Context

Context is everything. Ordinary activities put into a different context turn interesting, both to the person doing them, and to people around. Turning things interesting keeps things fresh. And keeping things fresh makes all the difference when life grinds hard and winter refuses to back off. So take a couple of ordinary activities and events like a run in the woods and a couple of lost dogs, and put them in a different context, and with a bit of a stretch, you can conjure a story.

As I write, the storm that won’t leave, which is also the storm that doesn’t seem to want to arrive, continues to blow, and the snow that was promised to start in earnest over twenty-four hours ago is still trying to work up its motivation to accumulate. Now take that ordinary event and put it in the context of surviving a winter full of such storms, barely clothed, barely fed, barely sheltered, two-hundred and thirty-three years ago. You’re in the Continental Army, and for the second time in three years, your leader, General Washington, has elected to ride out the winter, this time the most brutal in memory, in the hills and hollows near Morristown, New Jersey.

Imagine your joy when March finally arrives. I often refer to the Dark Period, that sixty days from January First till March First, as an ordeal. It’s nothing compared to what these men faced. No matter how brutal the weather at Martha’s Vineyard or Hyannis, I’ve got a hot shower. They weren’t so lucky. As the story goes, they endured twenty snowstorms in December 1779 alone.

This occurred to me when I found myself running the trails of Morristown National Historical Park on what happened to be March First, a day that couldn’t decide whether to break with sun or spit with snow, but to me, it was the end of the dark period. Spring was clearly banging at the door, despite tonight’s aforementioned storm (hey, it’ll melt soon, right?). Certainly those men of the American Revolution were still cold, but turning the calendar to March must have lifted their spirits.

Being out on the trails certainly lifted my spirits. On day seventeen of a stretch where I’d spent all of two full days at home, and on wrapping up a week of business in New Jersey, weariness was setting in. Granted, two of those days away were for races already documented here, and other on-the-road runs help maintain sanity, like an icy Maine morning slog and the evening set of mile repeats at the high school near our Jersey headquarters. But by Friday afternoon, burnt was an apt description, so knowing there was nothing but highway to fill the afternoon, there was no logical reason not to delay those miles of pavement in order to soak up some limes of historic ground before heading for home. Keep it fresh.

The park consists of a couple of almost non-contiguous chunks of land surrounded by modern mansions of wealth. What was a secluded series of hidden glens edged with heights ideal for watching for the enemy is now a secluded series of hidden glens edged with the heights of consumption and sumptuous living. It’s not an expansive place, so to get in a satisfying number of miles I set off from the southern part known as the New Jersey Brigade area. The terrain easily lived up to the hills that Google Maps had billed, rising and falling excessively, never allowing for any rhythm establishment. But this wasn’t a place to worry about rhythm, it was a place to kick back, slow down, and soak up the surprisingly open woods, bared by winter of nearly all underbrush, while marveling at the extent of Hurricane Sandy damage so far inland. That unfathomable level of timber destruction was in fact a theme of the entire week in the area.

A small river, more hills, and a road brought me into the main part of the park, known as the Jockey Hollow area, but still trail-bound, away from the attractions of the park. Not that those spots had done any attracting. I may have been thinking spring, but the feeling clearly wasn’t universal. By the time I’d finished my ninety-minute jaunt, I still had fingers left over after counting all the people I encountered, which was why I was surprised to be greeted by two friendly and enthusiastic canines on a deserted stretch of trail. Two canines who decided to become running companions, who fell into my stride like they’d known me forever. I expected to find their people around the next bend, but no people. A half mile, two people, but not their people. A mile or more later, including several tries to send them off to…where? Where could I send them? Mattered not, they stuck like glue, so onward, hoping to find their people, but…nobody.

Lost dogs aren’t rare, nor are dogs running trails. But there’s something ironic finding yourself as the stranger in town, wandering unknown turf in the role of Pied Piper to a couple of obviously well-cared for yet clearly lost pets. You can’t ignore them, especially as they’re following you further from their home. One might say I stepped in it; visiting Bostonian now has local responsibility. A problem? Yes, but at least an enjoyable one, being led by a little white a creature of boundless energy, constantly fifteen feet ahead on the trail, that I’m guessing was a schnoodle, and trailed by a chocolate lab, lively at the start, but who by the end of this odyssey would hit the wall in exhaustion and be put to shame by his small friend.

Knowing that losing them – and not knowing their fate – might be worse than leading them further, I pulled a phone number from their tags and played mental games to commit it to memory so as to at least report when later reunited with a phone. Fortunately, a couple of phone-equipped humans appeared a half mile later, and in no time we’d arranged a rendezvous at the next road crossing where a hugely relieved owner met me to retrieve Sage and Lovey, who were indeed quite lost, someone apparently having left a door open.

Headline: Stranger from afar effects not-terribly-heroic but certainly appreciated dog rescue from the deserted woods of a historic national park. Common event, but the context made it kind of interesting. I’m sure the local news would have made it into a nice human-interest story, but instead I slinked off back into the woods, checked out a bit more of the park, soaked up the history as well as some errant precipitation, and, slightly damp and cold, went home, happy to have had an eventful afternoon to keep it fresh.

Twice Chilled

It’s like being a twice-baked potato, except it’s the opposite, and last I checked, I’m not a potato. It happened again, and at this rate, my body should be acclimated for an Arctic expedition. Or at a minimum, perhaps I’ve reversed some of the effects of last spring’s Boston Bake-Fest, an overheating that I’m convinced has made me more sensitive to the cold ever since. The torture that brings on these thoughts came about on Sunday on Cape Cod, just a few sea miles from the previous week’s bodily refrigeration on Martha’s Vineyard.

Traditions die hard, and this one nearly made me die the hard way. For the fourth year, my local club, the Highland City Striders, fielded our men’s masters’ team at the Hyannis Marathon Relay. For the fourth year, Rocket John took the first leg and I the third, in a race where it’s two laps to the marathon and two legs to the lap, so our legs in fact share the same start and finish points. Our tradition has been that after he runs his leg, he hangs out at the exchange zone at Craigsville Beach while our second man returns to the starting point, hands off to me, and I return to that same exchange zone. He, by then typically damp and cold, daringly jumps out of a warm automotive shelter and joins me for our ‘warm down’, running the back half of the course which comprises the second and forth legs. We always tease our anchor man that our plan provides insurance: should we find him dead on the course, we can take the baton and make a run for it. This year, he wasn’t the one we should have worried about.

Hyannis is not a small event, and the larger an event gets, the tougher the decision gets as to whether the show goes on when conditions turn ugly. This one nearly didn’t get off the ground. The Weather Gods predicted doom, gloom, not to mention plenty of white stuff and at one point winds exceeding the speed limit on secondary highways. Faced with those possibilities, several thousand of us breathed a collective sigh of relief when the day was upgraded to merely windy, cold rain. Ah, what fools we can be when our perceptions are subconsciously biased. Windy cold rain…Martha’s Vineyard, Wineglass Half, I know that’s not pretty, but relative to what we’d feared, hey, not so bad, right? And oh, did it rain! Buckets, I tell you. John set off in nothing less than a downpour.

But twenty minutes before my leg, the Gods smiled, and it slacked. Mind you, it didn’t stop, but slowed enough that aided by a seriously fashionable trash bag, I was able to warm up and take the handoff in a not entirely soggy state. As I always coached my cross-country team, running in the rain only stinks when you start. Once you’re in it, you’re in it.

Seven miles and several cross-country-like stretches later (where we had to divert through sideline mud pits to avoid minor floods), I’d clicked off my leg to the beach, and found myself thoroughly saturated. To avoid the chill, John and I hit the back six quickly.

Cue the deep, ominous music. The rain picked up. The wind strengthened. And the temperature dropped. It was like Martha’s Vineyard all over again, but far wetter. It wasn’t a warm down, it wasn’t even a cool down. It was a repeat refrigeration, but unlike the previous week, I didn’t head straight for the shower, and that mistake nearly finished me. Instead, back at post-race party central, I tried to re-warm with copious hot soup while still cloaked in soak. Lesson to self: staying in wet stuff, dumb idea. Hot soup to no avail, violent shakes encroaching, a club-mate handed me her room key and ordered me to the shower. By the end of the interminably long walk to that furthest-most room, I’d reached the seriously ugly stage, nearly unable to strip away drenched frozen layers, barely reaching warm water. Not wanting to alarm me, she didn’t tell me until I returned that my lips had been blue. And I should note that I wasn’t alone. Others, including GBTC buddy Joe, who ran a far stronger training-run full marathon than he planned, told me of similar experiences. It was just one of those seriously ugly days.

But amidst the drama was the almost anti-climactic happiness of yet another hand-painted fourth clam shell, the unique award of the Hyannis relay, as once again our masters team topped a weather-thinned field for the win. No, there wasn’t much competition, and no, we didn’t match last year’s time (given the conditions, that wasn’t a surprise), but once a post-race scoring glitch was ironed out it was clear that we’d left no doubt, bettering the next-nearest team by well over a half-hour. Twice chilled within eight days, but four wins in a row, a growing set of clams, and spring, I insist, arrives Friday.

On A Different Note, Thirty-Two Years Later Department: The encouragement of a great coach sticks with you forever. Back in those schoolboy First Lap days, our distance man for winter and spring track was a guy named John Perry. I couldn’t tell you his qualifications, I couldn’t tell you whether he was truly a great coach from a technical perspective, but I can tell you that he knew how to motivate. During the winter track season of eighty to eighty-one, while we roamed from improvised to inappropriate venues (such as the ‘track’ at the Domes at Elmira College consisting of duct-tape markings circling the tennis courts, don’t impale yourself passing around the net posts!), While we raced around those somewhat dangerous circuits, Coach Perry would scream in his unique hoarse voice that still rings in my head, “Lift and DRIVE Mr. Cattarin!” “Pick ‘em up and put ‘em down!” To this day I still think of those phrases as mantra.

But that year he also held out a special carrot. He spoke constantly of an elite meet to be held at Princeton University at the end of the winter season that he wanted a few of us to qualify for and travel to. Along with those commands to lift and drive came a new refrain, “We’re gonna’ go to PRINCETON!” To a high school kid, it was exotic, it was exciting, it was worthy of busting our butts to achieve.

Alas, we never went to that meet (I never learned if we missed a cut-off, or by how much, or…?). Other than a quick drive-through perusal while on business in Trenton early in my career, I really never even went to Princeton at all…until last week. Being as it is now college touring time for Dearest Daughter the Elder, I found myself in that wealthy, beautiful portion of New Jersey so that DD the E could tour the Disneyesque campus of that hallowed ivy. The morning before our campus tour, I embarked on my own, striking out on the peaceful Delaware & Raritan Canal trail for a few miles before diverting to downtown Princeton, then plunging into the disarmingly beautiful campus. It was easy to get somewhat lost in the myriads of pathways crisscrossing the expansive school, but it was a joyful kind of lost, soaking up the perfectly manicured scenery at every bend, and confident that when I found myself spit out on the other end, it would be easy to find the canal for the jaunt back to the hotel we’d dubbed Forward Camp Princeton. That interlude of lost lasted probably only ten minutes, but it was a ten minute span I’d waited thirty-two years for, since that winter of eighty-one. Lift and DRIVE, Mr. Cattarin, we’re gonna’ go to Princeton. Maybe it wasn’t the track, maybe it was just the campus, but thanks, Coach, I finally made it, and I was thinking of you.

Multi-Dimensional Goodness

A true New England classic, the Martha’s Vineyard 20-Miler boasts the slogan “No Weenies”, aptly accompanied by the familiar red circle-with-a-bar international NO symbol cleanly stomping out that word. Ironic then that I found myself wearing that race shirt, complete with that logo, the next day when I sought the shelter of an indoor hamster cage run (a.k.a. treadmill) for the first time in over a year. Yes, I weenied out, but given the brutal icy wind blowing the day’s fresh snow across ugly sloppy roads, and mostly having just thawed from the previous day’s experience, well, my disdain of those wide-belted devices was trumped by a whiff of sanity.

This bending of a core principal (Outside!) was induced by the final miles of Saturday’s 20-Miler, when racing into a wind-driven stinging sleet, already soaked by nearly fifteen miles of precipitation, having lost most feeling in my arms and weathered a couple of rounds of frozen and re-thawed eyelids, I found my legs so cold and numb that I feared they’d stop working and I’d stumble. While I staved off repeat of the Great Wineglass Tragedy, I was pretty close to non-functional crossing the line. Rarely have I beelined so rapidly to the rejuvenation of a hot shower. Suffice to say that the race director didn’t lie in his race-eve email warning that the weather would, in a word, suck.

I’d already concluded that we did it right last year, jumping in less than twenty-four hours before the starting gun, already knowing we faced a day of wind but one mainly dominated by relative midwinter warmth and sunshine. Not so this year, when Rocket John and I opted to take the early-bird registration discount months back, which left us feverishly fretting the forecast. Frankly, the angst probably wasn’t worth the ten bucks we each saved, but then again, had we not committed, with the forecast as it was, we’d probably have opted out. John, who suffered an injury-ridden rough day, probably wouldn’t have minded, but despite the extremity refrigeration bonus, I’d have missed out on a good one. Ya’ never know, if you don’t toe the line, it won’t happen!

A good one it was, and on so many dimensions. How do we count the ways? There’s the sheer adventure of the planes, trains and automobiles-style complex journey, or in this case, boats, buses, and automobiles. This is not a simple excursion, though the organizers make it as easy as possible. There’s the enthusiasm of the volunteers, never such a cold and wet lot putting on such happy faces – and their uncanny ability to have your checked baggage ready and waiting when you walk in the door to the school is nothing short of exemplary customer service. Then there’s the ‘Old Home Days’ atmosphere, this being an event for the die-hards, and indeed the die-hards make their appearances creating a reunion of sorts. And not only old friends reunited, but new friendships made, bonds enhanced by the joy of us veterans sharing our logistical knowledge of this odyssey with the first-timers who, unlike at most easily-manageable races, can really benefit from the guidance. But that’s only the start of it, because this race has some pretty serious legs and it’s long enough to generate the excitement of a developing drama.

Old Friends, Club Friends, New Friends on the Vineyard

There’s a healthy competitive club presence here, with my Greater Boston crew fielding five and some clubs up to a dozen. While we didn’t take the new club participation trophy, we’ll claim the bravery medal, as one of our own was probably the only soul brave enough to run this in merely shorts and a singlet. I think they’re still chipping poor Jon out of his personal ice block.

Moreso there’s a healthy competitive presence in general, with a lot of experienced runners who know tactics and appreciate competitive teamwork. This year’s race developed much differently from last year’s, where the top ten all went out hard and fast. This year’s start was so leisurely by comparison that despite my promises not to go out too hot, I had to hold back so as not to lead the pack around the first bend. Two of my GBTC teammates soon forged away, and it was only that promise of conservatism that made me hold back with the chase pack, which in retrospect was the smart option. But by mile three I wasn’t so sure, as we lumbered a loping six-thirty-four pace – already putting me behind my hoped for six-thirty average.

I needn’t have worried. These guys knew what they were doing. As soon as we rounded the tip of Oak Bluffs and put the wind at our backs, we dropped the pace twenty to twenty-five seconds and made a game of it. Easily the most enjoyable stretch of the race, for seven miles we as competitors worked as a tight team to hold a solid tempo and put plenty of time in the bank, hitting the halfway point a few seconds ahead of last year’s irrationally exuberant start.

But at ten I miscalculated slightly, having placed myself on the road to avoid the snow of the bike trails and not returned to the trail in time for a turn which snuck up sooner than expected. I found myself on a wide trajectory that broke the pack magic, and suddenly I was alone in a self-motivation exercise as the rain picked up and the air grew colder. The next few miles were tough mentally, no longer carried by or carrying the pack, but the teamwork wasn’t finished. Anyone who’s run this race before knows that the second half is tough not only for being the later miles, but due to the prevailing winds, the gentle but long upgrades that never seem to offer up the favor of downs, and the somewhat mind-numbing sameness of the scenery once away from the coast. Thus when Tom from competing club Whirlaway caught up with me around mile thirteen, he well knew he’d be better off with the motivation of two rather than simply pushing forward alone with that far left to go. Between that and his just being a wicked good guy to help drag me along, together we held the splits to respectable, if not first-half levels, until he motored on with two and a half to go, close enough that we each could find the will to finish it under our own steam. While he put nearly a minute on me in those last two miles (my nineteenth was abysmal), it’s pretty clear that teamwork benefitted both of us.

My mental math told me a Personal Record was in the offing, though after that snail-like mile nineteen I still had some doubt. Twenty was a screamer though (or perhaps the nineteenth mile marker was misplaced, which seems a little more likely), and the clock read a surprisingly smaller number than expected – well under two-oh-nine and a big personal best by more than a minute – far better than I’d expected on the starting line. For the second year it was good enough to take top honors my age group, a nice boost being less than six weeks away from moving to the next one. Greater Boston’s team of five cleaned up, winning the overall men’s, three age groups, and a second place age group; five out of five medalists, not too shabby. More important though was the fact that this year’s race was simply smarter, with a conservative start (still no negative splits, but at a roughly sixty-three – sixty-five split, not too bad) and more teamwork, bringing a better result.

Fitting that after all of this that Old Home Days served up a final chapter on the boat ride home when we met up with Chris of RunRunLive fame, the very Chris whom I’d met not far from the mainland side ferry terminal while running Cape Cod seven-plus years back, and who inspired this blog. Thanks for the brew, Chris, who knew they actually served the good stuff on the boat? Chris is raising bucks for Team Hoyt for Boston, consider dropping some coin in his till on his web site.

And so it was that after this somewhat epic day, when Sunday dawned snowy, sloppy, but most importantly, windy as all get up, gusts well over forty, it was, after all, the day after, not the day of, and I’d already legitimately earner my No Weenies shirt and medal. Nothing says you have to push into a near-suspended-animation experience daily. But having said all that, I must admit that amidst the boredom, faced with two large screen televisions each tuned to farm-team pro, er, excuse me, college basketball, both just far enough away so as to make the scores unreadable, and of course having no headphones to hear the commentary, yes, amidst that and the warmth and sweat of the great indoors, the bruised arms from whacking the channel changing squawk box, the amusement at people mounting and dismounting their mills within ten minutes, indeed, despite all that, I must admit I got a pretty darn good workout in on that hamster cage.

Give Yourself Credit

Once upon a time in a different era, all of two weekends ago, back before our simply cold winter world was transformed into the Great White North following the Blizzard of ’13 (I steadfastly refuse to use the Weather Channel’s goofy storm names), an interesting event occurred, quite unexpectedly. That particular Sunday I headed out with Joe the Plumber, one of my Greater Boston training buddies, for a sixteen miler. Determined not to hurt ourselves too badly (which we invariably do when we run together), we went out deliberately slow, and were pleased to see we’d barely broken seven and a half minutes at the mile mark. Very shortly thereafter – translate, we still hadn’t really picked up the pace yet toward the frenetic finish we’d pull off a hundred minutes or so later – we approached an intersection where a runner came at us from another direction.

I’ll pause here to note how surprisingly rare it is to encounter other runners. You’d think with our numbers, we’d be tripping over each other, but it generally doesn’t happen. I’m convinced that eighty percent of them do a couple laps around their neighborhoods and never venture onto the roads that are long enough – read, more or less main roads – to actually cover any distance. Since those are the roads I frequent, well, you can see the connection here – or lack thereof. As such, events such as this I describe are unusual enough to make themselves instantly notable.

That being said, along comes said runner, approaching from the right. A young ‘un, he was, daring enough to be out in shorts on a chilly winter day, that being a characteristic of youthful exuberance, or perhaps foolishness, but now is not the moment to examine that aspect. What was notable was that to our appearance, he looked like a rocket: fast, smooth, just plain smokin’ it down the road. Not the jogger type whatsoever. Neither of us said anything as he passed through the intersection just ahead of us, where we made our planned turn seconds later which converged our routes, dropping us perhaps fifty feet behind him. And then a funny thing happened. He didn’t get away.

Our routes converged for only a quarter mile or so before he took the next right while our plans carried us straight ahead. But when he turned, he was now perhaps only forty feet in front of us. And recall, we weren’t really up to speed yet, this being early on, with fifteen miles in front of us. The implication was obvious and intriguing.

To that point, neither Joe nor I had spoken about our wordless interloper, which made it even more amusing when, shortly after his departure, we simultaneously over-spoke each other with almost identical comments of, “Do we really look like that?”

The literal answer was, of course, no, since we had twenty to twenty-five years on the kid, and no sweet teenage girl would ever ask us to the prom (and we’re both thankful for that). But aside from our, let’s say, mature features, the meaningful answer was, wow, perhaps we do.

Now and then I’ll hear from someone in town that they saw me run by, and I’ll usually think about how pathetic I must have looked at that point. A few weeks ago it happened as I was struggling up the final climb of another long one, trailing my training partner of the day by a decent margin, utterly spent while trying to pull off a major effort while enduring a major cold. I was ratted out the next day, and instantly wished my espier hadn’t seen me then. But inevitably those viewers have no such impression. Even when that person is another runner, their assessment is almost universally positive.

I’m not commenting on my svelte form here, but making a general statement. It’s easy for us to form a less than optimal impression of ourselves based on our struggles on any given day compared to our ideal vision of what we’d like to be. It’s equally easy to look at others and marvel at how smooth, how fast, how good they look, and compare ourselves negatively. What’s hard is to put those two together and accept that you, no matter your pace, your form, your style, probably look pretty darn good to the casual observer, and as I’ve often noted, just by being out there, you’re setting a great example. Look at that guy go! Man, I oughta’ do that, too!

Our encounter with the fast-looking guy lasted all of about a minute, but the lesson learned has stuck around now, more than a week later, when I think back about it. The real trick will be to pull that memory out when I really need it, like today when I found myself struggling uphill into stiff wind, body sore and tired after several straight days of ten-plus-milers following the dig-out from our blizzard. I didn’t think about it today, but I should have.

Give yourself credit. You look better than you think, even when you know you don’t look so hot at the end of a hard effort or race. Feel good about it, you’re sending the right message.

Meanwhile, about that blizzard: Yup, it snowed, and it snowed lots, somewhere between two and two and a half feet. I’m thankful I don’t live on the coast, suffered no tidal surges, didn’t lose power, and live in a neighborhood of great people who all pull together at times like this. My snow blower consists of two arms and a shovel, accompanied by six more arms of my family, whereas all of my neighbors utilize fossil-fuel-driven mechanical means. I’m not complaining, there are places and needs for both methods. We dug and blew and heaved and dug some more, helping each other for hours upon hours until the multitudinous mayhem of moguls had been transformed into a pretty patch of paved pathways. I do think they get the short end of the deal, as their machines need a lot more maintenance than mine and they miss out on the best upper body workout known to man, but I’m glad they’re there. And after all this? Well, what would you expect? Went for a run (carefully) of course!

A Very Quick Distraction

It’s been a rather brutal week in Lake Wobegon. One would think we’d moved to central Minnesota for the temperatures we’ve seen; temperatures more reminiscent of the youthful days of the First Lap rather than those of the tepid winters of late. Such weeks just scream for a distraction to help us forget that late January has been, as it statistically should be, the coldest part of the year. And a distraction we did get, a quick one, indeed, a very quick one. More on that later.

First it’s worth noting that times like these test men’s souls, or more accurately, the part of the soul that constitutes the memory. After a number of chilly outings of late, Thursday morning I found myself in Boston proper, having stayed overnight at an overpriced hotel for a work function, a hotel that shouldn’t be shamed for trying to charge me more at the front desk than they were advertising on their web site, a hotel that, despite their lowest rate being double what I’m happy to pay, still found the need to try to charge exorbitant fees for expected freebies like internet service and local phone calls, and God forbid, if you’re a visitor from afar unlucky enough to have a cell phone that doesn’t work here, fees for calling over the pond that were simply shocking. No, they shouldn’t be shamed and should be left anonymous so that nobody knows it’s the Westin….oops.

Anyway, finding myself in the famed area code six-one-seven ironically on day six-one-seven of the streak (the long-term reader will recall this happened in Seattle on day two-oh-six, and though I didn’t mention it, was supposed to happen last week in New Jersey on six-oh-nine before that excursion was called off due to weather, but I digress), I didn’t have the luxury of waiting till the sun was high, as duty beckoned, so a sunrise jaunt was in order. If this was six-one-seven in six-one-seven, it was only appropriate to pop in roughly four in four. Degrees, that is, with a notable wind to add to the fun. One may think it unwise on a morning like to head to a place likely to be exposed to even more wind that, but being in striking distance of the waterfront at sunrise on a morning extracted straight from a Renaissance master’s painting simply can’t be ignored. The sun rose in unequalled glory from a low cloud bank over the harbor as I circled Fort Independence on Castle Island, and only a memory of that guy freezing to death in Jack London’s Call of the Wild, seventh grade English class (see, we do remember some of that stuff) kept me from circuiting the entire causeway that encircles Pleasant Bay. I figured it might be a long time before someone found my frozen corpse out there.

Four was cold, no doubt, but I recalled the night in my youthful days when I’d gone out late one night at the other four, four below. So when asked about my sanity later in the day, I referenced that night, implying that the current day’s run wasn’t really so bad. And later research into my old logs proved that I was both wrong and right, as my memory of the record coldest run was wrong, but only further proving that I was right, Thursday indeed wasn’t so bad. As it turns out, that earlier record wasn’t four below, it was ten below, the night of January third, nineteen eighty one. There’s a record I have no real desire to exceed.

By Saturday, the surprisingly well attended nine degree club run felt almost comfortable, and afterward, the sun made it actually feel warm till I got back into car and saw it had risen only to twelve. Clearly it was time to do something to stop thinking about the cold, cold, cold.

And that something was only hours away, and a few miles down the road. For that very afternoon we were treated to an event of Olympic proportion right in our backyard. The rumors that had floated for several weeks had been confirmed, and thus Darling Daughter the Younger and I made our way to Boston, braving the hazards of impossible parking, to insert ourselves into the stands at the Boston University

Terrier Classic track meet, where the organizers had assembled an all-star cast for an invitational mile featuring none other than Galen Rupp, silver medalist in the 10,000, which if my recollection is correct made him the first American to medal in that event since 1964. That race was among the most thrilling I’ve ever seen, and here was the star attraction, targeting a sub-three-fifty mile in our backyard. Three-fifty!

The indoor track at Boston University is supposedly one of the fastest (it holds my somewhat less-than-light-speed Second Lap mile personal best), and the facility is among the finest, with ample room for spectators. Good thing, because the place was packed solid, not only with the many club and collegiate athletes of the major meet in progress, but with hordes who’d made the same pilgrimage as we, simply to see history in the making. The crowd which, by sheer physical facility limitations, was smaller than the massive stadium in

London, was to a man completely tuned into the significance of what was happening on the oval. That crowd spilled from the seats, jammed the rails of the bleachers, packed the perimeter of the track, and through sheer numbers of athletes, managed to almost fill the infield as well, and generated an energy level I haven’t experienced live in years, if not decades. That crowd roared louder and louder on each circuit, reaching new crescendos as the first pacer dropped as planned at eight hundred meters, the second pacer stepped aside four hundred meters later, leaving Galen alone to drive the last four hundred meters in fifty-eight flat while the house exploded. The Cubs winning the World Series would not generate the concentrated energy inside that building. It wasn’t electric, it was nuclear.

Rupp missed breaking three-fifty but came close enough that nobody left unsatisfied. Three-fifty-point-nine-two, the fifth fastest indoor mile in history, and the second fastest by an American. And following him, at three-fifty-seven up,

four more clocking under four, and the final, sixth runner, clocking four flat. I had to explain to Darling Daughter how merely sixty years ago it was considered impossible to break the four-minute barrier, and here we’d just witnessed a race where essentially everyone did it – and the guys who’d just run three-fifty-seven were essentially ignored!

While Darling Daughter, the Biggest Fan of the leading runners of our day, was understandably in heaven (as was, to our amusement, the young lady sitting behind us, clearly of the same mindset – who needs rock stars when you have these guys?) I was no less in awe. Rupp and his coach Alberto Salazar, just a few feet from us, not for an expo appearance, but making history on a track that I’ve run.

Suffice to say that we pretty much forgot that it was cold outside.

My video of the race, admittedly not of professional quality, can be seen on YouTube at this link. It’s worth the five minutes, just to absorb the energy of the moment. Enjoy.

Zero Dark Thirty

When we can motor through the dark times, it makes the normal days seem like a breeze. That this week brought its challenges makes emerging on the other side that much sweeter. No, nobody died here, no diagnoses of deadly illness, no unearthly conflagrations, or anything, but suffice to say there have been easier weeks, and Wednesday was the zenith of days we could have done without.

Overriding everything is the simple fact that it’s dark. It’s winter, even if it did push fifty degrees today. Here on the eastern edge of the time zone, the sun just doesn’t shine much, especially in the afternoon, so plan your runs carefully. It’s that annual time that I call the Sixty Day Challenge, also known as the Dark Period: January 1 till I declare virtual spring on March 1. Come on, you can make it thought sixty days of anything, right? Count off the six day chunks, another ten percent done, bang! It’ll be spring.

But during those sixty days, it’s dark, wet, sloppy, icy, dreary, cold, windy, and did I say dark? With a job that takes me places, exciting and vibrant places like Wednesday’s destination of a small town in Maine (no insult, truly lovely people to meet and hopefully not infect), well, momma always said there’d be days like this. Actually, she didn’t, but she should have. Suffice to say that I’m not a fan of being out for a run at five thirty in the morning because that’s my only chance with a long day on the road in front of me, when it’s dark, wet, sloppy, icy, dreary, cold, windy, and did I say dark? But there I was, my own little version of Zero Dark Thirty, battling through the pre-dawn blackness, just without the guns and terrorists, and on the streets of Marlborough rather than somewhere in Pakistan. (Disclosure: No, I haven’t seen the movie, so if the comparison is weak, sorry, but what else do you write about on a week like this?)

Yet even in the darkness, lights can shine. Who’d have thought that at such an awful hour I’d meet up on the road with a potential new training friend, an ultramarathoner recently moved to town, camped within a mile of home base, also out at such an unpleasant hour? You just can’t write off the dark days, because good can and will come from them. We’ll have to watch this one. Meanwhile, back to the dreariness…

Such inspirational serendipity was a good reward since not only was it dark, we, sloppy, icy, dreary, cold, windy, and did I say dark?, but to add to the joy, I was well into a bout of significantly unpleasant ill-health, being that several trillion energetic little viruses had decided to hold a swim meet in my veins. No, not the flu (yes, I had my flu shot), no, this was not all that horrible save that at some point this week I wheezed up the contents of, and possibly the structure of, pretty much both lungs. This wasn’t near-death, but neither was it fun. No amount of sit-ups at the gym can prepare your abdominal muscles for the pain induced by days of horrendous hacking. All day, all night (so sorry, dearest spouse!), and at five-thirty in the morning, on the roads, when it’s dark, wet, sloppy, icy, dreary, cold, windy, and did I say dark? Add to that the day’s exhausting excursion to Maine, and I was looking and feeling my best. The rest of the week was pretty much a wipe out.

I really can’t complain (no I’m not complaining, merely journaling, right?) It’s a benefit of the running life thing makes one relatively healthy, and as a result I don’t get sick too often. This bout just laid down a challenge: beat the little buggers, and don’t let them break you in the process. Damn the phlegm torpedoes, half steam ahead, run, albeit slowly, right through it. No chest cold, no matter how nasty, is going to break the streak now having exceeded six hundred days, right? So wheezing away, I forced out a few miles each day, and frankly, those were the best minutes of each day, the only times that really cleared my head. Take this as a reminder for the future: sick, miserable, get out there anyway if you can. It can only help, assuming it doesn’t kill you.

After several days of death trots, the invitation arrived in my inbox for a long one on Saturday with my training partner who oddly prefers the title, “Problem Child”. In this case, his choice of a nickname was appropriate, seeing as his invitation left me with a vexing problem: taking him up might be either brilliant or insane, depending on your perspective. Seeing as I’d broken the proverbial emergency glass on Friday and reached for the old leftover Hi-Test painkillers to knock down the fire in my throat, and popped one as late as five AM on Saturday, planning to bang out high double digits at noon may not have been the brightest idea. Or maybe it was?

Not being a total fool, I planned a small loop for us as a test ride, to be extended to the long loop if the cylinders fired. Five miles in at a decidedly casual pace, we decided it was working, and continued our traipse into the next town south, over many hills and more than a few dales, finishing up seventeen miles later, still on the manufacturing side of an atypical volume of unmentionable bronchial secretions, but feeling like I’d returned once again in the land of the living. Or in short, there’s nothing like a good run to cure what ails you.

A distracted week of darkness, illness, duress, and finally success, and, hey, look at that! We’re more than twenty percent through the Dark Period! How’d you like that?

Good Enough

You’ve all heard the old one about the guy who says he’s just flown in from (pick your favorite distant location), and man, are his arms tired! Closing out the year, admittedly I felt a little of that, though not necessarily in my arms. Somehow I managed to eke a run into the schedule every day of 2012, stretching the three-mile-minimum-per-day streak to five-ninety-three when the ball dropped in Times Square. In doing so, the log tells me that I covered over twenty-seven-hundred miles, toed the race starting line twenty-two times, and notched personal bests in ten of those contests. Nice numbers, but other than the streak, they got reset to zero last night at midnight. It’s a new year and we start our obsessive counting all over again.

So after all that, man, are my legs tired! Or so it seemed for the last few weeks following the rapid-fire four-races-in-twenty-one-days episode of personal abuse that culminated at Nationals in Kentucky. I’ve shied away from the early winter indoor track meets, thinking, probably rightly, that the legs needed some downtime, and knowing for sure that the pesky Achilles did. But when January First rolls around, it is, after all, our duty as runners to uphold our own special version of insanity, and race on New Year’s Day. For me, tradition says it’s time to head back to my old neighborhood from the eighties and race the Freezer Five.

A part of me wanted to turn the unofficial personal best I pegged at the five-mile split in my Mill Cities leg last month into a real live “it counts” personal best at the truly five mile Freezer. The bulk of me, however, knew that the creakiness index of my bones over the past two weeks put that possibility pretty much out of the question. Mother Nature effectively sealed that assumption this morning by delivering a significantly nasty west wind, chillingly saturated with drifting snow, assuring that the opening westbound miles of the Freezer’s out-and-back-with-a-lollipop course would cure just about everyone of dreams of exceptional speediness. While you’d like to think you’d get it all back on the tail-wind-assisted return trip, we all know it just doesn’t work that way.

Piling on top of this, it seemed the Zombies ate my brain, causing me to lose sunglasses – on my head, run to the starting line without my racing shoes, and generally just not to be mentally engaged in the task. Suffice to say that I wasn’t expecting an A-Team performance. But what emerged turned out to be good enough, and a nice start to the year.

Two races embarked into the bitter wind from the starting line: the guy who won it by such an obscene margin that he was ten yards out front before we’d covered a hundred, and everyone else. Ignoring him, the rest of us actually had a competitive, hard-fought, and rather enjoyable (save the pain, of course) good-ole’-fashioned road fracas. Knowing one rival who generally plasters me to the nearest utility pole whenever we meet was out with an injury – never the way you want to get ahead, but when it happens, you factor it in – I was still rather surprised to find just myself and two others setting the pace (remember, we’re going to completely ignore the guy who won it).

In fairness, I tried to take my turn cutting through the abusive wind of miles one and two. In truth, I couldn’t quite summon the gear needed to take get out front of our mini-pack more than about a quarter of the time. It was too early to expend that level of energy, and for what purpose? The real first place was gone, well out of reach, the footsteps around me hinted that our pack was small, and those I’d seen were all youngsters. Let’s face it: in the masters racing game, if you ain’t old, it’s nice to beat you but I really don’t care if I don’t. And further, there were no mile markers on the course, (shame!), so we had no idea of our pace, and with that wind, no expectations of excellence. It was a day for good enough, race the ones you’re with, and the time will be what it may.

Circling the mini-loop at the far end of this course brings the fun of getting to see the field on their outbound leg, and for them, getting to see and cheer on the leaders. This being Freezer Five Number Five for me, it’s become an annual reunion of sorts, resulting in plenty of hoots of support from the midpack. Indeed, enough of them knew who’s who that several reported to me later a rather surprising tidbit: whereas I’d thought there were only three or four of us in our virtual leaders pack, in fact, they said, there was at least eight, ten, perhaps a dozen, all in hot pursuit of some old guy, a pied piper of sorts, leading the charge up the small rise to Sterling Airport. Had I known, I might have shouted “BURMA” and panicked. Ignorance is bliss.

One youngster broke free on that rise, and while I couldn’t hold him, in trying to maintain some contact I managed to break free from the rest of the gaggle. The leading gap widened, the trailing footsteps faded, and it looked like the finishing order was set, so long as I could summons good enough to stave off any late challenges. At roughly where I thought the mile-to-go mark should be, a watch check confirmed my expectation that nothing special was happening in the time department, only adding to the feeling that good enough would be good enough. Killing it probably wouldn’t catch the guy in front (who wasn’t’ an old guy anyway), and even if it did, he was minutes behind the real winner, the one with mutant DNA. Killing it wouldn’t hit that personal best time, barring sudden lapses in the laws of physics. So why kill it? Bring it home, good enough.

One-hundred-ten percent effort? Nope. Call it ninety-five, but ninety-five on a day when I wasn’t sure I could summons up eighty, and it was good enough. Good enough to take the masters win for the first time in this race. Good enough for my best placing in this race. Good enough that my time , while not special, wasn’t too disappointing, either. Good enough to start the year on a good enough note.

Some days, good enough is good enough, and we can be happy about that.