Icarus

Lying on the mat at the Y this morning, after an intense core workout and hip stretches, I realized the flatness I've been experiencing all week is just the surface manifestation of a deeper grief.

When Icarus came crashing down into the blue Aegean, his waxen wings melted by the aloof sun, eyes averted from such human hubris, as he tumbled through that turbulent terror into desolate clarity, Icarus finally understood gravity, inexorable as Ananke-necessity, infinitely stronger than any countervailing human effort.

I feel exhilarated when I see photographs of runners airborne, caught in that infinitesmal moment between contact of one foot or another with mother earth stretched out beneath like a patient safety net, holding us safe, whether we will it or not.

Each step that launches me off this earth is a miniature mirror of Icarus' wild flight. And each landing reflects that first and final fall.

Half marathon

I ran my first half marathon last Sunday in Vancouver. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and cool, and over 3500 runners ran a very scenic course from the University of British Columbia, through Kitsilano, across the Burrard Bridge to Stanley Park. A band played raucously; runners, munching bananas and bagels, mingled with excited families and friends; and I felt oddly flat. As Peggy Lee might have said, "is that all there is to a race?"

I don't want to admit to feeling competitive; yet the next morning, looking at the race results online, I felt deflated when I saw I was slower than the average runner in my age group. I ran the race in a respectable 1 hour and 55 minutes - five minutes faster than my public goal of 2 hours, ten minutes slower than my private goal of 1:45.

A small dishonesty to be more ambitious than I might let on to others; yet part of a persona I've interiorized for a very long time. Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Balliol College at Oxford, an institution that instilled the ideal of 'effortless superiority', which fit well for someone who never did homework and passed exams with minimal study.

Yet there are no shortcuts in running. My body will carry me as far and as fast as it is able. Training, recovery, rest, and nutrition will make me stronger; yet no matter how much effort and time I put into it, I won't become a world beater. Time's arrow flies in one direction, and sometimes that is down hill.

Or should I make that uphill? Most of the Vancouver half marathon course was along a gentle downhill slope - too easy to over-stride or go for broke too early. For the first half of the race, I resisted the temptation to run fast, shuffling along on the grass verge whenever I could, shifting to a walk every ten minutes, watching other runners go by, then enjoying the childish pleasure of catching up to them and passing them again. I played 'tag' for four turns with one tall bearded heavy-set man who was pushing along as hard as he could. Somewhere around Spanish Banks, I complimented him on his form and then ran away, determined to complete the second half within fifty minutes.

Which I did - accelerating after making it through the long Art Nouveau rise of the grand old bridge and the opening curve of Beach Drive. One man lay stretched out flat on the sidewalk, his head cradled still by a couple of paramedics. Another casualty had an oxygen mask strapped to his face. All this from a two hour race? On the other side of the street, a woman came cruising down, obviously a fast runner who had just completed the race, enthusiastic, exhorting us to finish hard, complete the race in under two hours. I nodded and began to really pour it on along that final stretch.

And then the painful expectancy of a finish line, surely it should be around this corner, no, wait, what's that red banner, just a sponsor's logo, and yes, finally, legs flailing, running out of steam just a moment too soon, then recovering to run tall past the line and through, lining up for a perfunctory medal, a banana, an overheard conversation about the latest running watch, stretching while waiting for a bus back to the race hotel, relaxing over green tea and an almond chocolate croissant with a friend who was reading a newspaper story about our ongoing epidemic of mental illness.

I'm wondering now about a possible parallel between mental illness and running - maybe I'll save that for another post when I'm not feeling depleted!

Trusting Gravity

Walking home today at lunchtime, I shortened my stride and was disconcerted to find I was holding my breath. And when I exhaled, there was a moment of dizzy unsureness, alleviated only when my feet pushed deeper into the ground. So then I took lighter steps, experimenting with my tenuous trust in gravity's hold. Although I feel like floating, I'm still tethered to the ground; only my head feels like a helium balloon.

Until this week, I was feeling smug about my stride. Nice short steps with an enjoyable rhythm of heelstrike to the ground, ankle rolling forward, and then a slight lift off from the ball of the foot. Yes, I was running slower, which was fine with me; getting the form right feels more important than speed.

"You're walking differently," my friend N observed last Sunday, as we strolled leisurely towards the open air market on Government Street. I pressed her for more details; she would only add, "like a Masai".

The Masai walk long distances barefoot in East Africa. A Masai foot touches down on a sweet spot just in front of the heel, pivots fully on the ankle, and then pushes off from the ball of the foot. This makes for a uniquely springy stride and gorgeous posture. A Swiss company makes expensive footwear that claims to duplicate the Masai walk for Westerners.

Swiss MBTI, they are eclectically named; hideously expensive, they come with their very own video. I bought a pair of MBTI sandals in a fit of enthusiasm over a year ago, and never got around to wearing them last summer, because I couldn't find time to watch the video. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly loaded up the video. After some cursory footage of athletic Masai tribesmen demonstrating their brandname strut, a strapping, obviously Central European, bleached blonde in white lab uniform smilingly introduced apprehensive clients to their new MBTI shoes, while the video repetitively extolled their benefits in multiple languages. As the video ostentatiously points out, these aren't just shoes, they're medical appliances.

I strapped on my medical appliances last evening to run errands in Cook Street Village, and quickly found that my stride was way too long. Teetering along, I shortened the distance between landing and taking off, and found myself serenely gliding along at an impossibly slow pace. And of course I was holding my breath.

In anticipation of what? It's hard to stay light, float slow, trust inertia and gravity to play their part in keeping me upright, stable, and moving along. I see heavy joggers pounding the pavement, their feet, ankles, knees, hips absorbing the full punishing blow of all that impact. Something in us needs to push the river, gouge at the earth, gulp down the air around us, as if what we are given is not enough.

As I run, my body is learning afresh how to walk and breathe, letting old patterns surface and dissolve, hopefully to be replaced by new, lighter, more efficient ways of linking together musculature, ligaments, bone in articulated connection with the earth as well.

I get to test it out when I run a half-marathon in Vancouver this Sunday. I'm excited and a bit afraid. Hopefully, it will be more fun than pain, and I can remember to breathe and walk in between.

Pacing Myself

How slow can I possibly run? I tried to find out this morning. First I walked a block, putting one foot in front of the other, stretching my neck by lifting and lowering my head, then moving it side to side, doing circles, clockwise, anti-clockwise, somewhat startled by the grinding sound coming from the base of my neck. On a tree branch above my head, a crow cackled harshly. Black shirt, black shorts, black hair all tousled, wagging my head - the crow probably saw me as a demented mutant.

At the end of the block, I hopped off the curb and broke into a slow run diagonally across the empty expanse of Quadra Street. I was still putting one foot in front of the other and my sleep-drugged movement felt just as slow as when I was walking a moment earlier; yet now, I was undeniably in running mode. As I loped in slow motion up the gentle grassy slope, I tried to focus on what distinguishes even the slowest run from walking - a miniature explosion in the ball of the foot, mushrooming upward, launching motion through calf and upper leg.

Just after the intersection with Humboldt Street, flanked on either side by ugly new facilities for the very old, the gradient gets steeper. Running up the hill in the cold dark wet mornings last winter, I felt breathless, yet victorious, each time I made it to the crest. I ran the hill grimly, and geared myself up by programming the treadmill to a hill course that was probably too steep and too fast for my strength. I wasn't stupid; I just didn't know any better. I alternated between ignoring and icing injuries - stubborn shin splints, a sudden sharp spasm in the calf, an ankle twitch, a footache.

Now I run the hill easily and I prize my legs like a race horse. Each twinge triggers an anxious awareness of possible derailment. There's the goal of getting to the marathon and making it through what still seems like an inconceivably long distance; yet even more compelling, I don't want to grieve the loss of this rhythmic movement, this deeper breath that fills and swills out the dark unkempt cavities in the lower lungs where old stuck depressive energy resides, this low-key endorphin ecstacy that lights up each cell like a pilot light.

So I pace myself. I run slow, shorten the stride, touch down as lightly as I can. I don't yet float along as easily as the two Japanese-origin runners in the marathon clinic I joined last week. One of them barely lifts up her feet and yet, shuffling along, is at the front of the pack; the other's calves turn over nice and light, regular as a metronome. The accompanying melody should be light and perky, lyrical, maybe just relaxed.

I'm looking forward to seeing those two, and a bunch of other runners at the clinic tonight. For the next sixteen weeks, until the marathon, we will be meeting every Wednesday for running drills and every Saturday for long runs. Some are regulars, taking clinics marathon after marathon, running in packs; this is their community. As always, I'm a spy coming in from the cold, or maybe just an alien, peeking into another form of North American sociability. More on that in another posting. I have to pace myself in this blog as well.

Picture Postcard

For some months now, I wake up early. Sometimes even before the alarm has the chance to sound its insistent beep, in electronic mimicry of the birds chirping beyond the pale curtains, I reach over to silence it, pull on shorts and running shirt, stretch calves, hamstrings and lower back, swig down three glasses of water from a silver cup and venture out.

The moist silence slips on like cool velvet, and I blink in the vivid golden sunshine, the glistening grass, the surreal clarity of this late spring morning. Shivering, I walk down a woodchip path between stately chestnut trees, fumbling with iPod, keys, headphones, watching the seconds and minutes circle around and around until it's time; then I kick off lightly, shuffling along, anxiously assessing ankles, knees, the disconnect between a body beginning to move and awareness still reaching plaintively for the last trailing clouds of dream.

I run slowly, running through a checklist that will accompany me through the next two hours: are my arms hanging by my side, hands loose, fingers curled, thumb up, how is the tension in my shoulders, can I shake it out, how about the posture, am I running tall, straighten that lower back a bit, there you go, and are my feet under the hips, how long is the stride, shorten it, even more, lighten the footstrike, get that ankle motion going, heel touchdown, mobilize the foot fully, exaggerate the movement a bit, get the spring from the ball of the foot, tip tap, tip tap, there you go.

Moving along, watch the time, oh seven minutes already, I don't want to stop and walk, let's run just a bit more, just until that next tree or turn in the road, after the hill, there now I can pause, no, maybe let's jog along a bit more until the next water fountain, take a few sips, okay, now walk, admire the view.

And it really is worth admiring. In the last few weeks, I've been running through the leafy paths of Beacon Hill Park and along scenic Dallas Road, past the postcard panorama of the Olympic Mountains, rising gigantic and jagged from the Aegean blue of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, long-lost Spanish explorer whose influence still extends to a few Spanish names in this prim English colonial city, Victoria by the sea, where I run past mansions of every conceivable conceit, framed by topiary hedges and manicured lawns, lined along the city's most fabled promenades, Hollywood Crescent, Gonzales Bay, King George Terrace, Beach Drive.

The housing market might be crashing elsewhere, here the realtors' signs are merely staying a few weeks longer - Sotheby International advertising a once in a lifetime opportunity for merely $2.199 million. From the street side, the houses look like modest two story shacks; when you round the corner and see across the bay or inlet, they are gigantic, four floors or more, as if perched on invisible stilts.

This morning I ran a bit beyond Oak Bay marina and then regretfully turned back. Other joggers, runners, dog walkers, and elderly matrons out for their morning constitutional were already turning out, although it was too early for the golfers. Turning a corner, I regretted not having a camera - I would have liked to show you the perfect photograph of Victoria - the emerald greens of the golf course against the backdrop of a red-roofed white-washed lighthouse on a rocky outcrop in the blue strait, and beyond the snow-capped mountains.

Did I mention I'm training for a marathon? The Royal Victoria Marathon, in fact - October 12, 2008. In the next few months, I'll try to keep up this blog, to record the thoughts, insights and experiences that will arise as I run.