Not the smartest thing to do.
After my last race in May, I had some grand plans for the fall. They fell apart over the summer when it became readily apparent that my body can’t follow a training schedule. Maybe it will be able to again someday, but that day isn’t here yet. I’m like Jekyll and Hyde. One morning I may wake up ready to bust a fifteen miler in two hours and have it feel like nothing, the next day I may struggle to just run around the block because my lungs act up. It is extremely frustrating and doesn’t follow any sort of rhyme or reason.
After throwing away my plans (aka “delusions of grandeur”), my only planned “race” for the fall was to do a solo, celebratory 50K on the Gettysburg battlefield — to celebrate being two years in remission from cancer. That mission was accomplished. 
And, that was supposed to be it. But then I started to feel sort of bad about not doing the hospital’s annual charity 5K, so I figured why not … then of course, on Thursday I woke up with a sore throat. By Sunday morning I had a cough and couldn’t talk. Basically blossomed into a full blown sinus infection — I seem to have these problems every fall.
Still, it was good running weather — 50 degrees, wind maybe around 15 mph (headwind out, tail coming back) and it is a flat, fast course. I wanted to hit around 22 minutes, maybe break 21, outside shot at maybe going under 21:45.
In honor of Bob (who was being good despite my trying to get him to come out and “jog” the course), I ran in a blue singlet. I was a handful of runners dressed that way — most seemed incredibly overdressed (I mean, it was 50, not 30…)
As usual I lined up totally wrong. I try to get up towards the front, and people line up ahead of me anyway. So I spent the first half mile trying to just find some room to run. The first two miles were fine, the third mile started to feel hard, and I started to kick way too early — probably a good 4/10ths of a mile out, but I sustained it. Ended up with a burning lung and an aching chest and I was pretty sure I was going to cough up my lung or my heart or both, but fortunately, they all stayed put. I really finished running hard — feeling more like I was running the 400 in high school again then finishing a 5K. Blew by a group of guys I’d been trailing for a long time, tried to keep ahead of them. Hit the line and of course, I forgot to stop my garmin. haha. I knew I was under 21 minutes, but didn’t know if I hit the 21:45 goal.
I was able to figure out from looking at my run in Sports Tracks that my splits ended up as 7:14, 7:08, 6:48, 0:35 (rold you I was flying at the end!) for an official time of 21:44.8.
So, I just slipped underneath my goal time — talk about cutting it close. And it is a post-cancer PR. Last year I ran the same race without a cold in 22:55.
Is my body healed from cancer and the attendent treatment? No. But is it getting better? Well, the differences in times from the end of September 2007 (27:02) and now (21:44) seem to tell the tale. I still find racing frustrating from the standpoint I don’t know if I’ll get Jekyll or Hyde, so I have no idea if I’ll keep racing in the future or basically “hang ‘em” up from racing. I do like running hard …
follow the leader
September is here. (Did you know September is leukemia and lymphoma awareness month?) You can see it in the angle of the sun and in the flowers blooming along the trail; the summer wildflowers have been replaced by the orange and yellow tiny touch-me-nots. You can see it in the birds — the fledglings are flying strong and sure now, and some of the early migraters like the tiny blue Indigo buntings have already departed south. And you can see it in the rapidly dwindling amount of daylight.
I love September; I love the cool nights that set up beautiful mornings for running, with pink and red and orange sunrises. I love the warm days and the brightness of an impossibly blue sky.
Runs tend to blend together after awhile; a few are memorable (some for all the right reasons and some, unfortunately, for all the wrong ones), but most sort of fade into a collective experience. There are runs that stick with you, though. I think today was one of those runs.
It wasn’t particularly memorable because it was such a great run; I’d consider it a decent run, a little slower than normal pace, comfortable, and finished at a decent clip. No, what made this run memorable is what I saw.
Despite the slightly slower pace, the miles were clipping by at a steady rate. It is funny how some days it feels like the miles go by so slowly that time stands still, whereas other days the miles clip by like today as though time has warped forward. In the grayish light that marks the twilight right before dawn, I turned into the valley and down onto the dirt bridle trail. Half a mile into the bridle trail stretch, coming around a bend through the woods, I spotted him.
A buck. Not the partly white “ghost deer” buck that is seen infrequently, but rather a healthy, stout brown buck, with black hooves and white tufts above them. He sported a set of formidable antlers. He stared at me with a sort of intense curiosity — not really afraid, yet also ready to run if necessary.
He was a handsome buck, one of the best looking bucks I have ever seen.
Deer are very common here. Does with rapidly growing fawns tend to come up the steep hills of the valley to destroy flowers, trees, anything green and somewhat edible. The bucks are rare, though. They are shy, secretive, and aloof. Seeing a buck is a treat. What happened next was amazing.
As I approached, still clipping along at a steady pace, the buck took off and trotted down the trail. He stopped, and looked back at me. When I approached again, he trotted a little further down the trail, head held high and proud. He then stopped and stared back at me once more. For half a mile we played follow the leader, until he finally spotted something more interesting and took off crashing through the underbrush and into the dense tangle of green and brown woods.
I have run many, many miles in my lifetime, but never has the opportunity to play follow the leader with a buck presented itself. I suppose that is part of the draw and part of what keeps me a runner — knowing no matter how many miles I run, the chance to experience something new and special and different always still exists.
Playing follow the leader with a buck. Who would have thought.
reflections on two years in remission
Most of you know my story, so I’m sorry to repeat parts of it. But since so many of you were a part of this chapter in my life, I wanted to share with you my reflections on being two years in remission from cancer. I apologize for the length; when the words start flowing they tend to unleash as a torrent. No hard feelings if its too long to read.
I can feel the warmth of the late summer sun beating on my shoulders as I kneel down and tighten and tie the laces of my running shoes. This is not a time of day I normally run, but today the urge to do a run after work was too irresistible to try and fight, and so, shoes secure, I straighten up and almost instantly ease into a trot. Within a tenth of a mile, I make the sharp turn to the left, and down the corridor into the cool leafy green darkness of the woods. My trail is a fairly wide, mostly flat dirt ribbon cut through a sea of trees that meanders along underneath the cottonwoods and the maples, between the tall ancient shale banks of the Rocky River. Some days the River is a raging brown torrent, swollen from recent rains, but today, the water moves sluggishly and the depth is low enough that the many namesake rocks poking up from below the water’s surface are clearly visible, providing an occasional good perching spot for a great blue heron. It is definitely a hot day and the humidity hangs so thick you almost expect to be able to see the individual molecules hanging suspended in the still air. Although it is still hot and the summer sun blazes down with a fierce intensity, the angle foretells that autumn will be here soon and my trail will be decked out in its best reds and golds. But for now its still warm and humid and the trees are decked out in vivid greens and tall flowering wing stem lines the banks of the riverbed.
This time about three years ago, I was struggling to understand what was happening to my body. You see I have been a runner for almost as long as I can remember, and I always have felt in tune with my body. I couldn’t understand why the previous fall I had developed a lingering dry cough that wouldn’t go away or why the left side of my abdomen felt so much firmer than the right. I also couldn’t figure out why the right side of my chest itched so deeply and so incessantly that I would scratch at it absentmindedly until it literally bled. What bothered me most is something that continues to hound me to some extent to this very day — the sudden attacks of nauseating, aching nerve pain radiating down from my right shoulder into my elbow that would stop me cold and leave me doubled over in pain. I fought that pain all through the summer and fall of 2006, on into the dark, cold days as the calendar flipped over to 2007. Finally the pain became too much and I went to the doctor. CT scans revealed that I had a fourteen centimeter mass in my left abdomen and what were ominously described as “shadows” in my chest. The shadows turned out to be masses that took up most of my chest and were pushing upwards into the right side of my neck, displacing veins and arteries. My right arm didn’t hurt because of a pinched nerve; it hurt because the nerves and blood vessels were being strangled to death.
I was all of 26-years old and suddenly found myself sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for the local surgeons to palpate the abdominal mass and to remark upon its grotesque size. They all shook their heads and pronounced me “a Clinic case.” And so that’s how I found myself among the maze of cavernous buildings that make up the Main Campus of the Cleveland Clinic. There, on a cold and gray February morning littered with a few errant white snowflakes, one of their top surgeons pronounced my mass as a rare kind of liver tumor that had metastasized through my chest. Left hanging in the air, unspoken, was the obvious inevitable prognosis. Only a biopsy was necessary to confirm the verdict.
The biopsy required an incision and a large needle that removed cores of the tumor. I can still remember vividly the sound of the needle’s spring and the sort of dull ache that accompanied each of the five samples taken, as well as the discussion between the two doctors over what my mass represented. It was almost as if it were all happening to someone else, and I was only an observer. I ran a little afterwards, but mostly lived a listless existence, awaiting the inevitable call. On the morning of February 14, the day following a massive snowstorm that blanketed Cleveland with two feet of snow, I found out I didn’t have liver cancer. Instead, I had a type of cancer of the immune system known as Hodgkin’s Disease. Hodgkin’s Disease is one of a handful of cancers that is curable even at stage four. All I could think was I have a chance now.
Within about twenty-four hours I was sitting on a table in front of an oncologist in now very familiar exam room number seven listening to his pronouncements of how I would require eight months of chemotherapy, and how the goal was hopefully to cure me. I don’t remember too much about the meeting — I distinctly remember of course being told I would lose all my hair — but mostly I remember being numb. This still seemed surreal, like something that I was watching happen to someone else from a far away distance. Every night I’d go to bed and wake up feeling fine … and then that terrible feeling would come over me like a freezing wave of icy water when I remembered that I had cancer.
Shocked and numbed and unable to think straight, I did what seemed like the logical thing at the time, but actually was probably one of the stupidest possible things I have ever done in my entire life — I decided to argue with my oncologist about everything. After having been bounced between doctors and desperately wanting someone to give me a definitive answer, when someone finally stepped in to take firm control … That was too much. So what if I had a 14 cm mass in my stomach and a pleural effusion and SVC syndrome was causing me to have to sleep sitting up because I otherwise felt like I was suffocating. So what if my heart raced because I was just that anemic. There was absolutely no way was I going to be hospitalized. I even argued that I didn’t need a bone marrow biopsy. Later, when I discovered that my oncologist was, in fact, a hardcore runner himself, I decided I liked him and now we get along great. But I didn’t like his seizing control of everything at first, even though I realize in hindsight that’s what was necessary at the time.
My oncologist prevailed, and in the all too short span of a week, I went from a runner – an athlete – to a cancer patient, hospitalized, sporting an extremely annoying giant heart rate monitor and an IV line attached to the newly placed port in my chest. I limped around because my butt hurt from the bone marrow biopsy and found that I couldn’t even think because I was dizzy and hazy from being pumped full of chemicals.
After somehow surviving an extremely rough first treatment, I managed to struggle through the first few cycles of chemo ok as the long Cleveland winter eventually softened into spring. And I was running, of course. First day out of the hospital after my initial chemo, I tried to run. I think I went about twenty yards before the dizziness from the anemia stopped me in my tracks. Things improved from there. One neat thing about Hodgkin’s Disease is how sensitive it is to chemotherapy – within hours of my first chemotherapy session, you could actually see the huge abdominal mass started to diminish and visibly recede. But just as things started to really improve and my spirits started to lift, the road took a sharp turn. I started to develop a cough again. A PET scan after the third cycle of chemo in mid-May revealed I was in remission, but also that I had some inflammation in my right lung. Hodgkin’s Disease is commonly treated with a chemotherapy regimen called ABVD — it’s a four-drug combination given for 4 to 8 cycles (each cycle lasting approximately a month or 28-days to be precise), with two treatments in each cycle. The “B” drug is Bleomycin — a drug particularly feared for its toxicity to the lungs and lucky me — I had developed pulmonary complications from the Bleo.
I tried to keep running through the summer despite the fact that my right lung was inflamed. I would drive down to my trail and try to run up and down it like I had done so many thousands of times before. It seemed so easy then, so elementary, so natural. My trail is flat and easy to run; its dirt surface is easy on your legs. But now just making it to the first bridge that marked the one-mile point was a monumental struggle that left me completely out of breath. I would stand there with my hands on my knees and gasp on the side of the trail and envy the other runners passing by me, watching them with jealous and feverish eyes.
I just couldn’t give up running. Cancer is a horrible disease that robs you of your dignity and inflicts physical, mental, and emotional pain. When you look at the pictures of me from the summer of 2007 you see a cancer patient: the swollen, yellowish tinge of my face, the pitiful thinness of my ponytail told the sad tale that I spent more than my fair share on the second floor in the oncology department of the cancer center. All I had to keep me connected with the rest of the normal world was my running. It was there I could still feel alive and free and like an athlete, not the shell of a human who was seemingly being slowly poisoned to death by chemicals. Fortunately, my oncologist never tried to discourage me from running; when I asked him he sort of smiled and said he knew it would be futile, that I wouldn’t listen to him and would just run anyway. For a second I thought maybe he reads minds, but then it registered that being a runner himself he figured the consequences of not running would be far worse than anything I could do to myself running.
I kept trying to run all through the summer because I just felt I had to keep running to maintain some semblance of normalcy in my life. It was anything but easy. I struggled to jog for just a few minutes before getting out of breath. One particularly terrible morning, I pushed myself to run until I literally coughed up bright red streams of blood. The very next day I sat on a bridge near the hospital and contemplated quitting chemotherapy altogether – what was the point of getting better if I could never run again anyway? But something inside, some small piece of resolve that probably had been hardened and sharpened to a razor point by those many thousands of miles pounding the roads just wouldn’t let me call it quits. Instead, I determined to keep running and keep doing chemotherapy. I would keep going — or I would die trying.
Since I decided not dying was probably a good idea, I got smart. I ran like a beginner would run, mixing walking and running until my lungs healed enough from the Bleomycin damage to allow me to start running continuously again. Summer faded into fall and I finished chemotherapy on September 21, 2007. The seemingly endless cycle of going for chemotherapy every other Friday and feeling poisoned for days was finally over after sixteen infusions — eight cycles — of ABVD.
Any joy I felt about being done with ABVD was soon tempered by a sobering post-treatment scan. My post-therapy CT scan revealed I still had an almost 5 cm mass in my chest, an enlarged spleen, and most ominously a new pulmonary nodule. My normally affable oncologist told me grimly that my case kept him up at night. He said he would do another scan in two months, cautioning me to call him immediately if I didn’t feel well. I felt ok; actually, I thrived. I kept running, growing slowly stronger. The next scan was right before Christmas and it showed the nodule was gone and the spleen was starting to shrink. Every scan since then has been, essentially, as normal as they possibly can be.
I say that because I’m physically scarred by cancer forever. My scans show all sorts of petrified artifacts scattered throughout my chest — scar tissue is very common with Hodgkin’s Disease and I had much more disease than most people. My breathing has never returned to what it was before chemo — although I am now a much stronger runner than when I finished chemo, I am not quite as fast as I once was because of the scarred tissue from the Bleo. I still have a mediport in my upper left chest. And my right arm, though it improved once the masses stopped strangling the vessels and nerves, still has a tendency to swell up, become discolored, and ache.
There are emotional scars, too. I struggle with demons that threaten to consume me, that bite at my ankles and hold me back — the fear of relapse, the fear of having to undergo more treatment. I honestly think I fear more treatment even more than death.
My oncologist never discussed odds with me, and I honestly was always too afraid to ask him. At first you hear you have Hodgkin’s Disease and you think well that’s good because that’s one they can cure, but then you start to dig a little more deeply and you realize while they may cure more people than die from Hodgkin’s, a good outcome is far from assured, particularly for someone like me who had massive disease and probable liver involvement. From my own research, I gathered that my odds of relapse given the extent of my disease were probably in the range of 50% to 60%. I also knew full well that if Hodgkin’s Disease relapses, then it almost always tends to relapse within the first 18 to 24 months. And so for the past two years, I’ve been living on the edge, a proverbial sword always seeming to dangle just a few precarious inches above my head, looking forward to the fall of 2009. I’ve always been a little afraid of trying to piece too many parts of my life back together for fear of everything shattering into a million tiny shards again. I just don’t think I could bear that.
And yet here I find myself running on this humid August 19, 2009, on my trail, underneath the canopy, into the dying late summer light, knowing for certain that I am free of cancer — the scan yesterday revealed that everything was stable. My strides are regular, my breathing a bit raspy, but steady. I’m at once exhausted and elated; I’m tired from a full day of work and from the stress of worrying, and I’m also a little hungry and thirsty, but freedom invigorates each stride and I feel as though there are tiny wings attached to my heels that allow me to break the ties that bind us to the earth. There is certainly hope in my heart and wings on my heels today.
I knew that I was going down a very dark and frightening path when all this began, but if I could have seen the road that represents the past few years and how many tortuous, mountainous hills that I needed to ascend, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to even take the first step. Instead, I think I might have simply curled up in fear underneath that exam table in room number seven and never come out. The road I’ve gone down has wound around and up some of the steepest, sharpest hills I’ve ever climbed. It has tested me in ways I never thought possible, and I’m sure in many ways, I was wanting. I’m certainly not perfect; many days went by where I felt sorry for myself. I guess some of that is just normal, after all cancer is a path you wouldn’t wish upon anyone, and I know all too many people who are currently running along their own version, dealing with their own diagnoses. The elation and joy I feel personally over a good result is always tinged with a feeling of guilt over how I am doing so well, when others are still suffering.
What do I credit for being alive, for being here? Maybe I’m just supposed to be here? Not sure about that, but I try to live my life like I’m supposed to be here. I suppose luck has to be credited, more than anything else. Having an excellent oncologist and excellent nurses, certainly helped too. But then, so did a good attitude.
My attitude and approach to fighting cancer was shaped by my experiences as a runner. As the road ahead revealed itself in all its cruelty and darkness, I went through many moments where all I wanted to do was just stop or quit, just as I have had those moments on runs that have gone bad. I think maybe I would have indeed abandoned my journey except that running equipped me with all the strategies and tools necessary to get through the rough areas. It was running, after all, that taught me how to climb the steep hills and to just focus on what I could do — and how to cope when the road ahead seemed too long and too arduous. If five more miles seems too far, then focus on making it one mile. If one mile seems too far, focus on making it just a half mile. If that seems too far, then focus on tenths. And so on. Just keep moving forward, always. So, there is no doubt about it in my mind – I’m alive because I was a runner. Whether I would have had the inner strength to survive without running … I honestly have no idea. I don’t really want to think about it.
Strangely, cancer has been both the best and worst experience of my life. It has irrevocably changed me, and I will never be able to fully erase the scars it has left. In a way, I wouldn’t want to erase the scars. Honestly, I never knew until I had cancer how much I really loved running or how much I loved life. Cancer gave me new eyes to look at the world and everything now is a little more crisp and in focus. You learn what matters and what doesn’t.
Being a runner, I wondered how cancer would change my running. I’m certainly slower than I was at my peak, but somehow, the runs are better. I can truly say that most mornings I wake up and I ache to go for a run, to feel the wind against my body, to test my limits, to exceed them. This love for running and life was purchased at a very dear price, with such tremendous struggle, and I would hate to ever lose it.
I finished my six-mile run just as the sun was starting its final lilac and pink descent behind the gathering thunderheads that portend storms tonight. It was notably darker and cooler at the trailhead as I brushed the sweat from my arms. It seemed appropriate to finish at sunset, for I’m hoping that the sun is also beginning its final descent on what is paradoxically the most terrible and meaningful experience of my life. I feel as though I will wake up in the morning to find myself running along a new path – not one that is ominous and winding and fearsome, but rather one on which the light that blazes before me is so brilliant, so bright, that it dazzles me just to look forward into it. That irresistible urge is calling me and so you’ll have to excuse me … you understand, I am a runner, and I learned long ago that the siren song of a new path is too strong to try and resist … I just have to go — I’ve waited two years and just can’t stand to wait any longer to run down this new path, free.
you can keep your diamonds
Like probably many runners, I do most of my running at an easy, conversational pace. I don’t race much and so it is pretty rare that I venture into the territory where my running gets me out of breath and makes my heart pound. If I’m breathing hard on a daily run, it is because my lungs are having a bad day, not that I’m taxing every fiber of my leg muscles to their maximum capacity.
I come from a sprinter heritage, though. I cut my teeth in junior high and high school in the short distances, the races “tailor made for the neurotics;” my events were the 100 and 200 meters. I felt like the coach was punishing me if I had to run farther. I lived for the all-out adrenaline burst from right out of the block, the pushing of every fiber, the pure speed of running as fast as I possibly could.
I’m still pretty fast, which seems to surprise people. If I’m not reduced to a quivering, hyperventilating puddle of goo by the end of the race, my kick is very dangerous – if you let me hang near you at the end you do so at your own peril. A few weeks back on a whim I ran 400 meters on the track and managed to actually clock a 65 – which is actually faster than I could run in high school. Granted when I hit the line I was completely spent – toast if you will – and I wasn’t running another step further than that. My legs were totally exhausted and depleted, left quivering and shaking from the high level of exertion from running all out.
Every so often, I feel that ancient need, that unquenchable desire to just burn, to run fast and hard. It isn’t really a competitive fixation; I don’t really feel the urge to try and run people down who I see on my runs (it is actually not too common for me to come up on another runner). No, it is more really just a primal thing, an urge, like a hunger or a deep, hot thirst. Like that I wasn’t just meant to run long and steady all the time, I was also supposed to run fast. For me that yearning to run fast is a burning ember that lies mostly dormant in my soul, just smoldering, waiting to erupt when a few droplets of passion ignite it into a ball of flame and the urge cannot be resisted anymore.
Today was one of those days. Maybe it was the unseasonable coolness – it was fifty-nine degrees this morning and I half-expected to be able to see my breath. Such days are exceedingly rare in August and must be suitably relished and celebrated. Perhaps it was the strange sort of newly scrubbed cleanness the world had this morning: everything looked sharp – no haze or fuzz or heavy fog today. Or the fact I slept well for once last night. Maybe it was the easy run the day before that left my muscles aching for something more. Or maybe it was just all the salmon I ate last night. (Definitely possible.) Or perhaps something in my subconscious just woke up that smoldering volcano in my soul. But whatever the reason, this morning, there was a bit of steam in my step. And so there was no gradual easing into my usual stride. And there was no sightseeing nature trip– I took off running right from the bottom of the driveway, rolling along, fast, clipping away the miles at 7:20 pace.
(Fast is, of course, relative. What is fast to me is just a Kenyan’s warm up jog. 7:20 to me is just over 5K race pace.)
I ran right into the rising sun that had just peaked red over the top of the horizon and the buildings. I ran straight towards it with reckless abandon, like I was racing the sun itself, and if I won, I could reach out and grab it. There’s a thrill to running fast, to the quicker rhythm, to the faster breathing that excites the senses. Everything is sort of enhanced – the sun looked redder, the grass greener, the trees outlined against the sky sharper, the sky itself a more brilliant shade of heavenly azure blue.
Running is a primal act – so simple, yet so beautiful, something you find yourself yearning for hungrily if you miss a few days, something you find yourself craving, and the reason is because it is something you were always meant to do, something hard-wired in your genetic code as a human being.
Running is easy to write about because it is natural poetry and the words that describe it just flow from the tip of the pen to the paper. Running is a symphony of the various systems of the body. You find the effort perfectly dialed in and your just rolling. The brain is the conductor of this great musical opus — after all there is a great deal of rhyme and rhythm to running — and act that is at once both wild and free and chaotic like a runaway freight train yet at the same time fully in control. The brain maintains control of the orchestra, not allowing any one piece to dominate the others — no, instead the brain remains firmly in control of the whole, monitoring each system of the body, adapting, adjusting, aware, seeking information from the eyes and the ears, from the muscles and the nerves, and sending cues. Cues to the gut to shut down temporarily, cues to the lungs to draw in more oxygen from the air to feed ravenous muscles, cues to the heart to hammer a hard and steady rhythm like a sledgehammer to pump and push and hurtle hot blood in rushing torrents through the labyrinth of veins and arteries that make up the aqueducts of the body.
No wonder one feels no more alive than when running. And no wonder we yearn for it when we can’t do it for awhile.
I ended up running four miles at that pace, with a few more tacked on for good measure at a much slower and controlled pace – my much more usual 8:20s. Still the fast running felt good, and I finished with a flourish, relishing a good day. All days aren’t good days, and you can’t run fast every day – obviously. But there is also the incessant whisper of your rational self, the self that reminds you of the wisdom that if you ran this way every day, today wouldn’t be special. After all, rare things have always been most prized by human society, things like rock hard diamonds that glisten brightly just like the many millions of transient drops of dew that lined the individual blades of grass.
I suppose most girls would prefer a gift of sparkling and burnished diamonds more than a good hard run like I had this morning. They can keep their shiny rocks – they don’t interest me. For what I had today is just as rare as the most precious and exotic stone ever produced by the earth, but it can’t be bought or sold in any store or marketplace; indeed, it can’t be bought or sold at all. Diamonds can be purchased for you with the sweat of others, with the expended effort of others. What I experienced today can’t be bought or sold, it has to be earned and won, and slowly honed and sharpened like the fine steel blade of a sword by YOU. It has to be won in sweat and strain and hard work that can only be given and expended by YOU. You get back what you put in to this sport. No one can do it for you and give you the feeling of accomplishment, of pride, of feeling and experiencing the symphony of poetry in motion that is running. And that is what makes the feeling I had this morning way more precious than any shiny rock. You can keep your diamonds. I have something of much greater value than all the shiny and rare rocks in all the world.
learning to fly ~ a post script
Last weekend, I wrote about the fledgling kingfisher who was learning to fly and was having a hard time living up to the species reputation as a superb and agile flier due to flight feathers that hadn’t grown in quite yet. I figured after leaving the valley that day that I would probably never see the bird again. Although always hopeful that the bird would grow up and come to a good conclusion, I know the mortality rate for young birds is extremely high. All sorts of dangers lurk for a young bird that can’t fly very well — the prehistoric snapping turtles that lurk below the murky water, the ever present and vigilant hawks that patrol from the air, and simply the muddy water itself that can drown a youngster who can’t find dry land quickly enough. Nature sometimes seems to be exceedingly cruel.
I’m currently dealing with some health issues of my own that I’m 99% sure are NOT related to lymphoma (unless they happen to be side effects of the chemo, always a possibility I suppose) so I haven’t been logging my usual miles. I’ve still been running, though. After a rather long week that included my baseball team raising the white flag for the next who knows how many years, I was looking forward to spending the day engaged in the activity that makes me happy. That activity is, of course, loping down dirt paths through fields lined with the first of the newly blooming yellow wingstem that rises as tall as me, through woods scented with the sweet smell of button bush, where everything is now overgrown and green and vibrant and alive. Its high summer in Cleveland right now. Even if the temperature and the humidity this summer seem like as though we’ve been stuck in a continual September, the blooming touch-me-nots and doll eyes and cardinal flowers indicate it is the beginning of August. The dog days.
Running along the millpond path, I saw the young kingfisher. I can’t ever be certain it is the same bird — but it was obviously a young bird. It was perched up in a tree. I stopped to watch it. It stayed motionless for a long while in the tree (allowing me to approach fairly close which I think indicates it may be the same bird) — but then it took off and flew on steady strong wings all the way across the pond. No hesitation, no threat of falling into the water, just steady and sure flight. Not quite as good as mom and dad yet, but a marked improvement from last weekend.
Obviously, I’m cheering for this little bird. How it does, how long it lives … No one probably will ever know. I do imagine now we never will cross paths again, or if we do, I won’t be able to tell next weekend this bird from any of the others down at the mill pond. But I’m happy to put the post-script on the story that this little guy has been successful — at least so far. I think it probably has overcome the biggest hurdle of its life — just getting out the door and testing its wings.
Fortunately, the stakes aren’t life and death with running, unlike for the little kingfisher living down at the millpond. But in fifteen plus years in the sport, I have found that the “mortality rate” for new runners is as high as he mortality rate for young birds — so many people start, find it too hard or get injured, and then they quit the sport. Like nature, running can be cruel — no time outs and progress that can be frustratingly and maddeningly slow. And there are traps — too much too soon, naysayers, injuries like shin splints. However, just like the young kingfisher has his parents and other kingfishers to learn from, there are plenty of people willing to help new runners — runners who remember the first time out the door testing tentative legs, finding wings to fly. No one can run the miles for you, though, just like no one can fly for our young kingfisher. For that, you have to rely on your own heart and will to ultimately beat the odds and survive.
