday night after the attack I’d slept for 20 hours.

Ned was baffled.  No, I hadn’t lost any friends or family in the bombing.  No, I hadn’t seen a counselor.  Yes, I understood that every other Amherst runner was lacing up and competing that day.  I couldn’t describe what I had.  Malaise?

I agreed to toe the line.  The gun went off and I followed the surge.  But I was in a haze.  I just kept slipping back, getting passed on all sides.  The world was at war, a nasty surreptitious war with invisible enemies and civilian targets, unlike anything ever fought before.  And somehow I was supposed to care about who ran faster from one point to another in Western Massachusetts.  I started walking.  And then I zombie-walked off the course and stopped.

When the race was over, Ned did not disguise his disappointment.  I typically recall these kind of memorable conversations word for word.  This one’s a blur.  Just a lot of Ned’s finger pointing at me and my teammates.  The ones who had all toughened up and raced today.  The NCAA had cancel events during the week, but decided to hold Saturday’s meets.  It was clearly time for everyone to move on.  And there I was, reduced to muffling snot-faced sobbing.  Totally at a loss of words.  I didn’t know if I was crying because (a) Ned’s words had sunk in, and I actually felt guilty about dropping from the race, (b) because I could no longer pretend my coach wasn’t a total a-wipe, as I’d long suspected, or (c) it was still sinking in that I now lived in a world populated by crazy jihadist terrorists who might blow up people I loved at any moment.

When a cat pees on your furniture, it’s almost impossible to get the smell out, even with powerful chemicals.  When Ned and I lost respect for each other that day, every tiny skirmish from that day forth was magnified.  Ned thought I was a princess.  I thought he was a Neanderthal.  It became personal, and a power struggle.  Ned won most of the power struggles (No, you have to wear the bunhuggers.  Yes, even for individual track events.  Why?  Because girls don’t look good in shorts.)  But in our power struggle there were really no winners, just two big losers as a pair who should have made an invincible team came to detest each other.

Ned and I were on moderately good terms after xc Nationals.  I think Ned recognized that I’d made a powerful push to return to form following my month-long suspension, and ran the race of my life at Nationals.  Then one day I told him about my plans to study abroad the next semester in Melbourne, Australia.  I’d be going with Katelyn, my lab partner and friend from the soccer team.  As experimental biologists, Katelyn and I had discovered that if we chased our vodka shots with a squirt from a bottle of Hersheys chocolate syrup it made getting drunk a lot more fun.

if it hadn’t been for Katelyn, i’d never have run a marathon or gotten a phd in biology

After Nationals, Ned had taken my All-America award to have a professional calligrapher inscribe my name.  A couple weeks later I stepped into his office and asked if the document was ready.  He opened his palms and said he didn’t know where it was.  Maybe it had been misplaced.  He didn’t try to look for it.  It was only then that I realized how wounded and fuming he was over my decision to study abroad.  There was a weird phenomenon: whenever Ned and I locked heads, his facial features would start to distort in cartoonish ways.  The gap between his teeth would enlarge.  His forehead extended.  His eyes got beadier.  I always left Ned’s office feeling much worse than when I arrived.

I never got my All-America award.  I ventured into Ned’s office a few more times to ask for it, but always got the same response.  You could cut through the tension in the air with a butter knife.

Sometimes I fantasize about driving up to Amherst, cat-burglaring into Ned’s office (in a skin-tight black cat suit with slicked hair, of course), rifling through all the file drawers until I find my award, and stealing it back.  I know it’s something that I’d just store at the bottom of some drawer with other old documents.  But it’s the principle.  I know was an obstinate little athlete.  That I never lived up to my potential, or the dreams of my coaches — and my father before them.  And I know I’m a big whiner.  Aaron recently titled one of his Strava runs: Tenleytown / Georgetown in which the Marmot comes along for half the run, and she demonstrates her ability to whine even at a brisk pace.  But honestly, I wish other people would whine more.  Like for all those years when Aaron silently suffered through Lyme, with me naively clippetty-clopping along utterly unaware how uncomfortable he was.

I know Ned doesn’t think I deserved my All-America award.  That I didn’t put in the work.  That I never lived up that ascetic ideal that runners should surrender themselves to the sport, powering through pain and injury and hardship like an inspirational Nike ad.  As time has passed, I’ve tried to see Ned’s perspective.  To spend all your time devising meticulous training plans, with a specific purpose to each workout and training run.  And have me foil them, over and over.  In truth, Ned’s fury actually was his way of caring about me.  For most of the runners, he would’ve shrugged if they’d scooted off to Melbourne for a semester or dropped out of a race.  He desperately wanted me to run the way he did, like my soles were on fire and nothing would stand between me and my goals. For someone who came so tantalizingly close to his Olympic dreams, maybe he couldn’t help himself.

Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness (2015)

Suzy Favor Hamilton

Many athletes have a hard time retiring….This was not the case for me.  I had hated competing for decades, since high school really, and had been looking forward to retiring for years.  –SFH

I devoured Ms Hamilton’s memoir in three days.  Most running books — think Born to Run — glorify the thrill and natural beauty of running.  Since we’re high on Star Wars at the moment, we can think of this as the ‘light side’ of running.  The endorphins, the alpine forests, the satisfaction of laying out a challenge for oneself and completing it.  Far fewer books foray in the dark side of running.

The dark side of running isn’t the pain, or exhaustion, or the daily trudge of training.  Those are difficult, yes, and at times unpleasant.  But the dark side is what resides within the mind.  The gnawing self-doubt, the suffocating weight of performance expectations, and the terrifying loss of control over one’s own body.  And the feeling of entrapment, that you don’t want to let your family down, or your team, your coach, and everyone else.  Suzy Favor Hamilton suffered from crippling pre-race anxiety.  In one episode she recalls wishing her leg would break.  Child sports stars often feel like passive spectators in their own circus.  Like many other young athletes, bulimia was Suzy Hamilton’s way of exerting a measure of control over her teenage years.  Her longterm eating disorder was a clear sign of larger psychological problems, including what eventually manifested as bipolar depression.  Suzy was certain that members of her family knew but never addressed her bulimia.  After all, she was winning.

Some professional athletes have admitted to how much they hated competing (Andre Agassi is a prime example).  But public exposure of Ms Hamilton’s post-career foray into Las Vegas sex work compelled her to be unusually candid about her mental illness, including the roles of compulsion and mania in driving her success as a runner.

Being bipolar means being insatiable.  The high of the mania is never high enough.  There is always a desire — a need — to push the high to the next level, in the same way that a drug addict constantly requires more and stronger drugs. — SFH

According to the book, Ms Hamilton’s slip into prostitution was simply a different outlet for the same manic drive that took her to three Olympics and a record 9 NCAA titles.  Only after intentionally throwing herself to the track during the 1500m finals at the Sydney Olympics did she finally say enough and retire from the sport.  However, bipolar is a demanding mistress, and ultimately she only ended up substituting one compulsion on the track for another in Vegas.

An interesting foil to Hamilton’s experience is her best friend Mary Hartzheim, who joined the University of Wisconsin’s running program with Suzy as an equally talented freshman.  Mary is the paragon to which Suzy aspires — a balanced, charismatic girl who ran hard but was never consumed by it.  After running four years at Wisconsin, Mary calmly walked away from the sport.

~            ~            ~

I never had a mental illness.  Or an eating disorder.  But that doesn’t mean I never tangoed with the dark side of running.  That I didn’t regularly wish the bus would break down on the way to a track meet.  That the smell of icyhot doesn’t still give me a jolt of panic decades later.  That I couldn’t relate to everything Suzy Favor Hamilton experienced as a runner (no, not the sex worker part….).  The dread.  The wish that it would all just go away.  The trapped feeling of not wanting to run, but also not wanting to let everyone down.

It took me a decade to cease hating running.  To learn how to run and compete in a healthy, sustainable way.  It took a lot of friends along the way.  It took Aaron.  It took pine needles and pileated woodpeckers.  The Cook Street Track Club, the Nittany Valley Running Club, and WUS.  The Teton Crest Trail.  My mom.  I had to claw my way from the dark into the light side of running, over years and years.  Starting with a particular summer 15 years ago in New Mexico.

~            ~            ~

The August sun in New Mexico will punish you for sleeping in on a Sunday.  But the possibility of rising before 9am never even occurs to a 20-year old kid.  So I affixed my anti-solar armaments: a $10 pair of sunglasses, a Boston Red Sox hat, and a pair of old biking gloves I had borrowed.  I can remember so many details about the man who lent me those biking gloves, but after a decade and a half I can no longer recall his name.  On my first day in the Albuquerque sun I had managed to slather SPF 50 sunblock everywhere except for the backs of my hands, and now I put on the biking gloves religiously each time I left the house.  I wore them driving the 1992 4-runner (lent to me by the same man who’d lent the gloves), going for runs, and riding the neighbor’s black Tennessee Walker.  Within ten minutes of heading out the door, I could feel the sun’s noontime rays cooking the backs of my hands, even through the gloves.

Twenty-year olds also don’t carry water on runs, and my mouth was fully parched after two miles.  But the dryness hardly registered.  My mind was too busy churning over a single question, which rolled over and over  inside my skull like waves tapping on the shore.  To run or not to run…..

My soccer season had been a bust.  I didn’t like the Amherst dining hall’s offerings and had lost too much weight at the start of the fall.  Under-strength, I injured my Achilles and never really bounced back.  But just a couple weeks after the soccer season ended, I came roaring out onto the indoor track, winning the opening pre-Christmas mile and ending up 10th at the NCAA National meet in the 1500m, despite some rookie mistakes.

The question boiled down to: should I do something I’m mediocre at but love (soccer), or something I’m talented at but detest (running)?  Should I be happy?  Or should I be good?  In all my (rather expensive) Stanford/Amherst education, from Plato to the Buddha to Tolstoy, none of it seemed to offer any kind of insight into this simple but life-defining question.

If you were looking for a sign of where my athletic loyalties lay, you had to look no further than my clothes. Sweating through the New Mexico desert, it’s appealing to imagine me in some slick little running outfit, maybe one of those Oiselle tank tops and some Sonja-style spandex over my sleek 110-lb frame.  I can guarantee this was not the case.  My thighs were most certainly swimming in baggy Lanzera soccer shorts.  You could have fit three of me inside one of my billowing cotton tees from an old soccer tournament.  If running was stupid, running clothes were even stupider.  Except for long running tights that were absolutely necessary to survive the New England winter, I didn’t own a single piece of running apparel.

I had given running the slip before.  That was the whole point of escaping to Stanford, the one university that hadn’t recruited me to run.  I didn’t have Suzy Hamilton’s kind of manic drive propelling me to run.   In junior year of high school, when I started throwing races, my parents sent me to a sports psychologist.

‘So, why are you here today, Martha?’

‘I haven’t been running very well.  I dropped out of a race.’

‘How do you feel when you run?’

‘Like I’m going through the motions.  I hate running.  I’ve always hated it.  I don’t want to do it anymore.’

The point of going to the therapist was to identify and treat the mental blocks that were preventing me from performing.  I walked out of there with a carte blanche to never run a step again if I didn’t want to.  As far as I was concerned, therapy rocked.

But choosing a university because it’s track program is too elite to notice you wasn’t exactly sharp decision-making, and transferring to Amherst after freshman year had been, far and away, the toughest and best decision I’d ever made.  At Stanford I wasn’t good enough (or committed enough) to do anything.  Doors swung wide open in the Pioneer Valley.  I could study biology — and Russian — and creative writing.  I could play varsity soccer — and compete on the equestrian team (pony jumping!) — and something even lured me back to the good ole track.

The problem with running wasn’t the pain.  I played soccer through broken bones, bloody noses, heat strokes, etc.  One year in Cocoa Beach, FL we played through a raging hurricane that pelleted our faces so hard the opposing team forfeited at half time.  Even when I got benched in 7th grade for being small (I was 4th percentile for weight), my love of soccer never flickered.  The problem was that running felt like something I was forced to do, simply because I was good at winning races.  On Sundays when I was supposed to do a long run I would delay all day.  Finally, just before it started to get dark I’d shove two or three cupcakes in my mouth and try to get myself out the door.  I ran all my runs the same: slow and miserable at the beginning, and then at some point I’d realize I was only a mile or two from home and I’d dash home with such delight that I was done.  And not have to run again, at least for another day.

The desert has a way of distilling complex issues, melting them down to their essence.  Something deep in my bones wanted to run, and I could feel it out in the open sands.  The desert is so still, you can hear voices you’ve never heard before.  Prophesies whispering through the sage.  Not promising victories or crowns.  The glow of victory lasts two weeks, tops.  No, I was promised something sweeter: ownership.

There was a different kind of running out there.  Not the circles around the track.  No smell of icyhot.  I was not beholden to Ned, my track coach, or even my teammates or parents.  I’d have to follow my own nose, but there was a different kind of running out there, and it would lead me to everything that would be important to me in life, everything that I would love and hold sacred.

This New Mexico adventure had been my first night spent alone in a hotel room.  My first solo road trip.  I had ordered my first beer (they didn’t seem to card out here) and sat at the bar drinking alone, just like in the movies.  I called from pay phones to let my family know I was still alive.

That day I made a deal with the desert.  I would run.

I ran cross country that fall, but fiercely on my own terms.  That made for tense coach-athlete relations, and Ned suspended me from the team in the heart of the season, from mid-September to mid-October.  I trotted around on my own, and returned for the last meets.  I PRed by 30 seconds at Nationals (17:44 for 5k) on a cold November day in Wisconsin, earning All-America with a 19th place finish, and propelled Amherst women to a best-ever 7th place team finish.  And then I walked away and never competed for Amherst again.  Everyone thought I was burned out.  But I was just beginning.

“Where beauty is — I think is beauty — beauty isn’t all about just nice, loveliness like. Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing then we cross on to new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”

— John O’Donohue (an Irish Poet, Philosopher, and Catholic scholar):

As I look toward the Ring experience, O’Donohue’s notion of beauty resonated with me because I felt like I crossed over a threshold worthily. My first Ring experience resulted in a disqualification because I ran down a road rather than staying on the trail. I had unfinished business, on this course. It’s been three years, so I decided to toe the line again.

Over this time, I have committed to living my life more consciously. That process has resulted in making substantial changes, so that my life aligns with what I value. I have also worked to cultivate healthier habits. A wise yoga teacher says that “this process is two steps forward and one step back,” but my internal optimist recognizes that I’m still moving forward.

Before the start, I had my usual nervous response of checking stuff. I missed the start announcement. When I started the race, I found myself running a faster runner. After a few minutes of chatting and laughing, I eased back on my pace. It was great because I ran with different people who I often don’t get to chat with in races. They had interesting tales to tell.

This year, the course did not seem as demanding and grueling to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve run longer distances? Or perhaps it was because I’ve done harder races now? Or perhaps I was just being more mindful?

What do I mean by mindfulness? Rather than dwelling on questions like: Could finish this distance? Am I good enough as a runner? I kept going back to the facts: I was in one of my favorite places (i.e. the woods), where I was enjoying time with people. I also relished the joy that being out in nature brings me. Things like hearing bird calls, feeling the wind blowing on my skin as I rush down the hills, and sensing the muscle burn when I climb uphill (I know that sounds sick, but I speak the truth).

While there were moments of doubt and internal questioning: Why I was running this race? These moments seemed more spaced out than my prior experience. If they came up, I merely dispelled them because I wanted to enjoy this experience and embrace the beauty of the moment. The experience was one as John describes as substantial becoming. How?

1) Fullness

Even though, I was nervous at the start. I came into the race with a different mindset. It created a sense of fullness on the course because I had a sense of adequacy in my skills and confidence that I could finish this race. Rather than spending the day battling my ego, I found myself embracing the experience, receiving help along the way because I hurt my hand badly when I fell at mile 8, and settling into a consistent pace. The mindset of adequacy helped enable me overcome the doubts as they came up. I accepted the fearful stories that my mind invoked as paper tigers rather than my current reality. When fear came up about my potentially limited resources, meeting countless animals that could kill me in seconds, and my own potential to injure myself, I recognized it more quickly than I would have in the past and adjusted. Sometimes, the fear was a friendly reminder that I needed to make a physical change (i.e. eat or drink). However, my fear was legitimate at one point. It came up when I was debating if I was lost. I ran downhill for a couple of miles without markers, catching cobwebs, and running on an ungroomed trail. That was a moment, where I was thankful for fear. The sense of confidence in my ability and desire to finish this race enabled me to embrace the experience rather than spending time fighting my ego. I merely accepted this experience as one that would fulfill me regardless of the outcome. Therefore, this race was so much more enjoyable.

2) Grace and Elegance

Honestly, I would not define myself as a graceful runner. I have moments were I can move on the trail in a way that appears graceful because of years of practice. However, friends of mine will tell you those graceful moments are often followed by a huge thud because I have a natural tendency to fall. Perhaps I am a graceful faller? When I look to define my performance on the trail, I’d like to claim that I’m more elegant. What do I mean by elegance? I mean that I have worked towards having more effective, simple, and efficient ways of running and feeding myself. Things are less complicated because I have learned small habits along the way. I also know what makes me content on the trail. I have come to accept that some things that my friends, self-proclaimed running gurus, or the various running publications suggest as the new magic elixir (i.e. performance enhancing, comforting, and soothing) merely evoke misery for me. For instance, eating any apple products while running is like taking a laxative. A race free of unnecessary runners trots is worth noting. Any products that invoke that type of response have been given away or trashed quickly! By the way, this race was free of runners’ trots.

3) Depth

One of the biggest challenges for me was running alone in the wee hours of the later evening and morning about nine hours total. Initially, there was a sense of suffering that came over me as I found myself alone. At one point, I needed to take a pee, which would be easy in the right mindset. However, it was during the period of time when you are so exhausted that even running is difficult. In attempts to remain my own dignity, I tried pee appropriately along the side of the trail. Everything seemed okay until I looked behind me after the pee and realized that I was standing the edge of a sustainable drop off. That scared me, but my survival instincts set-in. I found myself totally going for a stop, drop, and roll across the trail to avoid falling back. As I caught composure post-roll, I realized that embracing depth in that way might not been my ideal way, but that’s about as much depth as a trail runner experiences. It also reminded me to look back before you squat because it would be horrible to say you didn’t finish because you picked an inappropriate pee spot.

My headlamp died a few minutes after the pee incident. In the past, I would have looked for the third incident. As I stood there in the darkness accepting where I was at this moment: Yes, I was suffering. Yes, I was suffering from sleep deprivation. Yes, I was not really even able to walk in a straight line. Yes, I was lonely. Yet, here was a sense of calm that came over me in the darkness as I changed my headlamp. Rather than dwell in self-pity, I moved to a more mindful approach of acceptance recognizing that my suffering and loneliness was not limited to my own experience, but it is also a collective human experience.

Where link to depth? In our lives, we feel like there are difficult moments where we are suffering and in the dark. Yet, the only way out is grounding into these experiences and accepting them for what they are, while we simultaneously embrace hope for change. At these points, we feel like we have limited resources to navigate the next part of our journey, but we still motivate ourselves to move forward by putting one foot in front of the other. A simple action in these moments is worth more than allowing ourselves to wallow in our self- pity, thus creating additional suffering. Over time the small footsteps allow us to cover a substantial distance, then we will find ourselves reconnected to our tribe (i.e. likeminded people). As I moved through the night after my revelation, I found myself much more at ease. I also found it easier for me to recognize see the various lights out in the distance. The moon came a central guiding point for me. The depth of the experience of connecting with difficult human emotions enabled me to move from a place to fear (particularly since I’m afraid of the dark) to a place of acceptance, which was a warm and welcoming experience for me.

4) Homecoming

Homecoming was amplified for me when I came to the final aid station. It was crewed by one of my favorite female trail runners. As I ran up a candlelit road, it was lovely to be in the company of people again. I enjoyed one of my favorite trail beverages: a Cherry Coke. Kind words were spoken back and forth as we caught up on each other’s summers, then I was sent off to finish. As I ran down the road toward the finish, I knew that I was going to make it. Even though, there was a climb uphill and a rock filled downhill. When I summited the top of the hill, the sun started rising. It seemed appropriate homecoming celebration. As I started the downward descent towards the Signal Knob parking lot, I was less fearful of the rocks this time. I found myself running a bit. Then, I’d stop to take in the beautiful sunrise. I was truly thankful to be feeling more grounded than three years ago. To me, there is nothing better than watching the sunrise because it’s a reminder of how the cycle of life is truly remarkable.

Meaning that, there are times when we find ourselves in dark and bleak moments questioning if we should continue down our current path. As we continue and work through those dark and bleak moments by maintaining our own sense of hope and faith in the final outcome, we start to see the light again. I find that the greatest moments of darkness occur just before the sunrises. It’s like that in life too. Often, the most difficult times are followed by some of the most joyful times. I find that when you go through difficult and challenging times; they make you more grateful and motivate you to celebrate the joyfulness that arises when you come back to yourself in these good times. I believe that to truly live our lives; we need continue to accept both the difficult and joyful times because they teach us about ourselves. The difficult times show us our strength and resilience in the face of adversity. The joyful times provide us with hope and faith in ourselves.

As I stood there in the parking lot greeted by many familiar faces, I was in shock. When I had finished this race three years ago, it seemed like dumb luck. This time, I had finished knowing that I was worthy and able to do it. I also felt I had truly embraced the experience in the challenging and beautiful moments equally. That’s a substantial homecoming.