Lessons on the Water

Recently, while gathered with some friends, the “what would we do if money was no object” hypothetical was proposed while I worked feverishly to keep the small fire in our chiminea from erupting into a five alarm blaze. I casually responded, “I don’t know, probably what I am doing already.” The guffaw from my wife was almost instantaneous, “You’d be running or fly fishing, and I would see you for about half an hour a day.”

Knee-deep in Irondequoit Creek

When the Wheels Fall Off

Runners have strange pre-race nightmares. We wake fitfully to quadruple check that we packed our shoes. We toss and turn over thoughts of body-chafing in unmentionable areas. We avoid fiber for weeks to quell the fever-inducing thought of race-day incontinence. We spend our taper weeks of relaxation wound tighter than the Gordian Knot imagining the million ways our race goals could become unraveled. It is the stuff of great psychological thrillers.

So what if? What if all those nightmares came to fruition on race day? What do you do? How do you respond to your running world collapsing around you? These are questions every runner must answer at some point, because I guarantee you will have a race where “the wheels fall off.”

Don't Think. Just Run

A classic track t-shirt

For the past twenty years, I have marked spring’s arrival with one event. It is not the calendar date of the spring equinox. It is not the first day the thermometer reads above 40 degrees. It is not even the day that the last pile of dirty, brown, snow-ice-slush finally melts from the corner of my driveway. Since I was in seventh-grade in 1994, I have marked every spring’s arrival with the first track practice of the year.

Track season, like its spring placement, is a season of rebirth and growth. It is a season where we shake off the long miles of winter’s doldrums and adjust our eyes to again soak in natural light. Track is a season of camaraderie, challenge, and t-shirts!

The Purpose of Purpose

Battling the elements at the front of a group
in the 2012 Lake Effect Half Marathon

Lately I have been thinking a great deal about purpose. Perhaps this is a byproduct of winter marathon training and battling what seems to be a never-ending deluge of polar vortexes. When your eyelids are frozen open by wind and sleet, and you’ve lost all sensation in your appendages, the “what am I doing” question plays like a song on repeat with every consecutive mile. To train for a marathon at any time, you have to be, what polite friends call, quirky. To train for a marathon through an upstate New York winter, you have to be downright crazy.