The gauntlet one year later, a retrospective on running

June 18th, 2008

It was one year ago today that I became a runner. At least, it was one year ago today that I got drunk and decided to start running. The actual exercise part didn’t start for a couple more weeks. Because of this anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on running and trying to determine whether I have moved beyond the hatred that plagued our relationship in my youth.

I’ve learned there’s much I admire about Running.

I’m a confident and competitive academic with a tortured history with athletics. I am the glasses-clad, graceless girl afraid of the volleyball who was always chosen last in gym class. Accordingly, running helped me find a new kind of self-love and confidence. As a sport, recreational running is inclusive, individual and incremental. It’s available to all ages and abilities, all sexes, sizes and shapes. One race cures the intimidated participant who witnesses a wave of different people mixing together with a common purpose.

While running is certainly competitive, the goal is individual achievement, not adversarial triumph. For the 99% of runners who have no expectation of winning, the race is against yourself, against the clock. It’s about setting realistic expectations and working hard, bit-by-bit, goal-by-goal, to achieve them. It’s about convincing yourself to carry on when you’re tired and about learning to treat your body well.

In the few races I have run, I have always felt embraced and encouraged by others. When you run even one race of any distance, you become a “runner.” The competitors are supportive: “Good work, runners,” they’ll call to you as you pass, happily sharing their label, graciously admitting you into the club. People on the sidelines cheer, “Stay strong, runners. Finish hard.”

Still, despite my better understanding of running, our relationship still feels more like tolerance, more like coexistence and less like fondness. I still approach training with a feeling of requirement. I still rarely achieve a high. I find it easy to justify a shortcut when my legs hurt or when I’m not feeling up to par.

And, two weeks ago, when I ran my first half-marathon, I learned that Running will not tolerate my disrespect.

After running the Ten Mile last fall, a half-marathon seemed reachable. Never a math whiz, I simply thought “If you can run ten miles, you can run 13.” Nevermind I was fresh off my holiday break, in which I’d traded running for eating for several weeks.

No, instead of the constant and considered way I trained for the my first ten mile, I approached preparation for the half in the same procrastinative way I used to approach my schoolwork. I tried cramming it all in on the cusp of the deadline. I jumped in at week 7 of the 12 week program and forced myself to do the long runs.

Running long distance requires patience, pacing, diligence and commitment. So while I managed (barely) to finish the half-marathon, I didn’t experience the joy running provided me on that first run. I failed to meet my time goal, but worse, I felt terrible - tired, sick and dehydrated. I pictured running looking at me silently like my favorite professor: You got by, but you didn’t fool me. You are capable of better.

Despite my showing at the half marathon, I hope to run the ten mile again this fall. While I still don’t always look forward to running, I always feel like a better person for having done it. We’re still a little tortured, but I’m not ready to give up on it just yet.

  | Posted in » Ten Mile Madness | Track by Leo

Do chainsaws also come from Mars?

June 16th, 2008

I try to avoid gender generalizations, but, sometimes, I observe things about men that I don’t understand.

Like their thing with power tools.

By 8:30 on a sunny Father’s Day morning, my husband had been to Home Depot, purchased a chainsaw and returned, and the men on my street had gathered in my front yard.  They’d flocked over one-by-one as though answering to some magnetic force calling them to respond.

During a powerful thunderstorm the night before, a strong, straight wind had blown down a leafy shade tree, ripping it out of the ground at the root. (We believe it was the wind despite eyewitness insistence by 3yob that it was either a big monster or possibly the tooth fairy).

Across the street a small tree lay snapped in half at two feet up its trunk. Next door a large pine, still connected to the ground, leaned precariously over a driveway. Our tree was the largest tree, though, and our yard a central location in observing neighborhood damage. Families out for Sunday morning storm surveys drove slowly by, snapping an occasional picture.

And, so, on this bright and dewy morning on the day of the family barbecue, several neighborhood fathers were circled around the stump in my yard, coffee cups in hand, analyzing the trees and contemplating removal.

“Yeah, you’re definitely going to need a chainsaw for this,” remarked one neighbor, a hint of envy in his voice. “Do you have a chainsaw?”

“I just picked one up this morning,” replied my husband. I had begun to notice that Hubs, while genuinely disappointed about losing the tree, seemed to be emanating a strange level of excitement.

“Oh, you could have borrowed one of mine,” said another neighbor, who delicately added with a combination of shy embarrassment and subtle swagger, “I actually have three.”

You could feel the admiration of the group well-up, “Wow, three chainsaws.”

“Yeah, last year for my birthday I bought myself a Steel.”

I didn’t know what a “Steel” was (in fact I didn’t learn until I googled it, that it’s actually a “Stihl”), but judging by the reaction from the group (congratulatory gasps and utterances of justification, things like “Oh, yeah, you deserve it! Good for you!”-statements I didn’t know men made to each other), I suspected that this might be like me telling my book club I’d splurged on Seven jeans or bought my little black dress from Vera Wang.

“You know,” continued the Stihl-owning neighbor reflectively, taking a sip of his coffee, “if you cut it up into small enough pieces you could use this for firewood next winter.”

The rest of the conversation got a little blurry as I imagined my favorite tree chunked up and tossed into the fireplace - a tree my children had climbed, that shaded their picnics and provided privacy and sun-protection to their bedroom windows. The pit in my stomach reminded me of the day I realized that the bacon on my breakfast plate was actually a pig named Bubbles whom I’d been feeding since his infancy.  I don’t disagree with the use - for the pig or the tree - but it seemed a little wrong to dive right in without even a little mourning.

A few minutes later the group disbanded and the neighborhood became a harmony of chainsaw noise. But before the cutting began, 5 and I grabbed our cameras. “It’s too bad about our tree,” she said.

  | Posted in » Everything Else | Track by Leo

You know that I’m a sucker for anything acoustic.

June 13th, 2008

Oh, how I do love a good mixtape.

Modern technology has simplified the process (whether that’s good or bad is arguable), but I have had fewer occasions for creation in recent years.

With summer upon us, the kids and I have been barreling through songs on my iPod, borrowing new CDs from the library and blaring the radio in the car, and I realized I have a reason once again to design perfect playlists for some fresh, new, occasionally-appreciative listeners.

Now I need your assistance with my latest new plan for content: Mom’s Mixtapes, which, of course, I intend to post on Mondays (see what I did there!).

In an effort to start this summer off with a creative focus, this week’s topic: Imagination. Imagination appears as the subject of plenty of popular songs, among them a few that I already own:

• With Imagination (I’ll Get There), Harry Connick Jr.
• Imagination, Erasure
• Surfin’ in My Imagination, Ralph Covert

Brainstorming time - any additions from your archives? Imagination need not be in the title, but should be in the lyrics, and while the subject matter need not be kid-cognizable, it should be kid-friendly. (For those of you who might be so inclined to offer it (and you know who you are), I’ll probably skip this one.)

I have considered grabbing Pure Imagination from the Willy Wonka movie. Gene Wilder’s presentation disturbs me slightly less than the Kenny Loggins cover, but I think I lean toward the Maroon 5 version as the least terrifying. (Can someone tell me how a song with such lovely lyrics manages to creep me out so badly?)

Tune in Monday for a final list, an iMix and related summer activities.

  | Posted in » Mixtape Monday | Track by Leo

Quote of the Day

May 20th, 2008

A few years ago, (when I had only one child!), I muttered aloud to a good friend about wishing I had more time to write, about how work and family so monopolized me that I had no energy left for creative pursuits - for reading, for writing, even for exercise. Some time later my friend gave me a book: “If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit” by Brenda Ueland.

Ueland, a Minneapolis author who taught evening writing classes, often to women ‘homemakers’, published the book in 1938, and the title is somewhat deceiving. It’s less about writing as a craft and more about finding the freedom to foster individual creativity and pride. For me, the book has become a go-to source of inspiration and motivation on days when I am questioning whether to blog, or read my book club book, or run, or do any of those “low-priority” Google to-do tasks.

For example, she writes:

…[I]f you are always doing something for others, like a servant or a nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself. And how to be something yourself? Only by working hard and with gumption at something you love and care for and think is important.

I thought I’d share - just as a little reminder that whether you love to write, sing, or draw, to bake, craft or knit, to argue, campaign, or organize, to run, swim, or golf - it’s not just important to do those things “for yourself” - it’s necessary to your jobs as parent, spouse and friend.

  | Posted in » Job of Mom | Track by Leo

If you dare wear short shorts …

May 16th, 2008

It never occurred to me that I should shave my legs.  I don’t even recall being aware of leg hair.  Not until the summer before 8th grade on the Midway at the Montana State Fair. 

My best friend Julie and I were riding some amusement ride that whisked us high above the Fairgrounds and then stopped for loading and unloading.  We were swinging away, chatting it up about the cute boys on the ground below, when a crisp Montana gust came along and caused the fine blonde hairs on my leg to stand on end.

“Holy Cow,” remarked Julie, honest and amused, but not intentionally unkind, ”you look like an albino gorilla.”

That was the end of my youthful ignorance and the beginning of my hair removal life.

I bring this up only because, much to my disbelief and dismay, my 5 year-old daughter has recently started talking about her non-existent leg hair and lamenting that she doesn’t want her legs to someday be ”all hairy like Daddy’s.” 

I told her that all kids have hairy legs, and that when she’s a grown up she can choose whether to keep the hair or remove it..  I sensed her frustration with me immediately, “Oh, I’ll get rid of it,” she promised. 

So, tell me, was I the exception, or are our daughters growing up way, way, faster than we did?

  | Posted in » The Fretting Feminist | Track by Leo

It could work if Santa is like the Dread Pirate Roberts.

April 25th, 2008

I spend a lot of time reflecting on my personal and professional goals, trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be.  When we’re all rushing around through life we tend to define ourselves by career, by parenting choices, instead of viewing ourselves and our gifts as a whole. 

On this issue, we could learn by the example of our children.  My kids still aren’t hampered by convention.    They’re open to the idea that their lives can be filled by doing all the things that they like (or think they will like).  To wit- this morning’s “What do you want to be when you grow up” conversation.

6: “When I grow up I want to be an artist, a football player and a dad.”

4.9: “When I grow up I want to be a doctor for animals and a haircut girl.”

3: “When I grow up I going to be, um, …. a swimming teacher, a dumptruck guy and Santa.”

  | Posted in » Kid Speak | Track by Leo