Running Commentary

Christmas around the corner. Lots of rain here. It is cold. Nose-biting cold. But the photo to the left puts the whole Berkeley winter weather thing in perspective. I took this picture about five minutes ago--it's what I see out my window as I sit at the computer. The rose is smooshed up against the glass. Roses love rain, even cold rain, and when rain beats down they get giddy and leggy and happy to bloom. I've had weather luck in my running since CIM--have managed to slip between the raindrops, so to speak, for every run except one, which I used the treadmill for (see my last post). Here's another rain-related image, taken last week as I was logging some early morning miles. Not very wintry by Christmas-carol standards (no building a snowman in this meadow), but lovely nonetheless--a burst of winter color: a cushiony underfoot mosaic for a passing runner to appreciate. Saturday I ran with the Oakland Marathon training group I'm in. I was amazed and pleased to do ten...

Not long after completing CIM, I pretty much told the story of my marathon in pictures via Flickr . I've been slammed at work and busy trying to return to an even keel after the emotional highs and lows brought on by the long race and by the season in general. I am so very happy to have run the marathon, even though my time was less than stellar. My feet and calves cramped up toward the end, but I hobbled on in. I was 34th out of 43 in my age group. I'm proud to say that the 1st place runner is my friend, fellow team member, and also the kind person who drove me to Sacramento for the race. She's an inspiration! Recovery has been a challenge. I've gone from feeling euphoric to feeling older than mud and back again to being high. Because I'm a glutton for the agony of distance running, I am training for the Oakland Marathon, which is in late March. Last year I did the Oakland Half Marathon and loved it. Anyway, last Saturday I went on a group training run but only ...

A week ago Sunday I did my last long run before CIM . Afterward, I looked at the little map the run created in my Garmin Forerunner 205 and then I looked at the photos I took along the way, and it struck me that the whole thing was like some geography-based board game that takes the runner-player through many hazards in assorted different lands. It had rained the night before, so the first part of the game-board road map, the Bay Trail heading south from Berkeley, was lined with puddles. On the way back from Emeryville, not so m uch. I headed back to Berkeley, where the next segment of the game map had me dropping by the house to pick up the insoles for my running shoes. I had run seven miles before I realized I had inexplicably left them lying on top of the dryer. By the time I went through the front door, I was at mile 12. Surprisingly, I felt no ill effects then, or even the day after, from having run without that extra padding under my feet. Maybe the new less-is-more-in-the-...

I did run in SF last Tuesday, on the eve of the first game of the World Series. South on the Embarcadero, a lively 5-miler along the water, around the Giants' ballpark and back. This morning it's a different kind of run coming up. I just had a bowl of cereal and two short cups of coffee. It's still dark outside--Sunday 6 am, and most of the world is still asleep. Should I head out for my scheduled 18-miler? Or just go for a 20 and the heck with worrying? Instead of sitting in the kitchen, I sit at my desk to eat so that I don't bother Z, who was out late last night doing his docent gig at the Blackhawk Museum Halloween party. Instead of the Sunday paper, right now I read Runners' World . For motivation. To convince myself that I'm not too slow, too old, too undertrained to do this. I go online and use the RW pace calculator . To break five hours in the marathon I really will have to run an 11-minute pace. I can do that without too much pain in a 5K or a 10K, bu...

And if I don't have anything to say, can I make it look as if I do by changing my usual font and writing my non-content in red? Or by adding in some blue sky? I'm often so busy that I feel I don't have the time to write in this blog, even though I have so much that I'd love to record here. Today I do have a little time, but not much in the posting pitcher to pour out. It's like, the old Beatles song I sometimes sing to my sleepy self when I run early in the day : Nothing to say but what a day, how's your boy been Nothing to do, it's up to you I've got nothing to say but it's OK Good morning, good morning Good morning ah Ah, indeed. I had a conversation with my friend R. this morning that touched on ways for a person to follow a meaningful path, a daunting endeavor given the particular strictures a person can feel limited by--finances, relationships, employment, health (you fill in the blank). For myself, I have no pat answers. I feel honor-bound ...

Because I am now in San Francisco for the bulk of my day (of my life!), I am working on ways to fit in a run now and then. Doing this will become more and more of a challenge as the days grow shorter and the light heads south. Yesterday around 6 p.m. I headed out the office door for a 5-miler. I don't know why my legs felt like lead for the first 2 miles, but they did. I was heading north, into the wind, which probably didn't help. I took this from the end of the pier. I felt like a running tourist--or maybe just a running fool. I ran up The Embarcadero to the end, out the SF Municipal Pier and back, and then up the hill on the path that leads to Fort Mason. This was taken after I crested the hill. I ran around the grassy area before heading back down. A couple of years ago when I did this route I had to stop on the hilltop and rest! Two years ago, when I ran this route fairly frequently, it seemed harder. For some reason the hill seemed much less ferocious last night than I...

First, for you, flowers for reading my blog. Next, a report form day three of my full-time working life. Briefly: It's OK! I made it to the track last night just as if I'd spent only four hours at the office, not eight. I've gotten out on my lunch hour two days out of three to climb a few steps. Haven't gone all the way up to Coit Tower yet--hence the title of this post. Tomorrow I'm going to get out of the house early and either go to the gym or go for a run in an effort to start feeling like I'll be able to get a full ration of a.m. workouts in during the coming winter. Here, a report of a different kind: My injured pinkie doesn't hurt but is still bound to its neighboring finger in hopes it will straighten up and type right (typewrite?). I tell you, my brain is dictating faster than my fingers can dream of typing right now, and it is frustrating. Finally, a heart to you for bearing with me. (This photo doesn't have much to do with running, but I like ...

Wouldn't you know that the first real rain of the season would come today, long-run day for me as I ramp up for CIM , which seems to be approaching at a rate of speed that would alarm even Einstein, who contended (and proved, after a fashion, I believe) that time doesn't always pass at the same rate--it's a bit like silly putty in its malleability. Anyway, rain it did. It wasn't raining when I headed out the door around 8:30 am, but it sure was by the time I came back, well over two hours later. Last weekend I ran 12 miles on a hot Saturday and was discouraged by how difficult it was. This week my goal was to do 14--and I ended up doing 15 and not feeling too bad. I added on the extra mile courtesy of my runner friend Mac, whom I encountered out at the Richmond end of the Ohlone Greenway . He asked me if I'd ever run through the tunnel on the path's extension "over there," and he pointed across busy San Pablo Avenue. At this point I had done some add-o...

I started working on this post so long ago that I no longer have any clear idea what I had in mind for it (today is October 6). Hmmm. September was a busy month. I think my idea was to touch briefly on what went on for me. About the only way I could even remember was to look at my camera phone for the images that caught my eye as I barreled through the days. The first part of the month was taken up by our trip back to Connecticut for the wedding of my son the doctor to his sweetie the doctor. The two handsome men above are my boys. The bride and groom are with their sibs, and the dreamy flower girls complete the party. Our Miss Nat, the smaller dreamy gal, is now a veteran flower girl, having been in two weddings this year. The end of the trip for me was a visit to see my friend M in Rhode Island. I ran two mornings in a row along the Blackstone path in Providence. My last night, we stayed at M's beach house. No running, but a couple of good long beach walks. Back in the Bay Area,...

...when I'm 64...which I am this very day! Drove up to Santa Rosa this morning with four of my teammates to run the 18th Annual Phil Widener Empire Open, a PAUSATF cross-country race. (Below is a photo of the men's Masters start--couldn't take a picture of the women's Open start because I was too busy starting!) I had a wonderful time today. Driving my little Honda full of chattering women to Santa Rosa, racing with them (they sang Happy Birthday to me when I crossed the finish line), and having breakfast afterward at the Cafe Azul made my day. It reminded me of being in high school and tooling around in my parents' car with all my girlfriends, everybody talking at once, our happy energy fizzing and sparking until the whole car glowed. I came across a couple of lovely sentences yesterday when I was finishing up A Three Dog Life , by Abigail Thomas: "The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young.... There's nothing I want to relive--c...

The local paper has a big story today about California's proposed $42.6 billion bullet train. Part of me is appalled at the notion of spending that kind of money when countless nonexpendible services are crying out with economic pain. But--part of me is pumping my fist in the air, saying, "Yeah. I wanna move fast!" We are human beings, and I believe that as such, we are hard-core nomads, wired for movement. To me, the most apparent evidence of this is that we run. But when I look around, I see that the innate instinct toward locomotion informs countless aspects of our civilization. Our cities--heck, our country, our very civilized world--are created around our compulsion to move our bodies (not to mention our goods and our very lives) from one place to another. I run under a train track. I live on a street, which by definition is a place for movin' right along. It's street connected to many other streets. And I take a bus home from work. Speaking of multibillion-...

I slack off at keeping this blog current, but that doesn't mean I stop running or that I stop taking pictures (both when running and when not). When I look at the pictures stacked up in my phone it strikes me that they are a visual bread-crumb trail that I can follow from where I am back through the days that are behind me. The photos are doors along my trail of past runs, doors I can knock on and have opened by my memories. (I have the feeling this mixed metaphor is about to flatten me like a runaway train. Yikes, another metaphor.) Anyway. Here's a brief visual trip back through some recent runs. One Saturday in late June my club 's Saturday training run took us to the Little Farm in Tilden Park . This was around the time of the Oscar Grant trial , which was feeding racial tensions across the state. I came upon these two peaceful bovines, the light-skinned one gently licking the dark-skinned one. No tension here. On another Saturday, the training run was on East Bay Muni...

Fourteen years ago today I ran the San Francisco Marathon, my first. I was less that two months away from my 50th birthday, and I was under-trained and overexcited. My boyfriend of two months, Z, showed up at the 16-mile mark and ran with me to the finish. I've had this picture on my refrigerator since 1996, and I never get tired of looking at it. One reason I love it is that I appreciate how rare it is to pinpoint a specific instance of joy, an event so special that I can say with certainty, "This was one of the happiest moments of my life."

I'm thankful for the passage of time, which has (paradoxically) allowed me to remember more. Specifically to remember more good things about my mother than I was able to during the time directly following her death. Her last three years were hard on her and hard on me, and it's taken time to put them in perspective. She lived to be 94! She lived a long, complicated, unspeakably rich life! Should I use another exclamation point? Surely the memory of her evokes many (!). Here we are, she and I, in front of our house on Bon Rea Way, in Reno, circa 1966. Me: 19 years old; Mom: 55. Sometimes I still get the impulse to call her on the phone and ask her a question about cooking, or about literature, or about travel--she was an expert on all these subjects. Sometimes I just want to tell her how cute our cat is, or how funny Z was last week when he and I spontaneously started talking in rhymes. She loved animals. She loved wordplay. Or I want to describe the run I took when Z and I were...

How funny it is to say "I feel like my life has somehow changed." Funny because of course it has. Change is what my life--what anyone's life--consists of. My closely held illusion that everything in my little sphere remains the same is just that: an illusion. All the same, one reason I haven't posted for a while is that my world feels a bit unexplored lately. On April 1, I started eating a more or less vegan diet. Somewhere around that same time I started running with a women's team from my running club (see my last post). These are two specific, identifiable changes in my life, so it's easy for me to attribute all other manner of changes to them. It strikes me, however, that they may be the symptoms rather than the causes of a general shift I'm feeling in the nature of my existence. Abstract enough for you?? I would be more clear for you if I were more clear myself. All I know is that as I get older and start to believe in my own mortality more than was ...