First Marathon

Yesterday I ran my first marathon. If you're reading this post, be prepared, because this is going to be a self-adoring entry. Why it is, given other grinding accomplishments in recent years, this one feels brighter, I don't know; but it does. Maybe because professional, parental or intellectual achievements require too much backstory, even in my own head, and this, it's just a long-ass run. Which I did.

I started running a few years ago because I needed exercise. Running is free and available anytime anywhere -- big advantages over a gym. I had two or three on-years interspersed with off years, during which time I never figured out if I enjoyed it. When I'm on, I wake up at 5:20, shave and brush, and am on the road by 5:35 for 35-45 minutes, before I come back and eat and read the paper before showering and leaving at 6:45 for work on my bike. This routine often means I'm not sleeping enough. But when I try running after work, the other thing happens, which is I don't want to. Because I think I might hate it. So running has been a dutiful routine, a trade I make with my body, and I've been able to do this thing by making the time for it before I'm awake enough to make any kind of choice.

Barcs might have been a great place to run in Hungary. The countryside was beautiful and there were dirt roads in every direction but south. But I was afraid of twisting an ankle and lying undiscovered in a muddy rut for a day or more. And while running through town, something I never saw anyone else doing, I received what I felt were shaming looks from stopped conversations and ubiquitous stares. By the time I returned to Seattle, I had 30 pounds to lose.

The first year back I ran sometimes, watched my weight a little, lost a few pounds. But the second year back, after a difficult year on a few levels, I made serious moves, including sticking to a regular routine and diet with the intention of losing all the extra weight. And because I tended to binge on weekends, I ended up trying to counteract this with longer runs, 12 miles even, on Sundays; and in December, I realized I was actually running a half-marathon: I wondered if maybe I could do something longer. So when a colleague at school talked about running the Rock 'n' Roll half-marathon, I signed up too -- but I quietly signed up for the full.

I didn't want to join a training group or read articles or guides and I never did. I read some websites that alarmed me by listing enormous distances, twice a week, leading up to training runs of 26 miles or 20; they burned my eyes so I had to look away, and at times I'd check back with these sites, but only quickly because the eye-burn set in quickly. The one thing I hung onto was that I should add miles without overtraining and taper down in the end. That was my guide.

I ran 15 miles in February at maybe 6.9 mph. I ran 16 in March at 7 mph. Then in the end of April, I thought for the first time maybe I really would be able to run a marathon by running 18 at 7.1. I hit my longest run at the end of May: 22 miles, on half a Clif bar and three water fountain stops. 6.7 miles per hour.

Below are photos from runs.

Foster Marsh Trail, Seattle

Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle

Little Gunpowder Falls, Maryland:
park by Stephanie's childhood home

Little Gunpowder Falls, Maryland

Philadelphia

Carkeek Park, Seattle

I figured I could run a marathon after a 22 miler. The secret I guarded was that I didn't just want to finish. That's the line: "I'll be happy just to finish." My secret involved math, and the math said, if I could run 22 unsupported miles on half a Clif bar at 6.7 mph, then I could maybe run 26.2 cushy institutional miles at the same; and quietly, without even the articulation of thought, I whispered to myself, maybe 7. The math said if I averaged 6.7, I'd finish in 3 hours and 55 minutes. At 7.0, ten minutes faster. I wanted to run the marathon under four hours, and I was quietly hoping for 3:45.

Stephanie knew I was nervous, but she didn't know I was nervous because I wanted to beat a time, which meant drawing hard on a body's reserves without knowing the point I'd deplete them and face a disappointment I might be too embarrassed to share.

I was doing my training alone. And it meant on the day of the marathon, there were important elements I didn't know, like how to drink and how often and what, and how to pee, and, here's something not inconsequential I didn't know: whether to go fast or slow. I didn't know how to train for the run, didn't do training groups or partner runs, didn't know how to eat in preparation or what carbo-loading was supposed to look like. I was divided about running light or running energized, and ended up eating a pulled-pork sandwich and a plate of french fries instead.

I did get very consistent advice when I told people I was running my first marathon: they said to start a race by pacing myself, to hold myself back. Everyone said it. They told me that I'd be feeling good and strong in all the adrenaline of the moment and I'd want to go fast but should resist: a marathon is no sprint: I'd deplete my stores and hit the wall. 

I thought about this advice a lot, because it seemed right, and because I suspected it was advice my body wouldn't heed easily. I saw my body once in group run conditions, and even though I'm not a competitive person, even though I get distracted, for example, if I'm ahead in tennis until no one has to face losing but me, during the one casual group run I joined at Greenlake a few blocks from home, my body didn't want to wait when other runners were in its way. I found myself pushing a hard pace to run with the man in the lead (and asking his advice about marathons -- which was to take it easy); I finished alongside him at the very front and was totally wrecked the next day after just a 3 mile run. 

So I was nervous about the marathon, because I knew I had in me an urge to pass and get in front, even among serious endurance runners (who knew better); I didn't trust myself to tame the urge, to put down the itch everyone seemed to anticipate and mark with clear caution.

The morning of the race, I woke up early to clear my guts and went back to bed and waited for an hour. When my alarm went off, I stepped into my fancy runner pants and shorts and socks and shoes, lubed some band-aides and put them on my nipples, wrapped a sweat-head over my head and buttered myself in sunscreen, and I wondered what my body would do in the next few hours.

How would it respond in race conditions. How would it do after three hours. And would it try to lurch past people the way everyone told me not to let it.

And when the marathon came, I did end up passing people, like the cocky rookie I was, though I tried to stay steady; there were 20,000 people, 2,300 running the full; I was 8 waves from the start; I hate crowds. I knew I was supposed to take it easy but there were so many goddamn people. I didn't push but I didn't slow myself either. And then a funny thing happened. 

Nothing. I kept passing people.

I went into my head and listened to the playlist I'd prepared and it carried me on and on. Miles passed and so did I. Wendy met me mile after mile on her bike and cheered me on. I'd stop for water or Gatorade and jump straight back in, catching up and then moving beyond people who ran with their cups and threw them into the street.

In the end, I was 140th of 2,346 marathoners, 16th in my age group, coming in at 3:27:33 -- running at a pace for 26 miles I almost never matched in training, drinking the noxious Gatorade for the first time in my life, awkwardly ignoring almost all the advice everyone gave me.

I feel good. I ran a marathon. And it wasn't bad.

Letter to David Guterson re: keynote speech

June 13, 2013
Dear David Guterson,

I wanted to find you after the ceremonies last night to let you know that you were heard. What I heard you saying was that we naturally pursue happiness but settle for amusements that feel like happiness and are aggressively sold as happiness when a deeper joy is quietly available to us—if we recognize these amusements as deliberate evasion, if we turn instead to unafraid thoughtfulness in naked contact with mortality and the world.

That’s what I heard you say.

The audience became agitated, as far as I could tell, when your message lingeringly spelled out the big things we had to fear—inevitable annihilation, polar ice caps melting, a likely creator willing to spare no child, saint or self from torment—and became further restive when you unblinkingly confronted the young audience with common and, given beloved supporters and generous regard on this night, embarrassing ways high schoolers already fled themselves—most notably, the number of seats filled by students repeatedly using marijuana. Perhaps the audience was right and you were reciting too much of our darkness for the occasion; but I also appreciated your willingness to treat graduates as adults and share with them honestly and bravely your largest questions and fears and our most entrenched dangers, with language that reflected real grappling and no mere platitudes.

Graduates of my philosophy class seemed to understand the layers of your speech. I know this because several of them found me and dropped a line or two that connected your speech with things they’d learned. Certainly hedonists provided related counsel on happiness. Epicurus said that “happiness is that which is under our control,” and that “it is not an unbroken succession of drinking, feasts and revelry […] that produces a sober life; it is sober reasoning” (Hicks, Stoic and Epicurean, 1925). We read passages as well by Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill who also assert that thought, instead of impulse fulfillment, is the path to happiness. J.S. Mill says that “pleasure of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of moral sentiments [have] a much higher value as pleasures than those of mere sensation” because they are more permanent, and more importantly, because they fulfill our greatest capacities as human beings (The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill, 242). Rousseau, meanwhile, distinguishes between duty and impulse, between appetite and justice, and says that “impulse of mere appetite is slavery”:

Although in this state, he is deprived of many advantages he derives from nature, he acquires equally great ones in return; his faculties are exercised and developed; his ideas are expanded; his feelings are ennobled; his whole soul is exalted to such a degree that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he has emerged, he ought to bless without ceasing the happy moment that released him from it for ever, and transformed him from a stupid and ignorant animal into an intelligent being and a man. (Social Contract, chapter 8)

J.S. Mill sums up this idea famously: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” So, when you spoke to the ways we distract ourselves, with texting and music stuffed in our ears, for example, and of the few rare moments left for real thought, you seemed to be speaking in this tradition. And when you spoke of the need to face mortality head on, you seemed to be speaking in the tradition of Arthur Schopenhauer, who says that our suffering brings us into sanctifying harmony with a universe indeed full of pain.

Such ideas, of necessity, are morbid and accusatory, but they were intended, as I understand them, to challenge students to break from a culture that esteems consumption and multitasking—a challenge onerous and sincere enough that you had to topple their complacency to get there.

Unfortunately, parents mostly heard the morbidity and accusation on a night when they hoped to celebrate achievements and wanted to make bright a luster of possibility. It’s true warnings can be welcome: the valedictory speech, for example, masterfully presented moral hazard as an inevitable partner of our dreams. Yet because of the urgency of your warning, you dwelt there longer than was welcome for these parents.

I was proud of our graduates, who, for the most part, did not join families in opposition but listened instead, and, indeed, worked to hear you.

Finally, I want to thank you, and to apologize, and to ask you for your own thoughts about the evening.

I am also enclosing my parting words to my Philosophy students, which includes a message I think you’ll find familiar.

Your colleague as a high-school-English-teaching-Mr.-G—

David Grosskopf
Roosevelt High School


January 29, 2013
Dear Philosophy and Literature students,

This is a farewell letter.

I wanted to repeat some of the things I have said in class.

The pressures of the life to which you’ve signed on will continue to have an irresistible rhythm. I know that you have felt their aggressive push from the onslaught of class assignments coming at you many ways at once, and from rebuilding over and over for unformed groups of students every five months, and from the impersonal, unassailable judgments of college entrance boards, and from your parents’ need for your safety and academic progress.

These pressures have undoubtedly forced a rhythm on you time and time again that prevent you from your healthiest states of being: when you can think with clarity and laugh -- and cry -- with ease, when you have time and sense to be compassionate and grateful, when imagination is engaged, when interactions electrify, and when your heart is big and easy, you are in a good place.

You’ll get into college or whatever and the pressures of high school will end, but new pressure will continually force the rhythm of your life. That’s just the way it is. You’ll have things to do by certain times, and you’ll be overwhelmed and you’ll cope. The feeling of anxiety and unease that has felt like something you just need to get through is going to come back, again and again.

I know you’ve seen adults that live this way much of the time. Television and alcohol fit very nicely into this rhythm, and that is part of what you’ve seen (and part of what I think you’ve already done).

But there are ways to take control of the rhythm of your life again. You have to deliberately slow down the pace. You have to put yourself in jagged relationship to the grinding path to which you default. Television and alcohol will do nothing to change this pace. But you already know and do many things that can. Travel, adventure, and exercise can shift your rhythm enough for you to reevaluate and readjust. Conversation with someone smart and unafraid. Inefficiencies can be good for you. Creative and expressive arts can put you back in mind. Any kind of art -- literature, painting, theater, music, etc., -- has the potential to alter perspective and change your pace. It’s the job of art to do so.

These things are enlivening and accessible; but taking control of the rhythm of your life will often require a conscious, deliberate step.

Thank you for the honor and privilege of being your teacher. I’ll miss you.

David Grosskopf