There is a tree by Sullivans Pond that, every year, is the first to signal with blazing yellow the coming of Autumn. In deepening September nights, Fall chooses this tree among all trees to lay herself down beneath – her icy dream whispers tremble through its leaves – her secret revelations turn them gold. This special tree is Autumn’s herald of swelling gourds and startlingly blue skies. It is the light-gathering beacon of Nova Scotia’s finest season.
As Summer wanes, each morning, in the lingering chill, as I gently stretch before a run, I’ll watch this tree, waiting for the first burst of yellow. Often, it comes all at once, unseen.
There is a deep stillness at the heart of autumn, a sense of peace and contentment that descends only after the frost touches that first tree – a final convincing consolation: even though warmth and growth will soon be lost, everything is okay. I can believe this consolation in autumn; I can feel it.
Some runners need variety. They need loop courses; they need to explore new vistas, new paths – otherwise, their running gets stale. I can understand where those runners are coming from. I too love to use a run to explore new sights. But my opportunities for novelty are somewhat limited because I don’t own a car. I could take the bus to new locales, but the amount of time and planning involved makes the thought unpalatable. Instead, I run the same out-and-back routes day after day, season after season, and I love it.
What I’ve come to notice after three years of running in Dartmouth along the shores of Lake Banook and up the Shubie Trail as far as Waverly is that the concept of “the same” is, at heart, meaningless. Sure, in a rough way, I run the “same” route – but nothing about the route is really ever the same. Nothing.
In fact, I find I get a deeper feel for seasonal changes by paying attention to how my route is different on each run. I watch for the first fragile spring flowers and waxy buds, for summer’s exuberance as the forest canopy fills in the sky (and sometimes messes with my Garmin’s satellite connection!), for that blazing yellow tree by the glassy waters of Sullivans Pond, and for the emptiness of bare tree limbs scratching the tinny winter sky. I feel an intimacy with the life that flows and changes and surrounds me along my route – and each twist and turn and uphill and downhill is now like an old friend. In fact, I’ve named most of the kilometre splits along the way – like 5k hill and 7k bay. When my Garmin goes wonky, it’s no problem – I know precisely how far from the bench in Sullivans Pond I am.
My running, then, helps me to stay in touch with the basic rhythms of the natural world, which keeps me grounded much more than the city rhythms of traffic and street lights. I do love new running routes, and I do love to explore, but I’ve come to appreciate the familiarity I have with my route. Paradoxically, though, it’s a familiarity that lacks essential sameness: it’s in a vague sense the same, but different in its essential details each time I run. Familiarity doesn’t seem to be about grasping some kind of static essence; rather, it seems to be a kind of traveling with, a following along – a long run with a friend under endless lapis lazuli skies.
My out-and-back route, then, has taught me that, at heart, the world really is impermanent – only our concepts about it seem to stay the same. Further, running in autumn has made me realize that there is a sadness at the heart of all things – a constant leave-taking, a constant departure. But somehow it’s okay. Somehow that’s the only way life can unfold.
Today, the blazing yellow of the Sullivans Pond tree is scattered among the grass and along the bottom of the pond – not only are its leaves the first to change, but they are also the first to fall – being chosen has its costs. Still, the autumn colours do have a couple of strong weeks to play with the light before all the leaves are lost… this year. I have a little time to enjoy the bright stand of birches at kilometre 8 and the tamaracks at 9.5km.
I look forward to visiting them like old friends.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Art of Discomfort
I was thinking last night about suffering. Strange, I know – perhaps even morbid – but it’s something that inevitably comes to mind during and after a maxed-out threshold run with Cliff. For me, this meant 3x15 minutes @ 6:00/mile pace with 3:00 rests (that’s about 7.5 miles of hard running). That’s a pretty heavy load for me, and it was made even heavier by the gut-searing hills where we were training: the ironically named Point Pleasant Park in Halifax. What I was thinking about, though, is why runners like me choose – seek out, even – suffering.
Okay. Maybe “suffering” is too strong a word for what I was feeling while trying to sustain the pace up some long hills – perhaps I’ll go with “discomfort.” Whatever you want to call it, what I met with on those hills was not just laboured breathing and the sear of lactic acid flooding my muscles but also a divided interpretation of those physiological signals. On the one hand, I knew the training was “good” – good because I felt it was preparing me to achieve my goal in a week and a half, good because the discomfort was a sign of the effort needed to become faster and stronger. On the other hand, however, I felt a real desire to stop, an interpretation of those signals as “bad”: bad because they could be a sign of overtraining, bad because over-effort could result in injury. In the end, for better or for worse, the “good” outweighed the “bad,” and I completed the workout.
It is an ongoing battle for any runner, though, trying to figure out what is good and what is bad in training. The “ethics” of training are far from clear in advance – you can only know them by their fruits… when it’s too late. And it all feels like crap sometimes, good or bad.
However, what fascinates me with all this discomfort is what it takes to push on despite it – why a runner doesn’t obey when a fairly insistent part of her mind is screaming STOP! There’s probably more than one reason, but it struck me during that punishing threshold workout that one reason is a kind of creative desire – a will to create.
One thing most runners have in common is a continual desire to change, to transform. If you run to lose weight (like I did at first), then each decision to run is fuelled by a desire to transform not only how you look but also how you live. If you run to compete against others or yourself, then your decision to run takes its energy from a desire to stimulate the necessary changes to your muscles, circulatory system, and so forth to go faster and faster. Even if you run simply to maintain your fitness level, there is still that basic desire to enter into an activity of transformation and movement.
But the funny thing about transformation (this kind, at least) is that it’s uncomfortable – it hurts… sometimes a lot. But the desire to create through transformation – to shape the body and mind through running – can cut through the discomfort. At its best, this desire can light the fires of a kind of artistic creativity. The runner can work like a sculptor, chipping away at the bits of stone that encrust the ideal form hidden within the block of marble – except for runners, the hammers and chisels of their toolkit are workouts: easy runs and long runs for broad chiselling, intervals and thresholds and hills for taking chunks out, and rest and recovery for smoothing the form. The runner’s work, however, is never finished.
So for me, labouring up those hills in Point Pleasant Park was, to some degree, an artistic choice, made and sustained by a desire for self-transformation. In my mind, I see a runner capable of running 6:00/mile over 13 miles, so my workout was like a studio session, where I chipped off more extraneous pieces of stone in my effort to reveal and actualize this idea of myself as a runner.
The danger comes in being overzealous with your chisels. One wrong hammer, and you can waste the block of stone – an arm or a leg (or worse!) can get lopped off.
I don’t want to take the comparison of running and sculpture (or the visual arts in general) too far. What I’m saying, though, is that there is an art to the way runners deal with discomfort, and it is fuelled by a creative desire. Discomfort is simply part of the transformation process, and in this sense, every runner embraces discomfort as a “good” thing, as a condition of self-creation/transformation (although everyone is very happy when the workout is over!). But it isn’t true that the more discomfort you feel and can handle, the better you’ll be – this fact adds to running as an art. There is a line at which a creative discomfort tips over and becomes a destructive pain – when the work serves more to obscure the desired image than to reveal it. That’s when desire darkens and becomes frustration.
But the risk of failure and frustration amplifies the bliss of a good run and a good race. And this is one of the many things I love about all runners, from those just starting and shuffling along to those who push the upper limits of what the human body can achieve – we’re all taking creative risks. We could fail; we could do harm… lasting harm, even; we could become embittered, but we do it anyway – and we choose to make it meaningful to us even if, like all artistic practices, it is not inherently so.
To me, pushing through the discomfort of Wednesday evening’s threshold running was worth it. Ever so slightly, I’ve shaped and transformed myself according to a particular vision of myself. However, I have no idea if it helped or hindered my goal for Valley Harvest… for that, I’ll have to wait until the 11th – the only revelation is in the performance.
Okay. Maybe “suffering” is too strong a word for what I was feeling while trying to sustain the pace up some long hills – perhaps I’ll go with “discomfort.” Whatever you want to call it, what I met with on those hills was not just laboured breathing and the sear of lactic acid flooding my muscles but also a divided interpretation of those physiological signals. On the one hand, I knew the training was “good” – good because I felt it was preparing me to achieve my goal in a week and a half, good because the discomfort was a sign of the effort needed to become faster and stronger. On the other hand, however, I felt a real desire to stop, an interpretation of those signals as “bad”: bad because they could be a sign of overtraining, bad because over-effort could result in injury. In the end, for better or for worse, the “good” outweighed the “bad,” and I completed the workout.
It is an ongoing battle for any runner, though, trying to figure out what is good and what is bad in training. The “ethics” of training are far from clear in advance – you can only know them by their fruits… when it’s too late. And it all feels like crap sometimes, good or bad.
However, what fascinates me with all this discomfort is what it takes to push on despite it – why a runner doesn’t obey when a fairly insistent part of her mind is screaming STOP! There’s probably more than one reason, but it struck me during that punishing threshold workout that one reason is a kind of creative desire – a will to create.
One thing most runners have in common is a continual desire to change, to transform. If you run to lose weight (like I did at first), then each decision to run is fuelled by a desire to transform not only how you look but also how you live. If you run to compete against others or yourself, then your decision to run takes its energy from a desire to stimulate the necessary changes to your muscles, circulatory system, and so forth to go faster and faster. Even if you run simply to maintain your fitness level, there is still that basic desire to enter into an activity of transformation and movement.
But the funny thing about transformation (this kind, at least) is that it’s uncomfortable – it hurts… sometimes a lot. But the desire to create through transformation – to shape the body and mind through running – can cut through the discomfort. At its best, this desire can light the fires of a kind of artistic creativity. The runner can work like a sculptor, chipping away at the bits of stone that encrust the ideal form hidden within the block of marble – except for runners, the hammers and chisels of their toolkit are workouts: easy runs and long runs for broad chiselling, intervals and thresholds and hills for taking chunks out, and rest and recovery for smoothing the form. The runner’s work, however, is never finished.
So for me, labouring up those hills in Point Pleasant Park was, to some degree, an artistic choice, made and sustained by a desire for self-transformation. In my mind, I see a runner capable of running 6:00/mile over 13 miles, so my workout was like a studio session, where I chipped off more extraneous pieces of stone in my effort to reveal and actualize this idea of myself as a runner.
The danger comes in being overzealous with your chisels. One wrong hammer, and you can waste the block of stone – an arm or a leg (or worse!) can get lopped off.
I don’t want to take the comparison of running and sculpture (or the visual arts in general) too far. What I’m saying, though, is that there is an art to the way runners deal with discomfort, and it is fuelled by a creative desire. Discomfort is simply part of the transformation process, and in this sense, every runner embraces discomfort as a “good” thing, as a condition of self-creation/transformation (although everyone is very happy when the workout is over!). But it isn’t true that the more discomfort you feel and can handle, the better you’ll be – this fact adds to running as an art. There is a line at which a creative discomfort tips over and becomes a destructive pain – when the work serves more to obscure the desired image than to reveal it. That’s when desire darkens and becomes frustration.
But the risk of failure and frustration amplifies the bliss of a good run and a good race. And this is one of the many things I love about all runners, from those just starting and shuffling along to those who push the upper limits of what the human body can achieve – we’re all taking creative risks. We could fail; we could do harm… lasting harm, even; we could become embittered, but we do it anyway – and we choose to make it meaningful to us even if, like all artistic practices, it is not inherently so.
To me, pushing through the discomfort of Wednesday evening’s threshold running was worth it. Ever so slightly, I’ve shaped and transformed myself according to a particular vision of myself. However, I have no idea if it helped or hindered my goal for Valley Harvest… for that, I’ll have to wait until the 11th – the only revelation is in the performance.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Rum Runners Relay 2009
What a day!
So. This past Saturday was the 25th running of the Rum Runners Relay, a 10-stage relay from Halifax to Lunenburg – and what a hoot! A group of folks calling themselves the Gonzo Adventure Club dreamed this thing up a quarter century ago, and they’ve been putting on an amazing show ever since. This was my first time participating – but I sure hope it won’t be my last!
The race takes its name from a colourful period in the history of the south shore of Nova Scotia, back when thirsty Yankees suffering under the strain of Prohibition turned to Canada for the spirits of salvation. And we, being the noble and caring folks that we are, supplied that need, running crates of the good stuff across the dangerous gulf of Maine, hiding from the authorities within the numberless coves and bays that sneak their way along the coast.
The race commemorates and celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of our past as well as our generosity of spirit and our exuberance for the good life (aided by a bit o’ firewater). It also recognizes the heroic and selfless acts of civil disobedience that our ancestors performed during troubled and misguided times.
I guess.
Anyway… the race is just a really fun day of running and camaraderie. 60 teams of 10 or less (if someone runs more than one leg) take to the left side of old Highway 3 and wind their way up and down over hill after hill through hamlet after hamlet until the final finish line in Lunenburg. Each leg is hotly contested, and the accumulated time of each team is tracked and added up, creating drama and tension from 6:30am until 7:00pm. Fabulous.
I was a bit of an 11th-hour addition to “The Outliers,” a team put together by the crazy-fast, Blue Nose Marathon winning Leah Jabbour. I had the honour of running leg 6, which travels from the Yacht Club in Hubbards to the industrial plant in East River – a haul of 10.7km over rolling terrain, but with a beautiful final kilometre of downhill running.
I was a little nervous about running the leg because I’d run it the previous Sunday (as recounted in my post “A Bad Run”) and not held up very well. I also knew that I was in tough against Jeff Courish, a fast runner from the Halifax Running Club team who also trains with the same coach as I do. As a result, I had a few butterflies in my stomach as I did my warm-up run around Hubbards cove (my folks have a trailer in Hubbards, so I was staying only a km from the start line).
But that nervous energy turned to excitement as soon as I trotted down the hill to the yacht club. The finish line for leg 5 was set up, the tunes were blaring, and all sorts of people were gathered – either warming up or greeting their team mates as they finished leg 5. The neat thing with this race is that you can travel the course from leg to leg as a team, cheering your runners on, checking the updated stats, and the whole thing has the exuberant feel of a travelling carnival. So I let myself get caught up in the spirit of the day and didn’t worry about the competition. Besides, it was a perfect fall day – cool and clear with a warm sun – why not just enjoy?
And enjoy I did. I lined up in front with Jeff and a couple of others – stayed relaxed up the hill out of the yacht club behind another runner – but then took the lead as soon as we started the first downhill. I felt good, so I opened ‘er up a bit in the first km, trying to make a bit of a statement to the folks behind with a 3:32. At the same time, though, I didn’t want to push too hard because I knew the course was hilly and because I’ve got the Valley half marathon in two weeks! But my “comfortable” was fast enough to keep me out in front the whole way (by comfortable I mean just on the edge of “I wanna die!” pace).
The fan support along the way was awesome. People in cars travelling to the finish would honk – or squeeze a rubber chicken! – and shout encouragement. Folks were also camped out on the side of the road to cheer for the runners. My team had the first water stop on my leg, so I got a big cheer from them (even though I turned down the water), and whoever organized the second water stop convinced someone to dress in a giant lobster costume: it’s a hell of a boost getting cheered on by a six foot lobster – a hell of a boost.
For me, the run was amazing. The whole time I heard Cliff’s voice in my head telling me to “cycle those hips” and to keep the stride long behind. And it was working! My splits were in the low 3:40s and below, even on the hills. In fact, according to my Garmin, I crossed 10k in 36:36 – a big PB for me! After that, I just opened it up on the final downhill and cruised the last 700m at a 3:17 pace. So much fun! I won the leg and helped my team – I was ecstatic. On top of that, the team finished 4th overall – a great achievement considering the depth of the competition.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t travel the rest of the way with the team to Lunenburg. Next year, though, if I’m lucky enough to get on a team, I’m going to go from leg to leg and get the full Rum Runners experience. What a blast.
Now, I don’t know if I’ve emptied the tank for Valley – but who cares?! That day was what racing is all about for me – I don’t regret pushing a tiny bit harder than I’d planned. I’ll see if I can remember that in the final kilometres of Valley if I run out of gas!
One final note: a huge thank you to all the organizers and volunteers for the event. Also, a big thank you to Leah for organizing the team and giving me a spot on it. 3 bows of gratitude to you all.
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