Month: December 2015

“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.

 

One of the things I like about DC is that you have four distinct seasons of approximately equal length (3 months).  Nudge a little north and spring starts to compress into a smidgeon at the end of May.  Even just 3 hours north in State College, you never had a proper spring, just muddy cold tails of winter for most of March and April.  Drift a little south into Virginia and the Carolinas and you lose a proper winter.  DC is a little mid-Atlantic sweet spot where each season takes itself seriously.

My body follows DC’s strong seasonality, with distinct fall and spring training cycles, and winter and summer off.  Maybe it’s a relic of the high school and college track and cross country cycles, with clear summer and winter downtimes followed by September and March buildups to marque championships in November and May.  Or maybe it’s just the tug of Miss Mother Nature, with the body’s natural drive kicking in with the cooling of summer heat or the budding of orchids.  Clover time.

This fall was peppered with works trips (Mexico, Taiwan, Florida, Virginia Tech), but I tried to squeeze as many races as I could between September and November (Big Schloss, Navy-AirForce Half Marathon, Ellen’s Run, MountainBack, Stone Mill 50).  After Stone Mill, I’d take some R&R and settle in for winter.

But sometimes different cycles collide.  A most overwhelmed uterus at Stone Mill smashed my little fall running plan to bits.  There was no crescendo.  Why would I take time off after covering a slow 27 miles at Stone Mill?  Physically I didn’t need a break.

I’ve noticed in Aaron’s UltraRunner magazine that there is a surging obsession with coaches for trail running.  Has anyone else noticed how many articles now are about professional coaching?  I’m so confused.  I thought the whole point of trail running was to get away from people telling you what to do.  After a youth drenched in athlete-coach tensions, the trails are my free space.  Part of the joy derives from knowing I can give two big middle fingers to anyone who starts to tell me what to do.  Aaron knows the line well.  Even Strava sometimes oversteps and has to be cut back.

But I will admit that in that one little moment after Stone Mill it would have been useful to have a coach, someone to whom I’m beholden, who could just affirm Marmot, take some bloody time off.

It felt unearned.  It felt stupid.  I wasn’t even sore.  Aaron reminded me that you can’t take a break from training when you haven’t been training to begin with.  But after Stone Mill I took a little vacation from running.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean no running.  It’s jut a hiatus from the almighty Strava.  No goals, no tracking miles. Whether I did 5 miles, 10 miles, or 40 miles over the course of a week, it was all the same.

Cue……Los Angeles.  Aaron’s brother Mark and his wife Amanda had just bought a new arts & crafts style house in Echo Park and were hosting Thanksgiving this year.  Aaron and I stayed with my aunt’s family in Santa Monica, and split time between the families.  Every day was sunny and cool and perfect.  The perfect place to kick off Operation KickBack.

Aaron and I indulged ourselves with a 22-mile loop in the Santa Monica mountains.  Remarkable how we could trot out the door from my aunt’s house in Santa Monica and zigzag a couple miles through some streets and find ourselves at Will Rogers Park and the entrance to miles upon miles of trails up into the mountains and overlooking the ocean.

Now, I am not a California girl.  (Maybe that’s not as self-explanatory as it seems to me, but I’m not diving into that here.)  But I do like to visit.  My aunt and uncle have a cabin in Mammoth, and Aaron and I would love to get out to California more, for skiing in the winter and running in the summer.  We’ve also deduced that the LA marathon starts within a mile of Aaron’s brother’s house, and ends within a mile of my aunt’s house in Santa Monica.  Will definitely need to do that point-to-point some time, maybe in 2017.

I continued Operation KickBack in Clearwater, Florida, where I flew directly from LA for a conference.  I made sure to escape from the conference for a sunset run along the beach that ended with a dip in the Gulf of Mexico.  It was my first time swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.  There’s something about floating in the dark salty water as the red fireball of the sun melts into the horizon that lets you forgive yourself of everything, past and present.

As soon as I touched down from Florida in DC, it was time for Magnus Gluteus Maximus.  Last year, I did the whole 50k.  And spent most of those miles griping about how Sean had ditched me that year.  This year was a social run.  Sean had a knee problem.  Our dear delicate flower Schmidty this time had horrible kidney stones.  Hellgate was the following weekend and Aaron could join but not go too far.  Evan was post-Pinhoti and rounded out our merry band of slackers.  The plan was to run 5-6 miles out with Brian, Sean, and Aaron, and then continue on with Evan to perhaps do the whole thing.  But Evan and I had split for a minute or 2 before I realized my stupidity.  I was missing quality social miles!  Evan and I quickly reversed and caught Sean, Aaron, and Brian to run the 6 or so miles back to Hemlock with them.  Evan and I then ran a couple miles upstream, to round out a BlackJack 21.  It was a splendidly sunny and warm day, and the most fun I’d had on the trails in a while.  Sean was limping horribly and I was a little concerned.  But you can’t be friends with Sean if you can’t handle watching him hurt himself.

One of the things I’ve never understood about MGM is why the pizza doesn’t arrive until 1:30.  The winner of MGM is not the person who covers the 50k the fastest.  If you run too fast, you just have to wait longer for the food.  Last year I was the real winner, arriving just 10 minutes before the pizza came.  Changed out of my wet clothes and Bingo, hot food.  But most years I don’t run the whole thing and end up leaving around 12:30, the utmost limit of my hunger tolerance.  There’s a Wegmans on the way home.  And an awesome pizza place we discovered in Clifton.

This year, by 12:30 I’d eaten my fill of Katie’s sugar balls and was starting to motivate towards the door, when I ran into Clapper.

‘You know Michele told me to order the pizza earlier this year,’ he began.  ‘But then I thought that would just reward all the people who went short.’

I tried to wrap my head around the notion that a marmot who’d woken up at 6am and run 21 miles should be food-deprived and punished.

‘Really?  You want your party to just be the blowhards that run the whole thing?’  I found my logic unassailable.  ‘We’re leaving, Joe.  We’re hungry.  I ran 21 miles and I want food.’

You could see the lightbulb flash.  Now here Joe gets a lot of credit for how quickly he changed course.  He dialed up the pizza guys right away to try to rush-deliver the pies.  Sure, it was still another 45 minutes or so before they arrived.  But his efforts were symbolic, and the hangry marmot was appeased.  Sean, Aaron, Brian, and I held on for several more hours of festivities, one of which involved me exercising my duties as a member of the ‘Stick Club’.  If you want to know what the Stick Club is, you’ll have to query me offline.  I’m confident that only very close friends will have made it this far in the blog anyway, and there’s nothing to worry about, but Aaron says people might get the wrong idea about me.

I’m not a very politically active person.  I’m not terribly active in the VHTRC either.  But I do try, with all my marmot powers, to make running fun for myself and others, e.g., Donut Runs and Beer Miles.  For the month of December I’ve made our WUS runs ZooLights runs, zigzagging through the National Zoo and stopping into the animal houses to see the critters.  Aaron and I have been painstakingly shepherding WUS back to its roots as a fun social run, not a sprint free-for-all.  So if I can get the pizzas to arrive at noon at MGM, instead of 1:30, it will be a subtle but symbolic victory for putting more weight on having a fun and social time out on the trails, and less on running insanely long distances.

I next took my crazy notion that running should be fun to State College, PA, where Aaron and I spent the Friday before Christmas.  I met up with old running buddies (pun intended) at the noon time run from Rec Hall.  Tom, Meira, Dave M, Costas, and two new young guys Seth and Mike Z headed out with me for a golf course loop that quickly devolved into a group effort to keep a semi-inflated ball with us that I found on the side of the path.  We’re runners, not soccer players, so there was a fair bit of retrieving the ball from woods and ditches.  We got bonus points for kicking the ball into someone’s butt (preferably Costas’s).  At some point someone declared, We should have a ball on all our runs!  The game ended to much consternation when Costas accidentally kicked the ball into someone’s fenced-in yard and Costas refused to climb the fence to get it.  You know, the fact that a beat-up old ball can bring so much joy to a group of runners kind of makes you wonder how fun-deprived runners must normally be.

I’ve waxed on previously about the unexpected charms of State College, and my attachment to the place and people, so I’ll refrain from too much of that.  I’ll admit that I felt a bit guilty Thursday night when it was clear that post-Hellgate exhausted Aaron was straining to keep his eyes open as we drove up to PA.  But after 48 hours in State College I didn’t feel guilty anymore.  State College is a fix I need a couple times a year.  It might seem stupid.  There are ostensibly plenty of places to get a massage in DC, a fair share of fancy ice cream places, plenty of shoe stores, running trails, etc. etc.

But, ironically, DC is a tough place to be if you like people.  You have to work really hard at it.  You have to plan things in advance.  You have to wake up really early.  On Sundays.  You have to coordinate schedules, and fight rush-hour traffic.  Hanging out with people in State College is seamless.  You want to do a happy hour on Friday?  Tom sent out an email to the listserv and we had to yank all the tables together to fit everyone.  You want to jaunt with friends in the mountains?  You roll out of bed at 9am, drive 5 minutes, and head off into the hills at the sane hour of 10am.  And if you haven’t had enough of your buddies, you whine and chant until your friends agree to go to the Naked Egg for brunch.  It turns out it’s graduation weekend and things are crAzY packed.  And by crazy packed, I mean we have to wait 20-30 minutes.  That would be the shortest brunch line in the history of the District of Columbia.

Don’t get me wrong, I love DC.  I love my job, my apartment, Rock Creek Park, Cleveland Park, WUS, Vace Pizza, etc etc.  Life is good.  But you have to work hard to be a social cat.  You have to organize and plan, sometimes months in advance.  Sarah Wright is one of my very best friends, not just in DC but in the world, and I can’t actually recall the last time I saw her.  It’s neither of our faults.  It’s just DC.