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waiting up til 36 gets home
March 09, 2005
not sure what i'm doing. i'm sitting here at home, drinking my second young's double chocolate stout. just wrote another blog entry that i'll post soon. i'm listening to songs and trying to sing along, quietly, with my hoarse voice - "in the blue tv screen light, i drew a map of canada... oh, canada... with your face sketched on it twice..."
11:52. at some point i decided i should just be awake until midnight. don't know why this one seems more important. maybe it's the rush to 40.
right now, today, i feel okay. i feel good. i have my problems to face, but they only matter so much. i still miss some things, but you know what we say about trying to force the universe to unfold.
while we're waiting, let's catch you up on a few things.
saturday morning, i got up to run a 5K with my friend katie, from my little running group that still doesn't have a cool name. we were a bit concerned - there was a small field, maybe 100 people - that we might come in last. there were a few kids in the race, and we were determined not to let the 9 year old girl beat us. we would beat her, by any means necessary, literally, if necessary.
we talked about it as an exploratory run - we were without the swiss timing of pacer janay. i really wanted to run it in 27 minutes, which would have meant 9 minute miles. i decided that was unrealistic, and i was hoping for 29 minutes or so.
we started out pretty hard, as usual. katie is competitive. i tend to be competitive. i'm not sure how much we were competing against each other, but i know for damn sure we were competing with everyone else, and especially the damned 9 year old. every time someone passed us, i kept saying, "ignore it. exploratory run. don't get sucked in," and we more or less stuck to that.
we ran past the capitol, down congress, fast, taking advantage of the slight downgrade. but then we turned west briefly, then north, back up colorado, and 16 blocks of gradual uphills.
i stayed with katie for about two and a quarter miles, then she took off. the last mile was pretty difficult for me, and i seemed to be fighting the same demons, the same inability to push myself further.
i managed a bit of a sprint at the very end, passing a few people, and i reached down and stopped my watch as i crossed the finish.
26:05.
8:24 miles. i was stunned. i began to see what i've more fully realized in the days since - that at freescale, at this race, and in the eight miles i'd run the next morning, i didn't push myself farther because there wasn't much farther i could push my body. i did everything i could at freescale in those conditions. i ran harder than ever at the 5k race saturday, and sunday morning, i ran 10:45 miles on a difficult 8-mile course, improving my time there dramatically.
i'm actually pushing myself harder than ever, up to my limits even as they're being pushed back by training. i've been confusing bumping against those physical limits with being mentally weak. it's still a good question to ask, a good battle to fight, but i plan to give myself more credit when i win that battle.
katie finished a good 30-60 seconds ahead of me, and she thought the announcer, some sportscaster from a local station, said something about being the second female finisher.
we hung out, just in case. a 14 year-old girl took first female overall. katie moved off to talk to someone she knew, and the announcer moved through the various female age groups. at the 30-40 age group, which katie, um, falls somewhere in (is that ok? can i say that?), the announcer couldn't read the name and had to ask for help. i was disappointed, thinking that the name must be something like Zebollah Pzybytrska.
as it turned out, the announcer was just an idiot who couldn't read the name "cathleen." katie was startled, and i became a drunken football fan. "WOOOOOOHOOOOOO! YEAH! YEAH! WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" quite inappropriate. but, hey, i was happy, for katie, and for myself.
that morning, as i got ready for the race, i had thought about my seemingly sad but actually grand history in athletics. i sucked in baseball and football. honestly, i was a bad-ass on a road bike in high school, and it's the only athletic thing i'll brag about, largely because it's the only sport i ever personally excelled at.
i entered a series of local races, and arrived late for the juniors race. so i raced against the adults, and finished high. i was told not to bother with the juniors, and to stay with the adults. of course, weeks later, i broke my collarbone the day before my birthday, just screwing around on the bike, and stupidly, i never got seriously back into racing.
i've put together and played on three championship city league basketball teams, and we're headed for a fourth championship. i've coached three seasons of women's basketball. my team won a stunning championship as the underdogs in our second season, and came in second last season.
so, early saturday morning, it occurred to me that i've never done anything athletic without the goal or expectation of winning, until i started running. i still have a team, and it's one of the tightest, most supportive teams i've ever known. the challenge for each of us, though, is entirely personal, and i didn't see any of us ever being in a position to win an event.
and that's cool. in fact, i think it's a refreshing thing for all of us. we're doing it for all the right reasons.
yeah.
it's still pretty fcuking cool that katie won, though.
oh, look. it's 12:26am. happy birthday to me! i can go to bed, now.
postscript - incidentally, something odd's been happening the last week or so... every night, i've dreamt of old friends. i go to them, they come to me. i see their lives, and i'm happy for them, though often a bit sad that i wasn't more of a part. some of them are people i haven't seen in years. i hadn't seen anamaria in over a decade, but there she was, all grown up, with a nice husband. we were in a car dealership, mercedes, i think, and everything was white - the cars, the floor, the walls. anamaria and her husband both wore elegant flowing white clothing, looking modern, but classic and sort of angelic.
another night, i visited lori and her husband in their home. again, everything in white. i know in subsequent nights, i've seen stance, robert, others, though i can't remember the details as well.
i usually have a good sense for dreams and what they're about. not a matter of freudian analysis, but a matter of intuition and first impression, with a bit of jungian ideas about archetypes certainly influencing the interpretation.
but i don't feel comfortable addressing this one. i think it's there, the reason for all this, but maybe i don't want to give it a voice.
Posted by Rob at March 9, 2005 12:26 AM