Going For the World Record

When I was a kid, we would actually read the Guinness Book of World Records. There was always a copy around the house and I seem to recall we’d actually buy a new one now and then, expecting to see new and interesting factoids, yet it seemed each version had the same creepy picture of the guy with several-feet-long fingernails (which, with the birth of the Internet, is no longer shocking of course). Sis may recall all of this differently, but it matters not since this paragraph is, after all, just a set-up.

Because I’m going for what I figure must be a world record. I’m certain it’s not in the aforementioned book. But it has to be a record. And I’ll be very happy if I fail in my attempt.

People try for years to get into the New York City Marathon. Year after year they enter the lottery, they get turned down, they try again, they get dinged again. I, on the other hand, have had a different sort of New York problem: I keep getting in, but I’ve still never run the race. Not Did-Not-Finish, mind you. Did-Not Start. Did-Not-Show-Up.

Four times. How many people can say that? And now I’m going for a fifth.

I’m in again, and if I don’t run, well, seriously, can you think of anyone who’s been registered to run New York five times and has never run the race? That’s gotta’ make the Fred Lebow edition of the Guinness book. But as noted, I’ll be happy if I fail in this attempt because, hey, after all, it would be cool to finally run New York.

For the record, I’ve never had to deal with the lottery. My entries have always started as a qualifier – for which there aren’t all that many slots in New York, but they do exist. And from there they’ve all gone south in one way or another. First time, skipped due to an injury. Then came Hurricane Sandy, but I took the refund rather than the deferral (yet they still sent me shirts and medals – very sweet of them!). Third try, another one skipped due to another injury, though that time I took a deferral, which landed me in the next edition – my fourth try – which was body-slammed by COVID. For that one I took yet another deferral and, fighting injuries at the time, pushed it out a year to this year’s race. And whaddaya’ know, along comes the registration window and I am finally feeling like I might make it marathon distance by fall. Plus, as I was pondering whether it made sense to shell out another New-York-sized entry fee, it occurred to me that I’d opted not to take the refund the last time, so when the invitation came in, it rang up at zero dollars. Two words: Saw-weet! So here we go, attempt number five. I waltz into either Central Park or the record books at oh-for-life.

Now, I hear you saying, what’s all this talk about marathons? Didn’t you walk away from Boston just a few months ago? Haven’t your injuries of late pretty much hinted that marathons might not be the best idea for a frequent hobby? Yes, I hear you saying that. And yes, I did walk away from Boston, including my continuous streak, which means it’s now harder for me to get back into Boston. And yes, going back to the old days of three marathons a year are probably not the best medicine, but hey, now and then…

And besides, you’re missing the point. After a few years of struggling with all sorts of injuries – my last race was in the fall of nineteen and resulted in a torn meniscus, followed the next summer by more injury struggles that led to far more cycling than running (which, in the first year of COVID was just fine with me), and followed by yet another summer of barely running – well, after all that, I’m finally mostly back in one piece. I’ve put in a few consecutive months of decent training, and while I’m still sucking wind, I’m actually starting to feel like a runner again. In short, I’m a few years older but I’m not dead yet (and still looking in awe of our clubmate “TB76” who’s still running strong and inspiring us at yes, that age).

At this point, my perspective is entirely different. I might well compete again, but I don’t have to. Those “lost years” of injury fog – which, I note, weren’t lost at all, due to the cycling and lots of hiking which notched a few lifetime goals – notched me up a few years but also in the age grading tables, which have always been my measure of reality. You can’t just compare today’s pace to five years back and lament, because your tires have five more years on them. And using those beloved tables, even yesterday’s training run, had it been a race, would have ranked with some of my lower-end ten-miler races from years back. So my wind-sucking of today isn’t really that bad. And next year, when I hit a new age group, well, I’ll never say never, it could be fun to seriously toe the line again. Because Dearest Spouse thinks I don’t have enough award crap in my office already (not).

But as noted, I don’t have to compete, I can just enjoy. I’m loving just going for the runs. Our club runs have never been more fun, because as for pace, well, I just don’t care, it’s just great to be out with friends (COVID sort of taught us that, you think? …and it also taught us that if you didn’t run today, who really cares if you shower?). Really, as for the marathon thing, other than knowing I have to remind myself how I used to keep going for twenty miles, the rest doesn’t matter.

So, New York won’t be like the marathons of old, tweaking and tuning and fretting the training, the gear, the logistics, the everything just to get it all right for that great time. It won’t be a body-punishing death-warmed-over struggle to shave off a couple more minutes. I’m just going for a run. I’m going to soak up the five boroughs. I’m going to see a million New Yorkers. I might even, at the suggestion of my native New Yorker running buddy the Brooklyn Barrister, even do something as cheesy as putting my name on my shirt just to rile up the crowd and have a little – no, scratch that – a lotta’ fun. I’ll get there when I get there. And if I waltz into Central Park instead of the record books under the category of Non-Completion, it will in fact be a waltz.

Remind me of that so I remember to do a little dance step over the finish line.

State of the Unicorn

There comes a time to walk away. There also comes a time to accept that it’s OK for someone else to walk away. I’m not running the Boston Marathon this year. No unicorn this year. Don’t ask me to convince you that I know what I’m saying. I know exactly what I’m saying. Yes, I’m qualified for this year’s race, and yes, I’m entered (and paid for it), and no, I’m not showing up.

This ends a fourteen-year run of qualifying and running every year. It ends my ten-year-streak status that gets me in with a simple qualifying time rather than having to make the time plus the ‘cut-off’ (which makes qualifying harder, being over seven minutes this year). It ends a chapter of my life that frankly, I never expected to happen in the first place, but it was grand, it helped define me, and it will never leave me. Hella’ run.

I’m fine with it. But it’s become clear to me that some of you I’ve spoken with might not be fine with it. Let me be blunt: please get over that. You need to be fine with me being fine with it. Stop being amazed. Stop trying to talk me out of this. I’m thrilled that I’ve had this experience. Be thrilled with me. I’m not dying. I’m good.

First and most importantly, my body says no. Too many parts are saying that it just doesn’t make sense to pile on that additional wear and tear. From here on, I run for fun. I run for joy. I run when I can without too much ensuing damage. But the “hinges” (as a friend I hadn’t seen in years referred to them the other day) are requesting that I don’t punish them further at the moment just to cover the twenty-six into Boston for the fifteenth (official) time. I just don’t need to.

That’s the second part: I’ve nothing to prove. I’m not going to run fifty of these, or forty, or even twenty-five. Any of those numbers are a grand achievement. But so is fourteen. How many people have run fourteen consecutive Bostons – each time as a qualified runner? (Hint: I don’t know, and I don’t care.) I’m thrilled with what’s happened since that first one in ’07, the one that was almost cancelled due to what at the time we thought was an awful storm (oh, if we’d only known what was coming!). I’m thrilled at the levels of success I’ve had along the way. There are no woulda’ coulda’s in my rearview mirror.

The body says that if I push my training hard enough to do anything more than jog the race, various parts will rebel. At the moment, it’s the left Achilles, and also the left knee, but at any given time of late it has been any number of parts. But things have always hurt in the past, right? Given better timing, might I have worked around some of these issues? Sure. This time, though, those aches and pains not only intersected with training, but had I pushed it, would have likely pushed off other life goals. You can’t hike mountains if you can’t even walk, right?

Age? Of course, but that’s not admitting defeat, just management. Wear and tear from years of pounding the pavement? Yep, but I wouldn’t trade those miles for anything in the world. I may have wounds, but I also have the wins, actual, metaphorical, and emotional, and I’m still in fine mettle compared to the average Joe my age. (Have you seen poor Joe?)

So why not just jog it? Take that victory lap? In one word, Delta. And in a few more words, the ratio of Delta to gain.

Don’t get me wrong. The Gods of Boston are trying to do the right things. For this year’s race, you have to be vaccinated or test negative. But wherever you set up a security periphery, there is danger at that edge. You can’t get in to get your bib until you’ve met medical mettle. But you’ll be among crowds to get to the med tent to show your vaccine card or get your test. And those crowds will come from places like Mississippi (with apologies to vaccinated folks in Mississippi, but no apologies whatsoever for the unvaxxed). So you’re still in a crowd, and it’s still, um, Delta. (And oddly, it seems you can go into the expo no matter who you are, but hey, I could be reading that wrong, and I could skip that anyway as there aren’t as many freebies as in the golden age anyway).

So there’s a risk. But life is a risk. We fly, we drive, we eat fast food, and certainly none of us realized the risk of getting blown up in ’13. But we take those risks for reasons. Here, there’s just not that great of a reason.

If I had a chance in hell of re-qualifying for next year, that would tilt the equation. But there isn’t. Running Boston this year was always going to be a joyride, a victory lap. Jog out number fifteen, spend a lot more time high fiving the crowd, maybe soak up the scream tunnel a little more, do those crowd waves, you know, live it up, soak it in.

But why risk it in the age of Delta? Not just me, but why put Dearest Spouse at risk? And Dearest Offspring the Younger, who now being just an hour and a half up the road, we tend to see more often (the Elder being six air hours away is reasonably safe from any foolishness I might propagate). It’s just not worth the risk for a shirt and a fun run, especially when my drawer of shirts runneth over years ago. And the crowd will probably be rather meager anyway.

So let it go. Let the Achilles heal (they take way too long) so I’ll be running in the winter, the spring, and beyond. Make sure I can continue to hang out with my running buds, the best friends one could ever hope for. Ponder that I might be dumb enough to even jog New York next year, since I’ve got a reserved entry thanks to my fourth attempt at running it was again cancelled (and if I register and don’t run it again, I might set a record for not running New York five times – that’s gotta’ count for something, right?).

At the end of the day, Boston is just a race, and I’m not willing to risk “Long COVID” and propagating the next mutation of the virus, let alone the health of my family, for just a race. It’s changed, too. Once the ultimate mecca, the grandaddy, the pinnacle of marathoning, well, it still is, but it’s also become just another product, marketed incessantly in order to expand its brand. Yes, the race almost died in the seventies when prize money emerged at other races and Boston resisted, so yes, you have to keep up with the Joneses at some point, but this year’s pitch for their virtual event shed all semblance of glory and stature. To refresh you, they advertised a virtual event well before they announced what the real event would look like. They offered an absurdly large number of entries – I believe it was seventy thousand, though I haven’t fact-checked my recollection. For a hundred and twenty-five bucks – I kid you not – you could go for a run on your own. A shirt was fifty more. I can’t lie to you: that blatant money-grab lowered their stature in my eyes more than a few notches. This on the tail of last year’s virtual event mobile app which featured pre-loaded glamour photos of supposed participants, which, if real, were amazingly and consistently genetically superior to average-looking marathoners, and which, as a marathon app, failed to cover the basics like measuring the course accurately (it rang up twenty-four for me) and submitting results successfully (I had to do it via email to the support team). It does make you wonder where the priorities lie.

Then there are the realities of COVID. While they are holding the event this year (others are still cancelling, most recently Mount Desert Island marathon which again threw in the towel in the face of pressures on the local medical system due to the virus), it’s not all that much of an event. Unless you’re an elite, there is no start this year. There’s no Athlete’s Village. The bus drops you off in Hopkinton, you walk to the start, and when you get there, you go for a run. We all knew that with chip timing it never really mattered when you started, but the start was the event. Even if you were in the second or later waves, you heard the announcers, saw the flyover, felt the excitement. Now it’s kind of like a garden fountain, buses hauling runners from Boston and dropping them to drizzle back to Boston in a continuous flow. One almost suspects you could get to Boston, get on a bus, and just do it again. All we need is the little statue of Buddha next to the stream as the water trickles down the rocks, waiting to be pumped back to the top.

And not to mention, the community of agony will be gone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve shared snacks, cups, and whole water bottles with my fellow runners. We always instinctively trusted our strong bodies to overcome any passed pathogens. No longer. I wouldn’t even want to be behind someone breathing heavily. Mississippi again (and sorry again to Mississippi vaxxers). And it’s not just me. If the Gods of Boston thought it was safe for you to be close to your fellow runners, there would be a real start. There isn’t, because it isn’t.

So this summer I’ve focused elsewhere. Some cycling again like last summer to be sure, but more toward the mountains, where I’ve wrapped up some significant life-long goals. Within a three-week span I wrapped up the Adirondack 46ers, the Northeast 111, and the New England Hundred Highest summit lists, the latter a truly unique experience, finishing on the Canadian Border at Boundary Peak. (True, when arriving for my annual physical a week later and being asked whether I’d been out of the country, having hiked for three miles along the border – and back – the answer took a little explaining.) Those goals were nearly forty years in the making.

My point is that the restless adventurer soul isn’t going to curl up in a corner and dry up because I stop running one race. I may hang back for a while, let various parts heal, and return at a little lower intensity, but return is most certainly in the cards. Probably not to Boston, but hey, been there, done that. On to the next chapter.

Announcing the Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

Note: This site hosts my long-running running blog. Today I’m using it as a convenient platform to post about the endowed scholarship that my sister and I have created in honor of our mom, Janice Cattarin, who passed away in July of 2020. The first section of this post is a short briefer on the scholarship – what you need to know to donate and enhance the endowment. After that are some additional stories about mom that you may enjoy. And after that, navigate the blog if you’re so inclined. I haven’t written much in the last year, but there are plenty of stories archived for your enjoyment.

For the “Just Let Me Donate Now! Quick!” folks… 

Go to www.sunybroome.edu/gift. Under Designation of Gift, check “In Honor” or “In Memory” and enter “Janice Cattarin Scholarship”.  If your employer offers matching gifts, the Foundation qualifies!

 

Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

Janice Cattarin believed strongly in the value of education and worked actively to further educational opportunities for women in the Southern Tier of New York, her home for nearly 60 years.

Widowed at age 28 in the mid-1960s with two young children, Jan was fortunate that her late husband’s employer IBM offered her a position shortly thereafter. That was possible in large part because she was also fortunate to have had the opportunity to earn a degree earlier in life. Her education likely made the difference between just getting by as a single mother and the quarter-century-long professional career she enjoyed at IBM, which spanned numerous functions until she retired in 1992. Her family benefited tremendously from the value of her having the education which enabled her success.

In 1967 Jan joined the Binghamton chapter of American Association of University Women, an organization founded in 1881 with the mission to advance equity for women and girls through advocacy, education and research. She was active in the organization for over fifty years until her death in 2020. She held nearly every office, attended every meeting possible, and volunteered at every event, and most importantly was active in the AAUW Scholarship Committee. She received the Binghamton area Women of Achievement Award in 1984 for her work in AAUW.

The Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women was established by her children to honor their mother, to give back to the community that was her and her family’s home, and to recognize the value of education for women, especially those who find themselves in a changing or difficult life situation where education offers the opportunity to raise themselves and their families to success.

SUNY Broome and the Janice Cattarin Scholarship

SUNY Broome, formerly known as Broome Community College, offers an ideal environment to maximize the impact of the Janice Cattarin Scholarship. It fulfills the educational needs for those striving to elevate their situation while holding costs low, but student resources are also often low, and there is always need.

It is intended that the Scholarship will operate in perpetuity, awarding several scholarships annually. Recipients will be chosen by a committee made up of SUNY Broome faculty, family, SUNY Broome academic affairs staff, and members of the Binghamton Chapter of AAUW.

Giving to the Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

The Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women is administered by the Broome Community College Foundation (a.k.a. SUNY Broome Foundation), a 501(c)3 foundation affiliated with SUNY Broome. Gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Gifts can be made online or by check as detailed at www.sunybroome.edu/ways-to-give

Online gifts can be made at www.sunybroome.edu/gift

Under Designation of Gift, please be sure to check either “In Honor” or “In Memory” and enter “Janice Cattarin Scholarship”. The full scholarship name isn’t required; the staff will identify the gift and designate appropriately.

The Janice Cattarin Scholarship can also benefit from matching gifts from employers who offer this benefit. Please see details at www.sunybroome.edu/matching-gifts.

About the SUNY Broome Foundation

The Broome Community College Foundation strives to be among the most supportive community college foundations in the State University of New York System and in the country. The Foundation aims to assist needy students, recognize and honor high-achieving students, help faculty and staff provide the best instructional environment possible, and encourage innovation and achievement on campus, especially where government funds are either unavailable or insufficient.

Each year, about 87% of the SUNY Broome student population need additional funding to attend school. Without this help, attending college would be a little to null opportunity. Through the valiant efforts of the College alumni, businesses, community friends, foundations, associations, organizations, SUNY Broome faculty, staff, and students, the Foundation is able to award over $1,000,000 each year to deserving and financially disadvantaged students. The Foundation’s priority is to provide private financial funding to our students through merit scholarships and grants-in-aid.

Additional information on the SUNY Broome Foundation can be found at: broomeccfoundation.org

Broome Community College Foundation, Inc.
PO Box 1017
Binghamton, NY 13902-1017

For additional information about the Janice Cattarin Scholarship Memorial for Women please feel free to contact:

Catherine Abashian Williams, MPA, CFRE
Executive Director, Broome Community College Foundation, Inc.
williamscr at sunybroome.edu

or Gary Cattarin, son of Janice Cattarin at cattarin at comcast.net

Note: That's the facts bit. The rest is for your enjoyment.

More About Mom and the Scholarship

Let’s start with the frank part: Many who’ve run with me, worked with me, or just crossed my path have heard me lament about the trials and tribulations of caring for my aged mother (from afar, Cindy did most of the up-close leg work, bless her…). Truth: The last decade has been a rough ride. Mom did plenty of things I’ve complained vocally about as my form of ‘talk therapy’. Elderly people are frustrating in many ways. I probably will be too at some point, even if I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things not to do from mom.

But here’s the other frank part: Before all that, Mom was all the nuts. To use a bad sports metaphor, she wasn’t just thrown a curve ball, she took the proverbial beanball. I’ve mentioned repeatedly – in her obituary, in the scholarship brief above, and many other times – how she was widowed early with two young kids. You know that part. What else you should know is how she got up out of the dust and made it. And not just eked it out, but made it comfortably and with style.

She told me once that after dad’s death, she’d considered moving from our home in Upstate New York back to Ohio to be near her parents. But she didn’t. She kept on, and made her own life in New York. IBM was invaluable in making that happen, but they were only the third part of the equation. Her education was the first, her spirit the enabler, and IBM provided the vehicle.

Mom & Dad moved to the Endicott area when Dad the engineer took a job with IBM in 1961. In the five years before he passed, he made quite a mark; when I co-op’d there in 1980, people introduced me as Bob’s son. That was an eye-opener. Tom Watson’s IBM took care of their own in those days, and they hired mom the year after dad's death. Sure, they needed every able-bodied brain they could get, but mom’s education opened doors that led past a basic job to a professional career. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a young kid, you don’t see the significance of a lot of things; they just are. When the Chevy wagon went away for the ’67 Firebird, it never occurred to me that mom was young and single and cool. It just meant that when we piled in the car with the neighborhood kids for a ride to McDonald’s, which in those days was take-out and we often ate in the car, it was a tight fit in a tiny backseat. But somehow we fit; we were little, and she was young and single and cool and on top of that, a professional woman.

She wasn’t the only one. IBM was ahead of its time. We spent plenty of time with her professional women friends. It seemed perfectly normal to me. But looking back I can see all the things I didn’t notice then. That small klatch was still an anomaly, even at IBM, and almost non-existent outside that orbit. It was still a man’s world. Mail still came to Mrs. Robert Cattarin a decade or more after dad’s death. She just didn’t let that stop her.

She dated a couple of people but never remarried. She finished the job, so to speak, of raising us, all on her own. Sure, she had help. For years she employed our caretaker, Mrs. Lucas to be there when we got home from school, since she couldn’t be (and yes, she was smart enough to file and pay the employer portion social security taxes, unlike a later Supreme Court candidate who didn't). Her parents would move in for a week each year and scrub every surface and fix every broken thing. And we had the best neighbors in the world. Bill next door was there for anything we needed. Not because of sympathy for that single mom next door, but just because that’s who he was (and still is, for that matter).

By the time I was in high school it had finally dawned on me that the reason I had to coordinate with mom for dinner plans almost daily over email (yes, in 1980, we were both IBMers, she for real, me as a high-school co-op) was because her calendar was, well, crazy. She was crazy involved.

You learn how not to grow moss from such a person.

So back to the scholarship. Why? The scholarship is endowed at the SUNY Broome Foundation and benefits SUNY Broome students. SUNY Broome is the new name for what we knew as Broome Community College (SUNY, for those of you non-New Yorkers, is the State University of New York system). Neither I nor my sister nor mom went to SUNY Broome (though my younger kid did get a fine education at another SUNY school). So why there?

The year after dad passed, mom joined an organization called the American Association of University Women, or AAUW. I don’t know how she learned about it or what spurred her initial sign-up, but it’s not hard to guess that educated professional women in the 60’s were not in the majority, and that the social and intellectual rewards from hanging out with people of her type were a big draw. Mom had attended Stephens College in Missouri, which at that time was a junior college, and then Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (not to be confused with THE Ohio State University), so she had a degree, which, as I’ve noted, probably made all the difference between just making it and making it nicely. I can’t say that IBM wouldn’t have hired her, but I can speculate that they wouldn’t have put her on professional track without her education.

AAUW has been all about advocating for women’s education since their founding in the nineteenth century. Today, when women make up more than half of all college students, that might seem like an anachronism. But when broken down by field, there is still a long way to go. I’m an avid reader of Scientific American, and they’ve run countless columns about how far we are from gender equity in science and research, for example. And even now, there’s no question that traditional women’s roles persist. Not that that’s wrong, but it adds a challenge to a woman trying to come back from life’s curve balls – or beanballs – and lift themselves to success.

Mom worked tirelessly on almost everything that AAUW did. And one of those things that AAUW did was to create a scholarship fund endowed at SUNY Broome, targeting ‘non-traditional’ women students. Not teens just getting started, but women who have taken a curve ball or a beanball and are trying to lift themselves and their families to success. That was mom’s story. My story is what it is because she succeeded.

When mom passed and we wanted to designate a charity for gifts, because we didn’t want flowers and in the age of COVID had nothing to do with them anyway, so sis and I opted for the AAUW scholarship fund as a worthy target. Then when the dust settled, we decided to earmark funds she’d given us years earlier to the same cause. In light of our substantial gift, the AAUW chapter considered renaming their scholarship in mom’s name, but in the end we opted to set up a separate endowed scholarship in her name with the same goals and selection criterion as the original fund. This means more grants to more students. And hopefully more success stories and successful and happy families. And it also serves as a gift to the community which she called home for nearly sixty years, and which gave sis and I our starts.

The scholarship is administered by the SUNY Broome Foundation who’s significant size means the endowment enjoys perpetual professional investment management. The Binghamton AAUW Scholarship Committee will judge applicants, though sis and I can also chime in if we wish, and the Foundation will ensure that if AAUW and sis and I are long gone, they’ll continue to administer the scholarship and award grants. So this really is a perpetual gift.

When was the last time you were able to be a part of a legacy?

Please consider donating to the scholarship fund.

And thanks for reading this.

By the way, you can read mom’s obituary here.

On Six

Was it just two weeks ago that I broke my blogging silence? Answer: slightly more, but pretty much, yeah. And did I call that one, “Take Six”, whereas I’m calling this one “On Six”? Answer: yeah, but that is purely a convenient coincidence. And when you read this story, should you assume that the last episode was an intentional setup for this one? Answer: Not on your life. Really. It wasn’t.

Sure, I hadn’t published in ten months (nearly eleven, but who’s counting?). And sure, I said it was anyone’s guess as to whether I’d run the Virtual Boston Marathon, with the smart money resting on No. And yes, I did run it a few days later. But it wasn’t a setup. I didn’t know. Trust me on this.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that my previous post saw the light of day on the last day of August. Truth is, it came out under dark of night somewhat after midnight on the first day of September. Having failed to poke my head above water since last October, I felt a weird drive to publish earlier than the month before hitting a solid year of silence. And I came so close to getting it done, missing by about twenty minutes, that I backdated it into August. Call it cheating, and shame me. I know this sounds weird. It just mattered at the time. And this confession matters now, why?

Because that was Tuesday, the first of September, and so far as I knew, there was no way in purgatory (or lower) that I’d run Virtual Boston. Sure, there was a part of me that wanted to do it, but the event window was opening in mere days and I had run a grand total of nine laps around the track – two and a quarter miles – since swapping the running shoes for the bike shoes back in mid-May. And that was absolutely the truth. At that moment.

The very next day, my clubmate Dan turned things up-side-down. 

At noon on Wednesday – yes, the very day after posting that it’d be nearly unthinkable that I’d run a “VBM” – Dan pinged me: “Do you think you could run a half marathon? Would you join us for the first half of our Virtual Boston on Saturday morning? We’ll go slow! I promise!”

Game on.

Now, the idea of showing up and running any distance with a group that would have to figure out what to do when I crumpled into a ball by the side of the road after a few miles was simply ludicrous. But as I’ve said often before, the runner mentality doesn’t rule out ludicrous.

The idea that I’d join them only to run as a pacer or companion for the first half alone wasn’t so much ludicrous as it was a defiance of logic. What’s with this halfway stuff? Why suffer just for that? And me pace them? Seriously, don’t you have that a little backwards? Hey, if I’m in, I’m in.

But I was by no means in. At least, not yet. Not having run only nine laps three weeks earlier.

So I check my calendar and yup, I’ve got no meetings for the next hour. I lace up the shoes and go out the door and, well, let’s just see what happens.

Serendipity happens.

We all know that we run together not only because it’s socially enjoyable, but because in doing so we drive each other forward almost subconsciously. You stop thinking about everything that hurts and you focus on good conversation. But doing anything together of late has been fraught with risk; we all know that even seemingly healthy people can be asymptomatic carriers in the Age of COVID. So I certainly haven’t been calling people up to run or bike or hike with (though I’ve toyed with the idea a few times). But as I noted, serendipity happens.

Less than an hour from Dan’s ping, when I step out the door, a (different) friend I haven’t seen or chatted with in a while runs past my driveway. Like this was all planned. I call out, he holds up for me to waddle up to catch him, and we end up cruising a few miles, blissful chatter making me ignore the fact that my body hasn’t run since, when? Which, to be fair, it really didn’t seem to be minding. Rolling home a whopping four and a quarter miles later and feeling fine, I figured Saturday could happen. But I wasn’t going to commit. Not yet. Let’s at least pop in a few more miles on Thursday, and maybe even a loosen-up jaunt on Friday.

Here’s where I say, “Wait a minute, how old am I, and how long have I been doing this? And don’t I know what’s coming by this point?” Denial is powerful. I really thought I’d run a little more before Saturday. I should have known better. My body has been consistent since, oh, let’s say, forever. There’s a three-day recovery from these first-time-for-anything efforts. From the bodily insult on Day Zero, we move to Day One, where the muscles aren’t happy. Then we hit Day Two, also known as Max Burn Day, which is just that. Day Three brings the fire down to Day One level, and the next day we’re in the clear. This, for me, has always been. The weeks-prior track laps had been so slow, with breaks in-between, that they didn’t trigger the sequence. False confidence. But galivanting off with a friend at a real pace (not fast, but at least a pace in the neighborhood of what Dan had planned for Saturday), well, yeah, that pretty much did it. The clock was activated.

Now you’re doing the math and you’ve quickly realized that time may be flexible in the relativistic space, but not here in normal life, and there wasn’t enough of it. From that run on Wednesday, hmm, then Day One, muscles certainly hurt, I’d better rest. Then Day Two, Max Burn Day, landed on Friday and it was indeed quite the burn; running on them now would probably extend it so I’d better not. And yes, that puts Day Three on… Saturday. Mid-day, really. So no, we’re not out of the woods by early morning Saturday. Not even close.

Having thus not gotten out the door again, that meant Saturday rolled around not only with legs still afire, but with a mere six and a half miles on my running odometer since May. Sweet.

And that brings us to the wordplay section of our story. Those of you who have ever done a track workout with me know that one of my old wisecracks is to tell the group that we’ll start (whatever interval we’re doing) on six. Then I’ll start counting, “One! Two! Six!” and bolt. My fellow runners get a humorous break during the workout, and they catch on after the first few times.

So it is. We go on six. And so it was on Saturday.

Now, Dan’s VBM course started at his home in Hudson, a few miles north of my home, and headed due south to the Boston Marathon starting line in Hopkinton, which happens to be exactly a half marathon (you really can’t make this up, the distance just works out; it’s eerie). This meant we’d be running through my town, bypassing my home by just a mile or so. Not knowing how this whole VBM would go, I told Dearest Spouse that I might be home within the hour.

The rest is almost a foregone conclusion. Quads, hamstrings, and at least one calf were angry by the very first block from our socially distanced start (which admittedly was virtually impossible to maintain for twenty six miles, though we tried – at least at times) at the chalk start/finish line Dan had laid down in front of his home. Everything north my waist was hunky-dory; the cycling had done it’s work for cardio health, and my brain was deluded enough to ignore the rest, a good thing since the southern half hurt early and just got worse as the day wore on. But chit-chat, ribbing, bad jokes, and even, late in the day, truly horrendous singing kept us going, the three of us who planned to go the distance, and a fourth (later joined by a fifth) along for camaraderie, plus the roadside assistance from Dan’s wife and other friends. I hand Dan a lot of credit for setting all this up – even getting the club’s show clock for the finish line – and for policing our pace to a fault. Riding a wave of adrenaline of stupidity, I cruised past the bail-out-for-home point and just ran. Slowly. Casually. Somewhat painfully. Yet enjoyably. This really was fun

In Hopkinton, we tossed in a loop around the traffic island in front of the common just to ensure we didn’t end up a hair short, which wouldn’t have mattered, since the Virtual Boston Marathon Official App failed miserably: it couldn’t measure distance (twelve-point-oh at the half marathon… cool!), so the results had to be submitted manually anyway. As the saying goes, you had One Job… But we knew the distance and we knew what we did. (The app also failed again later trying to submit results. OK, you had Two Jobs… but hey, it was very good at supplying meaningless rah-rah. Whatever.)

Somehow the Hopkinton cop who cheerfully stopped traffic and seemingly took six pictures of us on the starting line managed to never hit the shutter, so we settled for some disorganized selfies instead. And then we headed north, where, as you might expect, slow and painful became slow and painful at twenty-something miles, a different thing altogether. We’d swapped our southbound pacer companion in Hopkinton for another, so while Marathoner Things One and Two lumbered steadily on, pacer companion Charles dutifully stuck with me when I hit the inevitable walk break zone and dropped back a bit. But by that point it would have taken Jock Semple pulling me off the course to keep me from finishing this foolish folly, and even that might not have worked (it didn’t work for him many years ago, right?)

To add a bit of ironic circular closure to the feat, around mile twenty-three we passed the home of that very same friend who’d distracted me on Wednesday’s run and helped me convince myself that this was a potentially possible stupid thing to do. And there he was, out working on the lawn, getting a front row seat to my soon-to-be successful submission to stupidity, marveling at what he was mostly, but not entirely, not responsible for. A few miles later, it was in the books.

If you don’t count those nine laps around the track back in early August, this was pretty much zero to marathon in three days flat. Not to say I wasn’t in good shape from the cycling and hiking, but, well, they’re clearly different muscles. It was by far the slowest marathon I’ve ever run, even counting those uber-casual Groton Marathons. But that entirely casual approach made it fun, right up to the end.

And technically, I didn’t need to do it. The Boston Athletic Association had announced that not running this would not interrupt any Boston Marathon streak, though in generosity they simultaneously stated that doing it would count toward extending a streak. So call this a freebie, number fourteen, and since they’ve basically grandfathered qualifying times into the next edition, fifteen could be in the cards, if the event even happens and I’m able to move when it does. After that, the likelihood that I’ll requalify for future years is doubtful. Heck, in the few brief runs I’ve taken since that day, I can’t fathom how I managed twenty six at all.

But hey, you never know. I didn’t expect to run any marathon on six, either.

Phoenix Riding (Or, Take Six!)

To the outside world it seems... He writes occasionally, we read occasionally, what’s the big deal? Heck, we didn’t notice he stopped writing a while back. He didn’t send flowers either.  Who cares? 

To the author it seems... Holy Bejeezus, I’ve been trying to write this column now for six months, no, make that nine! I’ve never gotten to a conclusion, and the world keeps changing. I wonder how long before Google locks you out of your own blog?

This is a running blog, but there’s scant little running going on here. Whatever. My small and anything-but-loyal band of readers know that besides dishing out amusing stories to compete for a tiny sliver of their time, my goal in this now dozen-year-long series of chronicles has been to provide some positivism, some uplift (and this year being Excrement Expo 2020, we really need positivism). Sure, there have been chapters where I’ve railed on various organizations or situations, but at the end of the day, I’m a moderately old guy who tries to keep at it, and in telling the tale of doing so, encourage others, moderately, very, or even not old, to do the same. When my unnaturally excessive activity light winks out, that will be a sad day. 

So world, let me say this: I’m not dead yet. I may have some flesh wounds, but I’m in decent shape at the moment, though that isn’t due to running. Or perhaps it is; not physically, but mentally. The running brain, perhaps the lizard part of it, but whatever, it just won’t let you hang up the active life and the desire to stay fit. So when one avenue is shut down, you find a different road. This new one (which really isn’t new at all) uses two wheels. 

For years I’ve weathered scorn from non-runners who insisted I’d ruin my [pick your favorite joints – knees, hips, feet, whatever]. And today I write with a diagnosed meniscus tear and unquestionably sore knees. So were they right? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if they were, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been a hella’ ride, and it isn’t over, as Bluto (Belushi) once said, till we decide it is. 

Yes, I have sore knees, but consider that before I started running, I couldn’t hike downhill without knee braces. Now, Adirondack Death Marches are a regular occurrence (including thirty-seven miles, five summits, and ten-thousand-foot-plus vertical feet over two days a few weeks back…which was a bit much, I’ll admit…so really, can I blame running for my woes?) I could point out other benefits, but the reality is, If I hadn’t been running for the last fifteen years, I’d bet good money that plenty of other things would hurt a lot more. Motion is lotion, as my most recent physical therapist likes to say (she’s right, of course). 

I’ve completed fifty-seven solar orbits, and when I look at my male ancestors when they were my age (at least the ones that weren’t already dead by then, which is most of them), they look, to be frank, what I think of as old. My beloved Uncle Joe, pictured at about a year younger than I am now, looked like someone approaching sixty, which isn’t a bad thing for someone who was, in fact, approaching sixty (and he made it to ninety-nine, smiling all the way, so he clearly did a lot of things right). But I look in the mirror and I don’t see the word sixty (I know, I’m not supposed to say that, you are, [gosh, thanks!] but I’m waxing philosophical here, so just go with it), nor do I see the appearance of true age in most of my active circle. Maybe it’s just my rockin’ fashion sense compared to Joe’s era (I hear you laugh uproariously) or failings of the photography of his day, but I’d like to think that our mutually-supported active life has staved off decline to the rocking chair by a bit, and I think Dearest Spouse and my clubmates would agree. A few wounds aren’t too bad a price. 

All that being said, the reason I’m in decent shape at the moment is largely thanks to inspiration from Dearest Offspring the Younger, who back in May, while she hunkered down with us for a three-month COVID-induced house arrest (and cooked up for us an incredibly creative menu and breads and desserts and…), suggested we go for a bike ride. Out came the trusty Trek 520, purchased for the princely sum of three hundred eighty-three bucks almost exactly thirty-four years earlier (with thanks to Wing-San for the advice on that life purchase). The same trusty Trek that carried me through Appalachian Mountain Club Vermont Green Mountain Death Rides in the eighties (said sled being held up by a cycling companion, name forgotten, in the pic, circa 1989), and more importantly, carried me on AMC Worcester Thursday night rides where on one fateful evening in 1991 I met a charming lady who would become Dearest Spouse. Yes, said trusty Trek emerged, and its tires, which I couldn’t even pin to a specific decade, actually held air. And now, nineteen-hundred miles later, I’m no longer feeling like a tub.

Cycling isn’t a new thing, it’s just been in hibernation for about a quarter century. And it arrived just in time. When that fateful return to the bike came around, I’d been trying to turn the running thing back on after a six-month healing break, during which, well, we’ll get to all the fun and games that went down during that time of silence in a bit. But truth be told, it wasn’t going so well. My pace was, by my standards, molasses-like, which really didn’t matter, but worse, my body was, by anyone’s standards, rebelling. Then those two wheels rolled in to bring me back from the world of the fitness dead. Not like Phoenix rising, but like Phoenix riding. Yep, there it is, that clever title tie-in. You were waiting for it, weren’t you?

Mind you, that six-month break produced a half-dozen tries to put out some sort of an update on how things just weren’t healing. But each time I came around to, “But things just aren’t healing, I’m not running, and my loving readers, they just don’t care,” and I’d put it aside for a few weeks. Then come back to it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Perhaps by this sixth try I’ll get it out the door. Heck, by now the article even has two titles! So, Take Six! 

 So, in rapid-fire succession, 

Take Zero (because you heard this already): The half-marathon I shouldn’t have finished, and the Cheese Storm Incident (also known as CSI: Marlborough). And… he’s down.

Take One: Death by PT! Which really meant lots of exercises that we hoped would make things stronger without breaking anything else. And sitting on the beloved (not) spin bike at the gym (which you could do, pre-COVID). And getting a bit pudgy. (Yeah, I know, not by societal standards, but still…) The plan was to do this until said knee plateaued for at least three months, at which point we might think about the nuclear option (wait, who’s “we”, I hear you ask? In this case it’s Dr. Triathlon and I, who made a secret plot to run the NYC marathon together… how’d that work out, eh?). And I wrote about it. But you really didn’t care. So I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Two: Where I prove to have the patience of a puppy. We opt to pull in our dates and jump to the nuclear option ahead of time. But Dr. Triathlon manages to break some of his own bones skiing (I ask him, “When an orthopedist breaks something, who do YOU go to?” He replies, “Me!”), so things get delayed, and next thing you know it’s time for my half-business, half-pleasure trip to Arizona where Dearest Spouse and I plan to hike the deserts after my conference. An unexpected traffic encounter (which happened to be in Phoenix; thus her recovery adds a sort of double entendre to Phoenix half of the title, you think?) puts an end to her hiking plans, but we wander the countryside anyway and I get one day of hiking at a really wild place called Chiricahua (the picture here doesn’t do it justice, you’ve gotta’ go there!), which I’d never heard of before, but which seems to pop up everywhere since. And I wrote about it, or started to, because it while the desert was cool (or hot), the whole trip experience wasn’t very uplifting (you might say it was impactful), so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Three: The nuclear option, PRP, or Plasma Rich Platelets (as opposed to the thermonuclear option, traditional meniscus surgery, which we’d decided is a bad idea for anyone who plans to remain very active). In this chapter, we extract some of my ether of life, centrifuge the daylights out of it in a really cool machine, and come up with a syringe of highly concentrated platelets – the component of your blood that induces healing. Dr. Tri refers to this stuff as “Miracle Gro”, as opposed to the sack of red blood cells left over, which will get you DQ’d for blood doping. Then we inject it into my knee and see what happens. Which, the first time, is not much. And the second time, feeling like a human pincushion, is sadly still not much. Well, you’ve gotta’ go up to bat, right? It was worth trying. And I wrote about it, but besides pictures of the cool blood machine, there wasn’t a lot compelling, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Four: It’s now pushing March and looking doubtful I’ll be able to keep my Boston Marathon streak alive. So I hatch a diabolical plan: Cook up a virus in my Level Four Biohazard Lab deep in the basement, unleash it on the world (of course, I had thought of this and started months earlier, because I’m diabolical), and make sure the nation is led by the most incompetent collection of liars, cheats, and morons we’ve ever seen. And it worked. Boston is postponed. Five extra months to heal. My streak might live on… And I wrote about it, but the O.J. Simpson “What If I Did It?” joke was truly tasteless even by my standards, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Five: Said virus forces Dearest Offspring the Younger, now an experienced chef, to abandon her upstate New York outpost and take refuge in Fort Home, resulting in the aforementioned orgy of baking and cooking and pastry the likes of which the world has rarely seen. I don’t believe we ate the same dinner twice. It was, what you might call, an expansionary time. Around the time when Boston was to have been run, I tried to get back out there. I logged about eighty-five miles over a month, not enough to counteract the culinary delights, and of course, the gym was closed. Things were getting desperate. And I wrote about it, but it was just another Oh Woe Is Me tale, so I put it aside, unpublished.

And then: “Hey Dad, let’s go for a bike ride.” 

Take Six: Phoenix rides. 

[Truth in advertising: Really that was Take Seven. The original Take Six didn’t make it out the door, either. I wrote about the cycling emerging, but wasn’t sure the it would stick, so I put it aside, unpublished. But Seven was pretty much Six, so I stopped counting.]

Once I glued my thirty-year-old cycling shoes back together with silicone caulk (since shopping the Age of COVID is a challenge) and refreshed my bicycle maintenance skills, the bike quickly became a habit, much like running. The first month was exciting, the second settled into a routine, but a good one, and by the third I’d ridden to towns I’d never driven through, not to mention all three neighboring states. It’s been a ride, literally; and one that my knees have been happy about. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do come November. 

Somewhere in the haze of quarantined days, Boston turned from postponed to cancelled to virtual, and that event comes up in a few days. I’ve run a grand total of two miles around the track in the last three months. But between the cycling and plenty of hikes ranging from those Death Marches to reasonable mountains to some amusing local stuff (triple points!), the summer has seen plenty of fitness restored. Whether it will let me jog a ludicrously slow virtual marathon is anyone’s guess. Whether I’ll even try is also anyone’s guess. Wagers, anyone? 

Truth is, this could well be the end of big running miles. Or maybe not, who knows? I have been and always will be a big proponent of running as a source of physical and mental fitness, but I never deluded myself into thinking it would last forever. If this turns out to be a transition, I might not spend much time running, but the running mentality won’t let me sit on my posterior, either. It’s just fitness OCD redefined to another medium.

The Cheese Storm Incident

It’s fitting, I suppose. My first attempt to run the New York City Marathon dramatically came to an end thanks to a major storm. So it was, again, this time. Sort of. That first time it was Hurricane Sandy, which, after a week of dithering (what to do?), finally put the nail in the coffin of the event. This latest time it was an entirely different and somewhat odd type of storm, which, after a month of dithering (what to do?), it too finally put the nail in the coffin of the event. Such was born the Cheese Storm Incident.

I suppose I deserve it. I’ve always had an aversion to trash-talking of any sort; you trash-talk and you usually get bit. That’s why I never do it before a race. I avoid it so much that my clubmates regularly ignore me when I anti-trash-talk (if that’s a thing) and point out how crappy I’m usually feeling and how poorly I expect to perform before toeing the line. Even when I really do have a Meh race, they often don’t see it that way, only reinforcing their disbelief of my pre-race grumblings.

This time, I blew it.

Granted, what I did would hardly be called trash-talking, but by my standards, perhaps I jinxed myself. I wrote “I Must Run This Marathon”, and I stated aloud far too many times that I’d be running New York come hell or high water (though considering Hurricane Sandy, high water would in fact be a good reason why I wouldn’t run, but you get the idea). I guess that for me that qualified as braggadocio. I opened my mouth. I got bit.

I’m out. Cancelled. Not only that but sidelined. I’m now oh-for-three on New York.

To cut to the car crash, as a former co-worker used to say, I’m the proud owner of a complete radial tear in posterior horn of the medial meniscus of my right knee, and, in the wake of the Cheese Storm, it might actually be worse. Dr. Triathlon (we’ll get to him later) prefers the self-healing option, which could take up to (gulp!) six months, though I’m hoping for four. Surgery, says he, only removes material and hastens the onset of bone-on-bone arthritis, not a good idea for the active, athletic type, especially when there’s already evidence of some bone degeneration around the tear. In short, me and the (literal) pain-in-the-ass stationary bike down at El-Cheapo gym are going to be good friends for quite a while.

Oh how did we get here? How have we sunk so low? How has the ever-increasing entropy of the universe caught up with us? (We? Us? I hear you saying… Yes, you’re just fine, I’m the hurtin’ puppy. It’s just linguistic artistic license. Go with it.)

It all started in a 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno California… no, wait, that was Ted Baxter (just checking to see how old you, dear reader, really are). In my case it all started with a simple walk around town back in May, prior to Sugarloaf. Or at least that’s when I noticed it. It probably started before that, because the symptom that came on quite suddenly that day, as Dearest Spouse and I neared completion of a long circuit around our beloved city wasn’t so much in the knee as behind it. Suddenly I couldn’t straighten my leg, and later I’d find I couldn’t bend it all the way, either. This, it would turn out, appeared to be the work of a big-ass baker’s cyst, which itself appeared to be the work of an already ticked off meniscus. But at that stage, who knew? I did what all runners do: walked it off, managed the pain. We live for pain, right? Then Sugarloaf came with decent results, so I shrugged it off. Runner mentality.

But as I’ve previously documented, I really couldn’t entirely shrug it off. I don’t need to reiterate the bitching and moaning of my last post. Suffice to say that during the last Adirondack Death March weekend of the season the pain was manageable, but for days afterward I wasn’t moving too well. And New York loomed. What to do? This called for a Plan, yes, that’s Plan with a Capital P.

Serendipity dropped an interesting idea. A running bud posted that a half-marathon needed pacers. On Nantucket. Now, I’ve lived in the Commonwealth for over thirty-four years, and I’ve yet to go to Nantucket. I know, it’s just an island, but someday I need to set foot there. And a half marathon would force some decent miles, three weeks before New York. And acting as a pacer would force a slow, comfortable pace. It would be a proof point, a bit of confidence heading into which might be an Epic Struggle in New York. To be fair, it wasn’t the greatest deal around; though the race was free for pacers, the boat ticket and the pacing team shirt rang up to a decent price, but I really didn’t care. It was an Adventure. It was Nantucket. And it fit within The Plan.

Just to be sure I wasn’t running on anything seriously broken, I paid a visit to a new orthopedist, an athletic type we’ll call Dr. Triathlon (I told you we’d get to him) who came recommended by my current physical therapist and spiritual advisor as the best knee guy out there. A couple of fresh x-rays revealed nothing (though I’d never learn why the radiologist put a menacing arrow on one of them), no surprise for what I expected was a soft tissue issue. I left his office cleared to run but a bit perplexed. I was skeptical of his diagnosis (said skepticism would prove apt in due time) that the lower end of my hamstring, which wraps around the inside of the knee where the pain was greatest, was seriously angry. This really didn’t fit the bone-centric pain I was feeling, but hey, he’s the doctor, right? I left with a prescription for some beat-things-into-submission meds.

Which did nothing. So much for that theory. And the horizon seemed to be sinking by the day. By the time the pacing team shirt showed up in the mail, I was no longer certain I could even run that half at the comfortable pace I’d committed. And as a pacer, I couldn’t chance letting down those whom I’d be pacing. Time to amend The Plan.

Turns out I had a free entry to another local half marathon (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty; it was free because the previous race by this organization had, um, underperformed, let’s say, so they offered me this one). Two weeks before Nantucket.

Now you are starting to see the absurdity of the situation. From running a Boston Qualifier in May, I was reduced to running a half marathon just to see if I could run a half marathon slowly as a pacer, which in itself was just to see if I had a shot in heck of running New York. Sad, ain’t it?

The day of said local half dawned close to ideal. It’d turn mildly warm a few miles in, but nothing to provide any excuse for a total collapse; no, this would all be on me. A small gaggle of about seventy lined up at an obscure spot on an obscure road in an obscure town, and with zero expectations for racing performance – this was, after all, just a test of going the distance casually – I sauntered off about as casually as I’ve ever started a race. Frankly, it was downright pleasant.

And for a while, it stayed that way. I was easily exceeding the pace I’d need to pace without much effort. For a few miles I linked up with the young lady who’d win the women’s side; curiously she looked familiar, which turned out to be because I’d run an earlier event with her identical twin sister. All was sunshine, butterflies, and happiness (along with a couple of good hills, which I rather enjoyed, I really loved the course) till about halfway in. Then all went to hell in the space of a mile.

From cruising to barely moving. From, yeah, the knee hurts a little, but no different than usual, to a stride so uneven, so favoring the tragic knee that the opposite calf started twitching dangerously. From humming to a broken wreck. Stretching stops. Both calves flipping out. As much pain walking (no, limping) as running (no, jogging). Downright pathetic. But just as stupidly as ever, willing myself to finish. I shuffled home, tail between legs, and drowned my sorrows by crashing the party at the hometown 5K, a far more jovial, friend-filled, and food-and-beer equipped event.

Now I wasn’t just not moving too well, I was in downright agony. Running was out of the question. A flurry of phone calls to Dr. Triathlon’s office over the course of the week got me booked for an MRI that Friday night, and after laying in the bang-bang tube with the earphones pumping bad music (really, that’s what they called ‘classic rock’?) I left with a DVD that I totally could not interpret. I mean, x-rays are straightforward. MRIs are wild. Looking at those images, I swore there were cracks right through the base of my femur, which felt about right for the pain (wrong: just normal vascular structures that exist inside your bones…who knew?). But by the weekend, the pain was calming down and I was feeling like this too would pass.

Do you remember that this is supposed to be about the Cheese Storm Incident? I haven’t forgotten. It’s time.

It’s now Monday evening. I have an MRI in hand. I have an appointment with Dr. Tri and, I suppose, with fate, in the morning. And I have a substantial bowl of pasta in front of me for dinner, whipped up by Dearest Spouse. And DS picks up the jar of grated cheese, because this being a more-or-less desperation dinner, it doesn’t merit grating up the real parmesan in the fridge. And it’s one of those store-brand plastic jars with the lid that opens on one side to sprinkle and on the other to pour or spoon. And she holds onto the lid flap and shakes it vigorously to break up the clumps. But only one lid flap. The other is freer than a love child at Burning Man. And it’s the side that pours. And oh, did it rain. It poured.

Cheese Storm. Category Five.

An instant of silence, that tension of, she’s wondering, will he be pissed at this lapse (which, admittedly, I’ve been known to allow to happen, I’m not proud of that failing), and… we burst out laughing. A happy old married couple moment. Dearest Spouse starts to move to clean up and I say, oh, just sit down and eat, we’ll deal with it later. We eat our dinner surrounded by a fresh coat of cheese as delicate as the soon to arrive snow. See, even I can be poetic if I try hard.

Sated with pasta, I retrieve the vacuum from the basement, and we work more efficiently than FEMA after a tornado to remediate the mayhem. Satisfied, I walk gently down the stairs to return said vacuum, still fully aware that my knee is not in top form. And halfway down, on an otherwise ordinary step, something goes pop, or crunch, or snap, I really don’t know, but I know it makes some sort of discernable unpleasant nonstandard noise, and the pain shoots, and I cannot move. At that moment, I know it’s over. My hopes of pulling off the New York City Marathon at last – are toast. I spend the evening crawling around the house. It’s that bad.

Thus, the Cheese Storm Incident. So, how did you kill your knee? Cleaning up cheese. No, really.

I stumble into Dr. Triathlon’s office the next morning on crutches. He doesn’t seem alarmed. I guess he’s used to this, but since I’d left him in far better shape the last time I’d seen him, I guess I expected at least a little surprise. The MRI, which, having been taken Friday night before Tropical Storm Romano made landfall, is probably already obsolete (though again, Dr. Tri didn’t seem concerned by this either), shows the damage. Only a radiologist could string together prose like, “Complete radial tear of the posterior horn of the medial meniscus. Associated edema at the meniscocapsular junction at the level of the posterior horn may represent meniscocapsular sprain.” There was more, but I don’t want to unnecessarily raise the average word length of this saga.

I didn’t disagree with Dr. Tri’s assessment that it’s worth trying to let it heal rather than surgically snipping out parts that will never grow back. So it’s months of no running. Pray for my sanity. No Nantucket – not a big deal, though I felt bad for having committed and having to pull out. But moreso... No New York. And so that’s it. Three and out.

Unlike Boston, New York does allow for a deferral, so I can translate my entry to next year (paying again, but whatever…). But I’ll have to decide that around January, when it may not be entirely clear how well the healing is going. I had already concluded that it was probably time to scale back to shorter distances – I just planned to ease into that after New York, and Boston, and, well…I’d get there at some point, and not fret about it. There are always adventures to be had that don’t require twenty-six miles, and there are plenty more summits as well. Just take it as it comes…

But you’ve got to admit that if it had to happen, you couldn’t ask for a better title for the big moment.

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.