celebrating five years of running with four hours of torture

Two months ago I completed a marathon. The idea of running the 2014 LA Marathon had been in the back of my mind for over a year, because it would be a way of celebrating five years of running. So in the after glow of my fall half, I signed up.

There were about 4 months between the time I signed up and race day. In that time, I moved to my own apartment, took two and a half weeks off because of an injury, traveled to Seattle for a writers conference, and got ready to host my sister and her family in my new place (they arrived just days before the race; my brother-in-law ran it with me). I also logged around 300 miles (I think??? though that number should have been higher), including both 18 and 20 milers. Those days were pretty great because, aside from spending three hours running, I had the rest of the day to justify every lazy or indulgent desire with, "heck yeah I'm gonna do that, i just ran 20 miles." Mostly that meant eating popcorn and drinking alcohol.

So, race day. Was crazy and awesome and a little disappointing all at the same time. I knew not to expect to hit my original goal time (sub 4:15) because there were so many variables, including the fact that my injury had taken me out during a crucial time in training. I also woke up at 1am the morning of the race trying to figure out what time I really needed to get up. I'd set my alarm for 2:30 (we needed to leave at 3am) but then realized that because it was daylight savings time THERE WAS NO 2:30. Trippy. And only 4 hours of sleep. On my couch. After hearing my nephew barf the night before.

Even if you're not a runner, you probably know that while a marathon requires physical training and endurance, it's equally a mental challenge. That was definitely the case for me. Here's what I remember thinking at each mile:

Mile 1: I saw Ben! Hi Ben! And wow, there are so many people running.

Mile 2: Get out of my way! Oh and there's Mandi! But she doesn't see me! MANDI! (didn't see me.)

Mile 3: Running downtown is fun when there are no cars. But so many people...

Mile 4: I'm tired already.

Mile 5: There are still people in my way!

Mile 6: I hope my 10K time is good because people who are tracking my progress are getting a text right now.

Mile 7: Echo Park is so cool.

Mile 8: I can't wait to cross mile 10.

Mile 9: Am I at mile 10 yet?

Mile 10: Omg there's Lori and Andrew and Natalie! (My sister and her kids, didn't expect to see them here.) I almost start crying because I'm happy and scared and exhilarated.

Mile 11: What does the fox say? I hope this song isn't stuck in my head the rest of the race.

Mile 12: Hollywood is so weird.

Mile 13: I wonder what my half marathon time is? Again, people are tracking. And where's Judy? I need to see Judy!

Mile 14: There's Judy! I need to pee. (Stopped to use porta-potty, which, with the line, took about 6 minutes!)

Mile 15: Downhill, yay! And holy crap, why is the sun out?

Mile 16: I can't believe I still have 10 miles. It's getting really hot.

Miles 17-18: A blur.

Mile 19: I'm so hot. Where's Mirna? I need that gatorade. Mirna, Mirna, Mirna... There's Mirna! Also, I'm really tired of injesting sugar (gatorade, shotblocks).

Mile 20: I swear I see mirages. Long, hot, unshady stretch.

Mile 21: Holy crap.

Mile 22: This is how I felt:

Mile 23: Cramping, running under hoses that spectators are holding out for us, I don't know how I'm gonna finish this thing.

Mile 24: I stop to walk next to an older gentleman who starts encouraging me. But then he won't stop. Decide to start running again so I don't get stuck with this guy.

Mile 25: I don't know if I will ever run again.

Mile 26: Who decided to add that freakin .2 to this race?

Ten minutes after I finished: I want to do another one!

polishing the stars

My sister Andrea sent me this text this morning. Some context: Amelia is her seven-year old daughter and one of the coolest second-graders around (I'm biased, but still...). The maps and water is my other sister, Lori. The poetry and Shel Silverstein is me.

I was a little surprised to hear about Amelia taking the book to school. If you've been following along, you may remember reading about my nieces and nephews opening gifts at Christmas last year, and how they seemed a little disappointed with the seeming dullness of the books I gave them. I didn't necessarily blame them. Books just kinda sit there, looking all rectangle-like and unmoving. There's some work involved in getting to the fun of them.

Anyway, apparently Amelia opened the book and found the fun in the Shel Silverstein book I gave her. I knew she would like it, because like Mr. Silverstein, she is a little goofy and giggly (her laugh is the best), and she also thinks pretty deeply and makes astute observations. Did I tell you that the last time I saw her, she recognized a painting on the cover of one of my books as a Van Gogh? She was six at the time. I know.

So, in honor of Amelia and her budding love for poetry, and just because Shel Silverstein is great (and should still be read by adults), here's one of his poems for you today.

Somebody Has To (from A Light in the Attic)

Somebody has to go polish the stars,
They’re looking a little bit dull.
Somebody has to go polish the stars,
For the eagles and starlings and gulls
Have all been complaining they’re tarnished and worn,
They say they want new ones we cannot afford.
So please get your rags
And your polishing jars,
Somebody has to go polish the stars.
~Shel Silverstein
(via here)

being better than we are

The past few Mondays I've been running with J. He's one of the homeless guys in my running group. J's always a few steps ahead of me, and I would run faster to keep up  with him but I can never be sure that the next traffic light will turn red in time for us to stop and get a breather. So instead I huff and puff just a little bit behind him and hope that we'll talk a little bit at those red traffic lights, and for the thirty seconds after we start again and I'm able to keep pace with him.

This arrangement, and the fact that J. is reserved, means that after a few times running with him, I am just getting to know about his life. This week we talked some about running, and how he ran track in high school, the 100 meters. "I could run fast then. Before I started smoking." He's tried to stop, he said, but stress makes it hard. I agreed - I have my own habits that are hard to kick.

My run this morning was solitary, in the quiet neighborhoods around the Rose Bowl. The sky gradually turned from black to gray to light blue. The air was cool. I heard birds singing, and occasionally passed some runners or walkers, but otherwise I was completely alone. I've been trying to pray during these morning runs, and this morning J. came to mind. I prayed for him and his job interviews and his smoking habit. During prayer, I found myself wanting J. to know that he can be better than he is, and not just in a pull-yourself-up kind of way, but in a deep, life-changing, spirit way. I wanted him to know that God changes things.

As a writer, I love revising pieces. I love seeing where sentences are out of place, or where words can be cut, and then seeing how those changes make the piece completely new, and stronger and more powerful. I think that's why, as I was praying for J., I started thinking of God's process in our lives as revision. A different thought - one from God - during stressful times could help J. kick that smoking habit in a decisive way. A new way of seeing himself and his life is a key to being better than he is.

***
I wanted to share this news spot from Indianapolis, about the local Back on My Feet chapter. One of the guys interviewed says that, before he started the program, he found himself "just doing the same thing." The program was an opportunity to get in on the revising that God wants to do in his life.

varied conversations with men about height

1. On a blind date

When I arrived at the restaurant, I spotted him at the hostess station. I approached him, and he turned and recognized me and we gave each other a quick, awkward hug. Then his first words, after saying hi and how are you, were, "Huh, I've never dated a tall girl before. How do you feel about being tall?"

2. At a friend's birthday party

The subject of my height came up in an indirect way. First, the the taller one and I talked about people we knew in common, then of my friend - a female who happens to be a baller (his words, not mine, and meaning really good at basketball). The taller one and shorter one, both guys, were roommates, and so knew each other fairly well. I knew them only marginally, as friends of friends, though I'd developed a slight crush on the shorter one when I met him a month or two before.

"So do you play basket-"

The taller one started to ask me if I played basketball, but I cut him off. "You're not really asking me that, are you?" I thought he'd hear the flirting at the edge of my voice, and that, as a tall person, he'd get the joke. We started laughing, and his smile and mock-shocked look in his eyes told me he felt both sheepish and pleased.

After we'd joked about it, the shorter one asked, "How tall are you?" And always more earnest and direct with men who make me feel nervous, with men I like, I told him. He said he was the same height, and never considered himself tall. I said something about being a tall woman and the strange mix of responses my height draws from people. Like when I wear heels at work, I said, and everybody automatically looks down at my feet to understand where my height is coming from. What I was getting at is that I stick out, people look, and there's no way to avoid it.

We endured an awkward silence, neither of us knowing what to say next, and moved on.

3. Shopping in downtown Los Angeles

"How tall are you?" He asked this while my friend, the customer at his store, looked at shoes for her fiance. "Six foot?"

This was actually the second verbalized response to my height that afternoon. Maybe it was my short dress that made my legs look especially long that day? Just an hour ago, while we were walking around downtown, a homeless man had yelled at me from across the street, "Yo, did you play basketball in high school?" I'd ignored him, and my friend had laughed.

I answered the store owner's question about my height, and he thought me lucky. "Most women are five foot, five foot two." I smiled and tried to decide how frank I wanted to be with this man about the "luck" of being a tall woman. My friend interrupted by asking for a shoe size in the model she was interested in.

I stood at the front of the store, looking at something on my phone, and joined my friend when she paid. He gave her a business card, then handed one to me and said he'd like to take me out sometime. "I really like tall women," he said. I said ok, or thank you, or something like that, eager to leave, but also strangely grateful.

"You should call him," my friend said as we walked to the car. His card is still in the cupholder of my car.

sundays are for things like this

Sundays are good days for taking a day off and doing things that on the surface my not seem to directly improve or inspire your writing, but that you know keep those creative juices churning.

Like wandering downtown. Like laughing with a friend. Like eating ice cream.

Happy Sunday, friends.

i'm trying to be smarter than i am

I promised to post every day this month. And in my mind, I vowed to not give in to cheater posts - like, just choosing a quote to throw up here for days I didn't feel like writing, or something like that. Something substantial, something thoughtful, every day.

But then this afternoon I was talking to a friend about writing and how I have this "weird secret desire" (aren't most of our desires weird and secret in some way?) to write short stories, and she said that based on what she's read of mine (that being one piece) she'd assumed I already write short stories. And I heard myself saying, "Well I've had this idea for one, maybe I'll just write it and see what happens." This friend and I are in a writing/creativity group together that has its second monthly meeting next week, so I thought - hey, why not write it for that, but also for my blog. It will be flash fiction, just a few hundred words. I'll whip it up today, get it on the blog for the day's post, then tighten it up for the meeting.

Uh, wishful thinking. I'm a few hundred words in and nothing's really happened yet, it's all background (which I'm afraid I'll end up cutting in the end) so really I'm just getting to know the character, who is pretty intense.

SO. No short story for you today. Instead I have (drumroll please) chosen a quote for you! About writing short stories! (And making art!)

Stories expect us to be smarter than we are. We need to see what we could not see until, as we furiously squint and rewrite and squint and rewrite, we finally find our way to something that we had not seen before, and that is beautiful in the truest sense of stories - full, wise, satisfying.

And we are changed as well. Tired and exhilarated, we have been shown by our own words that the world is different from what we thought, and that our first thoughts - which had seemed so fine! - were only the beginning of a long road. It is an exceptional lesson that every story proffers. It is the business of art, always.

                                                                              -Erin McGraw, contributed to A Syllable of Water

Happy Saturday, friends.

a spiritual lesson from my $4 cups of coffee

The new coffee shops that I like (and am slightly ashamed to like) are in LA’s up-and-coming Arts Districts, that strange little industrial area tucked behind Little Tokyo, east of downtown. Like most things hipster, the Arts District likes to be gritty yet new, hidden only to be found out. Sometimes when I need an afternoon pick me up, I go to the hipster places, because let’s face it, the hipsters know about a few things, including coffee. There, bearded men and women wearing messy buns right on top of their heads and bright red lipstick are waiting to charge me $4 for a cup of coffee, and I readily give it to them.

But this isn’t about coffee, it’s about how I get there. I have to drive, since it’s a little over a mile from my office. First I pass through the Financial District, with its tall buildings and fast-moving business people and lawyers. Then, briefly, the Jewelry District where bright signs sell bright wares. Then a sign for Gallery Row, an area where art galleries, artisan restaurants and lofts are giving old theater buildings their second chance at a spotlight. Things change fast, within a block or two. And here is where it changes most — only a block after Gallery Row there is trash littering streets, and makeshift housing, made of boxes and shopping carts and tents, dots the sidewalks just a few hundred feet from the luxury housing that young people are moving into. This is Skid Row, a city unto itself, its own culture and rules and geography. 

This drive to get coffee, this weekly passing through, is a large part of the reason I’m running with my new running group in Skid Row. Over the past year or two, every time I drive by, I’m reminded of a parable from the Bible about a rich man who ate good food and wore nice things. Right outside of where he lived, there was a poor, hungry man with sores all over his body. Later, after they both died, their situations seem to have flipped: the rich man is tormented while the poor man is beside Abraham, the Father of Israel (the implication is that the poor man has it pretty good if he’s next to Abraham). In his agony, the rich man calls out for mercy, but Abraham tells him that he’s already had his good things, and now there is a chasm between the rich and the poor in the afterlife, one that can’t be crossed. Their lots are fixed. 

Intense, I know. Like all of God’s Word, this story has layers to unpack. But one main point I think Jesus is getting at in sharing this parable is that right now, during this life, there isn’t an impossible chasm. Rich people can give to poor people, and vice versa. The story also says something about how and when we choose to seek comfort. It has a lot to say about our hearts. I'm still buying that hipster coffee on occasion, but I hope I'm also seeing things a little more clearly as I reflect on this passage, run with guys from URM and cross boundaries that aren't really there.