Experience

I have to turn this experience into something...

Trails of patience

The whole day seemed to be “up.”

I was just more than 35 kilometers (about 22 miles) into my first 50k trail race, headed up to Bald Mountain, the highest point on the course. And there, in front of me, as if strewn carelessly like some infantile giant’s marbles, the trail was awash in rocks and boulders.

Blocking the way “up.”

It wasn’t, I told myself, simply another opportunity to rip an ankle or do a face plant and wind up with a broken jaw and maybe some broken ribs. It might as well have been a couple hundred meters of boulder-marbles.

The run had taken a greater toll than I had anticipated. And I was physically and mentally exhausted, despite nearly eight months of the best training of my life. In fact I had nearly quit when I pulled into the aid station a few minutes earlier at 22 miles. I told my partner that I didn’t know if I could go on. I felt confused and a little dazed. I was tired of “up.” It was a strange feeling. She didn’t know what to do. I realized shortly that the woman who just passed me had been right: You have to eat food out here or you will break down.

So I looked behind me, back down the trail toward where the aid station and a warm blanket and food and my partner lay. Then I looked ahead at those damn boulders and words she had told me in a card she gave me the day before rang in my head: “You aren’t afraid. You keep moving forward--putting in your time, your determination…You run and run, not away, but forward. You persevere. You never, never quit.”

And then I knew: I would not quit. I would finish this run. I deliberately and methodically stepped across the field of boulders, and the next, and the next and up the trail until I got to the top of Bald Mountain where I downed some cheese and a couple cups of Mt. Dew and Coke.

When I got back down to my partner and the next aid station just four and a half miles from the finish I felt renewed. The confusion and daze were gone. I was determined. “Let’s finish this thing,” I told her.

There is something about faith in a good outcome that gives us the patience to weather bad times, whether in a long trail race or in life. Because I hadn’t paid enough attention to how rigorous the trail run had been and didn’t take in enough food, my body was crashing. And somewhere along the trail I lost my faith that my training had been good enough to finish this adventure. There would be no good outcome, I had thought.

The Mt. Dew and the Coke and the cheese helped me recover enough to get to the finish line in reasonably good shape. But I believe it was the patience to hear what was inside me that did as much to keep me moving forward. When I stood quietly on that trail in front of those boulders, and listened to the wind and the rain and the voice inside that said “never, never quit” I was able run again.

I crossed the finish line in 6 hours 46 minutes. A decent effort for my first 50 kilometer race. It seems Mr. Disappointment won’t be wagging his finger at me after all.

Thanks for reading.

Disappointment

Disappointment is an unfortunate but inevitable part of life. Learning that for ourselves is hard enough. Teaching that to our children is even harder.

Some of my personal trials over the past year have taught me disappointment is as everyday an aspect of life as joy.

Through all the years running has taught me how to handle disappointment and mine the experience for hidden value. People beat us in races. We are disappointed. We can’t run as fast as we used to. We are disappointed. It’s raining or it’s too cold and we don’t want to run. We are disappointed.

In fact, each time I step out my door to run or to race is another opportunity to be disappointed somehow. On the flip side, it’s also an equally great opportunity for satisfaction or joy.

This coming weekend is an example. Saturday I will run my first competitive 50K race. And by the time the sun sets in the mountains of southwestern Virginia I will know which--the glow of joy or the weight of disappointment, or both--will sit with me.

Though I’ve run the 31 miles in training, my training has been confined mostly to gently rolling roads. The course I’ll run has 8,800 feet of elevation change, including a climb of 2,500 feet over 10 miles. This race offers a buffet of opportunities to somehow fail and therefore face disappointment.

It’s a lot like life. Each time we reach beyond the things we already are good at we risk disappointment. Each time we engage with others, each time we put ourselves out there in a relationship, there’s a chance for humiliation or embarrassment or pain. Things don’t turn out the way we hope. And disappointment is right there wagging his finger at us saying, “I told you so.”

But the rewards are even greater. Sure, people disappoint us. We risk disappointment stretching beyond our comfort zone or the people we hang around all the time. But the reaching also gives us the chance to see ourselves in a different and better light, to grow. The rewards for mastering something new, for meeting someone new seem far greater to me. Just as getting up and running every day and seeing what I can do could be. Just as stepping up to that starting line on a crisp fall morning in the mountains of Virginia and running for six or seven hours might be.

Thanks for reading.

Original and Authentic

Original and authentic. These words have become my mantra. They provide a litmus test by which I can evaluate all the choices I make on a daily basis.

I realize there is very little I can control in life. My response to what happens is the only thing I can control. Am I responding to what is true and original about me when faced with a choice or am I simply reacting? What are my best choices in any given situation? What would be the most desired outcome in any situation? What short-term pain might I cause myself making an authentic decision that is in my best long-term interests?

My focus has changed a lot over the past eight months or so. I used to spend a lot of time looking at the years ahead at all the possibilities. And an equal amount of time looking over my shoulder at what happened in the past, mostly looking at all my failures. But being committed to becoming original and authentic demands being aware of where I am right now. Being present without venturing too far forward or behind doesn't come naturally. It's too easy to daydream about where I might be in a month or in five years. It's even easier to go to Negativetown on my past, which is littered with so many mistakes and failures they lay like land mines on my psyche. If I spend too much time there I'm bound to step on one of them.

I have developed this theory: we are creating tomorrow's memories right now. The best way to feel good about our past is to live authentically and originally in the present. We can't control the future and can't erase the past. We control only our responses to right now.

Original and authentic.

Thanks for reading.

No Man's Land?

Ultra purists will scoff. My non-runner friends will just shake their heads at my insanity. Ultra veterans don't even get their heart rates up for anything less than 50 miles, the threshold most of them believe where the term "ultra" even starts to be applied. Other runners don't see any reason for running farther than 26.2.

I have been training since February for my first 50k. I'm logging about 50 miles a week around Ann Arbor building a base that will carry me to around 70 miles a week in July and August. But I'm in sort of a runner's No Man's land. The math says 31 is more than 26.2. But 50k doesn't carry the same weight as 50 miles. I don't want to diminish the achievement for anyone who runs 50 miles. That is a long, long run. But does that mean those extra five miles beyond the marathon are worthless, worthy of being left like abandoned children on the trail to true Ultra-hood? Is it written somewhere those extra 19 miles between the 50k and the 50 miler is where the moniker of Ultra runner is earned?

I'll be pondering the significance of this running math on the trail in Virginia this fall. I know I'll feel the extra miles too, regardless of what the purists say. My "coming out" so to speak and joining a more exclusive community of runners who have looked beyond the marathon is an important step in my evolution as a runner. One more leg in a journey that began with a so-so experience with Cross Country in high school. And maybe venturing beyond what I'm accustomed to as a runner can serve as a metaphor for life. Something about being willing to take on something bigger and more difficult.

I might not yet belong to that most exclusive of running clubs--the Ultra runner. But, come September 26, I will be more than "just a marathoner."

Thanks for reading.

If I get up early enough, as I often do, I get to watch my girls sleeping. There is something especially endearing for a parent in the face of a sleeping child. Maybe it's the peace we witness, the cheeks flushed, the blankets wrapped way up around their chins, a smile on their lips.

I see them and all my troubles float away as smoke and I wonder why I wear my worries in the first place. To see your child sleeping contentedly is to feel safe in the world oneself as if their very sleep puts a protective ring around one's home. Who could harm a slumbering angel?

My girls sleeping also reminds me of my role as provider; I am expected to take care of them, feed, clothe, house in the least and help mend broken hearts, wipe away tears, clean up scrapes, offer insights into the world in the most. I sometimes find it ironic that rather than fear the challenge this higher role provides, I relish it. The chance to be responsible for molding little hearts and minds. The opportunity to learn from my own experiences in the questions my girls pose. The chance to question the wisdom earned from those very experiences, and to examine my values, philosophy, and attitudes.

When I watch them sleep I feel more authentic and less a poseur. It's as if in their rhythmic breathing I find I am less concerned with my own hang ups and problems and more at peace with life. There is enough difficulty in life now and I find solace in the faces of my sleeping daughters. Hope flows. Scars on my heart fade. And the sun rises.

Thanks for reading.

THE PLACES THAT SCARE YOU

Why is it that we get so bogged down by our feelings? The things that make us human and help us explore our existence are often the very same things that lock us up in myopic and self-damaging patterns of thinking. We are often afraid of the very things that will save us; places in our souls we are afraid to go.

I am going through a divorce. I have of late become so weighed down by guilt and remorse that I had begun to only feel like a villain, never anything else. There are children involved and most of my guilt over being the one who initiated the breakup of my relationship with my wife was focused on how I was "destroying" the family for these young hearts. A good portion, however, also lay in the hurt I had caused my wife by being the one who started the breakup.

Guilt is not necessarily bad, as I have learned recently, because it shows us whether we are living up to the standards we expect of ourselves and acts as a sort of weather vane pointing us in the direction of how to be the type of people we want to be. Guilt can be something we feel and process, like a bird sensing a change in the direction of the wind. Or, as had been my case recently, become an almost unendurable companion, relentlessly burdening us with our mistakes, bad choices, hurts, like a computer with bad code that keeps running through an endless loop of rebooting only to fail time and again. We try to "re-boot" by examining all the possible reasons for our guilty feelings and rooting out the "bad code" as we recount and recast events and choices we've made. And we wind up in the same spot, like Bill Murray on Groundhog Day.

A way to short circuit this endless re-booting and cycle of guilt is to look at whether we are lumping certain feelings and aspects of our behavior together that really are separate. Take for example grief and doubt. The experts tell us that a few things in life cause enormous psychological pain; the death of a parent, spouse or child (been there), sudden job loss (ditto) and, ahem, divorce. In fact, the experts say, the grief caused in each of these life events are remarkably similar. Plain and simple: divorce causes grief.

I've actually been grieving (even though I couldn't label it) over the loss of the security and familiarity of family--the rituals and routines of daily family life along with all its joys and sorrow, the loss of the house I devoted so much hard work with my wife to restoring, and the closeness of a relationship that crosses years. In my grief over the end of all these things, I hurt.

I lumped my grief with some doubt over whether I was on the right path, which became loaded with guilt over the hurt that lay in the wake of the divorce and voila--I'm in shitsville.

It's understandable why all these feelings--grief, doubt, and guilt--might be tied in my psyche. They are closely related. But fusing them caused the relentless cycle of re-booting and increased my downward spiral. But...

A wise friend and advisor instructed me that maybe the grief I was experiencing was totally normal and should not be hanging out with my doubt and that shouldn't be in bed with my guilt. All three are quite normal for people going through divorce to feel, especially those who initiate the divorce, and that each feeling can be experienced, appreciated and honored separately as you experience them. It doesn't necessarily follow, she explained, that my because I'm feeling grief over the losses inherent in the divorce, that I should feel greater guilt over the hurt felt by my family and others and that, in turn, should not necessarily increase the doubt I may have felt over why I initiated the divorce in the first place.

What I was afraid of doing--this is the places that scares you part from the title of this blog--was admitting that I felt grief over the losses I've experienced because of the divorce. And this is the hardest part: just experiencing the grief and the sadness of the loss. I blunted it. I ran away from it. If I didn't admit that I hurt because of what I lost, then maybe it would go away.

The fact that I will never again sit on the front porch that I built on Sunday mornings after my run drinking coffee and watching all the good Catholics go to their weekly guilt session hurts. The fact that I won't be able to walk into any of my daughters' bedrooms in the middle of the night just because. That my 400 square foot apartment is a poor excuse for a "home" but it is my home for now. That it will be a long time before I experience the simple routines and rituals that make up the everyday lives of intact families.

Losing all of these hurt.

And in my grief, I felt doubt and even more guilt for "wrecking the future."

But now I've re- re-booted my thinking. And I'm allowing the grief to come in and be my companion for a while. Then I'll show it to the door. And then I'll sit with my guilt for a bit and let it tell me what I did wrong. And then, he too can head out the door. And last I'll take my doubt for a run then send it down a different street when I head for home.

Each of these feelings and countless others we feel are a natural part of the experiences each of us faces in life. And each feeling makes us more human in our own way. Instead of mindlessly lumping them all together and trying to hide from them we can be more Buddhist and accept them as a natural consequence of whatever is happening to us. We can experience the "bad" feelings the same way we experience the good feelings and then let them pass. We don't need to be locked up by our feelings.

As my advisor gave me a hug on my way out she recounted a saying that she has passed on to others feeling pain: "You are where you should be."

Thanks for reading.