OK, the race was a great time. I have checked, and nothing important fell off me. So success all around.
We roused ourselves from or throne (little Shakespeare joke there for the theatre nerds) and wended a caravan down to Alexandria, Virginia on the fine Saturday morning.
About 85% of the way there we were stopped on the highway as police cars and an ambulance crowded around a tiny black two-seater sports car that had clearly barrel-rolled through the tree-thick median scant minutes before we arrived. Whoever had been in it was either already in the ambulance, still bouncing through the foliage, or not extant in sufficient quantities to collect onto a gurney anymore. One tree as big around as my leg had been shattered right through the middle and was just a shredded stump about three feet high. The car looked like a black pencil that has been chewed in frustration.
Speed kills. Or a great omen that a bunch of people using their feet to get from A to B was the way to go. Or, as is often the case in life, both.
Though the tally may creep up a bit, Jim's team raised right around twelve grand. He was given an award at the pre-race for raising the most private money; meaning he didn't have a company sponsor: just good people, friends, and family. Many of you donated through this blog to that, and I am very grateful, for myself, for Jim, and for anybody suffering from Multiple Myeloma who will be helped by the research, development, and awareness funded by your gifts. Thank you very much.
Of course, Jim said he would match all the gifts, so your 12K will be 24K, which is really wonderful. Jim is currently outside, wearing a beer barrel attached to suspenders, selling apples and match-sticks on the corner. If anybody has chores they need doing, his back is pretty strong and he's a hard worker, so let us know.
Some genius putz donated through me using the name "IP Daley," a level of humour so childish that I am still laughing. Who says you can't be in Third Grade forever, right? Whoever you are, I hope you enjoyed your signed, first-edition copy of "Bloody Balls" by Rusty Zipper as you went to sleep that night. It would only be fitting.
The Kiss Myeloma team had about twenty members, and Jim's fund-raising earned us our own tent with the team name across the top. So it was with calm pleasure that we gathered together at our tables under our tent and allowed the sun to very quickly turn the 45 degree morning into a 60 degree morning.
I know this will sound snotty, but it is true: in New York, we race a little harder for stuff. There are simply too many people in New York races for them not to be planned and executed with a high level of precision. As often as not that is annoying, with some random race volunteer becoming a safety-vest nazi and the repetitive cries of "stay to your left! Runners to your LEFT!!" shattering the beautiful Central Park morning.
But I am used to it, I guess. So when the DJ--yes, the DJ, cranking pop tunes off his Macbook under the tent next to ours--announced that the race would start in five minutes and would everyone who was running get to the front and everyone who was walking get to the back, I was not really prepared. This was not the NY-style fifteen minutes in your assigned corral, doing asinine calisthenics to try and psych out the dipshits next to you, blowing on your hands manically as a way to try and forget how badly you need to pee.
This was a bunch of people awake on a Saturday for a cause, collecting on a side-street near a movie theatre parking lot in Alexandria, Virginia. Which, once I got over my smug Manhattan attitude, was really kind of nice.
I made my way to the front of the line. OK, 'line' isn't really the word. The front of the...three women in matching MMRF windbreakers standing in the middle of the street holding their hands out.
I went to the front out of habit. Blew on my hands out of habit. Looked around me for someone I would compete with out of habit.
Then seven 9-year old boys bounded past and toed the line, right in front of me. Giggling, talking a mile a minute, nudging each other, wiping grubby hands across dangling bangs as they barely, barely held the power and sproing of youth within bodies draped to the knees with MMRF Race For Research t-shirts, odd tunics with sweatshirt hoods popping out the top and barely-laced basketball sneakers peeping out the bottom.
Hmmm. If only I had a scythe. One good swing, about hip height, and I would have open road when the race started.
That's what the pale, bald, going-soft nut-job behind these boys was thinking. The hairless weirdo with the big kissy lips on his shirt. If I had been their moms, I probably would have whispered "Thomas, Gideon, stay away from that man behind you. Just move over here towards Sarah and Alicia, OK? Give that man some room, OK? Please?"
And then the gun sounded. Seriously, a gun. Some random dude off to the right held up a starter's pistol, and there was a crack in the morning air, a puff of smoke, and at least forty people all went "Oh!" at the same time, caught blissfully unawares. We were off. It was great. It was a race put together for non-racing reasons, and everything about it was beautiful.
The insane children flew away from me like, well, like they had finally turned around and seen me looming and depilated behind them like some Boo Radley in short shorts and sneakers. They moved near the speed of light, pushing against each other, themselves and their ridiculously long shirts, and were out of my frame of vision in an instant.
And then they were back. I had forgotten that kids are like dogs: mostly sprint. Literally a hundred and fifty feet from the start line I passed every one of them; they were panting, one was crying, having locked his legs together under his tunic-shirt and taken a dive right there in the middle of the street, face-planting to the glee of his brethren and, I am sure, the terrified chagrin of his mom.
Their forward lightning had scattered and was now equally lateral. They had gone from a streaming V of kid-geese streaking towards the horizon to a group of agitated pigeon-boys waddling in the middle of the street.
So I passed them, and that was nice.
The course was a straight out-and-back on one wide road. About a hundred yards along, the road reared up in a horrific overpass to clear the I-95 on-ramp from which most of us had been disgorged an hour and half earlier. An elevation of probably 50 feet in less than 100 yards of pavement. It separated the men from the boys and the women from the girls in a hilariously efficient minute and a half of racing. I passed my first defeated person walking before I had even started to sweat.
Which was only because I had actually grown a brain, and was not running any faster that I was able. The first twenty yards I gave in to race-borne habit of past years, and I lurched off the line probably running a minute and a half per mile faster than I should have, and certainly faster than this current body could sustain for more than about a football field. But I settled in very quickly to the hopefully-ten-minute-mile-or-slightly-better I have been aiming for. Feet doing just enough to not shuffle, knees lifting but not any more than I could sustain, breathing a bit like a billows but a billows I could push and pull for the next half hour.
It was, in a slow, plodding, decrepit kind of way, glorious.
Running, once you have done it enough to get rid of your bad habits, is not about how fast you can go. That's sprinting. Running is about how fast you can go for the distance required. And to really do that at all well, you have to spend a lot of time on diagnostics: how do I feel? What hurts? What is strong? What might pop? What can hold me up today? Do I have it in me to speed up? To hurt myself but return again next week? To push as hard as I can without pushing past health?
For me, what has been such a revelation, such an addiction, about running, is that it boils down to this: I have to push myself beyond the limits and into a place where I am always just a sliver of fate shy of breaking: but no further. I have to find the edge of ability and pain and obstinacy and flesh; and I have to stay there, for as long as I can.
A year and a half ago in Boston that was running a marathon into a daylong headwind, up and over Heartbreak Hill, and across the finish line in three hours and eight minutes and forty-two seconds. That's a seven minute twelve second per mile pace for over twenty six miles.
Saturday that was not falling over, not getting in front of my breathing, and not stopping or walking at all, to finish in twenty-eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds over a 3.1 mile course. That's nine minutes ten seconds per mile.
So two minutes per mile slower over a course approximately one eighth as long as me at my best.
That is how far I have fallen.
And it was glorious.
Because I made it. Upright, running, even picking it up for a 'sprint' of sorts the last fifty yards. Not bleeding from the eyes, not limping along on hamstrings snapped like kindling in winter, not seated and weeping along the median strip at the two mile point, barfing on my bright yellow shoes.
When the going gets tough, the tough lower their expectations.
Because you have to. It is a higher hurdle to admit you are weak and work from there than to just push a healthy body further. I've done both, now. I know what I'm talking about.
Everyone on our team finished, the walkers and the runners. I was fourth, I think, of our group, behind a helluva good guy who is new to running and got a PR (Personal Record for you civilians) and in whose eyes I saw the hunger to go even faster that I miss and will feel again one day. Behind a father and daughter loping along chatting pleasantly to each other the whole way.
And behind a hundred or so other people in this small race for a good cause on a good day.
Jim ran the whole race as well, and was not bothered by the calf and Achilles issues he worried would hamper his run. He had a great day, too. My mother walked, with friends on either side, snapping pictures of people as they passed in the other direction.
And afterward there were brownies and bagels and Bloodies for the drinkers and Virgins for me and the kids. And laughter and catching up with friends, and a few more brownies, and we were the last people in the parking lot, still enjoying the sun and the humanity under our tent as the crew of laborers came sheepishly over to tell us they had to take it down now.
Sometimes, things just go well.
Fuck cancer.
