K and I are going out to the Pacific Northwest next week for a
brief trip to see my family, celebrate K’s birthday (it’s a big one), and
visit North Cascades National Park. North Cascades was the second least-visited
National Park in the U.S. last year, a fact as surprising as it is delightful. I suppose after people have done Olympic and Rainier, they figure they’ve
seen the essential PNW and stop there. Fine with me; it’s August and
everyone is in summer desperation mode. Miles-long standstill traffic at a bear-sighting in Yellowstone or scores-deep crowds between you and the South Rim –
hard pass. Hit ‘em where they ain’t.
There’s also a race I’m doing out there, by the way, which I’ll
get to later in this post. For now, I’ll leave it at that, which is all I told
my family about it. They don’t understand my running obsession, so I’ve stopped
giving details. Can anyone really understand someone else’s obsession if
they don’t share it? What’s more, when my mother’s in the picture, I’ve pretty
much stopped talking about my life at all. There’s not much point. Presented with new
information, she gets confused, she doesn’t understand, and she quickly
forgets. Lately this happens even presented with old information – my name, her
name, her marital status, the past 40 years of her life.
Mom’s thoughts run in circles these days. She asks a question, my
father or sister or I answer, and then, because the topic is still in her mind,
a few minutes later she’ll ask the same thing. And yet, as is common,
she remembers with absolute clarity things that happened in her childhood, over
80 years ago, during a war nearly everyone else alive only knows about from
history books. As well, she remembers – has never forgotten – music. Mom likes
to say that she learned English listening to old musicals. Like a multilingual
Eliza Doolittle, she’ll suddenly break into “The rain in Spain stays mainly in
the plain!” (and will sing it, of course, again). That’s one of her
favorites these days, though her top favorite right now doesn’t come from a
musical but rather a Hitchcock film. It’s “Qué será, será,” the
song Doris Day belted out in The Man Who Knew Too Much. My mother adored Doris Day; in my childhood Mom thought she was consoling me for
my less-than-flawless complexion by saying, “Doris Day has freckles too!” It did
not console. Doris Day was no Barbie.
*****
When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me…
*****
“So how long have you been running?”
I mathed it out. “About 15 years.”
Compared to many of my running friends, that’s not exceptional,
but it’s a lifetime to the person who asked, as her dropped jaw and wide eyes
attested. She hadn’t yet been breathing air for 15 years.
A position had opened up for coaching the younger runners on the
cross-country team where I teach high school, and I figured why not. That is, other
than the fact that I have zero actual cross-country experience, either running
it as a student or coaching it as an adult. The other coaches, my husband,
and all my running friends assured me that didn’t matter. I know running, and I
know motivation. What more was there?
That said, running is different when you’re 54 and not 14, not that anyone there would know it. In
a baseball hat and sunglasses hiding silver streaks and crow’s feet, I likely don’t
look my age to the casual observer, and even after I tell the inquisitive young
athlete I wasn’t a runner in high school, it would still probably surprise her
to know the 15-year clock didn’t start until I was in my late 30s. If she’s
impressed by my 15-year career, she’d be stunned stupid to find out I’m close
to her grandma’s age.
But right now that doesn’t matter. I’m doing a five-mile trail run
with her and a few others on a balmy Saturday morning and she’s asking me
everything I know about the sport. This group is mostly the
back-of-the-packers, newer to running and visibly intimidated by the varsity
group, tall and statuesque and so very assured about everything they do.
I turn them away from such comparisons and instead wax heartfelt
and rapturous about the joys of running. “Plus,” I add for the benefit of encouraging
a healthy competitive spirit, “Running is full of surprises. The person you
would never pick out as being fast – a lot of times that person is an absolute beast
out there. It’s a funny thing about runners: they often look quite ordinary.”
“Yes! That’s true! In fact, umm …” my youthful protege hesitated, glancing
at me, “I don’t mean this as disrespect, but that’s what I thought about you
when I first saw you. I had no idea you were running a hundred miles!”
I laughed. I didn’t take it as disrespect at all. For 53 years of
my life, I had no idea myself. Fought very hard against it, in fact, the way
runners do when a crazy idea gets hold of them. After a 5K, twice that is impossible.
After 10K, a half marathon can’t happen. After a half, no way am I doing
a full. After a full, no way will I do another. After several, ultras are out
of the question. After 50K, 50 miles, 100K, nope, nope, nope, that’s it, no
more, the end. And so here we are again, less than two weeks away from
something I never even thought was a thing, much less a thing I’d do.
*****
When I
grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart, what lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows day after day?
Here’s what my sweetheart said…
*****
During the taper – often about two weeks before a race – a lot of things happen
in the runner’s brain to make up for the lack of megamiles. You think you’re
injured. You think you’re coming down with something. Everything you eat is
making you bloaty and flabby, and you question every aspect of your training
plan. Only in this case, I was RIGHT to question my
training, because I felt really, really good. How can that BE? I’m TRAINING to
run A HUNDRED MILES. You don’t feel GOOD doing that, and if you do, you’re doing
it very, very WRONG.
K disagreed. He thought I’d done quite well prepping physically;
the question was whether I was sufficiently prepared mentally. This is
something he’s always observed about me, and for good reason: he’s right. My
brain gives me much more trouble than my legs, and running, as I blithely tell the
XC athletes, is very much mental. Also do as I say, not as I do.
There’s an added mental-fortitude aspect to this particular race I’m
doing, in that it’s not actually 100 miles but rather 32 hours. Participants
have that amount of time to run as many 2.6-mile loops around a lake in the
mountains as they can. Many of the runners are aiming for their first hundred,
as it’s a relatively easy course and the short loops mean aid is readily available.
Even other nutty ultra runners often disdain fixed-time loop races,
for the same reason non-runners do: it sounds excruciatingly boring. And yet, I
argue, there is a comfort to familiarity that makes doing something this insane
a little more feasible, at least to me and like-minded lunatics. Plus, realistically,
what is there to see on any trail, loop or otherwise, in the middle of the
night, when the mind is most likely to shut down?
“The problem,” said a friend of mine with several hundreds under
her belt, “is there’s the temptation to stop whenever you finish a loop. If you’re
50 miles from the start on an out-and-back course, you might as well keep going
because you don’t have much choice.”
My mind, however, doesn’t work like that. I’m more likely to stop
if the road ahead is long and daunting and I have far to go before I can rest.
If I know I can rest in just a few short miles, I know I can do that again,
over and over. At least, I think I can do that. At least, sometimes
I think that. Oh hell.
*****
Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be?
Will I be handsome? Will I be rich?
I tell them tenderly…
*****
During our run that Saturday, one of the varsity runners passed my group, grimacing with the heat and his efforts but still smiling as we cheered him on. “How’s it going?” I called to him.
He groaned. “I feel like death.”
“Well, you know, if you don’t feel like death, you aren’t
pushing hard enough!”
The kid beamed at me, pleased: it feels good to know that your suffering is a testament to
your strength and perseverance. Funny thing is I’m not sure I always believe
that myself. Frequently I observe that suffering is mostly just a whole lot of
pain and misery. It isn’t noble, it doesn’t build character, it doesn’t go
towards a greater purpose. When my mother plunges from jaunty renditions of
showtunes into an abyss of darkness and rage, what lesson can I learn from it?
What inspiration can I draw?
But I don’t think about that now. We’re running now. We’re
breathing and moving and our hearts are beating and even though we end up where
we’ve started, like a song that comes back to its chorus, there’s joy in the
return.
“This is so different from cross country in my middle school!” the
inquisitive girl exclaimed. “The coach was awful. She made us run laps around the
track all the time. That’s the only thing we did. And if we stopped to
walk, she kicked us out of practice for the rest of the day.”
I was justly appalled. “That’s horrible! Running should not feel like punishment!”
And with respect to Danny Rojas and Ted Lasso, I added, “Running is life!”
Perhaps that was laying it on too thick, but it did go over well.
Smiles all around, and a shyly added, “I hope I can be like you and run as an
adult. I wonder if I’ll be able to do that.”
I didn’t break out into song, no matter how tempted I might have
been. “It’s possible,” I said. “I’m hoping the experience you have now will help
make it possible.”
Which is not quite the same thing as “Qué será, será,” but funny thing about that famous song: the title is meaningless. It’s a mistranslation. Grammatically, it doesn’t work; musically, who cares – it’s catchy and singable, and apparently very memorable.
Qué será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Qué será, será
What will be, will be
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