Climb Ev'ry Mountain

Nice hunk of rock, no?

I'm editing a guidebook to climbing Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, and this is one of the illustrations. Half Dome is the most-climbed feature in the park, scaled early and often not only by seasoned rock climbers but by ordinary folks too.

I'm liking Half Dome as metaphor, feeling as I often do like a scrambling ant on the monolith of my life. Some places offer good footholds, others are steep and sheer and slippery. But the only alternative to up is down. Anyway, all this makes a great excuse to use this photo on my blog.

In January the last two years I've started running well and have felt poised to make great strides in my training (pun intended). And both years I've targeted the Avenue of the Giants marathon (in May) as my objective. In 2005 I'm not sure what happened--my log just shows that I petered out toward the end of the month and never really came back strong enough to do marathon-level training. I do recall that I was still having trouble with the tendons in the bottoms of my feet, an ailment that subsided quite a bit after my shoulder injury last year forced me to cut back.

In 2006 I logged 86 miles in January, but in early February fell while running and bruised my right hip. That set me back a couple of weeks, and though I came back fairly quickly, I gave up the marathon idea.

Both years I did run the Ave. half marathon: 2:32:17 in 2005 and 2:25:43 in 2006. Later in 2006, even though I had the worst accident of my running career in June, I came back and finished strong, totaling 710 miles for the year. I had turned 60 in August, and was starting to hear what as a hyperbolic undergraduate I used to call time's wing'd chariot rumbling ominously over the cobblestones of my training life. A hoity way of saying I realized time was getting short for an old fart like me to ever do another marathon. The result of all of this, of course, is that once again I'm setting my sights on the Avenue of the Giants marathon, which is slated this year for May 6.

My training m.o. will be to build up my long runs over the next four months, doing one long one a week for two weeks out of every three and increasing the distance as May draws closer. So this week was my first "long" run. Here I put the adjective in quotes, because for being long, it wasn't what I'd consider very long--7 miles. I did it this morning, before breakfast. That's about as far as I like to go before eating anything, although I've done 8 or 9 and haven't die. Today along the way I ingested a 100-calorie energy gel, so I didn't suffer for even a second. I'll be up front: I rarely do suffer on my pre-breakfast runs. Being a 21st-century American, i.e., someone who lives ridiculously well, going for 10 hours without food comes nowhere near depleting my body's energy stores. I am always fat with accessible glycogen for firing my muscles, even at 6 a.m.

Today was a treat. Glorious, crystal-clear sky, waning moon hanging like a spotlight over my left shoulder. Sunday quiet filled the streets--ran down the yellow line on Delaware St. just because I could. Right after I reached my turnaround point, Stockton St. in El Cerrito, the lightening blue welkin (lovely word--you could look it up) turned to gold in the east, and up popped the sun. The birds appeared as if by magic and started their chirping and shuffling in the grass as I ran by. It was my favorite kind of run, that is, one where nothing happened. I didn't fall, I didn't feel bad, I didn't have any dire thoughts. It was just me and the ground and the air and the sky and the birds and what could be wrong with that?

I feel as if I'm setting myself up for another marathon disappointment by starting out with a promising January. But I'd just as soon not have any other kind!