Running Commentary

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 ...

I haven't written in weeks. I'm happy to say I've been running a lot, however. I'm working out with the women's team at the track on Tuesday evenings, plus I'm doing training runs with my running club often on Saturday mornings. Since I last wrote, I've done two races, taken one fall, and pulled a groin muscle at the gym. Busy times! Also, I have to note that I got really worn out last week. I mean dragging-around tired, spacey, running-into-walls tired. I don't know whether it was from an increase in my running intensity, from my new vegetarian diet, from working too much--or just from being older than I've ever been before. (You are in the same boat as I am on that last count, you know.) The other reason I might be tired is that time has sped up. It definitely has. I planned to put in a garden in March, and finally got around to doing it today. What? It isn't March? April, maybe? I was so sure it was no later than early May, anyway. This garde...

Going to a ball game on a weekday afternoon is generally regarded as a lazy and mindless activity. But for me on this particular sunny day, baseball (paradoxically) constituted a mindful engagement. I left work and went to the A's-Detroit game by myself. I sat in a section that was fairly empty, although on three sides I was surrounded by what was reportedly some 20,000 schoolchildren. They were not, shall we say, quiet. In my ears I had the radio commentary of Ray Fosse, Ken Korach, and Vince Cotroneo . The A's were not at their best. I even texted my favorite nephew that "the A's suck." And yet--and yet, as I sat there I got more and more interested in what Ray and Ken and Vince were saying. I realized their broadcast constituted a narrative about the A's in particular and baseball in general; they were dipping into a story that is ongoing and rich, calling on their past experiences to illuminate the present happenings and to speculate about the future. Th...

I believe I've titled a number of previous posts "Checking In." Well today, I'm checking out. Checking out the contents of my brain, that is. First, I wanted to note that I went to LA (Culver City and Burbank, to be specific) over the weekend for the birthdays of my son the doctor and my granddaughter, who is the sweetest granddaughter that I (or anyone else in the world) could have. Here's me after Dr. D and I ran up Baldwin Hill. My boy was kind enough to lope along at a pace that didn't leave me looking like something Harley and Hazel dragged in (Harley and Hazel being the resident cats in Culver City). After the short weekend I came home for some running-related activities. First was volunteering at a water station for my club's Tilden Tough Ten race, aka the anti-Bay to Breakers. It was freezing in Tilden Park--note the posture of my fellow volunteers. We considered snuggling up to those cows but thought the better of it. Monday I went to the gym. I ...

An odd theme has surfaced in my photo / running life lately (I link those two adjectives because I don't always separate them in my mind). I'm hoping I'm seeing rabbits because I'm getting as fast as one. Is that's what's hoppening? I've had two bunny encounters recently, one when I was on a rainy run and and one when I ended a run in the middle of an Easter egg hunt. (A picture of the latter didn't end up in this space but can be seen in my Facebook wall photos. Please do friend me. Eek, I used "friend" as a verb.) Last night I had a bunny encounter of the third kind. It started when after work I went up the hill to Piedmont High, expecting to run track again with the Tuesday night gang just as I did last week. Before we could run a step, however, we were told the track was closed because a championship lacrosse game was about to begin. Someone (me, I think) suggested running down the hill to Lake Merritt and formatting our speed work in a li...

The Food Part of this Post The title of this post is intended to signal a confession: I'm not a full vegan. I've decided that while I won't actively seek to ingest honey, neither will I refuse to eat foods (mainly breads) that list honey as an ingredient. My Vegan Living for Dummies book contains many useful guidelines for converting to total veganism, but also encourages a person to be realistic about how stringent she chooses to be in pursuit of physiological and spiritual fidelity to vegan principles. I read the book as acknowledging that successful adherence to many (but not all) vegan principles is better than failed adherence to an extensive set of unbreakable laws. The Running Part I'm set to run at the track again tonight. Last week the hardest part of the experience was avoiding getting lost on the way to the track. Well, not really. There was definitely room for improvement, however, in the arriving-there-on time-and-un-lost department. During this past week I...

After my rain-soaked track session last week (see previous post), I was emboldened to show up at a different track the following Tuesday, this time in the latter part of the day. The women's team was doing a speed workout. I'd like to say "I ran with the team!" but that would be an exaggeration. I was where the other team members were. They ran--I ran. I was just a little behind them, that's all (insert smiley face here). But I'm not going to bemoan my lack of speed. I was there. I ran my own best way. I had fun! I'll go again next week if the stars align. As you can see, it was a lovely evening, with gentle spring sunlight throwing long shadows across the turf as the brightness of the day faded into evening. Endorphins filled the air. I ran with so much energy that I'm starting to label my new vegetarian diet a "success" rather than merely an "experiment."

I feel like a mole. Or a vole. Or a groundhog, even. One of those creatures that lives in impossibly tangled tunnels beneath the earth and only occasionally sees the light of day. Too much time has gone by unaccounted for in this space for me to even think of extricating myself from my subterranean burrow and catching up. I do have a collection of phone photos taken in the course of my unintended hiatus, but they all need to be accompanied by explicatory narrative, narrative I'm at this point unable to supply with muc h éclat. Let's see what we have: The USATF-PAC team I've joined through my running club. As part of my earlier-expressed desire to run more and specifically to run more with other people, I participated in the Zippy 5K in Golden Gate Park last month. It was great to be with the newly formed team and great to race with more than my personal interests in mind. The Team The Start of the Men's Race Then I have some photos from various solo runs I've done....

No blue skies and flowers today--we have cool spring rain instead. Through my window a few minutes ago I saw a very fat squirrel in the process of bulking up, as if a nip of autumn were in the air. He's not quite in the Fatty McFat class yet, but is working on it. I had another wildlife encounter Saturday morning as I took a short hike in Martinez after arriving too early at the Contra Costa shoreline for my running club's weekly training run. (Training run sounds far more respectable than fun run, which also describes the event pretty well.) Poring over Google Images results makes me think my little friends (I saw two) were common newts. I wouldn't tell them they're common to their face, however; they should go on thinking they're as special as I think they are. The run was near Rankin Park, pictured below, but it was no walk in da park. We ran the course of the Brickyard Race , which is next weekend. My running companions and I meant to go out four miles and then ...

This flower thing--let's just get it taken care of right now. Soon I will be back in this space with more heavy thoughts about physical and spiritual nourishment, but the featured topic today is flowers. This time of year, as I walk and run my way through my daily life, I am a hopeless fool for flowers. The only thing worse than a hopeless fool is a hopeless fool with a camera phone. So here are my flower photos, all in one sweet, fell swoop. Here are two from my walk to work in San Francisco. And here are a couple from the East Bay. These are from our very own front yard. And here's the finale--a crimson carpet showing how all good blossoms meet their end. So now, please go out and have a flowery day!

I just read over my first-ever post, from December 2005, and realized what a wiseacre I was in those ancient days. Rather than being appalled, I found myself hoping my writing hasn't lost that wacky edge. I bring this up because some days I feel myself, and consequently this blog, heading off in a pretty serious direction. Today (this past week, actually), the topic is food. What it is that I eat, why I eat it, and whether I want to modify my choices. I've been interested for a while in the nutritional and philosophical implications of choosing to eat vegan. The last time I ate meat (on purpose, anyway) was in 1988. I've continued to eat dairy products and fish, but still figured that if I did choose to go vegan it wouldn't involve making any very dramatic change in my dietary habits. I stopped eating meat in the first place right after I read Diet for a Small Planet . Frances Moore Lappe was so articulate in her indictment of the meat industry that after that eschewing...

Yesterday I did run the Oakland Running Festival Half Marathon. I felt under-trained and, because of that, extremely nervous at the race's start. (Note: Click on the photos to see them larger.) I needn't have worried. What a great race! Well organized, with a smörgåsbord of neighborhood sights and sounds for all of us, slow and fast, to enjoy. So much fun that I (almost) forgot how much work I was doing. We saw all kinds of bands. My baseball team was well represented by some hard-core fans. In West Oakland we ran under a flaming arch, courtesy of The Crucible , a nonprofit arts education center. And just when we were all about out of steam, with only three-plus miles to go, we got sprinkled with fairy dust by an official emissary from Children's Fairyland . I came in 11th in my age group, but got the same medal as those ten people who finished ahead of me. Who could ask for more? Well, I could ask for more. From myself, that is. The more I am asking for is related to t...

That would be yesterday not in the long-range, historical sense, but yesterday as in the day before today (and today not in the larger, metaphorical sense, but as in plain old March 21). Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Hey, that could be a song. Nah, would never catch on. Anyway. Yesterday I went up to Inspiration Point in Tilden Park for the weekly LMJS fun run. I'm consciously taking it easy from now until next Sunday, the day of the half marathon that I've so cavalierly committed to. So I figured I would run about 6 slow miles as I watched the rest of the pack disappear in the distance. Didn't happen. Instead, I ran with my new running friend, B. I'm pretty sure his natural training pace is about 9.5- to 10-minute miles, but he kindly slowed down for me. The result was that I ran probably a minute per mile faster than I would have on my own--and had a great time! My run couldn't be described as "taking it easy," but for now, anyway, I d...

It just struck me how odd it is to use the expression "hold on" when really what I'm trying to say to myself is "let go." Let go of all that's gone on in my life since last I posted. Let go of that urgent feeling that I have to relate everything that's happened in my running life and the rest of my life (if the two are in fact separate). I call it the James Boswell syndrome, naming it after the 18th-century biographer of Samuel Johnson . I fell in love with Boswell during my college years--not for his biographical skills but for his addiction to recording every possible detail, the tedious along with the interesting, about his own life. (His London Journal is a good starting place for anyone interested in his autobiographical oeuvre.) So. What's been going on with me and isn't so soporific that it could be marketed as the new Ambien ? Work, a lot of it. (That's my excuse for not posting.) But other than that, plenty of fun and quite a bit o...