Author: martha

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 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.

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.

 

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.

 

Tussey MountainBack 50-mile relay

State College, PA

October 25, 2015

‘So, was MountainBack about what you expected?’  I feared that I may have overhyped it in the days leading up the race.

‘Well,’ Cecily began, choosing her words carefully.  ‘When we started the trip I thought this was just going to be a fun run.’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.  ‘I sold it that way to get you to sign up.’

‘And then it started to dribble out during our ride up that the DCR was actually a pretty seriously competitive event.’  We were taking the scenic way again for our drive home, winding through the rolling Pennsylvania farm lands in the dwindling light.  ‘And then when we met your friends for dinner, I kind of had an Oh Shit moment and realized that I was going to have to run really hard and fast.’

‘I bet the dead giveaway was when I suggested you warm up a lot before your first leg.’

‘But in the end, it was neither of those.  People were so laid back, even though we were running hard.’

‘So you had fun?’  I’d dragged Cecily into this whole shenanigan.  I was still worried she was scarred for life and never going to do it again.

‘Yes!  You know I haven’t run very competitively since college.’  Cecily had been a star 800m runner at Dartmouth, back in the day.  We’d competed together in high school.  ‘It felt like the good ole days of 4 x 800.’

MountainBack this year had its share of highs: pulling my team into the lead on that tough Leg 4 hill; re-taking the lead on the thrilling bomb down Leg 10; throwing my arms around Alex at the finish line, after he’d held onto our team’s lead by the skin of his teeth.  But nothing was more satisfying than knowing that Cecily had caught the magic of MountainBack.  That one race where you run against your friends with the fiercest of competition, running your guts out, whispering taunts, and then share hugs and beers at the end.

This year the DCR had new Commissioners: Cali and CJ.  They mixed some things up: we had the draft just a couple days before the race, to minimize pre-race sandbagging.  This negated some traditions: ordering matching singlets, team names along a theme, the weeks of pre-race trash talk.  But it avoided a key draft problem: injury dropouts and ringer substitutions.

Most of my team this year was newbies.  And, as Sheakowski noted in the MountainBack parking lot, we were the ‘Kid Team’, with an average age that was at least a decade less than everything other team.  Whenever a team wins the DCR, there’s typically an ensuing onslaught of sandbagging accusations.  But the Kid Team didn’t have any clear sandbaggers; everyone just ran solidly.  I took one gamble pick in the 4th round on Andy Bogus, who was a last minute sub and didn’t have much of a bio, and ended up churning out a clutch run up the killer Leg 11.  Drafting by phone is always a challenge.  You have no idea who’s been picked already.  You don’t have a chance to meet any of the new people.  But as Cali was listing off the folks still remaining in the 4th round, I yelled into the phone ‘Give me Bogus!’

The DCR was made more complex this year by the fact that every team had a different leg order.  So you had a lot of mismatches: captains running against 4th round picks on Legs 5 and 11, last-round picks against 3rd-round picks on Leg 2 and 8, etc.  So there were likely to be a lot of lead changes.  Patrick shot the Kid Team out to the lead on Leg 1, and we were in the lead for a larger percentage of the race than any other team.  At various times the Pink team (Costas’s team) and the Orange team (Zimmerman’s team) took the lead.  But on Legs 4 and 10 I managed to wrestle it back, and give Andy and Alex enough cushion to hold off Mike M, Zimmerman, Ken, and everyone else on their heels.

This was my 11th consecutive Tussey MountainBack relay, and my 9th consecutive year of DCR (for more information on the elaborate Draft Challenge Relay, see blog posts from prior years).  But my first DCR win.  We also won the Standard Men’s division, which was a larger number of teams.  But we all know that the only thing that matters is how you stack up against the other DCR teams.

Overall, I liked a lot of things about the new Cali/CJ DCR.  Thank god I don’t have to buy another stupid singlet I’m never gonna wear.  And the lack of last-minute substitutions kept the competition a lot more fair.  No one can really hurl the customary sandbagger accusations at the Kid Team.  We just had a good strategy: (a) stack our front end on Legs 1/7 and 2/8 with speedsters Patrick and Cecily of Penn State men’s soccer and Dartmouth track team fame, respectively; (b) ask Dana to do his best to keep us in the race on Leg 3/9, knowing that he’d be running against runners picked higher in the draft order but if he kept us within sight of other DCR runners, the marmot’s competitive instincts would kick in; (c) sure enough, dangle some DCR headbands in front of me and I’ll track them down on 4/10, Taiwan jetlag be damned; and (d) count on Bogus and Andy’s pure toughness to clutch onto shrinking leads.

Going into Leg 10, I informed my team, ‘Now guys, you all made me work damn hard on Leg 4……’  Catching Meira and Costas on uphill legs had been grueling work.  My training involves neither (a) speedwork or (b) hills, so MountainBack is always a hard jolt to my system.  ‘So you all are going to give me a nice cushy lead on Leg 10.’  We’d been in the lead since the top of Leg 4, and a nice float down Leg 10 seemed like an apt reward for heaving my lungs out on Leg 4’s steep hills.

‘Chri-kies,’ I muttered as the Orange team came into view.  Pink team was right on our tail.  They were going to make me do it again.  And if we were going to win the DCR, putting us in the lead wasn’t enough.  With mismatched legs coming up, I had to give Bogus and Alex a couple minutes of cushion.  As I went by an ultra runner, he yelled, No one else running like that out here.  My hamstrings would be sore for more than a week.  But I gave the Kid Team the last push it needed.  Bogus held tough on Leg 11, a monster performance for a 4th round pick.  Alex put it all out there on Leg 12.

My fears about the Kid Team had been vanquished.  That Bogus, in his baggy pajama pants and oops-I-got-lost-mountain-biking-yesterday-and-did-way-too-many-miles had no idea what he was getting into on Leg 11.  That Cecily would hate me forever for dragging her into all this.  That I’d be crawling after a long, sleepless trip to Taiwan and back.

As Cecily and I drove home to DC, I found myself admitting that a side of me still very much misses State College.  We had been there less than 24 hours, but it was enough for her to know exactly what I meant.  It might be tough to find a decent Ethiopian restaurant in the Happy Valley.  Or catch an Ariel Pink concert.  Or race with 45,000 people around the Mall.  But there’s a coziness, and an ease of living.  The way everyone was able to convene impromptu for happy hour at Toftrees (if we want to do something with friends in DC we have to plan weeks in advance — there’s no just scootin’ across the city).  The way the shoe guy at Rapid Transit, Brock, knew who I was and had shared friends, and helped me and Cecily sort through the entire basement of clothing racks to find just what we were looking for.

And of course how can we omit Luna and his wonderful doggies and garage apartment?  Sure, this year we had to contend with a lot of mouse poo (seriously, Luns, we got to get Leda in there).  But what’s MountainBack without a shower that ends with accidentally smearing mouse poo all over your wet body (as it turned out a little mouse had found the warm wrapped towel a delightful place to relieve himself)?  If there had been a live feed of Luna’s apartment the night before MountainBack, you would have seen me and Cecily shrieking and laughing, as I had taken a blanket from the upper reaches of the closet (‘no way a mouse could get all the way up there,’ Cecily had assured me) and thrown it onto my bed, sending pellets of poo flying in all directions across the apartment.  After scraping up all the pellets, we determined that one bed was 100% poo free, and Cecily and I tucked in together under the sheets.  Because friends don’t let friends sleep in mouse poo.

Most of these photos were kindly provided by Judd Michael.