Blah, blah, blah. On running, journeys, and the meaning of suffering

Dear Diary,

I'm happy to report that this weekend I did not crap myself while running.  And if you're wondering why I didn't say that last weekend...well.

Moving on.

The lowest 'knuckle' on both my big toes hurt, and my quads are stiff, and some toes on my left foot are a bit raw on the ends, and I've still got a bit of that post-race narcolepsy. But, I'll go to work tomorrow morning.  Meanwhile, now that I won't be required to read and write I'll be doing more running and writing.

You know, as I run these things I realize, in the grand scheme of things, my own epic struggles are ridiculously and completely self-imposed.  I wonder what the onlookers think, as we run through their town, especially the ones who didn't come out to watch but were just going about their lives and there's this marathon in the way.  I imagine that guy, the one leaning against the fence as he might sit all day, staring, and I wonder what his life is like.  I wonder if he wonders what my life is like. Does he imagine that it is easy?  is he right?

There are those whose epic struggle is complete a marathon, just one, and then they are done.  Or a 10K.  Or a 5K.  They have meaning.  They have done something more than most will ever do and that, for them, is enough.  For others, there is a quest for more, and for so many different reasons.  For some, it might be a type of penance; for others, a triumph of will.  For sill others, a voice in their head whispers, ordinary, ordinary or something far more malevolent, is something to be quieted.    

We create our own struggles, our own dramas.  Some like me seem to enjoy them more when they hurt. The struggle I undertook to leave behind welfare and food stamps seems to have imprinted into me the need to meet goals, especially ones that are crazy and hard. I know that I'll hurt.  I might even cry.  It's all part of the fun.   :-/

I've passed lots of people with Vibram five-finger shoes, or just barefoot, who are clearly suffering.  My first instinct is to mock them: Did Born to Run convince him that running barefoot is natural?  Well, it is.  26 miles of cement and asphalt, however, is not.  Personally, it's weird, to me, to create that kind of suffering, to give one's life meaning, but that's their journey, their need to do something extraordinary. As my mother might have pointed out to me, You ran 62 miles when you could have taken a car.

Towards the end of road marathons especially, I pass a lot of men who are healthy and athletic-looking.  (Sweet Baboo thinks maybe most men do not pace themselves as well as women do.) Their slumped shoulders and shuffling feet speak their fatigue, and they are tired, suffering, and determined.  Perhaps if it was easy, it wouldn't mean as much.  It means more to overcome it on your own.  It is uniquely personal.

It's not to be imposed, however.  The woman at the Kalamazoo marathon who pulled a small boy along by the hand, a small boy of about eight, who was wearing a Tee-shirt that proclaimed: CHOOSE LIFE. CHOOSE ADOPTION, didn't know this.  As I passed, he asked mommy if he could rest for a moment, and she urged him on.  If you want to make your children walking advertisements for your beliefs, fine, but don't drag them 26 miles.  The journey, THEIR journey, means more if they push THEMselves.  You can't give the meaning of the journey to someone.  They have to find it on their own. Otherwise, they'll hate you for it.  When they think of your beliefs, they'll think of suffering.

There are the stories, and the journeys. Take none of them for granted.  They are uniquely those that belong to the people who created them. The sign at mile 12 that says "Jeanette you are a 13.1 rockstar!" made me smile because my guess is that there is a story behind that sign and the people who wrote it.  Jeanette, wherever she is, is a rockstar. We all are.

...

Training blahs.

So, I'm following this training plan, or trying to, anyway. Problem is, it isn't a training plan for someone who does high-altitude, hot races on the day before I'm supposed to do my long runs. EEP. There's something about a real hot workout that just wears me out. I wind up napping most of the rest of the day, and I never get to that long run the next day...I do all the short ones, so my volume is up. Well, sorta. The truth is, I'm sick of the heat. It's got me pretty uninspired.

Just in time: it's finally cooling off. Still...

remember: I. am. lazy. I'm also deep into feeling sorry for myself for losing my job. And, I've been fooling myself in believing that moving boxes of stuff out of the garage equates to training for triathlon.

So far, for August:

Bike, 41 miles (oooh. pathetic.)

Run, 51 miles.

Swim, 1600 meters.

Anyway, my longest run to date since the "Run the Caldera" marathon in June has been 13 miles, and I'm doing the New Mexico marathon in 2 weeks. Gonna be a Long. Day.

I just set my almost finished bowl of cereal next to me to start writing, and realized that my cat was not snuggling and purring, she was finishing the bowl for me. And purring. Dammit. Does it every occur to anyone except me how odd it is, on occasion, that there are animals living in my house?

Animals. In my House. eating and peeing, and not always what and where they are supposed to do these things, which since the day we moved out of caves and into houses, are OUTSIDE.

I'm cranky.

I'm optimistically hoping that the triathlons that have been preempting my long runs are doing something to help me in the area of endurance, even though they've all been sprints.

and Baboo isn't here. He's somewhere else, on business, which means I'll eat badly, stay up too late, and generally take crappy care of myself. I'm pretty certain at this point that if he wasn't in my life, I'd be huge, miserable, tired, and depressed. We take good care of each other.

Gonna go eat some eggs now. I should go out, even for a quick run. Oh, wait...the hummingbird feeder needs filling...

...

Next, there will be people in floating chairs.

Today's workout I've dubbed "Hell Ride's Big Brother". It was slated to be a ride of about 75-80 miles, the most I've done since Ironman Couer D'Alene last year.

Hot, hot, hot and a stiff headwind. WINDY. By the time we were near mile 65, I knew I was in trouble. I was drinking gallons of fluid but hadn't gone to the bathroom in 4 hours. When we started climbing Tramway the thousand feet back up to home, I was drowsy. Really drowsy. My eyes kept closing while I was on the bike. My right hand and foot were numb, too, and so finally I pulled over and decided to walk a bit.

Baboo had other ideas - he deposited me in the shade at a mini-mart with lots of ice cold gatorade and a frozen fruit bar, and headed home to get the car. He returned an hour later with ice and cold drink. I'm less drowsy now. Oddly enough, though, I felt a bit like a failure for not finishing the climb up Tramway in what was probably nearly 100 degree heat there on the blacktop.

Such is the life that we live now - I am surrounded by tiny, lithe bird people who train far more rigorously than I. So that, when I have to stop after 63 miles into a ride from heat sickness, I feel like a deadbeat.

Of course, when I sit an observe people, such as I did while waiting

for Sweet Baboo to come pick me up, I realize that I am part of a very small group. I watched people argue and honk at each other over who got to get to the gas pump first. On a Sunday. I watched a fairly well-dressed man pull a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray, brush it off, and ask someone for a light. I saw very heavy parents offer their children chocolate bars "since we didn't have time for lunch today".

The more time I spend out observing the masses or watching popular TV, the more real life is starting to remind me, frighteningly, of the movies Idiocracy and Wall-E. Don't laugh. When's the last time you went to a large discount store and saw perfectly able-bodied people driving those motorized carts around? And how much more can Discovery and The Learning Channel dumb-down their content? Pretty soon, there will be a new, educational show on about the adventures of a Pawn Shop owner.* Yee.

So today, we were sitting in the shade for a bit at San Felipe pueblo, and a woman came in with her daughter. The daughter, perhaps 6 or 7 years of age, could clearly walk, and so could the woman. But not finding a parking space to her liking, (there were many empty spaces about 100 feet away) she simply parked next to a gas pump. Nobody could use it to get gas because she had decided to simply park there.

Meanwhile, while she was in the mini-mart, her passenger flicked cigarette ashes out the car window toward the gas pump. yes, you read that right: lit cigarette ashes. gas pump about 2 feet away, as I looked around cautiously for the big red button you push to shut off the gas in an emergency.

Earlier last week, I observed a man with his 8- or 9-year-old son at a mini-mart. The son was looking longingly at fruit juices, but Dad then asked him if he wanted a RedBull. He then reached for a large RedBull. "You want one of these?" and and then handed it to him. I leaned over to Baboo and whispered, "2 hours from now he's going to scream at or smack him because he won't settle down."

A family come out of the mini-mart; one of the children carrying a large cappacino drink. We talked about that: I remember asking my mom for a sip of her "Suisse Mocha" coffee drink, and she would give me one, but I wasn't allowed to have my own because "Coffee stunts your growth." Sweet Baboo, meanwhile, shared with me that he was told that coffee was a grown-up drink, and he could have some when you're grown-up. Now drink your milk.

As a teacher, I had assumed that kids bought their own energy drinks that they brought to school. Clearly, it's likely that their parents bought them in bulk and gave them to them every day. Where I got a thermos of milk, today's child gets a Monster drink.

Yikes. No wonder people are on meth. By the time they're in their late teens, caffeine no longer has any kick. Not that they'll need it, with their floating mobility chairs.

Just my two cents, as usual.

*Not kidding. Check your local listings.

Putty face.

I have a particular problem that used to be bad all the time but now, it only affects me at certain times of the month or when I can't run. It has a name. Every flaw. Every asymmetry, that is normal for a person to have, is magnified, far and beyond the usual issues people have with their appearance.

I look at myself and a recent picture and just before I can express my horror of how awful I look in the picture, Sweet Baboo says, "Hey, that's a good picture of you!" My closest best friend, when I lived in South Dakota, thought that I was vain because I checked the mirror so much. She just didn't get i that I was checking, the same way someone with an eating disorder might check their weight.

I blame my mom. And maybe, some chemical stuff that I probably inherited from my father's side. LOTS of depression and self loathing runs deep in both sides of my family. But anyway, Mom was a professional artist and so I have more than a healthy knowledge of "proper" proportion and symmetry and am acutely aware that I have neither of those things and frankly neither does anyone else but remember, a good neurosis is all about me Me, and my inability to stop fixating on how much I often wish I looked like something other than how I looked.

In bad times, I see the chicken pock scar from when I was ten, and the mole that I've tried to freeze off 3 times despite most people not even noticing that it's there, and the groove that's deepening between my eyebrows, and the nose that I've had altered, and lines that are just starting on my forehead. I feel the insecurity rising in me, the desperation, as I look at a face that looks like I've had a stroke. My face misshapen. I look like a face made of putty that's been stretched unevenly.

But then.
But then I say, Screw it. And I go out for a run. And then it fades away. I come back all sassy and sweaty and don't care how I look. I see myself, and I see strong and healthy. I'm a strong healthy slightly assymetrical nearsighted forty-something woman and I don't notice the lines after the run. I just notice the glow, and the smile.

Except that right now, I can't run. Erg. I've gotten better about this problem that I have with my appearance, but I want to stay ahead of it. I used to take meds that helped with various things, but nothing ever helped with this, until I started running.

So. But. I'm not writing this for validation of how non-ugly I am. I know, intellectually, that I'm not ugly. But when putty face strikes, it's not intellectual. It's emotional, and it's chemical. I'm telling you because maybe you know what it's like. I'm telling you that it's not you. It's emotional, and it's chemical. You just have to keep searching to find the solution, which for me, was running. Sometimes, for some people, it's meds, or therapy. For me, it was running.

Running, for me, is magical. I stop picking at my skin. I stop staring in the mirror. Sometimes I go by reflective surfaces and I even forget to check. I run, and I'm fabulous, and beautiful, and strong.

So I run. ALOT. Except that right now I can't. Soooo, I guess this afternoon I'll try aqua-jogging. Running is my new drug, my new addiction that makes the ugly putty face go away.

I'll do anything to keep it from coming back.

...