Run On

“This is so dumb-ass.”

That was my furtive aside to my friend and co-runner Amy as we approached mile eight of a supposed 16 mile run in the pouring rain.

“Only if it keeps raining,” she said brightly.

My glasses – without which I literally cannot see past the end of my nose – were spattered with wet, my hat a failed awning, my shoes a squishy mess. I’d decided against a jacket – it hadn’t been raining when we started out – and a cold wind cut across by bare shoulders.

One of the marathon training volunteers pulled up in his car alongside our group of nine, looking cozy and dry. “Great work, guys!” he shouted. “Keep it up!” and off he sped.

Amy sighed. “I guess we’re expected to just keep on going,” she said.

I’d been dreading this run all week. My throat was sore. I was tired. I was irritable. Yet here I was, rain falling hard, slogging along.

I confronted the first moment of doubt, real doubt, since I’d begin training more than four months ago. What was the feasibility of this whole 26.2 mile hallucination? Why was I subjecting myself to this abuse? I, a non-runner, an absolute non-athlete, a “delicate flower,” as I so often remind my six-year-old son if he so much as bumps into me.

I don’t like to run in the cold, or the heat, or the rain. I like to be cool and dry and as comfortable as possible at all times. I do most of my solo runs in the early morning, before dawn, so I don’t have to contend with the sun. I doubt I would have even attempted this training in any other city but Los Angeles. When LA doesn’t cooperate, it makes me extremely grumpy.

Adding to my sour mood was the introduction of the Amazing Race, a game Coach Scott had devised for us --inspired by the television show -- to help us get through this, our longest run yet. The game is all about geography-based trivia, and as anyone who knows me knows, I am sorely lacking in matters of geography. I’m not proud of it, and I’ve actually taken steps to ameliorate my ignorance. But I knew I was going to be of little help to my team on this one.

Mae became the keeper of the questions, and she stored them in a sealed plastic bag thoughtfully provided by Coach Scott. At each water stop we were given a new set of questions set in a new country. (“True or False: Australia is the only continent that does not have glaciers.” “A male kangaroo is called a boomer, what is a female called?”)

It turned out the rest of the group wasn’t much better than I, so we shrugged it off, did what we could and went on our way until we got to France, at mile 12.

The table was being tended by Coach Scott’s parents, Pat and Ray Boliver, who always bring snacks loaded with the sweet, salty and vinegary flavors I crave when running. Pat kept everything covered so it wouldn’t get soggy. I was so busy loading up on sliced pickles, peanuts mixed with candy corns, and Ritz crackers smeared with peanut butter –plus I was deep into that brain-numb state that settles in around mile ten-- that it took me a couple of minutes to notice the lovely cheese plate off to the side.

I headed for it immediately, but Scott’s son, Alec, stopped me. “This is part of the game,” he said, and asked me to identify the three cheeses on the plate. Easy: brie, Muenster and brie. He looked at me. My friend Amy nudged me and said, “The other ‘B.”

Oh, right. Blue. I meant blue. Alec was satisfied. Then, with a mischievous grin, he directed me to sample the blue. Pat and Ray leaned in, and all three waited, watching my face intently. I happily downed a cube, enjoying the rich, creamy mouth fug.

“Delicious,” I said. “Can I have more?”

Alec looked confused.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s stinky,” he said. “We all tried it, and it’s awful.”

Ray nodded in agreement.

“What kind of person eats a thing like that?” he wondered at me.

I might have responded with, “What kind of person stands out in the pouring rain serving cheese and crackers to a bunch of idiots who insist on running themselves to death?”

Instead I helped myself to more cheese and took off into the rain.

Though my co-runners and I lost the Amazing Race, we got the cheese. And for 16 miles we ran our hearts out -- blisters, soaking shirts, soggy hats and all -- like the foolish true believers we suddenly realized we'd become.

*I was wrong on the Muenster-- which, of course isn't French. And the blue wasn't just any blue. It was Roquefort.

Posted by Sara Catania at 3:08 PM | Permalink

“Forgive me Coach, for I have sinned. Having failed to reach my minimum fundraising goal, I am not worthy to continue my training…

“What’s that you say? You take American Express?”

This week hundreds of runners training for the LA Marathon with AIDS Project Los Angeles received letters of “recommitment” that they are required to sign if they want to continue training. The vaguely religious terminology is in keeping with a program that is entirely secular and yet impressive in its functional mimicry of organized religion.

There are the weekly gatherings, kicked off with an inspirational message from our fundraising coach, Linda Francisco: “Lookin’ good, AIDS marathoners! Lookin’ good!” There are by-the-book (Jeff Galloway’s Marathon, You Can Do it!) pointers from running coach Scott Boliver: “If you pour water on your head, make sure to bend over, otherwise that water will slide down your back, into your butt crack and all the way into your shoes. Blisters waiting to happen.”

There are the group runs, where the Good Word on training is passed from runner to runner: “Try these shot blocks – they rock!” We suffer together, we pray together (especially on steep-up hills), and we rejoice together (most vociferously at the sight of the blessed yellow fire hydrant that signals the finish line). There’s the taking of the special food at the mid-point water station (wafer-esque pickles are my personal favorite), and a righteous cause at the center (AIDS, bad. Fighting AIDS, good.).

And there’s the tithe, known as recommitment.

Signing the APLA recommitment letter means that within a couple of weeks, if participants have not raised a minimum of $500, their personal credit card will be charged for that amount. Six weeks after that, if they haven’t collected the full $1,600 minimum required of each trainee, the shortfall goes on their credit card too.

Next week Coach Scott and the other organizers will take roll. Those who have signed the recommitment letter will be rewarded with a bracelet indicating their approved status. (Kind of like the nifty wooden cross I received after reconciliaton.) Those who haven’t signed get squat.

Scott isn’t going to excommunicate anyone, but peer pressure eventually causes the slackers to flee. Scott has run 17 marathons and raised tens of thousands of dollars for AIDS relief, so he knows of what he speaks: “If everyone in the group has signed the form, meaning they’re footing the bill until they can raise the money, they’re not going to look too kindly on the one guy who’s getting a free ride.”

How to look at this? On the one hand, we all signed up for the APLA training agreeing to raise the money. It’s a big boost to the organization’s coffers and helps them provide medical care, food, clothing and shelter for thousands of people living with AIDS and HIV in LA County, home to one of the nation’s largest HIV-positive populations. Some 90 percent of APLA clients live on less than $20,000 a year, and half have no health insurance of any kind. More than a third of the agency’s $17 million annual budget in 2007 came from fundraising, and the marathon played a big part.

On the other hand, since we started training the economy has taken dive after dive. What in late September looked merely difficult now appears exponentially more daunting. It’s a bad time to be asking for money. Lots of people don’t have it, and those who do are hanging on to it for fear they may soon join the ranks of those without. Even those who are willing to give are giving less -- $10 or $25 instead of $50 or $100.

For selfish reasons I want everyone to stick around. I look forward to the weekly updates on Mae’s ice skating lessons, Monica’s wedding plans, Andrea’s neuroma, Steve’s search for the perfect dog, Dwayne’s film-making exploits, Eun’s acupuncture studies, Sandy’s sporting events and Amy’s travel adventures. It helps pass the time. Sometimes it’s a very long time, so the more people and the more stories, the better. I don’t want to lose anyone.

But even before recommitment, the number of runners in training has dropped. As Coach Scott predicted early on, only about half the original group of 200-plus is still around. It’s no small thing to have made it this far. Four months of early rising on Saturday mornings and slow slogs through the streets of Burbank after foregoing a well-deserved Friday night cocktail for fear that it would become the Saturday morning running disaster.

Those of us who have come this far have made a serious personal investment. To throw it all away now, because of a measly $1,600, seems so very wrong. The problem is, $1,600 isn’t measly, especially when it’s going on your personal credit card, and the money isn’t going to drop from the sky, no matter how many Hail Marys are on offer.

I’m fortunate to be blogging about the training. Donors can see and track my progress, and the fundraising wasn’t hard for me (my family was incredibly generous). Most people don’t have that kind of platform, so here goes: If you want to make a donation to help my co-runners get to the finish line in May, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch.

Posted by Sara Catania at 9:19 AM | Permalink

“After today, whenever anyone boasts about running a half-marathon, you can tell them half-marathons are for pussies.”

This declaration to the larger group, intended as a morale booster, came from a fellow (male) runner as we were preparing last Saturday to take on 14 miles, our longest run to date and about the length of a half-marathon.

I was more than a little put off by the remark, which I took a bit too personally, but when I mentioned it to my husband later he just shook his head. “You know,” he said, “not all pussies are women.” Of course. In matters of language, I am more typically on the wrong side of the line between precision and elasticity, between consideration and offense. I prefer not to tread too lightly, letting coarse words to fall where they may. Gendered obscenities carry a particular giddy joy. They can deliver a much-needed wallop. They can pull one out of a funk. They can create a sense of possibility and purpose.

They can also offend. Once, when I described an important book as “seminal,” I was informed by an objector that I had bestowed upon it some masculine importance and in so doing excluded its female-driven value. I was informed that the word “seminal,” used in this context, was obscene. The work was David Halberstam’s The Powers that Be, as seminal to understanding the macho media as any assessment I’ve come across. I stood my ground.

So why did the “half-marathons are for pussies” get under my skin? In part because in the few months I’ve been training and blogging about it, I’ve learned a thing or two about the historic exclusion of women from competitive running.

From ancient Greece on, women were largely shut out of marathons. In the 1970’s, when they started running in the big races anyway, they were forcibly removed. In one notorious incident, marathoner Kathy Switzer was set upon by race organizers who tried to drag her off the course while her running mates did their best to protect her.

The excuses for excluding women were generally two-fold. First, there wasn’t enough room for women and second, women were not built for running. Eventually, in early 1980, the College of Sports Medicine found “no conclusive scientific or medical evidence that long-distance running is contraindicated for the healthy, trained female athlete” and recommended that “females be allowed to compete at the national and international level in the same distances in which their male counterparts compete.” Once that opinion was aired, it was only a matter of time before space opened up for women to run alongside men.

Fast forward a few decades to the ’08-’09 AIDS Project Los Angeles training for the LA Marathon. We are halfway through the training program now, and in my highly anecdotal experience, it is women who make up the majority of runners. Granted we’re talking not about elite marathoners, just everyday ladies who are hoping to do something good for the world and for themselves.

So where are all the dudes? One theory, again bolstered only by my very limited anecdotal experience, is that guys tend to overtrain and burn out quickly. They run too much and too hard, their bodies protest and they drop out.

Certainly in my running group most of the runners who have made it this far are women. There have been several weeks were only women showed up for the group run, and we are generally in better shape than the men in the group. On our hardest run to date, an eight-miler that felt like 18, it was a group made up entirely of women who made it to the finish line on pace.

One of my best runs so far was week 15, an easy six-miler (hard to believe I’m putting “easy” and “six-mile” together, but that is one of the great satisfactions of this program). It was the weekend after New Year’s and our group was a modest four. But all of us were amped and ready to roll. Our jaunt through the streets of Burbank was smooth, swift and sweet.

I was none too confident when I showed up this past Saturday for the 14-mile challenge-- the biggest run of my brief life as a runner. I haven’t been doing this long enough to believe that I can keep adding miles without suffering some devastating calamity. Yet each time I get out there I put one foot in front of the other, a few hours go by, it’s done, I’m starving and I’ve run some length I never imagined I ever would.

Saturday was no different. We started out with a group of eight, including two men, but both dropped out before the finish. We ended with an all-female group coming in at 3 hours, 25 minutes. Right on pace and feeling tired but strong.

I guess half-marathons really are for pussies.

Posted by Sara Catania at 11:24 PM | Permalink