Run Super Run

(10 reasons why) I love Beacon Hill

2016-08-17T14:25:00.002-07:00

Running up (and down) Beacon Hill is an efficient and compact hill workout. The trails up the hill starting at Dallas Road provide a steady 10% grade, rising 15 meters over a 160 meter incline with a satisfying scramble at the top.
Running down Beacon Hill Loop towards Circle Drive and the rest of the Park is a nice cool down of 360 meters.
Running back up the curve of Beacon Hill Loop gives a consistent increase in elevation grade starting at 2% and rising to 7% at the top.
For a shorter cool-down between hill repeats, one can run up the hill and right back down because there are multiple trails on either side.
The scenic overlook at the ‘summit’ is hard to top – panoramic views of the spectacular Olympic mountains just across the azure waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Circle Drive (the loop around the hill) is exactly one mile long – perfect for mile-repeats. The road has a separate bike/pedestrian lane which is handy for evading slow-moving car traffic.
In springtime, Beacon Hill is ablaze with blue wildflowers (flowering camas native to the area).
In summer, the once lush green meadows turn to sun-bleached gold.
Peacocks wander the lower reaches of the hill. I almost ran into one the other day. Surreal, yes.
And baby goats scamper and lurch around adorably too, if you’re looking for signs of hope and rejuvenation after a particularly life-threatening workout.

In praise of running

2012-10-12T14:04:00.001-07:00

Running gives me everything. Running gives me a supportive community of comrades who are both more competitive and more altruistic, as Christopher McDougall points out; maybe because we can viscerally connect with each other’s pain, pride and perseverance. Running also gives me the chance to be alone, moving through the mist of ever-shifting thoughts and needs and grudges, grinding them down mile after mile into dust, leaving me clean.

Running is my meditation, helping me check in and focus on each body part, the aching ankle, the wonky knee, the tight hamstring, the lazy glute, bringing me to empathy and gratitude for this miraculous body whose tissues and structure reflect my genetic inheritance, psychological makeup and everything else that has shaped me. Running is elemental: each step grounds me, like Antaeus, in the replenishing energy of earth; each breath is a deep drink of air; I soak in the salt ocean of my sweat. Running gives me a feel for the health of my lungs, my blood, my heart. Each race I run is an objective gauge of my fitness, my level of energy, my excessive intake of muffins. Running helps me stay truthful in a world where it is too easy to lie. (Which may be why so many runners reacted to Paul Ryan’s little fib about his marathon time; a harmless exaggeration to a non-runner, but a basic betrayal of the runner’s code, revealing so much about the politician’s unreality.)

Because I run I get to fall for all these other gorgeous runners of every shape, size, age, race and gender, to like them and wish them well with all my being, even if it’s just through eye contact as we run past one another. If I were ever paralyzed I would hope to make contact with others with the same heart-felt intensity. Some people talk about running as a spiritual practice, but I can’t speak to that.

You can probably tell this was written after a great run. Running gives me the summery shimmer of endorphins, thank goodness, on a cool wet fall day.

The Empress has no (s**t)

2012-08-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

Warning/Avertissement: If you are an Anglophile visitor enchanted by the mystique of red double-decker buses, green lawns and ivy-covered hotels, or if you are a Victoria local who at least once a day likes full-heartedly to exclaim how lucky we are to live here, now would be a good time to stop reading this post. And if you should choose to continue, kindly refrain from hateful comments along the line of "Go back where you came from" because that is not really an option.

I don't really want to be a muckraker, a shit-disturber, but sadly I have no choice but to point out the obvious: Victoria has a problem with shit. Defecation, if you prefer medical terms, kaka if you verge on the infantile, merde in our other national lingua franca.

I'm not even referring to our little local controversy over sewage treatment. Only in Victoria, pristine capital of the greenest province in the great white north, will you find prominent environmentalists who are convinced that it is perfectly all right to flush untreated waste (filtered through a coarse mesh, it's true) into the narrow strait of Juan de Fuca separating our fair city from the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The fast-moving cold currents in the strait make for a perfect natural latrine, they argue, and the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to treat all that poop are better spent on other good causes.

Those good causes do not, however, include the maintenance and upkeep of public toilets. The City of Victoria has proudly installed public urinals in the "night-life district". (See: http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2011/02/07/CoolPublicUrinal/) However, this charming installation isn't particularly useful for women or people with disabilities. But then again, they should probably stay at home. Likewise, the homeless. Out for a run this weekday morning at 5.30 am, the facilities on Dallas Road were definitely shut down; at 6 am, I was thrilled to bits to find the public toilets locked up at Willows Beach; and at 6.30 am, further along the lovely Oak Bay waterfront, the washrooms were not open for business at Cadboro Bay's Gyro Park. I considered popping into the nearby Starbucks but was deterred by the sight of a pair of balding burly teletubbies sitting solemnly outside with their morning coffee, contemplating a leaf-blower loudly whooshing away any sign of human or vegetal life from the parking lot.

Oh, you know, the homeless, they make such a mess. They leave needles, trails of blood, puddles of urine, piles of feces, bio-hazards that suburban middle-class families shouldn't have to encounter. No wonder we have to lock up our public toilets at night. Why don't they just do their business at home? So what if they are homeless and Victoria has almost no affordable housing? Why don't they get a job... or just leave?

Another disclaimer: I am not a homeless person. I am an absurdly over-privileged middle-class middle-aged male.

I also happen to be a runner. Little known fact: running gives you the runs. The digestive system becomes more sensitive, peristalsis more insistent. The moving body seeks to expel all unnecessary materials.

Runners are out and about at all hours. We use public toilets because what's the alternative? Dive into the bush? Carry around latex gloves and little plastic baggies like the ubiquitous dog-owners proudly picking up after their animal surrogates? The tragedy of the commons in absurd miniature: every man, woman, child and pet with his, her or its own porta-potty.

Ever since Mohenjo Daro and the Romans, great cities have been built on the shared foundations of public infrastructure: viaducts, drains, roads. But to keep our toilets open, Victoria and its adjacent municipal fiefdoms, genteel Saanich, rich Oak Bay, upwardly mobile Colwood, ambitious Langford, would have to admit that Victoria is actually a city, and not just a quaint little preserve of retired English expatriate gardeners.

We might have to actually admit that we have bowels and bodily functions and that our collective body politic is suffering from a serious case of constipation. We would have to wake up from a pleasant Dickensian fantasy in which every doughty Englishman had his own little castle, replete with moat, and recognize that it's not enough to build ever larger suburban dwellings with multiple bathrooms which we spray with deoderant chemicals after every evacuation. We would have to step out of Queen Victoria's large shadow and let go of our fixation with the comfortable diaper of the mother complex that keeps this city and its residents in what has been called a 'velvet rut', the idyllic paralysis of infantile compliance with authority and the denial of libido.

Queen Victoria's bloomers were auctioned off a few years ago, to a Canadian apparently. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2008-07-30-victoria_N.htm) No word if there were stains on the Empress's underclothes.

Starting again...

2011-06-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

I ran for an hour the other day.

Normally, this would not be newsworthy. However, as my aching legs remind me two days later, this was my first run in over three months. I'm impressed how quickly the body dismantles the hard-won apparatus it constructs for specialized activities like marathon running. Like a high-efficiency short-order cook, the body takes what it gets and puts it to best use: if I choose to sit in front of a computer editing video instead of getting out there for a bracing run in the cold rain, so be it.

I would like to bring more of this ruthless responsibility into the rest of my life, this recognition that I make choices which have consequences, not necessarily bad or good in any absolute sense, yet with impact on the particular quality of life I choose to experience.

Ideally, I would both run and make video... Hard to do at the same time (although I did make a video while running the Boston marathon (see http://youtu.be/5E7G2XRC7gM) I would like to believe my capacity for creative expression would gain oxygen from the aerobic capacity I build through running, although I'm also aware that I don't want to do much besides eating ice cream after a long hard run... Somewhere along the way, I hope I will find the balance.

In the meantime, back to running feels good (especially two days later.)

when things fall apart...

2009-10-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’... Four days after the marathon, I continue to reflect on lessons from the race.

What kept me moving forward through the panic of knee pain at 14 kilometres, the mental barrier of sheer futility at 20 miles, unutterable exhaustion two hundred metres from the finish line? My doctor friend Rafi who thinks running is bad for you would probably call it foolish obstinacy. My mother, on the other hand, believes in the power of will and would probably applaud this display of determination, even if dismayed by the sorry sight of her son near collapsing.

The night before the race, I relaxed my nerves in a warm bath, following Jeff Galloway’s suggestion to visualize the course and to find some magic words. The next morning, I scrawled on my left forearm – trust, relax, flow. Amazing how often I looked at those injunctions to find strength and form to combat the onset of mental and physical slump.

I also watched an excellent short Runners’ World video with tips by great runners like Ryan Hall, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dean Karnazes and Dick Beardsley. During tough moments in the race, I reminded myself of Ryan’s advice to focus on the next step. Not the next five kilometres, not the bagel and banana waiting at an end point in the impossibly distant future, just the actual next step. (Amusing to consider Chairman Mao gave the same advice for a journey of a thousand miles.)

So this morning’s insight – when movement is underway, pay attention to form; when everything is falling apart, focus on the next step.

And really it makes sense to use the personal will as a resource when it is available, and when it starts to break down through stress and fatigue and the light of the ‘I’ draws dim and small, that’s when the next step becomes the only possible space for action, enabling surrender to a deeper flow that carries us forward beyond comprehension.

One marathon - two races

2009-10-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

I ran two races at yesterday’s Royal Victoria Marathon. First, a smart strategic strong 42 km run, with evenly timed 4.45 minutes per kilometre splits. Then, bizarrely disconnected, a final 200 metre stagger, knees jumbled, eyes squeezed tight shut, faltering stumble punctuated by long hyperventilating groans, mooing like a cow driven to the shambles by some invisible goad.

Or make that an invisible god - likely Hermes, swift mover, cosmic trickster, patron of thieves and magicians. In the evening, recuperating, I came across an email trail suggesting I had in fact made my race goal - qualifying for the Boston marathon - by one second. Checking the race results, I saw my name - at chip time 3.20.59 - closely followed by another runner from Quebec, another man, same age group, who came in at 3.21.00 - one second too slow to qualify for Boston.

Here’s the crux of free will versus necessity in that most fleeting of instants: do I take personal credit for months of clean living, hard practice runs, regular stretching, core training, good race planning, a conservative start, mental fortitude and discipline, or do I accept, with gratitude, the god’s gift of that stolen second, a sacred mystery beyond my control in that final disoriented step over the finish line?

And perhaps I needed to run 42 long and hard kilometres on my own steam (and the loving support of kind friends and cheering onlookers) to be able to surrender at the last to whatever force summons forth spring from stone legs, the prime mover’s manifestation in this personal effort.

In any event, I am happy and grateful.

running with an injury

2009-09-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

I took a risk this morning. The last long run of the marathon training clinic - a 34 km run planned for three plus hours. Last Saturday, we ran 2 hours and 45 minutes, and I felt fine, except for a pain on the top of my foot that got worse as the week went on. I iced and rested all week, forcing myself to skip speed workouts on Monday and Wednesday, but the localized swelling didn't go down and the pain went deeper into the foot.

Although I sternly told myself during the week that with five weeks to go until my fall race (the Royal Victoria Marathon on October 11), this was the time to rest up, I felt increasingly fretful and anxious, almost tearful as if some horrid curse had been inflicted on poor me. Physically, I felt bloated and heavy, as if I had gained pounds overnight from eating oversize portions, muffins and ice cream, normally burned away with a shrug during intensive training.

So this morning, I gingerly laced up my shoes and limped out to the run. With a short emergency detour to grab a couple of gels, I was in for the ride with the group. The first hour was painful - stabbing pains on the inside of the foot that seemed to get worse. I breathed through the pain and tried to relax into the run, going as slow as the slowest runner in our group, an unaccustomed humility that felt like practicing beginner's mind (or body).

Leaning forward like a chi runner, focusing on landing lightly on the balls of my feet, allowing the rhythm of the run to take over, pain gave way to pleasure and I felt a sag of relief at the prospect of not having to abort the run, limping painfully to the nearest pay phone with the quarter tucked into my water bottle pocket, calling a friend for a ride.

Instead I ran easily and fast until pain started to seize my knees and I could feel my core weakening, and then decisively took a short cut back to a friend's place, making it there a minute past three hours for the run. Doing a yoga inversion, sweat stinging my eyes, I felt gratitude and relief and the rush of joy at an unexpected win, at least for now, at the gambling table.

I'll see my chinese medicine doctor tomorrow though.

new start

2009-03-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

Snow on the streets

Victoria in mid-march

time to run

Perhaps haiku is the best approach to re-starting a blog that has gone stale... I won't write much right now, just putting out my intention to write again, to run again, to put myself into flow after a winter in hibernation, transformation, in slow station, installation.

The cherry blossoms are blooming inspite of the snow, I will run slowly and patiently to ease my knee, loosen my hip, rebuild my feet. Another running season, time to breathe deep, sink into the body's ecstatic connection with the road, itself, others who run, life itself.

Victoria's high end real estate

2008-07-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

Running through Victoria’s most posh neighbourhoods, I feel proprietarial, condescending, envious, and afraid. I am an intruder, casing the joint in the early morning, yet I am also in equal measure a neighbour sympathetic to the plight of millionaires trying to avoid losing money, realtor alert to the multitude of ‘for sale’ signs that have sprouted everywhere, and a canny investor (albeit with no money) looking for a good deal.

And you do see good deals (in relative terms) – the house for sale that was a once in a lifetime opportunity at 2.199 million is now going for a song at $1.999 million, in grim competition with a stone-gated mansion that has its very own website or an ocean-front penthouse. I am becoming aware of the slight but acute class distinctions between houses that are a mere 500 meters apart – the parvenu concrete block at the base of Foul Bay road doesn’t fall into the same category as the house up the hill that is being sold by Sotheby’s International. A water view is not the same thing as an ocean front, and King George Terrace is not to be confused with Hollywood Crescent. One of the dozen or so manorial residences at the corner of Beach Drive (before it turns into more plebeian Oak Bay with its rental apartments for seniors) sports oriental turrets on the small gatehouse for the gardener or visitor, not to be confused with the mansion itself at the end of the driveway.

I was glad to see an article in today’s New York Times confirming my impression that lots of high-end property is for sale right now. The article quotes local realtor Marsha Crawford saying that Victoria “has more property now on the market in a single month than we have seen in 18 years.” Most oceanfront homes on the market are being priced at between 2-4 million dollars. While, there has been a slowdown in transactions, I’m not feeling too sorry for the would-be sellers – “prices are up double digits over the same period last year.”

Apparently, four percent of Victoria’s houses are owned by Americans, with other foreigners owning another one percent. One realtor thinks Americans are selling their Canadian vacation properties “because of the Canadian dollar’s newfound strength and reinvesting in American vacation properties.” Perhaps he is too polite to consider that maybe they are just over-extended and desperately trying to get rid of whatever they can to get some cash.

3 hour run

2008-07-17T23:21:00.000-07:00

I ran longer than three hours (well, just a minute longer) for the first time this morning. My right foot hurts a bit, otherwise I feel good, even sitting in a cramped seat on a crowded airplane heading to Anchorage, surrounded by the smell of cheeseburgers and those who eat them.

Another first: I chose not to listen to music on my long run, although I did stick my iPod Shuffle and earphones into a pocket, just in case I got bored. Instead of zoning out to music, I was more aware of the rustle of leaves, the crash of waves, passing cyclists shouting to each other, the rasp of my breath, inducing a different trance state, with a synesthetic dimension – an undiluted appreciation of the pastel pink dawn over pale blue mountains half-hidden by a pearly layer of sea-level fog, a rust red container vessel, bright as blood in the early morning sun, the surreal yellow of a fire engine blocking the familiar path by Dallas Road, followed by the acrid shock of smoke floating up from the beach below.

This morning I ran (and walked – one minute for every nine or ten running) my usual route, which I am extending in 15 minute increments. I started at 5 am at the top of the gentle hill on Southgate street, a block and a half from where I live, slowly along the wood chip trail shaded by stately chestnut trees on Heywood Avenue, along the eastern border of Beacon Hill Park, past the peacocks screeching harshly in the petting zoo, across the street from the retirement homes on Douglas Street by mile zero, then looping east along Dallas Road through the no-leash zone beloved of dog owners, walkers, joggers and kitesurfers, around Clover Point where staid Victoria releases its raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca in pouting defiance of propriety and municipal toilet training, down the long slope to historic Ross Bay cemetery, in the cemetery itself along a narrow path between gravestones and tree stumps (which are conspiring these days to trip me up), across the street to Hollywood Crescent, up and down the killer hills of King George Terrace, past the Victoria golf course, the mansions and marinas of Oak Bay, and the lane by Willows Beach and Cattle Point, reminiscent of some genteel English seaside resort, replete with tea house and deck chairs, then looping back all the way again to James Bay and Beacon Hill with its landmark maple leaf flag fluttering proudly for all to see.

A few hours later, I told a colleague in passing I'd run three hours that morning, and she nearly fell off her chair. "What, are you training for a marathon?" she asked, incredulous, and I replied, "yes, actually I am."

Hip stretches

2008-07-13T19:12:00.000-07:00

I've really got into doing hip stretches in the last few weeks.

Trolling the Runner's World website, I came across a couple of wonderful videos with professional athletes, smiling and calmly brushing away a stray lock from an immaculate hairdo, while demonstrating a series of eye-popping stretches for the hips, core and abdominal muscles.

Most of these exercises are done on all fours - well, actually, less than all fours since they involve extending an arm and its opposite leg, or raising a leg parallel to the floor with knee bent at a forty five degree angle, or doing 'donkey kicks' backwards as far as possible, or extending and rotating the leg forward and outward, then reversing, and other amazing movements that leave me gasping, dripping, and exhilarated.

I've been doing rather gentler hip rotations for some years now, lying on my back to engage the abs, and also during the closing portion of my morning stretch routine, standing on one leg and rotating the hip in both directions nine times, then switching legs.

Then I follow my marvellous chi kung teacher Minke's instructions to rotate at the waist in each direction 'as if writing on the ceiling with a pencil sticking out from the top of your head'. This is relatively easy; yet when my hands drop down on either side from the waist to the hip, and I begin to rotate the pelvis and hips, my breath catches. Shame and self-consciousness inflame my face and I bring my unsteady attention back to the pelvis, dropping down into the core anxiety, the clenched root of neurosis.

I am outraged and embarrassed each time I manage to say this out loud. (Will they call me mad like Wilhelm Reich?) Toilet training is the primal lock on the ecstatic energy that streams through the infant's body. Before we know better, we are taught to clamp down on that undifferentiated libidinal flow. We learn too early to tighten our sphincters, often beyond our conscious control. We are conditioned (by banal triggers, the dull semiotics of pornography - inflated breasts or pectoral muscles, the numbing boredom of repetitive genital banging) to associate release with both pleasure and shame; the orgasm we get to experience is more guilty spasm than abandoned flow.

So when I do hip stretches, and manage to breathe into the anxiety, I am liberating not just the muscles of my hip and knee and calf and ankle that I use for running; I am unfastening the shackles of a rusty body/mind armour I want badly to let go. Who would have thought loosening your hips would help you lose your mind?!

Run for Canada

2008-07-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

On July 1, along with 800 other runners and walkers, I celebrated Canada Day by running the HBC 10K 'Run for Canada'.

The race started beside the Parliament Buildings facing Victoria's inner harbour, wound around Beacon Hill Park and the Dallas Road waterfront until picturesque Ross Bay cemetery, then turned back around James Bay, and back past the green lawns of the Parliament Buildings.

It was a nice morning for the run - sunny yet not too warm; the course was spectacular; the volunteers and spectators were kind; the shirts were beautiful; the post-race medals were bestowed by genuine Olympians - and the whole experience was altogether pleasant in a very Victoria kind of way.

I had a good run - maintaining a good relaxed pace and finishing strong in 45:36, which I thought was a personal best so far, until I realized the next morning that I had actually finished my first 10K last March in Maryland in 44:01. I was wiped out after that race, though, while I felt fine this week.

The best moment on the race for me, though, was seeing my friends Karin and Doug along the way. I was on the return stretch at the 7K mark, starting to pick up speed, when I saw Karin walking on the other side of the road. 'Go Karin!', I yelled; she waved back and pointed behind her. To my total delight, there was Doug, dauntlessly marching along, wearing the race shirt, a sun hat, and a broad smile.

Doug is 64, weighs more than he should, and has recently been put on blood thinners for an irregular heartbeat. At my urging, Karin (who is a serious runner) and he had signed up for the 10K before he found out about his heart issue. Around the same time, Karin hurt her calf and ankle; so it looked unlikely they would take part.

Yet there they were, walking along, and I was (and am) so proud of them for taking on the challenge and going the distance.

We met up later for breakfast and then sauntered down Government Street. We moved a table into the sunshine outside Starbucks and I fetched their mochas. Doug happily basked in the sun, sipping his creamy drink, looking good, if incongruous, in his fancy technical running shirt, modeled after the signature line Canada's Olympic athletes will wear next month in Beijing. Victoria (and nearby parts of Vancouver Island) is where 50 of Canada's Olympians live or train. There is a big send-off for them downtown this afternoon. I'm sure they will look good and do us proud. Yet I can't imagine being more proud than I was of Doug, walking along, indomitable, that Canada Day morning.

Icarus

2008-06-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

Lying on the mat at the Y this morning, after an intense core workout and hip stretches, I realized the flatness I've been experiencing all week is just the surface manifestation of a deeper grief.

When Icarus came crashing down into the blue Aegean, his waxen wings melted by the aloof sun, eyes averted from such human hubris, as he tumbled through that turbulent terror into desolate clarity, Icarus finally understood gravity, inexorable as Ananke-necessity, infinitely stronger than any countervailing human effort.

I feel exhilarated when I see photographs of runners airborne, caught in that infinitesmal moment between contact of one foot or another with mother earth stretched out beneath like a patient safety net, holding us safe, whether we will it or not.

Each step that launches me off this earth is a miniature mirror of Icarus' wild flight. And each landing reflects that first and final fall.

Half marathon

2008-06-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

I ran my first half marathon last Sunday in Vancouver. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and cool, and over 3500 runners ran a very scenic course from the University of British Columbia, through Kitsilano, across the Burrard Bridge to Stanley Park. A band played raucously; runners, munching bananas and bagels, mingled with excited families and friends; and I felt oddly flat. As Peggy Lee might have said, "is that all there is to a race?"

I don't want to admit to feeling competitive; yet the next morning, looking at the race results online, I felt deflated when I saw I was slower than the average runner in my age group. I ran the race in a respectable 1 hour and 55 minutes - five minutes faster than my public goal of 2 hours, ten minutes slower than my private goal of 1:45.

A small dishonesty to be more ambitious than I might let on to others; yet part of a persona I've interiorized for a very long time. Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Balliol College at Oxford, an institution that instilled the ideal of 'effortless superiority', which fit well for someone who never did homework and passed exams with minimal study.

Yet there are no shortcuts in running. My body will carry me as far and as fast as it is able. Training, recovery, rest, and nutrition will make me stronger; yet no matter how much effort and time I put into it, I won't become a world beater. Time's arrow flies in one direction, and sometimes that is down hill.

Or should I make that uphill? Most of the Vancouver half marathon course was along a gentle downhill slope - too easy to over-stride or go for broke too early. For the first half of the race, I resisted the temptation to run fast, shuffling along on the grass verge whenever I could, shifting to a walk every ten minutes, watching other runners go by, then enjoying the childish pleasure of catching up to them and passing them again. I played 'tag' for four turns with one tall bearded heavy-set man who was pushing along as hard as he could. Somewhere around Spanish Banks, I complimented him on his form and then ran away, determined to complete the second half within fifty minutes.

Which I did - accelerating after making it through the long Art Nouveau rise of the grand old bridge and the opening curve of Beach Drive. One man lay stretched out flat on the sidewalk, his head cradled still by a couple of paramedics. Another casualty had an oxygen mask strapped to his face. All this from a two hour race? On the other side of the street, a woman came cruising down, obviously a fast runner who had just completed the race, enthusiastic, exhorting us to finish hard, complete the race in under two hours. I nodded and began to really pour it on along that final stretch.

And then the painful expectancy of a finish line, surely it should be around this corner, no, wait, what's that red banner, just a sponsor's logo, and yes, finally, legs flailing, running out of steam just a moment too soon, then recovering to run tall past the line and through, lining up for a perfunctory medal, a banana, an overheard conversation about the latest running watch, stretching while waiting for a bus back to the race hotel, relaxing over green tea and an almond chocolate croissant with a friend who was reading a newspaper story about our ongoing epidemic of mental illness.

I'm wondering now about a possible parallel between mental illness and running - maybe I'll save that for another post when I'm not feeling depleted!

Trusting Gravity

2008-06-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

Walking home today at lunchtime, I shortened my stride and was disconcerted to find I was holding my breath. And when I exhaled, there was a moment of dizzy unsureness, alleviated only when my feet pushed deeper into the ground. So then I took lighter steps, experimenting with my tenuous trust in gravity's hold. Although I feel like floating, I'm still tethered to the ground; only my head feels like a helium balloon.

Until this week, I was feeling smug about my stride. Nice short steps with an enjoyable rhythm of heelstrike to the ground, ankle rolling forward, and then a slight lift off from the ball of the foot. Yes, I was running slower, which was fine with me; getting the form right feels more important than speed.

"You're walking differently," my friend N observed last Sunday, as we strolled leisurely towards the open air market on Government Street. I pressed her for more details; she would only add, "like a Masai".

The Masai walk long distances barefoot in East Africa. A Masai foot touches down on a sweet spot just in front of the heel, pivots fully on the ankle, and then pushes off from the ball of the foot. This makes for a uniquely springy stride and gorgeous posture. A Swiss company makes expensive footwear that claims to duplicate the Masai walk for Westerners.

Swiss MBTI, they are eclectically named; hideously expensive, they come with their very own video. I bought a pair of MBTI sandals in a fit of enthusiasm over a year ago, and never got around to wearing them last summer, because I couldn't find time to watch the video. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly loaded up the video. After some cursory footage of athletic Masai tribesmen demonstrating their brandname strut, a strapping, obviously Central European, bleached blonde in white lab uniform smilingly introduced apprehensive clients to their new MBTI shoes, while the video repetitively extolled their benefits in multiple languages. As the video ostentatiously points out, these aren't just shoes, they're medical appliances.

I strapped on my medical appliances last evening to run errands in Cook Street Village, and quickly found that my stride was way too long. Teetering along, I shortened the distance between landing and taking off, and found myself serenely gliding along at an impossibly slow pace. And of course I was holding my breath.

In anticipation of what? It's hard to stay light, float slow, trust inertia and gravity to play their part in keeping me upright, stable, and moving along. I see heavy joggers pounding the pavement, their feet, ankles, knees, hips absorbing the full punishing blow of all that impact. Something in us needs to push the river, gouge at the earth, gulp down the air around us, as if what we are given is not enough.

As I run, my body is learning afresh how to walk and breathe, letting old patterns surface and dissolve, hopefully to be replaced by new, lighter, more efficient ways of linking together musculature, ligaments, bone in articulated connection with the earth as well.

I get to test it out when I run a half-marathon in Vancouver this Sunday. I'm excited and a bit afraid. Hopefully, it will be more fun than pain, and I can remember to breathe and walk in between.

Pacing Myself

2008-06-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

How slow can I possibly run? I tried to find out this morning. First I walked a block, putting one foot in front of the other, stretching my neck by lifting and lowering my head, then moving it side to side, doing circles, clockwise, anti-clockwise, somewhat startled by the grinding sound coming from the base of my neck. On a tree branch above my head, a crow cackled harshly. Black shirt, black shorts, black hair all tousled, wagging my head - the crow probably saw me as a demented mutant.

At the end of the block, I hopped off the curb and broke into a slow run diagonally across the empty expanse of Quadra Street. I was still putting one foot in front of the other and my sleep-drugged movement felt just as slow as when I was walking a moment earlier; yet now, I was undeniably in running mode. As I loped in slow motion up the gentle grassy slope, I tried to focus on what distinguishes even the slowest run from walking - a miniature explosion in the ball of the foot, mushrooming upward, launching motion through calf and upper leg.

Just after the intersection with Humboldt Street, flanked on either side by ugly new facilities for the very old, the gradient gets steeper. Running up the hill in the cold dark wet mornings last winter, I felt breathless, yet victorious, each time I made it to the crest. I ran the hill grimly, and geared myself up by programming the treadmill to a hill course that was probably too steep and too fast for my strength. I wasn't stupid; I just didn't know any better. I alternated between ignoring and icing injuries - stubborn shin splints, a sudden sharp spasm in the calf, an ankle twitch, a footache.

Now I run the hill easily and I prize my legs like a race horse. Each twinge triggers an anxious awareness of possible derailment. There's the goal of getting to the marathon and making it through what still seems like an inconceivably long distance; yet even more compelling, I don't want to grieve the loss of this rhythmic movement, this deeper breath that fills and swills out the dark unkempt cavities in the lower lungs where old stuck depressive energy resides, this low-key endorphin ecstacy that lights up each cell like a pilot light.

So I pace myself. I run slow, shorten the stride, touch down as lightly as I can. I don't yet float along as easily as the two Japanese-origin runners in the marathon clinic I joined last week. One of them barely lifts up her feet and yet, shuffling along, is at the front of the pack; the other's calves turn over nice and light, regular as a metronome. The accompanying melody should be light and perky, lyrical, maybe just relaxed.

I'm looking forward to seeing those two, and a bunch of other runners at the clinic tonight. For the next sixteen weeks, until the marathon, we will be meeting every Wednesday for running drills and every Saturday for long runs. Some are regulars, taking clinics marathon after marathon, running in packs; this is their community. As always, I'm a spy coming in from the cold, or maybe just an alien, peeking into another form of North American sociability. More on that in another posting. I have to pace myself in this blog as well.

Picture Postcard

2008-06-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

For some months now, I wake up early. Sometimes even before the alarm has the chance to sound its insistent beep, in electronic mimicry of the birds chirping beyond the pale curtains, I reach over to silence it, pull on shorts and running shirt, stretch calves, hamstrings and lower back, swig down three glasses of water from a silver cup and venture out.

The moist silence slips on like cool velvet, and I blink in the vivid golden sunshine, the glistening grass, the surreal clarity of this late spring morning. Shivering, I walk down a woodchip path between stately chestnut trees, fumbling with iPod, keys, headphones, watching the seconds and minutes circle around and around until it's time; then I kick off lightly, shuffling along, anxiously assessing ankles, knees, the disconnect between a body beginning to move and awareness still reaching plaintively for the last trailing clouds of dream.

I run slowly, running through a checklist that will accompany me through the next two hours: are my arms hanging by my side, hands loose, fingers curled, thumb up, how is the tension in my shoulders, can I shake it out, how about the posture, am I running tall, straighten that lower back a bit, there you go, and are my feet under the hips, how long is the stride, shorten it, even more, lighten the footstrike, get that ankle motion going, heel touchdown, mobilize the foot fully, exaggerate the movement a bit, get the spring from the ball of the foot, tip tap, tip tap, there you go.

Moving along, watch the time, oh seven minutes already, I don't want to stop and walk, let's run just a bit more, just until that next tree or turn in the road, after the hill, there now I can pause, no, maybe let's jog along a bit more until the next water fountain, take a few sips, okay, now walk, admire the view.

And it really is worth admiring. In the last few weeks, I've been running through the leafy paths of Beacon Hill Park and along scenic Dallas Road, past the postcard panorama of the Olympic Mountains, rising gigantic and jagged from the Aegean blue of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, long-lost Spanish explorer whose influence still extends to a few Spanish names in this prim English colonial city, Victoria by the sea, where I run past mansions of every conceivable conceit, framed by topiary hedges and manicured lawns, lined along the city's most fabled promenades, Hollywood Crescent, Gonzales Bay, King George Terrace, Beach Drive.

The housing market might be crashing elsewhere, here the realtors' signs are merely staying a few weeks longer - Sotheby International advertising a once in a lifetime opportunity for merely $2.199 million. From the street side, the houses look like modest two story shacks; when you round the corner and see across the bay or inlet, they are gigantic, four floors or more, as if perched on invisible stilts.

This morning I ran a bit beyond Oak Bay marina and then regretfully turned back. Other joggers, runners, dog walkers, and elderly matrons out for their morning constitutional were already turning out, although it was too early for the golfers. Turning a corner, I regretted not having a camera - I would have liked to show you the perfect photograph of Victoria - the emerald greens of the golf course against the backdrop of a red-roofed white-washed lighthouse on a rocky outcrop in the blue strait, and beyond the snow-capped mountains.

Did I mention I'm training for a marathon? The Royal Victoria Marathon, in fact - October 12, 2008. In the next few months, I'll try to keep up this blog, to record the thoughts, insights and experiences that will arise as I run.