running – Page 2

Tarmac Meditations…Lessons I Learned at Marathon Camp Redux

November 18, 2010 By longrun 1 Comment

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 1…Run for an hour. Turn your hat backwards. Follow the moon home. Wash your face with cold water. Do crunches for four minutes like Coach told you to, 40 years ago. Do 20+ pushups. Eat toast, drink coffee. Go to a meeting. Do it again tomorrow. Life is where you find it. Life is what you make of it. “Welcome to the mountain. If you love mushrooms you are already a billionaire. ” Sakai said that.

Marathon Camp lesson No. 2…Run more. Facebook, Twitter, ESPN? Less. Rest, eat some good stuff, sleep and then get up and run again. Keep an open mind, open clear eyes, trust your pure heart. In other words, run daily, run slowly, don’t eat like a pig. Equally, relax and keep paying attention. Ernst Van Aaken said that, with a little help from Roger McGuinn.

Marathon Camp lesson No. 3…Pain is nature’s way of telling you to stay the hell in bed, get some rest, use ice, elevation, vitamin I (Ibuprofen), watch movies, read a book. Or maybe, get the hell up, do the run, the situps, the pushups, eat something, go to work. I suppose one could do both, in reverse order. Or not. Maybe the best approach is to walk slowly in a circle, and think about everything. Or not

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 4…Go out before daybreak. Start at bottom of trail. Turn hat backwards, turn on headlamp. Walk slowly. Pick up pace as muscles loosen. Pump elbows, breath in, breath out. Follow the trail. Avoid the glittering eyes in the trees. At the top, turn off your headlamp, lower your voice. Gaze at the stars. Pause. Turn on your headlamp. On the downhill, stretch it out, let it rip. Breathe deeply. In. Out. Smile. Everything is possible.

Napa 2009 Memory…A steady rain falls over the hills east of the Silverado Trail, an augury of the internal storms to come for those here to run the 31st Napa Valley Marathon. Cold, wet, tired, migrained, 62, I am at a start line after an absence of three long years. The rain seems a messenger from on high, cleansing the earth, the road ahead, readying the bodies and minds of the faithful for the task at hand.

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 4.5…Whip 2 eggs, 3 cups of skim milk, 3 cups of oatmeal, cinnamon to taste, 2 tbs sugar…preheat oven to 350, bake until done. Taste and refrigerate until morning or the midnight creepies, which ever comes first. Homemade carb loading after midnight. How cool is that?

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 5…1/2 bagel with PB. 1/2 banana. Water. Gatorade. Walk to a start line. Clear mind. Start slow, find your pace, look around. Lean on the final turn, keep your head up, eyes clear. Get a medal and some food. Look for a smile and a hug. A 1/2 marathon is not half of anything really. It is a full 13.1 miles. Later, when the road shows no sign of the race, embrace the idea, the reality, that the memory will last your lifetime.

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 6…Thomas Wolfe of “Look Homeward Angel” wrote that he would “…go up and down the country/and back and forth across the country/…go out West where the States are square/…go to Boise and Helena and Albuquerque/ I will go to Montana and the two Dakotas/…the unknown places.” Unknown places in the heart, a cadence of breath and footfall; the miles unwind, mind clears; all there is left is the doing.

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 7…How will I be humbled today? It is difficult when it is difficult because it is supposed to be. The lesson is that water wears away the hardest stone by flowing around it and over it; so, too, I get where I am going by yielding and continuing on at the same time. There is exhilaration, relief that the hard part has arrived. Now it is my time to find out what there is to find out on this day.

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 8…We do not often speak of the Wall, of leg cramps, hunger, rain, or hills in reverent tones. In each of us lives a desire to be challenged, to keep on, to stay in when the road gets hard. Without the difficulty, the victory over distance, of self over self, is harder to calculate, harder to embrace. It is harder to cherish, harder to keep shiny for the moments when things get lost and life gets away.

Marathon Camp Lesson No. 9… My magic mystical tour of the marathon has given way to a recognition that a run is just that, a run; train for it, run it. To carry the weight of recovery, of failed dreams and self image is way too much. 26.2 miles brings one to one’s knees no matter who they are; it is a humbling exercise in reality, in acceptance. It is less about will power and guts and more about being present with who we are in that moment.

Marathon Camp lesson No. 10…Take a step. Take another step. Repeat.

Napa 2009 Memory No. 2…By late afternoon there was no evidence of the 2,500 runners and volunteers. No paper cups, no Gu packages. The sun came out and by nightfall the Silverado Trail was dry. The next morning all that remained was local traffic and the faint sense of something that had happened here. It, too, would be washed away by the morning rains, falling light upon the vineyards whose bounty was still months away.

Tarmac Meditations-Evolving and Resolving Inside a Mystery

November 18, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Another long night. Ran to my meeting . Left the house at 6 something. Didn’t look at the time when I arrived. Felt good although the onset of cold and wet weather makes my breathing complicated. It helps to take walk breaks to ease the back tension which eventually closes down my breathing. Age and injury are not for the faint of heart. Going to investigate a project possibility that entails training for and running a marathon, a fifty K (50K) trail run and a 50 mile trail run in aid of running a 100K (62.5 miles) on or around my 65th birthday next August. This is the beginning of a plan that seems doable if I remember that I have traveled great distances from where I was to where I am and that getting to the start line and eventually getting to the finish line are the important metrics. Time over distance is not. Distance over time and attention paid is what I am after. The medals, should there be any, will last longer than I will, but the deed, the doing of it, is all that matters to me. Take a step. Take another step. Breathe in and out. Look around. Repeat.

Tarmac Meditations-So it Begins-Again

November 17, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Slept lousy if at all. Made crummy coffee at 3:30 AM. Burnt the toast. Went down to office to work. Stubbed a toe in the dark. Turned on the light. Stubbed the other big toe. Sat down to work bumped my knee. Computer was resting, did not want to wake up. Cursing and general bad attitude forced the computer to respond. That and turning it on. Finished the weekend shoot. Emailed the customer base. Decided not to run the Boston Marathon as a charity runner. Must qualify (old dude values to be sure). Lifted, lunged, made manly grunting noises. Went out for a quick 2-3 miles. Spent an hour on the roads. Made random turns. Listened to Van Morrison and Eric Clapton. Instead of point to point or an established route I re-discover the aimless run in the early morning, drifting, checking things out, letting the day come to me. Part of the plan will be days like this when there is a plan to run but no plan as to where or how much. Answer the why of it and the rest will take care of itself. Coffee leftovers, more burnt toast, some web building, and now it’s 9:37. Back still hurts, thinking of taking a nap. The day is either well started or in the bag. What’s next? Oh yeah, right! Write now. Nap later. Plan or no plan, time happens( John Lennon among many others).

Tarmac Meditations-No Plan is Not a Plan

November 7, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

If you have no plan, and I mostly don’t, then training is where you find it. When you are young and working out physically at both work and play, as I was, training kind of happened. When I swam competitively or ran track the training sessions were there to be attended, the events a matter of finding the competitors entrance after you got off the bus. The years gone by come to require more planning. The Internet is filled with training plans for runners. The gal in the picture probably hasn’t read one of them. She trains with the Joe Henderson Marathon Team; she has trained with them now for nearly six years. The long runs, the key to both the program’s success and the intense loyalty of its participants to the marathon and the coach, are on Sundays. She, Jean, has shown up for nearly all of them. She has run 17 marathons, some faster, some slower, all steady as she goes. Her plan requires balancing kids, her mother, her job, her commute, her social life, her fabulous chocolate chip cookies and like that. A life. I have read all of the training plans although I quit that after I started to run again for the pleasure/pain/ prayer-like aspects of running into my sixties. It occurred to me just now that I haven’t been running long( long distance) since my surgeries, but it is time to remember no plan is not a plan; that a plan can be simple. And I ought to have one. Run a mile, see how you feel is a plan. Run every weekday for a mile or more, take a day off every now and then and run longer by twice one day on the weekend is a plan. Run long on the weekend, increasing by 5% if every week, by 10% if every other week is plan. Run daily, run slowly, don’t eat like a pig is a plan. Ernst Van Aaken said that. Part of any running plan is to go to a good running store, assess if they know what they are doing; one criteria is that there are all types of people (bodies) selling, it is quiet, there is a sense of running history in the place, there is treadmill or other such for stride analysis, there are running groups for all levels that are organized out of the store. So why say all this? On account of I need to remember what I know. I took a rest day on Friday, felt lousy yesterday, Saturday, and worked early this morning; it will be three days without running, let alone running slowly or long, and the eating like a pig thing, well, it was not my best food weekend. So. A plan. Run daily, write it down. Run slowly, as if I had more than one speed. Write it down. Run long, two hours building to four on the weekend. Rest the other day. Write it down. Don’t eat like a pig; keep track of the fuel input says Matt Fitzgerald so as to support the output for more fun and better health. Write it down. Going to lift now, chop wood later, and write down my goals for the week. Now’s there’s a plan, inside the other plan if you see what I mean.

Tarmac Meditations- Rest Day

November 5, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Rest day. No running; well no running unless I can’t stand it. A good bet for now. Migraine, bad juju I think, too much thinking, not enough acting, too little clarity, too little, too often. “…Too much of nothin’ makes a fellow mean…”( The Mighty Quinn according to Bob Dylan)On the other hand, it is what I have made of it, the running, the writing, the shooting and like that. So it must be in my own hands to at least do the footwork…seat of the pants in the seat of the chair, quit yer whinin’ and write something, anything. In an hour or two you can go chop some wood, literally and then you can rearrange the weights, move the bench, do the laundry, sell something to some one , anyone, eat lunch a spoonful of complex carbs at a time, vacuum the living room, edit the last post, drift across the universe in a facebook space module, quit whinin’, send out the rent check(late), hang the micro fibre, dry the other stuff, gaze out the window, gaze at my own navel, shift the fleet up the coast ( as if), write some more. Nap. The road leads somewhere, even when I can’t see for looking. Keeping the faith, lifting your eyes to whatever you believe in, taking your medicine, literally and otherwise and keeping it tight. A rest day? Not so much.