Please read my summer blog!

I have started my Roughing it in the Cape Breton Bush blog again. Here is the link:

http://rtodd-logansglen.blogspot.ca/?m=1

Caught Up in the Chase

I have run three five km races in the past month or so, and in each case I have been chasing a time of 19:59 or faster.  Yes, I was trying to break what to me was a daunting barrier of 20 minutes. Whenever I tell people that I find 5 km races tougher than marathons, they look at me like I am out of my mind. It really is a statement that requires explanation.  What makes five km races so difficult, for me, is the level of effort required throughout the entire race.

Here’s what a five km race feels like.  At least here is how it felt last night, as I ran the Summer’s Night race in Guelph, beginning and ending at the Music Center on Cardigan. The gun goes off, and I try to get over the starting mats as quickly as possible.  I pick up speed and stride along to the first corner, feeling good as I hear the crowd cheering and before my body fully registers the effort I am making.  After I turn onto Dufferin St. I look down at my watch, check my pace, and see that I am going out way too fast, as in a 3:45 minutes/km pace.  May day, may day; this is not sustainable. I will blow up, and blow up quickly if I continue, as in collapse at the side of the road gasping for air, or worse.  I immediately dial back the pace, and watch as friends such as Chris and Tanya surge further ahead of me, as they should. 

Okay, this feels better, especially as I finish the slow rise up Dufferin and turn right, heading downhill towards the bike trail. As I begin on the trail, the numb feeling in my legs passes as a little more oxygen seems to be making it to my muscles.  I slow to a 3:55 pace.  Still a little ambitious; it could cost me later.  I have run enough races to know that for every second I go out too fast at the start, I will pay tenfold in the final kilometers.

Running behind the music center, I am buoyed by the voices of friends cheering me on, and I turn with exuberance towards the Norwich bridge. Turn again and I am on Arthur, running past my old condo and past the park where I walked Frodo in my early days of dog ownership. The daylight is dwindling, and dusk descends as I enter the grounds of Homewood and run beneath a canopy of trees.  I can feel myself slowing a little and check my watch to see I have dipped down to a 4:00 pace, yet I feel strong as I surge past my running friend Art, who encourages me as I go.  ‘You look strong, Robin, lots in the tank; just run by feel.” Perhaps he sees me checking my watch.  The thing is I can run by feel to a degree, but if it feels good, it is probably because I have slowed by a few seconds, and the watch keeps me honest.

I am through the Homewood grounds, and winding along the streets towards Speedvale, past the live music. I believe it is a trio to mark the 3^rd km, but I am labouring at this point and am focused just on breathing and regaining my pace.

Onto Speedvale and a small uphill to get to the trail, then onto the trail I have run hundreds of times.  It is straight in to the finish from here, but the city has not opened the bike gates, so I have to slow down to get around each one.  Hey, I’m fifty and not so nimble, but I manage to avoid colliding with any gates, even in my oxygen-deprived state.

I am uncomfortable, extremely so, and feel like retching, but miraculously I am still moving. I get onto the gravel trail and know it is just a matter of winding around past the park to the finish line behind the music center.  With the finish line so close I try to pick up my pace. I am not sure if I do or if the two men in front of me are merely slowing down, but either way I manage to pass them as I surge toward the finish line.

I can see the clock.  It is already registering 20:08 and I still have meters to go.  I have gutted it out, but today is not my day to break 20 minutes.  I am flooded with a mixture of relief—it is over—and disappointment—at finishing in 20:13.  I need to bend over for a few seconds to regain my equilibrium, but as I straighten I am greeted by Tanya and Chris, who finished a minute ahead of me. Their first question, of course, is did you go under 20? I shake my head, and they are quick to reassure me. This is not a PB course, they say consolingly, and the warmth of their words helps dissolve my disappointment.

As the evening settles in, I go for a cool down run with Chris and Deb, both very talented runners, and as we jog along, the talk quickly shifts from the race to the challenges of training while raising small children (do puppies count?) Deb recounts having run on her treadmill in the garage last week while her daughter napped.  The garage door was open and her neighbour looked at her quizzically as he mowed his lawn.  

We return to the music center, where the meeting room is full of runners consuming a seemingly endless supply of pizza and chocolate milk.  For those who can stomach it, there is beer to be enjoyed. As I stand talking to fellow runners such as Kelly, my training partner on the coldest winter days, and my travelling buddy to marathons such as Corning and Boston, thirteen seconds suddenly seems so very slight.

Simple Enough

I was quite aghast when I looked at the date of my last posting. Since that post the days have careened along in a way that reminds me of white water rafting when I was working out in Lake Louise.  That was back in 1984 or 1985, so I don’t recall a lot of details, but I do remember sitting in the sturdy rubber raft on a hot summer day, as we shot down the Columbia River near Golden, B.C. I was hanging on intently, with no time to look ahead and anticipate the next set of rapids.  Suddenly we would hit them and hurtle up out of our seats, or even sideways out of the raft as I did at one point, only to have my friend grab onto my life jacket and haul me down to the safety of the raft’s floor. Now I’m not suggesting that the end of the school year was dangerous, but it was one set of rapids after the next, starting with thirty-page creative writing projects, some of which were almost physically painful to read.  Think angels and demons, car wrecks and comas, and you can imagine the worst of them.  Then came exams and report cards, and end of the year speeches and roasts to prepare, and suddenly I found myself in the parking lot on the last day, shuffling to my car with no real sense of ta-da, we made it, though of course there never is that sense, as it is always a let down of sorts.

The thing with rapids is that once you are through them, you need time just to catch your breath and ponder what you’ve been through. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I have no excuse for not writing, except for the fact that like most things, when you stop for a while, stopping becomes easier than starting again. 

But I have been thinking about something for a while, and that is the phenomenon of knowing something or someone, only to be presented with information that contradicts your perception, sometimes entirely.

For example, I was running up Vance Rd. the other day when I heard something crashing through the grass behind me, and turned around to see Miss Deer running to greet me. What surprised me, beyond the rather noisy entrance she made, were the antlers that Miss Deer had grown since I had last seen her.  Well other than reindeer, female deer do not grow antlers, so I had a tough truth to face: Miss Deer was in fact Mr. Deer. I have to be honest, I was a little saddened, as I was quite fond of Miss Deer, or rather of the Miss Deer I had composed in my imagination. I would like to continue to feature her in my blog, and I guess I could have done so, as I don’t imagine there are many of you roaming up and down Vance looking for her (him).  But I feel I owe it to Mr. Deer to present him in an accurate light.  Therefore I reconciled myself to this newly discovered truth, patted his nice, velvety antlers and jogged along beside him for a time until we parted ways at the bridge.

Now this is no Crying Game revelation; Mr. Deer’s identity doesn’t change things for me, but it is a good reminder that the truth can be elusive or complex. I was struck by something my fellow librarian, Doug, wrote the other day in relation to a biography he was reading on Thomas Jefferson. He said that Jefferson was a complicated dude; he believed slavery was morally evil, yet he himself was quite racist. At the time I was just finishing Jane Leavy’s biography on Mickey Mantle and couldn’t help but feel the same thing about Mantle: he was a complicated dude. Leavy, who had idolized Mantle as a child growing up in New York, said in her introduction that she was determined to present Mickey Mantle as he was beyond the carefully constructed myth. The book took her years to write, as she interviewed so many people in an effort to present the truth, or the many truths of Mantle. Turns out he was pretty contradictory in nature. On the one hand he was a tremendously gifted ball player, who hit harder and ran faster than any player had ever done, and who was cast, against his will, as an American hero. On the other hand, he was a boy who never grew up; he was vulgar and crude and had no respect for women, and he struggled with alcohol addiction. In the end, I felt more than a little sad for Mickey Mantle.

By comparison, Mr. Deer is pretty uncomplicated.  He is who he is. At least for now, as I move beyond the school year and its many dramas, I think I want to surround myself with more Mr. Deers, who I can be sure of.  He likes his neck scratched, and his antlers rubbed, and he doesn’t mind when I swat mosquitoes away from his nose and eyes.  Simple enough.