The Long Run.
Saturday, BB and I did our first long run in a while. Ten miles, at about 7:30am. It was warm, and so we wore our hydration packs and brought snacks – though I only took on about 100 calories during the run. We ran slowly and steadily, making the distance in about an hour and forty-seven minutes. No rush. Just a nice steady jogging pace to get the miles in.
It felt good. The time I had off during the vacation really felt necessary. Not physically, but mentally. It was nice to not run for a week and a half and get myself prepped, emotionally, for a race at the end of July. And I’m excited for my triathlon. It’s going to be a great challenge and a difficult thing to achieve. And I know I’ll be proud of myself when I’ve accomplished it.
But I am starting to look forward to the long runs. There is something gently numbing and contemplative about going out in the heat for sixteen miles, pack and shoes, and just running slowly and surely for hours at a time. Everything can melt away, and the whole world becomes foot and leg and breath and road.
The long run is satisfying because it is its own expression of self. Determination. Endurance. There is no time. There is no finish line. There is no pressure. I can just go inhabit my body, explore the sensations of the run. Especially at the end, the long run hurts. My abs, my it bands, my feet, my quads. Pain invades them all. And pain is the reason to go on.
The relationship between a runner and their pain is difficult to put to words. I have mantras about pain when I run. “Pain is not real.” “Love the pain.” But I appreciate my pain. I want it there. I don’t need running to be easy. I want it to require something from me. I want my marathon to take everything I have to give it. I want it to hurt.
When I hurt, I know I’m trying. When I’m trying, I’m not giving up. My pain is the marker that today hasn’t defeated me. I am here.
Serious Training.
While I didn’t do much running in Argentina – we did a single 5 mile run – we did walk 90 miles in 8 days. Often carrying packs, and often at altitude. So my fitness shouldn’t have dropped much. My knee has been bugging me for weeks and I’m worried it’s from biking. So I’m resting it from that perspective for a while. I have exactly a month until my triathlon.
I’m not worried about fitness, really. I can do the things I need to do. It will be difficult and challenging, especially if it is very hot, but I believe I can do this. I just need to keep up my basic training regimen until the race. Which means lots of running in the heat, and a few more serious bricks.
I’m going to do a big-time brick on Wednesday in the morning before work. I’m thinking 20 miles on the bike, and a five mile run. I’m looking forward to doing some big things and working hard. I’m just hoping I don’t shred my knee doing it. I lost some strength on the trip, but I know what to do to get it back.
I’m excited and nervous for the race, but I’m feeling like physically I will be in a good place to do it. It’s just a matter of being steady and not caring about pace or time; I just want to finish. That’s what I’ll be proud of. I don’t need to be a great athlete. I don’t need to break three hours. I don’t need to have fast transitions or keep people from passing me. I just want to cross that end-line like a boss.
And then I will return to mostly running again, as we have a half marathon and a full marathon on the fall schedule. My knee doesn’t worry me too much. I’m always dealing with a minor injury. First an abs strain. Then a calf strain. Lately a knee, and a glute and a hamstring. All minor. The knee feels a bit different than the muscle stuff. But it’s all just a matter of getting in the easy work to convince the body to heal.
Home from Argentina.
That was a whirlwind trip. I did not realize, heading into the trip, that Argentina is the 8th largest country in the world. And we tried to see a decent portion of it in eight days. We landed in Buenos Aires Friday afternoon, following a flight through Lima, Peru that was delayed an hour for an airport workers’ strike. Luckily, that was about the biggest problem we had on the whole trip.
Buenos Aires is a huge, cosmopolitan city, justifiably called the “Latin Paradise”. Very European in feel, but laid out on a sensible grid that makes navigation easy. A bit grungier than some European capitals, but with gorgeous parks, avenues, and monuments.
From Buenos Aires, we took the bus to Mendoza. The bus is 15 hours. We left at about 6pm and got in at 9 am the next morning. Overnight buses in Argentina are a whole different level. Don’t think Greyhound. Think first-class airplane. Lay-flat seats. Stewardesses that I had to be fairly insistent with that I didn’t want free wine or whiskey. Meals. A bathroom. Movies. And it doesn’t stop. No time to ever get off and stretch. You just ride.
We slept pretty good in the chairs. We got “cama class” for that first ride, which is like a huge luxurious recliner that goes almost all the way back. It’s a good deal too. For $60, we got transport between cities, a place to sleep, and a meal.
Mendoza is a newer city because it was apparently destroyed by an earthquake not too long ago, and so the colonial stuff is mostly gone. But it has great parks and plazas.
We also had a fabulous dinner at a restaurant called “Siete Cocinas”, or Seven Kitchens, referring to seven Argentine cuisine styles. It was fabulous. I had rabbit tortellini, and a dessert just called “chocolate” which was a mesmerizing mix of probably seven types of chocolate things elegantly arranged in a bowl.
From Mendoza, we went to what was the highlight of the trip for me: Uspallata. A tiny mountain town on the road to Chile, Uspallata has little to do besides wander off into the mountains and stare at the sky. The scenery was jaw-dropping. And the weather was perfect, so that night, BB and I walked out into the desert scrub, behind a huge hill, and watched the southern stars. The Southern Cross was gleaming high in the sky, and with woodsmoke fires from town the smell and scenery and cold desert air, I was as happy as I know how to be.
The Andes are truly remarkable. This is my third time seeing them, and I hope it’s not my last.
After Uspallata, we went to Córdoba, in the Sierras leading up to the Andes. We spent a day in the city, and another day on a little tour around the colonial area. We don’t normally do guided tours, but this one was inexpensive, took the whole day, and allowed us to do a lot of stuff we couldn’t have done without renting a car. We saw an old Catholic mission, a German city that’s straight out of Bavaria, and a huge, gorgeous lake from one of Argentina’s many dams.
That led us back to Buenos Aires and home, which was a 48 hour experiment in sleep deprivation. While stumbling about delirious in BA, we went to the Museo des Belles Artes, which is a stunning, jaw-dropping museum. Absolutely world class, first-rate fine art museum. And a great education. Because in addition to all the “old masters” you’ll find in any of the world’s great museums, it houses a huge collection of South American masters I’d never heard of, who are every bit the greats that the people we have heard of are. If they’d toiled in Europe, they’d be household names.
We’re home safe and happy, and it was a wonderful trip. I have a lot more travel coming up this year. I’m going to speak in Rome and Canada, and we’re planning a little trip for Thanksgiving as usual. Maybe the Cayman Islands. Next year we’re thinking about Northern Italy and Slovenia.
I do love to travel, and I’m glad we do it. I feel very privileged to have the time and money and a traveling companion who is excited about seeing the world with me. Now I’m recovering and getting into the fitness I need to be in for my triathlon at the end of July. We only did one run on the trip, about 5 miles. But we walked another 90 miles, often carrying packs. So I hope I didn’t lose too much fitness.
Glad to be home.
Drunk Driving. Rape.
Yesterday in Kalamazoo, a man driving a pickup truck, which had been repeatedly reported as erratic, plowed into a group of cyclists, killing five and injuring four. It hasn’t been reported yet that the man was intoxicated, but the case bears all the hallmarks of a drunk-driving atrocity. I’m sensitive to this issue on both sides.
Anyone who’s read this blog for long know that I drove drunk constantly for about 10 years. I drove drunk during the day and at night. I drove while continuing to drink whiskey. I drove on city streets and highways. I drove drunk with people in my car who didn’t know I was drunk. I liked driving drunk. Sometimes I would drive drunk even when I had no particular place to go.
My behavior was depressingly typical of alcoholics – and others who drink problematically, whether they are alcohol dependent or not. In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous I hear stories almost every single meeting about driving drunk. And I don’t just mean having had a drink or four. I mean blackout falling down barely conscious world spinning drunk. That’s how I drove. That’s how most of us drove.
I don’t know how many members of AA there are. Some say as many as two million. But I know that recovered drunks are a small subset of drunks. I’m guessing somewhere around 3-5% of American drivers drive drunk on a regular basis. As cars have gotten safer, fewer people die. So the problem recedes into the background, because fewer traffic deaths means fewer headlines. But the crashes keep happening.
I’m also a cyclist now. And I fear drivers being drunk or distracted. I maintain a high level of vigilance and alertness to my surroundings. But as this incident shows, there’s not much you can do if someone is truly dangerous. I’m a bike. They’re a car. I’m going to lose. This is why I do most of my training on paved trails rather than on roads. Cars are just too dangerous. Luckily, there’s a paved trail near me that goes for about 25 miles.
I’ve heard that in America, if you want to get away with killing someone, do it drunk behind the wheel of a car. You’ll get 2-3 years and a lot of time off for good behavior. This is when I would reiterate my position: alcohol makes it worse, not better. Alcohol is not a mitigating factor. I’m sure this person – if he was drunk – will say that he would never have done such a thing sober and he is sick, not malicious.
An alcoholic is sick, certainly. But we are also malicious. While we drink, we do not care about your life or your rights or your autonomy or your liberty. We know it’s wrong to drink and drive. We don’t care. We drink anyway, we like driving drunk, we drive anyway. We kill. On purpose. Because we prefer us being drunk to you being alive.
Alcohol is not an excuse. Look at the Stanford rape case. The victim was drunk. The perpetrator was drunk. Neither of these things diminishes the rape, its severity, its heinousness, or the consequences to the victim. Nor should it diminish the consequences to the rapist. If anything, it should elevate them. We drink specifically in order to give ourselves permission to do things we normally would not do.
Do not accept the myth that my illness – alcoholism – excuses me from culpability for my actions. It does not. Alcohol does not excuse us. It reveals and enables our darker, more malignant designs.
Imminent Vacation.
Thursday night BB and I fly far far away for ten days to visit some new places that will require me to update my “passport” tattoo. I’m excited, and looking forward to the time off. Off from work, off from hard training. I’m obviously not bringing a bike, and we’re not likely to be swimming, so running a few miles here and there will probably be it. Like we did in Spain last year.
The time off will be very good. Even though I took a few days off in Southern California a couple weeks ago, I still feel like I badly need some time off. Frankly, I feel like I need several months off. But don’t we all. Luckily, I have a lot of vacation time built up. Even after this trip, and the three days I took in May, I should have about three weeks saved. I’ll be taking time periodically over the summer just to keep sane, and do some mid-day training.
Yesterday I did my longest bike-ride yet on the X wing. 20 miles in just over 80 minutes. Then, feeling pretty good despite the heat, I did a 2.5 mile run in 27 minutes. Slow, but effective. These bricks are hard, but I can feel the difference in my fitness. Perhaps if for no other reason than that I’m working out for 90-120 minutes instead of 45-60. The heat changes things too. But I’m feeling like finishing is possible, and I’ll be in decent condition when the day comes.
I’ve been making strides on food too, which is the one thing about vacation I’m not looking forward to: I am not a big fan of pretty much any non-Americanized foods. Even other cuisines that I like, like Indian and Thai and Mexican, I much prefer the American versions to the authentic versions. This trip is certain to challenge me food-wise, which means I’m likely to make poor choices and gain weight.
Of course, sometimes it means I can’t find anything to eat, and I end up losing weight. We’ll see.
BB and I are keeping the trip destination under wraps for now. I’ll post a few pictures when we touch down and we’ll see who can guess where we are. And hopefully, we’ll end up in at least a few places that are really rather remote.
A Saturday Swim-Run Brick.
This Saturday, BB and I got up early and went out to a YMCA camp about 25 miles from ECC so that I could do an open water swim practice. They set up buoys for a 500 yard loop in a lake, and for $30, I was free to swim as far as I wanted. So I pulled on my cap and my goggles and got in the water.
I was immediately disoriented. I’ve swum in lakes before, but only while playing, never for a workout, never with a plan. Usually I was just in cut-off shorts jumping off of a raft or a cliff over and over again. This was quite different. The first issue was that even though I was wearing goggles, I couldn’t actually see anything. Even when the water was only 5 feet deep, I couldn’t see the bottom. Then I found myself sprinting, swimming too fast and feeling winded.
I don’t like feeling winded while swimming. Easy, controlled breathing is crucial. If my breathing gets labored, I lose the confidence that I can stop, tread water, and cough if accidentally inhale some water. I don’t want to be trying to do that while out of breath. But I also found it very difficult to control my pace. I kept accelerating even when I consciously tried to slow down.
When I got out to the second buoy, I turned around to swim back for my 500 yards. When I got back, I was confused. It was too easy. I turned around and swam out for another out and back. Two circuits, and I felt like I’d only been in the water for 10 minutes. Something was wrong. I went out a third time and suddenly realized: there were three buoys, not two.
It was a triangle. I’d been doing about 150 yard out-and-backs. Not 500 yard loops. Suddenly it made more sense. I made the turn, and then did two loops of the longer triangular circuit. So in total, I did about 1300 yards: two 150 yard laps, and two 500 yard loops. Total time, about 39 minutes.
Then I got out of the water and BB and I put on our shoes and did a trail run in the woods. We ran at random, and got lost a couple times, and started to worry that we were on a largely-abandoned 800 acre wooded camp with no map, no phones, and no idea how to get home. Finally, our turnaround started to make sense, and we made it back to camp dirty and scratched after a 5.6 mile run.
This felt really good. I felt like it was a strong swim, and a good run. It was warm and humid again, but I didn’t wilt in the heat like I had the weekend before. I took a 200 calorie peanut butter and date bar between the swim and the run, and I think that sounds like a good plan for race day too. Things are slotting into place.
I vacillate on how hard this is going to be. Sometimes I worry that it’s going to be nearly impossible. Then some days I think I’ve got it in the bag. I’m sure it’s somewhere in between. And conditions will matter. But I think I’m on a good path forward to be able to finish. And that’s the whole goal. Finish, put a medal on the wall, and start marathon training.
We Have Ceased Fighting.
Taken to its reasonable conclusions, the program outlined in Alcoholics Anonymous is a highly ascetic, spiritual-type construct that fits in – in my mind – most closely with what westerners think of as “Buddhist”. It’s probably nothing like real Buddhism but it fits well with the pop-western uninvestigated version well enough. One of those similarities is the idea that suffering is caused by desires.
In AA, we often don’t name them desires, or suffering. But we say things like, our serenity is disrupted by having expectations, and lacking acceptance. One of the ways this is expressed comes from the discussion of step 10* in the book. The statement is, we have ceased fighting anyone and anything, even alcohol.
I like fighting. I like arguing and debating. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, I’m pretty sure I’m right and you’re wrong. The online world is designed to insert divisions in groups (not that humans needed a lot of help in the matter, but we got it anyway). Even groups that fundamentally agree on most things will align themselves against each other, behind barricades and fixing bayonets over minor semantics and points of argumentation.
It makes me sad. But I am learning to stop fighting. I do less of it than I used to. Largely through disassociation. I have eliminated more than three quarters of the people in my twitter feed, and set up filters so that I just don’t see most of the blowhards when they get riled up. But I shouldn’t fool myself: I am one of the blowhards. I regularly state opinions which people are free to disagree with, and then find myself annoyed when they do.
Truly ceasing fighting would probably be to finally actually follow through on my occasional dramatic outbursts and delete twitter and delete my blog and delete facebook and abandon social media and find myself in a smaller world with less strife and more time to simply be in my moment, present.
But then who would I brag to?
I’m not sure I have much to brag about these days. My career is in a slow building phase characterized by me not being very good at it. I need to learn a lot to be better, but I’m not sure I care about getting better at the things I’m not good at. I don’t value that work.
Maybe it’s time to admit I was wrong about the career ladder I’m currently pursuing. Maybe advancing up hospital management isn’t the right path for me. Maybe I need to write another grant, submit it, and look to return to primary research. That feels like returning to a career fraught with peril. Maybe I need to stop where I am, stop seeking higher responsibility. That feels like giving up.
Maybe I should give up. Maybe I should stop fighting to ascend and settle in. I am comfortable and I know how to make a good life out of what I have now. This should be enough for me. Stop and breathe. Accept my limitations: I am not well-suited to being a director, an administrator.
I don’t fight alcohol anymore. But I am constantly fighting in other aspects of my life. Easing back to recognizing where my serenity lies would be wise.
* “Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”
Setbacks and Ego.
This year has handed me some of my first ever major professional setbacks. When my department was hiring a new engineer, I was initially in the running to be the person to whom that new recruit reported. Instead, they were hired as a peer. This means that my career plan being in charge of engineering for operational improvement at MECMC is in jeopardy. In fact, I think it has vaporized.
I am a program manager in a successful department at a prestigious research institution. You’d think I’d be pleased. But now, with the feeling of a ceiling above me being slotted into permanent place at my current station, I am starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be pursuing other options. Maybe I should be looking to move to be with BB. Maybe I should be considering different career paths.
Maybe I should accept that the occasional professional setback is normal and ordinary, and I should take it in stride. I’m not special. I shouldn’t expect to have an endlessly rising tone to my career. But I’ve had setback after setback this year and I’m feeling demoralized and frustrated.
What I need to couple that with is that I’m not a very good manager in this kind of department. I know how to be and academic mentor, but despite training and coaching, I’m just not very good at the management and organization of a department. And I don’t like it. It feels like constant busy work taking me away from what I’m good at. I want to keep ascending, but that takes me further and further from what I’m good and and into things I dislike.
I want to be important and I want to make more money and I want to have a position of influence, but I’m not good at the things I need to be good at to make those things happen. And I want it all to happen immediately and I have a bad concept of a time frame for these things. People have been elevating me and accelerating me my whole life and maybe I’ve found the place from which I should no longer climb.
Maybe I’m just being a spoiled little kid. “If they’re not going to catapult me upwards, I’ll take my ball and go play somewhere else.” My ego is like that. But I’m feeling like I can’t do what I’ve been given to do, at the same time as I want more responsibility and greater sphere of influence. I need to stop, quiet, and ease off.
Serenity comes from humility. Being right-sized for where I am and what I need. Right now, I need to get better at what I’m doing rather than try to continue accelerating upwards. That’s embarrassing. I feel stupid and incompetent. I’m not sure how to do what I need to do, learn what I need to learn, or achieve what I want to achieve. I need to practice my AA principles. Be humble. Practice acceptance.
Second from Last.
I was second from last in my trail half-marathon. I walked almost all of the last 7 miles, due to my ankle hurting and the heat, and poor hill training. It’s kind of embarrassing. I know BB could have gone much further, much faster. She’s a lot fitter than I am and not carrying around 30 extra pounds of fat like I am.
It’s embarrassing, actually. I felt like I should be better: I just ran a half marathon in under two hours. I’ve been triathlon training. Uh oh. Maybe not nearly well enough. I’m heavy, and slow, I dehydrate easily, and I didn’t prepare well. I could be in a lot of trouble. I’m feeling stupid and fat and lazy and embarrassed.
But I finished. And more importantly, I started. I choose to do hard things. I may not be good at them. I may not be smart at them. I may not be talented or athletic or anything. But I start things. I take on challenges. This course was too hard for me and I still finished. It was too hot and too steep and too humid and too technical and too long. And I started it, and I finished it.
I’m allowed to be terrible at things. But I don’t get to be bad at something unless I start it. And the only thing it takes to be good at something is to be willing to be bad at it. I’m willing to be bad at trail running. I’m willing to be bad at endurance athletics. I’m willing to be bad at running in the heat and the wet and on hills and through rivers.
I am a bad trail runner. I’m not fit enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m not talented enough. And that’s ok. Because I may be a bad trail runner. But I’m a trail runner. I finished a grueling half-marathon in the Pennsylvania mountains with my partner by my side.
I’m not ashamed of being bad. Because you have to be bad before you can be good. And maybe I’ll be bad forever. Maybe trail running isn’t something I can do well. But I can do it. I started the race. And no matter what it threw at me – heat, humidity, hills, falls, injuries – I finished the race. So I’m a little embarrassed. I thought I’d be better. I had expectations.
But I am a finisher. Because I decided to start. And having started, I didn’t stop until the end.
The Trail Race Recap.
Wow. This was as hard a race as I’ve done, and I’m including the full marathon. While it was a race, it wasn’t a run. We jogged most of the first 6 miles, where we could. Some was too steep to run. But a couple of falls and 85 degree heat and 90ish% humidity and about 1900 feet of elevation gain and a jammed Achilles tendon combined to turn the last 7 miles into a hike, rather than a run. It was still as hard as I’ve ever experienced.
In retrospect, I should have figured it would be tough when there were a large number of cars in the parking lot with 100-mile finisher stickers. Including a Western States. The kind of people who do those showing up for this race should have told me that I was in for a tough day. The trail half-marathon is in rural Pennsylvania, near Reading. These are old hills. They know how to fight.
We brought our hydration packs, and we brought plenty of calories. But on a day like Sunday, nothing was going to be enough to feel good. The race starts with a river crossing, ensuring that our feet were wet throughout. Two category five climbs, and two category four climbs (lower is harder). My heart was racing even just walking up the hills, and at one point I needed to sit for a minute to keep going.
BB had it the whole way despite being bruised and bloodied. I bet she could have finished it forty minutes faster if she’d been alone. I was definitely the drag on the time. After 8 miles of brutal climbs, we spent about three miles on roads, usually at a steep downhill, so steep it made our toes hurt pressing into the fronts of our shoes. Luckily, this was through a neighborhood and a few kind homeowners sprayed us with hoses.
As we re-entered the woods, the horseflies came back. Most of the race we were bedeviled by flies the size of military drones. And then the “adventure” portion of the race started. Climbing over logs and trudging through knee-deep mud. My shoes filled with stones and silt. We trudged on. We did break into a trot from time to time when I felt like I could, but between the heat and my ankle, it wasn’t often.
When the finish-line finally showed itself, after 13.4 miles of back country hell, we managed to jog the last 100 yards or so and give our names to the crew at the end. They were keeping careful track of who crossed the line, because there were plenty of opportunities to get injured and be unable to go on. I had sweat my name off my bib.
We finished in three hours and forty seven minutes. This was as hard as anything I’ve ever done. Raw pain for most of the trek. We finished filthy, dehydrated, bloody, sore, and exhausted. They handed out burgers which were among the best things I’ve ever tasted, though I imagine they’d be nothing special at any other time. The shower we took after was a revelation of bliss.
Today, 48 hours after, my ankles are still wrecked, my shoulders are sore, and I feel like I was hit by a truck. Pretty good all told. I’m proud of myself. The masochism of endurance running is special for the joy and elation I feel when it’s done, and accomplished. But this one hurt. This one was at the limits of my ability.
I am a little concerned about what it says about my fitness. I’ve put on a few pounds recently and don’t feel as fit as I was back in April. I need to buckle down and do some more good work, drop the weight, and get into good shape or the triathlon will ruin me. Wish me luck. I’m gonna need it.
Infactorium 