Is running fun?

I think I have mentioned that I have decided to run a marathon for my 40^th birthday. The actual race is more than a month before my real birthday, which is significant only because it means I’m still in the more competitive 30-39 year old age group, but there are only two marathons on Guam, so I’ll be racing in April.

I found a training program online and started following it a several weeks ago. It’s not too time consuming right now, but I’m going to have to get in several runs of 2 hours or more. That means I’m going to have to get up earlier and earlier the next few Saturdays.  Most of the time I confine my runs to base because I don’t like worrying about traffic or dogs. The route is already getting old. I found someone to run at least a portion of the long runs with me, so the time spent running in large circles passes a little faster, but I’m still wondering if I really want to do this. Maybe the reason why runners are particularly susceptible to inspirational Facebook quotes and posters is because they are always seeking an answer to Why? Why run this far? Why use up what cartilage I have left in my knees? Is this really fun?

I ran one other marathon in my life, at age 22, several months after I graduated from college and several months before I got married. I was in graduate school, substitute teaching occasionally, and had no pressing responsibilities, other than paying my share of rent and utilities and feeding myself.  I was still in shape from collegiate running. I found it relaxing to spend a couple of hours on the weekend running around Dallas – mostly the Turtlecreek area or around White Rock Lake near SMU.  Then I could lie on the couch the rest of the weekend and read.

I ran a pretty good race – I think my time was 3:13 – and qualified for the 100^th anniversary of the Boston marathon. I was happy to hit this benchmark, since I had no real idea of how I’d do in this long race. Moreover, I knew I’d be in Rhode Island that spring as a newlywed for the historic event. I made notes on what to do to improve my time. Boston here I come! Or so I thought.

But life turned out better: shortly after the Dallas race, my husband and I were married, and by the time we moved to Rhode Island, I was pregnant and due to deliver our first baby right around the date of the Boston race.

Having a baby was more fun than training. So life sped along happily for many years in which I got good use out of a babyjogger, but I rarely raced, other than a couple of 5Ks over a period of 12 years.  When we moved to Mississippi, our youngest went to preK for a bit, so I didn’t need the babyjogger any more. I raced three or four times and surprised myself by winning my age group, and, once, the women’s division.

Now on Guam, there is a strong and healthy racing subculture. Every weekend you can find a road race, either a fundraiser or sponsored by the running club. Nearly once month or more the triathlon club holds an event. The bike club has regular rides. There’s a mountain bike series. There’s the Perimeter Run, the Cocos Island swim, the paddling group, the hash runners. Xterra Guam holds trail races and an international qualifying triathlon that attracts a relatively large number of participants for a small island. 

It helps that every weekend the weather is beautiful.

Many – if not most - of the participants in these various events are the same people.  Eventually you get to know some of them. You wish each other luck before the races and talk about what was hard afterwards. You chitchat about what race is coming up and what you’re doing for training. After several months of this, you have made friends.  You hang around after the race for ribbons and snacks and drawings for prizes. Fairly often I win my age group and sometimes get a coupon for a free dinner. Some races offer goody bags with coupons and marketing give-aways like pins and water bottles. I won a DVD player and a bottle of wine in drawings. Not bad for a $5 entry fee.

The drawback to these events is that most of them start at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. The plus is they are over before it starts to get hot.  Last weekend I got up on Saturday at 6 to run 12 miles with my friend for training and on Sunday at 5 to run in a 3 mile trail race. I was already tired from trying to get back into the school routine. I nearly stayed in bed on Sunday.

But after lying in bed several minutes, I realized I was wide awake, and I might as well get up. My son wanted to go (another fun part of these runs is that they are family friendly for the most part – great bonding opportunities). We hadn’t done a trail run before, and this one wasn’t too far from our house. I rolled out of bed, and we headed out.

About a hundred people were there. The route wound through the woods, down a clay hillside and across a stream that dropped into a waterfall. Back up the hill, a spectacular view provided inspiration for the second half of the run.  It was a tough course, but beautiful. And since the guy who was in the lead got lost, my son won, and I came in third overall.  For our pains and entry fee we received a cup of water and a handshake -  plus the satisfaction of beating some pretty fit looking guys. The race was its own reward, I guess.

I shouldn’t say “guess.” The race was rewarding. It was hard leaping from hillock to hillock and prancing across the stream. I wanted to walk the steep uphill. We were filthy when the race was over; our shoes were loaded with mud.  But I finished well, which is always satisfying.  And my son was really happy with his win, which always makes me happy.

There are few things that I am really good at, but I’m a better than average runner. I know that I wouldn’t be winning races in other places with the times that I’m running. In college I was a front of the middle of the pack runner, and I’d probably be in the same position in a big city race. Nonetheless, it still feels good to race, to win, to improve.

So even though it is not necessarily “fun” to do these training runs and to get up before the sun, it is fun to greet familiar faces, to be congratulated when hard work pays off, to use a talent that is God-given.  Being a decent runner is a gift that doesn’t seem to have any real service to humanity, but here on Guam, since the races are affordable and family friendly, running gives us the opportunity to interact with the community and to involve the family in fitness.  I like to think that when people see me out there, they see that you can have 6 kids and still be halfway normal.

Then again, maybe this isn’t normal.

and more...
"We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves...The more restricted our society and work become, the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, 'You must not run faster than this, or jump higher than that.' The human spirit is indomitable." 

-Sir Roger Bannister, first runner to run a sub-4 minute mile

"The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start." 
-John Bingham

"You have to wonder at times what you're doing out there. Over the years, I've given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement." 
- Steve Prefontaine

"I always loved running...it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs." 
-Jesse Owens

"The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare." 
-Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

"In running, it doesn't matter whether you come in first, in the middle of the pack, or last. You can say, 'I have finished.' There is a lot of satisfaction in that." 
-Fred Lebow, New York City Marathon co-founder

"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift." - Steve Prefontaine

"The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got." - Dr. George Sheehan

Talking with ghosts

Love this quote from an interview with editors M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Times about the Norton Anthology's anniversary:

Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?

Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s. What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown — cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.

And so I continue to stumble through Sophocles and Shakespeare with my students at the community college, even though I'm sure they wonder whether they are getting their money's worth from this class.

Actually, I have been very happy with the way the literature class has been going. It's a smaller group than last semester, and about half of the students are older than I am, so they are happy to sit around and talk about the relationships in these plays.  Last week we had a great discussion about whether it would have been better for Oedipus to live in ignorance than to find out his sins.  The class was pretty well split in opinion.  They may have had a hard time with the language, but they picked up on the themes. They were able to weep at this masterpiece from thousands of years ago.

There seems to be a good rapport among the lit students, and one lady really brought the class to life last week by bringing in warm bunelos. I was only going to eat a bite of one to be polite, but the donut melted away too quickly, reminding me of the donuts from a bakery near where my dad used to work. He could polish off a dozen in no time because they were so airy and sugary when warm that they seemed to evaporate. Only thing missing was coffee, which I'm afraid to drink because this class starts at 8 pm.

We are going to read "Fences" by August Wilson next, because the university next door is staging it in a few weeks.   I just read it for the first time myself, and although the language may strike some students as a bit rough (it was a bit jarring to me, at least - it had crossed my mind to take my kids to the play because I'm always looking for ways to sneak some culture in them, but it's definitely too mature for the youngers), I think the students will really enjoy discussing the family dynamics.  They've enjoyed talking about how the lovers in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" fall into familiar patterns; in "Fences" I hope they'll listen to the ghosts speaking about the next phase of life: marriage and parenting - and how the songs sung by Troy and Lyons and Gabe (like the stories in the anthology) keep the characters waking up in the morning, even when it seems like they've cut themselves off from all their reasons for living.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the same energy to enliven my composition class.  I get a lot of blank stares when I ask for volunteers to read or discuss.  Maybe it's time to bring in hot donuts.

A few good quotes

Going through old papers - love this quote:

“Every experience of beauty points to infinity” – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I just need to remind myself to look for those moments of beauty, like the great storm that blew through yesterday after days of drought, and not let myself get bogged down in the particulars as we get deeper into the moving process.  For instance, I've been hunting for days a lost address book. I'm fretting about the flight times.  I can't decide which photo albums to store, if any.  Meanwhile, the days are flying by - our packers come next week. Yikes!

Happily, we took the time last night to escape on a little date.  Our friends were giving a talk on marriage for Theology on Tap, so we left the kids with a movie and went to the gourmet pizza place to hear their spiel. We were practically the oldest people there, but we tried to blend in. And even though we've been married almost as long as our friends, it's always good to hear someone else's perspective on what makes a marriage work, especially when we're in the midst of a trying time.  Our friends talked mostly about their experiences, which were interesting since they come from different backgrounds, but the gems I am holding on to are these quotes: "This too shall pass" and "You have to practice daily conversions." Very apropos to our situation.

The other highlight of the week so far was the visiting Irish priest's homily on Sunday.  We went to a later Mass than usual to meet our older boys, returning from their retreat with 48 other teens, and their renewed spirits energized the congregation.  Then the priest gave one of those homilies that makes you want to stand up and shout "Amen."  I wish I could remember more of it, but he started out with quotes from William Butler Yeats and Thomas Kinsella on aging:  Kinsella's "Mirror in February":

"Now plainly in the mirror of my soul

I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ."

And from Yeats, I think it was from "When You are Old":

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;"

Anyway, since it was the Feast of Corpus Christi, he spoke about being incarnated and about the importance of physical symbols (used a story about how the abused jr. gestapo youth, when they were being rescued from the streets after the war, couldn't sleep unless they held a piece of bread), but how we also have to feed our souls.  It was all very eloquent, but now my brain is not working well enough to remember more. So back to trying to practice detachment.

Wisdom from Dubus

I'm subbing at the high school library today (joy! Can I do this always?) and came across this quote from Andre Dubus in one of the books to be reshelved, The Catholic Passion: Rediscovering the Power and Beauty of the Faith by David Scott.  The quote speaks to the motion I have felt in my heart after this week's tragedies:

Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound.... And while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot or will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone's home or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour's respite, or a day's, or a night's; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy.

A call to small actions.

Although I have read some of his short stories, I didn't know that Dubus was struck by a car while helping a woman and was injuried so badly that one of his legs was amputated, and he never regained use of the other.

Quick Takes without Complaints

1. After all my moaning yesterday, my sixth grader place 2nd in the physics category of the science fair! A minor miracle! I’m sure it is not because he earned extra points on creativity and neatness, but because he gave a good presentation to the judges, since he knew what he had done.



2. Daffodils are blooming! The end of drear February is near. Welcome spring! I don’t see a lot of bulbs coming up around here; they must not do as well with the short winters as they do up in the north, where the first daffodils arrive around the end of March or so. But these few blooming around the entrance of the library are a welcome harbinger.

3. Completed and filed taxes and now am planning what to do with the money the government pays me to have children in the form of the child tax credit, if Mr. IRS doesn’t announce an audit…



4. When I passed a house under construction on my run with the lab today, a construction worker called out “Beautiful Day!” Another said, “Beautiful dog!” Beautiful indeed. And beautiful work they were doing! Spring sunshine makes everything seem a little prettier.



5. Books in the mail! My father in law sent some thrillers to pass the time with, and my new old copy of Caryll Houselander’s Way of the Cross arrived from some Benedictines’ library, providentially. It begins with reflections like this:
                 "The Stations of the Cross are not given to us only to remind us of the historical Passion of Christ but to show us what is happening now, and happening to each one of us."

                      and "Each one meets himself on the Via Crucis, which is the road through death to life. In Christ he finds the meaning of his own suffering, the power of his own capacity for love. . . . The stations show us how each one can lighten the heavy cross that is laid upon the bent back of the whole human race now, how each one in the power of Christ's love can sweeten his own suffering and that of those around him."

Thanks for the recommendation, Anne.



6. A letter, a letter, I love a love letter! I love seeing my name written by my husband’s hand. Emails are for business and spies, phone calls are for catching up and feeling distant, but letters are a physical presence, transcenders of time when they take 20 days to arrive, tangible joys to be revisited.



7. I got a hair cut I like, and it was free! My mom trimmed it up while she was here.

Welcome, weekend!

Thanks, Jen, for hosting.

A Good Quote for Lent

From Magnificat for February 19th: Elizabeth Leseur writes:

I have jotted down in my notebook my Lenten resolutions, but I want to confirm them here. I must truly renew my life, and it is God whom I ask in all simplicity to transform me. I want to live interiorly more spiritually, exteriorly more gently and lovingly so as to make God better loved, who is the beginning and end of my spiritual life. . . .

A resolution worth adopting: to be more spiritual, more gentle, more loving, all with the goal of making God loved more.  Too often I attempt self-improvement plans with the idea of making myself more lovable to God, who knows all my failings anyway, instead of trying to show others how God loves, how God can work through people, how anything that is good comes, not from my efforts, but from Him.

Quotes for Advent

Some good Advent thoughts from Watch for the Light:

In “Yielding to God” by Philip Britts: “We are human and finite, and thus cannot live perpetually in a sense of expectation, or in a continuous Advent. We are distracted by many things. .. . Although we are tempted to exert ourselves and push ourselves forward in our search for God, the desire to climb nearer to God is nothing but egotistical satisfaction and self-aggrandizement. The way that Christ took was the low way. . . . It is not that we, as pilgrims, clib to a celestial city, but that the Christ child is born in the poverty of our hearts. . . .
It is easy to feel at this time of year that God is working on breaking down our hearts, reminding us how little we can accomplish on our own. “Human love cannot redeem.”


Another view: from “The God We Hardly Knew” by William Willimon: “We enjoy thinking of ourselves as basically generous, benevolent, giving people. That’s one reason why everyone, even the nominally religious, loves Christmas. Christmas is a season to celebrate our alleged generosity. . . . Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story – the one according to Luke not Dickens – is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers. . . . We prefer to think of ourselves as givers – powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. . . .

“I suspect that the difficulty of receiving is a factor in marriage, too. It’s painful to be thrust into such close proximity to another human being, day after day, year after year, until one gradually comes to see that one’s identity and character are due to an alarming degree, to what one has received from one’s spouse. Marriage is an everyday experience of living in the red – debtors to someone whom we have just begun to know. . . .

This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transforms us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.”



Gerard Manley Hopkins from "The Wreck of the Deutschland":

                Now burn, new born to the world,
               Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
              Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
             Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not
                          a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

Quoting someone else's quotes

I might end my self-imposed moratorium on buying more books. I finished Michael Dirda’s Book by Book and wanting to underline, fold corners, and circle the books I want to get around to reading someday, but the library wouldn’t appreciate my commentary, I’m sure. Some notes on the book, which is a series of quotes arranged and knit together with his commentary on books and life/life with books/living through books.

I agree with his list of 13 suggestions to encourage kids to read, although with reservations I agree the somewhat controversial “Quantity matters far more than quality – there will be plenty of time for classics.” Like vegetables, classics have to be forced down every now and then until a taste for them is developed. (I would like to take this opportunity to reassure him that I have said to my child, “Just a minute, I want to finish this chapter.)”

2 books he (and others) repeatedly recommend that I need to remember to get at some point: Little, Big by John Crowley, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.


I would like to be a guest in his guest room library.

Since the book is drawn from the quotes in his commonplace book, I thought I’d follow Dirda’s example and note some of my favorite quotes which he has quoted (and some of his own pithy one liners):


On Learning:
(quotes without attribution are Dirda’s own words) : “Erudition makes people feel uneasy; at worst it can seem vaguely undemocratic.” (a problem at school)

Anthony Hecht on John Crowe Ransom: “Mr. Ransom did not lecture, he inquired, and he invited the class to join his inquiry .. . . For one learned from him, not facts or positions, but a posture of the mind and spirit, a humanity and courtesy, a manly considerateness that inhabited his work as it did his person”



Lionel Trilling: on ‘making a life’ [conceiving human existence as a work of art]” “this desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self”



Flannery O’Connor on teaching: "The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."


“Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it. To my mind, life should be complex, packed with questioning, full of misdirection and wasted effort – a certain number of mistakes is, after all, the price for ‘living large’." Dirda



On Work

Hannah Arendt: “The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these aer but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to line in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans and neither the craftsman nor the man of action , has ever demanded to be ‘happy’ or thought that mortal man could be happy.”



“We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed possible.” – William Gerhadie

“An unfulfilled vacation drains the color from a man’s entire existence” – Honore de Balzac

“The chief source of art is man’s pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself” – William Morris


On love:

“Twinned helplessness/Against the huge tug of procreation.” Robert Graves

“Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through” John Updike

Dirda: “Only critics on deadline must rush to judgment”


On music: All arts according to Walter Pater: “constantly aspire to the condition of music”



On books:

“There are books…which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences" – RW Emerson



“As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.”



“Why is it so hard to talk – not write but speak – about literature? A friend asks about a new novel or collection of poetry? Almost any response tend sto sound a least faintly prissy, hokey, pretentious, academic, or utterly banal . .. The most typical character flaw of the bookish is the desire to show off.”



“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman” - Wallace Stevens


Note to self: memorize more poetry

Off the shelf

We finished Saving Private Ryan last night, and although perhaps the stoic in me wants to say that it pulls the heartstrings a little too hard, I did love the ending. And in a year or two, I'll let the boys watch it and hope that they remember to "earn it." We all owe our existence to the sacrifices of others. Only sometimes that is hard to remember when we're making our own.

So today the kids are watching a more age appropriate but probably time wasting film: G Force. Dad's on duty, and I'm reading blogs. I meant this to be something of a book review blog, so here are some quotes from what I'm reading lately:

From Katherine Paterson's The Invisible Child:
In "In Search of Wonder" she talks about books providing children a source to wonder at nature - human and the natural world, at language, and at the mystery of meaning. She writes: "If knowledge without a sense of reverence is dangerous, morality divorced from wonder leads either to chilling legalism or priggish sentimentality . . . When I write a book I am not setting out to teach virture I am trying to tell a story, I am trying to draw my reader into the mystery of human life in this world. I am trying to share my own sense of wonder that although I have not always been in this world and will not continue in it for too many more years, I am here now, sharing in the mystery of the universe, thinking, feeling, tasting, smelling,seeing, hearing, shouting, singing, speaking, laughing, crying, living, and dying."

She goes on to say we need to share with children the wonder of death as well as the wonder of birth. So someday we'll let the boys watch this movie, but now maybe The Fighting Sullivans is what we should look for.

I liked this too: "Meaning in a story reflects our belief that there is meaning in the universe, that no matter the disorder that frames our lives, in the center -- in the place that reveals who we are -- there is order."

I remember loving Paterson's books as a preteen. After rereading Bridge to Terabithia as an adult, I hesitated to recommend it to my kids, but after reading this collection of essays, I agree with what she is about. She says in "The Invisible Child" that people criticize her work for being hopeless or having unlovable characters, which hurts her because she loves her characters. "It is my hope, of course, that children will find these characters to be real children like themselves -- that they will be able to see themselves in them and then as they come to love and forgive these people on the page to be able to forgive and love their own deepest selves. . . . We do well to be suspicious of love that comes too easily."

Likewise, Flannery O'Connor rails against writing uplifting, moral stories, that reflect the prosperity of America and the joy of life in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" in Mystery and Manners. (I'm going to try to revisit Southern lit while I'm here, although O'C also rejects labelling regional writers. "Most readers these days must be sufficiently sick of hearing about Southern writers and Southern writing and what so many reviewers insist upon calling the 'Southern school'. . . . The writers of the editorial in question suggest that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. ... The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough . . . The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them." Even more, I imagine, would she cringe at being included with the ya-ya sisterhoods and sweet potato pie queens and all their knock-offs that lack even the sense of being "Christ-haunted.")



Back to the comparison with Paterson: "My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, adn for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause."

And like Paterson, O'C refuses to write the uplifting fiction the "tired reader" wants. "There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration."

Which brings me back to last night's film and reminds me of the tragedy described by Pentimento. Real darkness is out there. But still we hope for light. And keep trying to earn it despite recurring failures.