I left my quads in San Francisco

I left my quads in San Francisco.Yes I did.

The title for this piece came to me as I picked and swerved my way down the mountainside that is mile 19 of the San Francisco Marathon. 

Near me, other runners had thrown on the brakes, twirled themselves around, and proceeded to negotiate the precipice by walking backwards, toe to heel.  Me? I shrugged and continued doing what I’d been practicing for months now on the hills near home, gently slaloming, like I was skiing the steep parts of our blue square trails at Killington and Stratton. 

I wondered as the road went on and on and on, who took the smarter route, me or the reverse runners. I beat them all to the bottom, but at a cost: my quads were quivering like jello. Only time will tell, I thought, and reminded myself of a great runner saying: “If you feel good now, don’t worry. That’ll change.”  The saying works in reverse too because there are plenty of times during a marathon when you think nothing will feel right ever again, and then, lo and behold, suddenly you’re feeling like you could run forever.

  

Sure enough, the shakes were gone in a matter of minutes and I felt good for at least another ten, until the next downhill. It’s not just my heart I’ll be leaving behind here, I remember thinking, as my quads got weak and gooey all over again. 

The San Francisco Marathon was easily my hilliest marathon to date, though I’ve covered plenty of other courses with some interesting elevations. The Derry, NH sixteen-miler is ridiculous. The race organizers advertise it as being “moderately challenging,” though the elevation map looks like an EKG readout.  The Stu’s 30K course here in Massachusetts is known for being tough. If you can make it through Stu’s, finishing the Boston Marathon is a piece of cake.  The Manchester City Marathon and the Vermont City Marathon also offer up interesting ways to kill your legs. But San Francisco was a whole new experience entirely, though it wasn’t just about the hills. 

There were some hills.

  

The people involved in the marathon were easily the friendliest bunch I’ve met so far.  When I think back on San Francisco, I know I’ll remember the hills and I’ll smile a little. But I’ll remember the people too and even now I can’t stop grinning ear to ear. They were phenomenal. 

I met Monica, the head of the race pacers, the Friday before the marathon, on the shuttle bus to the expo at Fort Mason, a former military camp right on the bay.  She spent the entire bus ride giving me pointers on surviving the course. She told me the worst hill was just past the two-mile mark, and to not worry about finishing the race because the last half of the race is almost all downhill. When I arrived at the pacer table, she made me laugh, telling the volunteers to take good care of me because I was a friend of hers.   

And the volunteers DID take good care of me. They took good care of all of us.  From the expo volunteers, a mix of school kids and runners, who smiled and wished me good luck, to the leather clad, gray pony-tailed bikers who manned the water stops and helped with crowd control and yelled out lies like, "Looking good!" and "Almost there!"

At the expo,  I met a couple of guys giving away free wine if you signed up for their half marathon, which unfortunately is during my work year. We got to talking and turns out we’re practically neighbors. One is from a town a few miles away, and the other is from New Hampshire. Then I met wonderful Stephanie, a race volunteer with a great Facebook page dedicated to running California. She gave me some tips on staying hydrated out on the course and shared how psyched she was to be accompanying gorgeous and gorgeously strong ultra runner Dean Karnazes on a pre-marathon shake-out run the next morning.  

Dean Karnazes is awesome.

Race morning, my daughter and I were out the door of our Union Square hotel way before dawn, and speeding the mile down to Market Street hoping we weren’t too late for her  5:50 a.m. Wave 4 start time. Around us, the streets were silent, the only other pedestrians our fellow race participants. 

We arrived at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero just a few minutes too late. Her wave gate had been closed. No biggie. She decided she’d start with me, in Wave 8. We hit the portable toilet line along with several thousand other runners.  The guy in line behind me noticed my Boston Marathon hat and started talking about his 2015 Boston finish. Turns out, he ran for the same charity team my daughter and I have run for.  Typical marathon magic: Traverse the country to run a race in a new place, and randomly meet up with a teammate from all the way back home.  

My daughter got bored waiting around, and scurried off to join Wave 5. Pedro and I headed to our start line. We spent all our wait time talking about marathons we’d done and hoped to do. Behind us, the Oakland Bay Bridge glittered in the gray dawn. A couple of hundred feet ahead of us, the start banner beckoned. 

Once we began running, Pedro and I parted ways.  Every runner needs to run her own race. As my wave passed the Ferry Building, crowds screamed and waved like it was mid-afternoon at Fenway, not 6:25 a.m. in a city that had just gone to sleep hours before.  

Things quieted down a bit by the time we made it the two miles to Fisherman’s Wharf. Workers kneading dough in the windows of the Boudin Bakery restaurant nudged one another and laughed at us as we ran by. No one stood outside at Ghiradelli Square offering chocolate. 

The first hill – the steepest, according to Monica, took us to Fort Mason, sight of the marathon expo. From the top of the hill we took in breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge, at that time still mostly enshrouded in fog.  We took a meandering route along the bay, past the Palace of Fine Arts and Crissy Field, and eventually, just at mile five, started the second steep hill on the course, one that took us up and onto my reason for running: the Golden Gate Bridge.  I’d been dreaming of running over that bridge since the last time I visited San Francisco, on a 2003 cross country trip with my daughter. That's when I learned from another tourist that it was due to a marathon in the city that the traffic was so bad that weekend.

 "A marathon in July? Over the Golden Gate Bridge? I could run that!" I remember thinking.And now here I was, finally.

You’d think I’d remember a ton about running across that bridge, seeing that I’d been dreaming of doing it for more than a decade. In truth, I don’t remember all that much. All us marathoners were scrunched up into a couple of the lanes heading toward northern California.  My people ran in one lane north, while the speedier folks who'd already reached the other side and turned around ran south in the lane next to us. The rest of the bridge was open to traffic. 

The bridge was wet. Not sure if that was due to rain during the night or the fog, which still lingered among the topmost cables.  I studied the faces of the runners headed toward me from the Marin Headlands side, looking for my daughter who was at least two miles ahead of me by that point.  When I wasn’t watching for her, I was high-fiving the speedsters, or watching my footing. The roadway was slippery and pocked. When I could, I remembered to look up at the glowing metal above, and sideways to the massive pipes holding the structure in place. We couldn’t see much beyond the bridge because the railings were so high and the fog over the water was pretty dense. 

At the other side, we did a loop in a parking lot around a parks building. A few runners joined some entertainers who were doing in-line skate dancing to loud music coming from a tie-dyed painted van. Don’t know where those crazy runners got the energy for that.  The air on this side of the bay was thick with the scent of some flower I couldn’t put a name to. It was beautiful. The hills beyond were green and gold. Mist was everywhere. It was Disneyland forest. I would have been happy to continue running on that side of the bay. The smells and colors were just perfect. 

But the race continued back over the bay so back we went: up the bridge’s slight incline, then the flat middle, then down again, then up a steep hill to mile ten which gave us more great views and a sweet downhill that I could have stayed on forever.

We soon entered the Sea Cliff district of San Francisco and found ourselves rolling up and down streets lined with pastel homes.  When we finally entered Golden Gate Park, all I could think was, “Well, at least the hilly portion of the race is done.” Then we hit more hills as we scooted by picnickers out enjoying the morning, and bison grazing in distant gray green fields. 

The hardest hills for me were the park hills. I don’t know why. They weren’t long. They weren’t steep. They were dull though, quiet views of mossy trees and fields; sleep-inducing, compared to the rest of the vibrant course. 

At mile 16 I had a moment of panic. We left the park and I assumed, from having memorized the course map earlier, that we’d be heading back into the city. I did not need any more greenery and solitude. I wanted cheering crowds and pretty houses. But I’d read the map wrong. We weren’t done with the park. We were simply entering a different section. As we re-entered, I could feel my resolve faltering. I was finished. 

The marathon however, was not. So after a few minutes of walking and feeling sorry for myself, I started to run again.

We re-joined humanity at Haight Street. You couldn’t ask for a better, louder wake up call. The fans cheering us on were nutty. The storefronts were bizarre. The music was loud and perfect.  I could have run there forever and certainly, by the end of that steep downhill at mile 19, I felt like I had.

Miles twenty to twenty-three were urban and somewhat blighty. Nothing I hadn't been running on for decades. As I cruised that part of the city I got talking with the runner next to me, a California woman who travels to Boston every year to cheer on her qualifier husband. She talked about wanting to run the Boston Marathon too, one day. I told her about my connection with the American Liver Foundation and said a nationwide organization like that would be a perfect Boston charity for her. 

Then she told me about her sister, who died from liver disease complications brought on by diabetes. She said running on behalf of ALF would be a perfect fit for her. We marveled at fate, and talked about how strange it was to run into one another when we both shared such an important commonality. As we parted, I couldn't help but feel strong, even though the landscape was bleak and my legs minutes earlier had felt so worn out. Marathons are magic that way.

The miles passed pretty quickly, as I thought about this kind runner and all the neat people I'd met these few days on the left coast. Before I was ready, I hit mile twenty-four and we were back at the bay, Oakland off in the distance, past freighters so close I wanted to run up and touch them. Then we ran around AT&T  Park and there ahead of me, was the Bay Bridge and the marathon start where Pedro and I had chatted for a good twenty minutes, then the finish line banner just beyond.

I turned up my headset which, weirdly, was playing my latest psych song, Rachel Platten's "Fight Song," then heard a familiar voice call “Mom!” There was my favorite sight of all, my daughter. She was cheering me on from the sidelines. She’d finished much earlier, walked the mile uphill to the hotel, showered, changed and, legs stiff and worn out, had walked the mile back to watch me cross the finish line. Which I did. 

The next hours and days were a blur. We spent the rest of our time in San Francisco walking everywhere and eating everything and saying to each other, “Did we really run a marathon in San Francisco?” The whole thing felt like a dream to me.

My daughter, who is speedy, would say, “Well I know I did.” 

And from me, the slow poke:  “Well, I sort of did.”

I left my quads in San Francisco. And a little bit of my heart too. What a great time!

State:  #10, which means I get to join the 50 States Club!!!!!!!

Marathons: 19

Life happens on the hills. Plus, the views are phenomenal.

Miles. Smiles. They go together

After  I ran the Philadelphia Marathon in November, I had big plans. I decided because I’d survived running five marathon in 2014, that I would do another five marathons in 2015, all part of my big plan to run the U.S., one state at a time.  I sketched out a tentative plan, starting with an April marathon in Kansas that would give me an excuse to visit my daughter who lives in the Midwest, and finishing up with Chicago or Hartford in the fall. 

I deliberately gave my legs a break in December.  I ran once or twice a week, and focused instead on cross-training. I even skipped a few workouts, and took some time to enjoy life in the real world. 

In January, I started ramping up my distances. Within a few weeks I was back up to a fourteen mile long run. But something was off.  I was worse than sluggish. My runs were slower than my usual slow. I ached the entire time I was out there,  then was sore for hours after. And these were not your normal wear-and-tear muscle aches. These pains seemed to be emanating from deep in my bones.  

One thing all my 2014 long, slow runs had in common, including those lasting 26.2 miles: I recovered fast. I had no aches and pains after any of my practice runs.  Two days after Philly, I was walking around like I’d spent the entire weekend sleeping in front of the television.  I took it slow last year, and my body came back strong. Every. Single. Time.  

Now, two months after my last marathon? My body was 54 going on 99.  The shortest, easiest elliptical workout left me aching. My long runs killed me. My normal, thrice-weekly weight routine left me flattened.  I was getting discouraged. Maybe I’d used up all my running mojo during those five marathons?  Maybe I’d damaged my body? Or, maybe the problem was my brain, not my body? Maybe I needed a cheerleader, a coach to remind me that distance is as much mental as it is physical? 

I started working with a personal trainer, a guy from my gym who is an awesome coach.  My head improved a little bit, but my physical stamina didn’t show much of a change. Weights I’d been able to lift with no problem just months earlier were beyond my universe. Recovering from our half- hour gym sessions took days instead of hours.  

I began to notice problems outside of the gym too. Getting up for work was a struggle. Just getting out of bed hurt.  Carrying groceries in from the car left me exhausted.  My classroom is three long flights of stairs straight up. For years, I’ve been able to sprint that distance without thinking twice about it. Now, I’d have to stop twice on the way to catch my breath.   

In early February, I spent five days in bed with what I thought was the flu. Everything ached. The fatigue was like an anvil. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. It was that hard to move. After days of sleep, I felt a little better, but not much. This had to be something  serious.  I made an appointment to see my primary care doc. 

She listened to my whine list: constant fatigue, aches everywhere, depression, constant burning in my stomach.  She drew some blood and checked my vitals: blood pressure good, resting heart rate the usual low 40s that always send substitute medical pros into EKG scheduling mode until I tell them I run long distances and suggest they check my records.  

I asked her if I was dying, or maybe had pushed myself too far running all those marathons. She laughed her kind doctor laugh and said I probably was not dying and said yes, I was an idiot (she didn’t call me an idiot but I knew that’s what she meant) for running so many marathons but hadn’t she been telling me for years that marathoning is silly? 

She predicted I was suffering from low Vitamin D, a problem she was seeing among many of her patients, due to our record cold and snowy winter.  She reminded me that even in summer my Vitamin D level tends to be fairly low. She asked if I’d been taking the supplement she recommended to me the last time I’d seen her, back in June.  I admitted that no, I hadn’t. She told me to start taking a supplement and said she’d be in touch once she got my test results. 

Yup.

She was right about the Vitamin D. Probably about the marathoning too, but I’m not ready to listen to reason there yet. 

My summer levels hover at a barely there 32. My Vitamin D level this February was 17. My doc prescribed 50,000 units of Vitamin D once a week for twelve weeks, then 1,000 units a day.

Within days of taking that first supplement, I started feeling better. Within a few weeks, I was carrying my weekly grocery shopping into the house in one trip and running up the six flights of stairs at work again.  The depression and fatigue lifted. The stomach upset subsided. The deep aches abated. I began making huge strides with my trainer. I was back.

I’d planned on three spring marathons, but by the time I was well enough to run again, it was March and I'd run out of training time. Instead, I chose to work toward completing a stupidly hilly summer marathon  I'd had my eye on for years. 

This week, that summer marathon kicked my behind big-time. But every ache was one of those good ones that reminded me of how lucky I was to be alive. I recovered like a dream. 

I’m still awash in these huge waves of gratitude that come from understanding how phenomenally lucky I am. This week, the biggest problem in my life wasn’t anywhere near as serious as what so many folks dear to my heart are coping with. I’m not dealing with cancer, or worrying how I'll put food on the table, or coping with the death of a loved one. 

This week, all I had to do was run for 26.2 miles.  And I did. And the best part is that I knew how lucky I was the entire time I was out there, which probably explains the idiotic grin I’m wearing in each of my race pictures.  I just couldn’t stop smiling. Still smiling now.  More to come. Smiles and words, I mean. Miles too.

I'm running considerably slower than this, so I guess that makes me above average.

Friends: The one with the cat

I had the pleasure of running in Greece last week. 

Wow. Let’s pick that sentence apart a bit. 

First, pleasure and running in the same sentence?  It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put those two words even remotely near each other last month when, fourteen weeks into twenty weeks of  preparation I hit the “running is stupid” phase of my marathon training and started resenting every second of running, ellipting, rowing that has gone into gearing up for this latest ridiculousness.  

Then there’s the Greece part. Pinch me! I just spent almost two weeks in the land of Homer, Socrates, and wonder of wonders that greatest Greek of all, Pheidippides.  My Brooks Adrenalines possibly ran where he ran. My shoes, his bare feet maybe even shared a pebble or five.  Wow. 

If you’re not a marathoner, you might not know who this Pheidippides is and why he matters. If you are a marathoner, you’ve likely heard the story at least once. 

Pheidippides is Greek god-like in the world of distance running. The inspiration for not only the ancient marathon, but our modern race as well,  Pheidippides was a speedy messenger who became legend around 490 B.C., when he ran from the town of Marathon to Athens, about twenty miles away, to deliver news of a military victory against the Persians in the Battle of Marathon.  

After delivering his final message, the poor guy uttered these words: “Joy to you.” Then he dropped dead.  Modern day marathoners think this ending is supremely funny.  

There’s more to the story of course. He likely ran farther than today’s measly 26.2 mile race distance.  Some sources say he ran to and from Marathon a couple of times over several days with no rest whatsoever.  Also, he had no Gatorade, Body Glide, Gu, or fans cheering him on with “Worst Parade Ever,” “Shortcut over here,”  “Why do the cute ones always run away” (a personal favorite)  posters.  So he was probably super dehydrated and maybe a little fatigued by the time he dropped dead.  Plus, I can’t even begin to imagine the blisters and chafing. 

Marathoner humor.

 

We were in Athens at the start and end of our trip. Every morning in Athens, I jogged along the Aegean, on a beat-up sidewalk that also bordered a commuter rail and beyond that a busy roadway. I’d pretend the roar of traffic was the sound of the sea. When I wasn’t hopping over cracks and potholes – just like at home, I’d remind myself I was in Greece by focusing on the turquoise water to the west and the misty islands on the horizon, or on the sandy scrub brush hills that rose to the east, past the masses of hotels and apartment buildings. 

For the middle part of the trip, we were on the island of Crete at a resort on the Aegean Sea. The Fodele Beach Resort is a fantasy land of pastel-and-bright-white buildings, off a twisting main road and built into the side of a hill. Hill on Crete equals mountain in Mass.   

Beautiful, but tough for running. Excellent if you love everything else in life, including baklava which is plentiful and free. 

I was worried about keeping on track with my marathon training because there didn't seem to be anywhere to run. I tried out the resort “fitness center,” which turned out to be a mirrored, moldy room with only one piece of cardio equipment, an ancient treadmill.   

My first day at the resort, I ran three miles on that shaking dinosaur, the ligaments and tendons in my knees and feet screaming with every wobbly step I took. Three boys about ten years old – German I think, stood at my elbow the entire thirty minutes. They wanted a turn on the machine and I guess thought if they stared me down they could goad me into ending my run early.  As if. 

Exactly.

I exited the treadmill panicking a little and not just because I looked like crap in every single one of the three thousand reflections staring back at me.  I had a marathon to train for, but I knew there was no way I could get back on that vicious ankle-breaker. What to do? 

I couldn’t risk training on the one and only supremely narrow roadway, not just because it was unfamiliar territory. A few days earlier in Athens, on the crazy thoroughfare directly in front of our hotel, a woman attempting to cross the three busy lanes was hit and killed. The monster driver didn’t even bother to stop.  

I picture weary Pheidippides, replaying in his head all the battle slaughter he’d witnessed, maybe while stopping for a second in the shade of an olive tree to wipe his brow. Maybe as he thought about the tremendous loss of life, he shivered a little, just like I did that morning in the hotel lobby when I heard the news of the accident. Maybe, like me, he thought, “What is this world coming to?”

    

I opted for the safety of the pathways in and around the hotel compound, and spent day after day running up steep stairways, down driveway-distance paths, out to a quiet cove and back, again and again. I’d see the same tourists every morning, heading to the all-you-can-eat feeding fest that began in the main building each morning at seven and ended every night at 9:30. I’d nod to fellow workshop participants out for morning walks, exchange nods with other joggers sharing the same narrow trails.  

Each time I reached the tippity-top of the resort property, I stopped to view the sparkling Aegean far below, my lungs aching, legs eager and electric. I marveled at the twists and turns I’d taken over the years that brought me to this ridiculously beautiful place. I wondered about fate, and where this new grad school adventure would bring me. Then I’d start my descent, carefully picking my way because steep declines can ruin your legs. I waved to workers in lemon groves, exchanged smiles with the guard house cutie who raised the resort road gate for me each morning.  I bowed my head in respect toward ancient men out for morning shuffles and kerchiefed old women watering plants and sweeping stoops. 

 

Each morning at the flat bottom of the hill, just before a public beach, I passed a miniature stone chapel. The old reflexes always kicked in and I automatically made the sign of the cross several times, then muttered prayers for ill friends and family members, and that poor pedestrian back in Athens.  I stopped to take lots of photos every time I made it to my turnaround point, the shady grotto with the quiet waves and dark boulders, and would say a final prayer as I passed the church a second, third, fourth time. 

I'd run from here, back to the top of the resort. I'd pretend I was the first person to discover this, which meant I had to ignore the crushed cigarette packs all over the ground.

The morning before we left Crete, I noticed a dark form on the top rung of a ladder propped up against the tiny church. I  stopped to take a closer look and saw a cat, curled up in the shade, staring down at me.  I grabbed my phone to take a photo just as another runner, white singlet and black capris, approached. It was our fourth day seeing one another out running. According to international sports law,  we were running buddies by that point.

She stopped and stared at the church too.   

“Le chat,” she said, nodding.

I pointed to my chest. “USA,” I said, then pointed to her and said, “Francais?”

She shook her head and maybe that would have been that, but we’re both runners and we share some common bonds. For one thing, we value life. When we drive we always stop for pedestrians.

We continued talking, she in broken English, me in sprained French.  I learned she’s from Belgium and likes to run 5ks. She learned I was from near Boston and that I run marathons.  We discovered we both like cats.  We agreed that Crete is beautiful. Then we parted. She headed toward the grotto, her turnaround point also, and I headed back to my room.  

As I trotted along the narrow pathway, past the old men and old women, the lemon grove, the guard shack cutie, up the hill past the tourist families returning from their first breakfast of the morning, my fellow workshop participants heading to early coffee, I thought about what a pleasure it was to be a runner, and how grateful I was to be alive and well and running, there in Greece. 

Le chat is there somewhere. Top rung I think.