I Couldn't Tell Who Was Speaking!

Last night I booked my hotel room in Myrtle Beach for the marathon coming up Feb. 18. The inter-marathon stretch has all but swallowed me up. With three weeks to go until the next race, I could barely convince myself it was time to finalize travel plans.

This will be my fourth pilgrimage to Myrtle Beach. Recently, I enjoyed watching coverage of the Republican primary race from “my” marathon city: hey, don’t I recognize that palm tree behind Joe Johns? Or if not the tree, at the least the building. Perhaps the lettering spelling out “Convention” helped me identify the convention center where the race expo takes place.

Last February, I drove into Myrtle Beach at the end of a bad week, the kind I usually label “less than stellar.” And the marathon weekend worked its miracle. Saturday morning, I felt alive. I breathed in air like it was a new gift. I smiled. I glanced at the clothing in shop windows I passed along the race route. I figured it was a good sign if I could be interested in shopping 20 miles in. I felt so good, like I’d emerged from a dark tunnel.

Maybe it’s a January thing, a winter thing, these doldrums, this darkness. Once again, I’m calling my performances “less than stellar.” I’m running, but I’m not taking flight. I’m mired down with heavy legs. I’d rather be curled up on the couch with my pink fleece blanket. I have a theory that I’m solar powered. Why should I go out before the sun in the morning? Being awake is easy; feeling energized, not so much. A long run looks very, very long in the bleakness of a predawn Monday morning.

So I’ve been off my regular running schedule. I guess the most important thing is that I’ve been running at all, but I’ve done a lot of runs at odd times, late in the evening when I’d usually be at home eating dinner and getting ready for bed. I’ve gone to the fitness center at my apartment complex on a Friday night when only the TV connected to the treadmill was there to keep me company. And I’ve discovered, well, a few nuggets of interest I might have missed otherwise.

I’m one of those now-grown products of a TV babysitter—I’d even say a TV nanny. So I find some comfort in two-dimensional company. But when I run, I can’t watch a sitcom or a movie. I usually go for news, which isn’t all over the airwaves at 8:30 pm on a Friday night. Who’s available to keep vigil with me? Ah, Anderson Cooper.

It isn’t really fair of me, but I’ve never liked him. It dates back to watching him on Channel One news in high school. I don’t know why, but nothing connected with Channel One news could be cool. Yeah, I’m not proud of it, but I fell in with the herd mentality, and the herd didn’t like Anderson Cooper.

Still, he’s on the air weekday nights, talking politics and international disasters. I watched and found him not entirely unwatchable. At least, that is, until Bill Maher came on and made a joke about Mormons and polygamy: so 19th century! (Running is probably one of the safer activities to be engaged in when you’re riled up.)

After “AC360,” it’s Piers Morgan, whom I’ve disliked ever since his sex talk with Christine O’Donnell. And yet, I was glad that my treadmill workout kept me tuned in to his entire interview with Rick Santorum and family, which I never would have sat through at home. It didn’t change any of my political opinions, but it offered an insightful human portrait.

The only problem with watching TV during a workout is that the closed captioning on the treadmill TV screen sometimes fails to capture important aspects of a conversation, such as who is speaking when there’s a rapid exchange of dialogue, and what the voice tones sound like. I’m still intrigued by the conversation between Piers Morgan and Rick Santorum about America’s role in policing the world. Who said what? I read a few lines where I couldn’t tell.

I guess I can survive the suspense, as long as my running (early morning, late night, or somewhere in between) carries me all the way to my next appointment with a spiritual defibrillator.

Sometimes Running Sucks

As much as I want this blog to be positive and upbeat, I can’t post anything this week unless I allow myself the honesty of saying, Sometimes running sucks. It just does. Anything you love and give your time to has its moments, right? Even people—there are people in your life you always love, but once in a while they annoy the heck out of you. And pizza. It was my favorite food as a kid, but I remember sitting in a booth at Pizza Hut feeling so stuffed I almost believed I never wanted to see a pizza again.

Sometimes I feel that way about running. Your body can get tired, but your mind can get tired, too, exhausted from waiting out the long miles every day, always chasing a distant goal only to reset the next day and chase it again. I’m so stuffed with running that I had to postpone plans to drive to the Under Armor outlet for some post-Christmas shopping. I need a new pair of running pants stat, but I couldn’t envision walking into a store full of sports gear without my stomach turning over.

I’m not a machine. I can’t simply program it all in and run on autopilot. I guess the lows are a fair price for the highs … because when the running’s good, it’s like nothing else in the world.

It’s just that today, running sucks!

Where in the World (Will the Pink Shoes Go in 2012)?

When I was growing up, my mom had a classroom-worthy globe of the world. I would hold it with my nose positioned a few inches above the eastern hemisphere and spin it slowly, tasting the names of cities and rivers, mountain ranges and islands: Vladivostok, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Christmas Island … What was it like to live in those places, I wondered. What did people there do during an average day? What did they see out their windows? I would stare into the darkness beyond my own window and imagine that a light in the distance was the beacon in a lighthouse on a foreign shore.

In middle school I became obsessed with visiting Scandinavia, the birthplace of the great-grandparents who were the last of my ancestors to come to America. I decorated my room with pictures of Europe. I saved money in a piggy bank manufactured to look like a giant yellow crayon. I stood it on one end, covered it in brown paper with “battlements” cut into the top, and called it the Tower.

In high school I visited London and Paris with a school group headed by my French teacher. I remember the beautiful fields of rural England, with splashes of purple heather and red poppies. I remember the soft colored lights of the tour boats gliding along the Seine. I also remember feeling lost in every airport, always doing the wrong thing and going the wrong way, annoying my travel companions and, worse, the airport and customs officials. I can still smell the flooded basement of our hotel in London, where we ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant while the carpet made squishing sounds under the waiters’ shoes. I can’t picture the setting of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, since everyone in the swarming museum crowds wants their moment in front of her, just as I did, and some are more willing to fight for it. In France I couldn’t understand anyone, in spite of my year of classroom French. Honestly, I couldn’t understand a lot of people in England, either. By the end of the trip I was exhausted. On my last day in Paris, I managed to buy a child-size T-shirt from a street vendor without using any English. It was a gift for my younger cousin, and it used up the last of my money. It was the highlight of my trip. Still, I went home feeling like I may not make it as a world traveler after all.

In college I went back to France on a study abroad program with a group from the university. I understood the language a little better. I felt confident enough navigating around Paris to go out on my own. I have more good memories from that experience, more beautiful images stored away. But still, the trip had a checklist aspect. Guides showed us beautiful sights. We visited old churches, Roman ruins, museums stuffed with famous art. I stood on a café balcony overlooking the Mediterranean and thought, “Yeah, this is where those characters from that book would eat lunch.” I might have been an intruder in the scene. I was following someone else’s itinerary to take in the views that others had deemed noteworthy. And there’s nothing wrong with that; I don’t know a better way to get started. It’s just that standing on that balcony in Eze on the French Riviera was sort of an out-of-body experience, like I was watching a movie of a place instead of being there personally.

I reflected on all this one morning while I was running, and I relived the moment, too, when I found myself in a beautiful place without having read about it first, when I discovered myself in a breathtaking tableau quite by accident, and it was personal, it was my moment. It happened somewhere between Salem and Marblehead in Massachusetts, along the course of the Wicked Half-Marathon. I had already marveled at the coastline and the intense blue of the ocean, which kept meeting me unexpectedly when I’d turn down a new street. But it was about halfway through the race course that I got my most spectacular view of the sea, as buildings gave way to a vista of open water sparkling in the sunlight. I could barely breathe, and it wasn’t exhaustion that clutched my chest. It was one of the most purely joyful experiences of my life.

I began to feel that every trip changed me in some way. Every time I came home from somewhere, Dallas or Portsmouth or Dublin, I was different. I was richer. My soul had been expanded. Every experience became part of my identity.

I write this at the beginning of January; it is cold outside, and although the clock indicates it is still afternoon, I can tell that the light has begun to fade. Someone asked me today what I wanted for 2012. It’s the time of year when everyone talks like that. Well, this year I am going to get my car its 30,000-mile maintenance. I am going to buy a new pair of running pants. I am going to Myrtle Beach. I am going to Stockholm, Sweden.

I don’t know yet where else.

I don’t know. It is that time of year when it helps to start filling in the running calendar. If I want to travel somewhere within the United States between February and June, or even after June, it would help to start planning. Sometimes it is easier to get stuck in reminiscing. Oh, such great trips I’ve had. Maybe the best is behind me. Maybe it will never be that good again. Because for all the planning that goes into travel (I’m not a spontaneous traveler), there are some things you can’t plan or put on a checklist. Those magical moments happen when conditions are right, but there are no guarantees. That’s part of the magic.

When I was a kid spinning that globe, part of the intrigue was in not knowing. The names that sounded so exotic represented mysteries I couldn’t solve. Sometimes now I see those names in other contexts. CNN has a reporter there chronicling violence or starvation or some other tragedy. What is it like to live there? What is it like to live in Norway, the first Scandinavian country I managed to visit? Well, I still don’t know. The answers aren’t there on the surface, spelled out on the signs of the train station.

It’s an adventure. I can plan, I can choose based on timing and cost and other factors where to go this year. But I don’t know what will happen. I can't skip to the end of the book and read the last page. The future is there just out of reach, unwritten, uncertain, ready to unfold. It's scary and exciting and scary and ... 

And so begins the journey.

Note the awesome T-shirt contributed by Santa