Revisited

Back at the dawn of time (in this case, 2004) when I was training for my first marathon, my friend Lorraine (a trail runner and accomplished ultramarathoner) gently suggested that maybe I might want to try a race (any race) before I did my Big Marathon. Since I was in a state of constant anxiety for months leading up to said Big Marathon, and since everyone seemed to respect Lorraine, I took her up on her advice. Not knowing what race to sign up for, I also took her up on a trail run in her favorite series: one that offers a 50K at every race. I signed up for the Pirate's Cove (now called Rodeo Beach) 20K. At the time it was the longest run I had ever done in my life. I was unable to walk normally for days afterward. I learned of pain.

Flash forward to the dawn of today, or a couple hours before it to be more specific. The 25 mph winds and driving rain had kept me up part of the night, and I really wasn't feeling all that thrilled about running for 18 miles through that shit. Especially since my running has been sporadic at best and a bit scant in the mileage department. I had tried to sign up for the 20K, but it had been sold out at the time. When I got to the race (just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge), I found a whole table designated for people changing distances and met a girl who had just signed up for the 20K the night before. I was slightly miffed that I had missed an opportunity to slack, but I had a reputation to uphold here! I had said I would run 18 miles and 18 miles I would run, dammit!

I remembered very little about my last go-round on this race except climbing a set of stairs right at the beginning, and running a quarter mile in deep sand at the end. Then I remembered getting lost in Sausalito on the way home. That's it. So I stood at the start studying the course profile, which looked like this:

If you can't see it, a subtitle in the corner says "Gain: 4203'."

Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. "Heeeeey! What are you doing here?!" It was Sponsor. I gave her a huge hug. "Last minute trip to Sports Basement?" she asked, pointing to my jacket and zipping her own up higher. We were wearing the exact same jacket. We were also wearing almost exactly the same shorts.



"Well that's embarrassing!" I said.

"Dude, these trail runs have changed my life!" she said. I'd turned her on to the series months ago and then had never been able to make a race because of work commitments. I wanted to tell her that I was glad to have returned the favor, but it didn't occur to me to say it until several miles into the race. "They're amazing. This one old guy spent like a mile helping me find a place to pee with no poison ivy 2 weeks ago. No road runner would ever do that!"

We began running together, and immediately the trail started climbing steeply, but not so steeply that you couldn't run some of it. "Holy shit, when's this going to end?" she asked after walking the better part of a mile. I looked at her. We'd barely started and it wasn't all that steep. There was some more tough stuff to come. "It's just that I've been...mffmmmmb"

"What?" I asked. My hearing's not so good and I lose a lot of what people say, especially when they're out of breath.

"I'm ashamed to say it here," she said. There were runners right up our asses and we in turn were up other runners' asses. I guessed more than heard that the missing word was "smoking."

A million emotions ran through my head: shock, disappointment, sympathy, the desire to gloat. Drinking hadn't been the only bad habit that I'd gotten back into when I jumped off the wagon, and drinking wasn't the one that it took me longest to kick either. She had given me a relentless hard time about it. Now the tables had turned. "What happened?" I asked.

I wasn't in any kind of a hurry today, but eventually I couldn't wait for her any longer and set out on my own, running up the hill. For the most part the rain held off, but the fog was still so thick that you couldn't see 50 yards down the trail, let alone to the bottom of the cliffs we were running along (which is probably a good thing for me).

Somewhere behind that fog there is a cliff and then stunning views of the ocean, or maybe the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline, or maybe a pot of gold or the fountain of youth. The world may never know.

On a drier day, the trails may not have been too technical: mostly dirt singletrack and fire roads with very few rocks and roots. However, I had never run on a surface that was both slippery and sticky at the same time. When we came down the first long descent, it was like running on wet clay. Actually, it wasn't like running on wet clay, it was running on wet clay. I passed one guy slipping and sliding down the hill more than he was stepping. "Slippery as hell out here!" he said to me as I ran by.

I wanted to tell him, "It's much easier if you don't resist it!" but I was already way down the trail. I realized that that was true of a lot of things in life. I felt very zen for the next mile as I resolved to go with the flow more often.

Much to my surprise, I was feeling great. My butt was a little bit sore from some squats that I had done to shove it in Jillian Michaels' face, and my hips continued to be sore, tight, and bothersome, but my fatigue factor never exceeded about a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. The hardest part (just like all the old people say) was the downhills. Most of my running lately has been on treadmills, so I was in great uphill running shape, but there's no downhill on the dreadmill and my hips seemed to be taking most of the pounding. I'd never actually felt my ass contracting to brake my controlled falling downhill before. Weird.

Somehow the miles seemed to be disappearing behind me faster than I could appreciate them. Even though it was shitty and foggy and wet and it started to rain around mile 10, I was still in one of those states where I couldn't believe that this was actually my life! Here I was running up and down these mountains (which I'm sure had wonderful, stunning, amazing views), along trails that I recognized from ultrarunning blogs (Miwok, Marin Headlands, etc.), back out in California, and I had the fitness to actually rock up to one of these things any time I wanted to without being out of commission for a week afterward. How many other people were lucky enough to even have the fitness to have the OPTION to enjoy something like this? I loved my life.

"Isn't this so much better than spending the morning hung over?!" I asked a girl as I passed her (and almost slipped and fell on top of her) on some singletrack.


"I think I'm going to feel hung over for the rest of the day," she said.

I didn't feel that way. I don't think I had a single low moment for the whole race. I passed another guy, who got out of my way without my even having to say anything. "No hurry," I said to him. "I'm just having one of those moments where I feel so lucky that this is actually my life!"

"Well enjoy it while you can, because THAT won't last!" he told me.

It lasted. He was a humbug.

Somewhere around mile 15, I started the long, roller-coaster-like descent to the finish. Then the open hillside in my immediate vicinity (which is all I could see anyway) gave way to misty forests. I didn't want it to end. I wanted to keep running in those misty forests for another 10 miles. I can't remember ANY race that I didn't want to end. Ever.

Despite my hips being sore, I still felt light and fluid. I ran the last flat mile into the finish (not a deep sand finish, thankfully) somewhere around 9 minute pace. Nine-minute pace isn't so bad when it's mile number 18.5 and you're not particularly trained for running.

I passed the timing tent and asked where the finish line was. "You're done, honey. You can stop running now," the guy told me.

"Oh." Damn.

I finished about 20 minutes before Sponsor, and have no idea how I finished in the pack. In fact, I didn't remember that there WERE other people running this until somewhere around mile 16 and I realized that I just simply didn't care.

As I was running I was trying to figure out the reason for my good mood. How could I recreate this in every race I ever did for the rest of my life? I realized that a few things were different about this race:

1. I was out here because I WANTED to be out here, not because I wanted to beat a time, come in somewhere in the pack, add another feather to my cap, or train for another event.
2. I was fresh. I hadn't been training my ass off (or hardly at all) for over 6 months.
3. I didn't give a flying fuck where or when I finished. I was just out here to be out here because there was nowhere else I wanted to be at that particular moment. I had no idea what my body was capable of and was happy for every pain-free step that I got. I know that this is nearly the same as number 1, but it bears repeating.

So will I go back to being a trail runner? A cyclist? A triathlete? I had also been going through old race photos for a Christmas gift for my grandmother and realized that the happiest year of my life was the year that I didn't have any race goals and did every race under the sun. It wasn't until I actually tried to DO anything that I mucked up my happiness with goals. So maybe that's what my 2011 focus should be: going only to the races that I want to go to, and going only as hard as I feel like going.

...And build up a new crop of Straight Men Over 40 to keep me company while I do it...