Coming Around

The first time I checked my mail after missing the Richmond Marathon, I found it: my official certificate of acceptance into the 2013 Boston Marathon. I stood on the sidewalk in front of my mailbox in the gloom of a late-autumn afternoon, and somehow, suddenly, the shadows around me softened. I thought of the orange post-it note stuck to the wall of my cubicle at work, with the word “Boston” written on it. I had put it up back in September. In the midst of an unusually hectic week, I had wanted to remind myself to look forward.

Now, filled with disappointment over Richmond, I saw another message in the timing of the letter’s arrival. Sometimes there are second chances. When I had to drop out of the 2009 Boston Marathon because of a stress fracture, I felt discouraged about my future prospects. And yet, here I held the opportunity to try for the Boston Marathon again. Disappointments are part of life—but they are not the whole story.

I forget that too easily; thus the need for my orange post-it, a more crucial reminder than the shopping lists I jot down and then leave folded up in my purse. It seems an endless chore to shove back my negativity and focus on the positive. Still, there are those moments of beauty that come unexpected and unbidden, when all that is required on my part is to notice and appreciate. The evening before Thanksgiving, I left the gym downtown after a workout and headed for the parking garage to retrieve my car. As I waited for the walk signal at an intersection, I caught sight of a Christmas decoration seemingly floating above the street. It was an arrangement of blue stars, glowing softly in the dusk, and it wasn’t really floating, and it wasn’t alone. One by one, other quiet blue twinklers caught my eye. Tired as I was, and anxious over details, I thought they were some of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

Thanksgiving morning, I was coming again from a run, driving down 14th Street in Washington, DC, in glorious sunshine. As I approached Freedom Plaza, I noticed people wearing exercise gear and number bibs, one person here and one there and then groups and then rivers of them. I stopped at a red light on the edge of the plaza and watched them flow across the street in front of me. The sunlight was so golden and beautiful and the number bibs so bright and the runners so energetic and happy that I wanted to leap out of my car and join them. Only where would I park? I wondered. So I drove on, smiling.

I was listening recently to some of the songs from my Susan Boyle CD, and I always like the following lines from “Who I Was Born To Be”: “Now I’m not a girl/I have known the taste of defeat/And I've finally grown to believe/It will all come around again.” With running, sometimes things hurt, and sometimes it’s exhilarating, and sometimes things don’t work out, and sometimes they do. It’s hard to remember during the sting of a defeat, but good times do come around again—and I don’t mean just in running, but in life.

I should put that on a post-it note.

My letter from the BAA, with the medal from my qualifying marathon in Brookings, SD

Running Out

The 2012 Richmond Marathon T-shirt is pretty cool—I think. It has long sleeves and a dark background, midnight blue or black. I’m not sure because I haven’t looked at it in daylight.

I have a few superstitions when it comes to marathons. One of my Very Important Rules is that I don’t own the T-shirt until I do the run. These days, T-shirts are almost always handed out ahead of time, at packed expos where runners steer through tangles of merchandise to pick up their race bibs and timing chips. But I don’t look at the shirt or handle it any more than necessary to stuff it into my “goody bag.”

Of course, I would never, ever wear the shirt before the run.

It’s too bad: I may never know exactly what the 2012 Richmond Marathon T-shirt looks like. It is lurking behind the chair in my living room, wadded up inside a bag prominently labeled Anthem, for the marathon sponsor. I’ll have to figure out what to do with it at some point, but I know for sure it can never belong to me, because I never did the run.

What happened? I kept asking myself on Sunday … why couldn’t I pull it together in the darkness of my bedroom on Saturday morning? How could I lie there and watch time moving forward, until it was finally, indisputably too late?

I made the prerace trip down to Richmond and back Thursday evening to pick up my race packet (and, thus, the T-shirt). For an event that offers no race-day packet pickup, it seemed like the best strategy—I didn’t want to drive down Friday and then again Saturday morning, and even the expense of gas for two trips didn’t justify booking a hotel room. I keep thinking of songs I heard on the radio on the way home Thursday night. I keep thinking.

If I could back up a few days, I could fix it all. I’d back up past Saturday morning, because my plans grew endangered before that. If I could redo Friday, maybe … Ugh, Friday, sitting in a meeting at work imagining crackers with cheese—no, wait, crackers with peanut butter. Crackers with cottage cheese? Peeling off the wrapper on a piece of Halloween candy made to resemble an eyeball. Part of my brain kept screaming, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” And another, matter-of-fact part remarked, “You have bigger problems than this piece of chocolate.”

So, yeah, Friday didn’t go so well. But if I were really backing things up, I should go further. What about Thursday, when every minute of running strained me—not physically, but mentally, because my mind felt so tired. Hang in there, hang in there, it insists half-heartedly. And I just don’t want to hang in there any more. What about all the days before that, or the nights really, awake and miserable. Hmm, maybe I don’t want to go back that far after all. I’m not sure I could figure out how to fix that.

It’s hard letting go of the plans I had, even now that I’m left with no choice. But I’m telling myself to move on, direct resources toward the next marathon, on Kiawah Island. It makes me tired to think of traveling there. So then I worry, are my iron pills not working, is my “Be Positive” failing (see The Agony and the Ecstasy)?

Or am I just tired of running and running and never reaching that elusive finish line labeled “ENOUGH”?

Wow, think of the T-shirt they’d give out for finishers of that race.

Not to be

Luxembourgish, Seriously?

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the places I have visited for marathons past. At work, I glance away from my computer screen and catch sight of the postcards on my bulletin board: Tromso, Norway; Reykjavik, Iceland; Dublin, with its rows of colorful townhouse doors. In Tromso, north of the Arctic Circle and near enough to polar bear country, I slept in a bunk bed in a wooden cabin surrounded by trees and low hills, and the window next to my bed never darkened. I forget the stress of the initial arrival in the city, the confusion of finding transport from downtown to the campground, the anxiety of waiting around for my first evening marathon and hoping the rain would stop (it did). In the end, it’s the romance that stands out: the beautiful vista as we ran along the coastline with the sun low over the water, the triumphant downhill dash from the crest of the bridge toward mile marker 13, the campground, the cabin with its rustic charm, running water, and big-screen TV. (That’s my kind of camping!)

Oh, can’t I go back? Could I recapture the magic? I went back to Dublin a year ago, as I was starting this blog, and celebrated my first international marathon with my first return to an international marathon city. I loved it. I wanted to go back this year. But I figured, how many times can you luck out with good weather on your Wild Wicklow bus tour through the countryside the day after the marathon? (I’ve had two good bus tours without rain. Surely in Ireland that’s a miracle.)

So I started searching for my next destination. It is getting harder now, because I don’t run on Sundays for religious reasons. Dublin is always a Monday run; so was the marathon in Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Tromso and Reykjavik are Saturday events. But Sunday marathons are popular, and even more popular in Europe, it seems, than in the United States. I think I could—and shall, eventually—pen a whole blog entry about why marathons should not take place on Sunday, leaving religion out of it. But I’ll save that for later.

Because in spite of the difficulty (and I am counting on the increasing popularity of marathon running to add new events to the Marathon Guide calendar every year), I found my next marathon destination. Next June, I am heading to Luxembourg.

Luxembourg? Well, it wasn’t on my radar. Here’s part of what’s exciting in searching for marathons that don’t take place on Sunday—you end up going places you hadn’t thought of visiting before. If someone asked me my top-priority European destinations, just as a tourist, I’d probably rattle off the standards that come to everyone’s mind. I’d love to go back to France, of course, and visit Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, maybe Italy, Greece when I am especially adventurous, and the United Kingdom more than once, with a good chunk of time in Scotland. So far, I haven’t run marathons in any of those countries. But I can’t imagine trading any of the destinations I have visited; every one has been life changing in its own way.

Luxembourg, then. I think my impressions of this small country stem mostly from a series of books I read as a teenager, all set in the past and involving numerous European destinations. For me the idea of Luxembourg attaches to a sense of romance and history; I envision café terraces overlooking idyllic scenery, men in World War II uniforms, women with bright lipstick and flowing dresses. But Luxembourg today, and in real life? Hmm.

I looked it up on Wikipedia. (I have a feeling my college French professor Monsieur H. would not approve.) I learned that Luxembourg is the last remaining grand duchy, it borders France, Belgium, and Germany, and the official languages are French, German, and … Luxembourgish. Seriously?

My Luxembourg run is scheduled for June 8, 2013. That gives me some time to plan—how long will I stay, what places will I visit? (Perhaps France, Belgium, and Germany?) Oh, I am getting excited already! And in the meantime, maybe I can practice my French and pick up a few words of, um, Luxembourgish.

I must have picked the right destination. The word Luxembourgish makes me smile.

Iceland: someday I want to be here again

On the Verrazano Bridge

It costs twenty-five dollars in tolls to cross onto Long Island and back by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

I may not have believed it if I hadn’t made the journey myself. The twelve dollars I paid on my way to Long Island was the highest toll I had ever encountered—of course, that was before I paid thirteen dollars to head back toward New Jersey.

I approached the bridge fresh off the New Jersey Turnpike, with my notebook open to handwritten directions I tried to skim in quick glances as I proceeded through the “no-stopping zone,” the portion of my trip that involved skirting New York City via a succession of different roads. I had crossed one bridge already and was squinting at my directions (“What was the name of that other bridge?”) when I saw the massive structure looming up ahead of me.

The Verrazano Bridge has more than one level, and so did the course of my thoughts.

Why, I wondered on some level, do I let trips swallow me up like this? Why do I let this loneliness set in? I could feel my identity blurring, the edges of my self-image dissolving like the Wicked Witch in a rainstorm. But the parts that fell out the holes or evaporated into mist were the best parts, and all the bad, the fears, doubts, the bad habits, remained and grew concentrated.

Why, I wondered. And I knew it was because I couldn’t see my reflection. Because I rely too much on external reinforcements. Because there were no familiar sights or faces to reaffirm to me, “Yes, Roo, you know who you are.”

I grew stern with myself. You have to be present here, now, I thought. Embrace this moment, hurtling over an unfamiliar road under a bank of angry-looking clouds.

On a level above this muddy brooding, I listened to an NPR broadcast. A “Science Friday” feature that day came from a university in Idaho, my home state.

On yet another level, I stewed about tolls. I had just paid a so-far record-setting amount to exit the New Jersey Turnpike. My cash reserves now struck me as inadequate. I gulped as I read the sign announcing the twelve-dollar price to cross the bridge. The “no-stopping zone” might have to be amended to the “look frantically for an ATM zone,” I worried. And then I remembered that I’d stashed some additional cash and forgotten about it, until now.

I began to drive up.

Up toward the crest of the bridge. All the levels of thought flowed into wordless awe. Something about grandiose bridges takes my breath away. I don’t know if it’s the contrast in size, as the structure towers above me while my car and I shrink into specks, or if it’s the beauty that I never expect to find in steel and concrete. I felt myself being swallowed up again, but not into emptiness this time. My stomach fluttered with the kind of butterflies I felt when my mom would drive fast over a certain hill in the countryside of southeastern Idaho. The thrill zinged out toward my fingers and down to my toes.

And then I noticed the signs: “Life is worth living.” One, and another and another. “Life is worth living.” Space. Next sign. “Life is worth living.”

To discourage suicides, I realized. Because this is a big bridge, and people would come here to jump.

“Life is worth living.” Under the prominent message, the signs offered a phone number. A hotline.

I felt solemn again, and happy because the bridge was so beautiful, and relieved because I had more cash than I’d thought, and still peeved because twelve dollars is simply outrageous.

Split into all these emotions, I was nevertheless present, there and then, when I came off the bridge and read “Welcome to Brooklyn.”

On the way home, I wondered if some of the would-be jumpers were just shocked at having paid out the two biggest tolls of their lives. The thought made me smile a few days later, when I was back from my trip and deep in my usual postmarathon slump. I was casting about for reasons why “life is worth living.”

There, I mused. A memory, a smile. A gift from the Verrazano Bridge. So I got something for my twenty-five dollars, after all.

Life is worth living

Brief Tour of the Hamptons on a Cloudy Day

For the race ...

Elementary school hosting packet pickup and race start and finish, East Hampton. Bathrooms inside had toilets for small people.



At the beach ...

Not open for snacks after the race? (Maybe the Beach Hut opens on days NOT requiring outerwear.)

 

Family at the beach with black SUV: a moment where all is right with the world.

In the neighborhoods ...

Required elements include greenery,

a few hedges,

flowers in red, pink, and/or purple,

dashes of blue or yellow siding,

liberal doses of House of the Seven Gables gray,

and throw in some history.

Around town ...

Painted M&M sculptures, a Body Tech club, and an American flag--why not?

This way for some Ayurvedic treatments.



The line of carts suggests you are going to want A LOT of fresh produce.

Presbyterian church, in yellow with blue trim.

Inviting shop entrance or portal to a witch's lair? Come in and find out.



Main Street, Amagansett

 

Winter rentals available ... ah, yes, to stay a little longer!

Weekend To-Do List

To Do

1. Run Hamptons Marathon (drive to Long Island, find packet pickup site to get race number and timing chip, locate shuttle pickup point for race morning, find dinner, find the hotel, check in, get some rest, wake up on time, drive back to shuttle pickup site, ride to race start, run marathon [take a moment, take a breath, take in the scenery, keep moving{DO NOT stop, DO NOT cry}], cross finish line, collect medal, ride shuttle back to parking lot, clean up, take ibuprofen, take pictures, start home, find lunch, stay awake, stay alert, pay the tolls, fill up the gas tank, stop at the grocery store, unload the car, unpack, do laundry, take a shower, eat dinner, take ibuprofen …)—done!

Parking by the "No Parking" sign at packet pickup

I'm in, I'm in, I'm in!

In what, you ask? In trouble? In deep? Ah, but no!

I'm in the 2013 Boston Marathon! I received the official notification from the Boston Athletic Association that my registration has been accepted. (Now I can watch for the hard-copy acceptance certificate the BAA will send by mail.)

I like the pattern of 13's: a stress fracture immediately after my 13th marathon took me out of the running of the 2009 Boston Marathon, the first I qualified and registered for. Now in 2013, I get another chance (to stay healthy through the race!).

WOOHOO!!