Clear Vision

Saturday morning, while any normal person was still sleeping, I was standing in a big crowd thinking about my kids.  Olivia is 8, Benjamin is 5, and they look like this:

 

But I wasn’t thinking about them now.  I was thinking about them when they looked a lot more like this:

Ben, 2 months

Olivia, 3 years

So why was this self-proclaimed nerd and introvert with school aged children standing in a big crowd thinking back to when they were so little?  Was I in the middle of a demonstration, fighting for broken sleep, dirty diapers and temper tantrums?  Perhaps it was a group experiment in time travel?  Neither (though the second one sounds kind of cool).  I was once again in the midst of other runners, waiting for a race to start.

Because of the foot injury that I have been moaning about since April, my race season was destroyed and I am very far behind in getting the 9 qualifying races I need to qualify for the 2014 NYC Marathon.  So, instead of being done with these qualifiers by early July like I was supposed to be, I’m looking at the slim pickings of the few races that are left with NY Road Runners and sticking them into my schedule anywhere I can.  Because of this race, I had to juggle my marathon training schedule and do a 12 mile long run during the week so that I could stand in northern Harlem painfully early on a gorgeous Saturday morning to run/walk the Percy Sutton 5K.

Now, we all know that I don’t like mixing up my training schedule (or actually any schedule for that matter), my races are usually at least twice the length of a 5K, and the only time I like crowds is when I am watching them on TV and am miles away from them.  But the race started and I thought about my kids.  We ran for a couple of minutes and turned a corner, only to meet the largest hill I have seen outside any mountain range (and whoever decided that the big hills on the north end of Central Park should be named “The Harlem Hills” has never actually been to Harlem and experienced this big [expletive] hill that we were all trying to conquer).  Having only been running again for about a month now, and because I’ve been avoiding hills as best I can, this one was almost impossible.  But, I thought about Ben and Olivia as little kids again, and up I went.

I’m still doing run/walk intervals, and I have found that the combination that makes my foot the least cranky is 4 minutes running and 2 minutes walking.  So, after 4 minutes my watch beeps and forces me into a walk, and then after another 2 minutes it beeps again and allows me to pick up the pace again.  This time, of course the walk break started right when I reached the top of the hill, and I was actually grateful to have these 2 minutes to allow me to try to stop breathing like an emphysemic 90 year old man and bring my heart rate back to something that wasn’t going to spawn cardiac arrest. 

This race isn’t great.  Aside from the big [expletive] hill, the course is very narrow.  Picture a one way street in Manhattan with cars parked on either side, and how narrow that is (for my Boston friends, just picture any street in Brighton right after a snow storm).  Now add 5,000 runners all jockeying for position at the same time.  Then tack on a woman who is 5 feet tall (roughly, rounding up) and has to stop short every few minutes, creating a domino effect of runners who have to suddenly slow down to wiggle around her.  Finally, add to that the slew of swear words and complaints she hears from those runners who get caught up in that runner pile up.  As I said, not a great race.  And I was thinking about Olivia at age 3 and Ben as an infant, and the race felt spectacular.

OK, it’s time to explain why I kept thinking about them.  They are my vision.  I agree with what you’re thinking; that explains nothing.  Let me keep going here.  When Olivia was 3 years old, she was playing on the floor one day.  She had a castle fully equipped with King, Queen, princes and princesses, and 2 dragons that Olivia named “Puff” and “Poopsie” (don’t worry, I never understood it either).  I was holding Ben and she asked me if I’d sit on the floor and play with her.  I was 70 pounds overweight then, and getting down on the floor was an absolute chore.  It was also too hard to get up and I thought I’d look like a whale trying to stand on its tail, so I said that I couldn’t play because I was too busy and had stuff to do.  As I walked away from an opportunity to dive into whatever story a 3 year old’s imagination was about to make up, I told myself that I was never going to do that again.  That was the moment that I knew had to do something.  While Olivia was creating stories about kings, queens and Poopsie the dragon, I took the first step of my new journey where I envisioned myself being healthy and fit enough to play on the floor with my kids.  My vision never included marathons and triathlons.  Those were just the happy accidents that came out of something so important to me that it keeps my weight off and has me run/walking through cruddy 5Ks that cause me to reformulate training schedules and climb big [expletive] hills in north Harlem.

 

As they say, “What goes up, must come down,” and so near the end of the race I discovered that the big [expletive] uphill had now become a big [expletive] downhill which causes a person to consistently force weight on their sort-of-kind-of healed foot.  It wasn’t fun or painless, but I made it down, turned the corner that had hidden the hill at the start of the race and “sprinted” to the finish.  My time was crap – walking 2 minutes out of every 6 will do that – but it was over. Race #7 of 9 was in the books.

When I was heading home after the race, I thought about the last 2 that I have to do, and how very bizarre they are.  One is only 1 mile long, and the other is 18 (like I said before, it’s pretty slim pickings). But they will get me to the marathon in 2014.  More importantly, though, they will help me to play on the floor with my kids.