This morning I ran four miles through the trails leading out of the town of Boulder, Colorado. I don't wear a watch very often when I run these days. After four years of running and racing I have a good sense how my effort at any given moment translates into a minutes-per-mile-pace. In Colorado, however, I estimate my speed by knowing how fast I would be running, given my effort, in my sea level streets of Brooklyn and then I add a full minute per mile.
I am in Boulder this week for my organization's bi-annual conference. For days I have very little time to myself and the time I do have is spent honing and practicing my talking points, finding typos in the program that I should have found BEFORE it went to print, and trying desperately to get enough sleep to make it through the long days. Most of the time while here I am the host at my own party. A bookish loner from birth, it is not a role that comes naturally to me.
Many people here know that I run. They are supportive. They also joke fondly. They ask me if I ran this morning. They ask me how far I ran this morning. They ask me what time I had to get up to get in a run. And for a moment I think, "Wow, maybe I should have slept in instead."
It often takes a lot of effort to get out of bed and run. This is especially true when I know a very full day lies ahead and the night before involved dinner and a glass or two of Cabernet. And here in Colorado, 5,430 above sea level, with air at a premium, where I get breathless just going up a flight of stairs, with a large room full of people counting on me, can I afford the effort required to run?
Then I remember who I am. And I know that my running allows me to bravely face my days. It allows me to come through for others and for myself.
So today I awoke at 5:30am, slipped on my running clothes and shoes, pressed the down button of the elevator, and stepped out of the hotel lobby into the cool morning air. And two hours later—remembering my breath floating gently outside of my swiftly moving body—I smiled and welcomed eighty gathered colleagues.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Mustering Bravery After Boston
I'm in DC, where I have been since
the very early morning train brought me here yesterday for two days of
meetings and events.
I passed through Penn Station. I
rode Amtrak. I met in Federal buildings. I ate in public restaurants. I took a
long, fast run. I slept in a hotel and am now sitting in the same hotel's lobby
answering emails and finalizing conference planning until my next event. The
next event—the last before I head back to New York City and my sleeping
family—is an exclusive reception and dinner with non-profit, government, and
business leaders.
I lived through 9/11. And two days
ago, the finish line of world's most prestigious running event—an event I
participated in three years ago—was bombed, tearing apart people and
lives. Today, between meetings, I'm catching snippets of news about poison
in letters addressed to our nation's leaders. I'm hearing about pressure cooker
lids. And a dead child.
My own phone has been ringing
unchecked for three days, calls and texts and emails from worried family and
friends, uncertain whether or not I ran Boston. Because of the clock at the
finish line I know with some certainty—as much as I can know about my finish
time in any 26.2 mile run—that if I had run my pace would have put me there,
just through the finish line, medal and mylar blanket in place, heading to
baggage.
I consider myself a resilient person. This week just getting on the southbound 4:40am train the morning after took courage. Not having been in Boston, last
night's hard run along the Potomac felt strong.
Two days later, however, I don't want to drink wine with important people in our nation's capital. I want to pull the quilts over my head. And I am
reeling at just how very fucked up a very few people in this world are.
I know I will run marathons again including Boston. I know I will continue, for the foreseeable future, to live in a very large east coast city. And in a little while I will don my
heels and my small black dress and hop in a cab.
But in this moment this day
requires more bravery than I feel able to muster.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Day I Ran Boston and Discovered that Racing is Not the Same as Running Fast
Today is the 117th running of the Boston Marathon. In addition to wishing fleet feet to my friends running today's race, my thoughts turn back to Monday, April 19, 2010, the day I ran Boston.
I had a blissful first marathon in Portland, Maine in October, 2009. The day I ran Portland, I had called myself a runner for less than a year, had trained well, and was amazingly blissful for the entire 26.2 miles, finishing strong and happy and about 20 minutes faster than my fantasy goal time. I was hooked.
During the car ride from Maine back to Brooklyn, it suddenly dawned on me that I might just have qualified to run the Boston Marathon. A quick internet search revealed that, as a 45 year old woman, I needed a 4:00 marathon to qualify. My finishing time was 3:38.
The months leading up to the spring 2010 Boston Marathon were full of excitement, speed training, overuse injuries, physical therapy, and indecision. In the end, I decided to run the historic race, a decision that to this day I am so glad I made.
Today I find myself remembering back to that April morning. I boarded the hotel shuttle, leaving my family and friends behind at the hotel. Excitement on the shuttle and at the race start was palpable. We had all made it to Boston!
After that the story is probably pretty typical for novice racers. The sunshine and the excitement and my own desire to have an even better race than Portland took me out too fast. Several times along the course I questioned why I was there and contemplated what it would be like to just stop and lie down on the grass in the sunshine. But finish I did, aided by encouraging hugs from my family at Mile 20 and Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata on my quickly assembled ipod just before the final stretch. With all that struggle, I still pulled off a 3:40 finish, a time that should have made me happy indeed.
However, for months after Boston I experienced a desire to stop mid-race in nearly every race I ran. Sometimes I did stop, for just a moment, to give myself the pep talk I needed to finish. With lots of work and lots of talkings-to, the intensity and frequency of that particular race issue subsided. But it has never entirely vanished. Sometimes, mid-race, I just want to stop running.
I have spoken with lots of running friends about this, read books, and have received great advice. A triathlete friend from my college days suggested I focus on the pain and ask myself that, if this was how I felt all of the time, could I do it? My coach at the time of my Boston run told me that a marathon is a difficult distance and that anytime I finish one, I should feel proud and grateful. My team's new coach recently told me to consider, when the running gets tough, each part of my body. To examine why it is suddenly difficult and to make the decision about whether or not it is really too difficult to continue.
I have also invented a couple of my own mental imaging exercises. If voices start telling me to stop, I ask myself how I want to finish this. How I want to see myself and how I want to be seen in the world. I also remind myself that I can endure pretty much anything for the seven or so minutes that I probably have left in the race.
When I really consider my body as it races hard, I realize it is not my body that wants to stop. Sure my legs are working, my breathing is labored, my heart is exerting more than normal. But is any of this so painful that I genuinely need to stop? Or can my calm assessment of my body serve to reassure my taxed body parts that they can get through it?
I needed to achieve a certain level of fitness to even be having this conversation. But once there, running and racing, at least for me, is 95% mental. And for me, this almost never comes into the picture when I'm training, only when I'm racing and heap on myself the added pressure of wanting to do well, finish strong, and place in the top of my age group.
Someday I will run Boston again. I have qualified with every other marathon I have run, but I have chosen not to run Boston until I have matured as a racer because I want the next time to find the kind of bliss I felt in Portland. Or at least, if I don't find bliss, to have perspective and to be grateful to have run it well.
I had a blissful first marathon in Portland, Maine in October, 2009. The day I ran Portland, I had called myself a runner for less than a year, had trained well, and was amazingly blissful for the entire 26.2 miles, finishing strong and happy and about 20 minutes faster than my fantasy goal time. I was hooked.
During the car ride from Maine back to Brooklyn, it suddenly dawned on me that I might just have qualified to run the Boston Marathon. A quick internet search revealed that, as a 45 year old woman, I needed a 4:00 marathon to qualify. My finishing time was 3:38.
The months leading up to the spring 2010 Boston Marathon were full of excitement, speed training, overuse injuries, physical therapy, and indecision. In the end, I decided to run the historic race, a decision that to this day I am so glad I made.
Today I find myself remembering back to that April morning. I boarded the hotel shuttle, leaving my family and friends behind at the hotel. Excitement on the shuttle and at the race start was palpable. We had all made it to Boston!
After that the story is probably pretty typical for novice racers. The sunshine and the excitement and my own desire to have an even better race than Portland took me out too fast. Several times along the course I questioned why I was there and contemplated what it would be like to just stop and lie down on the grass in the sunshine. But finish I did, aided by encouraging hugs from my family at Mile 20 and Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata on my quickly assembled ipod just before the final stretch. With all that struggle, I still pulled off a 3:40 finish, a time that should have made me happy indeed.
However, for months after Boston I experienced a desire to stop mid-race in nearly every race I ran. Sometimes I did stop, for just a moment, to give myself the pep talk I needed to finish. With lots of work and lots of talkings-to, the intensity and frequency of that particular race issue subsided. But it has never entirely vanished. Sometimes, mid-race, I just want to stop running.
I have spoken with lots of running friends about this, read books, and have received great advice. A triathlete friend from my college days suggested I focus on the pain and ask myself that, if this was how I felt all of the time, could I do it? My coach at the time of my Boston run told me that a marathon is a difficult distance and that anytime I finish one, I should feel proud and grateful. My team's new coach recently told me to consider, when the running gets tough, each part of my body. To examine why it is suddenly difficult and to make the decision about whether or not it is really too difficult to continue.
I have also invented a couple of my own mental imaging exercises. If voices start telling me to stop, I ask myself how I want to finish this. How I want to see myself and how I want to be seen in the world. I also remind myself that I can endure pretty much anything for the seven or so minutes that I probably have left in the race.
When I really consider my body as it races hard, I realize it is not my body that wants to stop. Sure my legs are working, my breathing is labored, my heart is exerting more than normal. But is any of this so painful that I genuinely need to stop? Or can my calm assessment of my body serve to reassure my taxed body parts that they can get through it?
I needed to achieve a certain level of fitness to even be having this conversation. But once there, running and racing, at least for me, is 95% mental. And for me, this almost never comes into the picture when I'm training, only when I'm racing and heap on myself the added pressure of wanting to do well, finish strong, and place in the top of my age group.
Someday I will run Boston again. I have qualified with every other marathon I have run, but I have chosen not to run Boston until I have matured as a racer because I want the next time to find the kind of bliss I felt in Portland. Or at least, if I don't find bliss, to have perspective and to be grateful to have run it well.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Of Lightning and Jellyfish
While sitting by my six-year old daughter's bed last night as she drifted into sleep, questions continued. Wanting sleep to arrive, I gently told her to ask me one more question. Genevieve's final question to her mommy on the lovely spring evening was this: "Why did god make the world so complicated, with lightning and jellyfish and everything?"
When she awoke this morning, I followed the advice of my dear friend Lou Harry and had a lovely conversation with my sleepy-eyed, pajama-clad daughter. I paraphrased Lou wildly, but am including in this post his words in their entirety because they are beautiful and because I want to remember them and because they made me pause and consider the glorious complexity of our world and my place of wonder in it.
Lou said, "You want to know a secret, sweetie? All your life you are going to meet people who think they know who or what god is. And you know what? Maybe one or two of them might be right. But we don't know which ones and they don't know either. So here is what we are going to do. We're going to look at lightning and say 'wow' and we're going to look at jellyfish and we're going to say 'wow' and we're going to be thankful that we live in a world that is never ever ever going to get totally boring because there's always new stuff to learn about lightning and jellyfish and car motors and Velcro and bumble bees and tomatoes and daffodils and parakeets and people. And maybe the more we know and the more we feel the closer we get to whatever god is. And that was the most awesome question I heard all day...maybe even all year."
Yesterday morning I visited the Isamu Noguchi Museum with Genevieve's first grade class and was reminded anew of all that Noguchi has taught me throughout my life. Noguchi shaped my vision of what it is to live in the world as an artist. I understand because of him that the medium—stone, words, clay, paint, musical notes, bodies in motion, voices raised—is just the stuff you move around to achieve your vision. The medium has its own properties and "free will," just as the artist has hers, and art is the give-and-take-dance between the two.
This post is not about god. I, in no way, feel qualified to write on that subject. But it is about approaching life with wonder, embracing complexity, and being wide-eyed and naive and never ever bored. No matter what I undertake, as it unfolds the vastness of what I still have to learn becomes quickly apparent. It is that way with child welfare and adoption after 20 years in the field. It is that way with pottery and drawing and theatre and fiction and public policy and parenting and friendship and love and on and on. And, four years later, it remains acutely so with running.
On my gentle four mile run today I thought about Genevieve's question and about the newness with which both she and I view the world. And I thought about Isamu Noguchi, chisel in hand before his glorious basalt structures. I have been running seriously for four years. It began with two mile runs three times each week and it grew. By this time four years ago I had completed my first 10K race and was contemplating a fall marathon. Five marathons, several half marathons, and many other distances later, I still consider myself a beginner with so much to learn. And I still find unbelievable joy each time my running shoe-clad foot hits the pavement.
As I develop as a runner, my teachers are my running friends and teammates, but especially, because of what Noguchi taught me, my teachers are my own body, the air passing through my lungs, and the ground beneath my feet. I will now add to my list of teachers the lightning and the jellyfish.
When she awoke this morning, I followed the advice of my dear friend Lou Harry and had a lovely conversation with my sleepy-eyed, pajama-clad daughter. I paraphrased Lou wildly, but am including in this post his words in their entirety because they are beautiful and because I want to remember them and because they made me pause and consider the glorious complexity of our world and my place of wonder in it.
Lou said, "You want to know a secret, sweetie? All your life you are going to meet people who think they know who or what god is. And you know what? Maybe one or two of them might be right. But we don't know which ones and they don't know either. So here is what we are going to do. We're going to look at lightning and say 'wow' and we're going to look at jellyfish and we're going to say 'wow' and we're going to be thankful that we live in a world that is never ever ever going to get totally boring because there's always new stuff to learn about lightning and jellyfish and car motors and Velcro and bumble bees and tomatoes and daffodils and parakeets and people. And maybe the more we know and the more we feel the closer we get to whatever god is. And that was the most awesome question I heard all day...maybe even all year."
Yesterday morning I visited the Isamu Noguchi Museum with Genevieve's first grade class and was reminded anew of all that Noguchi has taught me throughout my life. Noguchi shaped my vision of what it is to live in the world as an artist. I understand because of him that the medium—stone, words, clay, paint, musical notes, bodies in motion, voices raised—is just the stuff you move around to achieve your vision. The medium has its own properties and "free will," just as the artist has hers, and art is the give-and-take-dance between the two.
This post is not about god. I, in no way, feel qualified to write on that subject. But it is about approaching life with wonder, embracing complexity, and being wide-eyed and naive and never ever bored. No matter what I undertake, as it unfolds the vastness of what I still have to learn becomes quickly apparent. It is that way with child welfare and adoption after 20 years in the field. It is that way with pottery and drawing and theatre and fiction and public policy and parenting and friendship and love and on and on. And, four years later, it remains acutely so with running.
On my gentle four mile run today I thought about Genevieve's question and about the newness with which both she and I view the world. And I thought about Isamu Noguchi, chisel in hand before his glorious basalt structures. I have been running seriously for four years. It began with two mile runs three times each week and it grew. By this time four years ago I had completed my first 10K race and was contemplating a fall marathon. Five marathons, several half marathons, and many other distances later, I still consider myself a beginner with so much to learn. And I still find unbelievable joy each time my running shoe-clad foot hits the pavement.
As I develop as a runner, my teachers are my running friends and teammates, but especially, because of what Noguchi taught me, my teachers are my own body, the air passing through my lungs, and the ground beneath my feet. I will now add to my list of teachers the lightning and the jellyfish.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Home is Where I Want to Be
Throughout my life I have searched for home--that elusive place of ease in my soul where all seems right with the world. While on an eight-mile run along the Androscoggin River in Brunswick, Maine Sunday morning, I affirmed an earlier realization that, for me, running just may be that home.
My life is rich, peopled by wonderful friends and dear family and marked by the fortune of deep love. I have followed a career path that is rewarding and adds value to society. But by nature I am reticent, which often strands me outside looking in, ever searching for a way to connect--and feel connected--more profoundly.
Moving along the running trail I perfectly inhabit my body, limbs synchronized, breath rising and falling easily within and without, air sweeping across my face, my thoughts drifting freely and brightly and gently in my mind, judgement gone (we will get to the difference between RUNNING and RACING for me in a later post!). Even on those days when the run comes hard, I can understand, forgive, and run on. I know my running self.
Like any love affair, there are problems with falling deeply in love with running. There is injury, of course. And even the anticipation of injury is ever-present, worrying that a forced separation will leave an accompanying void in my life. There are days with too little time. And days when I'm too stubbornly unhappy to get myself out the door to happiness.
But then there are the up-sides of this particular lover. Together we move in the world and see the world and its people in new ways. Inside of running I am a gentle witness to the strength and weaknesses of my own mind and body. I can take running with me wherever I go. My size 10 Sauconys fit even my smallest overnight carry-on. If there is no nearby trail, I am sure to find a hotel treadmill waiting for me. It takes me five minutes from pajamas to fully clad and ready to head out the door. And it is a certainty that just thirty minutes later I will be a happier and saner version of myself, more able to follow through on all of the demands of life.
Running has taught me so much, not the least of which is perspective. To quote David Byrne from his beautiful love song, Naive Melody, that has served me as a touchstone for decades, "Home is where I want to be but I guess I am already there."
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My life is rich, peopled by wonderful friends and dear family and marked by the fortune of deep love. I have followed a career path that is rewarding and adds value to society. But by nature I am reticent, which often strands me outside looking in, ever searching for a way to connect--and feel connected--more profoundly.
Moving along the running trail I perfectly inhabit my body, limbs synchronized, breath rising and falling easily within and without, air sweeping across my face, my thoughts drifting freely and brightly and gently in my mind, judgement gone (we will get to the difference between RUNNING and RACING for me in a later post!). Even on those days when the run comes hard, I can understand, forgive, and run on. I know my running self.
Like any love affair, there are problems with falling deeply in love with running. There is injury, of course. And even the anticipation of injury is ever-present, worrying that a forced separation will leave an accompanying void in my life. There are days with too little time. And days when I'm too stubbornly unhappy to get myself out the door to happiness.
But then there are the up-sides of this particular lover. Together we move in the world and see the world and its people in new ways. Inside of running I am a gentle witness to the strength and weaknesses of my own mind and body. I can take running with me wherever I go. My size 10 Sauconys fit even my smallest overnight carry-on. If there is no nearby trail, I am sure to find a hotel treadmill waiting for me. It takes me five minutes from pajamas to fully clad and ready to head out the door. And it is a certainty that just thirty minutes later I will be a happier and saner version of myself, more able to follow through on all of the demands of life.
Running has taught me so much, not the least of which is perspective. To quote David Byrne from his beautiful love song, Naive Melody, that has served me as a touchstone for decades, "Home is where I want to be but I guess I am already there."
.JPG)
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