Wrapping Up!

On Monday I'm hosting a bunch of friends for my birthday, which lucky for me falls on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this year. Everyone's arriving at 10 a.m. and we're going out for a 4-kilometer run around my neighborhood before we down some bagels and cake.

Today, with an easy run on the schedule, I mapped out the route.

After a trip through my neighborhood, the run takes in this park

and then winds up back in my driveway. Four kilometers is almost exactly 2.5 miles. I'm hoping kids and spouses will come, too, and that those who don't run will want to walk or bike or push strollers. I plan to spend time with everyone out there, jogging back and forth, walking when I feel like it, just soaking in the day. I don't believe in being "princess for a day" on my birthday, but I do believe that birthdays should be an occasion for gratitude and celebration.

I'm not good at writing inspiration, and while I do like reading the wise thoughts of others, I prefer to do it at certain times when it's really needed (like, say, the night before a race). And I don't think I'm particularly wise when it comes to running. But since this is my second-to-last post, I also wanted to share with you guys a few things I've learned through this sport. Apologies if some of them are platitudinous. I'm writing this for myself as well, because these are things I need reminding of.

1. The major thing that running and life have in common is that they rarely offer straight paths to any destination. Outside circumstances will interfere in some things. In others, you will change, and so (often, though not always) will your goals. You'll know the difference between when you're giving up on something and when you're simply moving on from it, in both running and life.

2. You can draw motivation from negative forces. It's no fun to live knowing you quit something you shouldn't have. But it's also a powerful thing to use that as fuel for another challenge, one you'll see through. Along the same lines: be aware of your faults (one of mine is laziness), and use that awareness to push you in the opposite direction from where those faults would take you if you let them control you.

3. You won't accomplish everything you want. Sorry to say it, but it's true. I am not a believer in "If you dream it, you can do it." At some point, all of us will bump up on the ceiling set by our innate abilities and other factors outside our control. But I don't think we should allow that to make us sad or sullen (at least not for very long). You can accomplish a lot more than you think if you put in the work. Be patient.

4. Your running will give you moments that are sublime. You don't have to be fast to have these moments. These moments have nothing to do with talent. They have to do with you recognizing and satisfying your in-born human need to move. So don't be jealous of others. You're getting the best part of running simply by doing it.

Thanks again to all of you for reading this! Remember that if you want to receive the race reports that I plan to write as I continue my quest for a Boston qualifying time, please email me at terzahbecker [at] gmail.com.

Looking Back at 2012

Miss Zippy put up a few questions to help us running bloggers reflect on the past year. I thought this would be a good way for me to do that, given that most of the next three weeks will continue to be devoted to recovery for me. I do have a plan for the first part of 2013 that I'll share in the next post. For now, though, let's look back!

• Best race experience? This one was easy for me: the Detroit Half-Marathon. It was not only a personal record at that distance for me, it was my first race since I stopped running to rehab my back. I had enjoyed my training with my new coach, but I had no idea a race like that was possible. On top of that, it was a great weekend getaway with good friends (especially Kathy) and my husband, Dan. It was pretty much perfect. Close second: the Houston Marathon in January. That was also a PR race, a fun trip with Kathy--and it featured all the inspiration you could ask for in the form of the Olympic Trials Marathon the day before our race.
• Best run? That's easy too: my first run outside since stopping for injury. I ran with Cynthia (more about her below) at what's since become my favorite place for easy runs. Though it was hot and short, it felt amazing. I knew I had emerged from the tunnel.
• Best new piece of gear? They aren't really new, but I'm going with my Asics arm-warmers. I'd had them for more than a year before I used them in Detroit. They were perfect for that day, allowing me to go light without freezing early in the race. I wore them again in the California International Marathon--same story.
• Best piece of running advice you received? To hire a coach. Which I did. It's wonderful. I'm really cheap, but hiring Darren De Reuck has been worth the money. He's reassuring after bad runs/races (ahem, CIM, which he told me would be slower than I wanted), and encouraging in just the right way when things go well (he's the one who told me to go much faster than I thought I could in Detroit).
• Most inspirational runner? I could also say that this person is the best new friend I made in 2012: Cynthia! Though she's not new in the least to endurance sports (can you say mountain biking?), she was new to running when I first met her in late 2011. Now, she's an old hand with many half-marathons, some tough trail races, several speedy 5Ks and much more under her running belt. She often places in her age group (though she's so modest she often discounts it--we all know better). She's also the person who recommended Darren to me. But she's also inspirational because she never gives up, she never stops experimenting (data nerd!), she doesn't let bad news get her down (at least not permanently) and she's a indefatigable supporter of all her friends and family. I'm excited because 2013 will bring at least two destination races with her.
• If you could sum up your year in a couple of words, what would they be? Peaks and valleys.

Wow!

Looking back at it like that, it's been a truly fine year. I never thought I would have said that about a year that featured no BQ, plus four months on the recumbent bike and doing back rehab exercises. But it's really true.

It's my humble hope that 2013 will be another good one. I'm sure there will be more valleys, but I know there will be peaks, too.

The End is In Sight

On October 19, I will have been writing this blog for two years. A month and a half later on December 2, I will run my sixth marathon, the California International, my last chance to qualify for the Boston Marathon before the deadline I set myself in my blog's title.

If I don't make the Boston cut-off on Dec. 2, I will continue the quest. I have a good coach, a program based on heart rate that I have enjoyed every day I've run on it and a real understanding of what doing this will take for someone like me. I've made lots of friends who support me both with their words and their examples. I've got a good balance now between my family, my job and my running. I can say I honestly feel that Boston is achievable.

Much of that I owe to this blog. But because I think every good story in old-fashioned print or online has a beginning, a middle and an end, my last post to this blog will be on January 21, 2013, the day I turn 40. I'm planning to have a big party that day that will involve running, and I want to exit this blog on a high note.

This end is nigh regardless of the outcome in Sacramento. I know there is a good chance I will not BQ by 40. I've had too tough a year, and my endurance base has eroded. I feel like my training since I hired Darren in June has been excellent. But even excellent training can't make up for a serious lack of miles for too long a time.

The outcome of the story that's meant to end on Jan. 21 was never certain. Not all stories have happy endings. But the beauty of real life as opposed to books is that in books (and blogs) the story may end otherwise than as you wanted.....but the life goes on and with it come other chances, other beginnings and endings. I'm already proof of this, as my whole adult running life has been the blooming of a second chance not to fail.

This isn't to say I want to run slower than 3 hours 44 minutes 59 seconds at CIM. I'm going to do my level best to hit that golden pace and do what I set out to do two years ago. Underdogs sometimes win.

So I hope you'll stick with me through my next two races (there's also the little matter of a half-marathon in Detroit less than two weeks from now!) and through my birthday, when for better or worse I'll close the book on BQ by 40 and move on to wherever my running feet bring me during the next decade, my best decade yet.

Not quite yet.....

10 Running Questions

Sarah and Dimity of Another Mother Runner posted a fun set of questions for running bloggers/moms to answer, so I thought I'd take break from training posts and answer them. Those of you moms (and dads) who are so inclined should consider yourselves tagged! If you blog your answers, please leave a link to the post in the comments here, or email me a link, so I can read what you have to say.

1. Best run ever: This was really hard to decide on, but I think I've nailed it: the XC Xtreme, a small cross-country race in my hometown that I did with my then-fiance now-husband. It was a cold March day in 2005, a four-mile course involving fence-scaling, hill climbing, ditch leaping, water slogging and ropes. I felt really strong and fit in the chilly air. Dan and I ended up finishing side-by-side after I trailed him for a long time, and I finished as third woman (that tells you it was a VERY small race!).

My favorite ever running photo of Dan.

I was behind him at the creek, but I caught up!

Getting my trophy! It was a piece of wood harvested from the course. It smelled like motor oil. The overall men's and women's winners got a set of antlers.

2. Three words that describe my running: therapeutic, rejuvenating, freeing

3. My go-to running outfit is: pretty boring--Nike tempo shorts in black or dark green and a race tech tee of some sort; now that it's chilly in the morning, I'm wearing light gloves, too, and when it gets cold for real I'll trade the shorts for capris and add a jacket.

In a half-marathon last year....pretty typical boring attire!

4. Quirky habit while running: Hmmm...I don't really have one (that I know of!).

5. Morning, midday, evening:  Morning! I'm a morning person all the way. And I always know that no matter how the rest of the day goes, it's OK because I got my run done.

6. I won’t run outside when it’s: both icy AND dark. I can handle either alone, but the combo sends me to the treadmill every time.

7. Worst injury—and how I got over it: my back earlier this year (though it stems from my pregnancy; I've had pain in my low back since late in my pregnancy in 2006); I'm still getting over it thanks to a combo of physical therapy, rest, Pilates and other core work and cross-training.

8. I felt most like a badass mother runner when: I set my 10K PR at the local turkey trot last year in front of my husband and kids. They almost never get to see me race, so it was really fun to know I'd see them at the finish line.

Run faster! Your children are watching!

9. Next race is: the Detroit International Half-Marathon on Oct. 21. I'm loving my training, but this still seems dauntingly close. We'll see how it goes. Right now my expectations for it are low. It's that Dec. 2 California International Marathon that I really want to rock.

10. Potential running goal for 2013: This is up in the air. If by some miracle of magical training by Darren combined with ideal weather and a little pixie dust I do qualify for the Boston Marathon on Dec. 2, my running in 2013 will about having fun and staying fit. I'd like to do a lot of shorter races, run on trails, maybe bust my 5K PR (but not worry a lot about that or anything else). If, however, I don't qualify for Boston, I'll work to stay healthy and continue to gun for that elusive BQ.

Do You Trash Talk?

My husband and I were playing two-handed bridge tonight, and I made a move that I thought would take a trick and surprise him. But turns out he was able to beat my play with a king I didn't realize he had.

"Shoulda counted better," he crowed.

On the next trick, I got him with an unexpected trump.

"Now who shoulda counted better!" I declared in triumph, taking the trick with a measly 10.

It's fun to do a little trash talking with my husband over bridge. But as we continued to play (and he beat me, probably because I started thinking about the subject of this post rather than the game), it occurred to me that I have a very different attitude about trash talking in running.

I don't do it. I don't like it. If anyone tried to trash talk me about a race, I'd roll right over and say, "Yeah, you're right. You're going to kick my ass."

So what's the difference between running and bridge? Part of it is that my husband and I are, well, husband and wife, and we know each other well enough to know where the line of too much and just enough teasing lies. In fact, he's one of the very few people I have enough of a level of comfort with to allow him to tease me at all. I hate being teased, period. I know it makes me come across in some contexts as uptight and humorless, when I don't think I'm humorless at all and I'm only a bit uptight, but it's the way I've always been. It's not that I can't poke fun at myself. But I'd rather be the one doing the poking. I wonder if this is a flaw. Probably. Probably not being able to take teasing is just a step from not being able to take criticism, which is a bad quality.

The other part of it, though, is that while I know I'm not very good at bridge and would like to get better, I'm laid-back when practicing it and not really worried about how I appear. In running, I know I'm not very good at it and want to get better--but I care a great deal about how I appear. I don't want to promise what I can't deliver, even to those who are friends. And if someone were to tease me about my running ability, about beating me in a particular race, my fragile ego would take it to heart, even if my head knew it was meant in fun.

This could be a big part of why I never liked team sports. Some people find sports-related teasing fun, a big part of the whole experience. Alas, I believe this is a side of running culture I'll never be able to participate in.

Do you talk trash in running? How are you about teasing?

The Olympics and Summer Vacation

This morning Dan and I got up early to watch the women's Olympic Marathon. We don't have cable or any kind of DVR/Tivo set-up, so watching it live was the only option. I've watched every Olympic Marathon since Deena and Meb took medals in 2004 (how awesome was that??), and I wasn't going to start missing them this year.

I didn't regret getting up (especially because Dan let me go back to sleep afterwards and I slept until 9:40 a.m., a post-kids record!). I also really enjoyed watching the men's 10,000 yesterday. My favorite feature of both races? Seeing the bonds between training partners.

Good friends who ran hard and supported each other to the end. Credit: NBC Olympics

"...one is silver and the other's gold." Credit: USA Today

When the floodlights go down, win or lose, these athletes will always have running and their friendships. I think it's fantastic! It makes me grateful for all of my running friends, and all of my friends, period.

Yesterday I ran for 50 minutes. I had to stop for a bathroom break, but even that made me happy, because it meant that I am once again running long enough that I need to worry about my diet the day before. Time to resume some old habits! I can't wait until Darren lets me run for an hour, and I think when I'm allowed to go 90 minutes I'll actually feel I can say those magic words, "I'm back."

I'm in the middle of reading Matt Fitzgerald's Run: The Mind-Body Method of Running By Feel. I will review it when I'm finished, but I wanted to put in a plug right away for the chapter on injury. He describes injuries as a gift because you come back from them both grateful for your running and hungry for your goals. This has certainly been my experience so far.

My family and I are going on vacation in southwest Colorado this week, so I'll be taking a blogging hiatus. When I come back, I'll be grateful for fall running, for my coaching situation, for my big kids who are starting kindergarten, for my husband, Dan, who rigged up an antenna and then a connection to the BBC so we could watch the Olympics (no cable in my house), for my extended family and all my friends. This has turned out to be a great summer, though not in the way I expected it to.

Here's the cabin near Durango where we'll be staying. Ahhh!!

Love Letter to the Ponds (July Recap)

It was one of those "I don't want to get out of bed" mornings. But my little 40-minute run with five 90-second pick-ups turned that around.

When I arrived at the park where I'm doing most of my outdoor running right now, I barely noticed its beauties. It consists of three man-made fishing ponds with a parking lot, picnic shelters and bathrooms on one side and the St. Vrain River on the other. The river side is especially pretty, the tumbling little river snaking through cottonwoods and falling over an old dam, and the ponds themselves are full of waterfowl (the egrets and blue herons are my favorites). It takes about 15 minutes at my warm-up pace to get all the way around the gravel loop. It's flat the whole time, perfect for someone coming back from an injury.

But this morning at 6 a.m. I was still half-asleep. Dan and I went down to Denver last night with some friends to see my beloved St. Louis Cardinals lose to the Colorado Rockies. I was all hyped up from the fun of seeing a baseball game--my first live one since my kids were born!--and didn't fall asleep until 11:30.

A loud splash brought me out of my reverie. I don't know what kind of animal I startled on my initial warm-up amble, but it woke me up. I began my jog, firing up the Casio. (I haven't used a Garmin since I began running again--Dan is pretty sure he lost ours. I don't know when I'm going to have to deal with that, but it's probably going to be soon.)

Gradually, awareness of my surroundings began seeping in. A rooster crowed. The full moon, sinking above the mountains in the west, faded from its initial snowy white to a pale cream color that blended with the morning sky. Ducks waddled awkwardly on land, plunging into the water where they became grace itself. My steps strengthened. I said hi to a couple of other regulars. Before I knew it, I was around the circuit once.

The second circuit brought five 90-second pick-ups. I had been too tired to worry about how I'd feel on them, a good thing since they felt great. Once thing I've noticed about the fartleks I've been assigned in the last three weeks or so is that I'm much less of a clock watcher with them than I have been with this kind of thing in the past. You know what I mean? When you think you must be almost done with the interval, and then you look at your timepiece and realize, oh, I'm only 1/4 of the way through? That doesn't happen to me much for now. It probably means I'm not going as fast as I used to, but I think it also means I'm doing them right.

Today, as I skimmed along, feeling more awake and alive with each step, I thought only about how great it was that I was in the shade for this pick-up, or on a nice straight-away for that one. When the run was over, I realized I'd gone further around the ponds than I have to this point. It was only seven and a half minutes of fast running, but it did the trick.

Four hours later, I'm feeling a little sleepy again, but also that I have the energy for the things I need to do today (including shopping for school supplies for kindergarten).

I'm eager to test myself on asphalt again, and hilly trails, and the track. I'm eager to run further. But I love my course around the ponds. It made for a July that, though I have no miles to tally and no races to report, was my best month since January and the Houston Marathon. So far it's making for a great August, too.

Running: I Get It

Do you ever unleash a rant as a comment on someone else's blog?

I never had until late last week, when Jeff at The Logic of Long Distance put up a post lamenting the influence of corporate money and mega-races on the sport of running. I agree with most of what was in the post....but a sub-point about the de-emphasis of winning and winners in the true and absolute sense of "this person ran faster than everyone else" in favor of participation by the masses poked at what (I realize now, in the clear and charitable light of a Sunday morning) is still a sensitive spot with me.

Jeff wrote: "Are we ready for a culture that is pitched at every moment to the mass? For business models that are more about appealing to numbers than to quality? Is this the culture we want for ourselves? A culture in which everyone participates, everyone understands, but no one does anything special?" He also refers to the book Once a Runner as the work that best captured what running is at its best: "a community of friends who wanted to do something different from everyone else: namely run a ton and have fun and do it with like minded weirdos." (I wrote a review of this book a year ago, and I mostly liked it.)

I don't really believe that everyone is "special" in every way, nor do I want to believe that. I believe we all have to find the ways in which we truly are special. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. My running *isn't* anything special in the absolute sense. Really I should put all the energy I'm putting into running into something I could really excel at or that might help someone else in the world. And were I truly generous, I'd trade my own potential for paltry personal records for a shot at witnessing the pinnacle of the sport achieved again and again by our most talented runners. If I'm honest with myself, though, these lonely, very personal wins are more important to me than whether world records are ever broken again.


I'm glad there are other runners like me, people of varying degrees of talent, people who would never be admitted to the "culture" described in Once a Runner, but people who do love the sport and find their own personal quests as compelling as I find mine. They are my fellow travelers, and in my opinion we are as noble a clan as the band of brothers Jeff refers to in his post. One reason we are noble: we accept anyone as long as they share the passion. Records....speed....these are nice (and some of you other folks I'd include in this group *are* pretty fast). But we are people with families, jobs, faith, other interests--and to call ourselves runners we don't feel we have to be so different, so apart from and above, those who don't run.


Jeff is a gentleman. He replied to my little rant with kindness and his usual dose of logic, saying he wasn't intending to say that I and those like me aren't real runners, nor was he writing about fast and slow. And I realized that a lot of what I said in my comment was the kind of thing you write when someone gets to you and it's 11 p.m. and you have your own hang-ups about whether you can really call yourself a runner (even if you think you've gotten over them--maybe I should rename this blog "The Emotion of Long Distance," since I lack clear-headed logic). Jeff is absolutely right about what happens when corporate interests start moving us away from the soul of the sport.


But the implications about fast and slow that I read into Jeff's post were there. He wrote, "Once a Runner is built around a still magical idea: the goal of running under 4:00 in the mile. It's a goal that only a few can dream of, and that even fewer can accomplish. It takes everything: natural talent, commitment, heart, courage, relentlessness, character. It can only be achieved through an extreme form of excellence, and therefore is simply logically unavailable to the mass of people."


Of course "the mass" can never expect to run under 4 minutes in the mile. But don't our own goals require those qualities--commitment, heart, courage, relentlessness, character? The only thing we don't share with Jeff's clan is the natural talent--which in a way is my point. It takes tenacity to chip minutes away from a personal best to achieve another personal best only you will ever see as anything special. It takes guts to run a 5-hour marathon.


In his reply to my comment, Jeff wrote: "....maybe I have to bite the bullet and say that one thing that brought me into this sport was its 'order of rank.' I wanted to be one of the kids that 'got it.' Maybe that's not the most noble aspect of human character. On the other hand, sport is one place where this sort of elitism that might be native to our character is sanctioned and safely expressed. After all, it's just running."


Is it ever "just running"? I was never on a cross-country or track team, and none of the kids who were thought I was anything special. Those kids were right. I'm one of John Parker's "night joggers." I'm a nearly-40-year-old librarian with two kids, a spare tire, a shitty lower back and a 22 1/2 minute 5K personal record set seven years ago.

But I get it. I do.

Adult-Onset Athlete

Many of you out there in the running blog world have been athletes for a long time. Off the top of my head, I can think of a baseball player, a horsewoman, a gymnast, a figure skater, and numerous participants in cross-country and track (of course).

But there are others of you who are like me: adult-onset athletes.

I wasn't a complete non-participant in sports as a child. I played several seasons of elementary-school soccer, made one sad attempt at being on the basketball team in seventh grade, one attempt at cross-country in ninth grade and spent a miserable season in tenth grade on the high-school soccer team. Despite these desultory efforts, or maybe because of them, I never would have called myself an athlete back then.

Nor do I think I deserved the label. The elementary-school soccer was entirely at the behest of my parents. I remember numerous ignoble attempts to avoid going to games, including faked illnesses and one day where I hid under the bench to avoid being made to play goalie. (Goalies, I had learned, were always blamed when the team lost.) I quit playing soccer as soon as my mother's will crumbled before my lack of interest.

I tried basketball, cross-country and soccer because as I got older, I became aware that people who played sports were cooler than people who didn't. This was not, however, a good reason to participate, and so I eventually failed at all these efforts too. It didn't help that none of those teams had coaches with any interest in or empathy for kids who exhibited little talent from the get-go. I'm not saying I'm an advocate for the "everyone's a winner" attitude. Far from it. But I'm also not a fan of those coaches (and the three in question all fit this description) who gave off a tacit "If you're not a winner, you're a loser" vibe.

Middle- and high-school sports did nothing for me but make me feel like a loser: cowardly, awkward, the furthest thing possible from an athlete. There's a famous John "The Penguin" Bingham quote: "The miracle is that I had the courage to start." The Penguin (I think) was talking about running a marathon. But in my case, the miracle is that I ever had the courage to enter a race. Someday I'll tell you the story of that first race, and why I think it "took" when nothing else ever had.

For today, though, I'm thinking about these things because Jeff at The Logic of Long Distance has a recent post about how un-reflective he was as a young athlete and how reflective he is now, and how he views this change. He writes, "What would the 20 year old runner I used to be say about the runner who now writes these blog posts? Then, I did not think of running as therapy, I thought of it as an expression of passion, joy, and competitive spirit. I engaged in it recklessly....[running] needed no further justification beyond the fact that I was good at it, loved it, and wanted to do well for my coaches and teammates."

Reading it, I felt a little sad that I have never been that kind of runner (or that kind of athlete). Yes, I'm grateful to have become a runner and an athlete at all. Given my past attitude toward sports, it really is a sort of (very) minor miracle. And, yes, I do have chill-down-the-spine moments during good runs and races. My running is not without passion.

But I still envy those of you who had that young, impetuous, all-in athletic experience, who fell in love with sports early enough to bring an unpremeditated enthusiasm to them, who remember a time when you didn't need to think so so hard about what running means to you or why it should mean anything. Jeff, and many of you reading this, got to be both kinds of athlete. I will only ever be the reflective, sometimes hesitant adult variety.


Do you remember a time when you were a young athlete, the kind Jeff describes? How much of that is left in you, and how are you different now? Do you regret the change?

Or are you the adult-onset variety, thoughtful, grateful, still a bit in awe that you're doing it all?