Crossing the Straights

It was 10am on Monday, the Labor Day holiday, and I needed Diana Nyad to make it to Florida.  I know that most people who may have been paying attention to the story of the 64-year-old woman on her fifth attempt in 35 years to swim the 110 miles between Cuba and Florida wanted her to succeed.  Or at least I can only presume most people didn't have any reason to want her to fail.  But I needed her to make it.  And although now it seems obvious why, it certainly wasn't obvious to me as I sat glued to my computer checking Nyad's real-time position, watching the dot in the ocean representing her coordinates move closer and closer to Key West.

To be frank, prior to Monday I may have heard of Nyad (in the context of her prior attempts a few years ago), but I had never really focused on her.  If anything, I likely thought she was out of her mind for devoting her life to this goal (who on Earth would want to swim from Cuba to the United States?  Why??).  And yet, on Labor Day I found myself fixated and agitated.  I felt anxious for her.  I worried about box jellyfish sightings.  I wondered whether the mild electrical field around her would be enough to keep the sharks away.  I wanted to know why her speech was slurred when her team called her in for hydration and nutrition that morning. (Was it the special -- albeit scary -- face-mask to prevent jellyfish stings interfering with her speech?  Was she experiencing some type of allergic reaction to something in the water??  Her team reported that they were worried about her airways but had not yet intervened -- why hadn't they intervened???).  As I called out to my husband in the kitchen "she's five miles out!", he gently asked "do you think this is marathon-related?"  I looked at him perplexed, my brow furrowing.  And then my face relaxed into recognition and acceptance.  Ah yes.  Of course.

Two weeks previously I had registered for next year's Boston Marathon.  Those of us who crossed the half way mark but were not able to finish due to the attack were given a special registration period (about ten days) during which we were permitted to sign-up for next year, to have the chance to run again (without meeting any qualifying standards or fundraising minimums) and presumably finish what we started.  I have been openly conflicted about this and most of me believes next year is not my year.  After I registered, to keep my options open, I proceeded to cry intermittently for days.  I'm not sure if I was sad for what was lost this past April, or already anticipating my disappointment next year when I don't show up to the starting line.  And yet, in the weeks since registering, I admit that I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the stretch of the course that passes Wellesley College (about 13 miles into the race).  In my day-dream, the sides of the road are lined with yellow daffodils (I read somewhere that somone wants to plant bulbs along the race course so that they bloom in April; a kind of force-field of flowers carrying the runners through to the finish).  In my day-dream, I am surrounded by people who understand: people who ran last year and couldn't complete the race; people who were at the finish and saw the horror; people who want Patriots Day to again be one of innocent celebration.  Although technically further away in time, I imagine that the world on race day 2014 feels closer to the events of April 15, 2013 than it does today, five months after.  There will presumably be reflections on the prior year; a resurgence of stories both sad and triumphant.  In my imagined April 21, 2014, the reinvigorated focus on the marathon bombings and its aftermath is something to which I feel connected, and which connects me with the others who come out for the race, whether to run or to watch.  The feeling I have when I envision being there is not really one of vindication against the attackers; I don't feel motivated by bravado.  It is more a feeling of understanding by, and commiseration with, my fellow runners and Bostonians, of communal recognition that even a year later (a generally accepted period of mourning), there is still a rawness (as I expect there will be), but nonetheless an exuberance in being together to pass this anniversary and welcome the new era of the Boston Marathon.  Changed, but not necessarily for the worse.

A friend recently shared a Rawandan proverb with me:  "You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you."  If I'm honest, I had to read that a number of times before I could make sense of it.  I have concluded that there is a lot of wisdom in it.  But what happens when what is "running inside you" is a race that cannot ever be finished?  A distance that cannot ever be covered?  After completing her swim, Nyad shared several words of wisdom.  "Never ever give up."  "You are never too old to chase your dreams."  And "find a way" to make your dreams happen.  That is inspiring but also a whole lot of pressure.  Not only to pursue your dreams at all costs, but also to know what those dreams are; to know what is running inside you and how to make it stop (or at least slow down).  Nyad has arguably accomplished both, outdistancing sharks and jellyfish while also finally achieving her long-standing dream of crossing the Florida Straights.  She had said that this would be her last attempt, no matter the outcome.  I wonder if that would have been true, if she could walk away having not succeeded.  I also wonder whether the moment she touched Florida sand, after 53 hours in the water, erased her prior disappointments and failures.  Was that the end to her 35 year journey, or just the end to her 53 hour one?  I wonder whether what is running inside me is really anything to do with not finishing the marathon, or much more to do with the threat to my family that was too close and too real.  A matter of seconds and feet that made all the difference.  One side of a street as opposed to the other.  What I do know is that right now my tolerance for disappointment is extremely low.  In recent weeks, when people or circumstances have failed to meet my expectations, I have felt it with a depth and duration that is abnormal.  That's not to say my disappointment isn't real or justified; just that my reaction to that disappointment is disproportionate.  On April 15 the world did not meet my expectations.  It defied expectations.  And I now find myself trying to make sure it doesn't let me down again, feeling that if I stare hard enough at the dot on my computer screen I can force Diana's arms and legs to continue moving her forward; I can telepathically push the sharks and jellyfish away; I can will her to the shore.  Because I needed her to make it there safely, this woman I've never met.  I needed her to go before me, and to not come up short.  I couldn't bear her disappointment, or mine, if she had failed again.  Because I know I'm still in the water; but if I squint hard I'm fairly certain I can see twinkling lights letting me know that land is within my reach.

Becoming an "ish" Kind of Girl

A good friend recently gave me one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received.  It’s one of those “runner stickers” that you put on the bumper of your car.  You know the ones; they are oval and say 13.1, 26.2, or even, God forbid, 70.3.  (One of the funnier ones I’ve seen says “0.0 I don’t run”.) 

The one she gave me says “26.ish”.       

My friend was apprehensive handing me the sticker, concerned that perhaps it would offend me given my conflicted feelings surrounding my almost-finish at the Boston Marathon this year.  To the contrary, I thought it was just perfect.  In fact, that one “ish” says more than I have been able to say in all of the words I have written since the marathon.  And as I face the impending “registration period” (when those of us who did not finish but crossed the half-way mark are permitted to sign up for next year’s Boston Marathon), and find myself wishing I did not have the choice to make, I am starting to wonder whether perhaps I need a little more “ish” in my life.

Growing up, a common refrain in my house was “almost doesn’t count, except in horse-shoes and hand grenades.”  In other words, you generally don’t get any points in life for “almost” succeeding.  This is not to say that I was not permitted to fail; to the contrary, it was encouraged as an important learning experience.  It was more a caution against using “almost” as an excuse for not trying your hardest.  Notwithstanding the unfortunate image that saying conjures in the context of the marathon bombings, I think it’s fair to say that my general approach to life has been consistent with its philosophy.  I don't believe in short cuts.  I am not one to take the easy way out.  I believe (rightly or wrongly) things are worth more if they are harder won.  I don't believe in mulligans (ok, maybe sometimes I believe in mulligans…).  I am someone who keeps score, who keeps track.  I catch typos.  I don’t like when people use the word “fortuitous” to mean “fortunate”.  I am not a sophisticated cook, but I am a decent baker (the former requiring a sixth sense for estimation I lack, the latter requiring close measurement.)  I believe that for the most part, almost doesn’t actually count.  Those characteristics are fundamentally part of who I am, and that’s ok.  They have served me well.  I am, in most regards, precise.  I am, in most regards, a “.2” kind of girl.

When I was preparing for the marathon, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital gave our team a training schedule to follow.  For each day of the 18-week training program it showed a suggested range of miles to run (1-3, 3-5, 4-6, 6-8…19-21), all culminating in “The Big Day!” (an implied 26.2).  Using the Garmin running watch my husband gave me for Christmas, I would clock my mileage each time I ran, making a note on the schedule of the exact amount, down to the second decimal point.  No “range” for me!  I wanted to know exactly how far I had gone.  Some weeks I would add it all up, and reflect with amazement on the distance my legs had traveled.  It was really one of the most meaningful aspects of the entire experience; seeing the proof of the transformation that was occurring in my body.  My strength and my endurance increasing, almost beyond my control.  I was living proof that really anyone can run a marathon; that if you put in the time and clock the miles your body will learn how to sustain that distance.

We had a particularly grueling New England winter last year, and for many of our long training runs my partner and I would head off to a local state park where the main access road, always plowed, provided 5 clear miles of hills.  We would run up and down this road, sometimes three times as we got closer to the race, talking about everything and anything.  One Saturday morning after a particularly large storm I remember the tree branches, frozen with white ice and heavy with snow, arched over us with the sun glinting and ricocheting between them.  It felt like being in a snow globe filled with glitter.  Our shadows stretched ahead on the white ground, the two of us, side by side (me always on the right, my friend on the left).  I reached for my phone, hoping to preserve the amazing moment.  But it was about 30 degrees and my phone was frozen, rendering the camera non-functional.  So instead I just looked around at the stunning beauty of my surroundings, breathed deeply the cold winter air and felt the contrast of the strong sun on my face, and thought how lucky I was to spend a Saturday morning with one of my best friends in this peaceful place, running.

Not too long ago I was commuting home from work with my husband and another friend of ours, who has run Boston before.  I was expressing ambivalence over whether I would run again, next year or ever.  He assumed I had run Boston prior to this past April, and when I said that this was my first marathon attempt ever, I admitted to feeling that I cannot actually say I have run a marathon.  Although many people have since told me “of course you ran a marathon, you were right there near the finish”, or “everyone knows the last .5 mile is nothing at that point”, his words were slightly different and much more poignant.  He said that he always felt that for Boston the marathon happens over the winter.  In other words, the marathon is getting up early in the cold dark and running.  The marathon is running up and down a plowed road in a state park, over and over and over, until you’ve hit your miles.  The marathon is running in the rain and wind, with soaking shoes and numb toes.  It’s doing the final long training run on the race route and seeing—and conquering—the hills for the first time.  It’s learning how to drink while running, how to eat GU Chomps while running, how to get rid of a cramp while running.  That’s the marathon.  Race day, he said, is your reward for all of that hard work.  From his perspective, I ran the marathon; I just didn’t get my reward.

When I got the email the other day notifying me that registration for my category of non-finisher would open in the near future (next week in fact), my heart sank.  99% of me knows it is just not possible next year.  Physically.  Emotionally.  Timing-wise.  But I also know I’ll probably register, leaving the door open and also dragging out the decision process uncomfortably.  It has forced me to really think about why I ran in the first place and whether the same, or different, motivations would push me to ever try again.  A large part of why I ran had to do with my running partner (and good friend) subtly suggesting that maybe I wasn’t up to it; maybe I didn't have the time or the dedication to join the Spaulding team.  This was brilliant reverse-psychology on her part because she knows me well enough to understand what motivates me.  I don’t like being told I can’t do something.  (And she was right; I doubted whether I could do it.)  I prefer to think that everything is in my reach and it’s up to me to decide where I put my energies.  And so I put my energy, all of my energy, into training.  And I clocked my miles, and I wrote down my distances.  I followed the recipe for marathon success like the meticulous baker I am, because I know that if you measure carefully and add the exact right amount of salt, baking powder, vanilla, flour, eggs, cinnamon, and sugar, you will get a coffee cake.  And if you run X amount of miles in the right order over 18 weeks, you will get a marathon. 

Obviously all the training in the world won’t prepare you for a terrorist attack.  But what I got that I didn’t expect were weeks of hard (very hard), but also enjoyable, preparation.  Moments like the snow globe (and countless others) that I won’t forget.  A perspective on my town and its beauty by foot, a new view of all the various roads and routes we ran that one doesn’t see while driving.  An education in fueling and hydrating long distance running.  Hours and hours with my good friend that no one can take away.  My own marathon.

It has been said, “life is a journey, not a destination”.  Even Miley Cyrus agrees, singing:

There's always gonna be another mountain

I'm always gonna wanna make it move

Always gonna be an uphill battle

Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose

Ain't about how fast I get there

Ain't about what's waitin' on the other side

It's the climb

Oh Miley.  So young; and yet, so wise.  In truth, I’m probably somewhere in-between.  It’s not only about the climb for me.  I do actually care what’s on the other side of that mountain.  So maybe what drives me is the .2; but I’m learning that what stays with me is the “ish”.  Even if I originally agreed to run the marathon to meet the challenge put to me—to cross that finish line—there is some truth that what truly transforms us is everything that comes before that point.  And that transformation can be blurry.  It is not really amenable to being defined or measured.  That is the “ish” of life (to me at least).  And in that regard, although I will likely continue to be motivated by what I perceive to be the reward, I am beginning to understand that the gravitas of the experience has already occurred long before the medals are handed out.

As simple as it sounds, maybe it's time to leave my running watch at home for a while and just run as fast as feels good, until my body wants to stop, enjoying the views instead of tracking my distance and pace.  To make my next goal, my next mountain, the challenge of being motivated solely by the “ish”.  To run another marathon, if I ever do, not so much for the finish but for the random beautiful moments along the way to the start.  Or at the very least to get comfortable with a decision not to run next year because I know I’ve already been transformed.  Who knows, maybe I will find I’m more of an “ish” girl than I thought.  Heck, I may even try cooking without a recipe…

The Things We Keep

I am a recovered hoarder.  Ok, fine, recovering hoarder.  Since a young age, I have imbued inanimate objects with life, personality, and significance beyond their molecular or monetary value.  I remember as a young girl finding a piece of thread in my room; I mean literally a piece of navy thread.  Perhaps it had come off of my comforter, or my school uniform?  Rather than toss it in the trash, I found an old small box, filled it with cotton balls, and created a little “home” for my new friend—the thread—and kept it on my bedside table.  I don’t remember what ultimately happened to it, but I am proud to report that I do not still have it.  That said I have an admittedly hard time letting go of the tangible evidence of my life.  I want to trace the “Y” carved into the old New York subway token; feel the worn tufts of fur on my first teddy “bear” (which is really a kangaroo); wear my high school team jacket; see just how small my child’s Crocs were at age 18 months.  Or at least I want the option, because in fact I never do those things (although all of these items are currently in my closet). 

I’ve managed to keep this proclivity in relative check.  I have never had a compulsion to buy things I don’t need (much though my husband might dispute that…).  I don’t believe my house is significantly more cluttered than others who have young kids.  I have never actually become “buried alive” as the TLC show on hoarding dramatically describes.  But I get how it could happen.  I understand what drives the impulse to surround ourselves with proof of life, and how under certain circumstances it could spin out of control.  I admit to having said out loud at some point “well, I might actually need these” when referring to a random assortment of hundreds of paper cocktail napkins I had stored (no, I won’t), and have felt my heart ache at the thought of putting an old Pottery Barn crib bumper in the “donation” pile (even though due to safety concerns it was never even on the crib at the same time a baby slept there).

In preparation for moving houses a few years ago, I committed to cleansing my home of excess.  Going forward I would live like the Amish.  I would have only the clothes that I wear on a regular basis in my closet.  I would have only the toys that are currently in favor.  If a piece of furniture didn’t fit in the new house right now, I wasn’t going to keep it with the idea that someday it might.  Being the consummate preparer, in advance of the move I watched episode after episode of “Hoarding: Buried Alive” to remind myself how bad things could get.  I read “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things” (by Gail Steketee), a psychological exploration of what drives people to hoard.  I hired two friends who are ridiculously organized to help me sell and donate anything I didn’t want to bring to the new house, and weed out as I unpacked in case anything slipped by.  (Fact:  if you ever want to cure yourself of a tendency to hoard, hold a yard sale and observe the die-hards who show up early.  I actually found myself, in a moment of paternalism, refusing to sell an egg-poaching pan to an individual I was certain would not be poaching any eggs.)  And I found it was true what they say in the books and on the shows: when you realize you don’t need something—when you realize you are saving it solely out of fear that letting go of the “thing” will cause you to lose the experience behind it—the weight that is lifted is more tangible that the item itself.  Now, whenever I find myself making piles of the kids’ schoolwork I can’t part with, or catch myself putting something into the back of a closet or under my bed so I don’t have to decide what to do with it, I channel that lightness; that feeling of total liberation that comes from saying: “Goodbye; I don’t need you, you ‘thing’, to demonstrate that my life has actually happened.  My experiences exist in me, in real-time, even without you as a reference point.”  (I recognize the irony of speaking directly to an object that I am trying to de-personify.)

It’s never easy to admit to relapse.  But here it goes: 

Right now, in the corner of my home office is the sweaty, blue, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital singlet I wore running in the Boston Marathon this year, with all of the personalization I carefully added with a Sharpie the night before the race.  It is crumpled in a ball, in essentially the same spot I left it on April 15, nearly four months ago, when I finally got home, hours after the race was stopped in the wake of the terrorist attack.  I remember peeling it off, still so wet and cold, wanting only to dissolve into tears in a hot shower.  It sits next to my “Runner’s Passport”, the packet of logistical information they give the runners before the race, which happened to have been left on the same file cabinet.  Until very recently the running shoes I wore that day sat by the bottom of the stairs directly outside my home office, exactly where I took them off on the way upstairs to my room.  Recently I debated whether to bring my shoes into the memorial set up in Copley Square, hearing that it would soon be dissembled and moved to an off-site location.  Not able to decide what to do, I instead moved them into the front hall closet, where they still sit.  My number…oh the coveted number (I can almost not bear to look at the photo I have of me picking it up before the race, smiling and unaware of what lay ahead).  I carefully removed it from the sweaty singlet (returning the shirt to its crumpled pile) and pinned it to my bulletin board, even though, like my childhood phone number, it’s a numerical sequence I doubt I could forget if I tried.  Leaning against the wall by the bulletin board is the poster my kids made for me, to cheer me at the finish that never was.  It miraculously survived, and is rolled up with care.  Our DVR still stores “The Boston Marathon”, my husband having thoughtfully set the recorder before he came into the city that day, so I could later watch the pre-race coverage of Hopkington and other race-related news.  I have never watched it.  He asked the other night if he could delete it and I simply shook my head no.

To be frank, I don’t notice these items when moving about my house; yet I know they are there.  And like the muscle strain aggravated from training that has sidelined me from physical activity this summer, and the stark line on the back of my right leg of once-burned-now-tanned skin where the strong sun hit the hem of my running pants for almost 26 miles, they are lingering reminders of April 15 with which I am not yet ready to part.  I suppose that I am not yet ready for the relief that might come by getting rid of them.  Or perhaps I know that there would be no such relief because these items really aren’t at all like too many paper cocktail napkins or an egg-poaching pan.  Any attempt, including this one, to define why they are significant will necessarily fail; their importance exists on a purely emotional and visceral level.  And although the brown line on my leg currently feels like a tattoo, I know that it will fade, most likely in exactly the right amount of time.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t be sorry on some level to realize one day that it is gone.  Because it’s possible to miss even reminders of hard days; to feel their absence.  At some point I am guessing that I will either wash or throw out my singlet, and at some point I will likely no longer be compelled to write about the marathon; it will be a distant memory, too many good (and bad) days having intervened.  But April 15 will remain woven into me, part of who I am in every present moment, a destructive day that has also made me better in many ways.  And as with all formative experiences, there’s no real rush to destroy the evidence.  Because this really isn't hoarding; it’s more like “holding” – and I think I, for one, do it for very different reasons.  For the same reasons I still have a bottle of my Grandma’s perfume, and every now and then, on both good and bad days, I just need a quick sniff.  A hug from a long time ago.  A hope that endings aren’t always permanent, and through some sort of “choose your own adventure” magic we can re-write the past.