Signs
Running is so weird. Last week I wrote about how I bailed on my cutback 16-mile LR because I just felt sub-meh, so instead of grinding through it, I ran for less than an hour before coming home and getting some additional rest. I felt like I was making the right decision, given the bodily feedback I had, but admittedly, it’s still hard sometimes when my head and heart are pulling me in different directions.
Well, after that bailed long run, on Sunday I ran the longest and farthest of this training cycle, and it felt better than I hoped it would. I figured I’d run about 26-27, maybe around 5-6 hours, and that’s pretty much exactly how it ended up: 26.5, 5:39, and just under 5,000’ of climbing. My goal was less as fast as possible and more along the lines of time on feet and dial-in the fueling for race day. I’m pretty happy with how it went, overall, and how I felt.
It was a weird beginning though, for sure, and something that I keep revisiting. I’ve found myself thinking about John a lot more recently, rest in peace. My guess is that it stems from last week’s Chicago Marathon because more often than not, he ran it (and Stacey would jump in for a bit), and we’d all text and email after the fact and celebrate the victories and bitch about the heartaches and/or the weather.
In the off-chance that he didn’t run it, John always offered colorful commentary about his observations of the race after the fact, mutual friends whom he saw (or didn’t see, curiously), that sort of thing. These text or email exchanges were a given every second Sunday in October.
It was weird to have a Chicago Marathon weekend come and go and not hear from him.
Anyway. As it is for a lot of people, for me, sometimes the hardest part of any given run is the first couple miles or, before that, simply getting out the door in the first place. I didn’t start my long LR on Sunday until dawn, around 6:45, so I wouldn’t have to wear a headlamp unnecessarily for hours. In the first 20 or so minutes, I was cycling through periodic mental soliloquies, wondering why I was doing this in the first place, thinking of all the other things I could be doing at that moment, trying to remember why I thought doing a 50k again was a good idea … typical beginning-of-LR mental banter when I’m by myself.
And then: BOOM. Shortly after I began running, the most brilliantly colored sky stopped me in my tracks. By myself, in the pre-dawn Sunday morning, I involuntarily let out an audible ohmygod for no one to hear but me. The colors were so unusual and so unlike what I see at this time of year that seeing them where and when I did stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t stop to take a picture because I just wanted to experience it, myself, right then and there.
I haven’t been running in the early mornings much anymore, save for the weekends, so maybe that affected my visceral response. Maybe the pre-dawn/blue hour skies are always that color at this time of year, and I just haven’t seen it lately to notice. The best I could remember, though, was that that type of sky — filled with those types of hues — is something that I usually don’t see until the early morning runs in the winter. (It’s part of the reason why winter running is always my fav season, even when I lived in Chicago).
Left to my own devices — and responsible for getting myself through the next five-or-so hours of running and climbing — I decided that this brilliant sky was an auspicious beginning to this run, the same run for which not all that long ago I was feeling a bit of trepidation.
Hell, maybe this sunrise was even a sign from John that this run would be fine, that I got this.
I realize that thinking that John was “sending” me a message from “the other side” sounds a bit crunchy, even for me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. So fast, within the first 20 minutes of my run, before I began the hard-hard work, my emotions catapulted from trepidation/gritting-teeth realism to thinking that I got this, it’s fine, it’s nothing I haven’t done before. The transition was quick and breathtakingly dramatic.
And then. Right as I was about to enter the park, after twenty minutes of chiding myself for thinking that John somehow sent me a brilliant, seemingly-rare sunrise, I noticed a sleek fox bolting out of someone’s yard and quickly trying to hide away in the woods.
It’s rare for me to see foxes at or near the park — in the almost-eight years I’ve been running there, I can probably count on one hand how many I’ve seen — and it got me thinking about John, again. Foxes no doubt are in the park and in the surrounding area, living right under our noses, but most of the time, we don’t see them; that’s how they survive, by flying under the radar more often than not.
John was that type of friend to a lot of people. You always knew he was there, that he was around, but a lot of the time, he chose to fly under the radar. He never wanted attention on himself. The thought of anyone lavishing praise or attention on him for anything, no matter how noble or amazing or great his accomplishment was, would make him cringe. (This even came up in his funeral service).
Maybe it’s weird to proclaim that an unseasonable, brilliantly-colored sunrise and then an elusive, almost-invisible fox in a twenty-minute timeframe, at the outset of a killer long run — one that I felt uneasy about from the get-go — made me think of my deceased friend and training partner, whom I miss dearly, but it did.
For the next five hours and change, my thoughts kept returning to our friendship that spanned over a decade-plus.
Even when the run got hard, or I got tired, or whatever, the momentary challenges were eclipsed by a sense of gratitude and calm, a feeling of genuine happiness to be out there and doing what I was doing.
Not going to lie: it was amazing. It was a run that I’ll definitely bottle.
