Write This One Quickly

It’s usually a process. Run a race, let it sink in a few days to allow the salient points to clarify, ponder a few days more on angles to make the story interesting, spend the inevitable additional period waiting for people to post pictures so I can spice up the tale for my quasi-readers who only look at the pictures (you know who you are), find time to start writing, and a week later if I’m lucky, two weeks later if I’m busy, you get the latest ponderings on my little slice of the universe.

Not this time. It’s fast track. Pen the piece promptly. Get it out the door, before it’s too late, before I change my mind, before I inevitably convince myself that no, sorry, this weekend’s wonders were not, in fact, a turning of the proverbial corner. Yessiree, tell the tale while the glow still emanates, while the aura lingers, while I still think things might be looking up.

It’s not really that I won a race this weekend. It wasn’t competitive, though it was fun, and we’ll get to that detail. It’s that I won it with a time and a consistent pace that for the first time in over a year made me think the curtains aren’t coming down on this three-hundred-and-thirty-four-part drama. It is that over the past three weeks, I’ve cranked my training mileage up to a consistently decent level not seen in over a year. It is that we closed our ten-miler the next morning with a few miles of downright quickness, punctuated by a half mile of oh-yeah-that’s-what-I-used-to-do-itiveness. It is the fact that I’ve had enough runs that feel, well, normal, of late, to cast a rosy glow on my view.

The race win was a foregone conclusion after about a quarter of a mile. Of the hundred and twenty participants, a good half were walkers, and a good half of the rest were casual joggers. Of this I can be relatively certain, because we, we being myself and the second- and third-place finishers, opted to jog the course for a warm-down, and it being an out-and-back, we had a first-hand view of a good portion of the field (and endured an endearing amount of runner-style catcalls: yes, we were indeed doing it again, ten whole kilometers; no, we didn’t have to pay twice; yes, we’re somewhat crazy – frankly, we loved every minute of it).

Of the rest of the field, there was really only one guy to beat, a young relative of the event organizer family. Though he popped out to a quick fifty yard lead, he started looking over his shoulder only a quarter mile in, so I knew it was just a matter of time. I took him down by the mile and put him away on the return trip, leaving him a minute back. A further minute behind him rolled in number three, a clubmate of mine, to round out the men’s cadre of Those Who Will Take Home Delectable Maple Syrup Prizes.

So winning this wasn’t really an issue – indeed, it was almost more of an embarrassment (but hey, they had prizes, so somebody had to win it, right?). What was an issue was that for a reasonable effort level (reasonable being defined as, yes, the Death Warmed Over look that I so wished for just a week ago returned, but no, no medical attention was required), I finally turned in a time that didn’t make me grimace. On an absolute level, I have to get used to bigger numbers on the time clock than in the old young days, but still, it wasn’t bad, and when run through the age grading calculator (my savior of growing old), this one chalked up quite nicely, darn close to the magic boundary that’s always defined a good race for me.

We’ll politely neglect to mention that it’s a forgiving course, with only a few mild rolls (and pretty darn accurate, only a hairbreadth long) and that the weather was nearly ideal. Just go with it. Quick. Before I change my mind.

So it was that off I trundled with some nice swag after enjoying what is essentially an extended family reunion, celebrating the life of my lost training partner John Tanner, and the Noyes family’s foundation to advance research to cure Batten disease which claimed their son Nicholas, whom John passionately supported. As I’ve often stated, I’m not big on charity fundraiser runs, since most are just a way to focus on the funds with no connection to the run. This one, on the other hand, honoring a dedicated runner like John, is an apt memorial, and is put on with tremendous dedication and a lot of love. For one day a year, I am honored to be treated like extended family. So yeah, I knocked off Nicholas’ cousin by the mile mark, but the title, well, sort of stayed in the extended family.

All that aside, I’m trying to convince myself that the physical therapy work – or as it’s billed to insurance, therapeutic exercises - is starting to pay off. The pain isn’t gone, not that I really expect it to go away entirely. The weakness isn’t gone, but it is maybe, sort of, perhaps, kind of, mildly abated, and yes, that I do hope to see go entirely. Plenty more obscure balancing exercises on one bent knee are in my future. Soldier on.

So quick, before the next string of two or three utterly horrible training runs where everything hurts, fatigue lames the leg, pace drops off the cliff, and my mood goes back into the sewer, quick, publish this one, and let’s hope this is a hint of better times ahead that maybe sticks.

Opting Out of Immortality

Until quite recently, the Meh dial has been turned to eleven. (I hate to digress right after my opening statement, but if you don’t get that reference, go here, it’s worth it, it’s a classic.) My trusty Ironman POS (Plain Old Stopwatch) gave up the ghost a while back. It decided I’d run a seriously long workout and simply stopped cold. Not died, as in, dead battery, no display, kaput, no, it just stopped (it was, I suppose, a stop watch, right?). No combination of rhythmic button tapping would budge it from its assurance that eighty five hours earlier I’d started to do something.

An odd combination of events including a credit card hack, an incompetent bank, and the phase of the moon conspired so that its replacement (another thirty-dollar Ironman, I just don’t need the maintenance chores of a high-falutin’ GPS watch) didn’t arrive for about three weeks. Three weeks of glancing at my wrist and remembering that I did not, in fact, know what time it was, but more importantly, three weeks of untimed runs. I have to admit, it was rather freeing. Run slow? Whatever. Miss a day? Call it healing. Racing? Why pay money to run slow with other people, I can do that for free?

It occurred to me that if time really stopped, as my ex-watch insisted, that would make me immortal. But as those three weeks of timelessness drifted by, I had to admit that immortality is overrated. Going down that path means there’s no need to work hard to stick around, but the topic of staying on this planet a lot longer inevitably turns political, so I’ll skip it for now. Suffice to say I can’t just give it up like that. I’ll opt out of immortality and keep up the fight. Meh be damned.

The fight has been notched up to full swing of late. There’s a line in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (utterly brilliant) musical Hamilton where Hercules Mulligan raps, “When you knock me down, I get the [f-bomb] back up again.” Getting back up again is never easy, but I’m trying (some of my co-workers would concur with that statement, though perhaps with a different meaning). So while it’s been a Summer of Silence in the blogosphere, all has not been silent in the background. Doctor Number Three has me working hard with a new Physical Terrorist, and last week it was time to go public, so to speak, and hit the race course again.

Race? For real? Calm down, these are merely baby steps. Start small, start local, start with the Forrest, our local three-point-two mile five-K, a race with almost more medals than people, as well as plenty of burgers and beers afterward. And, as it happened, complete with eighty-five degree heat under intense sun, in late September. Fall, global warming style.

The result? A Personal Worst. Worst ever on the Forrest course, even adjusting for the long course and for that new pesky traffic island they mistakenly sent us around. Second worst five click race ever. Though, if you slap on the age-grading tables, it only hit the bottom quartile, and after all, it was hot, he said, knowing that the heat really didn’t have much to do with it. So I guess you can pull out some redeeming qualities for the first race outing in many, many months.

Whatever, I got back out there. It never felt fast, but it felt solid. It was only three miles, but I didn’t fade. Once we’d done the sorting of the first mile and settled in, I just aimed for a consistent and half-decent pace, and even managed to pick one off along the way, catching the young lady leading the women’s category atop the last hill. Chiding her, “You’re not going to let an old fart beat you on the hills, are you? Let’s go!” I fully expected she’d slaughter me on the down, but instead I put a half minute on her by the end. Lay that on her, not on any heroics on my part.

This was not a race-to-the-death. This was a race to remember what a race was; after all, it’s been since May, and Gate City wasn’t exactly a speed festival. Baby steps. Solid, not crazy, since there wasn’t any crazy in the tank, and no reason to spend it if there was. I wasn’t going to win it, and there weren’t any old farts around to threaten the masters category, so just drive it in, keep it steady, be happy with solid, don’t do anything stupid. Heck, I didn’t even look all that bad at the finish. I’ve really got to work to re-polish that Death Warmed Over look back to perfection.

Not that Death Warmed Over is a goal, but if I can regain that look because I have managed to fill the tank with some crazy, I guess that will be progress. Meanwhile, just to start warding off the Meh, I’ve gone back to the medical world to let them practice some more, since they hadn’t nailed it on the first two tries. Both Doctor Number One (who I very much like) and Doctor Number Two (who I was rather wishy-washy on) insisted there was nothing wrong with that left leg other than inflammation! inflammation! inflammation! Doctor Number Three, looking at the very same image as One and Two, not only saw the sub-kneecap cartilage flaw (which he insisted was not caused by running, thank you very much, it just happened, stop telling me how running trashes knees), he also saw the notes that the radiologist had apparently appended to the image that neither One nor Two had pointed out. Howzat? Three’s theory is that the discomfort that flaw creates may have been making me subconsciously disfavor that leg for a long time, bringing about the atrophy all have detected. His approach is all about strength. Inflammation is an afterthought.

The odd thing is that it’s been a really big hiking summer with lots of new summits from Maine to Washington State including a rather humorous ‘trail run’ at Mount St. Helens, in hiking boots and hiking sun hat, when, a mile out, I realized I had no extra batteries and had to run back to retrieve them.

Not to mention a bunch of chances to really fall off cliffs on some of the steeper Acadia trails we’d shunned for twenty years for fear of losing our kids over the edge and being labelled Bad Parents (and, let’s face it, just for fear, too). You’d think all the ups and downs would have strengthened knees off the charts. But that hasn’t been the case – or perhaps things would be even worse without those vertical workouts.

In any case, my new Physical Terrorist Masochistic Mike (who should be labelled Sadist Mike, but the dual M-M sounds so much better) measured my left quad a full centimeter and a half smaller than my right (Aha! So that’s why I keep walking in circles!). And he’s got me working; this is a guy who can stretch his body and hold poses with unearthly strength and ease that would make a Yoga PhD blush. I, meanwhile, try to do this stuff and my legs just quiver while my fingertips hang ten inches from my toes, like they have since I was eight. But now he’s got me doing everything imaginable standing on one bent leg on my newly acquired balance ball, which lives in my office for instantaneous use whenever I’m inspired. I‘ve got to say, it does liven up conference calls.

Is it working? I’d like to think I’m sensing a bit more strength, my mileage is up the last couple weeks, my pace is improving, and I’ve even had a couple of hard training runs that felt pretty darn good. Yet fatigue still hits early, I’m nowhere near ready for hard core Grand Prix racing, and just finishing Boston this spring seems like the daunting goal that most normal people view it as. But as Masochism Mike rightly points out, it took me a long time to get here, and it’s going to take a long time to get out. Living in one dimension, he calls it, and it’s true, we runners are very good at going forward, but really could use a lot more strength in other directions to keep things strong, in line, and happy.

Immortality would make these struggles entirely unnecessary. But immortality would be a cop-out. If we don’t have to keep fighting for it, what’s the fun?