Either / Or

An email arrived a week back that sent a jolt through the system. Time to pick your transportation and baggage options for the New York City Marathon. It’s less than three months away.

Marathon? I’ve got a marathon slated out there? In less than three months? And not just any marathon, but New York, where I am Oh-for-Two, the first miss being Hurricane Sandy which wiped the event and much of Staten Island off the map, the second being a couple years back when my injured state just would not let it happen, so now, third time’s a charm (right?), and I Must Run This Marathon. But oh, how far from marathon shape I am in. Or not in.

Sure, I ran Sugarloaf just three short months ago, and sure, I pulled off a respectable showing. But oh, how fast things have been falling apart. I’m getting out there, but not necessarily to run or do anything remotely like getting ready for New York. Consider, I hiked as far in the Adirondacks in one three-day stretch last month as I ran for the entire month. Granted, while those classic Adirondack Death Marches didn’t hurt so far as endurance and fitness go (but certainly did leave scars both physical and emotional), …they were not runs. That’s different fitness.

Life has, I’m afraid, come down to an Either / Or proposition at this point. Too much running sometimes leaves me with tenderized joints that might – or might not – survive the next scheduled Death March (and those events need to be scheduled – travel, companions, etc.). But too much hiking leaves me without the running fitness that I need to be building, rather than losing, with New York looming. This year, injured or not, I am going (dammit), even if I need to jog or walk the thing. Thus, I need to be in some sort of shape other than marshmallow.

As such, there have been lots of non-running days before hiking expeditions, and there have been a lot of expeditions lately due to my obsession of chasing both Adirondack 46er status (and with it, completion of the Northeast 111 list, which, as I’ve noted here before, curiously includes 115 summits), and the New England Hundred Highest roster. None of the remaining summits on either list are common with the other, so I’ve got plenty of rocks to scale and short seasons (considering weather and daylight) to cram them in. And no, neither completion will happen this year, but you’ve got to make headway, right?

With little running comes little racing and with little racing comes little writing. The cable news industry may have to fill their airwaves, so for them, any news, even news that really isn’t, is news. The Weather Channel also ran into this problem, but their solution was to create so much weather-themed-but-not-actually-weather content that it seemed there was never any weather being reported when I tuned in, so I stopped tuning in. I’m not keen to emulate those models, so when I have little of great interest, I just go a bit dark.

And it’s been a bit dark of late, even somewhat depressing. A difficult time for someone who’s theme here is to find the bright spots, stay positive, highlight the good, shine with motivation. My body has decided to age quite a bit in recent months, and things hurt, things don’t heal, challenges mount. I used to carry on about the pesky left knee, but now it has a partner on the right which hurts in an entirely different manner, and, irony of irony, one hurts more running, the other walking, so you can’t win. Training has suffered. Racing has suffered. Fitness has suffered. But all bitching and moaning makes Jack a dull boy. So let’s stop bitching and tell stories anyway.

June brought about an entirely ordinary five-kilometer race, and July followed with an even more ordinary five-miler on the Fourth. Bitch, bitch, moan, moan, I hear you say, you still took a first and a second in your age group in those races, respectively. Yeah, but when you’re a full minute slower in than just a year back in a very short race, well, that’s disappointing. But there is good.

June’s outing was our local club’s race in honor of fallen Massachusetts State Trooped Thomas Clardy. It’s a race, but really, it’s a mission, so whatever racing performance comes out of something like this is secondary to our efforts to make it a premier event. And a premier event it was, all hands on deck from the club, the entire recruit class of the State Police running the course in formation, and a truly impressive showing from the law enforcement community, striking a note of pride in all of us. Oh, and there was also the fun of herding – and sometimes racing – the kids through the mini-marathon course. Hard work, I know, but somebody had to do it.

And as the race went, it wasn’t terrible, though it was a bit of a roller-coaster. Doing double duty as both race staff and runner, I didn’t commit to even leaving the start line until about ten minutes before the gun, and even then, I questioned why. Less than a mile in, passing Dearest Spouse, I gave her a look of anguish and shouted out, “It’s bad.”, but the mile clicked in better than expected giving me a reason for why I felt so beat up, so spirits brightened. Yet minutes later, by the halfway mark I was back on the rocks, so baked, so fried, that when a clubmate of my generation crept alongside, I gave in and told him to go out and get it, since my get it had got up and gone. But with a half mile to go, he tanked as well, and I had that momentary internal debate of honor: after having verbally conceded, what kind of cad would smoke on by? I rationalized that it wasn’t so much about passing him as it was about not letting myself disintegrate, not giving in even more, not letting myself slow down further, no matter who was in front or behind me. So, what could I do? It wasn’t pretty, but it was a win. And all of this action-packed drama in a mere three miles.

The amusement of the day was that while I put nine seconds on him by the line to take the Mostly Fossilized Division, the next finisher, a mere four seconds later, was equally ripened and rounded out the top three of our division. Thirteen seconds and three consecutive finishers covered the podium for our the old farts. Don’t think I’ve seen that before.

So, let’s see, we had civic pride, come-from-behind drama, and a statistical anomaly. Plenty good.

No such drama a month later at the Harvard Five-Miler on the Fourth of July. Just a hot, hilly, hellacious haul, and this time when an apparently fossilized competitor passed me by, I just smiled and waved and let him go as there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, then turned my attention back to coaching the young kid next to me while we tackled the big climb. My initial assessment of my vanquisher’s maturity proved accurate;

yes, you can indeed judge a book by its cover, and so I settled for the slightly smaller second-place-sized jug of maple syrup. The race? Meh. The outing with my clubmates? A prime example of finding the good.

And so, with no other races slated till fall, that would, by this not-very-ripe date of mid-August, have wrapped up the story of the summer already. Except that the summer has been repurposed for knocking off summits. Remember that bit about finding the good? Well, here's more: I’m declaring this a big win season, just in a different category. Since the start of last month, eight of the New England Hundred Highest have fallen, plus three of the ‘Dacks. I won’t finish either list this year, so I’d better not expire just yet, but that takes out a quarter of my remaining peaks in barely six weeks.

Hundred Highest summits range from mellow to obscure to gnarly, and each assault has taken on a different flavor. East Sleeper, a blowdown-encrusted viewless and forlorn spot, came down with the interesting bonus of signing on to a seven-summit multi-day backpacking trip, the first time I’ve strapped on a full pack since the early nineties. The good? I didn’t die. The Weeks (North, Middle, and South, two count, guess which ones…) topped Sleeper with an even more hellaciously blown down obstructed excuse for a trail, but served up some sublimely green and beautiful (and oddly flat) summits. Equinox and Pico delivered relatively tame – as in, pleasant, passable trails – ascents shared with Dearest Spouse, as did Jay. But the lug from that latter spot to its sister summit,

Big Jay, on a brushy, blowdown-tangled, mud and muck filled semblance of a barely beaten path which required an hour-twenty to cover a single mile (which of course had to be covered again in reverse) had DS questioning my sanity. And the last of this set (not chronologically, but story-logically), Vermont’s Mendon, offered some mild navigational challenges, but all in all could only be classified as a pleasant recovery hike because it came the day after that three-day stretch of Death Marches just to the west, and I needed something that by comparison seemed reasonable. Which brings us to…

I’m repeatedly taken aback by the Adirondacks. What they call trails out there boggle the mind compared to most New England trails (and consider that what we call trails in New England boggle the minds of folks from out west and other areas, so let’s give this insanity the ranking it is due). And then, as bad as those are, much of the ‘dacks are crisscrossed not with official trails but instead with herd paths, unmaintained trails that cover stunningly impassable terrain, serve up absurd steepness, and imbue general disbelief. It seems that around every corner is another, “You’ve gotta’ be kidding me!” moment.

Intrepid Adventurer Daniel, who I met years ago in the midst of the Mohawk Hudson Marathon and who has, since then, caught ‘dacks fever, met me for this multi-day scheduled abuse-a-thon. Day One served up a mere ten and a half miles on a relatively simple summit with only one “Holy Excrement” moment, a thirty-foot pitch described in the guide with the understatement, “very steep” that tested my upper-body climbing capabilities as well as a bit of mental gumption. (Of course, you never get pictures of these spots, since the camera is safely packed away at suck moments so that if they have to come and recover your limp and broken body, they’ll be able to recover the Trip So Far on your device.)

Day Two’s target was the summit that makes aspiring Adirondack 46ers groan: Allen. It’s a nineteen-and-a-half mile out and back, but its special joy is that you really don’t start climbing the mountain until about eight-and-a-half miles in, at which point you’ve got about two thousand feet of ascent in about a mile, up a rock slab waterfall coated in Allen’s famed red-slime algae. And of course, you also have to come back down the same way, because mountain justice is cruel. We survived the ordeal with a combined three butt-landings (Daniel won this one, two to one) and one hanging-from-a-tree-while-both-feet-flailed-for-a-grip (my special moment of joy).

For Day Three, we needed something a little less mentally taxing. I thought I had a good target. I failed miserably. Seymour turned into another way-too-steep slab climb (how steep? …let’s just say, if you’re a Scotsman, don’t wear a kilt) with way too many snarling struggles up precarious pitches, way too many brushy side paths, and way too much swinging from the trees while heading both uphill and down. It was during this ascent that the mountain nearly defeated me. For a time, I went to a dark place, I lost my will to fight, I decided that I might not finish this quest. But like a good marathon, the mind recovers.

So yeah, we’re going back for more. I won’t lie. Some of the challenges I’ve read and heard about on the summits that remain downright scare me. I’m still not certain I’ll finish either of these challenges. And I’m not sure my knees will hold up – either for ascending (and worse, descending) the heights, as well as surviving the distance of the Big Apple’s mean streets this fall. But the marathon mentality draws me to give it a try. And that’s always good.