(10 reasons why) I love Beacon Hill

1. Running up (and down) Beacon Hill is an efficient and compact hill workout. The trails up the hill starting at Dallas Road provide a steady 10% grade, rising 15 meters over a 160 meter incline with a satisfying scramble at the top. 
2. Running down Beacon Hill Loop towards Circle Drive and the rest of the Park is a nice cool down of 360 meters.
3. Running back up the curve of Beacon Hill Loop gives a consistent increase in elevation grade starting at 2% and rising to 7% at the top.
4. For a shorter cool-down between hill repeats, one can run up the hill and right back down because there are multiple trails on either side. 
5. The scenic overlook at the ‘summit’ is hard to top – panoramic views of the spectacular Olympic mountains just across the azure waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
6. Circle Drive (the loop around the hill) is exactly one mile long – perfect for mile-repeats. The road has a separate bike/pedestrian lane which is handy for evading slow-moving car traffic.
7. In springtime, Beacon Hill is ablaze with blue wildflowers (flowering camas native to the area).
8. In summer, the once lush green meadows turn to sun-bleached gold.
9. Peacocks wander the lower reaches of the hill. I almost ran into one the other day. Surreal, yes.
10. And baby goats scamper and lurch around adorably too, if you’re looking for signs of hope and rejuvenation after a particularly life-threatening workout.

In praise of running

Running gives me everything.  Running gives me a supportive community of comrades who are both more competitive and more altruistic, as Christopher McDougall points out; maybe because we can viscerally connect with each other’s pain, pride and perseverance.  Running also gives me the chance to be alone, moving through the mist of ever-shifting thoughts and needs and grudges, grinding them down mile after mile into dust, leaving me clean.  

Running is my meditation, helping me check in and focus on each body part, the aching ankle, the wonky knee, the tight hamstring, the lazy glute, bringing me to empathy and gratitude for this miraculous body whose tissues and structure reflect my genetic inheritance, psychological makeup and everything else that has shaped me.  Running is elemental: each step grounds me, like Antaeus, in the replenishing energy of earth; each breath is a deep drink of air; I soak in the salt ocean of my sweat.  Running gives me a feel for the health of my lungs, my blood, my heart.  Each race I run is an objective gauge of my fitness, my level of energy, my excessive intake of muffins.  Running helps me stay truthful in a world where it is too easy to lie. (Which may be why so many runners reacted to Paul Ryan’s little fib about his marathon time; a harmless exaggeration to a non-runner, but a basic betrayal of the runner’s code, revealing so much about the politician’s unreality.)   

Because I run I get to fall for all these other gorgeous runners of every shape, size, age, race and gender, to like them and wish them well with all my being, even if it’s just through eye contact as we run past one another.  If I were ever paralyzed I would hope to make contact with others with the same heart-felt intensity.  Some people talk about running as a spiritual practice, but I can’t speak to that.

You can probably tell this was written after a great run.  Running gives me the summery shimmer of endorphins, thank goodness, on a cool wet fall day.

The Empress has no (s**t)

Warning/Avertissement: If you are an Anglophile visitor enchanted by the mystique of red double-decker buses, green lawns and ivy-covered hotels, or if you are a Victoria local who at least once a day likes full-heartedly to exclaim how lucky we are to live here, now would be a good time to stop reading this post. And if you should choose to continue, kindly refrain from hateful comments along the line of "Go back where you came from" because that is not really an option.

I don't really want to be a muckraker, a shit-disturber, but sadly I have no choice but to point out the obvious: Victoria has a problem with shit. Defecation, if you prefer medical terms, kaka if you verge on the infantile, merde in our other national lingua franca.

I'm not even referring to our little local controversy over sewage treatment. Only in Victoria, pristine capital of the greenest province in the great white north, will you find prominent environmentalists who are convinced that it is perfectly all right to flush untreated waste (filtered through a coarse mesh, it's true) into the narrow strait of Juan de Fuca separating our fair city from the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The fast-moving cold currents in the strait make for a perfect natural latrine, they argue, and the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to treat all that poop are better spent on other good causes.

Those good causes do not, however, include the maintenance and upkeep of public toilets. The City of Victoria has proudly installed public urinals in the "night-life district". (See: http://thetyee.ca/ArtsAndCulture/2011/02/07/CoolPublicUrinal/) However, this charming installation isn't particularly useful for women or people with disabilities. But then again, they should probably stay at home. Likewise, the homeless. Out for a run this weekday morning at 5.30 am, the facilities on Dallas Road were definitely shut down; at 6 am, I was thrilled to bits to find the public toilets locked up at Willows Beach; and at 6.30 am, further along the lovely Oak Bay waterfront, the washrooms were not open for business at Cadboro Bay's Gyro Park. I considered popping into the nearby Starbucks but was deterred by the sight of a pair of balding burly teletubbies sitting solemnly outside with their morning coffee, contemplating a leaf-blower loudly whooshing away any sign of human or vegetal life from the parking lot.

Oh, you know, the homeless, they make such a mess. They leave needles, trails of blood, puddles of urine, piles of feces, bio-hazards that suburban middle-class families shouldn't have to encounter. No wonder we have to lock up our public toilets at night. Why don't they just do their business at home? So what if they are homeless and Victoria has almost no affordable housing? Why don't they get a job... or just leave?

Another disclaimer: I am not a homeless person. I am an absurdly over-privileged middle-class middle-aged male.

I also happen to be a runner. Little known fact: running gives you the runs. The digestive system becomes more sensitive, peristalsis more insistent. The moving body seeks to expel all unnecessary materials.

Runners are out and about at all hours. We use public toilets because what's the alternative? Dive into the bush? Carry around latex gloves and little plastic baggies like the ubiquitous dog-owners proudly picking up after their animal surrogates? The tragedy of the commons in absurd miniature: every man, woman, child and pet with his, her or its own porta-potty.

Ever since Mohenjo Daro and the Romans, great cities have been built on the shared foundations of public infrastructure: viaducts, drains, roads. But to keep our toilets open, Victoria and its adjacent municipal fiefdoms, genteel Saanich, rich Oak Bay, upwardly mobile Colwood, ambitious Langford, would have to admit that Victoria is actually a city, and not just a quaint little preserve of retired English expatriate gardeners.

We might have to actually admit that we have bowels and bodily functions and that our collective body politic is suffering from a serious case of constipation. We would have to wake up from a pleasant Dickensian fantasy in which every doughty Englishman had his own little castle, replete with moat, and recognize that it's not enough to build ever larger suburban dwellings with multiple bathrooms which we spray with deoderant chemicals after every evacuation. We would have to step out of Queen Victoria's large shadow and let go of our fixation with the comfortable diaper of the mother complex that keeps this city and its residents in what has been called a 'velvet rut', the idyllic paralysis of infantile compliance with authority and the denial of libido.

Queen Victoria's bloomers were auctioned off a few years ago, to a Canadian apparently. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2008-07-30-victoria_N.htm) No word if there were stains on the Empress's underclothes.

Starting again...

I ran for an hour the other day.

Normally, this would not be newsworthy. However, as my aching legs remind me two days later, this was my first run in over three months. I'm impressed how quickly the body dismantles the hard-won apparatus it constructs for specialized activities like marathon running. Like a high-efficiency short-order cook, the body takes what it gets and puts it to best use: if I choose to sit in front of a computer editing video instead of getting out there for a bracing run in the cold rain, so be it.

I would like to bring more of this ruthless responsibility into the rest of my life, this recognition that I make choices which have consequences, not necessarily bad or good in any absolute sense, yet with impact on the particular quality of life I choose to experience.

Ideally, I would both run and make video... Hard to do at the same time (although I did make a video while running the Boston marathon (see http://youtu.be/5E7G2XRC7gM) I would like to believe my capacity for creative expression would gain oxygen from the aerobic capacity I build through running, although I'm also aware that I don't want to do much besides eating ice cream after a long hard run... Somewhere along the way, I hope I will find the balance.

In the meantime, back to running feels good (especially two days later.)

when things fall apart...

‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’... Four days after the marathon, I continue to reflect on lessons from the race.

What kept me moving forward through the panic of knee pain at 14 kilometres, the mental barrier of sheer futility at 20 miles, unutterable exhaustion two hundred metres from the finish line? My doctor friend Rafi who thinks running is bad for you would probably call it foolish obstinacy. My mother, on the other hand, believes in the power of will and would probably applaud this display of determination, even if dismayed by the sorry sight of her son near collapsing.

The night before the race, I relaxed my nerves in a warm bath, following Jeff Galloway’s suggestion to visualize the course and to find some magic words. The next morning, I scrawled on my left forearm – trust, relax, flow. Amazing how often I looked at those injunctions to find strength and form to combat the onset of mental and physical slump.

I also watched an excellent short Runners’ World video with tips by great runners like Ryan Hall, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dean Karnazes and Dick Beardsley. During tough moments in the race, I reminded myself of Ryan’s advice to focus on the next step. Not the next five kilometres, not the bagel and banana waiting at an end point in the impossibly distant future, just the actual next step. (Amusing to consider Chairman Mao gave the same advice for a journey of a thousand miles.)

So this morning’s insight – when movement is underway, pay attention to form; when everything is falling apart, focus on the next step.

And really it makes sense to use the personal will as a resource when it is available, and when it starts to break down through stress and fatigue and the light of the ‘I’ draws dim and small, that’s when the next step becomes the only possible space for action, enabling surrender to a deeper flow that carries us forward beyond comprehension.

One marathon - two races

I ran two races at yesterday’s Royal Victoria Marathon. First, a smart strategic strong 42 km run, with evenly timed 4.45 minutes per kilometre splits. Then, bizarrely disconnected, a final 200 metre stagger, knees jumbled, eyes squeezed tight shut, faltering stumble punctuated by long hyperventilating groans, mooing like a cow driven to the shambles by some invisible goad.

Or make that an invisible god - likely Hermes, swift mover, cosmic trickster, patron of thieves and magicians. In the evening, recuperating, I came across an email trail suggesting I had in fact made my race goal - qualifying for the Boston marathon - by one second. Checking the race results, I saw my name - at chip time 3.20.59 - closely followed by another runner from Quebec, another man, same age group, who came in at 3.21.00 - one second too slow to qualify for Boston.

Here’s the crux of free will versus necessity in that most fleeting of instants: do I take personal credit for months of clean living, hard practice runs, regular stretching, core training, good race planning, a conservative start, mental fortitude and discipline, or do I accept, with gratitude, the god’s gift of that stolen second, a sacred mystery beyond my control in that final disoriented step over the finish line?

And perhaps I needed to run 42 long and hard kilometres on my own steam (and the loving support of kind friends and cheering onlookers) to be able to surrender at the last to whatever force summons forth spring from stone legs, the prime mover’s manifestation in this personal effort.

In any event, I am happy and grateful.

running with an injury

I took a risk this morning. The last long run of the marathon training clinic - a 34 km run planned for three plus hours. Last Saturday, we ran 2 hours and 45 minutes, and I felt fine, except for a pain on the top of my foot that got worse as the week went on. I iced and rested all week, forcing myself to skip speed workouts on Monday and Wednesday, but the localized swelling didn't go down and the pain went deeper into the foot.

Although I sternly told myself during the week that with five weeks to go until my fall race (the Royal Victoria Marathon on October 11), this was the time to rest up, I felt increasingly fretful and anxious, almost tearful as if some horrid curse had been inflicted on poor me. Physically, I felt bloated and heavy, as if I had gained pounds overnight from eating oversize portions, muffins and ice cream, normally burned away with a shrug during intensive training.

So this morning, I gingerly laced up my shoes and limped out to the run. With a short emergency detour to grab a couple of gels, I was in for the ride with the group. The first hour was painful - stabbing pains on the inside of the foot that seemed to get worse. I breathed through the pain and tried to relax into the run, going as slow as the slowest runner in our group, an unaccustomed humility that felt like practicing beginner's mind (or body).

Leaning forward like a chi runner, focusing on landing lightly on the balls of my feet, allowing the rhythm of the run to take over, pain gave way to pleasure and I felt a sag of relief at the prospect of not having to abort the run, limping painfully to the nearest pay phone with the quarter tucked into my water bottle pocket, calling a friend for a ride.

Instead I ran easily and fast until pain started to seize my knees and I could feel my core weakening, and then decisively took a short cut back to a friend's place, making it there a minute past three hours for the run. Doing a yoga inversion, sweat stinging my eyes, I felt gratitude and relief and the rush of joy at an unexpected win, at least for now, at the gambling table.

I'll see my chinese medicine doctor tomorrow though.