On Email

I promised I'd write. I think everyone in the yearbook signing frenzy does. And it wasn't just in true good friends’ books that I pledged to communicate faithfully, but it also happened to those strange connections like "shared a good laugh backstage during a musical," or "sat next to in AP Bio," and most often "had a crush but really didn't do much about it" people’s yearbooks that my ink touched. Graduations (and their lesser photocopied cousins, Reunions) are the wakes of adolescence complete with eulogies for the victims, a few tunes of nostalgia for the audience, and snacks afterwards for everyone. Though it is a time to say goodbye, most are unwilling in the way that we chant encore at the end of a concert in the hope that just maybe there could be one more song, one last chord. And so we promise we will write.

The letting go of this notion happens weeks or months later when perhaps new friends push out old memories or the hobgoblins of everyday life catch up with us. We get too busy to send a simple note. I didn’t write much for years after high school. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. I have at best an improvisational sense of grammar and am medically certified at skipping words. To write was to be afraid of exposing these inadequacies. As a math and computer science major most of my words were variable names.

At the fifth reunion I promised I write though I was unaware of how hard grad school was going to be. The conversations at fifth reunions are about how you can’t believe you are drinking with the faculty on the Mesa (the ones for the tenth are about marriage, and the fifteenth are about kids). Writing was a drunken promise, and these are seldom kept.

It was in the after moments of the tenth reunion when a small group of us were at a diner in Carpentaria, and as we lingered over pancakes and that the concept that one of our classmates came back with a sex change I promised once again that I would write. Technology had changed to the point that most of us were excited by having email accounts (it was early enough that we didn’t know that we would spend a good portion of our careers going through our in-boxes). Instead of hand stamping envelopes we could to string a few names together separated by semicolons and click send. The effort level to correspond had been lowered; it was possible to be a lazy writer.

And the writing became lazier too. Full sentences became optional as did capitalization and spelling. Exclamation points grew like weeds. In this grammatical haze, I felt that my own insufficiencies weren’t that much different than everyone else’s, and I did something quite unprecedented.

I wrote.

The first few emails about an improv class were clumsy and my most recent about my water heater still missed words, but over the last ten years I have sent every few months to a handful of friends and other assorted random people from Cate pieces about life. I believe that everyone should have an adventure every couple of months. Each of us has a good story about what happened last week. Looking back at mine there were probably a little too many about exercise and not enough pieces about how exactly I did something about the crushes, but a past can’t be edited. It can be forgotten though.

Writing is our civilization’s memory. It is our notes to our future selves. It fills the need to share what we feel is important.

Write.

Be mindful of the gatekeepers to the written world. I don’t want to minimize the importance of grammar. Our current president has shown the danger that comes from opaque syntax (I wonder if he accidentally spellchecked Iraq into Iran). Clarity matters. Bad grammar deflects the reader from the piece’s trail of logic and minimizes the acceptance of an argument.

But I also believe that sometimes you need to chuck whatever poorly constructed ideas you have out into the world. Writing is about hitting the send key and then dealing with the consequences. (Blogging is about hitting the save key and hoping someone browses). Sometimes these half formed thoughts collide with someone else half formed ideas, and they fuse together briefly before decaying like uranium in a reactor or the Police getting back together for a reunion tour. Sometimes people are actually helpful with giving you grammar suggestions, though sometimes you get comments back that you should use fewer metaphors in business communications.

Write.

It might be only ever so often. It might be only about a field near your house (this worked well for Robert Frost). It might offend (and if counter argument seems reasonable then write it again). It might be ignored. But write and hit send anyway.

Society has always had a class of professional writers. They used be called scribes, then later monks, and finally communication specialists. Steal their techniques but graft on your own thoughts. There will always be the need for the professionals because they are so much more fun to read, but in the last decade the internet has created a world where amateurs can contribute. Take advantage of this but play nicely.

Write.

I promise I will.

From the Department of the Interior

I have trust issues with my water heater. We had many good years together sharing my apartment in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Its grumblings and hissing were the purring of a pet I never had. Its warmth comforted me on foggy summer mornings.

But all relationships have their struggles. I came home one day and discovered that it had burped a small lake in my kitchen. Perhaps it wanted more independence, that it felt tied down as just being an appliance, or that it wasn’t getting enough attention for taking care of the homestead. The plumbers said it was an issue with the vents. I knew something brewed deeper.

I caught it again a week later in an angry hissy fit. The plumbers came back and replaced the pressure gauge and assured me that everything would be fine. But after you are twice soaked how do you back to the happier times? How do you not hear a grumble and wonder if there is a tantrum coming soon? As Al Green would ask: How do you mend a broken valve?

I don’t believe that we are the sum of our possessions, but I do believe that we carry their weight. Whatever interior decorating style I have can be described as "bachelor cluttered." For me a remodel is installing the new version of Microsoft Vista (the Paris Hilton of operating systems – attractive through serious cosmetics, but fundamentally neurotic underneath). My living room is a snake pit of cords, unread magazines, and clothes; all of which do not mix well with water.

A television dominates the far wall, and last week I stumbled into a new program called "Top Design" that is about interior decorators battling for a $100,000. Though I have a certain love for the Bravo shows where talented people compete (Project Runway, Top Chef), interior decorating isn’t exactly something I know quite much about. I started watching the program and saw several of the usual personality types – a couple of bitchy artists, a few theorists who lacked the hands-on-skills, a few blowhards, and some general exceedingly creative people who let their work speak for itself. What I didn’t expect was seeing was someone I knew.

Andrea Keller, one of the contestants, had the same "Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club" bangs that she had in high school. With her eyes half covered she is just as mysterious now as she was then. As opposed to my very much on the surface ramblings, you always got the sense with her that there were deep wheels turning. Her website bio (http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/bio/Andrea ) says that she now speaks twice the number of languages than she has sons, and I do believe that if she were a verb tense she would be the subjunctive with its way of dealing of possible worlds and tricky conjugation.

She needs this sense of possibilities to deal with the program's challenges. For the first contest they gave the designers five objects from a mystery client, and in teams of two they had to turn a blank three-walled space into a sanctuary.

As I cheered deeply for Andrea, I learned how to root for home designers. The first tip was that they were given a $50,000 dollar budget that I really think would have helped with my living room cord problem. Her electronics were putting lights underneath a bed, which I think would make me find a few socks that have been missing for years. http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/rate/episode_1/ryan_andrea.shtml

As to picking colors, the secret is to use schemes that no football team would ever use. Andrea had this shade of green that looked like healthy kelp. She used red shelves and a chair to bring contrast and guide your eyes in a circle around the room. It balanced the bed on the left, and the white edges she painted along the edges of the room framed the whole thing like the picture in the television she was given as an inspiration.

The judges thought of it more as a field goal than a touchdown, but it was good enough for her to move on to the next round. I breathed a sigh of relief and was quite content to have something to root for now that football season is over.

I don’t know what the next challenges will bring – are they going to do a dorm room or a taco stand, a dot com space or a post office? Will the new clients be supportive or demanding? But I do know I will be watching on Wednesday nights on Bravo just to see the bravery of someone from high school making it in the world creatively. And if they happen to have a show that helps in dealing with temperamental plumbing I will be cheering hard for a dry tranquility.

Happy New Years

I know that it has been over a month. December is my busiest for work and something has to pay the bills. I promise to write more.

In the meantime I did my favorite run: Arch Rock on New Year's.

Click to see map.

The Arch Rock Long Course

The Simmer

Yesterday was the first dinner date with S_, a wonderful blind date set-up who is intelligent, sporty, and cute. I went home at my early time. In a large bit of optimism I wanted to make my apartment smell nice and the best way to do this is to slowly simmer soup. I chopped up the usual assortment of cauliflower, potatoes, and mushrooms, added both apples and brussel sprouts for a bit of oomph, and let the concoction simmer in chicken stock. The smells of a healthy lifestyle wafted through to my living room that the house cleaners had just attended.

With the soup slowly reducing and feeling the need to relax a little before the date I decided to a small workout at the 24-hour Fitness down the street. There were a couple of exercise bikes available and I picked the one farthest from the window. The pedals had the straps that go across the top of a foot and let you pull up as well as push down. About a minute into my routine the strap on my right side became down and I reached down to buckle it back. This was a bad idea.

The buckle had a metal hook that attached it to the strap, and this spike went deep into my right thumb. I tried to pull up but the metal had been clamped in by the plastic part of the buckle and pulling sideways was going to take off most of the flesh. I politely asked the head trainer a few machines over "Could you please help?"

He came over and looked incredulous about how I did that. He and the other trainer quickly removed the entire strap from the exercise bike and equally quickly came to the same conclusion that the spike was hooked in deeply. It was 6:15, the date was an hour and fifteen minutes away, and while I think it is important to show that you exercise I don’t think you should show up to a dinner with actual equipment still lodged inside yourself.

I went to the emergency room. Normally there is a quite a wait to be seen, but if you are bleeding with a hook in your finger they don’t make you fill out as much paper work. I was quickly given a tetanus shot, but had to wait a bit to get x-rays. The technician was a bit of an artist and constantly wanted to shift the angle of my hand for the perfect exposure, but the movement caused the spike to shift around my thumb and the pain chilled me. Thankfully a few minutes later I finally got a local anesthetic. A few minutes later a doctor using a clamp unlodged my thumb. It was 7:15. All I needed was the nurse, Ian, to come over to clean and dress the wound.

I waited and kept watching the clock.

7:20 Nurse Ian goes down the hall.

7:25 Nurse Ian chats with the front desk.

7:30 S_ is probably at the restaurant.

7:35 Nurse Ian goes down the hall again.

7:40 S_ is probably a little upset that I haven’t shown.

7:42 Nurse Ian comes into dress the wound. He tells me that he would rather take his time and be thorough rather than patch me quickly. Since infection is a real risk with a puncture would I am not in a real position to argue, but it is slowly becoming

7:44 ...

7:46 Nurse Ian is finished and I run to the restaurant

7:51 I arrive at Chez Nous, but S_ has left. There would be no date.

I lumbered the few blocks home and realized I missed my opportunity. It took two weeks to get a day that S_ was available, and she is not unusual for people in this city. We are perpetually burdened by work or hobbies. The scant openings in schedules occur less often than rainstorms. The city is not a place where relationships build slowly with continuous stirring; there isn't enough time to let things simmer and instead we have microwave dating, the brief intense meetings arranged by the radiation of cell phones or email messages. The city is hooked on speed.

I made it home and rushed to the phone to apologize to S_. I promise if we go out again I will spend the entire day beforehand away from sharp pointy objects. She might be available sometime next week, but I can feel the hesitancy in her voice. I am sure that when she dreams of her ideal man, the word "klutz" isn’t mentioned much.

We chatted briefly about her Minnesota thanksgiving, and then said goodbye. I am left in my cold apartment and I realize that the burnt smell coming from my kitchen is what happens when things don't correctly simmer.

Someone Like You

Normally during my lazy Saturday morning breakfast I stick to the sports section to learn how our local teams are either heading south in the standings or location, but this last time while nursing my mocha I stumbled across in the entertainment section a particular event, Couples, Computers, and Gaming day. I almost spilt my mocha. For a late thirties single guy, hearing that there would be an all day event at the Ruby Skye featuring among other things a female Swedish Quake team who all lived in the same house, was a discovery somewhere between finding money that it made through the laundry and stumbling across that the cable company had accidentally unscrambled the Spice Channel. Ruby Skye is one of the hippest nightclubs in San Francisco, a place known for its DJ's pulsating out techno music into a room filled with epilepsy inducing strobe lights, a place where the acid trips of the sixties morphed into the ecstasy raves of the nineties, a place where just perhaps a group of Swedish women would be for an afternoon of coupling and computers.

This could have been the best day ever.

I arrived anxious. The club had the velvet ropes out in front, the traditional barrier separating the cool from the unworthy, and a larger bouncer worked the door. I tried my best to work the nonchalant geeky chic, the kind of confidence that comes from having the finest wireless devices stashed in one's pockets. Granted I didn't have the latest technology, but I doubt this mountain of a man was going to know.

The ticket booth was harder to pass. Two women worked the counter, and when I started to buy the ticket they asked the tough question: "Only one?"

"Yes, only one," I muttered feeling the same way I do when my parents ask if there was anyone special I want to bring to a holiday dinner. I hadn't realized that the event was BYOP (bring your own partner), and had sort of hoped that it would have more of a Burning Man kind of vibe, a day where cables weren't the only thing being hook up. With my palm pilot turned off and my cell phone set to vibrate I quickly went into the main dance area. There I saw something completely unexpected - a panel discussion.

It was a talk about games.

On the stage four women sat in folding chairs as a moderator passed a microphone between them. In front of them on the floor a crowd that was at least 90% male if not also 90% wearing sweatshirts watched the discussion. I felt I was not the only person there who wore a Star Trek uniform for Halloween.

The eldest of the panelists began by telling how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction in the new version of the game, Tomb Raider. She added that if publishers wanted to attract female gamers that they should have a way to skip the combat sequences and to have options where there isn't as much score keeping. I think she was going to continue about how there should be more cuddling after game play, but the next panelist started her session.

She was the publisher for the Desperate Housewives game that mimics the television show and allows the gamers to redecorate there own suburban home, gossip with characters from the show, or hook up with the pizza guy (tastefully off screen). Apparently there wasn't an option that lets the self-absorbed yuppies get crushed by a bad mortgage (or preferably space aliens), but there is always hope for the sequel. She talked about how she met her husband through gaming and that every week they host a Halo party. So far only guys attend the parties.

The next panelist began that she met her ex-boyfriend through gaming. The use of the "ex" couldn't have made the crowd more excited unless it was followed by the word "box". The bliss was short lived; the speaker lost 80 pounds by playing Dance Dance Revolution and then dumped the guy for an upgrade. She now hosts Star Wars fashion shows on the massively multiplayer version of the game where Wookies compete in the best evening gown or swimsuit. This to me seemed to be a complete waste of the furry creatures, because I thought their perfect use would be gunning down the Desperate Housewives, and I am deeply hoping for some conference synergy.

The last speaker was the Swedish Quake player, and the crowd had long given up that she might be single. She talked about the house and how she and her friends crush guys in tournaments. She went into the training that sounded triathlon-like in terms of commitment. Her wrist has been injured, and she wore a leather brace that Billy Idol would have if he ever got carpal tunnel syndrome. I have no doubt her team destroys everyone.

The panel was then open up to questions. I missed the first one, but the first panelist answered with how sexy a plain white shirt could be and repeated how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction. The moderator then went out into the audience to the mid-thirties guy seated a few rows ahead of me. As he stood, he wiped the top of his balding head. After a quick "test" into the microphone, he began his question in a soft voice to the Swede.

"Where can I find someone like you?"

The Maps of Our World

There are later stages of an origin, the ones after the moment is no longer innovative but still interesting enough to be spread out into the world, that can matter. Our universe began with a Big Bang, but the longer simmer was equally fascinating.

John Mather and George Smoot won 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in cosmic background radiation. In 1964, Penzias and Wilson had unexpected noise when conducting radio experiments. This disruption caused by the prevalent background radiation of the cosmos, was the first evidence to support that the universe was expanding as opposed to being in a steady state. If the universe was expanding then it would cool as it grew since atomic particles would have further to travel before collisions. When the temperature dropped enough to allow protons and neutrons to form hydrogen atoms, roughly 400,000 years after the start of the Big Bang, radiation became transparent that caused the noise discovered Penzias and Wilson. In 1989 this radiation was better mapped by satellite called COBE that John Mather and George Smoot were the principle investigators. The world indeed looked to be expanding.

The Internet also has had a simmer after the great bust.

Its beginning came out of the defense department and existed for a couple of decades to mostly connect scientists with the people who gave them grants. The origin was more like the beginnings of eukaryotes. The primordial soup long had been fermenting for a billion years and testing out various evolutionary recipes until it stumbled across a combination that worked like Johnny and The Moondogs kept trying new drummers until they found this guy named Ringo Starr and changed their name to the Beatles. They had early hits like “She Loves You,” just the Eukaryotes who billions of years earlier formed their own super group called multi cellular organisms had early hits like “Mitosis”) The internet’s big hit, a web browser, was remarkable in that it was the first piece of technology to come with a built in metaphor about arachnid domiciles already built in. Technologist and hack writers, like this author, have been abusing language ever since. The first major linguistic abuse was putting the letter “e” in front of words like commerce, bay, or pets. This lasted for a few years until the venture money ran out or Bush got elected, and quickly the visionaries shifted by switching to the letter “i” in front of words like tunes and pod. Only a brave futurist will guess whether the next Internet wave will start with the vowel “o” or move into a more exotic constant like “h.” or “j”

For the less brave futurists, the Internet is harder to grasp. It seems to exist everywhere in a constant hum of emails, text messages, podcasts, pictures, and videos – the background radiation of our modern world. One of the great cables that is used to extend it is Ethernet, and the term captures the umbilical chord nature of the wire that goes out of our machine into a place that we really aren’t sure. It is ether.

But what has been happening recently is that there is a branch of the Internet that is being tied to maps. Granted driving instructions have been around for a while, but with Google Maps it is now possible to create your own version of world and link the markers and routes of your existence. (This is a good set of instructions). This technology is being combined with blogs (Outside.in), events (eventpedia.net ), and cute girls in Colorado(hottiespots.com). http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com// has a more complete list.

I have started to add my own such as haikus made about cheering marathon runners and a race I did in Alaska. But I am a relative latecomer compared to those who have built out maps for the world of warcraft or where Oscar winners were born. The new branch of the Internet is more of an Intraweb with the ideas of the world now mapped to physical locations. We had that kind of context before in yellow pages, but what makes it different other than being able to search for everything near a given location is that anyone can contribute. The world has expanded to where the information has been broken down into protons and electrons, and people are free to build out new mashups of their own by mixing particles of knowledge and geography.

Now if someone could just create a site that could find my keys…

Epilogue

The great meteorologist Mark Twain once wrote, "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes." And while that is true for the North East, the more local version is if you don't like the weather, just run a few miles. On Sunday for the Nike Marathon we were blessed with a sunny start and a foggy finish - climates that were wonderful for both runners and alliteration enthusiasts.

Life should always be served on a sampler platter.

This is the last email of the season, and my final bit of advice (other than after a marathon it is helpful to walk down stairs backwards) is to encourage you to continue to seek new experiences. For most of you, this has been an introduction to the world of endurance sports. Welcome. Please stay while.

At this point I don't need to tell you that marathons are hard. They are harder than anything else I have done with the exception of grad school. You should be deeply proud of how much you have accomplished and how far you have gone.

They are hard to the point that is common to have post event depression, to feel that the rest of ordinary life isn't as meaningful. This is quite normal in the same way that crying at a finish line is. Marathons toy not only with your quads, but also with your emotions.

They are also hard to the point that there is a difference between marathon "the lifestyle" and marathon "the event." I truly believe that everyone had a marathon in them. It might be a slow one. It might be foggy one. However, frequently running marathons is tricky. Constantly training at that level is when you start to hit major issues like body type and technique. I don't want to discourage you from trying, there are people who run all fifty states or 100 miles in a day, but realize that most of us have about three marathons in us.

Make these as special as you can. Running for a cause is a great thing to do.

But it is also good to try other endurance sports as well. My favorite Team in Training season (except, of course, Summer Run) is cross-country skiing. It does have the logistical issue of being away on Saturdays from 6am to 8pm, but it is such a beautiful sport. It combines the grace of the wilderness with a cardio workout equal to running while being far more forgiving. The race in Alaska has a wonderful vibe. It is the only time I have gone to a pre-race info session to learn about how to handle moose on the trail.

There is less chance of that in triathlons, but you will need to learn how to handle other riders on the road. There is an intensity to triathletes that is different than single sport junkies. I think it stems from the nervousness of balancing all three sports. The great danger of the sport is that it is quite addicting. You feel great doing triathlon training (at least at the half ironman distance or below. I have not gone further than that).

Bike touring and distance swimming are fun on their own.

As for me, my biggest cross training this season has been writing. During our first coaches' meeting I asked April if I could write the occasional piece. I have in the past written something about every two to three months, and I thought I would try something as daring as writing monthly. April, ever the wonderful coach who will push you farther than you think, of course, said something about writing weekly. This felt the same as the start of my first marathon season when I knew I signed up for the bounds of what I could possibly do, but that I was a long way from getting there. I knew I had one piece about clothing and one about my brother, but the rest I would have to improvise.

I like to think that some of them worked. I want to say thanks so much for the positive feedback you gave me during the season. I have gathered them along with my older pieces at http://LifeInRestAndMotion.blogspot.com .

The discipline of writing is similar discipline of running. The secret to both is to have a good calendar. I learned by doing both not to get too disappointed when having crappy day, but to try harder the next.

I want to continue to write and will admit that my next few pieces won't be about running at all. After these months I, too, need to sneak in a bit more variety. I plan to continue to post to the blog.

And after a small break I do also plan coming back to the road. I would love to see you there sometime as well. Mark Twain also wrote about San Francisco, but I think he had it backwards. I know that the warmest summer ever I spent was the season running with a few good friends.

Thanks for a great season. Take care.

Click to see a day of Nike haiku's..

Nothing New

The last koan is the running adage: nothing new on race day. Not shoes. Not food. You have arrived at this point ready. Your training has worked. You have seen this course. You have felt the weather. It is nothing new. You are good to go. Believe this.

And if we are doing nothing new this week, then I, too, am going to go back to the work that I wrote this season. This is nothing new:

Lay your running clothes out the night before the run.

Run your own pace, not your neighbors’ nor Joan Benoit’s.

Cheer everyone you see on the course even if it is with just a nod. It is their day, too.

Remember your legends - the Susan Butcher's, the Lance Armstrong's, the Pheidippides', the Charles Lindberg's of the world - the ones who reached for the horizon. They, too, were nervous, as is anyone who pushes their limits. But the world is a better place for their courage. The world is a better place for yours.

Wear sunscreen but not above your eyes.

Remember your friends both present and past. They are the mile markers of your life. With luck place a few of them on the course. Tell the ones who want to take photographs that you will look the best around mile six. Save the better conversationalists for Lake Merced and Ocean Beach. Offer the ones who cheer you on race day pizza. Write the others about your gratitude. After all this done, perhaps convince one of them to go for a run.

Hydrate.

Appreciate beauty. Seek it out everywhere from museums to concerts. From great poets to silly musicians. From views of the Bridge to the cute runner just up ahead. Never underestimate the power of a muse. It is what gives civilization purpose.

Remember your honorees.

Enjoy the race t-shirt. Wear it to the next family dinner. Be nonchalant about it.

This season began with the word "Go", and it ends at the same place. There is one last "Go" this season, one last early morning run through the city on the familiar routes we call home. You are ready.

Go team. Go.

Sloppy Joes

Twenty years ago my boarding school cafeteria served Sloppy Joes for lunch. I don’t mean this in the vague sense with which we look back at our youth – how mothers always seemed to make cookies, fathers always seemed to make pancakes, or grandmothers drank gin and tonic. The memory is more specific than that. On October 7, 1986, Cate School served Sloppy Joes. This, I am certain.

It was a gorgeous sunny day with the sky the color of blue that parents use for their infant boys. Except for summer fog the weather in Santa Barbara has a warmth that feels like a hug under the coziness of a wool blanket.

I remember that sun and those Sloppy Joes.

But this is where it starts to blur. I must have been coming from some class – maybe Pre Calc or AP Biology when I saw my father at school. He had been there a couple of weeks earlier for a board meeting, and I was surprised to see him. He looked pale. I don’t know if he had slept in three days.

My youngest brother, Edward, had been on an eighth grade class trip to Yosemite the week before. Normally quite enthusiastic, he was sluggish on the hikes. My family thought he was sandbagging a little, but a fellow parent who was a doctor recommended that he checked out the red spots on his legs. Those spots were what sent my father on a flight down to Santa Barbara. Those spots changed everything.

My father pulled me out of the lunch line to the small senior lawn underneath that warm Santa Barbara sun. Still shocked, he managed to get the words out. “Edward has leukemia.”

And now the rest blurs as if paint thinner was poured on the canvas of my memories. There was the first trip up where I saw my brother hooked on a dialysis machine. The chemotherapy had worked so well that it killed every cancer cell, but his kidneys couldn’t keep up with the dead material and went into renal failure. He screamed about the catheter.

There was the second trip up when I went to the hospital and I couldn’t recognize my brother. The cortisone made his cheeks puff out to chipmunk levels and the chemo had ruined his hair.

There was the helplessness of being away an unable to do anything, and then when I returned home there was the awkwardness of trying to blend into my family’s rhythms. They had their rotations down about who went to the hospital, who went to the pharmacy, and who helped organize the donation of blood. The best I could do was to be invisible. My parents yelled as me when I instinctively flinched when my brother puked on me. I was supposed to just sit there and take it. They had already got to that point and had little sympathy for anyone who was away and hadn’t been through their daily grind. Suffering at a distance was only mental anguish; the real hardship was the physical part.

The uncertainty got to us all. The language of medicine is one of probabilities. You hear about 70% chances or 20% effectiveness. You start to follow the platelets and neutrophils counts you get from his blood work harder than any baseball box score. You ask, “What does it mean that the count is low? Is that normal?” But normal was a long time ago. Those days before the red spots seem distant. We have a family picture on a tennis court at my grandparents’ place of all of us take the summer before, the last photograph of normalness. We wouldn’t take another family portrait for years.

There were two different protocols my brother could go on, and his wonderful doctor, Kate Mattay (younger then than I am now), ran a model to figure out which one to use. My brother called it the Big Spin.

We joked about things like that. We kidded that he was the only one taking steroids at the junior varsity soccer game. We played Nintendo. We ate the food my parents friends gave us – the cookies and the chocolate thoughtfully given. Edward loved Marina Subs on Steiner Street to the point that we wondered whether the sandwiches would be written up in a medical journal.

We are a family long on neither hugs nor religion, and so it was our wit that carried us through. Sometimes we cried.

That started twenty years ago, and there was no family celebration this past week. During a lunch at Chili Up in the Crocker Galleria, my father; my other brother, George; and I mentioned that it had been twenty years, and that was it. Afterwards I realized how much chili can look like Sloppy Joes.

This is my eighth year of doing Team in Training, and while I have enjoyed the exercise and the friends I have made, it is that feeling of not being able to help back in boarding school that drives me to return.

I know that I am not alone. Each week we have heard several dedications made about friends and love ones. The fabric of suffering looms large over us all, and I just wanted to say thanks to each of you for making a difference. You are fending off of against that void of helplessness. It is a great and noble thing.

My family is not celebrating this day. Dark things need only to be briefly acknowledged.

Instead we are going to get together the day before the marathon to cheer Edward’s daughter’s first birthday. She arrived in a better world than her father (now a doctor specializing in clinical trials for cancer medicine), and we will work hard to make it an even better one for her children. Thanks for helping this cause.

Ode to the ‘Zar

Led Zeppelin opened their 1973 show at Kezar Stadium with “Rock and Roll”. The pounding drums and symbols quickly accompanied first by Page’s flailing opening guitar rift and then Plants roaring vocal must have been the perfect start for a concert. The watershed moment of alliteration – one of the few times a band with a Z in a name played in a venue with a Z – was probably lost on the attendees. I have no idea whether the summer fog had come in that day, but with the venue’s location at the edge of Haight Ashbury, the weather must have been hazy. Nobody would have shouted “get off of the grass.”

Kezar was a much larger stadium then. Forty Niners played there until 1971– trying to throw passes while ducking the beer bottles thrown from the crowd. Dirty Harry was filmed there. It was a tough place; the grit center of a city. In 1989 it took an earthquake to rip out the blue-collar heart of San Francisco, and a while smaller version was rebuilt, it has been a long time since the place has rocked.

The music played there now is mostly on Ipods. At a 3:40 song length Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” is perfect for an 800 repeat. Like flowers after a volcano blast, running clubs and triathlon groups have sprouted in the newer version of the stadium. They form tight packs and run around either the eight-lane track next to the field or a paved road at the rim. There are stairs to run and places to stretch. The place has been transformed from social to physical toughness; from a place where most were spectators to one where most are athletes. Cherish this transition.

Still some principles remain the same. Creating a strategy for a marathon is like developing a set list for a concert. You already have the tunes - we have done the Nike course in sections – and the next step is to assemble the pace.

Come up with mantras for the race that reflect the gears you want to use. I have two – the one for hills sounds like something Samuel L. Jackson would say on a plane with reptiles, and as such isn’t printable. The other for the flats is “rock steady.” I have a habit of going out to fast so I need the words to hold me back.

Work on your own set. Reflect on how far you have come from those opening hills in the Presidio to the time along Ocean Beach. Remember the foggy evenings spent hustling in what was once one of the toughest stadiums in football and a show for one greatest metal bands of all time.

At the 1973 concert Zeppelin played “Stairway to Heaven” in the middle part, their taper before going to “Whole lot of love” and “Communication Breakdown.” Like most things with Zeppelin, I am not really sure what the lyrics mean (nor do I know what the four signs were about), but they are always great to say:

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all

To be a rock and not to roll.

Skipping the Light Fandango

We waited in small clusters around picnic tables underneath the large white tent for the bride to arrive. The rain hit against the roof of the tent as a Bill Holiday mix played through the band's amplifier. The groom, also late but not as much, waited at the edge of the parquet floor that would serve both as the chapel and the dance hall. The rain kept coming.

Some things take a while.

It is the second marriage for both of them, and there wasn't a reason a rush. The small group of friends and family that had gathered in their backyard weren't going anywhere. We listened to torch songs in the rain.

It was the first time I have been to the second wedding of someone whom I went to the first. I was there the night he met his first wife at a band audition, and he woke me that night to talk on the phone of how he loved her long black hair. Soon he loved the other parts of her as well, and as we drifted to other sides of the country we would see others lives in snap shots. I watched the arc of that relationship stretch first upwards and then too long.

So here we were again underneath a tent waiting for his new bride. The moment felt almost Buddhist to be reincarnated back to the beginning point of another journey but still with a little bit of karma from the first. There was no reason to hurry.

The new bride also has long black hair, but she keeps in under a hat most of the time. She has a similar mixture of energy and intelligence as her husband, and when they dance they look brilliant together. His lumbering has been roped in and her twirling gets pushed back to his chest before being launched once again out into the music. Some of their moves are choreographed from the classes they took together; some are improvised. I don't know when they officially started dating; their relationship seeped out of a friendship. Some things take a while.

Finally the bride arrived and after walking past the pool she stopped at the edge of the damp lawn. Her husband rushed to her and he carried her in his arms across the lawn and place her down of a friend of theirs who serving as a Minster.

The rain didn't stop at exactly the end of the ceremony, but it did end perhaps after the cake shaped like a guitar had been cut or perhaps during the time the groom played a set with a few of his old band mate friends before the main rockabilly group went on stage.

I danced with bride mostly to avoid the mosquitoes who were as almost well fed as the guests. The crowd grew larger and soon the groom side and bride side gathered under the steady dowap beat on the parquet floor. We swirled and dipped to celebrate friends promising again love forever in life that we know will sometimes be choreographed and sometimes be improvised.

sroking

The morning started badly; the catamaran that we booked for our race wasn't at the pickup point. Our group of six swimmers for the Maui Channel Swim Relay waited at dawn on Kaanpali beach as our leader frantically dialed to find out about the boat.

"Dude," the catamaran captain began in a sun bleached tone on the phone, "I am so sorry. The fuel line popped. The boat won't be able to make it."

Sorry wasn't really the word we wanted to hear after marking our calendars, spending the money to fly, renting the cars to travel, and waking far too early. Sorry wasn't going to stay next to us as we alternated swimmers into the water for the several miles of open water between the islands of Lanai and Maui. Sorry wasn't going carry our food and sun tanning lotion. Sorry wasn't going to get us to the swim start. At least he was kind enough to soften the blow with a "Dude."

The first great skill you need for endurance sports is a solid aerobic base. This is the glue that you acquire from months of consistent training. But only second to this base is the ability to rally. Our team leader earned his keep when he said "I have a possible backup boat." Now I am huge believer of bringing back up gear to a race - a few extra hammer gels are always a good idea, and second set of goggles is pretty handy. But a back up boat is pretty huge.

Another team on the beach lent us their zodiac to travel a mile out towards the drifting catamaran, which let us fetch our food and what was apparently an overnight visiting blond. Our sea captain had mentioned to us about how great his ships stereo system was and about how he loved learning about humpback whales in his time spent at some capacity at Sea World. As much as that worked for getting us to book a day trip with him, it was even better at the Rusty Harpoon bar. When the zodiac returned from the catamaran, she jumped on shore and rushed to the parking lot mumbling "I have to catch my flight." Our ex-captain was going to miss our fees, but his weekend wasn't entirely unlucky.

Our leader found a cell number given out at the night before race meeting and woke up our possible new skipper. Like the maritime version of the Wolf from Pulp Fiction the new captain said he would be at the dock in twenty minutes. He was a sailor's sailor - his scraggly white beard puffed out in splotches from his sun burnt face. He was only an "arrgh" away from being an actual pirate. I am sure he shits seaweed.

We rushed down to Lahaina to see our new craft that was, in a word, cozy. But since our new requirements for a boat had been reduced to "operating" we took it.

"The boat only holds six people" our skipper barked. The girlfriend of one of the swimmers wasn't going to be able to go, and we debated whether or not a case of beer counted as passenger. This turned out a rather optimistic sense of the day.

A couple of us had done the race the year before and we felt we were experts the same way that sophomores think that they are better than freshmen because they have figured out their acne medicine. Last year we finished the race at 4:18 roughly two hours after the first beer was poured. This year we approached the race with the same casual attitude spending more time thinking our team name "Keep Stroking Sweetie" then actually spellchecking our flag. We forgot the "T" in "stroking" to make the new word "sroking." If we had done this race for a charity, then we should have picked literacy.

After loading the beer and way behind schedule we rushed out of the harbor towards Lanai. We hit our first bit of chop almost immediately, and as we headed towards the starting line the waves steadily increased to the point the boat would surf down their fronts and then make a quick turn to avoid the bow dipping into the sea. We would have to swim back against this water.

The first person puked just after the boat reached the starting line. The third swimmer lost most of the Bad Ass coffee she drank that morning off of the stern while our queasy second swimmer hung out near the bow. We talked about changing the order of our racers, but decided that it would be the best if they got into the water as soon as possible.

The gun went off and our team of bad spellers started against the ex-Olympians, assorted Australians, and whoever else was foolish enough to go out in this weather. As the pack of swimmers made there way through the boats that would parallel them for the race, we realized that our best swimmer was towards the back. We were only going to drop further as the race continued.

Our first swimmer returned to the boat and moaned a simple "ugh". The second swimmer did indeed do better in the water than the boat, but the third swimmer puked both halfway through her first leg and then shortly after returning and hustling up to bow. I was the fifth leg and I quickly realized the issue of swimming in waves bigger than our boat.

This was going to be more like boxing than swimming.

During the 30 minutes of my first leg and in between those moments where I foolishly tried to breath on the left side only to receive a mouthful of water I was able to breakdown the sea into two classifications: the swells and the chop.

The swells were the determined but steady ushers of the ocean. The secret was to let these mountains of water decide when to look out in front to figure out at where to aim at West Maui. They weren't gentle anymore than say riding an elephant would be, but they weren't overly mean.

The chop was when you swore. They slapped, pushed, and at one time knocked my goggles off. The chop was nasty.

We each finished our thirty minute legs and then started to do 10 minute rotations. Of all of the bravery I have seen during any race, the deepest rally I have ever witnessed was our third swimmer who vomited after each of her legs and still returned to the water. Next year I think we should get a sponsorship from Dramamine.

I think it was my second leg, but who knows it could have been my fourth, when I got my first sea hallucination. Later on shore my fellow swimmers all said that they too saw things in the water which were most likely patches of foam off of white caps, shadows from waves, or specks on goggles. Still there couldn't help be an uneasy feeling for those who forgot to do TV parental block for the Discovery Channel's shark week. The race has a little bit of a reputation for hungry spectators.

We did our best through the rotations. We dropped off a swimmer shortly before the end of each turn who would wait until the swimmer finishing the rotation would tag them. The exhausted finishing swimmer would somehow limp back to boat which always seemed to be twice as far as the distance covered in the rotation.

We passed the five hour mark and still were enough far away that we could not see the small craft advisory warnings that flapped along the coast of Maui. We went to six hours, and then to seven.

There is an abbreviation that to describe races days like these, those hard days of bad weather when the temperature is over 100 during a triathlon or that is snowing for a 50k ski race: GFU, generally fucked up. They are a part of any endurance career. The trick is to realize early that it is going to be a longer day and slow down. There are races you rush for time, but on days of GFU you go just to say you finished. (And when diving into nasty water helps to say "you can finish" just to get you to go.)

With tired shoulders and empty stomachs we rallied.

Somehow we finished and barely had time to shower before heading to the quiet victory banquet. We weren't the only ones battered, but we were in awe of the 17 swimmers who soloed the entire channel. The first female swimmer napped during the awards. No one was moving fast.

After a victory mai tai we, too, went to sleep and waited the next day to go to our catamaran captain and return the cooler that we grabbed at dawn with our unused beer. He paddled from his catamaran in his dingy. This time he had a brunette. She stumbled out of the boat, rushed bowlegged to her jeep, and burnt rubber away from him. Without losing a beat he asked how our race went.

Some of our teammates filled him in on the trip. They talked about the waves and the sea sickness. They talked about the sun and the long looks at the horizon. They talked how the ground kept feeling like it bobbed during meals and ultimately the pleasure of being able to wear the race t-shirt.

"Dude," he replied. "I totally had some ginseng that would have helped."

I don't know if our race over time will wander into a legend, whether is room for another shanty at the Rusty Harpoon. A veteran of 22 channel races said this was the toughest he has done so it has the outside possibility. But what I would like to wish for is that there is an evening in a small seaside bar when a sailor mentions the time he met a few swimmers who braved the roughest of seas. I hope there is a small little pause as he wonders what it would have been like to been out there before he looks up at a daiquiri saturated redhead and tells her how great is to listen to sounds of humpback whales over a brand new stereo system.

Aloft

The Maui marathon winds away from Charles Lindbergh's grave. As a fan of endurance Lindbergh was around for the first Maui marathon though I don't know if he made the trip from his A-Frame house that he spent the last years of his life under the tropic starry skies a few miles away from the sea. He was buried close that home at Palapala Ho'omau Church in Kipahulu. His plot is one of the few things that was quiet about his life.

In 1927 at the age of 25 on a late day in May Charles boarded the plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, at Roosevelt Air force base on Long Island and headed east. Two hours later he saw Cape Cod to his right as his plane hovered 150 feet above the water. Seven hours later he passed by the southern edge of Newfoundland. He left the airplane windows open and hoped the cool air would stop him from falling asleep.

He was a man stuck between epochs - a 19^th century explorer stuck with 20^th century media. In an earlier time John Henry would battle the development of the railroads, but as the first modern hero, Lindbergh embraced engineering. There is a certain kind of faith in machines that defines modern life; we are slaves to our blackberries, our cubicles, and our cars. Airplane travel has changed from a lone pilot's adrenaline from keeping from falling asleep to five dollar drinks to help the passengers make sure that they do. All such epoch need a herald. Some of the greatest changes in civilization come from slightly delirious 25 year olds.

As tired as he was over the Atlantic, I believe that must have been his favorite moment. I think if he could he would have spent the rest of his days alone and aloft. The Greeks were wrong about Icarus. The hardest part about trying to reach for the stars isn't about flying too high. It is the part when you have to return to the ground.

The world worshipped his journey. He won the Pulitzer Prize, the Boy Scout Silver Buffalo, the French Legion of Honor, and the silver cross of the German Eagle. Tall and of Swedish descent, he was one of the most photogenic people of his time. Three years after his flight he had his first child, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III.

Shortly before his son turned two he was kidnapped and 10 weeks later he was found dead a few miles away from his home. The trial for the murder was even larger than O.J's, and in the end after the execution the Lindbergh's headed to Europe to be away from the frenzy of the media.

It was, however, not a quiet time on the old continent. Lindbergh, ever a tinkerer, worked with the French surgeon, Alexis Carrel, to create a glass perfusion pump that allowed major progress in heart surgery, but the Germans had a different use for engineers and were developing a war machine. The German aviators so loved Lindbergh that he was invited to fly some of their new planes. He reported his results back to the United States, but this did little to sway the American public from being upset that Lindbergh did not return German Medal of Honor given to him by Hermann Göring.

The best that can be said for Lindbergh he that he picked the wrong war to be an isolationist. Though against Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews, he at times sounded like Mel Gibson when blaming them for getting the US into the war. (Unlike Mel, this was before the holocaust). President Roosevelt openly questioned his loyalty and refused to let him return to the Army Air Corps. Lindbergh had no sense of politics and was lost in the battle between countries.

The world must have made far more sense during his plane flight when the rules were simpler. Stay awake or die. Keep a straight course or die. Have faith in the machine.

Lindbergh was a pioneer at human endurance. But he was lousy at the calms.

For ourselves the calm period after the last long run is called the taper. It is an in-between time with the main goal is to let the body heal. We also want to keep fresh so we need to do a few runs before the big event. Relax during this time. It is one of the few times in your life that the best way to get better is cut down on your exercise. (Don't eliminate it entirely though). You can't make yourself faster between now and race. Take it easy. And as much as I think it is important to have new adventures, this period is not a great time to pick up a new sport like say aerobatics.

And like the Maui Marathon veering away from Lindbergh's grave, approach the taper the opposite way than Charles did life before the war. You can't be neither an isolationist removed from exercising entirely nor a tinkerer trying to figure out how to improve things. You have done the training; you are good to go. Enjoy the quiet time.

Charles must have loved Maui, the tropical island halfway across the pacific where the villagers left him alone. It is a beautiful place where you can watch the sunrise on Haleakala and watch it set behind Lanai. The south is ever dry and sunny while the winds on the north side are legendary for the surf. It is a compromise between the convenience of Oahu and the beauty of Kaui. I am sneaking there this weekend for a swim and plan to scout a bit of the course and a few of the mai tais.

Lindbergh became a spokesperson for wildlife preservation. He campaigned to protect endangered species like humpback and blue whales, and he supported the establishment of a national park. He died 34 years ago on August 26^th from Lymphatic cancer. His gravesite quotes Psalm 139: "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea..."

Mile Markers

It is my birthday again, and this event has long since slipped away from childhood exuberance to a more melancholy reflection of that parallel universe where my closet has less triathlon gear. Birthdays ricochet you back into endless introspection more than anything save weddings; both are celebrations of an old set of possibilities being replaced with new hopes. To have been to both in the past week is a bit like wandering through Versailles and staring into the infinity of mirrors on opposites sides of its rooms.

It is a great week for a long run.

So consider yourself fortunate that we are going far this weekend; for some it will be the last long run before the marathon. There is a natural anxiety for the final long training run both in preparation the night before and afterwards when pondering “is this all there is?” It is easy to worry about the distance, to have the feeling that you have to do at least 20 miles, but the real truth is that the last long run is only a fraction of the total training volume during the course of the season, a part of the program but only a small one. Several books advocate your last long run should be determined by time not distance, and in Europe they tend to do 30k ~ 18.3 miles, which is also the same distance I did when I did my best.

What I am trying to say is the last long run is an important to a marathon as a wedding is to a marriage. Everyone wants a great wedding, the magic day captured by photographs and toasts, but from what I have seen as an outsider to marriages is that they aren’t defined by their celebrations, but by their ability to handle the unexpected at two o’clock in the morning or some random Tuesday. Humor, good dance moves, general agreement about money, kids, and religion, and endless patience help.

The wedding I went to was a collection of friends from my first marathon season in 1999. It is symbol of my aging (like my hair gently frosting) that my friends’ weddings have shifted from production numbers fueled by parents with baseball team number of groomsmen and bridesmaids to quieter celebrations for the participants. Many years out from school we now have other groups of friends besides our classmates, but instead of being a larger celebration it has become harder and harder to get these friends from different parts of our lives together.

It had been a long time since the old marathon group was together and it was great to see everyone again. Under a lazy Los Altos sun we huddled around tables covered with jumbo shrimp, baked Brie, egg rolls and glasses of wine and talked about the time since we last met. There were children – one making his debut in a blue sailor outfit and the others now while looking more like their parents have started to develop their own personalities that will please and annoy their parents for years. We talked about new jobs and trips to Germany. We talked about half marathons, the c# programming language, and the TV show “Project Runway.” We enjoyed the wine.

The bride looked beautiful in a white dress that was convenient enough for her to float through reception and chat with everyone. MP3’s off of a laptop provided the background music, while toasts from her cousins from Bakersfield provided the laughter.

It was a great time to relax.

On our running calendars we have our athletic schedule, but in either Outlook or a daily planner, we have life’s mile markers. For most of these we experience the same emotions of last long runs – the dreaded anticipation and the wondering if that is all that there is. But on the occasional lazy summer day, all that is there winds up being just wonderful.

One Equal-Temper of Heroic Hearts

In 490 BC the battle of Marathon was Darius of Persia first attempt to unify Greece with his Empire. The larger Persian force attacked after they landed on the shore and the middle of the Greek army fell back. But as the Persians pursued the Greeks separated into two flanks and attacked in what is now called a pincer movement. Herodotus wrote that 6,400 Persians perished to 192 Athenians. It was the first Greek land victory against the Persians who like the group U2 had been invincible for decades.

The popular legend is that afterwards a herald named Pheidippides ran from the battlefield to Athens. It was an ancient Grecian August - not only the temperature must have been brutal, but also there was a general lack of quality footwear in those days. When reaching the palace Pheidippides, in the first known moment of product placement, said the word of our shoe sponsor ("Νενικήκαμεν!" - Nenikékamen, We were victorious!) and died on the spot after roughly after 26.2 miles.

This is not a very good race strategy.

So as we approach our races it is important develop a better strategy for ourselves. Certainly the time goal of a marathon changes from person to person (from sub 3 hours to while it is still daylight), but in general there are a few basics to any race strategy. The most important one is that you want to hydrate especially in August.

The second is the concept of a negative split. Simply put the second half of the race should be faster than the first. This is hard to do, and much more so for marathons than halves. But it is how the best marathons are run, and the golden goal of the sport. To get there we are going to practice pacing over the next few weeks. Soon it will seem natural to go out slowly.

Part of the secret is letting go. When the crowd surges forward with the adrenaline you need to hang back and say “this is the pace that I can maintain.” Let the speedsters go. Trust me that there is racing karma and you will see them worse for wear at mile 18.

This tends hard for guys. While synthetic testosterone might help win the Tour de France, its more natural form leads to males going all out far too early. Perhaps it was the excitement of the battle that pushed Pheidippides to his edge.

The male Greeks gods had cool stuff like thunder, war, and wine, but the Greek god for wisdom was a woman, Athena.

She was the god of the hero who traveled the furthest in ancient days – far past where Hercules strength or Jason’s desire took them – Ulysses. He was able to make it so far because he stuck to strategist whether it be fooling Cyclopes, giving a wooden horse, or explaining to his wife how he managed to be out with the boys for twenty years. The man was good.

Homer wrote about him first, but I prefer Sir Alfred Lloyd Tennyson poem that dealt with Ulysses’ negative split, the back half of his journey. It is about him once again return to the sea. It is one of my favorite poems:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

Here lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Edge of Endurance

In the prologue of Heart of Darkness as Marlowe drifts on the Thames he laments “at the time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say 'When I grow up I will go there.' ... True, by this time, it was not a blank space any more. I had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.”

That was over a century ago, and now as the edges of the unknown seem even more distant, epic journeys have almost come familiar. Not that you should travel up a river to see the dangers of colonialism - we are learning this in a desert instead, but there are now training programs for our personal physical limits, clubs that train together for Ironman distance triathlons, sherpas to help with major peaks, and cushy vacation packages that follow the Tour de France and practice the same hills. Instead of black ink, our world is being marked by chalked arrows, mile markers, and first aid stations.

But that edge is still there. There are impossible distances; like ultra-marathon runs, twenty-mile swims, and cross-country bike rides; as well as exotic places; such as Death Valley or the jungles of Borneo that linger both in our childhood consciousness and adult apprehensions. The most difficult of these races combine both of these elements. In March I traveled north with the Team in Training cross country ski program to see the start of one of the most challenging events on Earth, the Iditarod, and perhaps see one of the legends. The race has produced its share. Rick Swenson has won the race five times in three different decades. Col. Normal D. Vaughn completed the race at the age of 86. But the most famous of them is Susan Butcher.

The event is a 1,161-mile journey across the top of the world, over two mountain ranges and endless tundra. The sleighs are pulled by up to sixteen dogs, which is twice the number of reindeer that Santa uses. Granted he is only going long for a single day, and the Iditarod in a best-case scenario is an eight-day affair.

To succeed at endurance races requires months of training to gain not only fitness but also wisdom to make the correct series of decisions when racing in the artic. The choices that the mushers have must be brutal, a constant tradeoff between resting and pushing against the cold. Against the muted tones of wintertime and deprived of sleep the mind wanders, and the victors have to fight against the strong survival instinct to stop with the mental tricks they have practiced.

The ability to keep sharp is critical, because sledding isn’t just a physical task but a managerial one as well. The modern CEO dreams that all of his employees could be roped together and pull him towards greatness. A musher has to do this without the benefit of a stock option plan.

And like a CEO, a musher also needs to be an expert navigator. Rule 37 says mushers are restricted to traditional forms of navigation. Electronic or mechanical devices that measure speed and direction are prohibited i.e., Loran, night goggles and GPS. The rules have not been updated for IPods, but the call of the wild isn’t heard with headphones. It is the sound of paws on snow, and the swish of sleds on ice.

Susan has won the race four times, and was the first person to take a dog team to the top of Denali. She had an article written about her in the New Yorker, became a spokesperson for dog food, but still prefers life out in the deep bush than the comforts her fame brought her.

The one race that got away from her was when a crazed moose attacked her in 1985. The beast came into the team and started kicking the dogs. Susan held her off with her axe and parka, but the moose managed to kill two of her dogs and to injure 13 others. She spent the next two weeks in the hospital saving the lives of the injured dogs.

It would be tempting to say was her toughest trip to the hospital, but in December Susan was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). With current standard chemotherapy regimens, approximately 25-30% of adults younger than 60 years survive longer than 5 years and are considered cured. It is a brutal thing to get.

The boundaries of the natural world maybe smaller these days, but the human condition is still frail. Just as we once learned the safe trails to travel the wilderness, this century we are learning the routes around the map of the human genome. On the sixth chromosome is the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region, a collection of genes that determines the proteins on the surface of cells used for the immune system to recognize its body’s cells. Cells that don’t have those protein markings, say of a parasite, are attacked like a moose going through a pack of dogs. The trick of transplants is to transfer organs that have the same MHC proteins. In the case of a bone marrow transplant, if the marrow is not completely compatible, the new cells can also attack the body – a graph versus host rejection.

Susan and her supporters looked for a bone marrow match. Her two daughters and sister were tested, and the hope was that whatever the allele is for bravery on midwinters nights that manifests on her cells was out there with someone else. If the Iditarod is about a solo voyage using crudest of navigational technologies, the race against cancer is the opposite of that. It is a journey of a community, a network of support that uses the best of friendships to ease the burden and the best of science to help find a cure.

But both are long to point of blurring. She took on the treatment with the same determination she always has. Her husband wrote :

You can imagine a walk with Susan though. She will not go on a usual walk. We of course have to push her chemo cart around wherever we go. I asked for the all wheel drive off road type but they didn't have any so you can imagine what it was like. There we are hauling the cart over mud puddles, through the brush, up hillsides, down gravel roads and finally through a fence and up some stairs to get back to the hospital. As a result of my experience I have and idea that I am going to try to market to the medical supply companys.

The CHEMO BACKPACK. This is the latest inovation for those active cancer patients who don't want to hang around the ward pushing their carts. You just strap this handy device on your husband or wife and take off.

A few weeks later they found a match and on May 16 she had the transplant. But about a month later the newly planted immune system began attacking her. The doctors managed to suppress the new immune system from attacking her stomach, but in this weaken state the AML returned. Her husband wrote:

I cannot describe what this weekend has been like. Even if I could I don't think I would for a long time. Seeing someone you love in pain is too personal to share. Seeing the mother of my two small children struggle to be brave for them. Seeing the kids treating there mom with the same gentle compassion that they would a new born baby. Hearing the youngest one cry for her mother at night. Seeing the older taking on a mothers roll to care for her sister. Thinking of these things is almost to much to bear.

If Disney were writing this story, Susan would recover by the love of her dogs and her two girls, Tekla and Chisana. They do one last race and someone manage to go the distance against the tundra and then credit would roll as Hillary Duff sang.

But these are not the sounds of this story. Conrad’s book spins a darker fate to the champions of the frontier. On Saturday Susan Butcher passed away.

I want to believe that Marlowe was wrong about the edge of the natural world; there are worthwhile boundaries to explore. The last century came not only with the brutality that he found in the jungle but also with the achievement of voyages to the major peaks of the world. In our new century we will struggle with the power of biology as the last one did with the dangers of atomic physics. These boundaries are never approached easily for the edge of endurance is at the threshold of human tears.

We lost one of our bravest.

What Fools These Mortals be

We have now entered midsummer and I thought I would pass on some of the expertise of Shakespeare's play about the dream. Granted this could be a bit off topic; I don't know if he was a runner. Trotting the boards isn't the same as running trails; cloaks and codpieces weren't made of spandex. But if there isn't a quote "Methinks I did boink at mile twice a dozen", he did offer the following:

Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through blood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moone’s sphere;

This is about as good a race report as it gets.

The larger play at hand, however, is about mistaking your lover - someone literally falls for an ass. This notion of confused identity is an entire Shakespearean motif and I am sure help paid the bills for some of his more artistic work - he alternated styles like George Clooney. (There is an easy way to classify Shakespeare - following in love with someone who is dressed as a guy is a comedy; your uncle hooking up with your mom is a tragedy; defending against a large opposing army is priceless.)

Mistaken identity also can happen with Team in Training. The hard part for our world is that as you spend more time training you are more likely to accidentally start dating an endurance athlete. This is usually quite troubling and like everything early detection is the key. Check these conditions to discover if you might be a dating an endurance athlete:

1) They talk more about their it-band injury than they do about their job.
2) For them "LT threshold" does not refer to how little bacon they put on a sandwich.
3) Semi-formal is wearing a race t-shirt that they pr'd.
4) They call your time together as "Rest Days."
5) You met them at a race expo.
6) They never ask whether cloths make them look large, but always wonder if it makes them aerodynamic.
7) They call getting dressed in the morning "T-1."
8) They called their last breakup “a taper."
9) They wear body glide with dress shoes.
10) They need fill the need to hydrate and want a snack 20 minutes after *ahem* workouts.

If these conditions persist take them to a park and show them it is possible just to stay in one spot for a while. Tell them that this is called "picnicking". They might get confused at first and think they are suppose to do ab crunches or hold plank pose, but if you put out sandwiches and fresh fruit then perhaps they will get the idea. Sunsets are a good time and so is resting during the noon day sun. But perhaps the best time in the park are those lazy afternoons when you also catch a production of Shakespeare on a shared blanket and wonder if the true course of marathoning ever did run smooth.

Click to see map.