02.24.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:36 pm by Sarah
I know this doesn’t sound particularly tough or competitive, but I’ve decided to just own it about myself and say it out loud: I love small, friendly, unhyped road races. Especially the familiar campus variety, with the mandatory Gimghoul loop of varying directions, the awkward maneuvering on cobblestones and up narrow sidewalks, and the undergrad course monitors looking shocked to be awake at 8 am for the first time in months. I’m talking about the kind of race where you show up alone but run into people you know from all areas of your life - runners and non-runners, spouses with dogs on leashes, little kids running around. I love these types of races!
I realized this yesterday when I showed up at the Hearts on Franklin 5k at 8:15, my $20 in pocket ready for the 9 am start. I hadn’t planned for this, hadn’t trained specifically for this - didn’t even decide to do it for sure until I woke up feeling like it that morning. I wasn’t plagued by any morbid worries or fears or what ifs? I was just there, ready and open to see what I would have in me when the gun went off.
I’ll spare the details on the actual race except to say that I felt strong and confident, although I couldn’t lollygag: there were two fast women right behind me (the top three women were in the top 6 for the race, and all were under 19 minutes - not bad for such a small race!). I forgot to start my watch and had absolutely no idea of what I was doing except trying to run my way to first place and a $50 gift certificate to Whole Foods.
Really the point is just to say that somehow this low-key environment did me good. It reminded me of the simplicity of the sport and of why running is fun - no more pressure than an arcade game, really, except with a slightly higher starting fee. I just wanted to see what I could do on that day, on that course, in that situation. I know this is the basic idea for every race we run, but I sometimes lose sight of it when I think too much.
I realize that not every race can be a campus 5k. Not every race should be a campus 5k. What I’m thinking, though, is that the campus or community race is a good way to pick out what is important and leave the other stuff behind.
Related Posts:
ShutoutRunning HighTeammates!
Permalink
07.01.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:33 pm by Sarah
trying to talk when you’re underwater?
one of those dreams everyone has about running toward but still missing the bus?
reading something in a language in which you are barely proficient?
waking up after an afternoon nap and trying to get oriented?
walking on a moonbounce?
looking through a camera lens that it is out of focus?
It’s really hard to pinpoint exactly this feeling that I’m having today after my first official training run of the summer season. There is, for me, a weird combination of stubborn resistance and hopeful expectation. Others say they come back to running rearing to go. Not me, though. I have to see progress in order to yearn for more progress.
So right now I am taking things one mile at a time. Last week I cheated a bit and did some running with the Carrboro HS runners on Jay’s team, but not much. I’m hoping to get 30 miles in this week and I think that will feel like progress toward the 500 mile goal. I’m going to work at the Four on the Fourth, and I’m thinking I’ll be motivated to see other people out there, racing and talking about racing and just pushing themselves in the way that I will want to be pushing myself in the next few weeks or so.
Related Posts:
Sacral Stress FractureBreak!Pain in order to heel
Permalink
05.29.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:23 pm by Sarah
My best friend is possibly the least competitive person I have ever met. She’s intelligent and has all sorts of talents, from perfect pitch to outdoor cooking, and she has always been successful in all the traditional respects, but she shuns competition and the high pressure that sometimes goes with it. I mean this even at the most basic level: in grade school, she was always the first one to stand up in the pool during a handstand contest, while the rest of us were all turning blue under the water trying to outlast each other. She would say that she was tired, or that her lungs just couldn’t take it, and she would swim over to the side of the pool to wait for the ice cream truck. She has run a marathon and a half marathon, but she has absolutely no idea what her times were in either event, and in both races her strategy involved a hodge podge of running, walking, and talking to other racers from other places. She remained complacently, almost willfully, non-competitive.
I bring this up neither to celebrate nor to criticize my friend, but because sometimes her complete lack of competitiveness is a source of wonder to me. I can’t even fathom my world without its including some wrestling with the issue of competitiveness - often, but not always, in conjunction with my running. Am I too competitive, in a way that is destructive or that limits the amount of fun I can be having? Am I not competitive enough to really reach my potential? To what extent is it an insult to be called a competitive person? A noncompetitive one? Who would I be if running (not exclusively, but largely) had not provided me with this cyclical model for living - constant striving and planning and executing? And what would running provide me with, if I did it like my friend, without thoughts of competitiveness? None of these questions have easy answers, which is what makes them interesting: competitivenes is an unstable concept, ripe for theorizing.
Many cultural feminists say that competitiveness is a negative masculine trait, and they suggest that women who have developed it have somehow bought in to the masculinist culture that is the source of all the world’s problems. If we would only all be as non-competitive as possible, these feminists say, we could end war and greed and bring peace. I disagree with this because, among other problems, it oversimplifies what competition brings to the lives of those who experience it. It makes you know yourself, search out your inner boundaries, and confront the things about yourself that you may not otherwise have to admit were there. It helps you to prove yourself to yourself, and not just to the rest of the world in some monkey contest. The race or the spelling bee or whatever it is are just the means to an end.
I’m not saying that competition is for everyone, or that competition is the only way to achieve the self-awareness I have described above. I just find it fascinating to think about the thoroughness with which competition stamps some of our lives and not others, across culture, race, gender, time, class, etc. Competition is a way of knowing and reacting to the world, and it is one in which I am so much immersed that it is hard for me to imagine how my life might be structured otherwise.
Related Posts:
A puddle of sweatSynergyeffort is all
Permalink
05.18.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:19 am by Sarah
Have you ever found yourself traveling somewhere where getting in a run seemed next to impossible, and then somehow engineered a way to do it against all odds? I love doing that. I’m not always successful, of course, but I’ve had my moments. A few are coming to mind now: in college I went to the Florida Keys for spring break and walked over to a sleepy (as can be expected in such a place) high school to do drills on the one broken down hurdle they had, in the one athletic field they had, where there were students doing something only vaguely resembling physical activity. I am sure they thought I was crazy. What kind of spring breaker works out? What kind of spring breaker is awake during daylight hours?
On one memorable cross country trip with my dad I would wake up in whatever motel we were staying in, pack up, and run out the door just as my dad was getting up. He would shower, eat, and pick me up in the car on his way out. (This strategy is not recommended if you have your heart set on a run of a specific distance or time - the quality and length of the workout varied pretty drastically!)
This weekend I had another opportunity to beat the odds and get the workout in. For starters, I was getting married (!), which was huge in itself and exhausting and exciting, etc, etc. I anticipated I would not be setting any records with my weekly mileage during the week of my wedding. As it turned out, however, this was only a small part of the challenge: the real difficulty lie in the location, which was Beech Mountain, NC. Training location of Lance Armstrong, I think. I’ve been there before, but not to go running! It’s pretty high altitude (the same as Denver, some reliable person said), and it’s very hilly, with fast moving automobiles and not a lot of sidewalk. So my first run, on Thursday before the wedding, involved some general scariness, including an aborted attempt to actually run on the ski slope, a dog chase, an angry guy in a golf cart, and several honking horns. After twenty five minutes I was frazzled and heaving and perfectly willing to forego my plan of running six miles. The next day, however, I ended up doing a sort of hill workout involving one minute - 90s surges up a relatively safe and (comparatively) level part of the mountain, followed by jogging back down. I did this until I could not do it anymore, and then I cooled down. Sure, it was pretty repetitive and the trucker dozing in his car shook his head at me all eight times I ran by him, but in some sense it was more satisfying than a run under ideal conditions. For one thing, it required some determination and some creativity in arranging logistics to account for all the conditions: safety, terrain, altitude, time, etc. For another, it helped me know the place to which I was traveling in a way that I could not have otherwise. Most importantly, it affirmed the simplicity of this sport - it really can be done just about anywhere (perhaps barring a war zone, although I’ve heard that it gets done there, too!) - so long as one becomes willing to see the potential in the situation.
Anyway, I realize that this is half a pat on my own back, for which I apologize. Still, I think that it is a good thing to divorce training from a single, familiar setting sometimes, and to make it portable, flexible, more internal and imagination-driven than external and context-driven. The workout or run ought to be a combination of both internal and external, but too often we conceive of it as external and starve it of some of its greatest intensity.
Now that I think about it, I can make this tie in to one of my favorite fields of study, English Romanticism. We must not be like the trendy picturesque travelers of the early nineteenth century - the ones that Wordsworth scorned for looking at nature in a prescribed way, seeking out only certain scenes while bypassing others that did not resemble that which they had been taught to look for. We tend to do this also, in our preconceived notions of where and how training ought to take place. Here is what Wordsworth says on what it feels like to let the imagination guide:
“And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deelpy interfused, /Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/And the blue sky, and, in the mind of man, /A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things.”
Wordsworth is talking about imagination here - rolling through the places where we go (or run) and the thoughts that we have, bringing them all together, and enriching the whole experience. He wanted people to appreciate nature in original ways, not to judge but to reach out to it with the imagination and ”half create, half perceive.” I guess what I am suggesting is that we should do the same thing with our runs - expand our ideas of where and how they can take place, let the situation or location determine what we are going to do rather than relying too rigidly on a pre-set schedule, and just generally trust ourselves to make something worthwhile out of whatever we have to work with.
Related Posts:
RevitalizationInternal BattlesRarified air (Part 2)
Permalink
05.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:31 pm by Sarah
I have to admit that about half the time on this team I feel like Mark Wahlberg in Invincible, playing the unlikely new member of the Philadelphia Eagles who maybe, just maybe (but only toward the end of the movie, after he figures some things out), will come through with the big catch. For those of you with better taste in movies than I have (skip to the next paragraph, Diana!:), Wahlberg plays Vince Papale, the down-and-out bartender who tries out for and makes the team at age 30-something, after having played a year of high school football. The movie tracks his development, on and off the field - he proves himself, carves out a new life for himself with his new girlfriend . . . what a surprise, right?
I guess it goes without saying that teammates on CAC are pretty amazing athletes, and, like Papale throughout most of the movie, I am certainly in what I’d call the ”aspiring” stage of my running right now. Aspiring to earn my place, to establish myself as a serious member of the team - I think I have made some progress, but I am still up in the air as how far I dare to see myself going. Caroline and I have joked about the documentary movie we will some day make of our progress (you’re all invited to the opening:), and I think right now we are in the middle of a montage of small victories and minor mishaps: the Cooper River Bridge Run, for instance, where we both had pretty major PR’s, or my painful solo run on Thursday morning after the last workout. Or, for some humor, my faux pas at the UNC meet last month. I hadn’t run in a collegiate track meet since Clinton was president, so I got a little nervous and tried to jump into the first heat, only to cause some commotion at the start and have to step off the track. The good news here, of course, is that I still ran 4:46, which would have put me somewhere toward the back of that heat but not last.
So where is this going? I know the movie analogy is limited, because this is not going to be linear narrative. This is real life, and real life doesn’t end with the Big Victory two hours later. My next big goal is to run 17:40 at Freihofer’s Run For Women, but I have to say that if we end the movie with that it isn’t going to be very exciting. Nothing will have happened yet!
Related Posts:
Back in the Game
Permalink
