Author: martha

UPDATE – SHOES ARE TAKEN – very glad to see them go to good homes!

My feet expanded from a womens size 8 to size 8.5, and I have finally owned up to the fact that I can no longer wear the majority of my previous shoes. When I really like a shoe, I often buy several pairs, so many of these shoes are still in the box and have never been worn. Or they were shoes I won and never wore, or shoes that just never quite worked.  These shoes are all too small for me, so contact me if you have interest in any of these (I am not selling these for $$ but if you’d like to make a small donation to Homeward Trails Animal Rescue as a token gesture that would be appreciated):

 

 

‘Aaron, I have one goal.  Can you guess what it is?’

Aaron dislikes guessing games, especially poorly defined guessing games.  ‘I can’t even begin to.  What are the parameters of this said goal?’

‘Ultras.’

‘Oh, okay.  Umm… To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentations of their women?’

‘No.’

Aaron was unwilling to offer another guess.

‘I want to win Western States.’

‘How original.’

‘On a pony.’

He grinned.  ‘You mean the Tevis Cup.’

‘Yes.’

He kept grinning.

‘You don’t think I can do it.’  I was incredulous.

‘What’s a winning time for horses?’

‘No idea.  Not as fast as you’d think.’

‘Doesn’t really seem like you have the requisite expertise there.’

‘Dream big, baby.  It’ll happen when I’m in my 50s.’

Full Circle

The first time I ever rode a horse was on a family vacation at Lone Mountain Ranch in Montana when I was five years old. The animal was a large chestnut quarter horse with a white blaze named Nugget. I wore a massively oversized Washington Redskins ball cap, which didn’t cover my ears, and they were burnt red at the end of the long day.  Nugget liked to eat a lot of grass, and clearly was not bothered in the least by my tiny feet that flailed like duck wings, not even reaching his flank.  I fancied myself a great horsewoman (I had read all the Black Stallion books), so it was humiliating when they had to attach his bridle to the lead horse with a rope.  But it was a beautiful ride through the Montana mountains. A golden eagle soared above. Mule deer bounded in the distance. I wrapped my fingers through Nugget’s mane, and nuzzled his smooth neck with my cheek. My parents had no idea how much trouble this ride would cause in the Nelson household for years to come.

My family lived in a suburb a couple miles from the Washington, DC border. When I turned eight I started taking horseback riding lessons at the nearby Meadowbrook Stables. One by one, my friends eventually tired of horses, and quit, and my parents expected me to do the same. I had lot of other interests: I was also on a travel soccer team that made it to the finals of the Maryland State Championship, I played basketball and tennis and showed promise as a runner. My elementary school gym teacher had already phone up the high school track coach after he saw me run the mile.

It sounds absolutely absurd to suggest that my upbringing was anything but supremely privileged.  I went to sleep away camp.  My soccer team had a professional coach.  My family traveled to Europe when I was 10 to visit our Finnish relatives.  By all American standards I grew up with the world on a silver platter.  But in the context of the DC horse world, we were dirt poor.  I wasn’t going to get my own pony.  I wasn’t even going to get Devon boots.  Everything I owned was used — my show jacket, my chaps, my jodhpurs, my boots.  At the other end of the spectrum was Paige Johnson, who boarded her million dollar ponies at my barn.  Her dad owned BET television.

My parents saw the writing on the wall.  They saw how dejected I’d get when my exasperated instructor fumed about how I would have won the Pony Medal if it weren’t for my outfit: the color of my jodhpurs was wrong, my jacket was ill-fitting, my short boots were for kid riders….This was not the world for the Nelsons.

I had to give up horses in high school.  I had advanced to a point where I needed to start riding the A-rated shows in Culpepper.  My parents tallied that it would cost upwards of a grand a weekend and laughed.  But I never forgot about horses.  In college when I had a free Saturday without a game or a meet, I borrowed some friends’ riding clothes and competed in the inter-collegiate horse shows, winning some of the over fences events. It was my first time wearing tall boots.

These days I think all the time about taking up riding again.  But in the DC area it’s still $70-100 for a 1-hr lesson.  DC is teeming with lawyers and lobbyists who can drop that kind of money without blinking.  Aaron and I have great jobs that afford us a very comfortable lifestyle.  But not quite that comfortable.

When I was interviewing at veterinary schools, many of the profs at Cornell and NC State had horses.  Visiting Ithaca, I envisioned exactly what my new life would be like: a medium house with a sprawling track of land, some mutts and barn cats running loose, and a couple of thoroughbred rescues off the track that started off as crazies but came to love the trails as much as we do.  I’ve still got many miles to go before I get to this dream.  Miles on my own two feet.  But if Aaron’s counting on the dream fading over the next 20 years, he should remember how I told him I don’t want no wedding ring: just a horse.

 

DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon

March 14, 2015

Results

 Media coverage

“To move freely you must be deeply rooted.” -Bella Lewitsky, dancer (13 Jan 1916-2004)

Ooh, that’s no good. My shoulders sank when I saw the 1:30 time on the monitor.  I realized that, for the first time in seven years, I might race a marathon in over 3 hours.

My calves hurt. My right IT band was squirming. I had to piss like a race horse. My cold, drenched shirt clung heavily to my torso.

~ ~ ~
Aaron had sworn to the existence of a mythical creature: The Marathon That Doesn’t Suck So Hard You Wish You’d Get Hit By A Bus So You Didn’t Have to Run Miles 22-26. He attested to have experienced it himself, on many an occasion.
Personally, my spectrum of the post-marathon experience spans from a best-case scenario of curling up in fetal position for most of the day, to the not-uncommon medical tent-wheelchairs-hospitals-IVs combo.

Aaron had suggested several times a novel idea that ‘marathons feel better when you train for them’. But he also knew exactly how I felt about training. But as I’ve described in recent posts, I’ve softened just in the last few months to the idea that tracking my training and doing some more road running and pickups could result in less pain train on race day. Aaron bought me a very basic GPS watch and HR monitor this winter that I use from time to time to track my weekly mileage, along with Strava. I haven’t been using the HR monitor much in training, so we haven’t gotten down the measurements to a science yet. But I have at least a ballpark sense of what is an absurdly inappropriate heart race for a marathon pace.

The DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon presented the perfect opportunity to test whether I could run a marathon that wasn’t a suck-athon. I was bounded: I had to fly to Amsterdam for a work trip at 6:30pm the day of the marathon. I simply couldn’t afford to spend my afternoon curled up in a fetal position, let alone a the hospital.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll is a tough marathon to pace because the marathoners and half marathoners start together, making it all too easy to get pulled into going too fast by people who you know you’d be faster than if you weren’t running twice their distance. Good thing I had my handy dandy HR monitor to tell me if I was wildly out-doing myself.

Unfortunately, by mile 6 my HR monitor was informing me that I was wildly out-doing myself, with readings around 180. It would turn out that the monitor was picking up my cadence and not my actual heart rate, but it created enough confusion that I crawled through the 13.1-mile halfway point in 1:30 and change. At that point I realized the HR monitor was rubbish and wouldn’t look at my watch again for the remainder of the race.

I have a streak going of slipping in under 3 hours no matter the circumstances. Typically I give myself a good cushion so that I can positive split and still break 3. And the second half of the DC marathon is not quick. The field really thins out after the half marathoners finish, and there are few spectators along the course, especially in the Anacostia section. And there’s a major hill at mile 22. It was raining steadily and the road was filled with puddles. I had dug myself into a hole that I was unlikely to recover from.

~ ~ ~

The only upshot of the rain and desolation of the second half was that I finally had the privacy to relieve my bladder. I found the perfect spot around mile 14, with a large wall on my left and no one in sight, where without breaking stride I let ‘er flow. And flow. And flow. I was still peeing when I turned the corner. I was still peeing when the official photo guy snapped my picture. I think I peed for a full minute.

I came out of that pee a different runner: loose, relaxed, comfortable. The rain was coming down hard, but I started picking off the runners in front of me.  I ate four gels over the course of the race, and never got nauseated.  I ran the second 13.1 miles in 1:24, negative splitting by over 5 minutes. My last 10k was sub-40. I ran the second half of the race the way you boil a frog: gradually heating up the pace.

The last time I ran so freely was the backstretch of the Women’s Half Marathon back in September.  The cramping in my calves had abated, I was able to eat four energy gels with no nausea.  I spent the last 6 miles flying by guys like they were standing still.

‘This is your treat,’ I told myself, looking across the Anacostia River at DC’s waterfront, finally feeling what Aaron had described.  As some of you are aware, the last couple years have taken a toll on me, as I’ve reluctantly entertained the idea of relocating for a professorship — I’ve interviewed from New York to Scotland to Australia. But just in the last week or so, everything in my life finally sorted itself out.  I finally secured my dream job here in DC at the Fogarty International Center at the NIH, where I’ve been working for 7 years as a contractor.  We are so very happy here in DC.  So even though it was a bit lonely running over there on the other side of the Anacostia River, gazing over at DC gave me a great feeling of peace and a sense of being rooted that I haven’t had in many years.  This is my city.

~ ~ ~

I’ve had some high drama moments over my long running career. As a sophomore in high school I trailed for most of the race by over 100 meters at the Maryland State Cross Country Championship.  In the last quarter mile of the race I caught up to the leader, Kari McCarty of Hagerstown, and passed her in the finishing sprint across the field at Hereford.  Kari had beaten me by over a minute at Regionals.  I also had a come-from-behind victory at the Montgomery County Cross Country Championship.  The county championship was even bigger for me than states because it was all my friends and rivals and all four school size categories competing together (1A, 2A, 3A, 4A).  But these days marathons and ultras rarely come down to the final meters, so it’s been a while since I’ve had to use a big finishing kick.

When you cross the Anacostia River and head towards RFK, you can glimpse an arch of balloons that appears to be the finish line. Rounding into the finish, I had no awareness that the first woman was just ahead of me until the crowd started going nuts. I heard a fan yell, ‘Go get her!  She’s just ahead!’  When I spotted her, I could tell that she wasn’t moving well, but she had a long lead and it looked like there might not be enough turf left in the race to catch her. And I still had to spin myself around that horrible hairpin just before the finish.

Despite the rain there were hoards of people crowded at the finish and there was total mayhem when I blitzed by.  If this were a Disney movie, this is where it would go all slo-mo.   She was hurting and couldn’t put up much fight. But there was a twist: the arch of balloons wasn’t the actual finish line. You can imagine the kind of curse words I was sputtering when I surged to what I thought was the finish and there was no time mat there. There was a bit of panic, as I couldn’t even see where the real finish line was and had to run under another damn under pass.  But fortunately the finish line was just on the other side of the under pass, my legs held, and there waiting for me was Aaron.  He was shocked when I came in breaking the tape.  The last time he’d seen me along the course I was 5+ min behind the leader.

I got the celebrity treatment after the race — interviews, flowers, awards, got to meet Jim Ryun (I was pretty giddy about that), and, the best gift of all, I got to stand on a very warmly heated stage that finally got my teeth to stop chattering.  The second place woman, Rebecca Bader, and I huddled together right in front of the heater, milking it for as long as we could.  She had finished 2nd last year as well, but nothing bonds two women more quickly than sharing a heat source.  The celebrity treatment continued on the metro, where other runners were adorably excited to meet the ‘girl who’d won the marathon’ that day.

I haven’t had this kind of thrill at the races in a long time.  But I have to admit, 2:55 is not a PR for me — this was actually the fifth time I’ve run 2:55.  But even though the race wasn’t faster by time, the feeling of the race was fundamentally different from the previous times, getting faster and stronger as the race went on.  I’m heartened by running the last 10k in 39:45, and the second half in 1:24, including the big hill at mile 22.  Honestly, even though a PR would have been nice, I’d easily trade a race that felt great for one where I suffer my way through to a new PR any day.

 

I ran home throwing my bags on the floor, ripping off my jacket layers (it was hovering around freezing, which meant I had at least 3 jackets on).

‘Aaron!’

‘Yes, medium boo.’

‘You have to listen!  I listened to one of your ultrarunning podcasts and….and…there was a coach who was SANE.’

Aaron turned me on to the ultrarunner podcast a couple months ago, and I’ve enjoyed listening to 4 or 5 of them so far.  It certainly has a west coast bent, and most of the people and races I’m not familiar with, but I did really enjoy the Brian Rusiecki interview, not only because he is an adorable person but also because he discusses things we’re all familiar with like ‘Horton Miles’, Escarpment, etc.  But there was one interview that struck a chord hard.

I had never heard of Jason Koop before listening to the podcast.  Apparently he coaches a lot of ultra runners, including some of the elites (e.g., Dakota Jones).  There was an interesting dynamic during the interview, because the person conducting the interview naturally was interested in extracting juicy coaching tips and the secrets to training.  But Jason spent much of the interview deflecting these questions, emphasizing that each runner is individual and there is no formula that is generalizable for all runners.  Jason emphasized that unlike some coaches who also are runners themselves or RDs or have a full-time job, Jason only does coaching, and treats it like a craft.  He tailors workouts and training structures to an individual athlete, based on all kinds of variables including how quickly they recover.

Aaron hadn’t heard of Jason Koop either, and I pointed out the podcast for him on the website.

‘God it’s so frustrating,’ I put my head in my hands on the table.  I felt like I had found a unicorn.

When Aaron met me four years ago, my running was ‘unstructured’.  I didn’t own a watch.  And no, I don’t mean I didn’t own a GPS watch.  I mean I didn’t own any kind of device that could inform you of the time, except my cell phone.  I didn’t keep any log of miles.  To train for a marathon, I made sure I went out one Saturday a couple weeks before the race and did a ‘long run’.  I figured if I could run at least 18 miles on that day, I’d be set.  I could always squeeze out another 8 on marathon day.

Of course, I just waved my hands and guessed what 18 miles was back then.  Now with modern technology I have deduced that for my 2008 Marine Corp marathon my single ‘long run’ in Rock Creek Park was ~15 miles, for my 2010 Marine Corp my ‘long run’ around the Mall was ~14 miles, and for my 2009 Boston Marathon my long run was in a coffee plantation in Laos and probably wasn’t much more than 10 miles.  I probably ran 30-40 miles a week for regular training; less when I traveled.  But, I did sub-3 at all those marathons and figured I was the Queen of Marathon Training.

Aaron and I quickly came to discover that we had very divergent notions of ‘marathon training’.  In fact, he contended that my version could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered ‘training’.  And I had to agree with him.  ‘Training’ was in fact a dirty word.  For me, training meant Ned.  And Bob.  Old men trying to bend me to their will.  Aaron picked up on this very quickly and astutely averted any appearance that we might be ‘training’ for something.  If stopping to look at birds and mushrooms on our runs bothered him in any way, he disguised it very well.

I have a tendency to demonize my college track coach Ned.  From my perspective, he destroyed what could have been a fruitful collegiate career for me.  But as time goes on I try to be more balanced in my perspective.  My teammates had a lot of respect for him: he had been a wunderkid 800 meter runner who came agonizingly close to qualifying for the Olympics (less than a second).  He was a very technically proficient coach and I liked the way he scheduled our training to sacrifice success at the beginning of the season but sharpen and peak by the end.  I also liked the way he had us do ‘blind’ workouts where he would only tell us one interval at a time what to run (i.e., run 800m at 2:45-2:48 pace).  The intention was to fight our natural inclination to run slower in the middle of the workout.  Definitely made us run harder.

Ned and I got along splendidly….for about two days.  I was in his good graces for the first workout of the 2001 cross country season.  New England is beautiful in the fall, and I ran the workout as hard as I could, finishing first among teammates in each of the three one-mile repeats through the meadows.  It was by far the hardest and longest workout I had ever done, and I was proud to have my first collegiate cross country workout in the bag.  But I was a spindly little runner, a mere ~115 lbs, who raced hard but never trained.  Despite being the Maryland state cross country champion in high school, a typical day of training was to run a warm-up lap around the track and trot 2.5-3 miles around the neighborhood.  The only reason I had any speed at all was because I played travel-team soccer fall-winter-spring.

So my legs had not been ready for that caliber of workout.  And two days later when it was time to do another workout, I suggested that I should just jog around and try to shake out the lactic acid.  Amherst’s first meet of the season was in two days, and I was afraid I’d be totally dead-legged.  Ned chafed.  To his credit, Ned had gone through his calendar and very carefully designed each and every team workout over those months with a mind towards an ultimate goal: Nationals in November.  I begrudgingly trotted at half-speed through the workout, which only incensed him more.  We argued: he contended that the team was in base-building period and that I was supposed to feel dead-legged in September; I couldn’t reconcile doing a speed workout with building a base.  From that day on, he thought I was a princess who thought she deserved special treatment, and I felt like he wasn’t on my team.  Everything we did was perceived through those filters, and we clashed time and again

The second xc meet of the season fell a few days after September 11, 2001.  I had felt dead-legged at our first meet and didn’t have a great race, but I was our team’s first finisher and we won the meet as a team.  Ned was satisfied.  But I had an intense reaction to 9/11.  I hadn’t lost any loved ones in the Towers. I didn’t have any personal tragedies.  But the night of 9/12 I slept for 20+ hours.  Through all my classes.  When I finally woke up I couldn’t tell if it was morning or evening.  For the next few days I had no energy, like a zombie.  I didn’t even try to run.   But it was decided to hold our Saturday meet, and I dressed in uniform and rode the bus.  But after warm-up I told Ned that I was in some kind of post-9/11 funk, a depression, and I was not in a mindset to race.  Ned was unconvinced.  Everyone else on the team was running.  None of my friends or family had been lost in the Towers.  I ran about a half mile of the race and dropped.  Ned scowled at me for the rest of the day.  He pointed at all my other teammates standing around who had run their guts out that day, despite whatever trauma they may have experienced.  I had let each of them down.

The xc team was kind of a cult.  Ned liked it that way.  Everyone ate and lived together.  At least three couples from the time I was there wound up getting married.  The fact that I had no interest in being part of the cult made me all the more troubling for Ned.  A lot of girls stayed on the team for purely social reasons — all their closest friends were teammates.  In the end it was all too easy for me to walk away.  I had friends from the soccer team, from the equestrian club, from classes.  My best friend on the xc team was Aparna, who now is a successful professional comedian (a year or so ago Aaron and I watched her perform standup at Sixth & I).  I liked running with her because she was dark and funny and didn’t stop her watch every time we stepped over a log.  After long runs on weekend we went out for big tasty brunches and stuffed ourselves silly.  And we made fun of Ned.  A lot.

Ned and I had a fundamentally different vision of the coach-runner relationship.  I wanted a two-way relationship, where I talked openly about my mental and physical state and we would design a personalized training regimen that played to my strengths and recognized my weaknesses.  Ned perceived any requests for deviations from his team-designed training plan as insurrection.  He once declared, ‘This is not the Martha show!’

Ned suspended me for a critical month of xc training (late Sept to late Oct 2001), forbidding me from running with anyone else on the team, even on my own time.  But I came back at the tail end of the season and dropped a 17:44 5k to finish 19th at Nationals.  It hurt like hell, and after the race I lay in the van ill while my teammates did Iowa sightseeing adventures including the John Deere tractor museum.

The next spring I studied abroad in Melbourne, Australia, with Katelyn, my friend from the Amherst soccer team, and never ran competitively again in college again.  Several times I visited Ned’s office to retrieve my framed All-America certificate.  Each time he held up his hands and said he misplaced it.  I wonder if he eventually threw it out, or if it still languishes at the bottom of his file cabinet somewhere.

When my parents let me transfer after my freshman year of college from Stanford University in California to a small, liberal arts college in New England called Amherst College, they did so on the condition that I visit a therapist once I got to Amherst.  I was offended that my parents thought I’d lost the plot, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  But Patricia was awesome.  She quickly grasped why I had made the leap of faith to leave Stanford, and why I was likely to thrive in my new environs in Massachusetts.  Having settled the key issue rather quickly, we spent most of our time talking about Ned.  She recognized that Ned’s approach triggered the exact same reactions as my father had in high school, and that was part of why it made me shut down so quickly.  We also talked about how it came down to a power struggle.  From Ned’s perspective, any compromise on his part would undercut his authority, and diminish him in the eyes of the entire team, whose respect he needed in order to be an effective coach.  From my perspective, I needed a coach who had some give in the reins.  I knew my body well, and there were going to be days where what was good for the team wasn’t going to be good for me.

My senior year, after several seasons of not running, I flirted with the idea of competing again.  I came to some practices, it was kind of awkward, but it was fun to be running on the team again.  But I saw flickers of our old runner-coach power struggle, and there got to be a point where I needed to know that things would be different between Ned and myself, just the slightest indication that he and I could speak to each other like adults and make reasonable compromises.

There was only one thing I hated more about running than Ned, and that was the bun-hugger uniform.  We had severe issues with eating disorders among the girls on our team, including missed semesters from hospitalization, and I thought it was absurd that Ned still told some of the girls on the team they had to lose weight — or why we had to wear ‘thunderwear’ that exposed every bit of cottage cheese on our thighs.  I accepted that when we competed as a team, either in cross country or as a track relay, we needed our uniforms to match exactly.  But I had noticed that there was a girl who ran for Connecticut College who wore regular shorts when she ran an individual track event.

The bun-huggers came to symbolize the Grand Compromise I had in mind when it came to running for Amherst.  On one hand, I was 100% willing to be a teammate when competing for a relay or in cross country, when we raced as a team.  But when I was competing on my own, in the 1500m or the 3000m, I wanted to wear simple black shorts that I would be more comfortable in.  All the men wore black shorts.

‘Girls just don’t look good in shorts,’ Ned replied to my proposal, unflinching.

We stared at each other.  You could have carved through the hostility in the room with a butter knife.

‘Ned, you understand that we have severe eating disorders on this team.’  I myself had struggled to keep my weight up, had skipped a period, and wouldn’t get my health sorted out until I got a doctor to write me a note excusing me from the required Amherst meal plan because of my low weight (I was inspired to finally get off the detested meal plan when another friend of mine got to eat off campus after his doctor wrote him a note attesting to Todd’s ‘excessive flatulence’ problem caused by dining hall food).

I left the room in silence.  I had worn the bun-huggers for two whole seasons.  But I never would again.  They had become a symbol.  Ned had no idea that our conversation that day was about a lot more than bun-huggers.

I had big dreams.  Another girl on the team, Carter H., would go on to win NCAA championships and be All-America at least ten times.  She and I finished within 0.1 seconds of each other at Nationals.  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stuck it out, or if Ned had just met me a fraction of the way in the middle.  I wasn’t the only star female runner Ned had alienated.  All-America Katie S. had quit the team before I even joined.

My mom has often quibbled that I’m not very ‘accommodating’.  Ned was not the first coach to call me a ‘princess’.  But the truth is, if I were a guy, the term simply would have been ‘headstrong’.  I would eventually self-adopt the moniker ‘uncoachable’.  My mom still doesn’t know what kind of magic beans Aaron used to get me to agree to have a boyfriend.  Or to do a triathlon.  Pony whisperer.

My last semester at Amherst I lived several miles off campus on a horse farm.  My roommates were working adults in their late 20s, including the first guy I’d ever met who served actively in the military (Amherst College didn’t even let ROTC on campus).  I jaunted around on my own along the Pioneer Valley’s beautiful trails and ran my first marathon, again with Katelyn, in New York City in 3:14.  It was a very hot day and I sweltered in the crusty tye-dyed T-shirt my friend made for me, and discovered a Cliff bar was not the right thing to eat during a hot marathon.  I had to get an IV at Beth Israel hospital afterwards because I wasn’t holding down any food or liquid.  My mom exclaimed in relief, ‘At least you never have to run another marathon!’  I told her I couldn’t wait to do another.

~   ~   ~

This winter Aaron bought me my first GPS watch.  The watch’s truth serum was tough to swallow at first.  Runs I thought were 15 miles turned out to be 11 or 12, and runs I called 10 were really 7.  You’ve got to be kidding, I’m not running 10:30 pace!  My ego was shattered.

It’s still a work in progress, and we haven’t been able to get the heart rate monitor bit to function.  I signed up for Strava for tracking but won’t release my data publicly (although to my dismay apparently people get emails about segment records).  I don’t actually look at the watch at all while I run.  But after years of insulating myself against anything with the slightest whiff of structure, I am now aware of how many miles I’m typically running a week. And I’ve accompanied Aaron on a road run with 7 minute pick-ups, and have agreed to try to do it more regularly.

I’m still far from being in a place where I want to ‘train’. I don’t have any schedule or plan. But while I can get away with running 5k-marathon distances without any structured training, it’s harder to run ultras well without any sense of mileage. Although I’ve had some good races, I keep puking and I’ve had mostly bad ultras. I’ve thought many times of giving up at ultras altogether, just going to back to the shorter distances that I can run on birdwatching and mushroom hunting. But Aaron knows I have legs that want to throw down some serious distance. Maybe competitively, maybe not. I have to admit, after listening to Jason Koop I can see how I might plausibly some day accept a tailored training plan. It definitely took Aaron by surprise when I put on that watch.  We’ll see if I have some more surprises up my sleeve.

~    ~    ~

Regrets

I recently read an interview with Shalane Flanagan where she reflects about Rita Jeptoo recently testing positive for doping.  The most crushing part about her interview is where Shalane talks about the theoretical Moment that was stolen from her, standing on the podium with her wreath.  A moment that was stolen not just from her, but from her family and supporters.  None of us are potentially winning the Boston Marathon, but I think anyone who has been running a while can think of moments that slipped through their fingers, that could have happened had the water just happened to have flown down the other side.  I know Aaron feels like he was in the shape of his life going into the 2007 Chicago Marathon, perfectly poised to break the 2:30 marathon barrier, and then the temperatures soared above 90 degrees.  My friend and former coach Selena (who can definitely weigh in on my ‘uncoachable’ aspects from high school) finished second in the Marine Corps Marathon in 2:51 in the late 1990s and was poised to have a go at an Olympic Trials qualifier when she had a freak accident and broke her leg stepping on a log in Rock Creek Park.  In State College, Rebecca Donahue finished 7th at the Olympic Trials in the 5,000 in 2012, but has been plagued by one crazy health problem (e.g., kidney stones) after another.  It’s so easy to dwell on how things might have gone had certain variables been different.  I’m someone who in particular left a lot of stones unturned and have a lot of ‘what ifs?’  It sounds awfully cheesy, but at the end of the day I have no regrets.  PRs and CRs are nice, but can be a distraction.  Aaron and I both comment that the worst feature of Strava and our GPS watches is their obsession with PRs:  Oooh, we set a PR on that 0.5 mile stretch along the Potomac today!

One of the first times I met Aaron’s mom, who is also a competitive runner and regular age-group winner, we had a conversation about marathons:

‘Yeah, I could probably train up and qualify for Olympic Trials,’  I admitted.  ‘But it would require very focused training.  And it’s not like I’m going to qualify for the Olympics or anything.’

‘Oh, but wouldn’t that be so cool!’ Mrs Schwartzbard exclaimed.  ‘That would be such a great thing to talk about at cocktail parties!’

Early on, I was very shy and had a habit of talking to Aaron instead of directly to his parents.  ‘Aaron, I don’t go to cocktail parties, do I?’

 

 

 

SnowShoeFest IV

Canaan Valley, WV

February 27 – March 1, 2015

My obsession with iMovie continues…..

The SnowShoeFest Main Event of 2015 had already taken place in late January (SnowShoeFest III).  But Aaron and I, departing temporarily from our ‘Lazy Bears’ theme of 2015, decided to go for a Bonus Round, and host the Clappons and Knipling/Dahls (how come no one has a joint name for Keith and Tracy?  they could be the Dahl-lings) a month later for Round II (initially dubbed SnowShoeFest IIIb, but we eventually settled on SnowShoeFest IV).

This proved to be a wise decision, as Aaron’s video footage of Joe, Tracy, and Michele doing their ‘Three Stooges’ version of snowshoeing (see above) will provide entertainment for years to come.

You may have noticed that I don’t write my usual chapters of blog for SnowShoeFests.  In part that’s because while I’m willing to write at length about my own thoughts and experiences, SnowShoeFest is really not about my experience.  But it’s a weekend where my own priorities kind of go limp.  It’s more about sitting back, opening our doors, and making sure our friends enjoy their taste of our little Canaan world.

But I will provide an FAQ for questions likely to arise from viewing the video:

A: Yes, that is Baby Bur making a cameo.  The Burs independently made plans to go to Canaan the same weekend as SnowShoeFest IV and by some miracle we were able to cross paths several times.

A: No, Joe, Michele and Tracy did not spend most SSFIV on their bottoms, as the video may have suggested.  There was one brief point at the end where I decided to go off-piste to go through some deep snow where snowshoes of lesser quality were not as effective at staying upright.

A: No, I’m afraid I can’t explain Joe’s selection of outerwear.

A: Yes, that is an excellent question why Tracy is holding poles the length of her full body.  Joe seems to have thought that we’d be snowshoeing through many feet of soft snow, in which case such poles would have been very useful.  This turned out not to be the case, and Joe and Michele promptly returned the poles to the rack after about 3 minutes of failed snowshoeing.

A: Yes, getting the friendly (and now fat) Canaan chickadees to eat sunflower seeds out of your palm is not difficult.  Joe and Michele are our witnesses.  Canaan has no ticks, poison ivy, or poisonous snakes.  We’re still working on getting the chickadees to sew ball gowns for us and wash the dishes.

A: Speaking of Canaan being magical: yes, the highlight of the trip could very well have been when we ran into a merry group of fellow snowshoeing revelers several hours into our trek who happened to be stocked with an extremely large quantity of moonshine (very smooth, according to Tracy) and beers they were happy to share.  Joe was smitten.

A: Yes, that is the best resemblance of a moose that we have ever seen made naturally by snow.

A: I’m sorry, I have no explanation for how Aaron achieves such levels of adorableness.  I’ll get back to you after further study.