Stupid Marathon

            I ran the Rock and Roll Marathon in 3:33, six minutes slower than my first marathon three years ago -- not a bad time, especially with plantar fasciitis, but I averaged over eight-minute-miles and was disappointed.

            The forecast kept calling for rain, and our graduates got a cloud dump on the commencement field, and the forecasts, as we neared the marathon occurring the next morning, just looked wetter and wetter -- especially during those morning Saturday hours. I was unaccountably spooked. As we headed towards the commencement event, several people asked if I was nervous about giving the keynote, but what I was really worried about was the marathon in ten hours: I was worried my shoes would get soaked and my skin would fold and blister. I was worried my shirt would get heavy with water and chafe the skin off my nipples and armpits and neck. I was worried my glasses would wet over in condensation and I’d be running blind. I was fearing the rain with all of my stomach and chest. And that night, when I got home, I checked the weather report every ten minutes or so, hoping for change, trying to predict or prepare -- with a plastic bag poncho and plastic rubber-banded shoe galoshes waiting at the start line, for example -- and I fell asleep around 11:30 but woke up at 2:15, listening in terror to a hard driving rain beat down against the house and trees and street, a thrumming rain, after weeks of dry, sunny weather.

            But it lightened by sunrise. It stopped.

            The second obstacle was of my own making, and it fills me with regret and longing and hypotheticals. I hadn’t loaded up well the night before because we left for Memorial Stadium at 5:30, when I ate a bowl of spelt salad, and didn’t come home until 10:00 or so, when I didn’t eat anything, but I wasn’t worried. The morning of the marathon, I took a shit, lubed up friction points, ate a bowl of cereal, and didn’t worry.

            And then, crowded into the fourth coral (a crowd that kept me warm), I was worried about getting past and out into the open. But that happened soon enough. In fact, I pulled ahead and kept pulling ahead, just as I did in the first race; and because it seemed to work for me three years ago, I didn’t slow myself. But I have to say I was going much, much faster. I had four miles that were under seven minutes, one almost below six. When marathoners broke away from the half-marathoners, I was pacing a seven minute mile. When I hit 13.1, the half marathon, I was still there. In fact, it was soon after this I ran into the 3:15 pacing runners and decided to slow down and run with them for the distance remaining, which, if done, would bring me in at 3:07 or 3:08 or so, a blistering, happy pace. It was easy running with them. I felt I could charge ahead at any point, like before or after I stopped to drink water and Gatorade. It felt comfortable. I skipped the energy Gu handed out around that time -- I’d catch the next batch.

            Running with the 3:15 yellow-shirts was easy. But then, suddenly, it wasn’t. And there was no next batch of energy Gu. The pacers ran up a hill, I fell back a little. I caught up. But then, crossing the I-90 bridge to Mercer Island, I was gutting it out in that long expanse. And my energy was gone. I stopped at a port-a-potty in the middle of the bridge and leaned my head against the wall inside, near sleep. Then I got out and ran again, taking two glasses of water instead of one. Stopping, drinking, I walked to another cup; stopping, drinking, running. And I ran through the tunnel and down the hill and got more water when maybe I needed Gatorade or, better, food, knew there was a Gatorade station at the top in the other direction before I returned to the I-90 tunnel again, drank Gatorade, another, a water. Ran some, felt cramps, then walked. I was at about mile 21. Wondering if I had to finish. If I could walk the rest of the way. I tried jogging a little, but why, went back to walking. Walked all the way through the tunnel, down the first crest of the bridge. All those people I’d passed, passing me. The 3:30 yellow shirts passed me. I just kept walking. One man running the opposite direction, about a mile and a half behind me, lifted his arms for me, insistently, Get up! Go! And everyone was passing. I walked, wondering why the next water station was so far away when I thought it was in the middle of the bridge.

            Then a passing man asked, Gu?, and dropped a packet into my hands and ran off. I sucked down that chocolate – an Oompa Loompa pouring chocolate into my face -- and started running again. The carbohydrates helped me get back up. But this is no less true: that man’s kindness got me going again. I cried later, just recounting how a man gave me chocolate. I started running again. I didn’t run quickly, especially not at first, and it was still slow going to the end of the bridge, and my legs were on the edge of seizing into fully tightened cramps, but only a couple people passed me. And when we joined back with half-marathoners, nearly all walking at this point, some running, sheer snobbishness alarmed through me as I ran past their blue bibs. I wasn’t blistering fast anymore, and a few marathoners continued to pass me and I had nothing left for the final sprint, but I carried the last couple miles under nine minutes and crossed the gate.

            Stephanie, Dad and Wendy were there.

            A half an hour later than expected, or at least 15 minutes later, but I arrived.

Keynote address, Roosevelt HIgh School graduation June 17, 2016

Dear graduating class of 2016:

                On June 14^th, 1989, a few steps from here at what’s now Key Arena, I graduated from Roosevelt High School. I was obnoxious and inserted extra names on my name card as a shout-out to friends and also dolled up my big 1980s hair. I did the hair thing so often—nesting toys like a purple monkey up in my fro—that I won Most Distinctive Hairstyle in the Senior poll. I was very excited to be graduating, because I knew how happiness was made and how it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t made running day after day from one period to the next filling out multiple choice tests in the company of arbitrary communities until a day a counselor could look at a piece of paper and label me educated.

                This is why the graduation announcement I sent around the country opened to the following words: “Come see me receive a rolled-up piece of blank parchment and hear the saccharin speeches of the select bureaucrats who have slowly been swallowing the fruits of my education and who will not leave so much as an impression upon my life (or yours) as an aftertaste.”

                Here’s the point: Adults thought they knew the important building blocks of our happiness. I was pretty sure they didn’t. But now I’ve spent more than half my life at Roosevelt, and I’m now the adult, here to deliver my very own saccharin commencement address.

                What’s more, I do think I’m wiser than you, in some respects. For example, if you put purple monkeys in your hair, I will laugh knowingly and say, “Ha ha, yes. Cute.” But I also think that adults much too easily dismiss the vibrant passions and thoughts of adolescents, probably because you say and do some really stupid things; still, many of these passions and thoughts and questions are absolutely visionary and can indeed guide a life that’s rich with adventure, love, compassion, artistry, commitment and devotion to a just, healthy world; and I do think you already know both the major building blocks and the stumbling blocks to a happy life, and have developed strategies to dealing with both.

                One thing I-think-you-think-you-know-but-I-no-longer-believe is that to be happy, you must do work that you love: “If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” This idea is dangerous, and not just because it’s elitist when so many in our country can’t make such choices, but because it’s spiritually misleading.

                 If you can find a job you love, that’s terrific, that’s great. I have two friends who are poets, one who’s a clown, and one who’s a professional artisanal pencil sharpener. They‘ve found ways to earn livelihoods out of their passions. I love my job too—about a quarter of the time, just like I love you all a quarter of the time. But I’m not talking about me, or poets or clowns or artisanal pencil sharpeners. Too many people I know feel like they’ve blown it somewhere because they’re not passionate about their jobs; they’re deeply dissatisfied with their very lives, believing a job is a way happiness is made and then demoralizing themselves when they try to force it to be so. But there’s nothing wrong in life with a not-perfect job that pays the bills.

                Love your family, your friends, your co-workers; love artistic and spiritual pursuits. You don’t have to love your job.

                That’s one thing I don’t trust you to fathom right now, and, really, you shouldn’t: go forth and honor your passions and interests; but in five or ten years, remember that you were given permission to place your identity in something other than what you do to get by.

                Everything else I want to tell you this evening, you already know. If you’re like I was in Seattle Arena in 1989, you’re idealistic and judgmental and you know something about how happiness is made and how it isn’t, and you’re right to be idealistic and judgmental.

                You know adults in your life who aren’t happy, and you know why: They’re working too hard, or they’re too focused on things that don’t ultimately matter, or they no longer try new things. Anyway, that’s what it may look like, and you may not be far off. I know I’m this adult often enough: it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just get through the day and week and then zombie out in front of a screen as an easy but not very effective means of rest and renewal.

                I also know that that’s been you. Are you okay with that? Who are you in the moment you are most numb and overwhelmed? How do you get through it? How do you revive? The struggles and strategies you employed in high school you can lean on for the rest of your life. But if you aren’t good at dealing with your coping mode now, you better work on it, because, believe me, what you felt the night before key terms were due or when you were struggling to make sense of my ridiculous writing rubric or when you had to sit politely through a long, ceremonial speech—that detached sense of a sometimes frantic coping—that is not unique to high school; and without self-reflection and deliberate action, you could be stuck following a pattern that will hurt and dull you. “When abstraction sets to killing you,” as Albert Camus says in The Plague, “you’ve got to get busy with it.”

                So what do I do? I read. I surf the net. Once a week, my wife and I go to dinner and come home and watch something on Netflix. That’s not enough. Certainly purple-monkeyed David would not be impressed with his adult self. But sometimes I write. Sometimes I dance with my daughters. We lived in Hungary for a year and tried new routines. Sometimes I bask in my family’s music (though sometimes I hide). At work I’ve been able to revive by taking on Meghan O’Kelley in a rap battle, or by getting a hug from Jessamyn, or by getting a big, clapping, Julianna Quinn Hello.  I also do take full advantage of the holiday moments that stop routine and demand reflection, like every year when I graduate from Roosevelt and think back on what I learned and where I’m going and whom I’ve grown to cherish. These are building blocks for happiness.

                As for you, I know one thing you do is seek out new experience and adventure. You’re way up on adults with this one. Studies show novel encounters trigger the brain’s limbic system, which is where happiness is made; and yet adults often find themselves in a comfortable soothing stagnation. Getting out of a comfort zone allows a greater shot at making happiness and memories, and when you’re making vivid memories, you’re also slowing down the high speed blur of time passing. Many studies have shown that, after basic needs are met, experience brings about more happiness than material things. Even a bad experience turns into a good story. So travel; take a dance class; go to a monster truck rally:  hang on to your sense of adventure, especially when it seems easier to just stay home.

                Another thing you do beautifully is engage with sensitive immediacy. This includes responding to the world’s wounded-ness, or expressing the social patterns undergirding your own pain. I only have time for platitudes at this point, but I’m saying what you already know; I repeat it because it’s too easy to get swept up in our own dramas and deadlines. Give everyone their due humanity—the partisan, the panhandler, the person cutting you off in traffic: shut down the clannish outrage machine and the numbing distant busy-ness of your life to respond to the humanity and pain in others and thus engage in the bright, tender humanity of your own. This keeps you vital and vibrant too.

                My younger self believed in the importance of questions and wrote in a journal that questions are more important than answers. I agree with me. So here’s one final meditation, because I can’t get off the stage without inviting us all to wonder about the dominant social interloper of our lives—the Internet. You know how plants use animals to reproduce? Like when a bear eats some berries and wanders off and then poops out the berry seeds in some other territory and the seeds stick to the ground in their own soft fertilizing goodness? You know how a plant uses a bear? How is the internet using you? How has your smartphone been training your mind to behave?

                Okay, that’s it. Because you already know how happiness is made and how it’s not, I remind you only to be purposeful: not just loving but deliberately grateful, admiring, understanding and warm; not just happy but deliberately reflective, creative, friendly and bold; not just generous, but deliberately empathetic, healing, humble and kind.

                To the graduating class of 2016, I leave you with this impression, and this aftertaste. May your lives be filled with love. I’ll miss you. Thank you.

David Grosskopf