There is a musty old shower room on the Penn State campus. No one checks your ID. You don’t even really need to lock up your stuff. Situated in a dimly lit corner of Rec Hall, where the floors are stone cold and the heat pipes rattle, Rec Hall seems a forgotten 1970’s-era relic. No, this is not the shower room of the famed Jerry Sandusky crimes, which actually occurred in the modern and tightly secured locker rooms of the football team on the other side of campus. These are the gritty old locker rooms of the Nittany Valley Running Club (NVRC), an organization that could be considered the antithesis of the Penn State football program except for the fact that once a year Joe Paterno would take his picture with our Boston Marathon team to help us raise money for Centre Volunteers in Medicine. It costs $10 to join NVRC, and about 1,000x that to get clubhouse season tickets to Penn State football games. The only thing we have in common is that we don’t put our names on the backs of our jerseys. Oh wait, scratch that: they put the names on the football jerseys this year.
I’m not going to dive into a full history of my seven years running at noontime with the NVRC from Rec Hall, including three years when I was a graduate student at Penn State, and the last four years when I’ve been a frequent visitor, coming to Penn State for weeks at a time every couple of months to continue collaborations with my former PhD advisor, Eddie Holmes — and of course to catch up with the noontime runners. But it was on these formative noontime jogs that my running — and myself — really came of age. When I started running at noon I was the skinny girl who ran in over-sized cotton soccer shirts and ballooning soccer shorts that conveyed my reluctance to be a runner (or a female), instead clinging to my high school identity as a tomboy soccer player. But the nooners introduced me to the idea that running could be fun and relaxed and light-hearted, even at a brisk pace. And that not all guys preferred ocular surgery to getting chicked (the term ‘chicked’ was not even part of the vernacular there). Eventually I went out and bought some running shorts.
But Eddie will be moving permanently to Sydney, Australia, and with him my excuse for visiting Penn State regularly. Sure, having the chance to visit sunny Sydney will be welcome. But I’d trade all the beaches and rooftop bars in Sydney for a chance to trot around State College at noon with the Rec Hallers, many of whom I’ve been running with since I was a clueless twenty-something. I know I’ll return to State College for races, like I’m going back in October for MountainBack). But I can’t think of circumstances under which I’ll be able to run another noontime run, which has been such a mainstay of my running life (and mental sanity). And I can’t shake the irreversible sense of loss.
I began the WHM this year in mixed spirits. On one hand, this year’s race had everything going for it. My friend Tracy Dahl was debuting as the glorious new RD this year, guaranteeing a class A affair.  I had deliciously fueled up the night before at Jen Ragone’s on her famous cake and pizza. I was feeling fit and fast compared to last year, when I was still recovering from my August weeks in Asia, from pacing Aaron at Cascade Crest for 8 hours, and had my foot wrapped in tape for my plantar fasciitis. So I knew that no matter what this year couldn’t be worse than last’s.
Waddle and her lither mother Clover
But my cat from high school had begun to die that week. Waddle, the extraordinarily fat kitty that was born under my bed on Mother’s Day in 1999. She was born obese, and we named her Waddle because she was too fat to walk. We gave away the other four kittens, but kept the adorably obese Waddle with the button nose. Waddle was an extremely talkative cat, famous for her meow that sounded more like a parrot squawk. And for her extraordinary appetite. But Waddle had stopped eating and we could see her bones through her skin. I woke up Friday knowing she was not long for the world. I woke Saturday knowing that I would be able to race, but that Waddle and the sadness of her loss would be weighing on my mind. But the weather would not cooperate at all with my plan of wearing all black, and Jen rightly insisted that remove the black shirt.
Neal (now Daddy) Gorman leads out the ladies to the trail
After racing neck and neck with Eliza last year, I wanted very much to race alone this year. I found myself glancing over my shoulder a few times to make sure no one was sneaking up. I was determined not just to win the race this year, but to enjoy it, to restore the overwhelmingly positive feelings I had about the race in 2009. So I raced a fine line between keeping a safe lead but not pushing myself so hard that I would really suffer during the hills at the end of the course. After last year, I just wasn’t in the mood to suffer. I didn’t care about the time or the record, I just wanted to relish running a race that suits me perfectly: that is lined start to finish with my friends, an out-and-back that allows me to see all the other runners and cheer on my friends, a race that requires a complete runner with speed and strength and nimble feet, a race with woods that remind me of childhood. I didn’t obliterate any records, I didn’t blow away the field, but I had achieved exactly what I set out to run: a completely restorative race.
a much happier runner
Before I sign off I’d like to point out that Ragan’s performances at the WHM have been extraordinary. Ragan’s times make her the second fastest woman to ever run the course, surpassing all other previous WHM winners. Those who will have to race Ragan this fall will have their work cut out for them.
I’d also like to praise Tracy’s debut as the RD — the organization was flawless and vastly improved over previous years. Thank you Tracy, and we hope you return as RD next year!
I wanted to give a toast last night to Doug & Kerry, I had a lot on the tip of my tongue, but I hadn’t prepared anything and I’m no good at trying to ad lib these things. So here is my belated toast to Doug & Kerry, the rare WUSsie couple that has managed not to have their names merged into one (Torstin, Clapon, Marthon……).
In March of 2010 I was in one of my deep funks that I get from time to time and which can go on for several months, this one triggered by losing my beloved cat in a snowstorm and being injured and unable to run, all on top of my usual end-of-winter doldrums. Usually it’s a long process to break me out of the self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing and this sense of entropy, and my friends were having very little success this time. But when Sean Andrish told me that Kerry and Doug were seeing each other, it was like the curse was broken with a single lightning bolt, the world snapped together.
Because you come across only a handful of people in your life that seem so deserving of happiness, that anything short of an eternal blissful existence seems to violate your entire sense of world order. And Kerry Owens is definitely one of those saint-like people. Kerry is so generous that we can’t help but take it for granted. All of us do — because the generosity is so seamless and comes across so naturally it’s almost invisible. You have to kick yourself from time to time that the WUS house is not this magical castle in Woodley Park that God bequeathed upon all trail runners for their perpetual Tuesday night merriment — and occasional donut runs, beer miles, fatasses, etc. Because God really digs trail runners. The same can be said for Portobella, or for Kerry’s house in Frisco. In fact, if you consider for a moment our amazing club of runners, you don’t have to look far to realize that so much of our club’s foundation has been laid by Kerry’s incredible open door (and real estate empire~). I can say personally that if it weren’t for WUS and Kerry I wouldn’t be a trail runner today, that I wouldn’t have run the Women’s Half this weekend, that I wouldn’t have met Aaron — and I’m sure a lot of you guys could say the same.
Sometimes I try to think about what we can give back to someone who gives so much. And the main conclusion seems to be that our main obligation is to never take it all for granted, or to allow someone’s great generosities of the past to become burdens of the future. I’ll admit, as absolutely delighted as I was about Kerry and Doug’s marriage, there was also a sinking feeling that it could be a harbinger of the end of the WUS house. But while it makes me so sad to think that there might come a day where I don’t trot over to 2711 Woodley Road on Tuesday nights (seriously one of my main criteria for buying my apartment in Cleveland Park was that it had to be near the WUS house — my real estate agents were so perplexed by what this mysterious runner group house thing was), you have to realize that the WUS house is a crazy gift, that we’ve all been so fortunate to enjoy long enough to meet each other and build such long-lasting friendships. I owe so much of my happiness to that crazy Woodley House (I was so confused when Sean first tried to explain it to me — wait, you have married people living in your attic??), which so embodies the zany, free-form spirit of ultra-running.
But Doug and Kerry, while we like to think that you love us so much that you want us in your house forever because we are so cool and fun and wonderful, and plead that the DC running community will be hit with shock waves by any changes to WUS, we know that you have spoiled us rotten, that people like Kerry Owens do not exist in any other universe known to man, and that we have been living in a dreamlike reality that some day we will have to wake up from. It will be so damn hard, but I’ll try not to hit the snooze button.
This is a remarkable photograph, for anyone who knows me knows I don’t ride bikes. But while the rest of you are out there vanquishing Frenchie mountains, as well as those local slopes at the Ring, I’ve been conquering, well, my ass. And my shoulders. And neck. And long-standing absolute conviction that bicycles are vehicles of death.
It was my freshman year of college where my childhood friendship with the bicycle really went sour. Standford University’s sprawling campus made a bike a necessity. I had one friend who refused to bike, and I think she was late to every class she took. You could differentiate a Stanford undergrad from a grad student by whether they wore a bike helmet, with the grad students falling universally into the head protection category. With 5-10 thousand teenagers and young 20-somethings speeding across campus quads along self-defined pathways, a bike crash was witnessed on nearly a daily basis. But the kicker for me was the rainy season. As a prospective student I had visited Stanford in the delightful balmy spring. No one had informed me that Stanford’s paradise would descend into an abysmal bleak unabating rain storm from December to April. Seriously, not a sunny day during those months. The worst part was not biking in the rain, or the spike in wet-induced bike accidents, but the sitting through all your classes with a soaking wet ass. How in hell was I supposed to absorb multivariable calculus when my ass had just absorbed Lake Stanford?
When I transferred from Stanford to Amherst College after my freshman year, the reasons were primarily related to academics and athletics. I could devote a pretty hefty blog to why I left Stanford for Amherst, it was a pretty dramatic decision that most people around me heavily questioned at the time (many of the Californians at Stanford thought that I was returning home to attend a community college — I swear half the Stanford students did not know that Massachusetts and Maryland were not neighboring states). But I nothing made me happier than trading in the sprawling Stanford campus where Japanese tourists were shuttled around in long trains of tourist-mobiles snapping shots of students like they were exotic zoo animals (if you google ‘golf cart tour’, Stanford is the 3rd place that comes up, after Rome and Catalina Island) for the quaint, New Englandy, entirely stroll-able Amherst campus. The bike didn’t have anything to do with why I left Stanford, except for symbolizing my sense of being completely lost amid the dizzying flurry of Stanford bicycles ridden by kids who seemed to know where they were going and getting there in a hurry. I knew a fellow freshman who was taking double course loads, working for a start-up (this was 1999, the height of the tech bubble), and sleeping 3-4 hours a night. My parents were kind of miffed that I’d left my bike with a friend in Palo Alto, but the bike could have no part in the second incarnation of a more zen collegiate Martha.
I wouldn’t ride a bike again until Thailand. After graduating from Amherst and working in San Francisco a bit, my friend Sarah Wright (yes, the horse barn Sarah from Milwaukee I just visited) and I decided to muck around the world, starting in Southeast Asia. Again, a much longer blog is required for Martha & Sarah’s adventures in the Far East, but one day Sarah convinced me, despite my deep reservations, to rent bikes for a day so we could explore some of the more remote parts of whichever city we were in — maybe it wasn’t even Thailand, maybe it was Laos or Vietnam or Cambodia, I really can’t recall. All I can recall is that my bike ride HURT. Hurt places that had not been hurt since the first time I tried as a 14-year old to ram a tampon in. I suppose the $3 bikes we rented in Thailand were not exactly of the highest quality. From then on I equated biking with some kind of torture.
When I moved to Penn State to start my PhD in biology, I discovered that biking was not only ergonomically challenging, but also of a different culture. Maybe some of you are aware that State College, PA is one of the country’s foci of road and mountain biking. I swear State College has the highest number of bike shops per capita. And a new store pops up every time there is drama in the biking community (and there is A LOT of drama in the biking community), as one of the business partners splinters off. Since I was an energetic endurance athlete entering a small town, it was quite assumed that I too would join in the biking party. But the bikers were worlds different from running community. I thought collegiate runners were obsessive, but bikers brought it to a whole new level, with tightly stratified levels of competition and membership in sponsored teams, resulting in an intense, cliquish, chauvinistic, commercialized clash of egos jockeying to redefine to the pecking order. But there was humble respect for the marathon runner’s suffering. Even among the most hardcore bikers (State College played host to the World Championships for the Single-Speed Mountain Biking), they had to admit that even in the gnarliest of rides they didn’t quite taste that kind of intensity of suffering as the last miles of the marathon. And as a female runner who could run a marathon faster than Lance Armstrong, I got a measure of respect that was rarely afforded. But I pretty much steered clear of the biking world during my three years living in State College. Not only did biking strike me as the Wall Street of endurance athletics (ie, a completely commercialized arena for a certain breed of male to engage in proxy battles of the ego), but the number of injuries and deaths by bike in the area were haunting. Within my first weeks, a fellow grad student admitted that he had gotten the down payment for his house from the settlement he received from a horrific bike crash with a car. I was absolutely convinced my friend was on a death mission when he would ride his bike on the roads in the dark through the ice and sleet and snow. I left for DC as probably the only endurance athlete in town who had having never ridden what I had come to term ‘the vehicle of death’.
I was thrown for a loop when I saw that Aaron’s license plate read ‘TRI GEEK’. Aaron had never struck me as the biking/triathlete type. But Aaron shrewdly played down the extent of his past life as a biker/triathlete during the first months of our becoming acquainted. He let it drip out slowly: the bib shorts, the double ironmen, the accidents and injuries. I had vowed long ago that I would never in a million years date a biker, but quickly realized that Aaron deserved a pass. In fact, as evidenced by the photograph above, Aaron has quickly softened my opposition to biking. This was my first time mountain biking. My ass is sore, the ascents were thigh-busting, and the steep rocky descents terrifying. But it was pretty darn fun.
A couple of months ago, Aaron and I were in the bustling metropolis of State College, PA, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when we witnessed this commercial for the Farmer’s Only dating website. Since then, Farmer’s Only has provided an endless source of entertainment.
I have an account so that I can access profiles like this one:
So while I was visiting my friend Sarah’s farm in Wisconsin I had a chance to work on updating my profile:
scooping pony poo
And showing my kinship with tractors:
Um, I don’t know what this caption is supposed to say.
The Sarahs figured the Ryan affiliation would score big points with the Farmers Only folk:
Maybe farmers like romantic walks on the beach:
Or meercats?
I dunno, kinda tough to competes with the likes of this:
