What Do You Mean, "Retired"?

I've had a couple of people ask me over the last months, when I spoke about taking a break, if I plan to keep running. I've been running for almost twenty years - of course I plan to keep running. And I have been running over the past four months, just not nearly as much as I had been before. A similar question after my last post has been, what do I mean when I say I'm "retiring" from running? It's not from marathons - since I'm hoping to do a trail marathon this fall. It's not from trying to get faster - since I'm training for a 5K right now, and while I don't hope to break my PR at this one, I do have a goal in mind, and will try to PR later this year.

It might be from trying to be fast at longer distances, anything over an hour (so over a 10K for me). Or of road marathons, since my feet and knees complain when I spend too much time on pavement. But I think it's mostly from the pressure I've felt in the past around running.

I do know I can't quit running. Not that I had any intent of doing so, but over the past few weeks I've also come to see that I can't quit the urge to push myself in it. What I suppose I am doing is redefining the terms under which I am willing to push myself, and quitting those aspects that don't serve me.

But I do need to push.

Mentally: Can I do this? I can do this. I can do this but only by applying X tactic or by asking for help or by analyzing my weaknesses or by trying something new or by trying again or by pulling back here so I can move forward there. Until, oh hey, I did this.

Physically: That sensation of pushing against myself, finding those edges of discomfort or what I think is possible and massaging those edges, looking to see how I might do more, find a way around, stretch the edges out. Or sometimes just stomp over them, unthinking, unfeeling, Murakami's running machine. Until at some point I look back and see, oh, that's where I was - but I'm not there anymore.

Sometimes it's from finding new resources of power. Swing those arms, drive yourself forward, up that hill or through that interval. Straighten that spine, lift your head, raise your gaze and feel breath enter you fully. Let the energy of the day - sun, wind, rain, ground - be your energy too. Or the energy of the music, or a mantra, or even just counting: one, two, three, four. Or double-time: one-and-two-and-...

Sometimes it's finding new sources of endurance/stamina. Lots of mind games here. (And why not "games"? Is this not all play?) Paying attention, fully, to what surrounds me: colors, people, places. Or letting my mind ride some thought elsewhere. Or reminding myself of what I can do. For this I sometimes think of being in labor. Either one will serve; D's was long, days-long, and there was nothing to do but keep moving forward, trying new things, making adjustments, until he finally turned and was ready to move out. G's was fast, out of all control, nothing soothed me, nothing eased, all I could do was roar him out. What's any one run, no matter how long or painful, held next to those? But we forget what power we hold.

I think what I'm retiring from (or said otherwise: letting go of) is any sense that my running has to be for anything more than myself. I know I need running (or other movement that is sometimes meditative, sometimes intense) to feel right in my body, to be settled. And I take better care of myself in all areas when I have that movement. I like to push myself in my running - and I'm still exploring what that desire is about - and having race goals helps me do that. But I think I'm retiring from serious attachment to those goals. My last two marathons I needed to detach from a particular outcome to be able to enjoy them - and I did, but only late in the game when that was my only good choice. My first time out I never let go of that pressure on myself and not only did I not enjoy myself but I barely remember any of it. And every time I remember thinking, what would it have been like to train without having that pressure? Can I even do that?

So I guess I'm practicing that this year. A trail marathon will be a new thing for me, and I know my approach will be different, has to be different. To take a page from the habit-change literature, I'm changing my environment to make it easier to change my behavior (or thinking in this case).

Of course another question, unanswered, is: What exactly is it that makes me want to run so long? I really don't know. Perhaps as I keep running I'll find out.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(I've quoted this here before but it's a good one.)

Yours in questioning,
Annie

"Look for the Helpers" and Little Things

I had been working on a report about Saturday's race when the news about Boston started coming in. That report can wait.

Other people have already posted the Fred Rogers' quote about when disaster strikes, look for the helpers. It's the most comforting thing I've come across today. Especially as a parent, thinking about how to talk about this with my children. Perhaps not now. Buddy might be spared this for a little longer. But the next time some tragedy occurs.

I'm wearing my Soldier Field 10M shirt today, at work. I'm the only one wearing a race shirt here and it feels odd. Oh well. I'm wearing this one since it's the only one I have from a memorial event, and in honor of the National Guard who were among the first responders there. I'm wearing a Celtic cross, too, in honor of all those Boston Irish.

Runners' World has an article about how to help or show support. My next 26.2 miles are dedicated to the victims. I'm two and a half miles in so far.

It was a terrible morning for a run. It was a beautiful morning for a run. Every song that came up had some connection to Boston for me. I went to school in western Massachusetts and in Cambridge so I feel somewhat connected, a little? But I really don't know Boston proper. Only through this most glorious of runners' events, this beacon of hope and ambition, this most storied of marathons.

And it still is. It still is.

There is no place in the world that has not seen blood. "And still we rise."

May the souls of those killed, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Tracking My Obsession - Part 2 - Off to the Races!

Once I moved to Chicago, in 2000, the running scene was hugely different. Chicago is a city full of runners and great running places. I mean, you can't go anywhere without seeing runners, and if you're anywhere close to the lake you can barely keep from tripping on them. I had taken a break from regular running during my last months in Massachusetts as I become more and more involved in martial arts study, but now I started again, and even signed up for another marathon training program that did not involve fundraising.

Part of this training program involved my first road race, the 2001 Chicago Distance Classic. It was not love at first race. It was brutal. It was hot, of course, August on the lakefront, and a distance I had not covered before (20K, or about 12.5 miles). Nor was I in any way prepared for it. I finished - I even managed not to finish last - but I had no fun, and stopped my training program shortly thereafter.

Over the next four years I started and stopped and started running again. I stopped because of injury, or because my life got complicated - I started because there was nothing that made me feel as good as running did.

I had just started running more regularly again when I met The Dude, in 2005. There is nothing like being involved with another runner to affirm your own love for it. The Dude did not think I was crazy for heading out in all kinds of weather. The Dude understood how I felt after a good run, and that even a bad one was better than no run at all. And The Dude inspired me with his stories of marathons and half-marathons and running with his mom and their tradition of running the Ohio River Road Runners Turkey Trot together every year. That year I ran the Turkey Trot for the first time with him. There were old guys in sweatshirts and young women in tights, middle school kids, lots of middle-aged folk just like me, dogs barking furiously from the sidelines. It was hard, it was cold and windy and rainy, and it was AWESOME.

Chicago is a city where you seriously could run a race every single weekend of the year and not leave city limits. Add in the surrounding suburbs and you could make it every Saturday and Sunday. After that first one, if I'd had more money and time I would have run another race every month, I loved it that much. Instead I got married and worked weekends, ran a couple more a year later, then got pregnant. I kept thinking about races, though, kept planning, kept hoping. Kept having dreams of running a marathon.

So to start running again last year, to improve so much through better training, to be consistent in my training, to find ways to safely continue through injury, to build on the work of last year instead of starting all over again yet again, and to be in a place where I can realistically train for that long-awaited, 14-years-in-the-making marathon... why this is heaven indeed.

Tracking My Obsession - Part 1 - Telephone Poles and Trails

I realize that to many of my friends, my obsession with running may have come as a surprise. And even looking over the first few entries from last spring, I see that I show no sign of the single-mindedness that was about to spring forth.

But I have been running for 14 years now, since 1996, and fell in love with it immediately.

I don’t know why I started, though it was probably to lose weight and because I didn’t have easy access to a gym nor money for a bike. I started by running to one telephone pole, then walking to the next, then running again, and so on, until I could string a decent number of telephone poles together. And then there was no stopping me, especially once I realized that I could possibly run forever if I ran slowly enough.

I had two favorite routes, one on the road heading out of town where I could run on the broad shoulder with little fear of traffic, passing farmland. I loved to run this at night and in the winter, with the moon and stars above me, watching my breath in the dark.

In the day, and when the trails weren't made treacherous by ice, I ran into the woods and along old train tracks, passing the backs of farms with a view of the nearby hills, golden in the sun.

Most of my running was completely solitary, with no one around, and never any other runners. I didn't think of myself as part of the running community, being too slow and too fat, and not interested in road races. But even then, I dreamed of running long distances, of being a "real runner," of doing marathons and maybe even an ultra someday.

After a year or so of this I moved to my old college town where I had access to the track and cross-country trails at my alma mater. More rolling hills through farmland, more tree-shaded paths. Glorious. And now too, more runners - sometimes from the college, sometimes from the town - and even occasionally a local cross-country race, with wiry old men in singlets and young women in shorts and middle school kids all mixed in together, dogs barking furiously from the sidelines.

I still didn't think of myself as a runner, though I seriously considered training for a marathon through the Team in Training program. I even went to an information session for it, but in the end the fundraising involved scared me too much, as did the prospect of hours spent slogging around the track. No, my racing days were still to come.

New Year's Review

Prior to Buddy's birth, I was always wondering, to borrow the title of Po Bronson's book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" (I even posted study questions from that book earlier this year.)

It’s a question that just doesn’t seem that important to me right now. The urgency around it has left. And I am so grateful. I have spent more than enough time in my life agonizing over it.

I’d heard it said that having a child focuses you, puts things into perspective. Leaving aside the whole mess of how one's life and priorities change with having a child in the first place, it also becomes a lot easier to answer the question “What is most important to me?” when my resources outside of child-rearing become more limited, and I have to scrounge for every available bit of time/space/money/energy. "What is most important to me" is whatever I feel I have to do to feel most wholly myself (and thereby also most available to my chosen commitments of child, mate, and work).

Who knows why this seemed so impossible for me to figure out in the past? I could speculate for pages but would only end up boring myself and any others foolish enough to stick along.

In any case, this year I was granted a respite from the grinding questions of WHY is this important HOW is this meaningful WHAT will this mean for my life, and could, in little morsels of space for myself, just do, and be, as I most wanted.

(I think also my sheer animal pleasure in Buddy helped open that space for me. I am happiest in a kinesthetic rather than analytic mode anyway, but it’s very easy to let monkey mind take over in everyday life. Having Buddy around moves me more easily into my body.)

And at the end of the year, what turned out to be most important to me outside of Buddy? Spending time with The Dude. Spending some time every day in purposeful movement. Connecting and reconnecting with friends. Making things with my hands again. Being of help at work.

I realize that the two questions I bring up, “What should I do with my life?” and “What is most important to me?”, are not the same. There is an urgency, a pressure, to the first one, that to me relates to other questions about vocation, about having a sense of calling or mission, about ambition and feelings of self-worth… I think what I am grateful for at the end of 2009 is that this question is no longer, or not currently at least, the one I feel I need to answer.

Happy New Year Everyone!

So Why A Blog?

And why now?

I'd been meaning to start one before Buddy was born. I anticipated feeling disconnected from people during my maternity leave, and I anticipated feeling disconnected from myself in the all-absorbing task of taking care of an infant. I was particularly concerned about losing my connection to making music, since I'd only been playing for a short while, so I envisioned my blog as being a place to talk about music and what I was working on. A way of inspiring myself to play and to keep myself on track with practicing.

And then Buddy was born earlier than expected, and all my "nesting" instincts had gone into work (bah!), and then he had colic, and then I had to go back to work, and I just didn't get started writing. Facebook kept me connected to people while I was at home and for a while I thought it might be enough.

But honestly, in the tsumani of information that is Facebook, things get lost, or overlooked, or only glanced at. I wanted what I wrote to last a bit longer than the half-day or so that my post might last on someone's home page. Plus I was inspired by my friend the Pumpkin Mommy and her blog and her painstaking descriptions (with illustrating photographs!) of daily life in Japan.

And mostly, I just wanted to write again.

I no longer envision this as a music blog, mostly because I don't intend to try to pick up playing the bass again until Buddy goes off to school, if then. I'm tired of picking it up and putting it down again as I've done these last three years - I want to be able to devote serious study to it. And I'm finding that other art forms feel more compelling to me these days.

So I don't know what I'll write about, only that I will. As Whitman says, "I contain multitudes."

Thanks for reading - thanks for sharing. Blessings to you all.

Anne