see

a little something old for, you know. the vd...

i want you, my love, to watch me run,
to want to watch me intently
to see the measure of me in every stride.

i am not the fastest you'll see,
the heartiest,
the farthest from the starter's gun.

but watch me run and you will see the
heart that races faster than the others,
the mind denying all but what my legs require,
beating furiously to make the best of me,
who i am, paired with who i try to be.

watch my eyes as i tell you why i run,
see the weakness,
see the strength i answer it with.

watch me, and search my eyes,
in my moments of doubt and self-derision.

watch me, see the photos frozen,
the moments caught before they
trickle between our fingers.

if you see, and love what you see,
in those moments captured,
of doubt defeated,
of me giving myself a chance,
and trying to speak to a heart then unknown,
then it is you,
and here i am.

why we run in the rain

i remember the day that had shaken with thunder and frozen in lightning, that had been drenched by rains. one runner came, and chose to run. we went to the track together, and it was just her and i. i stood, and she ran. the workout was difficult, and she pushed against the resistance and the discomfort, but also against the rain. not everyone pushes as she did against the resistance and discomfort, but she did. and she was the only one that did it in the relentless downpour under dour grey skies. who would you put your money on, in a race? that day was one of my most rewarding as a coach.

but that was before. that was when running and coaching meant everything, before they were quickly and stupidly taken away.

when i run now, the memory of loss beats down on me, presses like high rushing water on my thoughts, exposes, seeps through and widens the cracks in my will, and floods my heart. i hear the things they said, i see backs turned to me, i remember what it was like to feel meaning, and i wonder how real that meaning could really have been. my feet grow waterlogged with sorrow. anger clings to my body, resisting the swiftness of my arms and legs.

but still, with the help of friends, true friends, i venture out, and i learn to run in these conditions, in the current season of my heart. and if i can keep running, it will make me stronger, on the road, and in my life. it's hard, and i decline as much as i accept, but it's all i can do.

so tomorrow, my friends and i are supposed to run, and tonight, the windows rattle slightly with the heavy peals of thunder. my cat sits leaning nervously against my leg. but unless lightning warns us away, we will run and be thankful for the test. instead of staring out the window and feeling helpless and beaten, we'll put ourselves out there, and we just may learn to love the feel of the rain and wind in our faces.

imagine how we'll run when the sun shines.

taper madness: it's everyone else that's crazy

February 16, 2006
(note: at the time i wrote this, i was an attorney at the state agency that regulates dentists. also, i quit my job the following week, after running my first marathon. that is another, much sillier, story.)

good afternoon, this is rob.

yes. yes, ma'am. i see. well, tell me what happ... oh, snap, i can see the finish line from my office. i didn't realize that...

what? oh, no, please, go ahead.

right. i see. so the dentist pulled the wrong tooth. because he was drunk. on absynthe. wow, that's different. real different. no, different is good. no, not so much for you, of course not.

ok, ma'am, i understand you're very upset, and in what you understand to be "pain." yes, ma'am, i made the air quotes. that was very perceptive of you. now, i grant you, you sound like you've got about 10 packets of banana blast gu in your maw, but i think you need to put this in perspective. now, i...

i'm sorry? gu? hellooo, it's a carb replacement energy gel. well, maybe if you turned off matlock and got off your ass, you'd have known that.

uh, no ma'am, i said... if jews turned over and cottoned giraffes, you'd have known that. no, ma'am that doesn't make sense, but it's ok, i'm a runner. i mean, an attorney.

so, look, i feel for you, but i mean, it's not like you've got, say, an IT band problem, or a stress fracture, or plantar fasciitis. heard of that? yeah, i got that. i get these pains in my feet that go up my ankle, and they annoy me and make me want to kick my cats, if it wouldn't, you know, hurt my feet. plus, they'll sleep next to my legs the night before the run and keep the hammies warm. no ma'am those aren't small hams.

you can file a complaint online, on our website. you don't need to talk to me. especially today. i mean... are you... are you talking to me? are you talkin' to me? cause... i don't see anyone else that's running a marathon this sunday.

you know, i shouldn't even be at work right now. i mean, what the hell? i need to be checking the news to see what the hell the hold-up is with sunday getting here. i think my calendar is slow. i should be home stress-testing my socks, and making sure there's no exposed elastic in the liner of my shorts. i should be hanging upside down in a vat full of icewater and listening to some ice cube, ac/dc, and mars volta to keep me mentally prepared. i shouldn't be here sneaking monopolova into my iced tea at work.

but here i am, listening to your petty problems. oh, a golf-ball sized abscess? oozing pus? yeah, well, i got a toenail i could show ya that'd make you gag. what? a fever? A FEVER? you wanna talk about hot - do you know the temp outside? it's 79 DAMN DEGREES! the wind is gusting up to 16 mph from the SOUTH! now, that's a freakin' headwind! what? why don't I wha... why in god's name would anyone be going north on sunday morning? are you mental?

it's very simple. i need sunday morning's temperatures to curve smoothly from 38 degrees at 7:00 am, to 50 at about 11:30. i need low humidity. and a tailwind. i was promised a tailwind. i converted to catholicism two weeks ago just to get low humidity and a tailwind. so help me god, and i mean that literally, i'll go aetheist!

no, i'm not spending taxpayer money staying glued to weather websites. i opened a personal credit card to pay a meteoroligist to sit in my office and give me verbal reports every ten minutes, freeing me up to study the course map carefully during my work hours. i don't know, he used to work in portland, then there was something about a career day visit to the local highschool. not important, except it made him a little more affordable.

so, you know, it's easy for you to sit there and mumble, with very poor diction, i might add, "look at me, my 72 year-old negligently mangled-mouth hurts, i might die from the infection. wahhhh." but sunday morning, while you're watching Faux News and gumming some pureed scrambled eggs, ima be at about mile 14, schvitzing through whatever nike dri-fit shirt i finally decide on, hoping the bandaids hold on over my nipples, and trying to focus on the hot girl in the black tights in front of me, hoping it'll distract me from the weird twinge of pain in my own left ass cheek.

yeah, you're damn right. no, don't cry, you didn't know. now you do. call me back on tuesday. afternoon.

out of time

time and time and time and time...

there's tiny pieces of paper, blowing in the wind around me, rushing at me, then arcing away in eddies, whooshing upwards on updrafts, swirling unpredictably in the vortices, the turbulence in the flow of time that our presence creates.

i reach to grab at the scraps, to grasp specific ones, or as many as possible, and the wind curls around inside my palm, carrying the slips across the landscape of my grasp, and safely free.

i catch glimpses through the gaps between my fingers, and on one, i see her, on another, me, so many other versions, iterations, of me, better, worse, but maybe only the better ones survive in storm, right?

time plays with us. this and that happen, two provident events, connected. but then time is added in, and two are now too far apart, though so close in every other way. love exists, and it's real, saturating it all, but time has shuffled the cards. i can see it across the room, but i can't get to it.

but it's gone both ways. i've been careless with time, arrogant. expected it to wait for me, hold up the smooth running of the universe so i could find courage, ask permission, decide, do. but cowardice was never overcome, permission was never asked nor granted, decisions were not made, and life didn't get done.

the debit column is just the past, the lump of time spent. time is just this thing, just another vector of force exerted on an object. but i can't fight it. i know it's coming, but i can't see it coming. and it keeps moving, swirling around me, carrying scraps of rice paper inked with events and catastrophies, comedies and tragedies, hopes realized and dashed, loneliness and love, all resistant to my grasp, the future slipping through my fingers and into the past.

the wind is quiet.

there - there she is.

tapering (five days to go)

A repost...

October 17, 2006

emails are flying between my friends and me. no work is getting done. emotions are high. we want to be in chicago right damned now, regardless of the weather (though we update each other on the forecast twice a day). we want to be running it now.

marathoners call it "taper madness" - the wackiness that ensues during the two or three week period before a marathon when we back off the mileage and let our bodies repair and become ready. i ask melissa, a psychologist, if there's a biochemical basis for the weird psychosis. hours pass, i get more emails reminiscing about our favorite coaches, about weather, and finally, "sure. but you are asking me to think in order to formulate an intelligent answer to that. and, i just can't do that right now."

so, i'm left to my own devices. i eat a banana, and stare at the whopping third document i've reviewed today. a normal pace would have me at 60 or so. why are we all losing our minds?
simply put, running is a natural ability, but training for and running a marathon is not a natural thing to do.

we train for 23 weeks. close to a thousand miles run - 30, 40, 50, 60 miles a week. we run four or five days a week. an hour monday, an hour tuesday, a hard workout for an hour and a half on wednesday, cross training or a half hour run on thursday, over an hour on friday, long runs for hours on saturdays.
those hours are squeezed into mornings before work, appended to the end of workdays when you feel like you only have the energy to open a beer and keep the couch from floating away.

people that choose and stick with this path are not likely to say, "I can't," and the training reinforces that. on the other hand, we say it more now than ever - "I can't, gotta run." "I can't, I have a race."

we push ourselves six days a week, for 23 weeks. exertion and fatigue become constants, as does the simple act of consistently, persistently committing ourselves to creating discomfort in our bodies and pressing on anyway.

"The will to win means nothing if you haven't the will to prepare." - Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

it's a compulsion, and if it didn't start as one, it became one along the way. every run says something about us, who we are and what we can do - not about our speed but about our will. sometimes, we're disappointed by how slow we were on a run or in a race, because we're competitive and because sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the time doesn't matter so much as how hard we pushed ourselves to get it.

one day, during a particularly hard workout on a high school track, a kid leaned out a passing car's window, yelling some line i recognized from a movie about the day of judgment being on us, and asking, "how will ye be judged?"

the immediate response yelled back as i turned down onto the stratghtaway - "by what i do here today."

we watch the chicago marathon highlight video, and the sight of the runners and the cheering crowds shakes us. to some extent, it's adrenaline - fight or flight response positively subverted, adrenaline charges as we recognize the scenario. but we can't do anything with it right now, sitting at our desks, or at home.

we want the race, the pre-run jitters, we want to be surrounded by 40,000 other people who have made the same journey thus far, the same hegira from doubt and unchallenged limitations.

we don't know each other, we might not even like each other if we did, but almost everyone out there "gets it," and we are finishing a journey together, whether it takes us 2:10 or 6:10 to do it.

the thousands of spectators lining the course watch people go by, see the determination and pain, and to some extent, they "get it." some of them will be motivated, as i was two years ago, to make that same commitment, to see what they can make themselves do.

i think again of our head coach, saying that whether it's the first time you cross the finish line, or the 50th, you are not the same person that started it.

the clock, the calendar, are running too slow. my friends and i want and need sunday to get here, so we can do what we have worked so hard to do, as best as we can on that given day. we want to run, so we can cross the finish line and see who we will have become.