07 April 2019

Train Wreck A’Comin’


It was a typical Thursday night evening club run, the kind we call ‘After Dark’ before Daylight Savings Time rolls around (gloriously), reduces our need for blinky lights, and turns them into ‘Into the Dusk’ runs. I consider these to be fun outings, three-quarters social and one-quarter workout. Though it’s true that if the right people show up, the run can morph from the a casual jog into sort of a quasi-fartlek, with the ‘fast gang’ pouring it on for stretches before circling back (amid shouts of “Swarm!”) to recoagulate the group. Never are they the kind of workout that makes you hurt the next day (summer hills and track arrived this week just to offer up that possibility).

But this time, by a couple miles in I was first skipping the out-and-back stretches up the bonus-hill cul-de-sacs, then limping alone back to our host’s home to nurse my woes in some of his home-brews among good friends, feeling sad, annoyed, conflicted, whatever. Boston was then just over two weeks away and I was out of commission. My right calf, which had twinged a bit on two earlier runs, had gone full-out pull, strain, tear, whatever; it just damn well hurt enough to tell me without a doubt that I was out for a least a few days. Having just hit a birthday the day before, that coming on the heels of my annual ‘return to running anniversary’ (fourteen years), and thus already feeling somewhat aged, then having had to deal with a plethora of other issues over the last few months, it was a good thing that home-brew was there (thanks, Mike) to prevent a Full-On Funk.

Let’s put it this way: lately it’s kind of like I’m standing on a low hill, staring out to sea, and I can see the tsunami coming. There’s not a lot I can do about it, not even run away, since running, it would seem, is one of the things I’m not doing so well at the moment. And now Boston is barely more than a week away. The train wreck, she is a’comin…

Over ten years ago I set out to write this blog with the theme of documenting the ups and downs of running later in life; ‘later' at the time I started writing loosely meant over forty, or in short, not a kid. The clock ticked, the bell tolled, and now I find myself documenting an entirely different kind of ‘later’, this one being what is unmistakably the start – or perhaps well into – the inevitable decline of aging. I’ve lamented many times in this column that it might be coming. I’m done with that ‘might’ stuff. It’s here. So let’s just deal with it. (And I’ve used way too many single quotes, so I’ll stop now.)

To begin with, I did something I rarely do. I went off for our weekend upstate New York visit to Dearest Offspring the Younger without a whit of running gear in my bags. No gear, can’t succumb in a weak moment and go out for a run, only to re-injure. Witness protection program. Forced healing, if you may. Nearly a week after the Calf Nelson, I finally gave it a test run, and yes, the calf came back, but by now it’s nearly certain I can’t save myself from the product of an entire season of bad training. Certainly not in a week before Boston. And certainly not with a knee that’s progressed pretty much beyond the point of no return.

Enough of that, at least for a few paragraphs. Look at the bright sides, right? That’s what I always try to do here. The bright side that my last race produced what I consider one of the best race photographs ever, so outstanding that I actually paid the photographer a few bucks to get a licensed copy to post it here without guilt. A photo that was so great because… I wasn’t racing. We’ll get back to that story later, but for now, just soak up the joy of me with the chowder ladies. You serve chowder (especially good chowder), I will come to your race. You insist that I take some home to Dearest Spouse, I will pose for a photograph. And no matter what happened on the course, I will leave happy.

Before we got to that chowderrific day in New Bedford (or New Beffuhd, as I often call it), I had to pass through the perennial rite of winter, the Hyannis Marathon Relay. Back in my college days, my service fraternity used to get a chapter award every year from the national organization, since all you really had to do to get it was to fill out the application which showed that your chapter was not, in fact, dead, and that you had, in fact, performed some service. And like magic, your H. Roe Bartle Award would arrive, the award you got for asking. Hyannis has almost become that: if you show up, show that you’ve made an effort to run a decent pace (e.g., you are not dead and you have performed some running), you will win your division in the relay. Which we did, for the ninth time. I need a bigger shelf for the clamshells.


Actually, two funny things happened this year, besides yet another year of dismal cold, rainy, and windy weather. First was that we actually did have some competition, and while our team’s time was off from previous years and was still enough to win our ninth masters’ division clam shell, there was actually a team within ten minutes of us.
Second was that we weren’t really masters. We sort of screwed up. To qualify as a masters team, everyone has to be over forty. We were all, as it turned out, over fifty, which meant that while we were perfectly legal to race as masters, we should have raced as seniors so as to avoid the withering competition of the young’uns. Oops. No matter, we ran off with it anyway. And a good time was had by all, as usual, except for the fact that they did not, as they usually do, have chowder after the race. Boo. Hiss.

The chowder had to wait for the New Beffuhd Half Marathon a few weeks later. Unlike Hyannis, New Beffuhd came around with the finest weather I’ve ever seen at that beloved race – so fine, in fact, that the legendary wind late in the race was for once almost non-existent. Despite this, it was a somewhat miserable day. How? Let me count the ways.

I should note that I actually ran a pretty good eight mile race. The only trouble is that this was a half marathon. The wheels started coming off at eight and things got progressively uglier as the miles clicked by. I was hoping that nobody captured me on film (er, pixels) late in the race, but sadly someone did ensconce for eternity my complete collapse of form, dignity, and hope.

Those high miles were the culmination of a myriad of woes, some previously documented here, some held in the deepest folds of darkness. You’re tired of hearing about the knee. You’re not surprised when I tell you the other one hurts at times, too. You haven’t heard me complain that my back has been acting up for months, on and off, but it has. And you won’t be surprised when I tell you that a week back (this has nothing to do with New Beffuhd), a strange sharp shooting pain attacked my right upper pelvic bone while on a short run over to the gym. So sharp it stopped me cold. So strange that the best Dr. Google could suggest was that I needed to have my uterus removed, which I think would be a significant challenge for the medical community. And stranger, the next day it was gone, completely, nary a wisp of recollection, never to return.

But the thing that’s making me feel old is that a few months ago Lady Doctor read me the scroll of reality. Those nagging cholesterol and blood pressure threats that we’ve been ignoring on the theory that enough exercise heals all wounds, well, as one’s age advances they grow on the risk charts, and the time had come, she said, that we had to do something about them. Exercise alone wouldn’t absolve her medical concern; it was time for low-dose meds. And though she hand-picked solutions described in the medical literature as ‘exercise tolerant’, within weeks of introduction I was a slobbering hopeless mess. Well, perhaps not slobbering, but all remnants of performance pretty much went to hell rapidly. Backing off on them helped a little, but it just seems that some damage of age has been induced.

And that was going through my head, if not my veins, while I plugged up the final hill at mile twelve, looking so obviously ragged that runners passing me were shouting the kind of encouragement that you toss at the hapless. Bless them. They meant well.

Perspective time: I’m battling age and wear and tear. It’s nothing compared to my friend Tom who’s battling cancer. And while this ended up as a Personal Worst for me in the half marathon, somehow I still almost scored for my team, rolling in less than a minute out of the money. And let’s face it, no matter how slow I thought it was, few of my non-running friends would find it at all understandable to hear me complain about how long it took to run a half-marathon, since that’s something they just don’t even consider doing on any given random weekend. Yeah, things hurt. But they do for most people my age. Deal with it.

So Boston looms, I’m more or less permanently injured, and I’ve run only a few more miles in the entire first quarter of this year than I have in some months. Whatever.

The reality is that all I have to do is finish Boston to keep my thirteen-year streak alive. Re-qualifying is the goal, and in any other year that wouldn’t be too hard. But if I don’t re-qualify, I’ve got a backup race already planned a month out. I’m hoping to make that just a fun outing with my clubmates, but it can turn deadly serious if it must. And if that fails?

Again, perspective time. When I started this whole Second Lap adventure, running a marathon wasn’t the goal, the plan, or even on the recipe list. When finishing a marathon turned into marathoning (my definition of having done more than one), qualifying for Boston wasn’t a realistic prospect. Surprise. That happened. Then it happened again. And lather, rinse, repeat, it kept happening. But it’s not going to keep happening forever. And it’s extremely unlikely that it will happen long enough to nudge myself onto that famed page in the Boston Marathon program listing the longest streakers. Heck, to make twenty-five, I’d need to keep this up every year till I’m sixty-eight; not saying I don’t want to be running then, but still chunking out Boston every year? Unlikely.
So it’s going to end, and when it does I will walk away, head high, smile on my face, and say, stealing the Douglass Adams line, “Thanks for all the fish.” There’s no point in lamenting. I never saw this coming (well, OK, I did dream, whatever), it came, and it’s been a helluva’ ride. And besides, there’s plenty of fun on our casual group runs and there are plenty of other adventures to tackle.

So let’s go see if this turns into a train wreck. Oughta’ be fun, in its sick sort of way.

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