Life on Parade

The centennial anniversary parade down Market Street ended, and I saw a homeless man stealing flowers from the Lotta fountain, a monument to the 1906 earthquake. The disaster itself is sort of a strange thing to celebrate - I am not sure if there will be a Katrina parade in New Orleans a century from now. But I do think that it does bring out a few features of our city: our desire to dress in costumes and our need to stop traffic. We are a city of Bay to Breaker joggers, Saint Patrick patrons, Chinese dragons, and Rainbow marchers; and sometimes we need to reflect on our history as a city built on top of sand dunes on top of seismic plates.

Most of the time San Francisco is known only for the culture it brought in 60's, and so we needed a day to celebrate the 06's. The parade had relics from that time - the fire engines, the Red Cross and the burlesque dancers, but it would have been nicer if they could have brought back the 1906 real estate prices. San Francisco biggest export isn’t Rice a Roni, but bubbles.

There had been constant unsteadiness that crept into our spring. The rain came almost biblically for forty days and nights dampening our psyche in a slow deliberate fashion the way that earth is moved by relentless erosion. April showers might bring May flowers elsewhere; here we dream of blue skies.

And April’s other gift to the world, baseball, has touched us bitterly. Instead of hopes of finally winning a World Series, our attention is now on our ancient left fielder. In his younger days he was equally quick around the bases and the field, but over time he trades his speed for power and perhaps his ethics for immortality. With his new broad shoulders he had hit more home runs in a single season than anyone else, but he now must also carry the hatred of the nation more than any player since Jackie Robinson.

But if Jackie Robinson was about the changing the unfortunate accepted rules of baseball to give the sport a better future, then Bonds is about reevaluating what was tolerated to make us question the past. With its roots on the radio, there is audible narrative of the sport that wants to compare players from different times more than other sports. We want 500 career homeruns to mean what it did in Vietnam era 1970’s as much as it does in the Iraq era of the aught’s. In the simplest sense it does - the home run hitters who debuted in the Fifties hit about the same as the home run hitters that debuted in the Eighties. One era does not look more powerful than the other:

Hank Aaron 755 Barry Bonds 708
Willie Mays 660
Frank Robinson 586 Sammy Sosa 588
Harmon Killebrew 573 Mark McGwire 583
Rafael Palmeiro 569
Mickey Mantle 536 Ken Griffey 536
Willie McCovey 521

But there is a difference in styles - one group played in a time when you celebrated after a game by going out for drinks and the other honed their skills by taking supplements to train longer in the weight room. It is the difference between having good team chemistry and a good team chemist. Boston ended its World Series draught because they used cutting edge medical techniques (including the steroid, cortisone) to heal a pitcher for a game against the Yankees and were cheered.

There is little applause for the medical wonder of Barry Bonds. He has had a not only fastballs but also syringes thrown at him. The government leaked his closed testimony to reporters, and his mistress got a book deal. He certainly isn’t the most likeable person on the planet, but none else seems to have burned as much by the curse of trying to become the best player he could by using the available loopholes.

I believe it is because he ruins the fantasy of baseball. I think we want to pretend that maybe if we were just a little bit faster or that maybe we had few more lucky bloopers senior year, that just maybe we (or perhaps the best player from the neighborhood) could be in the big leagues. And even if we are allowed to daydream about stepping up to the plate for the first time in a major league park or perhaps as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning for the pennant, there just isn’t enough imagination to let us pretend that we could be Barry Bonds. We have neither the godparent’s nor the physique to come close in the same way we know we never could be Shaq in a pick up game, but perhaps we could hit shots like Kobe.

What we are left with is an unusually wet April armed with the knowledge that we endured larger disasters. The city and baseball will survive even if we have to steal the flowers off of our monuments to the past.

Winter Included

Occasionally an email will slip through the spam filter or a piece of mass mailing will make it accidentally in the keep pile, and you are left with just a moment to consider the possibility of the glossy pitch, to daydream about the enclosed adventure, and to think that this race, however too far, could be really cool in a rebellious way that your friends, family, and quadriceps will think you are nuts and your fellow distance junkies will nod with that sounds hard. The one that slipped into my life was ski 50 kilometers in Alaska for Team in Training on one winter’s day.

The race has a locals’ scent that makes the event feel like a special hidden secret, like stumbling into to a bar and seeing Bonnie Raitt open a set, or like going to In and Out Burger and ordering an Animal style burger. In California it almost seems that the cross-training for Nordic skiing is apologizing - “Yes, it really tough. Yes, the drive every weekend to Tahoe is pretty far” but in Anchorage, skiing, like everything else, weaves into wintertime. The place has the mammalian need to continue to move against the cold.

It was hard not to be intimated by the race. There is an entire genre of the doomed icy narrative in which a bold (and almost always) male decides to push against the frozen climate. The legend is strong enough that it inspires actual people to take chances against Alaska as if it were nature’s own Vegas. In the nineties there was the Chris McCandless voyage “Into the Wild”, and recently there was the “Grizzly Man” journey down a bear’s digestive track. I really did not want to complete the trilogy and perhaps the best thing I did that weekend was to test my skis against the snow the day before and realize that this surface had the same lattice made with two hydrogen’s for every oxygen, that this was the same kind of conditions I had practiced at more local mountains, and that I was ready to glide even if part of the trail the day before was being used for the Iditarod.

The ceremonial start of the 1,000 mile sled race marks the end of the 17 day long Fur Rendezvous Festival, an affair that is the concoction of taxidermy, cold, and fashion. If Nordic skiing is about the purity of winter then the Fur Rondy is about getting close to the animal. Perhaps a little too close. The most spectacular hat-coat combinations still had the original mammal’s head and legs attached. The affect was the answer to the question of what would have happened if the NCAA mascots got really hard-core after a drinking binge.

For the Iditarod the starting area for the canines was similar to one for the humans but there was no theme music being played unless it was in a key too high for me to hear. Several blocks had been roped off, and the dogs barked anxiously for the start of the race. If there were a surprise about the event, other than you could watch part of it from a mall parking lot, was how small the dogs were. They are the mid-size variety, which at first felt like going to a monster truck pull but seeing how the vehicles had been replaced with Volkswagen Passat’s. The “strength to weight” ratio is often used by triathletes as an excuse for why they got dropped biking up a hill, and the dog size must follow the same principle. The musher’s must carry theirs and the dogs’ food on the several weeks journey and the bigger dogs just eat too much.

My biggest disappointment of the Iditarod was that it didn’t have a mass start. They launched each dog team a few minutes apart and there wasn’t the kind of pile up that happens with rental cars in the hands of Californians along the icy Steward highway.
My mild by comparison 50k race did have wave starts, and based on my dead last performance at Yellowstone the year before I was placed in the final wave. An hour before the race my teammates and I gathered at Robert Service high school, and we huddled on the floor to gain whatever knowledge we could from the locals. The one next to me had signed up for the 40k because he was afraid of the hills during the 50. This was not the kind of cheer I wanted to hear.

One by one the waves of skiers launched ahead. Ski starts are different than the swim scrum at the start of a triathlon. In skiing you must double poll - the equivalent of requiring everyone at a swim start to kick the first fifty yards, a personal dream of mine - and no one was run over. My wave had mostly my Team in Training teammates along with whatever elderly they couldn’t place anywhere else. The old folks quickly dropped us.

My entire race strategy was to sandbag the opening hills and then see what happens in the flats. The secret of endurance sports is learning to let go and trust your own pace rather than competition. I watched my two other closest teammates and my head coach blast up the hills and then out of sight as I did a quick gear change because the weather was in the quite balmy high 20’s.

Like doing taxes, going up hills isn’t that bad if you take them slowly enough. The down hills were more a problem. With the hundreds of skiers ahead of me, they had zambonied the descents into icy chutes. The race was going to be part luge.

Down the first hill I fell after the second bend. I hadn’t realized someone was on my tail. Normally if you are the downhill skier and someone tries to pass you on the inside right without saying anything like “track” or “on your right”, it isn’t your fault. But when the guy hit my boot, launched a ways down the hill, then skidded down the trail, and almost hit trees on the other side as if trying out for the opening of Wild World of Sports, I felt I had to say. “Dude, I am so sorry. Are you okay?”

He grunted as if I could understand bear and then pushed off. I was left to ski by self for a long time until I caught my first teammate at the second water stop.

We were starting to go through the main town of Anchorage. A phrase I heard while traveling outside of Anchorage was that they didn’t consider Anchorage to be part of real Alaska, and it reminded me hearing how people think of my hometown, San Francisco, isn’t part of the real America. Both get the high school isolationism of not being in the “in crowd.” If they were casting metropolitans as characters in “The Breakfast Club” San Francisco would be Judd Nelson’s “way too old to be in high school” rebel and Anchorage would be Ally Sheedy’s “very cute if she just would brush back her hair” babe still hoping to get asked to the prom. Anchorage is wonderful; how many other places have tunnels that you ski through?

Just over two thirds of the way through the course I picked off my head coach. I was so amazed that I fell on my tailbone. That vertebrate ached the rest of the vacation. I had also pushed my triceps to fatigue, and it hurt just to lift my polls. The fortunate thing about skiing in the flats is that you can get mostly by on legs and core strength. I knew for the hill at the end of the race I was doomed, but that was a ways off and I had to wonder who designed the layout. Marquis de Sade?

I past my last teammate with just a few miles left to go. The hill at the end was brutal, and I think I have one unhappy race photo waiting online for me somewhere. It is too bad they don’t take pictures a few minutes after finishing, because I discovered my race time was 3:54. I dropped almost an hour and twenty minutes from the prior year. A good portion of that was there was very fast snow, but I like to think in part some of it was that I am slowly becoming a real skier and I now have two t-shirts to show for it.

But I also know that my luck during the race was also from what I learned from seeing all the other mammals during the rest of the trip - the moose, the killer whales, the sea lions, and the bears - that winter is best conquered in packs. The foolishness of McCardness and Jack London was to fail to realize how great winters can be when shared with a group. And I want to say thanks to everyone along the way. I do want to thank the race organizers because that was one of the best races I have done in any sport. I want to thank all of my fellow skiers (even the one guy who grunted at me) because they were the politest group of slow twitch junkies I have met.

I want to thank all the people who help support me with donations either financial or just simply emotional. That a bunch of money is going to leukemia is a much better side effect of this trip than my hurt tailbone. You have really helped make a difference.

And I really want to thank my teammates and coaches for teaching so much, sharing so much, and laughing so often. It was one of the best adventures I have done.

Click here to show the map of the race.

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Toaster Oven

You don't want to be that guy.

Your last break up occurred two weeks after you joined the Team in Training cross country ski season to train for skiing fifty kilometers in Alaska. She dumped you after a hike in the headlands just north of San Francisco. Her parting reason, "We just don't have chemistry," haunts you through Thanksgiving luncheon and the early rounds of Christmas parties.

You think you have what it takes for making through the winter. You went to a college were winter was almost a major. Karl Swenson, the Olympian who graduated the year behind you, is gifted cross country skier. And even though you didn’t know him at the time, you must have ate at the same dining halls, gone to the same parties, and trudged across the snow covered green at some point. Granted he was probably much faster.

You rally. There is a girl a track practice you notice when she bends her left hamstring. You start to forget about the breakup. She is cute in a way that youth forgives mistakes. There is an attractiveness to potential that most men cherish over mileage however interesting. She is young enough to be a snowboarder instead of a skier and has grown up post grunge era instead of the post new wave one. And if there was ever were anyone who could help with not having enough chemistry, it should be the girl with the chemical engineering degree from M.I.T.

You ask her is she wants to go running along Crissy fields with ski poles. She is occupied that weekend.

She isn't beautiful in a magazine cover sense unless the magazine was "Outside." But there is something about a woman who is up for adventurous weekends, someone who perhaps never looks brilliant by the stern light of a cocktail party but is wondrous in the soft haze of a ski cabin mornings. You believe the best pheromones for the human race is enthusiasm for women and confidence for men. She has such joy.
Your friends set up you on a couple of blind dates but fail each time to mention that both of your dates are five years older than you and nice in a non-conversional sense. One just lost eighty pounds. The other really loved Ronald Reagan. You miss the chemist snowboarder.

You go up to the Sierra's to train with the cross-country ski team. You try to figure out how to ride up with her, but wind up getting stuck with someone who spends a lot time with her grandmother and is starting to merge into her the way that owners start to look like their pets.

You are in the same ski pace group as the chemist and when you see her in the first post Christmas practice she apologizes for being busy during the holidays. "Don't worry about it," you tell her. You do a loop together on the flat stretch called runway. Her natural artic grace came from a childhood in Maine. She glides when she skate skies. It looks effortless, but when you try to the same side to side motion you almost fall.

You ask her out to dinner on voice mail and she never gets back to you. She misses dry land training the next week.

You don’t want to be the guy who keeps calling all the time.

Your mother gives you the email address of someone you should contact for a date. She was widowed a year ago, and your mom is a friend with her ex in-laws. You spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to write "the ask out" letter that doesn’t contain the phrases "my mother thinks" or “your dead husband" You come up with something about adventures, but the widow never writes back.

The chemist lost her two front teeth in a kayak accident just over a year ago and wears braces as she goes through months of reconstructive dental surgery. It is the flaw that makes her seem plausible, that she really could go out with someone like you.

You want to cheer Karl Swenson when he races in Italy. You are enraptured by the idea that someone your age could still be an Olympian. You know that the US cross-country team is doomed; in the history of the Olympics the United States has one silver medal, but you want to believe in the underdog. That just perhaps on a frozen day across thirty miles in the Italian Alps, something amazing could happen. It is the same distance that you are training for in Alaska, and you know that even though the television will focus on ice skating the motto of the games is "stronger, higher, faster" and not "theme music, teddy bears, and sequins." Skiing is the winter sport and you want to believe that there are still miracles left in the Olympics. There must be miracles someplace.

The chemist had the flu and returned to the dry land training sessions. You do "F is for Fireman", "Mr. Incredible," and "Angry Cowboy" drills to work abductor muscles. You are a naturally faster runner than she is and when it comes times to do 800 meter repeats around the track, she does her laps with a tall, lumbering guy.

He sold his company a few years ago and now has an assistant to help him figure out how to spend his idle time. After ski season he wants to buy a plane and learn how to fly. They run side by side up the stairs. She must have learnt about how he wants to make a statue. He has a group in India that will do the carving for him. Nice in a bear like fashion, he organizes the rental cabins. She gives him the nickname "Crater" after a mark he left in snow.

She gave you the nickname "Animal" for your Muppet approach to attacking hills. What you lack in form you gain in fury. Distance skiing is about timing the rage. Hills are a safe place to let things go, but you still need to keep your passions on a leash or you have nothing left for later hills.

You send her a valentine email with ASCII characters in the form of a snow boarder. She compliments you at track practice and then runs with other guy. He invited her to the symphony, and they will drive up late Friday to a house he has rented for the group. He has season tickets and loves the opera. His assistant has been arranging things.

You learn that Karl Swenson dropped out of the 50k race. He has a head cold, and there won’t be that many miracles this winter.

You see Crater and the chemist together for the last trip to Tahoe before the race. He wears a retainer and somehow everything makes sense in a dental hygiene perspective. They have a place with a hot tub with a few other friends, and they ask you stay.

You can almost see the future now. You can see them dining well together for a year and then sometime after the next winter is over, maybe in the Alps or maybe in the Andes he will ask. You will be the common friend, the one that can sit on either side of the chapel. You will buy them a new toaster oven as a gift.

It is just that you don’t really want to be the toaster oven guy.

You say thanks, but you need to take care of things at sea level for a while.

The race in Alaska is a week away. The current weather is minus one with a strong possibility of a snowstorm, an Alaskan snowstorm. You remember that at less than zero your nose freezes when you breathe in. You lay out your gear from the race but still make one last panic trip to REI. You want to be a brave winter warrior. You want to be that guy.

Life in the key of G

Life in the Key of G

After reading Ansai Boys by Neil Gaiman, I believe that life is a song. We sing of those that have come before us, their deeds and their memories. We listen to trance of meetings, hum with the beats of our days, and, in our luckier moments, dance to tune of love.

The past few months I have been living in the key of G, the one that best straddles both the major and minor scales. I have date and was dumped; I have struggled against a year-end deadline at work but came out with only a few scars. The chords of victory and defeat clashed, but it feels this holiday music is over and the Christmas gifts and New Years promises have been put away. A new allegro midwinter movement has started. The refrain is about a hill.

I have signed up for another 50k ski race and the first five miles is up hill. If the state were Delaware I would feel good, but the race is in Alaska, and they know hills, the way that say Idaho knows potatoes, Minnesota knows lakes, and California knows expensive housing. The state is big in a way that gives Texas an inferiority complex. It is the frontier where there are documentaries of how people get mauled by bears and Jack London short stories of how someone froze unable to build a fire.

The hill should seem familiar, because I go up to the Sierra’s on alternate weekends to practice the skating motion of cross country skiing. When done correctly it has the gracefulness of a waltz with each stride and poll plant in synch with three quarters time. Given my natural staccato disposition, I am learning the dance slowly. And in much the same way in junior high I developed my footwork to the B52’s Rock Lobster and Skynards’ Free Bird, I know that most of the time I look foolish, but the only way to get better is to practice.

The hill should seem familiar, because I have been running the Lyon street steps with a ski conditioning class. I know they must think I am crazy because the class is meant for downhill training, and I keep telling them it is same imaginary snow. I just hope they think I am a good kind of Bay Area crazy that signs up for distance events as opposed to the other kind that wanders Market Street with signs about support for seven races of space aliens.

The hill should seem familiar, because I have been doing endurance sports for a while. This is my eighth year doing an event with Team in Trainingand I have done more than a few others that weren’t for a cancer research fundraiser. Granted not all of my attempts have been successful, because some races are like trying to bust a move to J Giels Band’s Love Stinks or pretty much anything by Phil Collins. These are never good ideas.

The hill should seem familiar, because I think the mid thirties is a Sisyphean struggle. Between pushing and polling we hope our careers and families will move ever upward despite whatever turns we encounter. The constant coldness is offset by the scenery we can see out of the corner of our glasses. The place is beautiful if we could just rest for a few minutes. I think these are the same climbs as we had in our twenties, but we now have much better gear.

The hill should seem easy. But I worry about it, because after its crescendo there is still left a marathon until I am home. And that is another song to learn.

Map of Bear Valley Workout.

Map of Last Donner Workout.

The Warrior and The Artist

You should return. If the Great Gatsby, the mainstay of high school English, laments “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” then you should let yourself drift back to that tide, back to that familiar time when you read about Gatsby and Daisy’s struggle, back to that contradictory place of a southern California board school, a place that had dormitory prefects who could take surfing as a sport, a place where studying for AP biology was done poolside under a gentle Santa Barbara sun, and a place that had classes on Saturdays but a week off to hike to the Kern River or camp in the Yosemite valley. Two of your favorite teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Sykes, are retiring and one of better things you can do is go back for their tribute weekend on March 25. You should return.

Just over twenty years ago we arrived at boarding school awkward, uncertain, and I was surprised why I was given the head of the arts program as an advisor. My strengths were math and science, and while I like to think I am creative, my coloring books growing up were always colored outside the boxes not so much because I was trying to channel Pollock, but because I lacked the coordination to be gentle. If Mrs. Sykes was ever assigned a less artistic advisee, she was very polite in her constant British charm never to share.

And she is an artist always – an artist when she dressed so stylishly in Santa Fe style outfits that seemed to flow everywhere matching her enthusiasm, an artist who went all out for Halloweens or Fair costumes, and artist who at least appreciated the creativity when she busted Carter Kirkwood and me for pumping music through the dorms’ PA system. She is also a great teacher, the patient kind, who would introduce chiaroscuro and composition to my world in Foundation Arts and provide sympathy to attempts at pottery when the bowls came out suitable only for ashtrays in an increasingly nonsmoking California. I learned about complementary colors – how red clashes with greens – by building out a color wheel and are grateful for the visual vocabulary that she gave to use for the rest of my life.

Her husband, my English Teacher, worked on my written vocabulary. To learn English from an Englishman is to feel closer to the source. He was an ex-rugby star and brought that kind of tough discipline to the language. Paragraphs needed to flow sentence by sentence as if the topic was a rugby ball being pitched from back to back. At their bests sports and literature have that same kind of natural ease, an economy of motion or words. He knew both of these well, and I can almost feel him still writing in margins about my abusive tendency towards metaphors and almost hear him coaching the sprinters during track practice how to high kick.

On one Hike Day many years ago he led me and two other students up the hill behind the school. The fog rolled in quickly and thick, and on the descent we missed a turn on the trail. We followed a canyon down as the shrubs became thicker. At a rest stop long after we had run out of water, he turned to me and said “I think I have broken my hand” in the same calm voice he used to say "this sentence is a bit awkward" or "try to show instead of tell."

A twig had gone completely through his hand and was poking through both sides. As we continued to hike first by the waning sun and then by the moon, the rugby warrior never mentioned his hand again. After the rescue when the doctors pulled the twig out he kept it in a small plastic jar, a souvenir of courage like rugby caps he won playing for England. He is the toughest man I know.

His wife might be the most graceful. At one parents’ weekend, my father was wandering around campus with the board of trustees. Excellent at real estate, he wasn’t the best for names and faces and got Mrs. Sykes confused with Ms. Graph, the Human Development teacher. He announced to the entire board that “this was the women teaching Arthur about sex” and she had the flair to laugh through such things.

Not that her husband didn’t accidentally get back at me. Sometimes if he came across a bit of homework that he liked he would read it to the class. It was quite a few months before one of mine was to his standard. He asked us to write about a body part and I decided to do a long treatise about the back of the girl’s neck who sat next to me at assembly (She was fascinated by Charlie Engs, sports star, one seat over so I had plenty of time to examine). And while this should have been a great moment of finally writing something worthy, a nice discourses about the slope of her lightly tanned neck popping out of tank top, the general piece was diminished because this girl also happened to be in our English class. He kept reading on, detail by detail – does she surf? Why does she like the tall blond guy? - Until both of us were deeply red.

We all had such moments. It was a time of such social pain and such giddy laughing, a vat of hormones in which some of your best friendships brewed. It was a time when awkwardness and achievement emulsified; in the same assembly you could be cheered for winning a soccer game or corrected for using the wrong preposition. You should spend a weekend and relieve this a bit. Tell your stories. Blush and laugh a few times.

Mostly what I remember about the Sykes was their kindness. As advisors they would invite over their small group from time to time. Sometimes the best cure for just being a teenager is a home cooked meal.

They must have needed that kindness later. I would love to say that they had the dream life, but after Mr. Skyes’ stroke I doubt it could be easy. There is courage to relationships that we never had to face in high school. While still occasionally tugged by hormones, as we drifted further from that time our bonds are more driven by logistics. The brightly colored canvases of our youth now have depth through chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark of our experiences. There was no way of knowing when they met for the first time at a party in her London flat that for so many years in the future together he would be silent, his once elegant voice trapped somewhere inside. You never know the disasters that can hit you on sunny October Tuesday.

While I suspect that it was never easy for them, a couple of years ago I came back to the Mesa and ran into them still smiling. She tends to him gently. He can still nod with approval, and he still recognized me as the guy who got lost in the woods. It meant so much after so many years that he still remembered me – that if our life is going to give us great disasters from time to time it also gives great friends.

And you should return to high school for a weekend to remember them. Two of the finest are retiring. They share the glow of the gifted ones that inspire you to be like them. You hope on your best days you could be a warrior during battles and an artist during calms. You should return.

Maui Channel 2005

We arrived at the Mala boat ramp sufficiently after sunrise that the sky had been bleached to a faded jean color, that half of other vessels had already started to load the bundles of food, sunscreen, and beer while the gentle waves pushed the ships up and down, and that the others still waiting for their turn huddled in tight packs of matching t-shirts, laughed nervously, and glanced quickly away to guess the conditions further out to sea. We were organized by a long chain of email that tried to anticipate what could go wrong and what we would need – the car rental, the place to stay, the air flights, the team name, the boat – that all started from a single thread, the note that was sent to twenty people that asked if anyone was interested in forming a six person relay team to swim the Maui Channel. The lucky ones replied.

John Donne said that, "No man is an island," but I believe that nothing is more human that to swim between them. It is our need for epic journey, to continue that travel that started across the grasslands of Africa and sent us into space - to reach sometimes further than we believe is possible. (In the case of swimming after the reach you are supposed to pull as you rotate.)

Our group was not only veteran swimmers, but each also had other superpowers. If we were comic characters we would be labeled like the Coach, the Captain, the Bartender, the House, the Driver, and the Mistress of Tunes. Our team name written on the make shift dolphin towel turned flag that we hung from the top of our boat was "Where the @#$% is the Kaanpali beach hotel," the finish line of the race and the location of the victory buffet.

Our name was also our mantra and a more reassuring phrase than what we heard when coming in from the airport. In the ample camaraderie that would define the weekend, a leathery fellow swimmer gave a ride to a couple of us from the airport. He had soloed the Maui channel the year before. Deeply impressed I asked him if he had ever gone further and he said that he had done the English Channel this year but that was nowhere near as hard as the Maui Channel. Nowhere near

This, the all time pre-race psych-out comment, scared me deeply as we motored over to race start on the island of Lanai. As we reached a tiny cove the Driver, a swimmer turned triathlete, jumped off the boat, headed to the beach to join the other teams' best swimmers, and tried not to be intimidated when the conversations on the starting line were about the Olympic trials. Doubly Irish her snowy skin was drenched in the most potent sunscreen manufactured on earth. Wearing a pink cap so we could easily see her among the heavy shoulder masses, she launched when the red starting flag was dropped. We saw her as she went through small flotilla that came for the race.

Next up was the Mistress of Tunes, the one who could not only navigate the deep waters but also equally important Ipod playlists. She was half Dominican and shrieked with joy when she saw a solo crossing by a fellow Dominican - the best part of trip because despite some assistance with medication she still had a hard time with seasickness. In fact the largest difficulty of the day wasn't the feared tiger sharks or jellyfish, but how to keep a stomach happy in a rolling sea. The chop was easier to deal while swimming in the waves than hanging on the rail of the boat, and she would often plunge in to give her digestive system a rest. With long powerful strokes she cruised through her half hour leg.

I, the least experienced swimmer, was next. The second thought that came to me (just after "I can't believe I am this far off shore") was how blue this sea was. That might sound cliché, but one of the things that I have learned from traveling for swims is how varied the palette of the ocean is. The San Francisco Bay always seems like a murky green while Cape Cod is a medium blue, and the Caribbean is almost azure. This sea had a darker blue, the kind of shade that football teams pick to increase their toughness, but with an endless clarity that only most pricey of gemstones have. The water temperature was a delightful warm just a couple of notches down from too hot but in that range where you could be comfortable either resting or cruising. With the exception of the waters around Capri, this might have been the most perfect place to swim that I have been, and I was lucky to get the leg that had least amount of chop.

After me was the Coach. She has the physique that only comes after multiple ironmans and was the only one to have done the race before. Some of her old teammates from her first race were back on a different, faster team. Fifteen-year veterans they had booked a luxurious catamaran, the Shangri-La, as their guide boat, but they still overcompensated the southern swells by going too far to the right. Those of us in the first few legs could site our swim direction off of the mast of the Shangri-La. It was the perfect metaphor that we would spend the day chasing paradise just further up the horizon.

Our team captain who had done a great job of organizing was the first one to ignore the Shangri-la and aimed off course up to Kapalula. He is a pilot by profession, and I would imagine quite used to planning his own route through life. The gang on the boat waved to him, and he corrected his course toward the two white matching hotels on the Kaanapali shore.

Our final swimmer was strong enough in the water that the Corona that she had before going into the water hardly fazed her. She has an infectious disposition, an aquatic Falstaff, that, well, would make the Jolly Rogers, jolly. She clicked with our boat captain who at one point of time must have been a great swimmer, but whose lifestyle on the island with poi, surf and rum, can kindly be said, has made him now a much better floater. He had the perfect name, Marco, for someone just coming out of the water disoriented, stocked the boat with tasty sashimi and mountain dew, and cut a pineapple so that it looked like a boat.

By two thirds of the way through the waves most of us were nursing our first corona and for the next round of ten-minute legs we thought this must be the easiest Maui channel crossing ever done. Distance swimming, like all endurance sports, has long stretches of loneliness. Sometimes in order to go far you must go alone.

But the brilliance of a relay team is that you can get a group together for a weekend and enjoy such wonders like watching shooting stars with a bottle chardonnay on a tennis court or seeing turtles bob up and down in a sunset soaked surf, that even as one person must be struggling against a sea it still left five in the boat to relax, and that there will be a group that you can always reminisce about the time you decided to swim between tropical volcanic islands.

Almost halfway through the third rotation, we realized that the Mistress of Tunes was the one who was going to reach shore on her leg. As soon as she got past the final swim buoys, we hopped in the water to join her for the last stretch that was protected by the black rock snorkeling area. We stroked and breathed the last hundred yards together and knew that we could be heroes, just for one day.

The One True Thing About Running: Falmouth Road Race

Running is the revolution that came to our doorstep. In the sixties my parents lived in San Francisco two miles away from the epicenter of counter culture, but the spirit of the era didn't reach them the same way that fog sometimes gets caught in the valleys of the city and can't drift over its peaks. But if the bra-less world of tie-dyed shirts never cluttered our family's closets, the one of waffle sneakers and synthetic shorts did. We witnessed the birth of jogging.

For generations my family has had a summer home in Woods Hole, a small town on the underbelly of Cape Cod known for marine biology and the place to catch the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. Falmouth, a town large enough to have a movie theater, lies seven miles away, and in 1973 a few people decided to make a run race between their favorite bars. I have no idea why this race caught on to such an extent other than it was in existence before the boom - the same way a couple of grad students who published their favorite links would wind up forming Yahoo. It was the right place in the right decade, and the opening wave on its starting line has contained the best runners this country has produced. In the seventies Bill Rogers and Frank Shorter, the last US gold medal winner in the marathon, were at the front. In the eighties Joan Benoit and Alberto Salazar ran the thing.

But as we would watch the elite field pass our driveway what I remembered more was the mass of people behind them. My family's place in on Church Street, the first right turn in race just before the bend that opens out to the long beach to the light house. It is a quiet road where kids walk holding their babysitters hands along the grassy sidewalks, and the loudest sound of the day is the ice-cream truck rolling through with little pictures of popsicles and sno-cones painted on its tan sides. But for one morning a year the place would rumble, not so much like a thunderstorm because those moans are only for half a minute, but more like the prolonged opening set of an Aerosmith show. Wave after wave of pounding would come, with the runners not quite at the first mile mark still having that determined glow of "I am here to race." Large runners, small runners, a wheel chair division, spandex clad women, men in oversized hats, track uniform kids, and more Red Sox's jerseys than actually sit in the dugout at Fenway - they all went by. At the end were the walkers waving to crowds like athletic Popes asking for encouragement from the dwindling spectators.

We would watch them all go by until the final motorcade rolled through and then head down the long driveway to the main house. I like to think that it would be at least an hour after we had watched this sweaty parade, one long hour while my parents, aunts, and uncles would argue over what to make to lunch after feeling just a little bit healthier for seeing this event, a mere hour while rocking on the wicker chairs at the end of the porch, before any of them smoked a cigarette.

Everyone has his or her own hobby, and a pack-a-day cigarette habit requires a certain commitment to nicotine. It seems like a distant world now - a place where not only could you eat brie during a pregnancy but could also wash it down with red wine. The drink of choice during cocktail hour, and it was called that, was gin and tonic. One of the favorite stories of my cousins was the time my brother tried to match drink for drink with my unsuspecting grandmother. She buried him in half an hour.

It wasn't that we didn't exercise - there was always sailing and tennis with our growing appreciation of Bjorn Borg. It was just that our sports were more conversational. A good joke could always cover a weak backhand, and the only way to handle a double fault was to laugh. Perhaps it was one of these little jests that caused my mom to decide to enter the road race in 1980. Our neighbor from across the street had an extra bib number, and so wearing her tennis shoes she decided that she would do it.

Everyone thought she was crazy.

* * *

"Running is your life," is what Joe Ueberoth told me in high school. It wasn't really meant as a compliment but more of a dig about pursuing something a little offbeat, the great crime of high school. But what I learned then and what I still believe is true is that it is far better to go through life being interesting than being cool.

Running was my life. In junior high I joined the track team and won my first varsity letter for gutting out the 800 meters. The summer before my senior year I completed my first Falmouth road race. My peak was coming in third at the county meet that year in the two-mile though still way too slow to do anything at the college level. I would run with a deep passion - the kind of nut would speed up going up hills just because I knew it would damage me less than the other runners, and give the raging testosterone through our bodies, there was no way they weren't going to follow.

I needed that passion because the one true thing about running is that it is really hard. It is repeats and pyramids, hills and track work. It is long days when you have gone out further than should and have to stumble home, and the early mornings when you start before you really wanted to wake but return smiling from having beat the sunrise.

It is a test of wills and we, Americans, having been losing at the elite level. There hasn't been a great US male distance runner in decades. The world had caught up with our training and they are, well for lack of a better word, hungrier. In a sense running is the same as poetry - a half century ago everyone knew the names of great living poets like cummings or Frost, but even now as no one knows who won the Pulitzer prize last year for poetry, our work is now published with refrigerator magnets and private emails. We are country of hacks, and I certainly have been guilty of stumbling through both.

* * *
I thought of doing the road race for over a year. I sent out a challenge to my cousins offering anyone a free ice cream at Dairy Queen if they came in first. I believe the best races are local and going back to salt breeze smells of my childhood was something I didn't want to miss.

The place had changed though. Fragrances were no longer purchased at candle shops, but at day spas. The drug store had become an espresso shop suggesting our general shift of self-medication. A mall on the outside of town was draining the merchants on Main Street like turpentine splashed across a Normal Rockwell painting.

The race had changed too. Not the mileage because that has to be a constant, but now registration was conducted three months earlier in an online lottery. You wear not only a bib with your number, but also a chip on shoe that activates on the start and finish lines. Rather than the great free for all there are series of waves ranging from the 4% body fat runners in the front to the entire workforce of Cheryl's pizzeria clad in day-glo green at the back. I was assigned to the pizza shirt wave and started next to two people - one wearing "I am running with Bob" and the other "I am Bob".

Not that I haven't had this before in a race - I am running further in a couple of weeks after a swim and a bike ride - but I think I wanted a little more of the simplicity of my memories. Because while I have gone longer distances, this race was the furthest I had gone back in time. Twenty-five years ago my mom ran this race when she was thirty-seven; an age that everyone thought was far too old to be out running; an age where she was burdened with three boys ages twelve, ten, and eight; and the age that I turn next week.

Our thirty-seventh years have little in common. I have not just finished adding a tennis court and swimming pool to my second home in Marin. My mom wasn't taking a spin class that measures her V02 max threshold and optimizes her training ranges. There are no children in my world. The return to my family summer home was eerily quiet the first day back; there was no background noise of kids screaming, and the energy of place felt subdued. No need for cocktails if there is nothing to take the edge off.

But when I think of the great feats that my mother has done the Falmouth Road Race is at the top of the list just ahead of swimming a mile across Tomales Bay for the first time at age fifty nine and trying to learn algebra so she could teach my youngest brother.

It is strange to realize now that my mother and I would not have been in the same social circles. You never expect the exact same life as your parents, but I think everyone believes that the journey would be at least somewhat familiar, however false a notion that is.

I wanted to do the race because I think it might have been the one time that our paths might have crossed. That somewhere on the other side of the two guys with the Bob t-shirts was a mother of three whose sons are terribly proud that she is doing this race. There is the old official race photo of my mom cruising to her 12-minute miles in puma shoes, and I have this great hope that somehow I could Photoshop us together. Mother and son framed as equals winding down the road side by side.

But a difference between then and now is that I don't believe that thirty-seven is too old for new journeys. The coach of a charity team that I ran with is ten years older than me and she still crushes me on a course. I have been buried by sixty-five year old men. There was a seventy five year old woman just behind the two Bob's who was doing the race for the twentieth time.

Yet I do believe is that we are all on the clock. There are only so many summer days to seize. My mom now walks with a limp and for longer distances with a cane. The neighbor from across the street, who did it for the first time with my mom twenty-five years ago, retired this year. "Sometimes," he told me, "it catches up with you."

The race, itself, was more brutal than I expected. I made sure that I was on the ride side of the road for going in front my family's place and they invigorated me as I went by. The hill up the lighthouse seemed small compared to the Bay Area's peaks, but by the time I had gone through the wooded area just before eel pond I felt pretty drained.

The unofficial weather report was "wicked muggy," and nasty heat is my nemesis for endurance events. I like to say that I have always beaten it, but there have been days, bitter days, when the heat has won. I no longer can run with the unchecked passion of my teens, but now must cruise at a gentler pace designed for a longer haul.

And maybe that is what turning thirty-seven is about. That passions have been checked with responsibilities. That perhaps the air is a little thicker to run through. That we are slower than we have been, but are so much more familiar with the route. That running, the mad scramble between our opportunities and disappointments, is our life.

Jive an' Wail

The coolest I might ever have been as an adult was in the summer of 1998. It was the waning years of the nineties when the papers rambled about Monica and the markets raged with online drug stores and supermarkets, a distant time of peace and dizzying motion when the word network became a verb and mindshare became the goal. If we were to experience the roar of the twenties then we had to steal its anthem. Swing was back in style.

I am not really sure how I convinced Amy Chamberlain to take swing dance classes with me. I think it was at a Christmas party when we got into a conversation about whether the animated character, Arthur, was really an Aardvark or a mouse. I was sticking to the mouse concept, but the early work proved that he once had a far less kid friendly proboscis. Somehow after this discussion, six months later we were swing dancing.

We found a small dancehall for classes in a neighborhood that is now called South Beach, but was then the China Basin. (I still don't understand the new name because it is neither south (it is on the east) nor a beach). The place had an appropriate seediness to remind us that swing came out of prohibition, but across the road the new ballpark was being built whose fans would be beautiful yuppies rather than the cold, bitter ones of the Candlestick. It was the last time for us to have edginess and we could dance like we didn't care.

Mercury, the Roman god, is a male, but in my own mythology the goddess for being everywhere at once is Amy. She had the ability to be both flakey and sincere. When you spent time with her you felt like you were in the center of the world, but you were never really sure when she would show up. I like to think that she believed that she could help everyone and almost had enough energy to pull it off.

And she did have such enthusiasm. I had no idea that this petite curly blond was an athletic dynamo. I was about a year from getting into any kind of shape having spent what it seemed like the decade eating at Taco Bell, and did my best just to try to keep up.

We twirled, cherry dipped and pretzel'd. But mostly we laughed.

Shakespeare wrote a sonnet comparing a woman to a summer's day, and if I had to pick a handful of days to be compared to (rather than the usual foggy ones), those four classes would be right in the mix. I wish I had the common sense then to realize that. There are the large moments like family reunions, weddings, and graduations that everyone knows to bring cameras to, but there are also those smaller ones that you wish you could capture and hold onto by something more reliable than fading memories.

We were wonders at turning and much better at dips than lifts. I never got down an over the back maneuver, but when we got caught halfway through a pose and wound up stuck like the board game twister we would just giggle to the dismay of our colleagues who seriously thought they could audition for the next Gap commercial.

The hard thing is that dances are fleeting and so are summer days.

I saw Amy only occasionally after that. A couple of years later we ran into each other at Portland Marathon. I think she had finished, showered, written a children's story, and come back to transition area, by the time I crossed the line. She could do it all.

And that is why it is so hard to find out that she has past. I mean how does someone like that drown? I got the news abroad and the reality of it still seems so distant.

I want to believe that she is out there way ahead – it could be another marathon, it could be Africa, it could be at a friend's wedding dancing – that she is just over the horizon giggling at the wonder of trying to do it all.

Backroads

I kept getting lost in France. The instructions from our Backroad's guides were more than adequate; if they were recipes, they would have not only the ingredients and the temperature, but also the right way to slice the vegetables and where to shop for the meat. The rest of the service from my luggage being taken from room to room, to the little jokes at rest stops, to the water bottles always being filled were equally well thought out, but still I wound up seeing a little bit more of France than I expected.

The group came from places like Boston, Cleveland, Texas, and Washington and followed the roads better than I did. They mostly made the proper turns save for a few unmarked roads, the doom of any directions. But for me the turns started to blend after a while. We constantly made lefts at yield signs, veered right around churches, and the second spoke at rotaries. France can seem like an endless maze of small grey cafes nested around churches and Post Offices. The new holy trinity of France is no longer the father, the son, and the spirit; but the church, the food, and the government ministries.

Some of these towns blurred, but some of the villages were a gorgeous in the same way the French summer peaches were - tantalizing in both brevity and intensity. There were a couple of moments while biking, perhaps after the delirium from making it up a hill or the quick breath from taking a turn a little fast - moments that we could see bales of hay rolled into impressionist cylinders instead of American cubes, or a group of cows grazing on the same field that British intelligence had to parachute to get data for d-day, or just an archipelago of red poppies in a sea of yellow mustard that we knew that we were in that mental postcard we first dreamt when booking the bike ride and the same memory we will return to when thinking about work after coming home.
That this is what it meant to be in rural Brittany and Normandy.

And sometimes we could tell by the smell. The scent of barns is universal. And the bugs that accompanied it as well.

Yet if the country doesn't always smell like flowers, at least the French version has old buildings to visit. The first day we biked to a sacked castle that was just only slightly larger the mansion we stayed in that evening. The next day we saw Fort La Latte, which unfortunately was not the French headquarters of Starbuck's, but it was perched on top of large bluff and had a large furnace to heat cannonballs instead of espressos. The cannonballs would take about six hours to heat up, so whatever ship that was in range would leave the harbor and probably have headed up the coast for the very nice cove where we had picnic by the sea.

Both of these days were just preludes to Mount St. Michelle - the Alcatraz of the abbey world. It is built on and into its own rock, which when the tide was high it would be its own island. The stones for the abbey's construction had to be floated on by boats from a nearby island, and the construction took centuries. I like to think of it as the first software project. During the audio tour we learned the first idea came as a vision, but then section after section fell down and was rebuilt.. There was the cloister 2.0, the facade 3.0, and the mission statement of the place had changed from church, to fort, to jail, to tourist trap.

The rain came the next day after we went to the tapestries in Bayeaux and headed the Normandy coast to where the allied troops landed.
Clutched tightly in my right hand the road instructions were well on the way to confetti. Somewhere in the gap between two of the threads was the instructions to make a right, but I continued on the same gravelly road. It lead me to an unexpected point, a small rocky beach covered in rotting kelp and wooden spikes. The storm had passed, but there were still a few eager clouds ahead hoping to catch up to the group.

In the distance was Utah Beach where the General Roosevelt had landed along with thousands of others on d-day, but now the place was empty except the waves and gulls. These beaches are flatter and simpler than you think from the movies like Saving Private Ryan. It is easy to say that they have the serenity of impressionist painting, because, well, it actually is where Seruat invented pointillism. He did several studies of Port en Basin where we stayed the last few nights of the journey. The rambling Atlantic was the foundation of the splotches that defined the genre and it simple blues and greens were perfect for the limited palette of the starving impressionists. The brightness of the Mediterranean would be added later with Van Gough, but for a moment, that brief year of 1888 (surprisingly not covered in vh1 I love the 80's), the place was in the center of the idea that you paint by dots.

I like to think of these beaches existing in both of those concepts, that they could be on both girls' impressionist wall calendars and in the boys' d-day video game, that there is such a duality of pain and peace, and that both revolutions of artistic innovation and military achievement can exist on the same sand.

The British landing at Arromanche was the best of the later. They actually floated over an entire dock a few days after the main landing.
Parts of the structure still exist like concrete beached whales.

I believe that travel has a similar dichotomy of the joy of new things combined with the desperation of good logistics.

I know that even as I kept getting lost in France, the week spent in bike shorts and racing jerseys was one of the best I have had in a while.

Sith Sliding Away

There is a moment of dialog when Darth Vader sounds like George Bush and mutters, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy," which comes off a bit unfair because most of the time our president sounds like Yoda – "Freedom, weapons of mass destruction is." But if the moral glue between the latest three Star Wars films and the original ones is (besides the importance of familial microcholridians) that there are shades of grey then my opinion of the last film is also in that murky limbo.

The film is about a man struggling to manage his career with his impending fatherhood and making some rather bad choices. Puff Daddy Vader is Othello in a galaxy far, far away. Not only because both rolls have been played by James Earl Jones, but because they share a nasty temper. No one criticizes Shakespeare on plausibility, but basically one misplaced handkerchief leads to a large body count. Lucas has better special effects, not all of which go into Natalie Portman's hairstyles, to make that same character transition, but lacks the playwright's language even if he did get the author of Shakespeare in Love to assist him with the script.

There was no help for the acting.

I think the first three films worked the best because Lucas had the fortune of casting two of the most archetype actors of the last century – the thespian's thespian in Alec Guinness and the intellectual action star in Harrison Ford. I think only Larry O. and Bogart would have been better, but I don't think either would have worked for scale. Ewan McGregor's wonderful smile is perfect when singing Elton John love songs to Nicole Kidman, but comes off as out of place as Chewbacca doing a cell phone commercial. It is a hard film when I think the actor that does his best work is R2D2.

So while I don't think Lucas did a very good job of capturing Shakespeare's themes, he does a much better job of playing to the front of the audience. The effects are amazing to the point that unbelievable becomes real. For the first film he had to put a couple of fur suits on elephants from Marine World to create mounts for sand people, but now he lives in a world of pixels where someone can ride on a lizard and there are neither wires nor seams to see. The animated character of General Grievous is so well done that we forget than he is descent of the same technology that gave us Jar Jar Binks and Ally McBeal's Dancing Baby.

Yet at times the technology almost too dominated the film – I think Lucas would love to replace everyone in the cast with robots if he could. (I see the continued casting of Jude Law in movies (but not in this one) as part of the same larger trend).

I went back to see the original's light saber battle and while it looked so grounded, because it was after all two old guys just taking hacks at each other, it felt more emotionally fulfilling. Now the rattling of swords are almost secondary to the mid air flips. The fencing has been reduced to rhythm gymnastics, and has the same gravitas shift from a battle where warriors clash to a competition where costumes matter. The Lord of the Rings is such a superior filmmaking effort not because Legolas can do a better triple pike, but because Peter Jackson has the common sense to use the effect sparingly. In one of his better sword fight plays, Hamlet, Bill wrote, "brevity is the soul of wit," and George seemed to miss all three – the brevity, the soul and the wit.

The best that can be said is that we get closure on that far away land (far better than we will ever get in Iraq). There is no surprise that Vader is going to have twins, but it was nice to know why Luke got screwed with being stranded on a desert planet with the last name equivalent of Stalin, and Leia got to be a princess. I think this movie has a great sequence for the fate of the various Jedi, which is better than anything in the prior two films, and seeing the helmet put on Vader is more devastating than any of the carnage done to a death star.

I am not with the new film nor am I its enemy; I am not Mark Anthony seeking to bury Lucas nor praise him. The movie is worth a couple of hours of summertime and the price of a ticket, but I don't think it will linger in my subconscious. Perhaps it is the final end of the nostalgia for being a child during the seventies, that I, too, like Vader will need to put on the heavy gear of responsibly and sigh frequently at work. But I think that there still will be magic out there, even if I have to wait a few more weeks for the next thing at the multiplex.

Twice Around

I think the first time you do any sport you play by the Rocky I rule. The goal is to last the fifteen rounds of the experience while some short old guy says, "you're an animal". Bruised and bewildered you should finish aware enough to shout out for the shy pet store girl and if lucky collect an Oscar for best picture. You will get later attempts to handle Creed, the Russian, or Mr. T. The first time is about going the distance.

The clerk at the local ski store was the first person I told that I was thinking about skiing a 50k. I explained to him that I hadn't skied since Reagan was in office and the goal was by the end of winter to be able to ski that length under the five hours and fifteen minute time cut off with the small issue that it never snows at my home city. I asked "What skis would do you recommend?"

He looked at me at the same way that a dog owner looks at their pet when they realized it swallowed a golf ball. "You know that fifty kilometers is really far?" Instead of buying, I rented skis for a while.

At the Team in Training information meeting (a fundraising organization for Leukemia Research), Dave, who became one of my coaches, talked about how 25k was the equivalent of a ski marathon, and he was thinking about emphasizing the valor of 10k for novice skiers. I asked him what it would take for the 50k. He, too, said, "that 50k is really far."

But I spent the winter practicing anyway with patient coaching and quality three-hour car rides. I was in decent shape but still had technique problems. I have three athletic attributes - I am good on a kickboard in a pool, I get very hot when I exercise, and I have strong determination. Coordination isn't a personal skill and even now I still can only really pole on my left side and can't really balance very well on my right leg. I look longingly at the gracefully strides of expert skate skiers the same way that a prairie dog must look at a gazelle. At some point there must have been a common evolutionary ancestor, but we each had specialized a long time ago.

Headed to the race I was confident that I could make the time cutoff unless there was a snowstorm or I messed up my hydration. For the later I had been practicing by putting perpeturm, a sugary fuel mix like cool aid with the calories cranked up, in with water into my camelbak reservoir for nutrition. It is trail mix in a tang format.

For the weather, the six times I went to practice skiing I had nothing but blue skies and 40-degree highs. I had lucked into missing all of the snowy days in the Sierra, and it had been one of the driest winters in the Rockies. If it were to snow I would have to improvise.

The night before the flight to Bozeman, I put the perpetum in the camelback and carried small snacks on the plane. I had not been to Montana since right after graduating from college for my roommate's wedding and looked forward to seeing him, his wife, and their four kids. It had been a long time.

Bozeman is a charming compact town that blends quickly into the rolling hills and jagged peaks that surrounds it. A love of hiking is almost a requirement for citizenship, and there very well could be more dogs than people. It has successfully kept its main street, a victory against the malls of America, and shops range from the expected sporting goods store with a rifle as a logo and gift shop with a moose crossing sign in the window to the unusual authentic Thai restaurant named Smilers. In San Francisco a place called Bang and Tail would be a bar, but in Bozeman it sells biking and skiing equipment. Foot apparel is available at Boots and Shoes, with the later seeming like an afterthought when shuffling through the mud of the early spring thaw. It is a boot kind of town except for the scuba shop, which felt about out of place as me. If in California we dream of mountain retreats, then from time to time in Montana they must think of warm beaches. Escapism is universal.

My roommate's kids are being raised as good Christians and Red Sox fans. They wear the caps more of the second and don't seem amazed that the Red Sox won the series. Faith is the strength that gets you through winters not just Octobers. My Giants lack Montana's natural modesty and kindness, but my roommate's family has that by the bushel.

After a pleasant day spent in Bozeman, complete with a tour of the noodle on stick art sculpture and nice morning walk, I met up with the rest of my teammates for the bus trip down to West Yellowstone. Instead of looking out the window to see actual wildlife we watched a video about a pack of wolves called the Druids that were released from their cages and sent out with GPS collars into Yellowstone. They played, howled, and hunted together, and I thought about how our own little team of charity skiers had done a similar adventure of traveling out into a new world unsure of the terrain but confident that we could handle the task together. The wolves then ate a deer and bred off-camera to make a litter of four cubs, and I felt the analogy wasn't going to work as well.

The ski race wasn't the only thing in West Yellowstone that weekend; there was also Sno-Blast, a convention for artic cat snowmobile dealers. Snowmobiliers are people who enjoy nature with the smell of napalm. They wear thick helmets to mask the sounds of their engine for themselves but leave the noise for everyone else and large neon jumpsuits that make them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a Star Wars fetish. They are the answer to the question of what would happen if bad taste were given a bunch of money and proceeded to drink heavily, smoke consistently, and destroy the hotel hot tub.

Needless to say there was a slight body composition difference between the cross-country skiers and the snowmobiliers, and I was a little disheartened when the hospitality clerk got me confused with the snowmobile crowd. I wanted to lean over to her and say "no, really I am here to do the 50k," but I think she would have just pointed me to the bar and told me to keep drinking.

The town of West Yellowstone was friendly like that. The ski shop there that sounds like a San Francisco bar is called "Free Heel and Wheel" and serves a great mocha. Most of the town was motels and gift shops, but they did have an I-Max theatre that showed NASCAR racing twice a day and a small zoo consisting of grizzly bears and wolves. I wondered how the animals felt to be caged so close to an actual park and thought the experience must be similar to the prisoners in San Quentin who can look out across San Francisco Bay to the sourdough city. Escapism is universal.

After race registration, a pasta dinner, a good night's sleep, and two pancakes for breakfast I arrived at the starting line for a quick warm-up. I was in the last wave with most of my coaches and lined up next to them. For the first fifty yards of a ski race you must double poll, which is to say you can't use your legs. The gun went off and I pressed forward. I could poll well, but my entire team had passed me on the first hill. It was going to be a long day.

Thirty minutes into the race it started snowing. It was a light flurry at first but then turned to large wet flakes that clung to my sunglasses. The 50k race had become a great deal harder.

One of the secrets of endurance racing is know what you can and cannot worry about. Your thoughts won't change the weather and so it is important to concentrate on what you can control - your pace and fueling. I took the first sip out of my camelback and realized only then that after three days perpetum in water ferments. Nothing grows in Gatorade, but the problem of drinking something healthier is that it was healthier for other creatures as well. Despite my careful preparation, my camelback was useless, and I would have to rely in the food I kept in my pockets and the water on the course.

By the first water stop I had passed a coach and her partner. They have much better technique than I do, but the thick snow meant that gliding wasn't going to work very well. Without the glide we were left to run through the snow with two very large sticks attached to our legs so everyone was going to be awkward – dashing across the snow, we looked more like penguins that deer. With my heart rate was ten beats above where it should be, I was worried that I was going out too fast because but there was a loose 11:30 am time cut-off for the first lap and I had not this far just be push aside.

Despite the weather I kept getting hotter and spent most of the time looking at the backs of two skiers ahead of me. By the third water stop I passed them as well in full throttle to make 11:30. Right towards the end, just before the Subaru ski team lapped me, I caught another group of teammates/coaches.

I went down the long straightway to the lap marker at 11:34 and was very nicely allowed to continue. (The year before the cutoff was noon, so they weren't sticking too hard on this point). The race close was at 2:30 pm so I would need to the second lap in just under three hours.

I shed my useless camelback and long sleeve shirt and gave these to our team managers extraordinaire, Barb Smalley and Ananda Baron, who kindly checked on everyone. They were next to the race director and could listen on the radio for our race numbers - mine was number 390. Down to a red fleece vest and a short sleeve t-shirt I headed out again to do the course one more time.

I don't believe in second chances. Even if you arrive back to exactly where you were before, you will be older and more tired when you look at that same path. Not that there isn't the longing - I have the times when I wish I wasn't as shy like a life long audition for the lead in "Sideways" - but the things you do can't be taken back.

One of those days I wish I could do over was May 2, 2004, the last time I did a race with Team in Training. The Olympic distance triathlon race was meant to be a tune up for a longer one a few weeks later, but I made a series of mistakes and was betrayed by two of my athletic features - that I exercise hot and that I am determined to go through anything.

That day I was amped from watching my teammates do well the day before and when I passed the final transition on to the run course the cheering of young, attractive women made me want to push even harder. I drank water and Gatorade before and during the race, but in retrospect I should had five water cups at each stop instead of just one.

The last thing I remembered I was three hundred yards from the end of the race at the base of the final hill with the finish line just around the corner.

I woke memoryless in a hospital. A mere minutes away from the end I had a heat stroke and seizure and had to be helicoptered out. A heat stroke is when the water in your brain has evaporated and your circuits are literally frying. I fear for what I might have lost. Barb came as quickly to the hospital and after an overnight stay I was released physically okay but restricted from doing any events in the heat.

A few months later I realized that if I could go far in the heat then I should try it in the cold and decided to switch sports to cross country skiing and came up with the silly goal of a 50k.

Yes, I don't think we ever get truly get second chances, but what we can get is second loops. Often we tend to travel in circles and when we come to that familiar fork, more worn and weary, we know the weight of each. The first time through a loop is done with blind exuberance that we had in our twenties. But now as we wander the second time through what we lack with energy is made up with focus.

This ski race wasn't a comeback. I can't return to the heat. But it was a chance for me to show that I still could go out and seize a day. Perhaps I wasn't the dominant wolf in the pack, but I still could hunt and howl at the moon. This race was about going the fifteen rounds.

I slowed down to conserve energy and returned to the first water stop just as they were closing it. They had already removed the trail markers but still had some water and PowerAde left. They asked me how many people were behind me, and I told them at least six. As I left they poured some more cups, which I didn't realize were going to be left unused.

On the second loop without kilometer markers I had no idea how fast I was going because I could not see anyone ahead either and kept myself amused by mumbling movie quotes. My favorite was King Théoden from the "Two Towers" when he was on the wall at Helms Deep as a sea of orcs attacked, "Is this all you have Saruman? Is this the best you can do?"

But whom I should have been really quoting was Frank the Tank from the movie "Old School." The two of us shared a moment of being out on our own without much clothing convinced very much that there was a pack of like mind people following them. Franks wife pulled him aside and asks him what he is doing and in a slurred moment of exuberance he responded, "We are streaking".

I was out there, too, streaking and striding in my short sleeve shirt. Only there was no one in a minivan to pull me over. The skiers behind me had left the race, and I am making a new rule that you know it is a tough ski day when your coaches from Alaska and Latvia drop out because of bad conditions. Later back at the hotel, we would joke that DNF stands for "definitely not foolish" But I had only me, two flasks of hammer gel, and geeky movie quotes to keep me going.

I only started to really worry when I found the second water stop had been abandoned. I had not seen anyone in an hour and wasn't carrying water. I could still follow the deep tracks, and onward I trudged. I started to fall more going down hills because my core muscles were tired, and the climbs seemed twice as long the second time around.

I wasn't the only one worried. Ananda and Barb were frantically listening on the radio for skier 390. If it had been anyone else, anyone who they hadn't been to the emergency room the time before, anyone who tended to be at least somewhat sane during a race, they probably would have relaxed, but I was the last one out. Why was I out there with a short sleeve shirt? Could anybody see me? If they can put GPS collars on wolves why can't they put them on skiers?

50k is far. It is roughly five miles further than a marathon. Sometime between what would have been the second and third water stops I passed that point slower than I have ever run that distance. It was going to be a long day. The one little bit of luck I had graced me at the third water stop. They had still had a few cups left and some cookies, and again I left some water for the non-existent people behind me.

Invigorated I looked at my watch and realized that I was going to have to really step it up to make the 2:30 pm cut-off. I started to push hard again and saw my first person in about two hours who was taking apart some of the 10k course. He radioed back to the finish line, and Ananda and Barb were relieved.

I ran into the head coach with about 3k left on the course and kept pressing to make the time. One wrong turn during the final chute made a me have to go over some gravel to get to the finish line. My watch said 2:26 and I felt I did not go all this way to let mere gravel get in the way. I hopped over the gravel and skied back and forth to the finish line. Expecting me to come down a different route six of my teammates came running down to greet me at the end. Ananda quickly put an old fleece over my exposed arms. The clock was at 2:27:30. Two and half minutes to spare.

I finished 164 out of 164 roughly fifty minutes behind anyone else. Of the 209 people who entered the race 45 did not finish which is just over 21%. The people with common sense were from places like Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Vermont where winter isn't just a weekend folly. One of the Subaru professionals called it a day early, as did four of my coaches. I was the sole team in training participant to finish and one coach and our category two bike racing captain finished as well. I have never been dead last at anything and felt so proud.

I had gone the fifteen rounds.

And if Rocky can shout at the end of his match so can I.

I want to really thank Ananda and Barb. One day we will have an ordinary race day with fair temperatures and sunny skies. We have been through so much together, and I hope you remember the good parts. I cried a little when Ananda drove me to MacDonald's afterward because I was so happy to have finally reached that finish line that has escaped me for ten months. And so happy that I could share it with her.

I want to thank my mentor Tracy and her partner Sigrida for so much guidance and not to mention rides up and back the to slopes every other weekend. I hope my offbeat humor was offset with my spiffy iPod.

I want to thank the coaches and captains, and especially Scott for leading the entire gang.

50k is far, and while I won't pretend that it wasn't deeply personal I won't forget the other reason I did it. I am just so grateful to have done a second lap, but the purpose of the program is to give cancer patients a second lap of their own. During the course of training we heard statistics like 80% survival rate, which can seem abstract at times. But when I look at the numbers of the race as a comparison, I realize that 20% can include quite a few people who are noble and special on their own. I don't want to lose any of them.

Thanks again to all