Twilight of Childhood - Life, Death, & Soccer

While we are working on our aerobic base, the rest of the world is turned to a different sporting endeavor, the World Cup. In the seventies soccer arrived with jogging and disco. The later two were for the adults. Soccer was for kids.

The secret of the beautiful sport - what David Eggers likes and Chuck Klosterman despises - is that it is an easily played game. Throw a ball out amongst a group of eight year olds and they will understand that the ball has to move towards the opposite net even if they are bunched around the orb like runners around a water stop on a hot day. It was the first team I ever joined. In our OP shorts, knee high socks, and bowl haircuts we, small band of carpooled warriors, bravely enjoyed the world where everyone played, and the debates on the ride home weren’t about who should get the ball to score, but whether you would rather be Spiderman or Superman.

But as we aged it became clear that even if we weren’t all going to be super heroes, some of us had far more talent than others. In junior high I was on the same fall soccer team as John Henry Williams. In a Garrison Kellerian tribute our squad was called "intermediate" even though there wasn't a level below us. We had world-class intentions of getting the ball into the net, even if the final score rarely reflected our hopes. We were always on the wrong side of the verge of greatness. Still after every 4-0 loss, John Henry was pleased to be out there; he had an infectious smile that said good game.

Perhaps his optimism came from a life of sports. There should have been some genetic hope that could have bloomed with John Henry; his father played baseball in the forties and fifties. My heroes growing up were Albert Einstein, Harry Houdini, Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Luke Skywalker. I had never heard of his dad.

With our demoted status we played at the furthest field from the showers. As a huge fan of hot water I would always sprint up a large hill after practice to get to the showers before the varsity and junior varsity players. Another coach noticed the uphill sprints and in the springtime I joined the track team.

John Henry went out for baseball. I was surprised that he made the varsity team, because he wasn't much more coordinated than me. Later in life I realized that there was not a high school coach on this planet who was going to cut Ted Williams' son. His father is a legend in New England somewhere above Sam Adams but below clam chowder. John Henry switched schools at the end of the year, and I lost contact with him.

We weren’t the only ones with dreams of soccer glory. Our nation has now sent its highest ranked teamed to the World Cup, and our imagination went wild - if we could tie the Czech Republic, if we could avoid the second red card with Italy, maybe miss playing Brazil. Our team was on the verge of greatness. But as in all of our dreams we still have that waking moment when childhoods have to end. We are struggling in Germany with the realization that wishes don’t mean goals. So if we are destined for a first round elimination I hope we could cheer the way John Henry did.

A few years ago I saw John Henry sportsmanship for the first time in a decade on TV when he helped his father along at a baseball game - literally a crutch that propped his father on a podium in center field with the remaining all time greats. Determined not to give up these childhood dreams and win the respect of his father later that year John Henry even tried out for a minor league team, but those managers weren't as lenient as the ones from our youth.

I don’t want dreams to die either, but this is the point where John Henry’s best intentions went past common sense. When his father died, John Henry stuck him in a freezer as a hope for the future and that his genetic material could be shared with the world. It seems like an idea out of a comic book or mythology, a modern Orpheus going to Hades to try to keep a love one alive.

But even Orpheus couldn’t make it back to the world. Everyone struggles with the waking moment of a dream’s end. And sometimes lives are as fleeting.

John Henry soon afterwards was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a malignant disease of the bone marrow in which hematopoietic precursors are arrested in an early stage of development. It is as if the blood cells themselves are yearning to remain in an eternal youthful state – John Henry’s dream at a cellular level. Their unwillingness to undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis) results in their accumulation in the bone marrow, blood, and, frequently, the spleen and liver. Normal blood production also decreases. About 10,000 people a year are diagnoses with AML. 25-30% of adults younger than 60 years survive longer than 5 years and are considered cured. I have no doubt that he did the best he could against the disease. But in 2004 John Henry Williams was among the 70%.

The obituaries talked mostly about his father being the last to hit 400 (and the cryonics part).

I want to think him more of the junior high version - the one coming off the intermediate soccer field and smiling, the one who was happy just to be playing.

For many of us this run season is the return to an earlier time when summers had to be spent outside. There will be bruises and sunburns of our youth even if we run on shakier knees. I don’t want to lose that youthful spirit, but this time around we are running for something just a little more than going up a hill to get to a shower first.

We run because there are a few friends and family that have already hit the metaphysical version of showers, and we wish they still could be here to play. What we lose in childhood innocence we gain in adult purpose. We run for research. We run for a cure.

But if I am allowed to dream again, I would like to pretend that John Henry is up there smiling someplace above - finally at the same level as his father and Superman - and never worries about the score.

GO2 Team

Summer movie season is upon us, and one of the surprising stars isn’t the man of steel, a mutant, or a religious code breaker but an ex vice-president. Lacking x-ray vision or a long hair cut Al Gore is armed only with PowerPoint slides and the luxury of science to discuss global energy and the impact on the environment. Without delving too much into politics, I want to do the same for running. Let me pull the slides.

Aerobic Anaerobic

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ → C₆H₁₂O₆ →

6CO₂ + 6H₂O 2C₃H₆O₃ (lactic acid)

2830 kJ 120kJ

Slide 1

We can categorize energy systems by the fuels they burn. In the case of cars we will all one day decide between gas and ethanol. For ourselves, we can convert sugars either directly into lactic acid or instead, in a longer process, combine it with oxygen to get carbon dioxide and water.

If the secret of a sustainable environment is developing renewable energy sources on a global scale, then the secret of endurance sports is to optimize sustainable energy at a personal level. We need a cruiser gear.

Lactic Acid	Runner with too much Lactic Acid

Slide 2

To get there we need to train at the point along our various effort levels called the anaerobic threshold, the boundary below which we use aerobic metabolism and above which we use the unsustainable anaerobic. It is the maximal aerobic effort level, the best payoff in terms of bang for buck.

The more you train at a particular metabolism, the more you adapt your body to it, and the more efficient it becomes. If you race every run you will develop a great racing gear (the Tasmanian Devil was anaerobic), and while that is fantastic for chasing after rabbits with Brooklyn accents, you will run out of sugars about mile 18. You will wish that you had spent more time developing your aerobic capacity.

While there are a slew of tests that can measure your anaerobic threshold (AT) with a great deal of accuracy, the simplest way is to find the pace where you can be slightly conversational. If you have enough oxygen to speak, then your body isn’t forcing to steal all of it for metabolism (as long as you don’t talk too much).

It is not to say that we never want to use the faster gears when we train – in order to go far we will need all available energy process – but it works out to about at most 10% of the time or as a more conveniently way of thinking about it, one workout a week. The best time to save this is the for the Wednesday evening speed/hills run.

For the rest of the time when we run, talk to your teammates. Discuss the high home prices or the summer beach novels. Share your knowledge of cheap restaurants and favorite places to run.

This team comes from such wonderful places - from Michigan and Texas; from grape lands of Napa and Lodi – and those are just your mentors. Talk about careers. Talk about high school loves. But breathe. Support you local aerobic system. Oxygen is your friend.

And occasionally on a windier trail, maybe on a sunrise buddy run or a lazy mentor run through a park, take a deeper gasp when you realize the beauty of the Bay Area environment.

Click to see Presido loop map.

Good Gear Days

Our summertime companion, the fog, will visit frequently to our workouts. There is an Alaskan saying, “There are no bad weather days just bad gear days.” If you had to pick a place that would know about outdoor fashion Alaska would be a good place to start (as opposed to the runways of Paris – The French on adversity have a saying “it is a piece of pie” which is why one place is known for the battles between man and nature and the other is known for the battles between man and waiters).

And while we are on adages, in the running world attire there is a saying that “cotton is rotten”. Normally I don’t believe that one should dress according to a rhyme - it leads to ideas like “Bell Bottoms are awesome” or “Sequins are groovin” - but the phrase does reflect the issue of wearing cotton while running. The fabric absorbs water. On cloudy sixty degree days when you are only going to run for a half an hour this is fine, but for longer runs or adverse temperatures this means that you will be keeping your sweat close to you rather than letting it evaporate as a coolant. It isn’t very pleasant. Simply put, cotton doesn’t have much range.

The way to extend the conditions we feel comfortable to train in is to extend the gear that we use. The simplest way of doing this is layering. Being able to put on and then shed non-absorbent garments allows for a great range of temperatures. Cyclists, gear fanatics perhaps worse than Alaskans, have all kinds of layers – outer shells, arms warmers, and long sleeve jerseys to name a few. The pockets on riding jersey also make then a great way to carry food, which we will need to do when we get to our longer runs.

Of the layers to have, two of the most important are hats and sunscreen. The later of which was discussed in a graduation speech from nearly a decade ago (see below). As for hats not only do they help with sweat going into your eyes, but they also keep you significantly warm. 30% of one's body heat can be lost through the head. About 13-16% of the body's blood volume is in the head at any given time, but it is a very exposed structure, allowing it to lose heat pretty quickly. A mind is a terrible thing to chill. To paraphrase Joe Cocker, you should leave your hat on.

In short come to practices with a few layers so as you cherish the hills you can take clothes off to cool and as the sun goes down you can add them back. Learn to dress like Alaskans and relax like the French. This will lead to more enjoyable workouts. And when you get home after a very foggy evening and your friends ask, “How was the run?” you can just look them straight in the eye and say:

“It was a piece of cake.”

Go

This begins with a word.

Go.

Our proud sponsors promote their shoes with “just do it”. But as part of improving at endurance sports is gaining efficiency by eliminating unnecessary motion, their phrase can be reduced.

Go.

Go, because the second toughest run you will ever do is the first one coming back into shape.

Go, because you are meeting a friend.

Go, because you want to make a new one.

Go.

While the word, run, can be used as a noun – a 5k fun run, a midnight run, the true essence of the word is as verb. Cherish this. Run to the corner. Run to the park. Run around the coaches on the parade ground. Run home.

Running is a journey. We will travel to such places: from the slopes of the presidio to the flats of Ocean Beach; from the trails in Marin to the shores of Maui or Crissy field, from these first anxious spring weeks to the celebratory autumn.

Go, because you made a promise to yourself.

Go, because the toughest run you will ever do is coming in the fall and you need the practice.

Go, because you know someone with cancer.

Go, because it feels right.

Go.

It isn’t that this season starts with the first step, because, well, you need to make sure your shoes are tied, but it begins with the belief, the hope, and the longing for a great adventure. Someday soon you will realize any day on the road is a great one.

Go. Go Team

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.