For Love and Money

We remember our hills. We remember the long ones that rise ever slowly. We remember the sudden peaks or the winding switchbacks. We remember the dirt path up to the bridge and the asphalt slope returning from Baker Beach. Sometimes we stride up them effortlessly. Sometimes we swear.

Flats are more of a blur than a memory. They are like those parts of our days that we know must have happened but fade quickly like thoughts about sophomore year in college or budget meetings; filled with motion but without the sense of progress. Flats are the same bus ride home every day. Flats are the point of the marathon when you think you past mile 18 but then see a sign up ahead for mile 17 and you wonder how you could be so absent minded that you actually lost track of a mile during a marathon. Flats are the silences between songs.

We remember our Wednesday night peaks - Lovers’ Lane and WebVan hill. They lie next to each other in the center of the presidio created with the same geological hiccup. We have run figure eights around them, two loops named for different epochs of our city’s history.

April coined WebVan hill after the television advertisement that showed the vans delivering food to the residents. Created by the San Francisco firm, Hal Riney, the ad had the hazy nostalgia that brought Reagan’s “Morning in America” and the intoxicating warming blur of Bartles and James wine coolers or Henry Wienhard’s beer.

The city was drunk on what felt like never ending newness. After good internship at Microsoft, you would have venture capitalists lined up to give you money to create evite. There were cab drivers discussing portal deals on cell phones as they drove in from the airport. The poor schlub who had worked in purchasing for years all of sudden could make millions as b2b integration expert. The money flowed (and, well, the fundraising was much easier if your friends were rolling in options). What differentiated this from the earlier tech booms that the word “network” changed from being a noun to a verb. There were link exchanges. There were drink exchanges. Who you knew was everything. There were more pitches than products, and the WebVan advertisement captured the haziness of actually having to deliver anything. It too soon faded like its cup holders at PacBell park.

A few yards over from WebVan the path that became Lover’s Lane was created centuries earlier to link the Spanish Presidio to the Mission. Later the American soldiers would trudge up over it to see their loves ones (either marital or fiscally based) who lived in the city. Motivation to go up a peak is often difficult – few of us have Sir Edmund Hillary’s attitude of Everest “because it’s there.” But after spending the entire week in only the company of their fellow soldiers, they must have set a record for hill repeat determination even if the return trip was done slightly bowlegged.

We share these paths of those that came before us. Sometimes the hills of our life are about money. Sometimes the challenges are about love. Sometimes the hill wins. But there are those days, the better moments of our character when we rise to meet the peak.

These are the times we remember.

Click to see Baker Beach map.

External Markers

Like junior high school dances the key issue of bone marrow transplants is avoiding rejection. Most of the cells of the human body are labeled with protein markers that are coded on major histocompatibility genes on our sixth chromosome. When the immune system discovers cells that don’t have the correct markers it can uses a variety of the methods to attack the intruder. For another tissue transplant (say a kidney) it is important that these markers match or the immune system will try to destroy the new tissue. With bone marrows transplants this issued is doubled because the new cells might unwarily attack the host – similar if you tried to relocate armies to foreign countries. These proteins are the truce between parts of ourselves.

Even though these markers are genetic and the best chance to get a match is through a family member, there are plenty of people who don’t match with their parents or siblings and desperately need bone marrow. A great thing you can do is to get tissue typed. The tissue typing procedure isn’t any more difficult than getting blood, and to put it bluntly could save a life of someone. The more complete bank of possible external matches the better. It is a great thing do in addition to the wonderfully appreciated raising of funds and awareness. Who knows? You might get to meet a genetic cousin or histocompatiable friend.

Granted this isn’t the only way to identify comrades. (In a fascinating research project it was discovered that folks preferred the smells of the people with different histocompatibly proteins. Opposites do attract, but similarity saves lives.) Cells aren’t unique in using external markings to signal identity. Peacocks have their plumage, flowers have their petals, and runners have race t-shirts.

Other than watching the occasional Project Runway episode, I am not that much of a fashion expert, but let's examine the taxonomy of endurance shirts...

A key element is degree of difficulty. If on a start line you see a runner with perhaps a quadruple Dipsea t-shirt (something April’s husband actually did) this will strike a deeper level of fear than someone wearing a Muffy’s run five-mile fundraiser (something I did).

I do also believe the following about t-shirts:

1. If you don’t finish a race you can’t wear the t-shirt. This rule is unbreakable. There is a Wildflower t-shirt that I am not allowed to wear, but that is another email about hydration.
2. If you get a t-shirt prior to the race start you can’t wear the shirt beforehand (see 1).
3. You are certainly allowed to wear a shirt for twice the time you spent training for the race. This gives you almost a full year for wearing your marathon shirt.
4. You probably shouldn’t wear a t-shirt unless you can do at least half of the race distance (unless in rule 3 grace period).
5. There is nothing better than passing someone with a macho t-shirt. When in doubt dress modestly and run strong.
6. You are always allowed to wear the same race shirt from an earlier year if you are entering the event again. Huge bonus for showing up in race expos with prior year shirts. It is a great way to strike up conversations. “Boy, it was hot” or “how about that mile six?”
7. The best time to wear a race t-shirt is when no one has any idea how hard the event is. “Catfish crawl, now what did you have to do for that?” Perfect times are work parties and class reunions.

Like all of your coaches I have seen a ton of race shirts from Ironman champions to someone doing a half marathon in a Spiderman suit. But out of all of the coolmax and cotton combinations I have watched during a race or at the parties the best t-shirt wasn’t the one that said “Finisher.” It was the one a friend wore that said “Cancer Free.”

Click to see Golden Gate Park and Great Highway.

Songs of Summer

While there might not be a price on childhood memories with the advent of ITunes nostalgia costs $.99 to download. It was in one of those “late night/why not click” whims that I decided to purchase Colin Hay’s solo album of mostly acoustic covers of his old band, Men at Work.

Men at Work are one of those awkward bands in the history of rock; the ones that sound absolutely brilliant for a couple of months then taste like a red white wine hangover. Depending on your decade they were the Hanson or Black Eye Pea’s of their day. They were from Australia, and their lyrics had southern hemisphere coolness. In the pre-google days of the world there was no easy way to know what exactly a vegemite sandwich was without being clued in by a knowing older sibling or cousin. There was the tinge of sexuality to their words - my friends debated the subtext of “A Land Down Under.” Still it isn’t a sin to put sex into Rock and Roll; their mistake was to use an overproduced horn section that Huey Lewis + Phil Collins would use to ruin the rest of the decade.

So what I expected when I downloaded the album was a slightly overpriced smirk, the kind of laugh when you look your high school haircut and you are pleased of how much more mature you are even if you never will be hip enough to set up a myspace account. I put my headphones on and then clicked on the first tune, “Beautiful World” with cheeks fully ready to chuckle at more vegemite references.

What I got was completely unexpected. Colin Hay is actually really good. Stripped away from saxophones and down to just a guitar he is a talented lyricist. Not all groups can pull that off. Nirvana’s “a mosquito, my libido” is only a shade different than “a spider sat down beside her”. If only Humpty Dumpy had long blond hair and facial stubble we would talk about how much of an egg genius he was.

I like to think running as other sports stripped down, the acoustic set of soccer without the ball or cycling without the bike. George Plimpton’s theory of sports writing was the smaller the ball, the better of literature. And unless world class sunbathing makes the Olympics it doesn’t get much more minimal than running.

Cherish this yin. As my high school English teacher would write about my sentences – simplify, simplify, simplify. Enter the yoga mind state when you run. Work on that inner narrator. Reflect. But always check for cars.

For safety sake, we are going to start to run without IPods so the sounds of our runs will be traffic mixed with imagination. It gives you the chance to develop the mental mix tape of your life with footsteps and breath as the rhythm section and the occasional “go team” as a chorus. Take time to craft your own lyrics.

The last time I ran, I wondered about Colin Hay and how it must be to go through life overshadowed by genius of youth played too loudly. A New York Times article mentioned about how high school stars later in life stopped exercising, and what I appreciate about Colin Hay is how he avoided this fate and keeps returning to road even if they are smaller crowds. It is a marathoner’s philosophy, and one of the proudest things to take this season is the knowledge that you are out there trying as well. The daily soundtrack of our lives is neither applause nor rock, but heartbeats at a threshold.

Beautiful World Colin Hay

My my my it’s a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea.

And still this emptiness persists
Perhaps this is as good as it gets
When you’ve given up the drink and those nasty cigarettes
Now I leave the party early at least with no regrets
I watch the sun as it comes up I watch it as it sets
Yeah this is as good as it gets.

Click to see July Fourth Inverness Road Race map.

Lance

My dentist follows the Tour de France. I mentioned cycling to him and for the entire time I was being scraped and flossed I learned about the rain, the cobblestones and the courage of the riders until he paused for a moment and I could see him dreaming of the French country side, the small farm towns next to battlefields, the crowds waving their flags and inflatable whales, the brutal heat of the Pyrenees, the narrow turns on cobblestone roads, and the long climb at Alpe D’uez. I then gargled and rinsed.

Cycling has skyrocketed in popularity because of the cult of Lance. He casts a long shadow over the sport, and if we are spending our summers using slow twitch muscles to fundraise for cancer research then he is as good as role model as they come. His yellow bracelets have become the most popular new men’s jewelry since digital watches decades ago, a symbol not of social affiliation but of personal aspiration.

We all wish we could be like Lance - except for that whole getting testicular cancer part (even Superman had kryptonite). The weekend roads of Marin are now clogged with the spandex hordes. The tightest fitting clothes are no longer on Castro Street, but on Alpine Dam and Lucas Valley Road. These packs of riders pound in a single line formation like a multi-segmented, multi-colored centipede as the scent of oak trees and asphalt rushes past their helmets. They signal with their hands, shout “car up” and “on your left”, and share my dentist’s daydream of perhaps winning a stage or perhaps helping a teammate to a jersey, but the only victories they have are hammering a hill in the correct gear and the exhausted satisfied nod that even though the ride was hard it was worth it.

There is, however, a bad taste to the Tour this year. Like governmental transitional problems that hit both King Lear and Iraq, the succession to a post tour Lance hasn’t run smooth. Three of the major heirs - Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and Francisco Mancebo - were linked to a drug syndicate in Spain. While cycling has always been on the forefront of the chemical alloys to create better frames for bike, it has also been on the chemical forefront for better bodies for the riders.

One of the techniques now banned is to draw blood out a few months before the race and then return it back to the system so there are more red blood cells to transport oxygen almost, to excuse the pun, in the same vein as leukemia patients being able to extract their own bone marrow and receive it after their system has been nuked. We are entering an era were we can make biological promises to our future selves, but there is a difference in that one is bone marrow for survival and the other is oxygen for endorsements. We don’t want to destroy innovation, but we need to limit our Frankenstein urges.

And so we must return to Lance. Even if the purity of the modern athlete as been tainted with the advances of biology, there is a simpler truth is that medicine gave Lance the chance to ride again. It gave inspiration to a nation that has been too often sitting on couches and that confused golf as exercise. People went on the road and learned to love putting sunscreen below their eyes to avoid it mixing with sweat. And from a deeply personal perspective I am quite happy that my dentist can work out his issues with pain on hill repeats.

So what does Mr. Armstrong do after the seven victories and after being Sheryl Crow’s favorite mistake? This year instead of going long in France, he is going hard in New York. This year isn’t about the bike. This is the year he is going to do a marathon. Like with several of you, it will be his first.

Click to see Blackie's Pasture Map.

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.