Fundraising

I have decided to join my friends doing athletic events to raise money for worthy causes. The cause I chose is St Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. My fundraising goal is a modest, yet daunting $500. Any donation is gratefully accepted. Please visit: http://www.mystjudeheroes.org/auntfun

Thank you.

Give Iowa a try

Yesterday started as many prerace mornings do. What was I thinking? I should be staying home with my kids. Yet one movement at a time, I kept making progress to leave. I wanted to run in Iowa. I wanted to see River City Square and Meredith Wilson’s birthplace. I wanted to color in another state on my map. And the race director had been so kind in his email. The race was started as an Eagle Scout project 10 years ago to raise money for the Newman Catholic School in Mason City. I really wanted to run this one.

But when I got to Iowa, the voice of doubt grew louder. “You haven’t trained fo this. Your hip flexor hurts.”. The truth is, I haven’t really dedicated myself to training since my first marathon three years ago. Like a teenager pushing the limits just to see how far it will go, I have been setting myself up for failure. Maybe this would be it. I had carpooled down from Minneapolis with John and Laura. When they asked me what I expected to run I said four and a half hours. But that was an hour faster than my last marathon. Could I really do it? I had a plane to catch so I couldn’t afford a five and a half hour marathon.

I think my hotel earned it’s single star from Triple A through bribing the rater. But I enjoyed a new podcast: Two Gomers Run a Marathon to help me block out the noise from the drive thru restaurant outside my window. The Gomers are marathon newbies but the issues they wrestle with of food and training and doubts are eternal. And they are funny.

I woke up and did not know what to do. Completely untrained for this marathon, I knew there was no way I could run 26.2 miles. That’s a long way! Even by car. A steady rain had fallen all night. What would I do? Again, autopilot more or less kicked in as the prospect of telling my carpool buddies I quit was harder to face than the cold rain.

Surprisingly, the rain stopped and we were left with a heavy fog. The race started in front of Meredith Wilson’s birthplace. The Music Man is so deeply engrained on my consciousness that I am genuinely surprised when I meet people who are unfamiliar with it. I found myself succumbing to a request to sing something and I picked Wells Fargo Wagon.

The first few miles took us through beautiful neighborhoods with autumn colored trees lining the road and meeting in the middle. Many houses were decorated for Halloween. My first mile was 8:07. Whoa! It didn’t feel that fast. I settled into a pace I could sustain but I don’t know what it was. We passed corn fields with drying corn and I learned that they can’t harvest it until the ground is dry enough so the combine won’t sink in the mud. There would be no harvesting today. The ground was swollen with water.

At around mile four I found myself in a clump of delightful runners from all over the Midwest. One was on a training run getting ready for her BQ attempt. Another was a mom in her first marathon. And so it went. We were running fast but it was sustainable. I hoped. There were so many of us that a course marshal said “That must be a pace group!” I hung with them until just after the halfway point where we turned on to a muddy trail that was just a bit wider than a single track. Some dropped back, some went ahead. Johnny, Lynne and I hung together. It was a pretty forest and reminded me of the Crescent Forest Trail Marathon in Gig Harbor. Near the turn around at mile 16 it got very muddy and I had to slow my pace significantly to maintain my footing. That lasted for about a mile but it zapped me. Lynne took off through the mud like she was born to do it. She would continue on to win our age group (40-49: she is 40).

I decided, now that my group was dispersed, that at 20 miles I would put my iPod on and look at my watch. I can’t remember what it said but it was close to three hours I put on the soundtrack from Love Actually so I wouldn’t have to hear any songs I didn’t like. 10k left. I was looking at a sub four. Unbelievable given my recent lack of marathon training. Maybe I really could train and taper and qualify for New York (sub 3:38).

Between miles 21 and 22, I saw no other runners or course marshalls. For a course as well attended as this one, this was unusual. I started worrying I had gone the wrong way. But I kept plodding along and before too long I saw someone ahead.

We were back in town and off the trail by mile 23. I passed a woman who was struggling and I offered some encouragement. She thanked me and then said “Uh oh! That’s a train whistle and we have to cross the track up here!” I picked up the pace as much as I could manage and we beat the train. The last few miles took forever as they often do. I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other and not walking. I had slowed considerably but was still faster than 10 minute miles. My brain was too mushy for that much math but I did note the mile markers were passing faster than every ten minutes. I began to predict a 3.58.

I finished in 3:57. I feel pretty good. I won third in my age group and got a nice medal. This was a surprise because last year the awards went only one deep.

In the final analysis I hope that the voice who believes in me continues to be louder or at least more persistent than the voice of doubt. And I think the Mason City Marathon should be on every marathoner’s list of “must do” races. The race swag included great socks from a local mill, the course was well staffed, the post race food was plentiful, the people were nice, and it was for a good cause. Give Iowa a try!

Gatorade just in time!

When I learned today that Pepsi had pulled the Amp app from iTunes, I didn’t believe it at first. They had been so obstinate all week, why the turn around? I had to go check for myself. Indeed, it’s gone. And just in time, too. I have a marathon this weekend and I didn’t really want to wear my fuel belt just in case the replacement drink on the course was Gatorade. I wanted to get drinks from the aid station. Thank you, Pepsi. I can leave my fuel belt at home.

Bullies again

Yesterday after school I walked into my son’s classroom to deliver something to his teacher. She got that look on her face that she always gets when he hasn’t finished his work. She used to have that look every day. My son has Tourette’s Syndrome and completing his work in a timely fashion is sometimes challenging. Then, when he does complete it, often it is in a form the teacher didn’t expect. For his Venn Diagram, he wrote the words around the edges of the circles rather than smack in the middle. He is creative, thoughtful, musically gifted, and generous beyond words. But teasing his brilliance out in ways that can result in a grade on an assignment is sometimes a challenge. I said “What now?”

“Oh, no, it’s not that. One of the other kids just came to me and told me that he is being bullied.” I couldn’t help it, but tears brimmed up in my eyes. I think all any parent wants is to protect their kids and to have them find true happiness, which often comes from hard work. I felt like she had just punched me in the stomach. “But I am not sure if he knows.” she added.

Between then and now, I have been able to find out what happened and I am sure that if he doesn’t realize it right now, he will some day. I believe the adults at his school love my son. I believe they understand him and support him. I believe they are dedicated to helping him be his best. They tell me the boys were counseled and dealt with appropriately. I will spare the details, but as a parent, I am satisfied with the school’s handling of this incident. Still, I am fighting the urge to curl up under my desk and cry.

I should be looking forward to running in Iowa this weekend. But at this moment, I just want to pull my son onto my lap and hold him in my arms. Forever.

Boycott Pepsi

I heard a disturbing piece of news this week, and I am not talking about Balloon Boy. Pepsi has a new energy drink called Amp. As part of their sales effort, they have created an iPhone app called “Amp Up Before You Score”. The “Amp” app was developed for PepsiCo to help men be duplicitous with women in order to manipulate them into having sex. The “score” in the title does not refer to basketball. The app includes a feature to keep track of sexual conquests and to brag about them to others. In their “apology”, Pepsi acted like a politician saying “Sorry if you were offended” and the app has not been pulled. I can just imagine that kind of apology in the principal’s office at school after an incident of name calling. “Sorry if you were offended.” I don’t think the principal would let that fly. And what does this say about the target audience of this app? Nothing positive, that’s for sure.

I am boycotting Pepsi (including their subsidiaries such as Tropicana and Quaker Oats). I don’t know if my little blog will make any difference, but I know I can’t make any difference at all if I sit here at my kitchen table mad about Pepsi’s degradation of women and I say nothing. Please boycott Pepsi, too.

Iron Girl

I ran 12 miles this morning in 1:45. That’s an average pace of 8:45 per mile. I know the miles I was running with Claire were faster than some of the others and they were hilly miles. And they felt good. Some of the other miles were slower. I told my buddies this morning that I was thinking about running the Iron Girl 10 miler again this year. They were thinking about it, too! I didn’t tell them that I looked up the results from last year and in my age group, an 8 minute per mile pace would place. The prizes are little necklaces and I want one.

The week before that is the 5.6 mile run for Maggie’s Place that my girls are running. I guess that will be a good test to see if I have 8 minute miles in me. I am excited to be running this short stuff again.

Quitter

I woke up this morning and I decided to quit my quest to run a marathon in every state. Nebraska was staring back at me from my closet door where I color in each state I have run and it was pure white. I didn’t run Nebraska and it was there on the map taunting me. Calling me a failure. In my defense, I had the flu and I could no more have run a marathon that day than shuffled out to check the mail. But there it was reminding me of the money I’d spent on nothing.

I will fall short of my goal this year. I feel like I do when I set a goal to run a marathon in under four hours, but I pass the twenty mile mark in over three fifteen. There is usually no way I can make up the time and I spend the last six miles kicking myself and rehashing the first twenty, wondering where I could have sped it up. Here I am in early October with almost three months left to go in the year watching my goal slip through my fingers with no idea what to do about it. And questioning my stupid goal. If it was really important, wouldn’t I strive for it to the exclusion of all else? Am I really balancing all the other priorities in my life or am I, at the core, just a quitter?

We have a phenomenal athlete on our cross country team. She has fans. Yesterday at a meet she didn’t attend, several of her fans came up to meet her. I must say I was disappointed by the lack of graciousness some of her teammates showed to the fans, but this is heady stuff for anyone, let alone the teenage teammates of a phenom. I offered to record a video greeting of the girls for the phenom. They were delighted. Do we need fans in order to run? Or are the fans a result of doing what you know you were meant to do and doing it well?

One of the coaches from another team said that if you weren’t in it to win, it wasn’t worth doing. I respectfully disagreed with him. I said “If I only ran the races I thought I would win, I would never show up at anything.” And I started to wonder… Why show up at all? Maybe that’s why I thought I would quit. But life fully lived is in the mundanity of every day living. God’s will is showing up and doing the next right thing.

I have signed up for 9 marathons this year (10 if you count Iowa in a few weeks) and I have only run 7. I decided that next year I am going to keep a spreadsheet and write down all the money I spend on marathons – the airfare, hotel, registration – including those I run and those I pay for but don’t run so I can get an accurate picture of how much money I am spending on this quest. I guess this means I am not quitting after all. Stupid quest.