'Perfect' Timing

It's 9:05 and I just returned from a walk.  Why this is important is because I set out for a walk at 8:04 and wanted to walk for an hour.  I hiked around the muddy trails underneath the redwoods that are just footsteps from our door and made it back exactly in an hour.  Reflecting on my satisfaction with my perfect return time I remembered that this past week, when running I'd set out for an hour run and when I returned to my car from the trails I was 4 minutes short of an hour.  So, what did I do?  What any self-respecting first-born perfectionist would do of course, I ran down the road for two minutes in one direction and turned back toward the car for the remaining two and stopped running when my watch said it'd been exactly an hour.  Why this craziness I thought?  Why does it have to be exactly an hour (or half-hour or 45 minutes) to count, why not be happy with a 57 minute run?  The funny thing is I know a lot of runners who also go by this to-the-minute philosophy.  Maybe it's a product of running races that are timed to the hundredth of a second, but more likely it's the fact that most runners I know are type-A perfectionist competitor types.  Sure, there are also non-type A runners as well, but I'd venture to guess that those are the joggers out there, who stop mid-run to pick a flower or enjoy the view or say hi to a friend or other such nonsense.

For the record, I'm done trying to be perfect.  In running this means that even though I don't have the ideal amount of time to train for an upcoming race, I'm still going to enter, knowing and--here's the clencher--accepting that it won't be my best race or even best possible effort, but it will have been worth it to do it anyway.  In real life this means that I'm going to stop refolding the towels after my 7-year old 'helps' me fold clothes.  I'm going to leave the crumbs on the counter occasionally and not compulsively rearrange the refrigerator after my husband goes grocery shopping.  I understand now that trying to be perfect has had an adverse affect on the things I've tried to do and it's seeped into my attitude toward myself and others.  At times rather than help me achieve it has kept me from starting.  And so, I'm ready to head to the land of mediocrity.  I'm not getting rid of my watch, and I'm certainly not giving up and buying a pair of velour of jogging pants, but I am ready to stop beating myself up over doing things perfectly (or that ever elusive 'right' way).  I will be happy with having made it out to the trails, regardless of the number of minutes I spend on them.  I will take in more of the scenery and appreciate the colors and smells and fresh air both on the trail and in life, reminding myself that striving so hard for a perfect outcome only guarantees failure and angst along the way, for is anything ever really perfect?

Well, this didn't quite turn out as I'd wanted it, but if you'll excuse me I'm going to head out for a 47 minute run.

Trying to be thankful

I’m finding it increasingly hard to be thankful for 80-degree weather in November. Not that it isn’t nice--but come on, it’s November for goodness sake. It’s a bit like receiving a leather jacket for Christmas when that’s what your brother wanted not you…it’s not quite what you asked for but you feel the need to be happy about it because it’s a gift, right?

Well I’ll come clean and say I wasn’t happy with the leather jacket (sorry mom), and I’m not happy with this summer-like weather when it is supposed to be raining (or better yet snowing, but that’s not likely here). This is the time of year when weather is supposed to afford us the luxury of relaxing by the fire, warm drink in hand, of wearing jeans and cozy wool sweaters. Hearty stews don’t taste quite right to me after a day in the sun, my new down comforter is too heavy to use, and forget sweaters - I’m still wearing tank tops and flip-flops.

The impending holidays seem just as out of place to me. Stringing Christmas lights when it’s 78-degrees out? (I witnessed this horror yesterday and thought I’d maybe skipped over part of my life and was now a retiree in Arizona) It was wrong. Almost as wrong as the new spring line of clothing coming out (think spaghetti straps, flip-flops, short-shorts) in Fred Meyer in February in Alaska and seeing all the high school girls wearing it in a foot or more of snow.

Some people are genuinely excited about all this warmness and sunshine and new green grass sprouting up. Some of these same people have grown up in California and think 40-degrees is freezing however, so they’re a little off to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, I love a sunny day…just not when it’s supposed to be cold. It’s a bit like trying to enjoy eggnog lattes all year long—part of what makes them so good is that you can only get them part of the year.

Soon enough I’ll be pining for warmer spring days I’m sure. I’ll be tired of the rain and wind, tired of having to wear a coat everywhere, ready for the heat of the sun on my face and for my bare feet to be in the sand again. Until then I’ll sip my eggnog latte in the sun and keep my comments about the warm weather to myself, mustering up thankfulness for untimely gifts.

Running through the dark with Dean

I ran with Dean Karnazes and survived! (Okay, it was only 40 minutes but it WAS dark). We got to hear firsthand how the race through the Sahara was, how he completed 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days, what keeps him moving on some of those aforementioned runs, that his kids like to run, about his health food company, and he confirmed how it all started (15 years ago on his 30th birthday he left a bar in San Francisco after drinking too much tequila and ran to Half Moon Bay...which for all you non-Californians is 30 miles). Quote of the evening: "People respect what I do, but not everyone understands it."

To read more about Dean, see http://www.ultramarathonman.com/flash/

Moving (in one place)

Unlike maybe the average person, we’ve moved. A lot. As in ‘seven-times-in-four-years’ kind of a lot. And we’ve just done it again. This time however, we literally moved across the street, which sounds ridiculous I know, but it really made sense for reasons I won’t go into here.

While all this moving has been good, at times I feel like we’ve been in constant motion for nine years now and I don’t know if it’ll ever change. I know the moving has kept me from becoming exceedingly comfortable in any given place, but I think now that it has been a good thing. We’ve packed and sorted our things so many times (or weighed keeping them based on a dollar per pound shipping rate) that many of our belongings we’ve sold or given away, lightening our load immensely. We’ve made new friends and said goodbye to old friends. We’ve sold our brand-new barely ever used fire red KitchenAide mixer which was a wedding present…okay—so there are some things we regret having to get rid of.

We’ve called Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and California home but in the end home has been consistently where we pause in between all the motion. Being sick this past week has allowed me to reflect on my need to keep moving, and my irritation on having to stop. Running (or, when pregnant in Alaska walking, hiking and snow shoeing or the ever-dreadful pool running) has been a near constant through all the moves. I’ve run on frozen lakes and frosted trails with hoar frost in Alaska, beside corn and hay fields and on ocean dyke roads in Washington, on cement sidewalks and treadmills in Hawaii, and now mostly sandy trails below larger than life redwoods in California.

Running trails with varied landscape, elevation, flora and fauna is one of my favorite things in life to do. Somehow fresh air and fresh scenery always seem to produce a fresh outlook on life. Around the trail bend another vista awaits, at the top of the hill with quads burning the ocean may be in view. Along the path I’ve maybe had conversation with a friend, old or new. I’ve sorted out thoughts, dismissing worries farmer-blow style. I return home, wherever that may be at the time, thankful and refreshed, ready for what lies ahead.

As we settle in (again) to a new home I treasure the houses, communities, peoples and trails that have been in our past, and am thankful for the opportunity to again find our place in our ever-moving world.

Lost in the woods and loving it

A friend and I set out to run a loop in nearby Fall Creek state park this weekend. Instead of a loop we ended up running a little over 8 miles, with about 7 of the 8 miles being entirely uphill. I’m not talking slightly up hill, I’m talking full-tilt-slightly dizzy-out of breath-quads burning-calve splitting endless dirt and sand headed straight up to high heaven.

I had a lot of time to think on this run. Usually when running together we talk nonstop, but the nature of this run made conversation all but impossible. I thought about how nice loops are to run with new scenery the whole run through. I thought about how my friend who is turning 40 this week must be super woman incarnate because at 31 I was definitely feeling my age with each shortened stride. I had moments of clarity when the pain and breathlessness and light cast through the redwoods morphed into near hallucination and I wondered anew at the beauty we have in our backyard.

I also wondered how in the hell we can put a man on the moon and have eight piece wine-openers (you know, the fancy one you got from your boss/friend/co-worker last year) but not design a sports bra that actually works. Or why the map at the bottom of the park didn’t show the northern most parts of Fall Creek—did they simply assume no one in their right mind would venture that far from the map way back down by the creek? And why after this much time on trails we don’t routinely carry water, a cell phone and mace (for hydration, help and the probably entirely false feeling that we could have a chance against a mountain lion).

We stopped a few times at signs that pointed the wrong direction, always assuming that just a ways farther up the trail would be the truck trail that we knew eventually connected with the trail we were on. By the time we considered turning back around it didn’t make sense--not that downhill didn’t sound good, just not another 8 miles of it. An hour and forty-five minutes into it, without water or food we decided to head to the road, flag down someone with a cell phone and call one of our husbands for a ride back down to the high school parking lot where my car was waiting.

When my friends’ husband arrived he couldn’t believe how far up the hill we were. We’d walked out of the forest at Summit Drive on Empire Grade road—which means nothing if you don’t know the area, but basically we were as high as you can get around here. He also couldn’t believe how bad we stunk. Reflecting in the backseat on the ride back down to my car I realized that there is maybe nothing quite as fun as having the time to get lost—not truly lost fearing for your life and well being, but lost discovering new territory and securing another adventurous memory with a friend.

New season, new goal

Like many an athlete I found a race that sounded good last spring. Beautiful location: the Sierra Nevadas in August, challenging: three days of trail running between 22-24 miles a day, doable: they promised a roving camp and three meals a day, with hot showers at the end of the day. I prodded, cajoled and all but begged three close friends to sign up as well and somewhat surprisingly, they did. We followed our own training plans but tried to do our long distance runs together on the weekend, with the goal being to get the miles in on new trails rather than the same trails we run every week. A couple of us even headed to Tahoe to do a self-imposed ‘high altitude training camp’ weekend, where three days of back to back running left of feeling as confident as possible with the race on the horizon.

Then fire season hit, and as we all know, hit early. We watched as trails we’ve hiked went up in flames in Big Sur, and trails we’ve run barely escaped scorching in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We debated the effect of smoke on our lungs as we ran with ash raining from the sky, but run we did. We ran the bluff overlooking the coastline at Wilder State Park, the Skyline to Sea trail from the mountains down to the ocean in Big Basin State Park, the mountain ridges in Nicene Marks State Park, past lime kilns and old homesteads in Fall Creek State Park, on dusty hot hills in Almaden Quicksilver and through misty fog over the rolling hills of Skyline Ridge with Silicon valley below.

Then we got the email notification saying that the race had been cancelled. They had not seen the sky for three weeks in the Sierras due to smoke cover and other races, notably the Western States 100 as well as an endurance mountain bike race, had been cancelled as well. Immediate relief mixed with melancholy settled in. One unexpected pregnancy and one bulged disc had surprised us all in the past few weeks and left our team of four a shaky team of three, but even with those surprises our sights were still set on completing the race…even if it meant more hiking than running.

The race refund came back this week, as well as confirmation that I’d made the newly formed Santa Cruz Endurance Team headed up by Martin Spierings (‘Ironman Goes Ultra’, July/August 2008) and sponsored by Central Coast Running. While the upcoming Silicon Valley ½ marathon race we will run is no three-day race in the Sierra Nevadas it does offer the chance of a new goal to pursue and the reasonable excuse to run new trails. In the end it’s the miles on these accessible and unbelievably close trails with varied terrain that makes the racing worth it. With our State Park system in jeopardy the reason to get out and enjoy these local treasures is even more pressing. So pick a park or a goal to hit this fall and enjoy the journey—even as it changes, which it most likely will.