ever-fixed mark

Three topics frequently covered in this space aligned in today’s Daily News coverage: John Updike’s grandson won this week’s final Newburyport road race, the High Street mile, barefoot.

Per the article, he’s not a proponent of barefoot running, but he had wounded his foot and couldn’t bear the pressure of a shoe.

I call that a good excuse to skip the race.

Kenyans.

Fit men in their twenties.

Fit teenage boys.

Fit men in their forties.

Walkers who are still finishing up the 5K course.

Teenage boy in an NHS cheerleading outfit, complete with skirt.

Fit women in their twenties.

Fit middle-aged men.

People who chit-chat while running.

Women with actual boobs.

Fit women with strollers.

Preteen boys.

Senior citizens.

Walk/runners.

Men with actual boobs.

Recently the two old iPods I was using to satisfy various needs — an early Shuffle for running, and an ancient Mini for listening to podcasts on the commute — committed synchronized suicide, and I assuaged my grief by purchasing a shiny new Nano. Although it’s postage-stamp sized, like the Shuffle, it holds my whole music collection, unlike the Shuffle or the Mini, and it has a cool touch-screen to boot. Unfortunately, when I tried to hook the thing up to my Mac, I discovered the reason that my two old iPods died at the same time: it was actually the interface with iTunes that has broken down. I switched my collection to another computer and was soon enjoying a much wider variety of music and podcasts than previously on my runs and commutes. I was able to repurpose the old devices for my kids (luckily, the number of kids matches the number of iPods; the dog is out of luck).

After hearing a few songs I hadn’t heard in a few years, I was reminded of how much I dig songs with unusual time signatures. One of my favorites is “The Comedians” by Elvis Costello. It alternates 5/4 with 6/8. There are a number of songs in 6/8 (essentially waltz time doubled), but not too many in 6/4, which is more like 2/4 tripled. My favorite is “Fell on Black Days,” by Soundgarden. Every time I hear it I find myself counting out “1, 2, 3, 4, FIVE, SIX” just to reassure myself that there are in fact six beats to a measure.

(There are times when I’m convinced that my aura is indeed a color on the autistic spectrum.)

Then there’s always Pink Floyd’s “Money” in 7/8. I cannot listen to that song and chew gum at the same time, so intent am I on counting.

Here is an excellent resource for the similarly obsessed.

I’ve started training again for the Yankee Homecoming ten-mile race, and as I’ve been putting in my miles I’ve noted the most alarming fashion trend on my fellow runners. Four words to strike fear into your heart: Knee-high running socks.

Really? We’re doing this now? Have we lost our collective memory of the seventies? Let me help you out:

ARGGGHHHH!

About six weeks before my first surgery, I decided to start running again. I’d been sidelined for over a year with a weird groin injury that never really healed despite a course of physical therapy and a long, long rest. It was difficult for me to describe the pain to my doctors. I would be tooling along just fine and then suddenly something would give. Sometimes this happened while I ran, but just as frequently it would happen while I was doing some household chore like loading the dishwasher. (My friend C: “Obviously you need to stop doing housework.”) I would say that it felt like my femur was popping out of joint, except that I know that couldn’t be it; the initial pop wasn’t that painful, but then it would ache for days. At one point, I couldn’t walk without limping.

As the months went by, I noticed I was limping less. I really wanted to run; I thought it might make me feel less broken, and I figured that, even if it hurt, I couldn’t make things much worse. I thought that getting into shape would help me recover from surgery more quickly, and setting my sights on the Yankee Homecoming 5K, one month after surgery, would be a good motivator for recovery.

I ran/walked for a few weeks, a process painful both mentally and physically. It took forever to work up to a consecutive mile, and then I was just willing myself through it. It wasn’t fun at all.

One day, over lunch, I was describing my ordeal to my former boss, and he advised me to change my gait. He said he had been reading a book about running, Born to Run, that advocated a more “natural” running style, whatever that meant. I couldn’t believe that the doctors, the physical therapist, or I hadn’t thought about changing my biomechanics before. No one had ever taught me how to run. I was probably doing it wrong!

I went home and Googled “how to run” and came up with a whole bunch of conflicting advice. One common theme was to avoid a hard heel-strike, landing instead on the balls on your feet. I tried three miles like that, essentially running on my tiptoes, and two things happened: first, my calf muscles tightened up in two permanent charley-horses, and second, my lower back pain disappeared. I didn’t even realize that I had constant lower back pain while running until I noticed its absence at mile three.

So: intriguing, but I couldn’t really run on my tippy-toes, could I? I consulted my new boss, a triathlete, and he advised me not to worry so much about where my foot struck, but to concentrate on rolling as quickly as possible through the ball of my foot and pushing off powerfully with my toes. The Internet offered some additional advice to lift my knees a bit more, and after a bit more experimentation I had a gait that not only enabled me to run without groin pain, but also made me run much, much faster with less effort. Now I found it easy to increase my miles, and within a few weeks I was up to seven. Then, I remembered something I had forgotten about running: after mile 5, you really start to get out of your head.

I finally picked up Born to Run myself and discovered, to my surprise, that it wasn’t a “how to run” book but a story about a tribe of Indians in Mexico who run for hours and hours just for the fun of it, and the American ultramarathoners who want to know their secrets. This was my favorite part:

…Vigil had become convinced that the next leap forward in human endurance would come from a dimension he dreaded getting into: character. Not the ‘character’ other coaches were always rah-rah-rah-ing about; Vigil wasn’t talking about ‘grit’ or ‘hunger’ or ‘the size of the fight in the dog.’ In fact, he meant the exact opposite. Vigil’s notion of character wasn’t toughness. It was compassion. Kindness. Love….. That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running…. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her…. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else….

To me, what this is saying is that running is supposed to be fun. You don’t do it because you have to lose weight or tone your legs or log a certain number of miles; you do it because it’s fun in and of itself. You don’t run in a gym, on a treadmill, bombarded with stimuli from 25 different TV sets like a mouse in an experiment. It’s not about doing the time, it’s about enjoying the ride.

Back in October I joined Weight Watchers at work. The premise is pretty simple: you get so many “points” (assigned by calories, fiber, and fat content) per day, with some extra weekly points, and you tote up your daily points, subtracting “activity” points, trying to stay under your target. Counting one’s food is abhorrent, but so is eating yourself sick, so there you go. It also works, but only because under the WW regime I ended up eating only a fraction of my typical daily intake. For example, on WW I got 20 points a day. Here’s what I would normally eat, pre-diet:

• Bagel: 8 points
• with peanut butter: 4 points
• 3-egg omelet: 8 points
• with cheese: 3 points
• actually, more cheese than that: 3 more points
• large orange juice: 4 points

Already 10 points over the daily limit, and that’s just breakfast! (And, you know, I would have considered that a perfectly healthy breakfast because there was no donut.) I’ve gone from wondering why it’s so hard for me to lose weight to marveling at the speedy metabolism that’s been keeping me from reaching “morbidly obese” for all these years.

It’s an unpleasant and somewhat terrifying experience, feeling your body consuming itself. There is a sort of panic that sets in when you’re burning more calories than you’re eating, not to mention a kind of anhedonia when you realize that there will be no joy in breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the foreseeable future.

Did I mention the TIRED? I didn’t exercise at all the first four weeks because I was just too damn exhausted to drag my butt anywhere. Then when my energy started to revive, I thought, hey, I’ve just lost x pounds; why should I go for a run? (I’m sure Doctor Mama would have a good rejoinder, but lalalalalala…I can’t hear her.)

I also suffered a strange kind of body dysmorphia that prevented me from realizing that my clothes were now far too big. I had been the same clothing size since high school (of course, the sizes have grown along with me since then). I kept visiting the mirror, wondering why 25 fewer pounds didn’t LOOK better on me. I finally twigged to the fact that one’s trousers weren’t supposed to sag in the ass like that, and I bought some pants a size smaller, but they still seemed baggy. Then I decided, just for grins, to try on the next size smaller and, incredibly, the next size. I am finally clad in something that does not make me look like a hobo (although Aitch says that my new red Converse make me look like a clown).

Another odd effect: I am now continuously COLD. I’ve lost some insulation, it’s true, but I’m still on the higher end of a normal BMI; I’m adequately confit‘ed. I’m convinced it’s my body slowing way down in a panic over the lack of incoming sustenance.

Happily, over the last month or two, my metabolism seems to have revved up a bit. During ski season, I added a weekly bagel and ice cream sundae to my menu, with no ill effects. I no longer record every bite, but I do weigh myself every day, and when the scale starts to creep up, I cut food or add exercise. Sounds like a fun existence, doesn’t it?

A disclaimer: I don’t think there’s any particular virtue in being thin, nor any great vice in eating recreationally. Both are the result of habits, and once a habit is entrenched, it’s pretty easy to follow. I’m happy now to have some habits that have pulled me from the brink of pre-diabetes.

Unfortunately, arteriosclerosis still has me in its sights. A few months ago I went to a new primary care doctor (more on that later) who tested me for Vitamin D (the hot new deficiency) and cholesterol. The Vitamin D was fine, but my cholesterol was over 250. The doctor sent me the lab result and wrote on it, “Modify diet and retest in 3 months.”

“Modify diet”? I’ve MODIFIED, baby. That ship has sailed, with an all-night buffet loaded with everything I’m no longer eating.

Question 1: Math. You have two children, a full-time job, and a 40-mile commute. When, where, and how far do you run? Factor the following into your answer: A. Waxing and waning of available daylight at your longitude/latitude B. Temperature, windspeed, and relative humidity C. Duration of your commute relative to the time you leave.

Question 2: Short essay. Evaluate the impact of your run on A. Your prospects for advancement at work B. Your children C. Your spouse D. Your sanity E. Your hairstyle.

I keep shifting around my run in the hopes that I’ll hit on some combination of time and place that makes it all suddenly seem easy. That hasn’t happened yet, but I did try something new this morning: I drove to work in my running clothes and ran in the city before work.

The advantage to this approach is that I drive when traffic is light and run when the sky is light (as opposed to running at home in the morning, which leaves it the other way around).

The main disadvantage to this approach is that I have to pack quite a bit of gear to get me presentable for work post-run. I am terrified that I’ll forget something important and emerge from the shower only to find I’m missing a left shoe, or (worse) a bra.

This morning, as I was completing my run, I was forced to go around three cars (lights on, engines running) parked in the bike lane in a no-parking zone. About ten feet down the street was a clump of parents and children waiting for the bus.

Thought #1: Who DRIVES to the bus stop? (Note: this is not a rural area where someone would have to walk two miles from his or her farm to R.R.#3 or similar.)

Thought #2: If you’re willing to take the trouble of driving two tenths of a mile to the bus stop, why not travel the extra 1.2 miles and drop your kid off at school?

Thought #3: Even if you’re so lazy that you would only drive two blocks and no farther, couldn’t you park about 20 yards down the street from the bus stop in one of the many spots that are open on 7:00 a.m. and WALK THE REST OF THE WAY?

I had three goals for the big ten-mile race this year:

Let’s see how I did, shall we?

We started off slowly enough, thanks to the crowd. I had vowed to try to stay with my friends for at least a few miles, with a stretch goal of running at their 10-minute mile pace for the whole thing. So when they picked up the pace, so did I. I was feeling a bit winded already by the half-mile mark, when I told them I wanted to run on the right side of the street for a bit so I could wave to the kids as we passed my house. I moved to the right: no kids. I moved to the left: no friends. I picked up the pace even more, hoping to catch up with them, but they were nowhere to be found in the crowd. At the one-mile point I marked the split time with my watch and goggled when I saw 9:17:59 — much, much faster than I wanted to be.

I slowed down a bit but felt pressured by all the runners passing me. I knew from experience that by mile 7 many of them would be walking, while I would still be running, but I still didn’t feel like I could slow down to a comfortable pace. For mile 2, my pace was 9:30; mile 3, 10:11. I felt the worst between mile markers 3 and 4, just like last year, and finally decided I was going to have to slow way down or I wouldn’t be able to finish. I was hot and thirsty and rubber-legged and felt just generally weak and awful. I was cheered here and there by the appearance of my friend C., the one who said to me in April 2007, “We’re doing the 10-mile race this year,” who had run the race with me last year but damaged her ankle so badly during the race she hadn’t been able to run since. She was dashing around on her bike intercepting the runners here and there, shouting encouragement. I ran mile 4 at 11:09 and started to feel more of a rhythm. I finished mile 5 at 11:50 and panicked a bit — too slow! — but by then I was rounding the corner to The Hill and my only concern was getting up without stopping.

Hills have never bothered me; I grew up running hills, and I always treat them as something to get over as quickly as possible. I felt physically awful going up that hill, but I didn’t feel intimidated. When I got to the top, this sense of relief washed over me, but at the same time I felt like quitting. I wasn’t having fun. Running alone was not exhilarating; it seemed pointless. By now I had learned, through C., that one of my running buddies was about five minutes ahead of me, and the other about five minutes behind. At this point I thought seriously about running back to meet my friend. I turned around to see if I could spot her winding around the course, but my body recoiled at the thought of retracing a step.

My splits were getting slower and slower, but I still felt like I was working hard. My left foot and leg started cramping, something that had never happened to me in 25 years of running. Suddenly, I remembered that I had given up bananas that week in an effort to cut some calories. Now, I’ve eaten a banana almost every day for most of my life, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the potassium was the only thing preventing my muscles from knotting up into big painful charleyhorses. Idiot!

I had reached the cool, shady part of the course where last year I had gotten a second wind. It was about this point that C. caught up with me again. She could see that I was hurting, and she rode alongside me for the remaining four miles, keeping up a steady stream of conversation and organizing all the people she recognized along the race route to cheer for me, personally, by name. Might I have finished without her? Maybe. Would I have had any fun without her? Definitely not. She totally got me through it, and I was grateful that I got a chance to “run” it with her again.

I finished in 1:50 and change, an eleven-minute pace. When I got home and looked up the results, I saw that this year I was not dead last in the Middle Aged Fat Lady division; I was 88th out of 91. Whoo-hoo! Also, I beat one of the deputies that C. and I smoked during the Frigid Fiver two years ago, and this year I had the pleasure of beating the county sheriff as well.

I may be a Middle Aged Fat Lady, but I can still outrun the Law.

It has been storming continually for about a week here: round-the-clock thunder and lightning, like those scenes in the first season of “Battlestar Galactica” where Helo and Sharon are fleeing the Cylons on post-apocalypse Caprica. You know those scare stories that the local news runs every summer, about people getting struck by lightning? Well, NPR ran one last week. NPR! You know it’s bad when your Serious News Outlet features “When Weather Attacks.”

There was one break in the weather, Saturday, which was the day I had planned to take Aitch camping. The local wildlife refuge was running a special one-night family camp-out, a sort of Camping Lite for those of us who are not completely one with nature. The idea is that we would come in after dinner, pitch our tents by the visitors’ center, go on a hike, come back and have snacks and stories in the barn, brush our teeth in the restroom, then bed down. The following morning we would have breakfast, go on another hike, and then leave.

It sounded like a great way to camp without all the muss and fuss of cooking over a fire, peeing in the woods, and so forth, but after I signed up and got the schedule in the mail I began to have some reservations. Aitch has historically not been good with structured group activities. He does fine at school, but when we have tried to enroll him in some type of lesson or class, he can be really resistant. I suppose I should be worried, but I have chalked it up to his being a Not Quite Five who needs to do his own thing when he breaks loose from school. If he doesn’t want swim lessons or karate classes or soccer right now (or, frankly, ever) that is OK by me; from what I’ve seen we’re not risking any great loss of scholarship money by failing to hone his skills at this critical juncture. So I have adopted a policy of enrolling him only in one-off activities, and then only if I can accept his bailing out after five minutes. I decided I could accept that outcome, although I really hoped that we could have a nice mommy-and-son trip.

I had to wake Aitch from an unplanned nap to get to the campsite on time (Danger, Will Robinson!) and then tear him from the arms of the father he had not seen for a week (Danger!), but he was in a good, if silly, mood as we put up the tent. The camp leaders really did run a tight ship; after half an hour they briskly called us together to commence hiking. We had not yet finished putting up the rain canopy on the tent, but the leader said, “Oh, you won’t need that, it’s going to be so hot tonight,” and I thought about the weather forecast and how nice it would be to see starts through the tent mesh, and I agreed.

The hike was an hour and a half in duration, conducted at the measured pace of the leader. Our boys are not able to keep a measured pace off-leash any more than the dog can, and I found myself having to tell Aitch to slow down, or hurry up, or stop digging for worms, and kind of resenting it all the while. I mean, I understand the value in a group activity, but this was camping. Shouldn’t the kids be running barefoot through the woods wielding sharpened sticks? Then after about half an hour, Aitch started complaining about bugs. I had not lavished DEET on his head and face, as I always do for myself, thinking to preserve his fertility for future years. The skeeters were fierce, though, some of the worst I’ve endured. Lately I’ve been noticing that Aitch’s best tantrums are accompanied by allergic reactions. I’m not sure if the allergy causes the bad behavior, or the tantrum just exacerbates his allergies, but I did know that I was not looking forward to a public meltdown in the woods. Luckily, he held it together until we made it back to the barn for snacks.

Finally, the kids were able to relax and play freely for a bit, but then the leaders decided to read a story. They chose a compelling tale about the founding of the Audubon society. A sample:

Fashion was killing birds as well as women’s chances to have the right to vote and be listened to. For who would listen to a woman with a dead bird on her head? And if the senseless slaughter for a silly fashion was not stopped, in a few years the birds with the prettiest feathers would all be dead, gone forever, extinct.

This is not exactly the kind of deathless prose that inspires five-year-old boys to sit open-jawed around a campfire. I had to ask Aitch to settle down a few times, and I was getting kind of irritated at the situation and tired of the sound of my own voice. He was, though, as well-behaved as could be expected.

Finally we settled down to bed. It took Aitch a while to fall asleep (he was, no doubt, contemplating the origins of the Audubon society), but he was happy. And I was relieved that we’d made it through the whole evening without any major incidents or demands to go home.

I woke up around 4:00 to rumbling sounds. “Amazing,” I thought, “You can hear the highway all the way back here.”

Then there were flashes. “Heat lightning,” I thought.

More rumbles. More flashes. I looked up and realized I could no longer see the stars through the mesh in the tent. The weather report had lied, and I was going to be struck by lightning and, even if I lived, I would set off metal detectors for the rest of my life, just like the people on NPR!

Maybe it will pass, I thought.

Then I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops on the tent. “We left off the rain canopy,” I remembered. (Reading comprehension test: did you catch the foreshadowing way up there in paragraph 4?) We had two choices: Put up the canopy before the storm hit, then wait out the dangerous part in the barn; or just strike the tent and get out of there. We opted for the latter, and managed to get everything packed up right before the worst of it. I felt like an idiot for not putting up the canopy in the first place, but in the circumstances I think it was the best we could do.

So, after a rainy Sunday and Monday we are experiencing another storm-free day — so far. It happens to be Race Day, and now I can add to my list of Race Worries (number 1: the starter’s pistol will trigger a Pavlovian response in the form of a need to urinate) fear that I will get caught in a freak thunderstorm.

With any luck, the lightning will give me superpowers, like the ability to run ten ten-minute miles.