Running from Running

"Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness."
~Alfred Nobel


"Even if you hide yourself from the world, don’t lose sight of your real nature."
~ Japanese Proverb

Look at that picture for a moment. That was October of 2010 in Victoria. The last few hundred feet of that fateful marathon which I will never forget. I look pretty good, I have to say. You would never know how much pain I was enduring and had endured, right? I was about to crumple under the weight of a PR that was 36 seconds too slow. Fall to my knees and wonder if I was dying or experiencing life to the fullest. Pain sets in, and the world slips away. You know what would have made that run even worse?

Cold.

The cold air has become my increasingly grouchy companion. The cold air makes a bad running day worse. In the summer it is sheer joy to throw on a pair of shorts and shoes (and literally that is it) and head out for 5 to 10 miles nearly every single day. The days get shorter in a hurry. The cool air from the ocean flows inland in much larger volumes and the evenings carry with them the need for more blankets. In the morning, I am stiff and sore, feeling delicate.

I am due for a run and I sit contemplating longer than normal. Sure, I am running less than I would be during the summer, but that is not unusual. I feel guilt for waiting, for hesitating. Now its not just physical, its psychological. I remind myself of the record: This is only the second year since 2004 that I am not running the Seattle Marathon. The dangerous spiral continues: I wonder if I will ever look as good as that picture above (read the previous blog entry, now). Inertia. It is hard to get something moving that hasn't moved much each week. I have been running two days a week. Not much. It is hard to make aging muscles and bones go willingly into the cold and exert themselves. It is hard for most people even in the warm, summer days to do this, imagine the gravity they must be experiencing?

Collect myself, remember that getting myself out NOW, in the cold against my will and inertia, will only make it easier when I have rough mornings in the reasonably warm days of summer. At least that is what I tell myself. The harsh conditions separate us into those that aren't willing to make the sacrifice and those that are and my own experience tells me that those willing to make it out on the cold, rainy days will be better prepared when it really counts. And I have faith in the dividends that will pay for me. It is true for anything where devotion to a craft is involved, where the time spent just "doing" is as valuable as time spent perfecting and fine-tuning.

And so, off into the cold wind. It is clear, crisp, and a good day to go running. My shoes feel hard, my body tight, and my mind unsure; which means all is right where it is supposed to be.

From what do you flee?

"I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of."
~Michel de Montaigne

There are a few times, or I guess more accurately, activities, when I am utterly sure of myself. During these, I enjoy lengthy periods of clarity in as much as my brain turns off, the questions desist, and I truly focus.

Running.

Playing music.

Doing an experiment in the lab.

The rest of the time the hole in my head is an unruly auditorium of unhappy citizens clamoring for a lynching. It is a mob scene. Though I have somehow prevented it from, well, preventing ME, it has been my lifelong companion. I sort of consider it as a crazy relative whom I just kind of ignore for the large majority of the year but must face at christmas or on summer vacation--only when forced to.

Do you ever look back at times in your life when you were really, really good at something, and wonder "will I ever be that good again?" I just scrolled down through my blog and saw my previous post about the Victoria Marathon, where I ran a 3:12 and change. And I thought "Wow, that was smokin' fast. I will never do that again." I look at that picture--however defeated I may seem--and realize how freakishly fit I was to be able to run that with as little training as I enjoyed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized as I got ready for that race that I looked at myself during Ironman 2009 and thought the same thing when I looked back at 2007. And I crushed my 2007 time, and felt stronger.

I suppose the point of this rambling is that no matter what the event or subject matter or activity, some of us are born to question ourselves. We question our value, our abilities, our worth, our fitness. And we always will. The real question becomes, do we listen to those questions and let them slow us down? Or do we live with them and persist and use them as a tool to get better? I think it varies, even within each of us, from day to day. Somedays it seems impossible to be good enough just for me, let alone anyone else. Other days I feel like I need everyone else to give me a freakin' break.

Every time I run I worry that I will never get back to where I was. Honestly. This is a fact I do not admit often, to many. It is true. Every single time I run I worry that my best is behind me, and that scares me to death. It absolutely terrifies me that someday my decline will begin and I will no longer be able to improve. And that is inevitable, I know. It is a fact of life, an inescapable truth.

So how do I deal with it? I guess time will tell, because right now, I choose to run from it.

Failure to Connect

“You only live twice:
Once when you're born and once when you look death in the face.”
~Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
~Carl Sagan







Tonight, while working on a scientific manuscript leftover from my thesis work, I suddenly had the urge to pause. I looked up, in front of me, at a painting that my late mother-in-law created. I stared at it. I stared more. I have looked at this painting a million times, while working just like this. But for some reason, this time, I saw how she blended the shades of green in the leaves, how she must have thought about the light, how the contrast of the shadows would need to be just right as to provide clarity yet not overcrowd the delicate nature of the ashy petals.

At that moment I was appreciating this work so much more because I see, for probably the first time, that in her painting she was seeing the world much the way her daughter is now seeing the world--but instead of with a brush, it is through the lens of her camera. I had finally made the greatest connection with Gail I could ever make. About 6.5 years too late.

And I started crying. I cried hard, the kind that make your abdomen seize. And no, it didn't feel good to "get it out" because it just left me with more to think about.

I dont cry very often; years often go by. I am not proud of this, it is not a statistic I wear on my lapel. It just is. Like the dust behind the couch. It is easy to see if you go looking for it.

I looked at the painting and saw her last moments of life again. Her second life. I remember how she told me, the winter before she finally let go of this painful world, to take care of Jan. Her Jan. Her angel. My angel. And I cried thinking about how, like countless other things since then, I feel like I have failed in that. I realized how I have changed so dramatically in the last 6 years.

And is it for the better? At least I can look at the painting now and understand.

I fool myself so often into thinking I am a success, but am I? What have I figured out, anyway? Will I ever?

I remember sitting with my grandfather by his ever-smoldering fireplace early in the morning a few times when I was a sophomore in high school. I was a paper-boy, and we were waiting for my newspapers to get dropped off so we could assemble them and I would go out into the neighborhood. Grampa would get up to help me when there was 5 feet of snow on the ground and I had to be at early morning Jazz Band practice. He sat, peacefully, staring at the fire, absolutely confident in his quiet composure. I remember thinking, even then, "he has it figured out. This is what he wants to do, and he isn't rationalizing it to anyone." I remember being a bit nervous around him, even then; not because I feared him, but because I wanted him to be proud of me. And I know, now, he was/is. I didn't "get" him then. At least I made that connection before it was too late.

What I wouldn't give now to sit with him again by that fire just one more time and feel that pressure. I would smile, though, now. In my complete imperfection, he probably got a huge kick seeing me squirm. And I would too, were the shoe on the other foot.

There are shockingly few connections left. I find myself feeling so often as though most people aren't interested in being genuine. The glancing blows I have made all feel fleeting and shallow. Acquaintances. "Friends" who I can't tell any of the things in this blog post. Why? That is a good question. I don't know why. It might be my unwillingness to accept a lot of what I see on first glance. I feel I must be one of the hardest people to be close with on the planet. Even the closest friends don't feel close anymore. Perhaps it's all me.

My dad and I connect on a lot of levels, we always have. Being who I am, and that is an awful lot like him, it is not a surprise that it hasn't always been easy. But through it all the connection has remained and for that I am eternally grateful. It is days like today when I feel remarkably alone and wonder: when the bell tolls for the last time, what will it have all been for? There is comfort in knowing my Pa is out there, probably tying up a Transformation, being as hard on himself as I am on myself.

So its me and Gail's painting, sitting here in the night, the quiet and dark. She stood in front of that on more than one day and stared at it much like I am now. I wonder if when she was doing that, she questioned herself as I am questioning myself. All those years I thought she was so hard to get along with, and it turns out we had a lot in common after all.

The Next 140.6 miles

A year seems like a long time...

...but it runs by in a blur.

That's what I was thinking as I drove away from Penticton, British Columbia, Canada last Tuesday. Having just signed up for Ironman Canada 2012, my third Ironman but first at Penticton, I caught myself having the "plenty of time until that rolls around" thoughts. Nice try, rookie. I knew better.

Sure, a year is 365 days, 52 weeks, 8760 hours. It IS a long time.

But then it happens. Suddenly it's 6 months away. Then 3 months. Then 3 weeks.

Then it's tomorrow.

Then I am standing on the beach wondering what happened to that year since I stood outside of a dirty white tent next to a serene Lake Okanogan thinking this was a good idea.

Here we go.

Timing

"Achilles: If you sailed any slower the war would be over."
"Odysseus: I'll miss the start as long as I'm here at the end."







I am a math guy. So here is what I think.

Wisdom = (time * experience)*(honesty)

Experience alone won't teach you. Time alone won't teach you. It takes both. And then it is multiplied by the fraction of honesty WITH OURSELVES, with the value of 1 being maximum honesty, and everything less being a fraction of 1.

The more dishonest we are with ourselves, the more we reduce the overall wisdom we gain from time and experience.

End of lesson 1.

What matters.

Where matters, also.

WHEN can make all the difference in the world. Ask any honest fly-fisherman. They will smile wryly and glibly describe to you how they watched the caddis coming off as thick as fog while they rigged up, trout literally ejecting themselves skyward after them. Then, by the time they achieved river's edge, silence.

Life imitates fishing, I always say.

"Things" happen for a reason, I hear a lot of folks wisefully state. Things include life changing events, I assume. Things include less profound events. But a lot of those "things" that I consider profound are only profound because of the timing and context of my experience at that particular moment.

The crossroads of experiences at every given moment can be so overwhleming and complex that I, for one, do not (can not, often by choice) even pay attention to it. Historically, in my little pathetic existence, only in the instance of the intersection of large magnitude "things" do I really take notice. I have aged I think wisely-- at least I am told I am a wise-ass a lot. I like to make myself feel good by allowing myself to take note of what appears to be less profound events more often, and then catalog those until later time for some good, old fashioned cogitation. Drawing lines between seemingly unrelated events at particular intersections of time. And what I have learned from this is that--holy shit--so much more exquisite relationship between seemingly non-related events, punctate throughout every day. The connections are staggering, from years ago to this moment.

I realized a long time ago the value of maintaining certain friendships that at the time did not seem viable. I did not truly understand the impact of time on everything.

Standing on the beach at the beginning of an Ironman, the impact of timing is clear.

Staring at yourself in the mirror in the morning, asking "where did I go wrong?" the impact isn't always so clear.

"I don't know how to separate the now from what used to be."

~Avett Brothers, "My Last Song to Jenny"