Monday, August 15, 2011

Catching up to myself




The east river runs blackboard green right now, north to south. But that will change. It always does.

We're back on the cancer floor. 10 south for a change, and, miracle of miracles--or maybe a history of being a low-maintenance and helpful patient and caregiver-giver--we have spent the whole stint in a single room. The singles are for isolation patients, so I try and look like i'm always working on a really pleghmy cough whenever I get near the slit window in the outer door, but I doubt anyone is fooled. If someone needs it, they'll boot us. And that will be fine.

OK, where was I? Ah, yes, Cambridge Maryland, June 13, I think, year of a fictitious lord two thousand eleven. Eagleman.

Eagleman is a half Ironman distance. Competitors:
Swim 1.2 miles
Bike 56 miles
Run 13.1 miles

In that order.

Eagleman takes place offshore from, in, and around the lovely town of Cambridge in my home state of Maryland. The swim take places in the Choptank, a river I have been sailing, crossing, swimming, and watching creep below me in summer Ocean City traffic most of my life. The bike leg leaves town and goes through the gorgeous Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, and the Half Marathon loops back through the backside of the town and out a bit into the cornfields that surround many Eastern Shore towns, often as not growing corn to feed the millions of chickens raised there on their way to American tables and gullets.

Oh, and the race is hard. Some scoff because it is virtually flat. Those people, the ones scoffing? They're tools. The Chesapeake Bay has a trick we sailors have known about forever--permanent headwind, direction-irrelevant. There's very little shade at any point, the Shore in mid June tends to be in the 90s with near equal humidity, and the only wind that might cool you is blowing right up your frigging nose. Bike speed averages here tend to be slow. And the Choptank is known, oddly enough, for it's chop.

So, sure, it is not the hardest 70.3 (inside slang for a Half Ironman, that denotes total mileage) but it is not the easiest either. Find me the easiest race, and I'll find you a waste of time. What the hell's the point of challenging yourself to something easy? Just seems stupid.

I almost passed out before the start. I have slowly and grudgingly discovered that one of the biggest physical shifts since treatment and into maintenance chemotherapy has been towards a tighter connection between my emotional and physical states.

Since diagnosis and treatment I have softened, or at the very least the rough-hewn walls between my emotions and my physical state have become much more semi-permeable. Part of this original division stems from being an actor: in order to be able to call upon your physicality at any moment to perform not-currently-true deeds, you have to able to be separate from whatever emotional truths you are experiencing. A professional performer has to pratfall when he's sad, stumble when he's at the height of his powers, seem unsure when she knows she has it all in exactly the right place.

Some of the division comes from being part Norwegian and part Scottish, or from the events of my life up to now. Or from being an Orioles fan. It could be anything.

But since diagnosis those walls have become a lot more like pumice than granite. Sit on one side, and you can hear the weeping, or the laughter, or the terror, on the other. A mediocre long-distance phone commercial can choke me up. There is a line N often reads from the prologue to her book when she's on tour, about pigeons: "[her grandfather] says they are fattest outside the library, because readers are generous. He says they always find their way home." I have read and heard that line hundreds of times. And I have never thought it anything but beautiful. But these days, I can't hear it without crying.

And so it goes with anticipation. Sitting on the parking lot asphalt in my tri-suit (a silly buy efficient mix of bike shorts, tech top, and pocketed exercise garment that most resembles Coney Island era one-pieces for men) I am sweating profusely from under my swim cap, as weak as I have felt in weeks, and just plain scared. All I can think about is drowning, or getting heat stroke, or riding off the straight flat roads into the brackish murk of the Blackwater Reserve.

But there's a tiny voice behind all that sort of incoherently telling me to shut the fuck up and go get in the water for my start wave.

So I do that.

Mediocre rock music piped across open water to people wearing swim caps. 'Eye of the Tiger' played to death before 8am. A local MC who may or may not know a single goddamn thing about triathlon and/or the region in which you compete (ours made it a solid half hour calling the river the Chunkthink before some local straightened her out). All of it lost because all you can do is tread water and anticipate. This is the worst part of racing. This is the best part of racing.

The air horn sounds, and in the space of three seconds you inhale a bunch of river, you worry that the timing chip velcroed to your ankle will come off any minute and render your whole race a fish tale, and the pasty white heel of some guy within five years of your age smashes full force up and into your nostril, trying to drive your septum and about five grams of brackish baywater into the center of your brain.

I finished the swim in just under 48 minutes, which was not bad but not stellar. Then again, I was on chemo. I kind of had to keep telling myself that--that day, the days and weeks prepping, the days I couldn't run or swim or bike enough to really feel like I could kill this race.

I was never supposed to kill this race. I am supposed to kill cancer. You see, in my head leukemia stands, arms akimbo and legs out wide like it is on the rolling deck of a tanker. And leukemia says to me "I own you. Go fuck yourself. You do what I tell you, and if I don't want you to accomplish something then goddammit you won't. Now go curl up in bed and listen with fear to each heartbeat. Nighty night."

That's my battle. And I forget sometimes. N reminds me that it isn't that I ran a slow three miles or that I was beat at the end of a day reading two hundred pages of an audiobook. It is that I did those things on poison. On purpose. People I run with, audition with, do union work with, sand floors with--they are helpful in seeing the leukemia, sure, but seeing it as this thing I am acting through.

Acting in spite of.

So I work to keep that in my head. Work to keep perspective on what my goals really are. Work to keep being me, owned by no disease or it's treatment.

The bike took about three hours and twenty minutes. But they factor in your two transition times to your total bike time, so if I recall I was actually riding about three hours and eight minutes, which over 56 miles is about seventeen and a half mph. I'm sure the winners went a lot faster than that.

I had aero-bars for the first time this year and it helped. They are bars that extend off the front of your handlebars that allow you to stay in a tuck and aerodynamic position as much humanly possible. Especially on a windy course, it makes a huge difference to keep yourself as out of the wind as possible.

People on chemotherapy are five times more likely than regular schmucks to get skin cancer. What being Norwegian Scottish Irish whatever adds or subtracts from those statistics, I don't know, but as soon as I was released from the hospital N made sure I got expensive and thick and predominantly natural sun cream. I had a lot of it on, slathered everywhere I might have a where.

But swimming and having strangers' armpits rub against you for 48 minutes and then leaning over a bike with no shade for three hours tests even the best sun cream. Suffice to say that I still have pretty distinct tan lines where my tri-suit crossed my shoulders, these two months later. Suffice to say it could have been a lot worse.

I worked the bike leg pretty hard, cursing and drooling and dropping my nice cold water bottle in an effort to get a drink without leaving my tuck. Luckily they have replacements at the aid stations, but I still stewed over dropping the one I had pre-frozen the night before. I grabbed some of the food bars from my tech pockets, grabbed a banana from an aid station, and balanced water and sports drinks throughout. But I was still pretty beat as the bike ended and the half marathon loomed.

Just get me to the run. That's what a lot of poeple who come to multisport from running say. All this silly swimming and biking shit is the obstacle: just get me to the run. If I get to the run I know I'll finish. I know I'm home.

And I thought that, too, but I was ragged out. And here is where I am most proud of myself.

With as little pomp and circumstance, as little self-flagellation, and as little tears as possible, I walked a pretty good portion of the first two miles. I would run three hundred yards, then slow to a quick walk. I'd pick a tree or a corner, and I'd pick it up and run again. I grabbed a handful of ice from the Mile 1 worker and threw it under my hat with one cube left out for my mouth, and when that melted I ran again.

I didn't beat myself up. I knew the goal was the finish line. I'm not fighting the streets of suburban Cambridge: I'm fighting fucking leukemia. The goal is the finish line. That's all. Dying with a good effort is worth a thimble of cat piss: completion is victory.

By mile 2 I decided I had rested enough. I felt the heat subside internally and the baseline strength come back to where it should. So I ran. And I didn't stop again. The half marathon took me two hours and twenty minutes. That's slow. And I'm fine with it.

There was a brief period where my sun-addled mind thought I could do the half marathon in under two hours. Even now I laugh as I try and find the logic that would have allowed that. I looked at my watch every mile marker on the run. Saw the 13s and the 12s at the start, then settled into the 10s and 9s once I paced up again. It was impossible math from the get. But math has never been my strong suit.

And I finished strong. I have mentioned before that this is not always a good thing. More often than not it means you left a little too much out on course, that you don't understand how to dose your effort. 

But, c'mon, I'm a performing bear, all the way through to the beaten and recovering and soon-to-beaten-again marrow. Finishing with a high turnover, a scrunched pushing face, and some light under my feet means as much to the quiet panting boy in my soul as it might to whatever camera I am mugging for. It's what I am. Who I am.

But, to be safe and to fulfill a promise to N--who had worriedly allowed me to pursue this abuse because she saw and sees how much it does for me, risk or no--I went straight from where they give you what seems like an absurdly heavy finisher's medal and take a picture of your cross-eyed pathetic self, over to the medical tent to get checked out.

I felt fine--all things considered--but had gotten goosebumps for the last two miles or so, and that can be an indicator of core-temperature differences that someone in my situation should keep an eye out for.

So I stumble to the tent, just across the finishing lane from the medals and photo podium. There are maybe ten EMS or EMTs, and one official doctor. The tent is open front, thirty feet wide and fifteen deep. There are cots and chairs. There are tired people of all stripes and sizes on the cots, on the chairs, on the ground between the cots and chairs. Some have IVs, some ice packs crinkling as they dribble themselves dead onto the backs of heated necks. Some people just have their heads between their knees, wrists flapped and hands dead-bird down in a position that speaks only of exhaustion. It reminded me of the field at Agincourt from Henry V: 

"I tell thee truly, Herald, I know not if the day be ours or no."

The day was mine. I walked up to the first EMT and said "...umm, hey, uh, I just finished and I feel pretty good but I there were maybe goosebumps and I'm on maintenance chemotherapy for Leuk--

That's about all I got out. The pleasantly burly gent furrowed his brow for half a sec, then just kind of bunched my partially unzipped tri-suit in his hand and walked me backward gently to where a cot caught me under the knees, and in was sitting.

He waded through the tired people and the tired people caring for them, and disappeared. 

I watched a daughter bring a banana and an ice pack to a man who looked to be in his early sixties. She was crying. He was nearly asleep on the ground next to me.

"I'm so proud of you, dad."
"I love you, honey. Oh, a banana. I'm. Yeah. That looks really good."
"Here. I'll peel it for you."
He smiles.

Then there hoves into view the perplexed but calm face of a young doctor, the only white coat in the place, the only red embroidery of a name. I didn't catch it.

"Did I hear right? You're on chemo?"
Now that it is done and I have caught a little breath and I know I finished, I am getting a little emotional.
"Well, I haven't taken today's dose because of the race and all, but yeah."
"What do you have?"
"In treatment for Leukemia. ALL. Remission about a year and a month now. I take 6mp ever day, have Methatrexate coming tonight, and Vincristine once a month."
"How are you feeling?"
"(choking tears a bit now) I...I'm tired."
"You look OK. You want an IV?"
"No, I just wanted to check in here. You know, make sure. I think I'm doing OK. I just wanted to..."
"You sit for as long as you want. You need anything, let us know."
"Thanks. I'll free this spot up for someone who needs it soon."
"Not a problem."
"Thanks. And, um, thanks for being a doctor. I mean...you know...you guys are helping keep me, not dead, and here, and...thanks" (tears and a little snot now).
...
"Hey, 1036?" (he doesn't know me, can only see my race number).
"Yeah?"
"You're an idiot. But you're my hero."

I laugh-snot-cry a syllable. Then go get a piece of corn on the cob. And a cookie. I think.

I finished in six hours, thirty-eight minutes, and forty-two seconds. Less than an hour slower than my time two years prior, when my marrow and I were still getting along.

Left foot. Right foot. Repeat.