It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Actually, it was a mild and foggy morning. You went for your first run from the house since your near-mortal hip injury and became giddy as your feet carried you through the familiar blocks. In your giddiness you envisioned writing a blog post that was in its subtle (?) way more about writing than about running. You were thinking about New York Times best-selling author Steve Friedman, who wrote an article on Suzi Cope for the current issue of Runner's World. You admired his intent, which was to present a moving story in a dramatic way, but you found yourself questioning his chosen vehicle for achieving that.

It takes guts, you brooded, to write an entire narrative article in the second person. As someone who just yesterday wrote an entire blog post in the third person, you had a sharpened appreciation for the pitfalls of deviating from the literary norm. During the night after your rogue post you had tossed and turned, wrapping the sweat-soaked sheets around your tortured form. Had you overstepped the boundaries implicit in your poetic license? Should you get back online, call up yesterday, and press the tantalizing link labeled "edit posts" so you could push and shove the post back into the first person?

In the morning, when you stumbled blurrily into the mean streets of Berkeley, you were unsure what to do. As you jogged slowly along, the endorphins trickled into your brain and you felt a consciousness just heightened enough to carry you perhaps as far as breakfast arise within you. You decided to leave your third-person post as it was. You copped unflinchingly to your cowardice in even thinking of changing it, realizing that you were the one who hoisted that flawed banner so it was now your obligation to leave it flying.

And then? Uh...where were you? Oh yes, Steve Friedman. You concluded that he would have been better off employing a more traditional approach to his subject, either interviewing Suzi Cope and publishing the resulting Q & A or simply telling her story in as a non-involved third-person narrator. You decided that by writing in a voice that is often used to signal the imperative (think advertising: You Should Buy This), Friedman too often enveloped his story in an unnecessary cloud of melodrama. As you may know, Cope is a legendary trail runner. The article details her very personal experience of giving up a child for adoption when she was quite young and then late in her life meeting him and establishing a warm relationship with him and his family. The point of the story, other than its obvious happy ending, seems to be that Cope became a running animal in the process of fleeing her life's big secret. If this is indeed what she did, surely the facts are compelling enough to be related in a less heavy-handed way.

You finished your run. You ate; you showered. You decided, against the advice of your inner critic, to write this post. Your morning had been harrowing, searing, challenging--well, up until breakfast, anyway--so you knew writing a critical, puzzling, and disjointed post was not a task that you needed to shy away from. When you finished composing it, you shook your head to see if the endorphins would dissipate and your judgment return. You had vowed yesterday never to blog in the third person again. Today you amended your vow to include swearing off the second person. You decided not to be "her," not to be "you," but just to be as "I" as you could be.

Q: What Does a Girl Do...

...when she can't run much and then gets further sidelined by a nasty summer cold?

Ans:

She goes to LA to see the kids, and goes with them to a ball game (Angels won).

She goes for a walk while she's down south and enjoys seeing the ubiquitous jacarandas weep their purple flowers all over the ground.

She talks to the animals.

She walks a lot. In the country...

...and in the city.

Finally, she agrees to go geocaching with Z, who obligingly poses with the fishes. She even spots the cache before he does and only gloats a teeny bit.

(Tomorrow, she's going for a run for sure, no matter what. She even promises never to talk about herself in the third person again. For Rickey Henderson it's okay, but she's no Rickey.)

Short But Incredibly Sweet

The title could refer to this on-the-fly post (except for the "sweet" part, mebbe), but really I am describing the run I went on this morning at 6 a.m.

It's no secret to anyone even slightly acquainted with me that I'm very sick of my hip injury, which as a matter of fact is 11 weeks old this very day. I've whined a lot.

I have continued to work out in various ways, some of them painful and none of them noticeably effective. So this morning I tried again. I was out on the section of the Ohlone Greenway that runs under the BART tracks for about an hour (rode my bike down there so I could keep my tender self off the pavement). Of that hour, I trotted along for some 26 minutes, meaning that even if I have lost so much speed that I'm only running 13-minute miles, I still ran two miles. And now, at 1:20 in the afternoon, I feel good. As in, I'm pain-free. I know better now than to think I'm fully back, but I am letting myself believe that I'm closer to being there than I've ever been before in the course of this healing process. I say, "yay!"

I love the way the ivy has grown up through the center of the sign pole and is now curling up out of the top (note the lateral sprig, too) and extending a tentacle in search of something else to climb. It must be summer!


And I thought the 60s were over in Berkeley. Don't try to tell that to the owners of these vehicles.


I never know what I'll see next on my morning adventures. I'm grateful that today I could ambulate on my own two feet. Doubt I'd have gotten far if I'd tried to ride one of these beauties--

I'm Having a Sunday

And a fine one it is. I'm supposed to be proofreading a book on rental forms, but instead have been shuffling around the house, whistling Mozart, watching the A's on TV, making a tunafish sandwich for lunch and sharing it with Danny Mo, the king of all cats.

Z has taken a part-time job, which keeps him out of the house Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It is just about the perfect activity for this rehabilitating period in his life, and we're glad that the opportunity popped up for him when he needed it. But I miss sharing my Sunday with him!

Meanwhile, the sliding door in the kitchen is open and a summer breeze is dancing in and out.

Summer breeze, makes me feel fine,
Blowing through the jasmine of my mind.

[Insert a nod of thanks and a smile here for Seals and Croft.]

So what have I been doing? Running. Why else would I be so giddy? Believe me when I say I'll never take mobility for granted again. Maybe if I promise that, fate will refrain from throwing me onto the pavement again, at least for another year or two. (An aside: Three years ago today I fell while running, fracturing my shoulder and tearing my rotator cuff. My right arm still protests now and then--especially when I'm swimming.)


Last week I walked up to the high school very early one morning and did four laps around the track. Of that mile, half of it I covered by "running," which has to be in quotation marks because it was probably running only in my mind (very slow, very awkward). Tentative as it was, the outing was still enough to float a golden bubble of hope in my sky that has since drifted down and settled itself around my formerly sad and gray and limping self.

So this morning I rode my bike down to the Ohlone Greenway, where I tethered the bike to a pole and then ran (no quotation marks!) for a total of 26 minutes. It felt wonderful, and I believe it is the beginning of the beginning.

When I went to retrieve my bike, two things happened.

First, I met a beagle named Stanley. I believe I'm in love, but don't tell Danny Mo.

Second, I had a vision of a warm bagel and--presto!--there appeared a bagel shop before my eyes. I'll just say that a breakfast of a toasted whole wheat bagel, nonfat cream cheese, and Trader Joe's blueberry jam put the perfect exclamation mark at the end of my morning.

Now, it's back to work I go. Have a lovely day, y'all.

Watch My Step!

Having a gimpy hinge, as I currently do, makes a person place the feet carefully while walking. (Helps prevent stumbling.) In my case this diligence has resulted in looking at the ground a lot more than usual.

Periodically in this blog I have published some ground shots (sky shots too, but that’s a different subject). So here are two more.

I've been passing this one daily for a while. It makes me smile.

This one does too; it's one in a series of chalk drawings that mirror the fauna along the sidewalk on Acton Street.

Fitness vs. Having a Fit

Every day I my hip feels a bit better (about time, too, says the grouch within). Here's a poster that stared me in the face Saturday when I ventured out on my bike to the local Trader Joe's, a round-trip journey of about six miles. I related to the poster's sentiment.

Friday was my first bike ride--a very tentative double circuit around the block. The actual riding is a piece o' cake--I've been logging bike miles at the gym for a week or two with only mild pain. Getting on and off my trusty bike (on left) has been a whole 'nuther story.

My habit has always been to mount by standing on my left leg and swinging my right leg back and up, over the saddle and into the pedal clip in one rather elegant and swashbuckling motion. Problem is, the left leg bone is connected to the left hip bone, the one that is bruised and cranky. This means my new way to get on is to concentrate on centering my body weight over my left foot and then sneak my right foot up that left leg to about knee level before thrusting it laterally over the center bar and dropping it onto the ground before I fall over. From that position of straddling the bike, I'm able to lift my right foot onto the pedal and finally push off and get in motion. Not too elegant and just the opposite of swashbuckling.

Dismounting is even more exciting (meaning terror-inducing). Not only do I have to repeat the above practice, except backward--before I can do that I have to halt the bike's forward motion. This means squeezing the brakes about three yards before my anticipated stopping point and slowing down enough that I can lower my left leg to the pavement before I teeter so much that both bike and I tip right over.

I never dreamed getting on and off a bike could be such an adventure.

Yesterday, the day after my trip to TJ's, I took another bike ride, this one on the Bay Trail. I think I went about eight miles. It felt wonderful, but for the rest of the day I was truly toast. Complete with grill marks across my brain.

Still, I'm so excited to be in motion again! This morning I biked to the library and then, later in the day, biked the short distance over to the pool, where I swam an unbroken 25 minutes. I'm not fast, but I'm steady, and I'm happy.

I was off today from work, but have to return tomorrow afternoon. In the morning I'm planning another session at the Berkeley Health Studio, aka my gym.


It's a no-frills place, and many of the customers are retired folks who strut around looking studly. I fit right in. When I can get there at 6:30 a.m., I'm often rewarded with some mighty lovely early morning light streaming through the front windows.

Ps. One other (big) reason I'm happier today that usual is that Z continues to recover well from his surgery. Very well. He still faces some challenges, but seems good at rebuilding his strength and even his very life one day at a time. He's an example for me to emulate.

Gym Rat Wannabe

I rejoined the gym a couple of weeks ago (“rejoined” means I last belonged about four years ago—maybe longer) and am doing my best to go regularly so I don’t feel as if I’ve wasted my money. Now that for the time being I’m not spending time running early in the morning (insert frowny face here), it is easier than it was before to carve out some gym time in my schedule.

This morning I went there loaded for bear and probably overdid it a bit. I started off walking up the stairs to the aerobic machines. Stairs seem to be the last frontier with this injury—raising my left leg and then loading it with my body weight is a real challenge. I give my performance this morning a B-minus. Once I ascended, I walked 10 minutes on the treadmill to warm up, traveling an impressive 0.3 mile. I even supported most of my weight on my arms and took a small jog, just to try and remember what it feels like to run. I probably jogged 30 paces, twice, before realizing it wasn’t that great an idea.

Then I went on the exercycle, where I did 20 minutes and even got my heart rate up to 135 bpm. My hip ached, my quad ached—I kept on going.

Next, I stretched on the mat and threw in a couple of floor exercises that the divine Jamie, of PT renown, has prescribed. From there it was back down the stairs (another B-minus) and on to the Nautilus machines to work out the biceps, triceps, pecs and some other good things. I did a few reps on the leg machines, too—leg lifts, quad pulls, those lateral inny-outy machines. It was all good.

Feeling righteous, I motored on down the street and met my friend R for breakfast. We both had oatmeal with bananas, walnuts, and lots of brown sugar. And I had a low-fat mocha. Mmmm.

Frankly, I’ve been a bit depressed lately over this whole bad hip thing, and this morning’s activities gave me a boost. Yesterday I was idle—motionless, even—all day except for a 10-minute walk. At the end of the day I felt stiff and cranky, which has led me to think I might as well get stiff and cranky from too much exercise as from not enough. I know I am blessed in my full life and my basic good health, so I really don’t want to take up too much time whining. Staying active seems to steer me away from that moany-groany pit. (Inny-outy machines? Moany-groany pit? And me, a professional word person? I've no excuse.) So, my lesson for today is, keep moving even when moving isn’t easy. Here’s hoping I listen to myself.