Maine: The way marathons should be

I had a good run at the start of July, a twelve-miler where my legs felt so alive I daydreamed for a half second after about signing up for another marathon. I was near a computer at the time, and my credit card was within arm’s reach, so I did: Maine Marathon, October 5.  

The next eight weeks saw a crazy mix of running every day, intense speed workouts nine times a week. I ate nothing but spinach and lean protein. Managed to drop that stubborn twenty pounds I’d been carrying around my middle since forever.

Okay, so maybe that’s all a little untrue.

Here’s what really happened: I ignored warm summer temperatures and my natural vacation inclination to sit around and read. Instead, I spent every extra minute at the gym. Worked my way up to six weeks of running 65 miles, took two minutes per mile off my pace, dropped ten pounds, not twenty.

I wish.

Here's the truth. Seconds after I signed up for the marathon, my running mojo abandoned me. During most of my training, I pretty much sat around and ate. After a couple of half-hearted attempts at speed workouts, I decided it was too hot to push myself. Instead I went slow but long. I lost a couple of pounds by the end of August, probably all water, and gained all that back plus a little extra once school/ stress eating began.

But at least I stayed healthy and on track.

Portland, Maine, the home of the Maine Marathon, is just a two-hour drive from where I live, so the ride straight up 95 was easy and uneventful. The expo at Southern Maine University was quiet and oozed Hometown, USA. There were truckloads of free pretzels and animal crackers, a few folks selling running clothes, and the requisite running store stand with assorted Gus, gels, and foam rollers.

The volunteer who gave me my bib number asked if this was my first marathon. That immediately shook my confidence. Did I look like someone who’d never run a marathon before? I told her it was my sixteenth.

“Wow. You’re hard core,” she said.

Now I started wondering if maybe I was a little too obsessive. 

Um. Yeah.

Our goody bags were environment-friendly reusable grocery totes with the Maine Marathon logo on the outside and lots of treasures within, including five bags of gummy dinosaur candy, store coupons, several tubes of lip balm, a can of B&M baked beans, Larabars, Luna bars, a pack of dried cranberries, KT athletic tape, and some tablets for nasal congestion.

The night before the race, I spread my treasures out on the hotel bed and admired it all. For a minute or ten, it occurred to me that maybe I should quit while I was ahead, drive home fast with my stash, before I actually attempted this train wreck of silliness. I checked the weather report, hoping for a monsoon. Sadly, the weather was due to be perfect, 50s and partly sunny.    

Next morning, I’m at the starting line with all the other runners, 3,500 of us. About a thousand of us are signed up for the whole distance. The rest are doing the half or the marathon relay. I’m in the back, behind the 10-minute-plus pace sign. I’m wishing I’d run more this summer and eaten less. I worry that I’d bitten off more than I should be chewing.

I start thinking of a  conversation I had with my class earlier in the week. One of the kids asked if I’d ever won a race.

“I win every time I get to the starting line,” I said.

All twenty-three kids looked at me like I’d just grown another head. I explained that every time I put on my sneakers and headed for a run, I was taking a leap of faith. Training alone can be hard. Nobody cares that you’re running except for you. No one’s applauding you, or saying “Way to go!” It’s easy to quit. Lots of people quit.

“Getting to the starting line is a triumph in and of itself,” I said.

I remind myself of the truth of this as I wait for today's insanity to commence. There are snippets of conversation all around me. Some folks are asking about the course. Others are talking about injuries, the weather. I hear someone call my name. I turn to find a young woman next to me. She’s my height and wears her dark hair in a tight ponytail. She looks vaguely familiar. She says I had her brother in school. We talk a bit. I remember her. She was a student in the classroom one over from mine. I ask how she’s doing. She tells me she’s a college grad. She bought her first house last spring. It’s been fourteen years since the last time we saw one another.

I asked her how she knew it was me. She says she recognized my face. She remembered, over the course of all these years that I run marathons. She was looking for me. My eyes start to sting as it hits me that maybe this is why I'm here today, to receive this reminder that sometimes when I talk about my running, my students listen. Maybe, on some greater level, this ridiculous 26.2 mile endeavor does matter.

GF was there to run her first half marathon. We hugged and I told her she was going to be awesome.

She was. I saw her on the course about an hour later. She had a big smile on her face and looked fast and strong.

As for me? I just did my best to enjoy the day. My legs started off heavy and stayed that way. The course was hillier than I expected, but prettier too. The first couple of miles, we ran on a wide boulevard alongside a cove.  Then we turned onto a road surrounded by woods. As the hills began, the front runners of the half marathon started returning our way. In addition to my young friend, I exchanged thumbs-ups with lots of other runners in shorts and t-shirts, a mustachioed guy in a black top and hot pink leggings, and at least one runner dressed as a moose.

The rest of the course was hilly and quiet, though for awhile we saw marathoners headed back our way. Part of the way, I ran with a couple of guys who were in the habit of running marathons most weekends. Sometimes I ran alone. About two hours into my run, I got to give a big hug to Larry Macon, the remarkably gifted gent who holds the world record for most marathons in a year. Larry had taken the early start and was moving forward heroically. Last time I’d seen him was in Ashland, MA, at mile three of the Boston Marathon when, like me, he'd been running that day on behalf of the American Liver Foundation. He's an inspiration. I got to tell him that last week. 

The last part of the run was tough. Lots of uphills. I spent several miles trotting behind and next to a contingent of about fifty soldiers, who were doing the course in full gear, with heavy packs on their backs. Their presence reminded me to count my blessings. Really. Any ache that I felt was nothing in comparison to their discomfort.

The course finished on the same wide straightway on which we began, with the cove to our left this time. As we turned the corner to the finish, I decided to do something I rarely ever have the energy to do. I sprinted ahead of a couple of folks, and finished strong. 

It wasn’t my best race. I hadn’t trained all that well. I admit I was possibly relying too much on the training from my two spring marathons a whole five months earlier. But to be fair to myself, I’d never run three marathons in one year before. I was afraid that my body might rebel. I was worried about stress fractures, and other infirmities that tend to hit older folks who push the limits a bit too much. I guess what I'm saying is that for the most part, my laid-back approach to training this summer was cautious and deliberate.  

Only problem for me was a troubled tummy, most likely the result of being out on the course for so long. A nap in the car on the way home, and a couple of bags of chips seemed to take care of that.

My one regret: I wish I’d had another couple of weeks to train. I would have liked to have gotten in a few more long runs, though Maine was in fact a training run of sorts.

I have another marathon coming up in a few weeks, then another a few weeks after that. I’m working on a new dream: one marathon for every state. Maine was state number seven. Only 43 left to go.  No deadline for hitting all fifty. No time goals for any of them. I just want to run and see what happens. After all, every marathon gives me something.    

Maine Marathon: state #7, marathon #16.                 

Every single time.

The dudette endures, and for now that's enough

It was around mile six of the 2013 Providence Marathon when my ideas about long distance running and who I wanted to be began changing. My stomach wasn’t doing too well. My throat had been on fire since around mile 3. I still don’t know exactly why, but I suspect it had something to do with the five pounds of homemade granola I’d chowed down on the day before, an early Mother’s Day present from one of my daughters.

The music on my headset was doing nothing to soothe my tummy. There were high school kids running all around me, laughing and yammering, bumping into me, not paying attention at all to anyone else on the road but themselves. How irritating. It was obvious they were having a blast, which made me even more miserable because the only blast I was experiencing was the one from the furnace burning deep in my belly.

To take my mind off the annoying happiness all around me, I started talking with a curmudgeonly looking runner two decades my senior, who I’d been trailing for most of the race. Turned out, he was a really nice guy. He told me he hoped to finish in under six hours. He wasn’t too concerned about time. After all, he’d just done a fast marathon in DC the week before. We chatted together for awhile about other races he'd done. He dropped back after awhile. I moved on, marveling at the idea of being well past retirement age and running marathons every week or two. I soon met another older guy. He was limping a bit. He told me he’d run marathons in every state in the country except Nevada, and he was planning on getting to that one soon. I had to shake my head and smile. Yet another knucklehead dreamer. 

When I started training for Providence, I hadn’t run a marathon in more than two years. My previous marathon, Manchester City in 2010, had given me an even dozen, a nice solid number to finish with.  After Manchester, I’d pretty much convinced myself that my marathon career was over. I was done with the time-consuming training, the blisters, the foolishness of it all. It is pretty silly when you think about it, all the time and effort we spend chasing after these stupid dreams just so we can feel good about ourselves, drop one more piece of hardware into our medal shoe box, add yet another braggy post to our facebook page. 

I’d decided it was time to focus on other aspects of my life: my family, my friends, my writing. And guess what changed? Not much. Turns out, all those years of marathoning had gotten me pretty good at organizing the other areas of my life. Now, without a focus, I was a little lost. Instead of all that moving forward I anticipated, I was pretty much running in place. 

So after two years of mediocrity, I signed up for Providence and began training. As my long runs progressed to longer runs, I started to feel more like me again. I was moving forward. 

Then there was the horror at Boston.

Three weeks later was Providence. I remember the starting line at Providence. All of us thousands of runners wearing some symbol of our love and fealty for our Boston Marathon family, blue and gold ribbons, Boston hats and shirts, messages marked onto singlets, arms, legs, faces. I remember the sharp shooters on the roofs of surrounding buildings, heavily padded police officers and their sniffing dogs walking among us as we stomped our feet and waited for the starting gun, soldiers on the sidewalks, grimly watching the crowds, long rifles packed on their backs. 

I remember thinking that this was not how I wanted to live my life, guarded and afraid of what was to come. 

I think a lot about those two older guys I met at Providence last year. I remember cheering them on as they finished. Even though between the two of them their marathons numbered in the hundreds, the smiles on their faces were as big as the smiles on the faces of every other finisher that day. I think about all every runner I've known has endured while pursuing their own particular versions of happiness.   

Before Providence, I always associated the word “endure” with a spectrum of negatives, like boredom, pain, abuse.

The Providence Marathon, and the folks I met while running it, gave me a new perspective on endurance. I saw lots of runners, joggers, walkers, limpers out there that day. They saw me too. We didn’t have long conversations or anything. In some cases, our communication wasn’t much more than a nod or a thumbs-up, maybe a grunt every now and then. 

But now, when I think endurance I think something different. I think of sharp shooters and of who I do not want to be. I think of how life ends way too quickly. I picture weathered skin and squinting laughing eyes. I think of small kindnesses and big pictures. I imagine rising up to face challenges, one step at a time -- on roads, in classrooms, at the keyboard.  

A whole lot of hooey? Maybe. 

We all live within narratives we’ve at least partially created for ourselves. For now, my idea of endurance is part of mine. Last week I ran marathon number 16. The creaks and aches, what few there were, have passed. My legs are again alive and kicking. That finish line smile? It’s still here too. What can I say, other than what's true for me right now? I endure.  

Three bullets says it all

I love to read out loud to my students. One of my favorite books is Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, by Bruce Coville. It’s a gripping tale of love and loss, friendship, family, pets, bullying. It pretty much covers all the big issues middle school kids face, and does so with plenty of humor and a ton of heart. 

I’ve gone through at least a half dozen copies of the book, in the dozen years or so that I’ve been reading it. Mainly because once I lend it out to one of the kids to read on his or her own, I usually don’t ever see it again. 

I just finished reading the story to my current class. They burst out in guffaws when I read the first chapter title, Love Letter of Doom, partly because of the phrase, but also because I’ve gotten really good at reading the book pretty dramatically. I know it almost by heart. As I read, I do my best to channel some of my favorite comedic actors, like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler,  William Shatner.

  

See, that’s yet another thing the public doesn’t get about teachers. We’re actors. Some days, like on state testing days for example, we get to follow a planned script. But that’s rare. Most times, we’re improvising, doing our soft shoe singing/dancing/ juggling, part of our brain focused on the words we need to say,  the other part gauging the audience reaction, and re-adjusting according to kid body language, eye messages, comments, and so on.  One minute I’m Cookie Monster, reminding kids that C is for characterization. The next I’m Beyonce telling kids to look at the board, to the left to the left. 

According to Google, David Scott set the world record for stand-up last year in Dubuque, Iowa, performing for forty hours and some change. Please. That’s minor league stuff.  Teaching IS stand-up. It is as mentally and physically exhausting as performing on Broadway, but without the glitzy after parties, the multi-million dollar contracts, the respect.

When I finished reading the Coville book, I went back and reread my favorite section, like I always do. We talk a lot in class about big ideas/ themes. This one particular paragraph is the heart of the book. The speaker, Hyacinth Priest, is trying to soothe Jeremy, who doesn’t want to let his pet dragon, Tiamat, leave his world for her new home, her ultimate destiny, the world of the dragons.   

Here’s the section:

Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart. 

It makes me cry every time I read it.

We talked a bit about this quote and why it’s important. As in other years, the ensuing conversation left me shaken, sad, worn out, hating my job, loving it at the same time. Because I need to respect boundaries, I can’t say what my students said. But because I’ve had a dozen or more conversations about this particular paragraph over the last decade or so, I feel comfortable relating previous responses. They don’t leave your head.

Sometimes you get students who’ll talk about deaths of a loved one, like a grandparent who died way back when the student was teeny. Sometimes kids will talk about longing to see family members who live thousands of miles away. I’ve taught many kids over the years from families that immigrate to the United States one at a time; for example dad first, then mom, then oldest sibling, next oldest, etc. It can take five, six, seven years for those families to re-assemble here in Massachusetts. You see the sadness in their eyes as the kids talk about living with aunts, uncles, family friends either here or in Ghana, Colombia, wherever, while they spend their childhood waiting for their family to be whole again. 

 You make mental notes of the kids who are nodding their heads in understanding, the kids who add in their own stories. You tattoo on your brain the names of the kids who hide their eyes, look away, pretend they don’t care.  

Sometimes a kid will catch you off-guard with this: “The man next door killed a cat just because he didn’t like it. He put it in a bag. I saw him.”

Or will make you dizzy with this: “Miss, why do people have to kill pets? It’s so mean, isn’t it?”  Then in a rush of words the student, I’ll call him Jake, told all of us how his dad had given him a pitbull puppy that he’d named Silverman (not the real name). At six weeks old Silverman’s fur was solid black and so soft. Jake talked about how he loved patting his dog, how he still remembers the feel of that fur. 

The puppy got in the habit of cuddling up next to him in front of the television. They slept together every night. The puppy grew strong and big. In class, Jake stood up to demonstrate how massive that was. He sucked in his stomach and pushed out his chest to show just how powerful Silverman had become. 

Then one day, Silverman bit a kid who was tussling with Jake in the fenced in yard. Jake is convinced the dog was just doing what he’d been trained to do – protect his owner. 

“Miss, my dad had to use three bullets to kill the dog. He was such a strong dog. Three bullets to the chest. One bullet wouldn’t do it. Why did my dad do that? Why did he kill my dog?”

You hear these stories, and you get overwhelmed, because it’s just so sad. You never endured, until adulthood, the grittiness some of these kids live with every day.

But on the flip side, you’re glad the kids are talking about this tough stuff, because you know you got to them. They’re showing empathy and compassion. They get the story. They showing you they're starting to understand how to relate to good literature. Your teacher instincts tell you that they are on their way to falling head over heels in love with reading, which means that maybe Jake and kids like him will stay in school, go to college, grab those lives they want to live.  

And then there's the other reality. You think about the MCAS, the MAPS testing, the WIDA, Fountas and Pinnell, PARCC, and all the other time-sucking assessments that your city and state insist are so important, and how none of those reflect much at all about authentic learning and what it means to teach the whole child. 

Good books teach us how to live and help us figure out who we want to be.

 

  

Innocence lost: In the elementary classroom the day after 9/11

This is what I remember about September 11, 2001, and the day after.

I was standing at the front of the classroom at the chalkboard, teaching a lesson on subjects and predicates. We were using a textbook that was copyrighted 1988, one year before my oldest student was born. Kids were raising their hands to go up to the board to add the subject/predicate slash mark to the sentences I'd written.

A teacher friend came into the room and nudged me over to the bank of windows, out of kid earshot. She whispered something about two planes hitting the World Trade Center Towers, first one then another.

How I responded: “What’s the punchline?” I thought it was some sick joke. 

She said it wasn’t a joke and that the principal was sending her around to tell all of us teachers. We weren’t supposed to say anything to the students. There was a chance that some of our students might have lost family members. We had tons of kids who had family in the five boroughs. In an elementary school, panic and rumors can spread as fast as lice.  

As soon as she left, I opened the door that led to the adjacent classroom, I made a face at my colleague, one that asked, "Did you hear?" He nodded. His face was pale. He looked tired. I wondered if I looked that way too.

A few seconds later, a message over the intercom told us to turn off all classroom computers immediately. For the next three hours, like most of my colleagues, I received no updates. I didn't know about the Pentagon or Shanksville. I didn't know if Boston had been hit. I didn't know if my own kids were safe.

At my lunch, I scooted upstairs to the audio visual supply room, where no students were allowed and where the principal had temporarily set up a television for faculty. I saw for the first time what most everyone else across the country had been watching for hours: the flattening of the towers, the chaos in DC, the horror in Pennsylvania.

Our principal sat with us in a room that was silent, except for gasps or brief exclamations. She was retiring the next day after over forty years in the education profession. I wonder now if she was thinking back to when she started her career. Wonder if she was thinking about her own starry-eyed innocence as a young teacher. Perhaps she was considering what she'd lost over the years, due to the sights she'd seen, the personal stories of abuse and violence that students had shared.  

"This is just the start," she said. I remember wondering what she meant by that.


It was hard going back to class. We teachers struggled to keep our emotions reigned in. We all had trouble focusing.
 

After work I drove home in a stupor, listening to the news but unable to absorb any of it. I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee because I thought maybe caffeine would sharpen my senses. I remember standing in line behind two high school-age girls who were gossiping about he-said-she-said kinds of things.  The store folks had turned on a radio, and were waiting on us silently so they could listen to the news. The mindless chatter of the girls drowned out everything.  

At home my daughters, who were in high school at the time, told me they'd watched the news all day. "You know you're safe," I said.

Each of them gave me big sighs, eye rolls, and versions of: "We know. We know. We heard that SO many times."

Neither of them wanted to watch any more of it with me on TV. I watched the news for only a few seconds. The sights were too gruesome, the grief overwhelming. I sent out some emails to friends to ask if they were okay, and thankfully everyone I knew was fine.

One friend who lived in Jersey City watched it all happen from a window in her condo. She had a late morning appointment in one of the towers. She was heading to take the subway into Manhattan when the first plane hit. She turned around, rushed home, and watched the horror from her patio.   

Next morning, I stopped at a couple of stores on my way to school. I picked up the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I wasn’t planning on reading these with the kids. I bought them because I wanted to read them later, on my own. I wondered how the day would go. I wondered what to say to my three groups of 11-and 12-year-olds. 

I decided to find out what they knew first. I stood in front of the classroom, watching carefully for body language cues. "So, what should we talk about today?"

Every group started yelling out about the attacks. Signalling for silence,I passed out paper and asked kids to write down everything they'd heard or seen. As they wrote ferociously, I paced the room and read their responses.

The amount of erroneous information was overwhelming. It was obvious that most grown ups hadn’t talked to their kids at all. Most of the students either knew about the events from kid word-of-mouth and thought that the entire city of New York had been destroyed and we were next, or had stayed up most of the night, unsupervised, watching graphic scenes of mayhem and death on television.

I’d gone to school thinking that I was just going to affirm for these kids what I'd told my own at home the night before and that morning before we left for school: "You are safe."

I never expected to have to deal with a question like this: “Are we going to die today?”

Or this: “Miss, did you see how those planes hit those buildings? Wow! It was just like a movie!”

Or this, from Miguel, who'd stayed up all night watching the news with his younger siblings. Miguel jumped up on a chair, flapped his arms like they were wings, and landed neatly on the floor, as most of his classmates laughed. "Did you see those people jumping off the buildings and flying through the air? That was so cool! I'm going to try that!"

From his buddies across the room: "Yeah! That was amazing. How'd they do that?"

It took several seconds to quiet down that class, as I thought, "What do I do now?" In my head, flickering like a black and white newsreel, I saw Miguel and his friends running home from school to their third- and second-story apartments, giggling as they rushed to their rickety front porches, hopping onto the railings, balancing for split seconds fifty feet up, diving, then breaking onto concrete pavement. 

I don't remember what I said, except I was stern and matter-of-fact, even while my head was spinning. I talked about height, velocity, moving objects, stationary objects, brains, spinal cords.  I did the best I could without getting overly graphic. I leaned back against the blackboard and pressed my palms into the chalk trough to keep the room in focus.


To this day, I can still picture Miguel hopping onto his chair, flapping his arms like the pigeons that roosted outside our classroom windows every morning, then jumping to the floor. But I still don't have words to describe what it felt like, watching innocence fade from young eyes, as I explained the reality that day, and the next day, and the next.