Great Birthday Bash

Next up on my event calendar is my first-ever trip to South Dakota for the Great Birthday Bash Marathon. My birthday falls on a Saturday this year, so I’ve decided to invite a few thousand runners to my party. Fortunately, my awesome party planners will organize everything. They’ll provide drinks and refreshments, manage the crowds, and even hand out party favors. I don’t want to come across as narcissistic, so the medals—uh, party favors—aren’t going to have my name on them, they’ll just say “Brookings Marathon” or something like that. Because even a Great Birthday Bash shouldn’t be too over the top.

I’m excited for the bash, but last weekend I started thinking about the birthday. I hate that! Sometimes birthdays inspire less-than-uplifting reflections and arbitrary deadlines—and maybe sometimes we need those. I’m not sure if I need them now or not. I’m in my fourth week of running more miles than usual. I get a new precedent stuck in my head and it turns to iron; it’s a bar marking off my new minimum standard or a shackle to torture myself with, and maybe both. I don’t think I really want to run this much. No, revise that: I don’t want to feel like I have to run this much. I wonder … if I took some of the time that’s now monopolized by running and I spent it doing something else—working on that book I’ve been meaning to start for the past many months, say—could I accomplish something more meaningful? Or why don’t I simply manage to do it all? When I stumbled onto coverage of the Rotterdam Marathon this weekend, the announcers discussed the training regimens of the elite runners. Upwards of 120, 130, 140 miles a week? The numbers kept getting higher. This is where I need a reality check. I am not an elite runner! But I watched them for nearly two hours and felt mesmerized.

I discovered the Universal Sports Network by accident, but the marathon coverage drew me in with talk of Olympic qualifying requirements and the magic of watching those elite runners perform. So smoothly, so easily they ran, as if they weren’t going fast at all. They glided through vacated city streets behind an escort that included bikes and motorcycles. The kilometer markers flew by. At one point I wondered if you’d even get a sense of the course, passing through it so quickly. They were amazing, thrilling in their peacefulness, with maybe now and then a fleeting expression hinting at the high stakes of their run that day.

This is an aspect of marathons I never see. Waiting around at the starting line, I sometimes hear announcements over the loud speakers that make reference to the elites. If I remember, I may think of them around the halfway point, figuring they have finished by now and are getting massages. The top runners in the Rotterdam Marathon had the Olympics in their sights, but behind them followed a field of 22,000 runners with no hopes—fantasies, maybe—of Olympic glory.

How often do world-class athletes and the rest of us compete in the same event? It’s like going out onto the baseball field during a lead-up to the World Series and tossing a ball around with your friends. Only it’s not, because by the end of the Rotterdam Marathon, a stretch of 10 to 15 miles separated those elite runners from the main pack. Such a demarcation goes far beyond the railings setting off the bleachers in a ballpark.

Clearly, I am not an elite runner. Watching the elites perform, I felt how far away I was, how I operate in a different universe. With the Great Birthday Bash looming and my new mileage requirement pounding me, I couldn’t help but question (as I do periodically) what it is all for. Because I know it will never be enough. I could run forever and still fall short of that elusive finish line I’m chasing—and that is part of the allure and part of the misery.

Any chance that for now, I can focus on this great party I have coming up and a HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME?

Warning: Do Not Repeat

I think it’s time to write about Charlottesville.

I haven’t wanted to. I had to let some time pass, and now a week after the race, the intensity of the experience has faded. A few uplifting moments are emerging from the fog of negativity that started swirling in my mind around mile 11. I don’t even know why I can’t get rid of the negativity altogether. Overall, I have to judge the event a success. Nothing bad happened, except that I didn’t enjoy myself, I didn’t feel inspired. And even that isn’t completely true. I can think of two really great points along the course. I felt strong all the way to the end, in spite of the brutality of the hills.

I guess my expectations did me in, as much as I tried not to have them. I know Charlottesville can do better. I’ve run the Charlottesville Marathon twice before. The first year, in 2008, the course was scenic but difficult, and I remember passing mile 24 and feeling like I was almost home (ha, these are the exhibition miles, I thought) only to face the worst hill of the whole race on the University of Virginia campus. But when I made it to the end and saw my finish time, I smiled wide. I’d done better on that hilly course than I’d expected.

The next time I ran it, in 2011, the course had changed. It was maybe less scenic but also definitely less hilly, and I had a guy dressed up as Elvis to keep me company for the last six miles or so. I raced him over the final stretch as someone along the course called out, “Beat Elvis!”

This year when I went to the marathon website to register, I noticed a blurb indicating the course had changed yet again and was now “mostly flat.” Seemed like the organizers were trending toward a flatter, faster course.

Uh huh. Ever heard of false advertising? I guess that’s what got to me: I went into the race with the wrong expectations, and I blamed the organizers. I spent most of the second half of the marathon planning the nasty review I would write for Marathonguide.com.

I haven’t written it. I probably won’t. It turns out that planning negative reviews isn’t as spiritually invigorating as some other marathon thought processes.

But back to those great moments: early on, as I crested the first really serious hill, I breathed deep and took in the panorama of green fields spread out below a sky just bursting into full-on golden morning. The effort of the climb lent sweetness to the beauty. The sun took on some energy after a long period of waking up, and so did I.

Later, after a long stretch without a mile marker, I contemplated in near despair whether I might be around mile 16. I approached yet another hill, and I glimpsed a mile marker at the top. I ran toward it, my eyes fixed on it … and then I realized it wasn’t 16, it was 17. Miracle!!

But the real miracle is how physically good I felt through the whole race. Strong and steady, never sapped. I know by now I can never take that for granted.

If I’d been able to turn off the angry fantasies of race organizers plotting intentional torture, I might have had a great time. Charlottesville showed itself off well, with blooming bushes that seemed at the peak of their glory. Why don’t I ever just come to Charlottesville, I wondered, just as last November I asked myself, why don’t I ever just come to Richmond?

For now, I’m looking ahead to May and my first-ever trip to South Dakota. It’s four weeks away. Yeah, I know, that’s a lot. But then, bring on more Blitz!

Oh ... and my friend recorded me promising I would never sign up for the Charlottesville Marathon again! (Note to self in 2013 ...)





Hangin' out at the bar early Saturday morning, waiting for the fun to START (Miller Lite really wants you to know they sponsored this marathon--note that I would not run in a marathon named after full-calorie beer)



Ready, ready, ready (as soon as I throw off my coat)

A beautiful run into the countryside (and no, that isn't me!)

Here I come--where's the finish line?

This cop is getting ready to write me a speeding ticket!

Oh, yeah, I'm never doing that again--woohoo!

But the blossoms were nice ...

They've got chocolate milk at the finish line.

And now that I've sworn off this race forever, my friend is driving me home!

Blitzed

After this year's Charlottesville Marathon, I feel like I've been sufficiently Blitzed.

On the Road

It tests your endurance to the limit. It requires focus on the present but confidence in an ultimate goal. You can’t allow yourself to be crushed by the thought of miles yet untraveled. It’s … the long drive to a marathon city!

My drive to Ellerbe, North Carolina, took around 5 hours. I cycled through moods and phases. Fortunately, when I reached the desperate-for-something-approximating-conversation phase, I found a radio station broadcasting the Rush Limbaugh show. Only Rush wasn’t in. Some guy with an accent I couldn’t pin down (do I need to get out more?) was filling in. I listened with curiosity. Yes, probably the wrong kind of curiosity, the sort that might tempt you in the checkout at the grocery store to reach out and toss the magazine with the salacious celebrity headline into your cart. What station was playing the Rush show, I wondered. Would there be any commercials? (Yes, there were.)

I feel like you do things on the road that you wouldn’t do in normal life. It comes of leaving your comfort zone, I suppose; it warps your perception of reality. This is why I have more trouble restraining my spending when I’m abroad. No matter how many calculations I do in my head, handing over unfamiliar-looking money called kroner or euros doesn’t have the same impact as forking over a wad of American dollars. So, uh, I’m paying what amounts to $5 for soda? Well … I still have more of these euro things left in my wallet. For now.

I mention the radio host’s accent because it’s significant that he wasn’t American. I stopped scanning radio stations and listened to the show, and instead of ending up unpleasantly bloated with celebrity gossip, I heard an interesting and amusing theory. It may be, suggests the guy filling in for Rush, that European society would have been better off embracing the gas-guzzling SUV or minivan. European birth rates are low, so low that there aren’t enough young Europeans to support the older Europeans. And why is that? Small cars, of course. How can you have more than one or two kids when you have to drive the family around in a roller skate? You can’t have more kids because they won’t fit!

To me, this didn’t seem to be an issue on the bike superhighways of the Netherlands, where families rode together on separate bicycles like schools of fish or a line of geese trailing after their mother. But I still thought the guy might have a point. (Maybe it was the influence of my longtime pickup truck fantasy as I drove along in my lovely but non-pickup Hyundai Accent.)

Sometime before my talk radio phase, I stopped for lunch and fuel, lured off the freeway by a Subway logo. Of course, there’s no room on a freeway sign to specify whether a particular Subway carries spinach. Or the yogurt parfaits that have shown up on the Subway menu but seem never to be available. The Subway I chose had no spinach. And no yogurt parfait. But it was next door to an old friend, a Food Lion grocery store.

On the road, you encounter store and restaurant chains you’ve never heard of before ...

... and some that you haven’t seen for a while. I discovered Food Lion during my first visit to Williamsburg, Virginia. My cousin and I opted out of paying for a rental car, and we were touring on foot. In July. Since we both grew up in a semiarid region of the West, we faced the humidity of a Virginia summer with wide-eyed naïveté. By the time we stumbled across the Food Lion, it was like making it to Mecca. I bought a big container of Sunny Delight and took one of the most satisfying drinks I’ve ever had in my life.

Later, when my mom came with me to help me move to Williamsburg for graduate school, we walked to that Food Lion whose location I knew. We walked and walked and walked because I knew we would reach it eventually. What I didn’t know yet was that there was another Food Lion a couple of blocks from my apartment, in the other direction.

With all this reflecting on past adventures, with the help of Rush’s guest host and a bunch of songs on the radio and a lot of squirming in my seat, I finally reached my destination of Ellerbe. I drove into the town and got out of the car to stretch my legs. One of the first things I saw was a sign that struck me as funny. Although maybe it’s more sad, or maybe just practical. I took a picture of it. There were people around when I took it, and I sort of hoped they wouldn’t notice me or wouldn’t care what I was doing, which they probably didn’t. I just thought it might have been a little rude of me as a visitor to Ellerbe to take a picture of a sign that made me snicker.

The whole town seemed so Podunk, I felt myself taking on the role of big-city tourist looking down my nose at the apparent lack of sophistication around me. The town had one stoplight, but I had to wonder why. I mean, why have one at all? It certainly didn’t seem necessary. And I was there during Friday rush hour.

As I mentioned in a an earlier post, I grew up in a one-stoplight town, but now I’m all cool because I work in Washington, DC, you know? Whatever … that doesn’t change the fact that I barely knew what turning lanes were before I went to college.

I wandered into the Food King grocery store and bought a package of plastic spoons. Then as I explored, a sign advertising another grocery store beckoned me down a cross street. The thing is I didn’t believe there was a grocery store down there. And there wasn’t. The sign was old. I decided Ellerbe felt a little sad.

Later, after I scoped out the marathon headquarters and started off to another city to check into my hotel, I drove through some residential neighborhoods. I noticed pretty houses with neat trim. I noticed cascades of blossoms in beautiful colors. I wondered, why was I taking pictures of Food King when I could have been photographing this? But it was getting late and dark …

I bought dinner at a Piggly Wiggly in Laurinburg and asked the grocery store cashier for directions to my hotel. This was after I awkwardly handed her my purchases because there wasn’t a conveyor belt at the checkout. How can you get through the checkout without a conveyor belt? (At the store my mom and I shopped at when I was growing up, there were no conveyor belts.)

If I hadn’t asked for directions, I might have seen a lot more of Laurinburg than I wanted to, since I was disoriented and my Mapquest directions warned me that my final destination hadn’t been pinpointed. With help from a couple of Piggly Wiggly store clerks, I navigated more blossom-laden streets and found the Jameson Inn. Across from a Wal-Mart: the ultimate sign of civilization?

The next day, I ran one of the most beautiful marathon courses I’ve ever experienced.

Driving north after the marathon, I seemed to find beauty all over. I swallowed hard as the Richmond skyline came into view--it struck me as it never had before. I was pretty punchy by then. The sun had set and the city was lit up. After a long drive, a long marathon, and several more hours of driving, I was back in Virginia. It had been a good trip, but I was coming home.

With a medal, a T-shirt, and a piece of pottery for coming in third. Ah, sweet. Mission accomplished.

Blitzing

It’s been almost 2 weeks since my last marathon—it must be time for another one! It’s the Spring Marathon Blitz, and I am registered to run in Charlottesville, Virginia, this Saturday.

This will be my third Charlottesville Marathon but I will also be running a third version of the course. Do the race organizers change it every year or only when I’m running? I don’t know, but last year I kept dreading a hill I remembered crushing me around mile 24, and then the second half of the course turned out to be completely different. Which I’m not complaining about, because during my first running of the Charlottesville Marathon, I kept comforting myself with the thought that I never had to run that course again. (It was, um, hilly.)

How sheepish did I feel, then, when I registered for a second running of the marathon. Hallelujah for a new course—I got to keep my word to myself after all. And this year, I’ve gleaned from the event website that yet another version of the marathon awaits. The description includes the word “flat,” but is that relative to past years? We’ll see!

A new feature last year was the prominent sponsorship from Miller Lite. The brand logo is hard to miss on my T-shirt and the medal. Funny that I ended up sitting in a bar waiting for the race to start. The bar was adjacent to the venue where I picked up my packet on race morning, and it was warm and cozy and only a few steps from the marathon start. So hanging out in a bar early on a Saturday morning: that’s where my life intersects with the party scene. But I was at the beginning of my wild fun, not the end.

I’m pretty high going into this race because of my great experience in Ellerbe, but I’m trying to manage my expectations. Physically, I’ve taken a downturn this week. I’m running tired. It seems like the Ellerbe hills exacted their toll long after I crossed the finish line.

So in spite of my past marathon experiences, I’m going into Saturday not knowing what to expect. But you know all I really want is a good T-shirt.

A Tale of Two Marathons

Last night as I browsed online to prepare for my trip to Sweden, I happened to read that more than 21,000 runners are registered for the 2012 Stockholm Marathon. Twenty-one thousand: about five times the population of my hometown when I was growing up.

Last week, I completed a marathon with about 80 other participants. While I could usually see a runner or two in the distance ahead of me, I trekked through much of the course in solitude.

The Ellerbe race was a “gut check” marathon, one of the runners told me last Saturday morning. Because most of the time you’re on your own—well, it’s you and the livestock.

No doubt the Stockholm Marathon promises a contrast. This year it will host more participants than ever before. But picture a city street flooded with runners, and the image could come from almost anywhere. They’re popping up all over now, these Big Marathons with their thousands of entrants. I’ve come to expect the chaos of convention center expos; on my way to pick up my race packet, I navigate nonchalantly through tangles of vendors seeking to profit from the running vogue.

And speaking of expectations, how about a nicely stocked goody bag, pace teams, the latest in chip technology, a crew of professional photographers … and throw in some chocolate milk at the finish line if you can manage. In return, I will submit to being placed in a “corral” as I wait around for the start of the race. I will divert a few brain cells from the effort of endurance to the skill of maneuvering around other runners without making the marathon a contact sport. This is the world of the Big Marathons. Maybe sometime soon it will get profiled on a reality TV series, slotted after “Toddlers in Tiaras” or “Dance Moms.”

Last week, the day before my 27th marathon (I think), I pulled into the circular driveway in front of the Ellerbe Springs Inn, ca. 1857, and walked up the steps to the porch, where a small group of people lounged on rocking chairs and porch railings. I could hear snippets of their friendly talk as I approached. “You get to that last one and wonder, why did they do this to me?” one man joked, and I knew he was referring to a hill on the course. Another man stood behind a folding table at the far end of the group. “Are you registered?” he asked me.

Ellerbe Springs Inn, sans runners on porch

I said yes, and he handed me a fluorescent green T-shirt. Then he informed me that the timing team would hand out race numbers in the morning. I felt a lack of closure, maybe, some odd desire to draw out this “packet pickup” ritual that didn’t involve a packet at all, so I took the opportunity to ask for directions to the town where I planned to spend the night. The genial group on the porch offered counsel. And then there was nothing more to do but get back in my car and drive away.

The next morning I returned to the inn to receive my race number and a plastic bag full of coupons and flyers for other races. I kept looking for a timing chip. No chip. “Am I supposed to have a chip?” I asked someone in the lobby.

“No, I don’t think so,” she replied. “There’s never been one before.”

Huh. No chip. Weird.

I pinned on my race number and checked the time: 50 minutes to go before the start. I began to curl into myself, into my anxiety. The morning outside looked bleak. More runners arrived with family members and friends in tow, and people began to speak to me. I got drawn into conversation in spite of my initial reluctance, and before I knew it I was trading stories and plans and then looking back at the clock and realizing it was time to go outside.

Such a small race presents some ironies: you spend many miles alone, but you cannot be anonymous. You don’t run by someone in silence. All the volunteers at every aid station watch you approach and hold out paper cups to you because you are the only runner around at the moment. And the scenery on this course was beautiful, with colors at once muted and intense: purple blossoms, green fields, burgundy trees, the blue silhouettes of hills blurring together as they met the gray sky. I dropped out of time. It was the ultimate runner’s high.

See, a burgundy tree

I considered how this race had challenged my Big Marathon expectations. I’ve done small runs before; I remember thinking I preferred them. But it’s been a while. I’m used to the super-expo-size events now, like the National Marathon in DC, where last year I crossed the starting line more than five minutes after the front of the pack let loose—that’s where you need a chip!

It’s two different marathon cultures, I decided. I felt the Ellerbe crowd fit into a tough class of runners, the kind who run because they can, the type to go chasing into thunderstorms in search of adventure. They don’t need cheering spectators to know they can get the job done. I admire that independence. It also scares me. I knew I was the wimp in the bunch. But when the rain hit me out on the course, I thought back to another small race I’d run in the rain, and I knew I could do it. I knew because I’d done it before.

The two cultures seemed very distinct to me when I first arrived at the Ellerbe Springs Inn, and when I drove into the town of Ellerbe and found one stoplight, which seemed completely unnecessary, and when the timing volunteer didn’t give me a chip and the race organizer warned the runners about a dog around mile 20. But in the end, I got a pretty cool medal that even a Big Marathon would be proud to hand out. I won a piece of pottery (a teal plate) for coming in third among women overall. I visited again with a few of the runners before I got in my car to head home.

Downtown Ellerbe

And looking back, I can see where the two cultures converge. Because the conversation on the porch of the inn when I walked up to get my T-shirt told me I was in the right place. The talk in the lobby the morning of the race pulled me out of myself because I was part of it. I’ve encountered this truth before as I’ve traveled for marathons in other countries: some things are different, but many things are the same. There is a language of running, and it goes beyond speaking. That’s why, whether running through the fields around Ellerbe, North Carolina, or flowing with the crowd through the city of Stockholm, I’m part of something larger than myself. In the end, the race is mine to run, the struggle is my own. And yet, as a runner I am not alone.

Why not start a race across from a restaurant called Pork Belly?

And anyway, before I finished school and got a job in the nation’s capital, I grew up in a one-stoplight town.