A Quarter Way Up the Mountain

A week ago, the climb ahead seemed daunting. Eight weeks to Boston, knees hurting (hurting? heck, knees crunching!), the gains of last fall seeming fleeting – here one day, gone in a slow arduous slog the next, and four, yes, four planned races to surmount before – oh yeah, there’s a marathon to be run, and a marathon where once again I’m stepping in without a qualifier for next year. Just to add gravy to that rosy outlook, I fully expect when the Boston seedings come out that this will be my first year not starting in the first wave, which will make notching that qualifier just a little bit more difficult. And just to add even more flavor to that mountain, other than the first of the four slated lung-busters, they’re not short races, either.

This is a new normal. The speed I could conjure up just a few years ago really isn’t quite there most of the time, but then again, with the benefit of Boston’s age graded qualification requirements, I more or less don’t need it. I need steady, I need smart, and frankly, starting back a bit will probably only serve to knock my stubborn brain into behaving for the first five miles.

Meanwhile, there are those four races between me and Hopkinton, or at least there were. Now there’s only three, one knocked off this weekend and knocked off in decent, if not spectacular, fashion, one that simply has to be done out of tradition. My offspring had better never choose to get married or reproduce nor shall any family member be permitted to pass through the Pearly Gates on the last weekend in February so long as the Hyannis Marathon Relay continues to be held. But we’ll get back to that.

Time flies when you’re having fun, right? I must have been having a lot of fun as suddenly two months have passed with nary a peep on this story stream. I’d like to tell you of grand adventures of running prowess, but I’ll have to settle for a lot of enjoyable runs with my peeps and an unconfirmed record for my coldest run. It was hard to tell just how cold it was that day at sis’ place in the old home turf of Upstate New York, since my phone hadn’t updated in a half-hour and there was no local thermometer handy, but said phone told me that the town to the left of me was five below and the town to the right (to which I ran) was even colder at minus nine, and I was stuck in the middle with few. Degrees, that is. Anything in the neighborhood would have broken my Second Lap, (read ‘adult’) record of zero, and I’d say my teenaged maximum chill of four below was in play, but we’ll never really know, will we?

Having survived that one, it’s all ice jams under the bridge now since March first signaled the end of the Sixty Day Challenge and therefor it is, by my rules, my edict, spring. I celebrated the day in shorts on a perfect fifty-degree morning in New York City on an early morning dozen-mile grand tour of New York’s finest bridge crossings with the Brooklyn Barrister. Then a mere day later, ah, spring in New England, the wind is howling, my neighbor’s pine tree is in my side yard (on the ground, mind you, it's not supposed to be there), and bombogenesis is wreaking havoc with every utility pole and coastline in the state. If you guessed that I snuck out for a few miles in the midst of the mayhem you would of course be playing an easy bet; the sneaky little streak that I’ve said little about (since I hover somewhere between, “This is a great motivator,” and, “This is killing me,”) is now over five months old and couldn’t be stopped by a little ‘ol epic storm of record proportion. But that streak has gotten me through the winter, and the end of winter of course brings us back to Hyannis.

Winter fulfilled its contract at Hyannis, a race that more often than not runs cold and generally nasty, and this one was cold in the worst way. I often say I’d prefer to run in a twenty-degree snowstorm (or for that matter, even colder on a sunny day) than forty and rain. And as Dearest Spouse likes to quote her grandmother, “Oh, did it rain.”

Forty and rain, worse, forty and solid, sometimes heavy rain, even more worse mixed with wind, penetrates like nothing else. There is no clothing that really defeats this, especially when you’re racing and you can’t seal yourself in a plastic cocoon (which I did at least for my warm-up, in a procured hand-me-down trash bag because I was too clueless to remember to bring my own). Once the cold water penetrates to your skin, it sucks the warmth, sucks the life, sucks the very soul from your being. Death soon ensues. (OK, that was a bit melodramatic.)

Wineglass Half 2011. Martha’s Vineyard 2013. Boston 2015. Hypothermia makes for days you remember. Hyannis breached that threshold once before, a week after that chilling Vineyard expedition, when windy cold rain left me blue – no, not sad, but blue – on return to the headquarters hotel. To be fair, it was my own fault, since I insist on the tradition of running the back half of the course as a warm-down (or chill-down) of sorts, turning my seven-mile leg into a half marathon’s worth of miles.

This one ranked on the blue scale as well, but with some special twists. On the positive side, for the first time in eight outings, Hyannis’ notorious wind reversed itself. That probably gave my largely westbound third leg a little tailwind boost (and I did turn in a decent enough pace to call this a decent enough race), but it made the largely eastbound back half – when the rain seemed to redouble its rate – rather gnarly. So when life gives you frozen lemons…? Sing. I conjured up every rain- or sun-related tune I could muster and belted out (and I mean belted) key lines whenever I passed course marshals, soggy fans, and the slower-paced half-marathoners. A favorite? La La Land’s “It’s Another Day of Sun!” Bystanders either loved it or menacingly reached for their phones.

By that point it just didn’t matter; I was soaked clean through. Somewhere around mile three in the race proper there are a couple of spots on the course that are notorious for road flooding, though even in a typical wet year you can skooch past the inky depths on the muddy sidelines. Road flood number one offered such an escape, but road flood number two, overwhelmed by the immensity of the precipitation, offered no safe alternative. Skooching looked quite certain to bring on a face-plant disaster, so damn the torpedoes, batten the hatches, we’re going in. In, as in at least seven or eight strides across, and easily more than five inches deep. As I said, just didn’t matter.

Prior to that dunk-tank experience, I’d taken the baton in a state of shock, my second leg arriving – what? – in the lead of the relay. Let’s be fair, our first leg, the Mad Moroccan, is a ringer of the first order, and our second leg, a last-minute fill-in for our injured second man, outdid himself as well. Lining up in the zone next to a couple of tall lanky twenty-somethings, I had nowhere to go but down, and indeed lost two spots over my seven miles. Truly, I felt no shame in running close, but not quite as fast, as a couple of kids half my age.

That left Anchor Danny to bring it home which of course he did, though amusingly I rolled in only a couple of minutes behind him, having foregone my usual post-leg rest-and-catch-my-breath reprieve in favor of getting moving on the back half before my blood stopped flowing and even more cold crept in. I’ve always threatened him – tongue-in-cheek of course – that if I ever caught him in his race to the finish that I’d beat him up, take his baton, and bolt for the line. This year’s cold made it almost plausible.

All the pre-race drama of finding a sub for our wounded warrior and wondering if anyone would show up to challenge our now eight-time divisional win streak was of course, in the end, inconsequential. We actually did have a competing team in our division this year who turned in a quite respectable result, but our collection of misfits somehow managed to turn in our best combined time ever and take third overall of the roughly forty teams out there. Plus, we had the longest team name of any of ‘em. If that ain’t a win, I don’t know what is. So there.

So rack up another clamshell. It hasn’t moved downstairs yet to join the collection of the seven who came before it. Give it time to absorb its new surroundings.

One down, three to go. A quarter of the way up that mountain of preparation for the annual big spring party on Boylston Street. Battered, bruised, and beaten, but still in the game. Besides, it’s spring. And I like climbing mountains.