Minding the Miles

Souring a bit on Apple

2012-01-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

Also, an illustrated exercise in multi-sourcing synchronicity, or how we learn about things these days

You know that I'm a three-decade fan of all things Apple — their inspired innovation, their magical utility — without calling myself a worshipper of Steve Jobs. A series of events in the last few days has opened my eyes to learn, through the lifecycle of an Apple product, sobering truths about the global economy and our relative spot high up on the food chain.

Driving home from work Friday, I caught an NPR or BBC story on how Apple was closing its five retail stores in China for a few days. Demand for the new iPhone 4S is so heated among China's emerging middle class, the report told us, that the hordes of people waiting outside the shops for too few of the products were turning angry, shoving, throwing eggs at the store. When the reporter asked why Apple couldn't simply make enough phones to meet the demand, an analyst explained that one factor in the limited supply is Apple's famed high-stakes security parameters. Apple products are assembled in just one gigantic plant in China, nowhere else, to help control the chances of any product secrets escaping.

The next morning I sat over coffee and bagels with my running pals after a brisk 10-miler. One of the many things I love about this weekly ritual, "the height of my social life" as one friend calls it, is that I sit with so many folks I would have little in common with -- age, work, income, political or religious views, etc. But because we have just covered the same distances, sweated, breathed hard, beat back pessimism and self- doubt and supported each other in the process, we are bonded by the time we sit down at a table and pass the peanut butter jar. Saturday I sat beside a young teacher who just ran her first marathon. I can't remember how we got there, but she told me that her brother works for Apple and travels regularly to China to check on his one piece of the products. The security measures are so large, she says, that he can't tell his family much more about what he does. He can't look at work documents or e-mails on the plane to and from China. His computer passwords are changed frequently.

Then this morning, a Facebook friend posts a link to a show from This American Life on what the manufacturing plants are like for Chinese workers -- sweatshops so hopeless that workers have leapt to their deaths from the top of one factory at regular intervals. Solo performer Mike Daisey has been giving a monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in New York City since one week (coincidentally) after Steve Jobs' death. Ira Glass of This American Life was impressed by Daisey's show and worked with him on an abbreviated version for the radio.

As Daisey mentions in his notes about the public radio experience, it was important that the personal and wry flavor of his monologue -- picture a slightly cleaned up, perhaps more engaging Michael Moore -- not be lost. Because, face it, how many of us in our idle Facebook and Internet surfing time would choose to click on an hour's show about sweatshop conditions? But when Daisey presents the context, we care. Here he was, a fervent worshipper of all things Mac who had even visited the "House of Jobs," suddenly discovering a few test photos on an iPhone that reveal the lifeless inside of a Chinese factory. And he decided he needed to learn about who, how, and where his revered products are made.

His story is so compelling and the reach of This American Life so broad that it looks as if things are happening. Apple is finally responding to the story, if in a limited and still veiled manner. It's by far not the only American manufacturer relying on the low cost of buying components and assembly in China. But I'm hoping that we Apple consumers are an outspoken enough crowd, and with enough moral conscience, to push the issue about working conditions in emerging industrialized nations.

Meanwhile, from the warmth of my comfortably heated home on this cold morning, a federally endorsed holiday, I contemplate all of my comforts. I surf the Web to see that Daisey's one-man show reopens in New York City just as I will be driving my son back up to his internship. I get a call on my iPhone from said son, now exploring New Orleans with a friend, to confirm his schedule. I check the theater ticket prices on my MacBook Pro. And I catch myself worrying about tight finances -- until I look back at the factory photos.

Christmas for Grown-Ups

2011-12-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

My neighbor Melissa and I stood outside my front gate yesterday in the gathering twilight, making plans to take off for Mexico for the next two weeks. That way, we figured, we could escape hearing "do you hear what I hear?" and "Feliz Navidad!" piped into every place of business that we enter. I was busy hanging pine roping on my picket fence, with red bows, but it occurred to me that if we left soon, I could avoid bringing home a tree and decorating it.

This year is proving the worst for getting into the Christmas spirit. It may have to do with the gorgeously mild weather we've had since Thanksgiving -- warm enough to confuse the flowers and budding trees. And it may come from thinking about how many people are financially strapped right now. I walked into a TJ Maxx before Thanksgiving and was horrified to see three whole aisles devoted to Christmas, well, stuff -- shiny gold and tinsely sprays and figurines and knick-knacks. Will people really buy all this, I wondered? And if so, please let it not be people who are living paycheck to paycheck (with whom I sometimes relate too much).

Mostly I think it's just that with each year that passes since the kids were little, when I could delight them with surprises and decorations and such, the more this holiday feels like just a lot of, well, stuff. I still insist on bringing home a real, fragrant tree. But Bob and I manage to strip that thing and get it out on the curb for trash pickup in record time lately, loving how open the house feels after we pack the holiday stuff away.

I treated myself the other day to a visit to a thrift store I'd never tried before. I took the time to try on a handful of bargain tops, but the canned Christmas music almost made me flee. I asked the sales clerk, a woman a little older than me, how she was doing with the background music. She looked up at me, rolled her eyes, and told me the songs repeat every hour. Oooh boy, I told her, thinking of my poor hairdresser Rick, stuck in a beauty salon with crappy Christmas music since November. But as the thrift store clerk handed me my bag of purchases she automatically said, "Merry Christmas!" with no irony. "Right," I answered, "Happy Holidays!" meaning to be silly. "Ah," she said, misinterpreting my hesitation, "and Happy Hannukah!"

It's not that there haven't been some touching moments this season. My friend Marylou in Ohio gets to see her grownup boy, who has been off across the country at an academy all fall. He wrote her that all he wants for Christmas is to donate any gift money to a children's hospital, to play games with his family, and to be the first to lick the spoon when she makes cookies. And then there's Melissa. She runs a bakery that is elbow-deep in Christmas orders. I had no idea she shared my humbug holiday views, so it was a warm moment of connecting with her last night over the smell of fresh pine boughs. Sharing, relating, admiring the neighbors' lights, laughing. It was all quite Christmasy -- as we planned our Mexican escape.

Only connecting

2011-12-05T04:09:00.001-08:00

Well, that was a powerful way to start a Monday morning and a new week -- hanging with writers Joan Didion and Sara Davidson to talk about writing, love, marriage, kids, aging. In the kind of half directed, half ambling way we explore online, I went to check something on Amazon (OK, in all honesty, it was to see how well my Ohio anthology, Good Roots, is selling after a few days of me shamelessly promoting it on Facebook). In that eerie way that our electronic hook-ups "know" us these days, Amazon reminded me that I was interested in reading Blue Nights, Didion's account of losing her daughter. Done, one click; the book will arrive in two days.

Then Amazon suggested "Joan," a mini-book by Davidson about her 40-year friendship with Didion in which she shares the older writer's thoughts on all the stuff that intrigues me -- writing, love, marriage, kids, aging. For $2.95 I downloaded "Joan" to my Mac and gobbled it up in one sitting. In tight and sure prose, Davidson shares wonderful insights from Didion: her work ethic, her pragmatism, her shyness (far more articulate in her writing than in person), the power of her partnership with her husband, the loss of her only child. I'm left inspired to work harder at the things that matter in my life -- family, friends, writing.

Here's the funny part. After letting some of the profundity wash over me and seep in a bit, my next inclination? To turn to this blog and Facebook to share with my Friends. I don't know what to make of this social media/blogosphere beast. Is it an unhealthy penchant, bordering on addiction, to daily share thoughts and details big and small with others? Or is it at the heart of what writers seek to do -- to connect? Does technology just speed the time from crafting thoughts to reaching readers down to a one-click two days, an instant download, a Facebook post, or has it created a monster?

The power of E.M. Forster's "only connect" threads through Didion and Davidson's friendship, beginning with their shared Berkeley English majors, a decade apart. Now at 76, having lost her true life partner and their only child, Didion tells Davidson that what's left, what matters, is to connect. I'm going with that.

Sharing the blog love

2011-11-30T02:47:00.001-08:00

I have a writer friend, Tom, who laughs about blogs. I get it; they are cliche and a dime a dozen. I've been ambivalent about them at times. But a good blog, well written, presents so much potential. For the writer, it's an exercise, keeping the writing muscles warmed up, and it provides immediate feedback from readers. For the reader, it's the promise of a quick essay, a tight insight into life -- and if it moves you, you can say so. Making connections, feeling connected is the most I've ever hoped to achieve with writing and editing publications. A dear friend and loyal "Minding the Miles" reader, Sally, has sent me twice to her friend's blog, "If You Can't Write, Blog." I loved her recent post about losing her mother and inheriting her lotion collection. It's funny, touching, real -- all my favorite stuff. And I thought of her as I bought a tube of Neutrogena Ageless Intensives.

Then yesterday a gift arrived in her blog, a great post about avoiding chain letters and chain e-mail forwards that promise you millions of dollars, hundreds of casserole recipes, and all good fortune if you just pass the e-mail along to 20 close friends. Turns out she'd just been nominated for the Liebster Blog Award, a pay-it-forward concept where awardees thank the blogger who gave them the award and nominate five other blogs with fewer than 200 followers. Still a bit wary that unwanted recipes and dancing teddy bears might result, she accepted the gift and kindly nominated Minding the Miles. It's a fun idea, in keeping with this season of gratitude and gifts. Unfortunately -- well, not so unfortunate -- most of my blogger friends don't qualify because they have too many followers. But this is a perfect opportunity to spotlight a beautiful pearl of a blog: Tao te Chu. Paula began her blog a year or so ago to deal with a devastating diagnosis of breast cancer. We readers were there, front row, as she got herself through a double mastectomy, treatments, and healing. Along the way she has fine-tuned her unique voice and perspective -- she's a wry, intensely perceptive therapist having to counsel herself. Her blog has been hibernating for a few months. I don't think she realizes that at this point she can write about anything -- a trip to the grocery store, surviving a winter storm -- and we'll gladly follow. Paula, we can't wait for you to grow the last few years of posts into the book you've been toying with.

Genius is in the details

2011-10-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

I've been captivated by Steve Jobs' story ever since the first word of his death came trickling in by Facebook posts and news alerts. A few days later I happened to be flying to the Bay Area, (his stomping grounds), so I treated myself to three or four magazines with cover stories on Jobs for airplane reading. I'm halfway through Walter Isaacson's biography (the two-page compilation that ran in Time magazine might have been enough, and better written).

I decidedly don't like the guy. But he fascinates me. There's the story line that always draws me -- as Jobs' cancer progressed and he knew he was dying, how did he handle the knowledge? I don't respect his petulance. Maybe it's defense because I don't have a lightning-quick mind, but a brilliant intellect pales in comparison to emotional intelligence any day, in my book. And such ego -- he loved the Think Different ad campaign because it cast him in the company of his own heroes. But we are all complicated.

Yesterday Jobs' genius was top of mind. I had decided to break down and buy a little camera, taking tiny steps back into photography. I wasn't looking for anything fancy, just a reliable, simple camera that I could use for work and play. I found myself at Best Buy, missing everything about the Apple store experience. Even at its most hectic, there is an order to the chaos in an Apple store. The help are all smart and "on." The ever-present minimalist aesthetic -- the fonts, the colors, product designs -- lends a calmness. By contrast, Best Buy is all electronic bells and whistles -- literally, high-pitched beeping the whole time I was there. You wait to be helped, you try to choose from 17 options, then you find a cash register (how 2010 is that?).

When I got home and opened the camera box, digging through layers of registration info, instructions, and an installation disk to find the camera, I thought again of Jobs. He thought through and cared about the whole product experience. Every Apple product comes in handsomely designed packaging that truly allows you to open the box, plug in and play.

As I unwrapped the cable to connect the camera to my MacBook, I thought about my iPhone. I really should consider that little device my best friend: e-mail, music, alarm clock, camera. Take a picture and e-mail it to a friend in seconds, wherever I am. Who could've dreamed of such a thing? Steve Jobs.

Online Scrabble: Ethics, efficacy, and wanting to win

2011-10-28T04:09:00.000-07:00

Bob and I were sitting at the ol' corner bar with friends when the topic of online Scrabble came up. Seems the appeal is growing, at least within my little circle.

When we started sharing our recent big-point words, Bob (who does not play) helpfully piped up about how I cheat. "You should see her," he says. "I look over in bed and she's looking up words online!"

"That's not cheating!" I returned. "It's just a resource."

At which point, a nice-enough looking woman sitting beside us at the bar, quietly eating soup and drinking wine with a man beside her, pipes up. "Excuse me, I don't mean to be eavesdropping, but I have to say"--at this point, I lift up in my seat and reach across the bar to high-five the woman, because I know she's going to defend my resourceful practice—-"that he's totally right, that's cheating."

"Hey!" I reproached her, as I sat back down. "I don't like you."

So I'm coming clean about my latest ethical dilemma (why not, since I've already shared about how I lied in front of a judge). In a pinch, I'll Google "words ending with ad," say, and morewords.com will give me a helpful list, organized by word length. If someone has taken the time to develop this helpful resource for Scrabble, it's got to be legit, right?

In my daily competitions, I am routinely trounced by Paula, Leslie, Sarah, and now Sally. Early on, blown away by their mastery, I discovered morewords.com. I just knew they had some secret weapon helping them pull arcane words out of their hats. When you play online, the various game programs (Lexulous, Wordscraper) allow you to check if a word is legit before you play it and to check lists of two-letter words. So going to find a list of words starting with or ending with a certain letter isn't that big of an infraction, right? Right?

Since that night at the bar, I've used morewords.com very rarely. And my win rate is about at 15 percent. Just sayin.

Bob's challenge to me, which he said I wasn't big enough to do, was to ask my opponents if they also use this resource. So here I am, a very big woman, putting it out there. Am I cheating? Do you cheat?

Gone to the Dogs

2011-10-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me more than in passing knows that I'm a dog person. For many who knew me pre-dog, this can come as a surprise. The change was overnight: One day I was a 36-year-old who had never owned a pet of any kind; the next day Chandler came into our lives and I was a goner. A Shepherd-Samoyed mix, Chandler was a dapper three-year-old raised by my friend Dave, who wanted him to be in a busier household with children. We all embraced him, learned from him, and fell easily in love. The rest is history — we're on to dogs number 3 and 4 now, two rescue mutts who warm my heart every day.

Yet I find myself often defending this affection, even if just in my head, knowing there are some who find it screwy. With other people, discovering we share a love of canines opens the door to instant friendship.

Earlier this week I visited San Francisco to see my friends Ann and Tom and my sister, Sandy. Ann and I caught two author readings -- Susan Orlean, talking about her new biography of the film star Rin Tin Tin, and Mary Oliver, reading poems at Stanford. Both writers, highly accomplished in their own rights and comfortable on stage, turned downright human when they talked about their dogs. Mary Oliver has written six or seven poems about her little Percy, who she lost at seven to a congenital condition. In her dreams, Percy scampers back to see her, as she has written about. Susan Orlean talked about transporting a German Shepherd puppy by plane and car to new adoptive owners and how, within minutes of starting her trip, she was hoping the new family had changed their minds.

I loved visiting San Francisco and all the ways there are to play in that area -- coffee shops and bookstores, hiking trails and yoga classes, crowded city streets and quiet hills. But I found myself, even over four days, missing my dogs terribly. I can call, text, and e-mail Bob when I'm away; I can't do much more than stare longingly at my iPhone photos of Amos and Juno. One morning on a run, enjoying the soft air and sights and sounds of Berkeley, I played a game with myself: If someone handed me a terrific job there, with enough money that Bob and I could live comfortably but we couldn't bring the dogs, would I take it? I was testing my devotion, I suppose. I kept trying to work my way around the question -- there must be a way they could come join us six months later? Stay with Kate until we find a large enough place?

When I told Ann about my mental game, she answered that there are probably more dogs than people in the Bay Area. As if to say, such a challenge would never come to pass.

We're quite comfortable here in North Carolina. Yesterday Bob and I walked the dogs through the woods behind the college. It was one of those perfect fall days -- the sun warm but not hot, the smells of leaves and woods strong and sweet. The sad thing is we probably wouldn't have hiked on our own -- having dogs who need exercise got us out there. Later, with two freelance jobs to finish this weekend, they kept me company on the deck -- Amos laying on top of the picnic table behind my laptop, Juno curled up in a spot of sunshine.

As with any good relationship, there is give and take. We supply food, shelter, walks, and trips to the woods. They pay me back with the comfort of their soft warm bodies squeezed next to mine on the couch, their enthusiasm, their joy.

Body Schizo

2011-10-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I took myself shopping. I was trying to replace a favorite pair of black pants -- such favorites that I finally literally wore a hole through the linen. They were just what I'd want for an upcoming trip to San Francisco that includes two readings -- casual yet literary, comfortable but not sweat pants.

I rarely wander into clothes stores these days. Shopping used to serve as entertainment, but some combination of wanting to conserve funds and resources (don't we all have stuffed closets as it is?) and not having to get very dressed up for work has kept me away. That, and the fact that most new clothes look ridiculous on me -- the low-cut pants that highlight the swell of my belly; blouses meant to emphasize a non-existent chest.

As I forced myself yesterday to work my way through armfuls of slacks, yoga pants and more, I just decided to laugh. I hope I'm not the only one who feels schizo in a dressing room. My body had served me well the last two days, working through a hard yoga class that morning and running a decent 11 miles the day before. But I tried on one tight yoga top that made me look adorable -- for a six-month pregnant woman. Most often I see myself in the mirror as a woman who could use a little exercise.

I didn't come home with any magic transformative clothes, but I did resolve to clean up my act nutritionally. And this morning I read this post from Bonny North -- it's the most sensible approach I've seen in a long time for deciding to clean up your act. I've got the exercise part down pat; I'm going to redouble my efforts in the other areas, for all the wonderful reasons she writes about.

See you in the protein aisle.

Appreciating my hard-working feet

2011-09-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

One of the first times I ever talked to my friend Brigitte was in yoga class when I caught her staring, with nurse practitioner clinical fascination, at the bottoms of my feet.

"I'm sorry," she said, finally looking up at me. "I love to look at feet that are uglier than mine."

It was true. She was catching my feet in a particularly unattractive stage. Aside from their wide spread in front and the protruding knob of a bunion on my left foot, I was sporting all kinds of callouses and blisters. Our local running guru, Dr. Bert, had just traced some of my hip pains to my feet. I had callouses in places where my feet shouldn't even be touching, he said. So he stuck quarter-sized metatarsal pads in my running shoes. It felt like running on rocks, at first, and the pads caused ugly blisters of their own.

Gradually, through some combination of the metatarsal pads and lots of side-angle poses in yoga, my feet have regained much of their natural arch. The callouses along the outside of my big toes have shrunk. Aside from the bunion, I kind of admire my feet.

Women have to take self love where we can find it--for me, it's my wrists and feet. They are my only body part that will ever wear sample size (6 1/2), so I generally enjoy shoe-shopping. But comfort always takes precedence over fashion. Like the Merrell sandals I've worn at some point every day this summer -- walking the dogs or cycling to yoga. They've served me well through a long, hot season, but they look stretched out and sweat-stained by now. So, despite a warm September week in North Carolina, I've been shopping for shoes that say "fall."

Tonight I found a pair of black clogs for work. They are shiny enough and with pointy enough toes to look professional but comfortable enough to actually walk in all day. When I went to admire my sophisticated look in the floor-level shoe mirror, I just had to crack up. I looked professional, yes, right up to my ankle. From there to my knees, my legs are a colorful roadmap of my summer. There's the half-dollar size wound on my left shin from our women's hike of Wilson Creek. Two or three stripes of poison ivy bumps in various stages are crusting over my right knee, probably courtesy of my dogs' paws. My right shin features a tri-tone bruise, a souvenir from running the Blue Ridge Relay. Sprinkle in a few mosquito bites and you get the picture.

Sophisticated I'll never be. But I know how to play -- just ask my legs. And my cute feet.

A little run in the hills

2011-09-11T17:55:00.000-07:00

You know what people say about childbirth, about how time must erode the memory of the pain, otherwise women would stop having kids? The same must be true of running round-the-clock relays, because the cotton-headed fatigue that those events create should make runners swear off such insanity.

Then, just the way a precious newborn starts to melt your heart, things get better. You drop your bag of smelly running clothes and sleep a solid night's sleep in your own bed. Teammates e-mail photo albums that help you remember how beautiful the course was and how many laughs you shared, from start to finish line. You realize that no one at home cares as intimately and genuinely as your teammates did about what you eat, how well hydrated you are, which layers you should wear. You start to miss the company of that weird little family.

By the time I got home last night from the Blue Ridge Relay, I'd gone 40 hours with only an hour's cat nap. I had to drive eight of my 12 teammates home from Asheville in our big ship of a 15-passenger van; all I wanted to do was collapse in my bed. A mid-ship faction of teammates — well, mostly a fireball named Colleen whose adrenaline came from being sprung from her four young kids —- worked the van hard to recruit next year's team. All I could think was nope, this stuff is crazy, one and done.

I still feel that way. But with a night's sleep behind me and a yoga class, hike with the dogs, and real food restoring my energy, I can start to remember all that was terrific about the adventure.

The Blue Ridge Relay starts up high at Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia and ends 208 hilly miles later in downtown Asheville, NC. In between, 12 teammates (or smaller teams of ultra runners) divide into two vans and cover the distance on winding back roads in legs of anywhere from 2-3 to 10 miles, three legs per runner. The fastest teams start mid-day Friday and finish Saturday morning. The rest of us mortals start early Friday morning and finish sometime Saturday afternoon.

So what's fun about riding along in a van, picking up and dropping off teammates, eating cold food, drinking bad coffee, and not sleeping for 36 hours? It's meeting and laughing easily with new friends: two fun-loving sisters, the twenty-something nieces of my running pal Bill; their friend Ian, an impressive young math teacher; and Chris, a programmer from UNCG, super runner, and quick wit. It's watching the moon light the mountain ridges on a cool September night and sunrise light the lifting fog. It's running alone for an hour, up and down hills, fast enough to know that I'd done my part for the team. It's the surreal zen of running at 5:30 am enclosed by the pitch black and a heavy fog, the world reduced to the three-foot circle of light created by my headlamp. It's entering a transition zone and realizing that the whole parking lot is full of strong-legged people who also like to run, laugh, and drink coffee.

We joked that our team t-shirts should have read "Bill made me do it." We were a team of his family members, his neighbor, and his Saturday morning running pals. That's Bill in the photo above, running his third and last leg. He loves the mountains and loves to run. He's worked hard since the spring to round up our team and organize us. After all his hours of photocopying maps, reserving vans, training hard on hills, pitching prospective runners and submitting paperwork, I found my real joy in watching Bill's wish come to life.

Great anticipation, long hours, heavy breathing, physical pain, little physical privacy, urgent phone updates, and a triumphant finish. Ultra relays and childbirth share plenty in common. For me, the Blue Ridge Relay will remain an only child. But a sweet one -- wanna see my pictures?

High expectations: Learning to let go

2011-08-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

I found a little nugget of wisdom in a random blog a few weeks ago. Its message is still guiding me: Let go of your expectations.

You've heard it before, right? I'm sure I have, in one form or another. I've practiced the concept every time I've headed to Atlanta to see my parents. My mother's state of mind colors any visit. With no expectations for a pleasant, loving time together, I've often been pleasantly surprised to find the time passed just fine.

The blogger poked fun at herself, realizing that a fellow musician disappointed her because he didn't get the memo that he was supposed to be nice to her that day. Bingo, I thought, I do that.

Expectations, the blogger wrote, are our way of handling our fears about the future. I had to puzzle over that one for a while. When its truth struck me, I felt the release of so much frantic, compulsive energy I'd been carrying around for too long. I've been looking at my job and most of my other pursuits as if they needed to take me to the next step, prove something -- and fast. They don't. And there's no giant stopwatch in the sky measuring me. That's the beautiful part about hitting 50 or so. We've done enough climbing, enough strategizing. It's OK to enjoy the plateau, take in the view, breathe a bit.

I knew that losing the trail markers guiding my life over the last 20 years -- mostly the stages of parenting, but also career growth -- felt freeing. I had to see that it also scared me a bit. Trusting the future is another exercise, a practice I'm still learning. But I've felt the shift.

Per-jury duty

2011-07-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

Our local paper reported yesterday that a jury on Friday sentenced a man to life in prison without parole for the 2008 murder of a convenience store clerk downtown.

Reading that story brought me great anguish. Not because I had any particular connection to the victim or the accused, but because I was supposed to serve on that jury.

Last Monday morning I showed up at the county courthouse, hustling into the jury waiting area with 100 other summoned folks. It was my first call to jury duty. I grew up watching Perry Mason, and I've caught enough bits of the Law & Order reruns that Bob likes to watch. I'd make a terrific juror, I'd decided -- perceptive, good listener, smart. Heck, I'd probably be picked for jury foreman for my obvious leadership qualities.

The morning wore on, hours of sitting in our rows of seats after watching a 12-minute instructional video. I started thinking about the novel I'd just read, Sarah's Key. In part it tells the true story about the French police rounding up Jews in WWII and holding them in a airless velodrome for three days without food or water. I started thinking about how we prospective jurors had no idea how long we'd end up sitting there, with no food or water or any idea about what they were going to do to us.

Finally at about 3 in the afternoon, after a lunch break in the suffocating heat outside, about 40 of us were lined up and marched to a fourth floor courtroom. I was the second of 12 people called to enter the jury box. A kind, smiling judge told us he knew that we all had jobs and families and things we'd rather be doing than sitting there, but the right to a jury of peers is a fundamental piece of our democracy and we all have to do our part. I liked him instantly. Then he told us we were there to hear a murder case. My heart swelled. Here was my chance to be a good citizen AND have it be interesting, not some dry, tedious civil complaint or insurance matter.

Here's the embarrassing part. I'd read about the murder in the paper and knew that it was coming to a jury trial that day. Secretly I had hoped I'd be assigned to that trial, the way a good journalist hopes to land the juiciest story. The judge said the trial should be all wrapped up by the end of the week, meaning not too much disruption during what is a slower time at my work. With Bob working from home this summer, he'd be able to take care of the dogs. All day I'd been surrounded by people who didn't want to be called to jury duty in the first place, and who definitely didn't want to sit on a murder case. And there I was, thrilled. So when the judge asked if any of us had any knowledge of the case, I kept quiet. Which amounts to perjury, I suppose. When an older woman told the judge that she had read a bit about it in the paper, he just asked her if she thought she could still be fair and objective -- and I knew I could do that.

Next the prosecuting attorney asked us to tell him our profession, our spouse's profession, where we lived and if we had kids. And he asked if any of us had experience with courtrooms beyond traffic tickets. Feeling a little guilty about my cover-up, I suppose, I shared that I had served as a volunteer guardian ad litem -- TEN YEARS AGO -- in Ohio, advocating for kids in cases of neglect or abuse. I naively thought that tidbit would work in my favor: Ah, she knows her way around a courtroom. I don't know if it was that volunteer service (too soft to put a guy away for life?), my husband teaching at Guilford College (too liberal to put a guy away for life?) or if my ridiculous eager energy was written all over my face. In any case, the attorney dismissed me, along with the woman who admitted to reading about the murder in the paper.

They tell you in the instructional video not to take a dismissal personally. But I did. I was crushed; I'd been fired. And when I read Saturday's newspaper account of the verdict and sentencing, the knife just twisted. The jury delivered their verdict at 4:30 on Friday afternoon. That could have been me, jury foreman, announcing our unanimous decision in time to still meet Bob for happy hour at 5. Ah, the stories I could have told him.

Dreaming the greater dreams

2011-07-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

"From time to time
We must find a place for ourselves
Alone
Where fresh breezes can blow through
Restoring
Replenishing
There is a need for times of silence
Times to fill days with golden smiles
And dream the greater dreams."

At the end of a mile walk yesterday, we found ourselves in an outdoor chapel. Despite a heavy heat haze, we could look out over the Blue Ridge to the distant outline of the Smokies, waves of gauzy receding ridge lines. The chapel setting was stunning: Rows of simple plank benches descending to a stone floor and knee-high wall, which was lined with inspirational dedication plaques like the one above.

Serendipity and awe have graced me each day of this week that Bob and I have spent in the mountains, staying in this idyllic cabin outside of Hendersonville, NC. We left town last Saturday morning, escaping the mid-summer heat. We knew that my father was in his final decline, following a few months of failing health. My mother, pointing out that we'd all said our goodbyes, urged me to go ahead with the trip. My brother got to Atlanta Monday evening; two hours later Dad died with my brother and mother beside him.

Sunday night Bob and I sat in a roadside concert hall in Asheville to hear Iris Dement. As the lights went down, Iris stepped out, sat down at the piano, and launched into a song that perfectly mirrors my thoughts on dying. Hidden by the dark and by Iris' booming piano and lilting voice, I snuck in a good cry:

"Some say once you're gone you're gone forever,
and some say you're gonna come back.
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
if in sinful ways you lack.
Some say that they're comin' back in a garden,
bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I'll just let the mystery be."

I've hiked at least an hour every morning with the two dogs. The quiet, the steady work of walking up and down trails, of shifting perspective from the small (two perfectly circular spider webs, tiny wildflowers) to the big (the breadth of the woods) have indeed replenished me. Bob and I have hiked to waterfalls (we saw the best ones when Ann and Tom joined us for a day), retreated to air-conditioned cafes in small towns for lunches, and taken afternoon naps. I've seen two deer, llamas (with campers, stopped at a mountain stream), a hummingbird and a turtle. After promising myself that I'd run up and down this little mountain road every day, I did it once and gave it up. Ann and I did yoga one morning in the wet grass, including handstands against trees -- I felt like a little kid.

Now I wonder how to bring this sense of peace and well-being to my day-to-day life back home. Having reflected for hours on life and death, family and friends, what matters and what doesn't, I hope my compass has been reset. I want to shake off all that I don't need and point towards what I can accomplish: the greater dreams.

Of course, one more nap on the screened porch sounds good, too.

Practicing detachment

2011-07-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

On my run this morning, we were talking about how bad things had happened the last few days. Kristin's first mortgage is being delayed; Will's dryer broke, then his car battery died. I realized it wasn't on the same scale, but I chimed in that I've broken two of my favorite coffee mugs, one each of the last two mornings.

Everything about this surprises me: that I was that attached to coffee mugs, and that after five years I could break two of them, two days in a row.

Five years ago was a heady time. Media General had hired me to start a magazine, and I had been lucky enough to hire Claudia as art director, partner, and pal. She designed the nameplate for Winston-Salem Monthly and I ordered the mugs with the nameplate on one side and "Ask me about my issues" on the other for our magazine launch. If you take a look at the picture, they're pretty swell, right? White bistro mugs with navy blue trim.

I moved on to other jobs, but I loved that year of joining forces with Claudia and creating some issues that still make me proud. And I've packed one of those white and blue mugs with me to each new workplace since. Every once in a while some astute colleague will start smiling, inexplicably, in the middle of some boring meeting and I'll realize they've just read my coffee mug.

So how did I break them? Walking the dogs, first thing in the morning. Juno jerked on her leash yesterday at our front gate and I dropped the first mug. This morning I put the second mug on the curb to clean up after Amos and they both started dancing about two border collies passing us -- and crushed the mug.

Yesterday I admonished Juno for making me drop the mug, as if it was all her fault that I didn't have a good grip on the handle when she darted ahead (did I do that to the kids when they were little and spilled juice? I'm sorry, Kate and Tommy). Today I decided the universe was trying to tell me something. But what? Move on? Pare down? Start fresh? Or maybe it's planned obsolescence, the way running shoes wear out quicker these days so you have to buy new ones sooner -- maybe online ceramic mugs, used day after day, don't last pass five years?

Detachment may be the best lesson I can take from these little losses. I need to practice it in much bigger areas of my life, as a parent of young adults who need to make their own choices, fix their own false steps. I don't like to think of myself as too attached to material things, or too opinionated that I can't find a neutral balance.

So I'm working on it. Tomorrow I'll walk the dogs with a boring, skinnier coffee mug, and it will be FINE. See? Just ask me about my issues, I'll tell you about them.

Galloway and Playing God

2011-06-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

I adopted my second running gadget (first was a hand-held water bottle, as I wrote about last year) when Robin gave me a green timer direct from Jeff Galloway. The former Olympic runner has branded the run-walk-run method of taking regular walking breaks throughout a run to keep runners injury free, to encourage new runners to start and keep veteran runners in the game. Now I "Galloway" two-thirds of my runs, typically running for six minutes, then walking for 40 seconds. It's enough of a break that an hour's run no longer seems daunting. I know I'll finish fine, not straggling in on my last legs.

Having a timer makes Gallowaying easy. I call it my beeper, clipping it on my waistband like an on-call physician. With a high-pitched "beep beep," it tells me when to stop running, then "beep beeps" to tell me to start running again. It's uncanny how long the 40-second walking breaks feel at the start of the run and how much the time shrinks towards the end of the run.

I was thinking of my little beeper this past weekend as I visited my father in Atlanta. Dad is 87 and in declining health. His latest diagnosis of congestive heart failure follows general weakness, then stroke, then pneumonia. Word came two weeks ago that he was in his last week, if not days. Things weren't quite adding up, from all the reports I'd heard, but I drove down to see him just in case it was my last chance to tell him I loved him.

Over the course of 24 hours, Dad improved remarkably. He went from lying prone, pale and moaning, to sitting up, taking spoonfuls of breakfast and answering questions. This turn of events puzzled my 85-year-old mother, who had begun planning my father's memorial service and such. At first she told us that Dad was holding on because he was scared to die. Slowly she's begun to acknowledge that he's just feeling better.

Running offers such tangible life lessons -- pacing yourself, one step at a time, setting goals. This time I thought of my beeper and how it rarely goes off right when I think it should, or when I "need" it to, like at the start of a hill that I'd rather walk up than run. That's part of the deal, I tell myself -- you have to take the breaks when and where they come. Otherwise I might be walking every hill, and 40-second breaks might turn into four minutes. Having agreed to "obey" the beeper, I can settle in to enjoy the run, knowing I can handle any six-minute stretch.

In the absence of believing much in any higher power, I think of the beeper and Dad. His time to go seemed close. But it's not here yet, and we don't call those shots. With the pleasant surprise of time left on the clock, I'm headed back to see Dad again this weekend. Kate, my college-aged daughter, is flying in from Pittsburgh to join us and hopefully hear more jokes from her funny grandpa. I hope I can ignore the question of how close he is to the end and just enjoy the run. When it's his time to go, he'll know.

Taking measure

2011-06-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

I started the week with a doctor's physical, first thing on Monday morning. What looked like a hassle turned into a joy when the nurse weighed and measured me and reported that since last April, I've lost 10 pounds and gained a half inch, hitting the 5'6 3/4 mark. Cool!

The weight, who knows. Could be I was coming off a bad winter last year (or a good year, if you're a bear) or that I had spent the previous week pedaling for hours in the hot sun. What's truly worth celebrating is my increased height. All my adult life I've measured 5'6 1/2. Then last year the nurse recorded my height at 5'6 and 1/4. The news chilled me: Just shy of my fiftieth birthday, I was already starting to shrink, signaling my physical decline.

So what's changed? I'm crediting the spine-twisting torturers, er, the GOOD PEOPLE at Triad Yoga who have taught me to stand tall, collarbone wide, shoulder blades traveling down, spine reaching upward. Fixing my slump remains a work in progress, as is most of my yoga practice, but the nurse's chart documents my effort.

The great thing about yoga: There is no end, no destination, it's just a journey. People practice yoga for decades and continue to grow stronger, wiser, more limber.

If you don't believe that a woman one year into menopause can grow, watch out. Next year, after I've topped 5'7, I'm investing in a whole new wardrobe. And I'll have a new excuse for not being able to touch my toes: It's too far to reach.

Enjoying the journey on two wheels

2011-06-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from a week's bike trip to the beach. Such journeys make my heart sing, but I've been struggling to find the words to explain why.

Partly it's looking at maps like the one above. I'm so proud to know that I covered the length of that blue line under my own power, my two strong legs pedaling my two little tires. Those same legs and two wheels have taken me across Ohio twice, across New York State, around Lake Champlain, a couple circles through Vermont, and around a circle of the South Carolina coast.

This trip took me and five women friends from Greensboro to Seagrove, then Southern Pines, then Lumberton, and finally to Ocean Isle Beach, 227 total miles. We knew the pace was a relaxed one -- fifty miles a day for three days, then seventy-seven flat miles the last day. The riding was nowhere near as challenging as the climbs through the Adirondacks and Green Mountains, but what we didn't count on was a stifling, 95-plus-degree heat wave that blanketed us all four days -- then evaporated as we drove home to Greensboro.

But it's more than just the numbers on my little odometer. It's also the laughs. I love to surround myself with people who don't take themselves (or their gear, or their abilities) too seriously. We laugh, often until we -- okay, maybe just me -- cry. We were leaving a Mexican restaurant after dinner on day three of this trip when an unusual looking young boy tried to sell us bags of M&Ms. Afterwards Dee described the boy as "compromised," a politically correct term that the rest of us hadn't known. It was also a perfect description of each of us middle-aged women after spending three days on the roads in 95-plus degree heat, and it became a sort of mantra: compromised. We kindly cut each other slack when we said "right" and meant left, lost the top of a water bottle just behind us, or searched for sunglasses on top of our heads -- but we laughed about it plenty.

You HAVE to love the refueling that's required on a bike trip of back-to-back days. You follow a hearty breakfast with a mid-morning snack, decent lunch, mid-afternoon snack, healthy dinner, evening snack. Eating before you're hungry, drinking before you're thirsty become necessary for keeping yourself moving forward. (The hard part, of course, is coming back to the real world and realizing your calorie needs must shrink down to more ordinary, sedentary lifestyles.)

Traveling by bike means taking in a profusion of local color -- we see, smell, taste, and hear it in a way you never can from a car. The sixty-something sisters from Long Island who fussed over us at the B&B in Seagrove. The small-town cafe in Red Springs, in the middle of nowhere, that served a hot vegetable buffet and exquisite tuna salad sandwiches. The curious residents who kindly helped with directions and wished us luck, told us to stay safe. The peace of a cool, shady morning on a quiet road where we'll see nothing but a few horses, grass, and trees for miles. The respite of a church overhang in the middle of a hot, steamy day. The smell of the headwind as it finally cooled into a sea breeze in our last few miles.

Mostly, though, it's the friends. This ride was another in a long series of great trips with Dee, my longtime bicycle pal. She's my hero, my navigator, my storyteller, my friend of three decades. This time we had the added pleasure of her bringing Sally along, a great plus. Sally's company made the jokes funnier, the work easier, the logistics clearer. We got Virginia, a New York City girl, out into the Carolina country. She loved the heat (bless her heart), the country stores, and the Southern hospitality. I enjoyed early morning coffee and talks with Robin, who lives one town away but I mostly "see" through e-mail. Twice we almost lost Robin -- first to an ailing stray dog that she didn't want to leave, next when she stopped to rescue a turtle in the middle of the road and almost got rear-ended by a car. Brigitte continues to blow me away, handling medical calls with one hand to her ear while pedaling all week, but also taking the time to ride with and befriend each of us on the trip.

Now, as we move back into the rhythm of our daily lives, we find ourselves no longer surrounded by friends who know intimately our food preferences, bodily functions, how much sleep we've gotten and how much sunscreen we need. We don't tiptoe so carefully in the early mornings as we did in our shared hotel rooms. We don't have pals to giggle with as we try to fall asleep at night. But we have funny photos that still make me giggle. And we have maps, promising as many trips as we can dream up: France. England. Virginia. Rhode Island.

To our support man, Bob, I bestow on you honorary WRINCLES status. To the WRINCLErs, cheers to the next adventure!

Dream, go forth, trust your gut

2011-05-20T05:13:00.000-07:00

No one has invited me to deliver a commencement address. My own kids, who I could force to sit and listen to me if I wanted to, aren't graduating. But this is the season of mortar boards and new beginnings. Despite this strange, stagnant economy, I feel opportunity in the air.

Kate, our oldest, is a rising college senior. She's scouting graduate programs, which feels like fine-tuning her future. Tommy, at 18, a rising college sophomore, just landed a summer internship in New York City with a rock-star photographer. Far-flung friends are sending us high school graduation announcements with little photos slipped inside of teenagers who barely resemble the toddlers we once knew.

Parenting at this point feels like pulling back a camera lens from close-up -- eat fruits and vegetables! you need more sleep! -- to seeing the wider, bigger picture. We are cheerleaders now, calling out from the sidelines. So here's my quick 1-2-3, and go get 'em!

1. Dream.
Running gives life so many tangible metaphors. One that I'd urge on all newly minted graduates is the power of visualization. In running it has to do with imagining your race, or your next goal, and picturing yourself executing it. You see the course, you see yourself running on pace, you see your success.

In life, visualization helps me make choices. It's dreaming about what I want and then breaking it down into steps to get there.

Kate said something the other night about wanting to work at universities because, even in a small town, they ensure an interesting, open-minded environment. She took me right back to a pivotal line her father offered me early in our courtship. Over breakfast or lunch at some diner in Boston, Bob told me with great conviction, "You would love living in a small college town." Here was a guy plotting out the parameters of a good, satisfying life and including me in those plans. With that, he hooked me.

2. Go forth.
Restlessness is OK. Taking action feels good -- and you don't have to hurt loved ones in the process.

Bob used to joke that while other wives have affairs, his just buys houses. It's true. In 10 years in a small Ohio town, we lived in three houses. I've also headed out on bike trips and trained for marathons, each satisfying an itch to accomplish, to reach goals. When our jobs haven't been exactly right, we've leapt off for something else. So while the primary actors in my life -- my family, close friends -- stay the same, I've opted to change the backdrop and story lines. A few times. More times than we need to count. But each new scene has added color and energy to my life, with just a few stumbles that I'd want to edit.

3. Trust your gut.
It took a while, but I've started to realize that when I feel envious of what someone else is doing, life has handed me another roadmap. Jealousy points directly to what I want, where I wish I could be, how I want to do something.

Likewise, when something feels supremely right -- for me it's hopping on my bike, sending a good letter, Bob -- your gut knows. It tells your heart to do those little flip-flops.

All right. I've kept you from photo ops and lunch with the family long enough.

Losing my crack-of-dawn ambitions

2011-05-04T06:54:00.000-07:00

Life's yin and yang give us ice and fire, dark and light, salty and sweet, Mac and PC, cat people and dog people, Republicans and Democrats -- and morning people and night people.

I've been a morning person all my life. The world looks more promising when I wake up. I think more creatively, dream more optimistically, solve problems more rationally in the light of a new day. And coffee is a great prize for waking up.

This past year, though, I've found myself slipping into a decidedly slower, less energetic morning routine. I think I'll blame Brigitte. She and I connected over yoga, then last spring she convinced me to run with the Downtown Dashers. They are a group of extraordinarily nice runners and triathletes, but they have terrible undiagnosed cases of sleep disorders. Twice a week they meet downtown to run at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. -- you know, so they can fit in their second workouts at 6 a.m.

Brigitte and I stuck out this sleep-deprived life for about a month. Then I boldly suggested she and I could run at 6 a.m. -- i.e., sleep in. I was thrilled. This worked perfectly for me -- wake at 5 or so, make coffee, walk the dogs, skim the paper, then head out the door feeling coherent and ready.

A month or so later Brigitte burst my bubble by confessing that even 6 a.m. was a stretch for her. Why on earth, she asked, do I get up so early? Sure, she gets up. She lets her dogs out, grabs a cup of coffee, but then she heads back to bed to do crossword puzzles for another hour -- or two.

Slacker, I thought. Aren't crossword puzzles and going back to bed for grandmas?

Lo and behold, as the year has unfolded and I've changed jobs (twice), each time rearranging my morning runs and yoga, my morning routine has mellowed significantly into a pattern much like my friend's. Wake up. Make coffee. Walk the dogs. Grab another cup. Then practically sprint back to bed to read the paper, play on Facebook, surf online news, and play my turn in a handful of online Scrabble games. It's my favorite time of day, relaxed and indulgent.

The past few days have been hectic, a swirl of computer issues, volunteering, and two days of hosting a film scout for work. This morning I crawled back in bed with my laptop and paper at 6:15 and looked up at 8 a.m.! Two years ago I would have run five miles, showered, and been at work by then.

I can see it now -- by the time I'm 60 I'll be staying in bed until lunchtime. I'll have lost my job and my husband, who still hits the ground running at o-dark-hundred.

Ah well. I'll call it mellowing. You can call me Grandma. Just don't call before 8.

Easter Bunny embraces e-commerce

2011-04-25T05:18:00.000-07:00

I surprised my kids this weekend with virtual Easter baskets. I had just come from a friend's house, where one last package of green plastic grass remained from her assembling of three festive baskets for her foster grandchildren.

My friend made me nostalgic for the days when it was easy to pleasantly stun our kids. I worked hard as a mom of young kids to celebrate these Christian holidays without dipping too deep into their commercial embrace or Biblical implications. It was worth it. One year in Mystic, Tommy told me earnestly that he saw the Easter Bunny hopping away from our yard after leaving her eggs. He also heard the reindeer landing on our roof one year in Ohio.

Making my way through life as a non-believer gets tricky on holidays. Maybe "non-believer" isn't fair. To sum up my Unitarian-Universalist values and creed in a sentence, I believe in the natural world, in our intrinsic goodness, in a natural power and energy greater than we can comprehend. But in a world where the Harris-Teeter lady tells me to have a Happy Easter as I leave her register on Sunday morning, I've had to interpret and substitute meanings all my adult life. Especially when the kids were young. Easter, I told them, celebrates spring, new life, new possibilities. That's as magical to me as the story of a man tortured and hanged who rises to the sky.

My parents, one a believer and one not, did the same for me. Despite all their issues and troubles -- all too visible and troubling now as age strips away some of the layers -- my parents raised me with a sense of optimism. I learned to dream at an early age. Somehow I believed I could achieve those dreams if I wanted them enough. Treats like Easter baskets and Christmas treasures were part of that mix. (That's me in the custom bunny ears, circa 1965.)

So I sent two Amazon gift cards to our two college kids as they sweat through their end-of-semester papers and exams. Online credit isn't your standard shrink-wrapped chocolate Easter bunny, but we've never been a terribly standard household. I'm hoping Kate and Tommy will find books to read, but I know they'll order music and movies. That's OK.

"Wow," Tommy responded, in an appreciative phone message. "I didn't realize we still celebrated Easter."

Finding my sailor

2011-03-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

I was 13 and living in the suburbs of Baltimore, in a subdivision that sprouted on a former horse farm. The waters of adolescence were turbulent -- we had relocated from Atlanta, my parents were miserable together, my new school was a huge junior high, I was enduring pimples and frizzy hair.

I don't remember how I found it, but Robin Lee Graham's book, Dove, saved me. His story of setting off from California at 16 to sail alone around the world on his boat, Dove, resonated with all of my angst, restlessness, and dreams. Pages of color photos of a tan, lean teenage boy with sun-bleached hair and sweet smile didn't hurt, of course.

I used to hop on my baby-blue bicycle and head out for the tree-lined gravel bike path behind us, the remains of the original farmhouse's driveway. On my bike I was no longer land-locked in the suburbs, I was sailing -- setting my own course, feeling the wind, free. No matter that I had never set foot on a sailboat, much less seen one in real life.

Somehow, from the depths of their own issues, my parents recognized my teen angst and agreed to send me to Echo Hill -- an unusual extravagance, especially with my two oldest siblings already in college. A junior high friend told me about the Quaker camp on the Chesapeake Bay that offered, among many other things, sailing.

The rest, as they say, is history. I learned to sail, but more importantly I found my "people" -- freewheeling folks, mostly from Sidwell Friends School in D.C., who taught me more about who I wanted to be. Sailing colored my next ten years, leading to summer jobs, friends, even my first job out of college at the US Yacht Racing Union. I admit that when an afternoon sail on the Charles River failed to impress my then-boyfriend, Bob, sailing lost much of its luster. As passions, bicycles and running were always there for me and they remain, easier to access.

Robin's book was turned into a movie. He wrote a second book, Home Is The Sailor, about how he and his wife, Patti, who he met halfway through his circumnavigation, found God after their initial turmoil being back on land. They settled in Montana, had two kids and were living off the land.

Somewhere along the line, before the days of Google and the Internet, I read that Robin was killed in a motorcycle accident. It seemed sad to have survived such a harrowing trip around the world only to die on land and close to home, but it closed his story. Or so I thought.

Last night, once again thanks to Google, I learned that Robin and Patti are actually alive and healthy, still in love, with grandchildren. Robin and his son, Ben, build houses in Montana. As one blogger posted, "The Grahams are in the construction business and continue to serve as a positive influence in the lives of young people through their writings and religious service to others. They are remarkable people and provide us all a remarkable story of courage, perserverance, hope and friendship. So there you are: they're well and Jesus freaks."

My Internet search quickly taught me something else: My experience finding inspiration in Robin's voyage is mirrored around the world. I saw dozens of comments from others who, as teenagers, had found similar inspiration from Dove. Who knew that the lonely eighth-grader lost in Lutherville had so much company? Many set sail, it seems; some even set their sights on circumnavigation. We are middle-aged now, graying and heavier like Patti and Robin in the photo above. But I suspect many of us also have a healthy twinkle in our eyes like they do. I recognize the look. Their smiles speak of finding passions that give life meaning and pull us out of ourselves.

Old flames and digital footprints

2011-03-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

My friend Robin thinks I should be a private investigator. When I was trying to land funding for GO FAR, her children's fitness nonprofit, I loved to take any lead and dig deep, learning what we could about prospective sponsors. We'd hit gold, for example, if I learned that a CEO or VP was a runner, because he or she would be more sympathetic to our cause. It turns out that one of the easiest things to learn on Google is whether or not you're a runner. If you've ever entered a decent size race, your results are usually traceable on the Internet.

Ah, the places Google can take you. I've just learned I can map an upcoming bike trip across North Carolina using Google maps, the bicycle option. My kids have taught me that whenever I don't know how to do something in any kind of software, I can Google it and likely find a training video answering my exact question.

And then there's the fun stuff, like tracking down an old crush.

It was the summer of 1981. A rising college senior, I was spending my second summer working on Martha's Vineyard. Working but also playing. A fun-spirited community of college kids staffed the restaurants, ice cream shops, and charter boats on the island every summer.

James, let's call him, was my age, a student at St. Michael's College. He worked on a fishing boat out of Menemsha, the picture-book fishing village on the western coast of the Vineyard. The previous summer he dated a beautiful young co-ed, a friend of mine; this summer he was unattached. We shared fun times as a group -- cookouts, concerts at the Hot Tin Roof, nights carousing in Oak Bluffs. I had a big crush, but I was too shy and unsure of myself to let him know. One fateful day off I rode my bike 16 miles across the island to spend a day with him out fishing. But as I pedaled up to the docks, he stood waving helplessly from his boat as it headed to sea.

I've been curious about him over the years. I'd Google "St Michael's" and his name and never find anything. Last weekend I tried again, this time searching on his name and "Martha's Vineyard." Bingo! There he was, a photo of him on the deck of his lobster boat, thanks to a Yankee Magazine story on eating local. He never left! A few more searches and I learned that he's married with a college-age son, and that lobstering has been a tough business. What's more, I know that his wife likes yoga, dogs, and much of the music I like -- heck, she and I could be sisters. Or friends.

Robin, the same friend who marvels at my research skills, has also warned me about putting too much of ourselves out there on the Internet. Someone, she says, could take my resume and other information and impersonate me. I've tossed such thoughts around, especially as I've read about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. His social media creation has changed not only how people around the globe connect with each other but also our notions of privacy. Essentially he believes that people want to connect more than they want to be private.

He's a whole generation younger than me, but I agree with Zuckerberg. I believe in a slight, careful blurring of the lines between professional and personal -- that who we are as people informs how we do our work, and vice versa. Facebook and other social media tools enable that balance, for me. I don't feel I have many secrets to hide (big surprise, I know, I'm a blogger) and connecting with others always gives me a kick.

Call it creeping, snooping, being nosy, but learning where James was and who he had married made me smile for days. It brought back sweet memories of summers rich with possibilities. It made me revisit the young woman I was at 20. I was a dreamer, hungry for adventure but anxious about my future, too inexperienced to feel much confidence. It made me look at my life now, from the perspective of that young woman, and she approves -- plenty of adventure, romance, and professional satisfaction have come my way.

Finding past connections like my old Martha's Vineyard crush makes the world feel a little smaller. As Zuckerberg says, we want to connect. We are curious about others, we are social. Too bad lobstermen don't seem to sign up for Facebook.

The boxes that free us

2011-02-17T03:56:00.000-08:00

As I walked the dogs this morning, I counted on my fingers how many hours of sleep I got last night. Eight and a half. Over the last few months, except for mild allergy attacks and micro hot flashes, I've gotten back to the good sleep that I crave, eight to nine hours.

Our lives changed on the fateful Sunday when I went to see Sharon, who runs the dog and cat rescue and foster program that brought us Amos and Juno. I was picking up a bark collar for Amos, who had taken to running wildly through the house in the evenings, frantically patrolling the front, back, sides of the house. And then barking in the middle of the night at any disturbance in his territory -- which happens to be a semi-busy street with people walking the sidewalk at any hour of night. Sharon mentioned that a dog trainer she'd just been working with swears by crates. They shrink the space a dog feels he needs to patrol, she said, from your entire house down to the footprint of the crate.

With that, I was off to the pet store. And to Bob's disbelief, the crates worked instantly. With the promise of a treat each time they get in at night, Amos races for his wire-frame box. Juno, she of the more demure temperament, was hesitant. But after the first two nights, she stepped in herself and curled into her little ball.

What amuses me now is how attuned these two are to our daily routine -- and the truth that I, averse to routines as I am, really do have a daily pattern. They know that Bob gets up first in the morning and pees. Then I get up and pee -- which prompts happy whining. They know they have to wait for me to make coffee. As soon as I slip a plastic bag in my coat pocket, Juno starts her giddy barking. Happy day! We're going out!

I know most grown-ups don't need eight hours of sleep, but it makes me feel much more human. I'm nearly giddy myself as I lead the dogs each night to their boxes, knowing I'm about to tuck myself into my flannel-sheeted crate of sorts, where I'll read for 11 minutes or so and be out.

The other night Bob was already in bed when I joined him after taking care of the dogs.

"Um, sorry," I told him. "They want you to come read them a story."

Lesson in loosening up

2011-02-11T05:33:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned that I tend to take myself too seriously?

After plenty of delay this morning, I began my morning yoga practice. Most mornings it's been a comfort, a pleasure to know that I'm gaining discipline as well as strength and flexibility.

This morning, not so much. Distracted by muscle moans, to-do lists, petty disappointments, and other concerns, my salutes to the sun were at half-mast. I soldiered through, which doesn't quite seem the intent of the Mother Sequence.

Then I got up to get a blanket for the shoulder stand. It was just a few feet away on the reading chair, but by the time I got back Amos had laid himself down on my mat. Perfectly centered. And stared at me with those sweet, soulful eyes of his.

Just so I could check off an accomplishment for the morning, I nudged and cajoled him out of the way and finished the sequence. But I heard his message loud and clear: Lighten up. Let it go. And laugh.

Tell me you could look Amos square in the eye (he's the bigger one, shown here with sister Juno) and take yourself seriously.

Happy Friday, friends.

Coach Bob, redux

2011-02-09T03:46:00.000-08:00

It's been quiet on the blog front. Not just mine, but the four or five friends' blogs I follow, too. I suspect it has a bit to do with the season, as Erin -- my twentysomething blog mentress -- whines, er writes about today. Love you, Erin.

In any case, I find myself with no wisdom, insight, or breakthrough to share. But in honor of my husband's birthday, I wanted to revive this tribute to him.

Scott's story: Good listen on being a dad

2011-01-20T05:01:00.000-08:00

I just cried a few times this morning listening to Scott, a Facebook friend from high school, being interviewed on NPR's The Story.

Scott tells his story of finding the silver lining -- time with his young daughter -- during his year and a half of looking for a financial job in a shipwrecked economy. Scott talked about walking his daughter to kindergarten and first grade and teaching her about different tree leaves, and sticking a note daily in her lunch. Bob and I immediately felt a little bad about our parenting -- did we do that? Were we ever that patient and nurturing?

The truth is, we taught our kids plenty. Bob, an urban guy, taught them the good things about baseball and lacrosse, about cracking open peanuts in the shell and cold shrimp, and especially about the value of friends. The days of Chandler, our first and most dignified dog, and I walking to pick the kids up from elementary school have become part of our family lore. We just didn't have as keen a sense as Scott had of how fleeting that time was, how quickly the kids would turn into middle schoolers who wanted little of our company or wisdom.

Scott's tales of applying for jobs in every way he could during this recession also strike a chord. Only in retrospect now, from the safety of a good and satisfying job, can I let myself recognize the pain of the last few years of job hunting, false starts, and uncertainty. It took at least as big a toll on my psyche as my bank account. My sister, friends, and friends of friends were in similar boats and kept reminding me it was the times, not me. But when, like Scott, you've never had trouble landing a good job, you think you'll be immune to such things. Then you start to think it's you.

I only hope that his new job allows Scott to run out to school programs, teacher meetings, and other events in the lives of young kids. I had great bosses who gave me that flexibility. It's a two-way street: Because my employers supported my commitment to family, I worked even harder at my job.

And then, again, the power of Facebook. I know more about Scott now, connecting with him only online, then I did when we walked the halls of Wellesley High School daily. He's one of the circle of Facebook friends who cheers my little victories, commiserates over my disappointments and the aches and pains of aging athletically.

Take the 10 minutes or so to listen to his story.

Home practice

2011-01-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

This morning I finished a full week of doing the Mother Sequence, a yoga series, each day, on my own. Those who know my lack of discipline for anything other than tying on my Asics and going out for a run will share my astonishment.

Home practice. I wish you could see what that looks like. From the clean, spare aesthetic of Triad Yoga's studio, picture the room that serves as Bob's office, my bill repository, and Bob's TV room. I try to ignore the dust and dog hair as I pull the throw rug aside and put down my mat. This signals Amos, who stands there as I begin with 12 sun salutations. He sniffs his nose at my upside-down face in down dog, wags his tail, and wonders if me lying face down on the floor is really just an invitation to play. Thankfully he gets bored by about the third sun salutation.

I have Ann and Brigitte to thank for this new practice. They began on January 1 with a vow to do the sequence daily for 21 days. And they have. I began with them, but then resisted for a week -- too many new starts for me right now, I said, and too much rearranging of my schedule, and any other excuse I could concoct. Finally, on the morning of 1-11-11, the date felt important enough to begin an undertaking -- and I was home on a snow day.

I deviate from standard yoga practice a bit. I play music when I know I should be concentrating and meditating, but the serendipity of Pandora's choices on my laptop always makes me happy. Still I try to concentrate on breathing, and I've gotten far better at counting -- which involves training my mind not to wander so far.

Two falls ago, among all my disappointments in training for the Outer Banks marathon, one triumph was learning I could do long runs of 15 miles or more on my own. I used to think I needed the distraction of company and conversation with others to run that long.

I feel that same sense of accomplishment now. Here at home with all the distractions and diversions I can imagine -- coffee, e-mail, magazines, chores -- I have set aside a half hour each day to tune inward, to breathe and move and focus. For a week. Two more weeks to go, Ann tells me. After 21 days this will become a habit I seek, a routine my body expects.

Yoga has brought me many gifts this past year. Less pain when I run, for starters. Kind, inspiring friends, certainly. Less fear of the future, knowing a way to move my muscles and joints for decades more. But I've thought of it as the thing I do when I go to class, when a teacher tells me what to do. Good grasshopper that I am, I've learned I can practice at home.

What we share

2011-01-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

I used to think of myself as intensely unique. For better or worse, mostly for all my flaws and warts but also a few brief sparks of genius, I was sure there was no one else like me in the world.

That notion is changing quickly in our digital age. I can search for me on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn and turn up hundreds, even thousands of Lisa Wattses. Some of us are doing quite impressive things -- we include artists and physicians and a marathon runner (!) in Australia.

It's not just my name. I've had many experiences with sharing that. Lisa was the Emma or the Kaitlin of the early 1960s. We had five Lisas on the high school soccer team. At one point my workplace included three of us. It's also appearance: I seem to have lots of look-alikes. I'm often introduced to people only to have them tell me they are quite sure they've met me somewhere before (and I swear this is beyond my memory issues). And demographics: As the younger end of the Baby Boom, my peers and I will experience the second halves of our lives en masse, expecting that our need for larger type, say, or attending seminars on retirement choices is, well, normal.

But those are externals. What interests me more is gradually realizing that my insides -- my concerns, torments, dreams, deepest yearnings -- are much like the hopes, worries, and idle thoughts inside others. If I posted some deep, dark secret on Facebook, like how I've always hated the way my face looks like I'm grimacing when I'm actually just thinking, I bet I'd hear from a few others who feel the same way.

If you grew up keeping fears and aspirations to yourself, worried that you should be different or better than you are, but you gradually grasp that others feel the same way, it's freeing.

I know that deep down at the DNA and molecule level, we're all snowflakes, no two exactly alike. In my twenties or so I enjoyed marking those differences, staking out how decidedly unique I could be. But, like snowflakes, we also have plenty in common. These days, that's what I enjoy discovering.

Fresh starts, precious rituals

2011-01-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Friends have been posting all sorts of profound and inspiring thoughts for the new year on Facebook (that's a whole 'nother post or two, about how much of my life seems to be lived on Facebook).

I spent New Year's Eve afternoon doubled over in stomach pain, a knot in my middle that cramped and cried. Our minimal evening plans were dashed, clearly, and I found some relief from a hot bath and a Netflix movie in bed. But it was time, mostly -- as in ten hours of sleep -- that did the trick.

After rising to a new year and new day -- breakfast at the diner with Bob, special yoga class with so many new friends -- I came home to read this timely thought from Tom Stites, former editor of the Unitarian Universalist magazine, quoting from the Rev. Dr. Galen J. Guengerich, co-minister at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City.

"Today is precious because it is given to us once and never again. Does this mean we should kneel at the dawn of each new day and bless the sun, or pause at the chime of each hour to express our gratitude? We could do worse. Human rites and rituals were developed to remind us of things that must never be forgotten. They remind us to take a seat at the feast of our mortality."

The UU church and yoga are as close as I'll ever get to spirituality, yet the little girl in me -- raised in the Catholic church -- loves and respects ritual. I'm glad to have started 2011 with sun salutations. Here's to your new year. However you greet it -- prayer, road race, five-course brunch -- remember in the most positive way that our days our numbered.

Getting Flexible

2010-12-28T06:31:00.000-08:00

"Flexibility is the ability to change: to see and adjust, see and adjust...."
—Jean Couch, preface, The Runner's Yoga Book

This notion, one of the first lines in a new book from a yoga teacher friend, warms me. Since starting yoga classes in earnest a little more than a year ago, I've sought flexibility. But I've narrowly defined that as being able to touch my toes in a forward bend, and I've nearly given up on that goal.

But flexibility as change, the ability to adjust? I'm good at change. Drawn to it. Except, of course, those things that are hard to change.

My most challenging task is to recognize mental ruts and have the confidence to shake them up. Last night in a tough yoga class, Terry announced with little warning that we'd all now do upward facing bow. I tried this nine months ago in Heather's class and couldn't lift up, so I've resorted since then to the lesser pose, bridge. But last night Terry and Brigitte, from her mat beside me, had already helped me do another scary pose (an inversion on my forearms). I didn't want to a. keep being the class rookie and b. keep being chicken, with Brigitte staring holes into me, telling me I could do it. I took a deep breath, thought of all the upper body strengthening work I've been doing with Thad, and pushed up. It worked!

Of course there are physical challenges to the pose — in the shoulders, arms, hips, legs. And I've made slow but steady progress in strengthening and opening those things. But the real muscle that I needed to adjust was my brain. My pledge to myself as I begin 2011 is to look more carefully at my mental ruts. I know that once I "see," I can adjust.

Answers from blowin' of my nose

2010-12-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

How many times can a [wo]man blow her nose, pretending she just doesn't care?

Like my friend Bob Dylan, I've been finding answers these last few days from blowing. My nose. Over and over. Prolonged fall allergies morphed into a sinus infection, I've decided — although those who know my hypochondriac tendency know that it could be something much more sinister. We'll see.

Day five of this junk has me worrying about my energy level. One of the nicest things anyone ever said to me was from a running buddy (stop me if you've heard this before, I tend to repeat it.) She was telling a group of us how she had tried yoga classes but she just found herself frustrated during the final relaxation parts, when she'd be making mental lists of everything she could and should be doing instead of lying there on her mat. I laughed and filed that away as a classic definition of Type A.

"But what does that mean about me?" I asked her. I can go-go-go with the best of 'em at times, then other times love turning off. "Oh Lisa," she said, "you're just balanced." I liked that notion.

But before you think it's all bread and roses in balanced A-B land, here's the thing: There's often great tension in keeping one's balance. Just ask a gymnast.

After a few days last week of muddling through work and other chores while fighting a fever and headache, I succumbed on Friday. I spent the day mostly in bed reading and watching a movie, guarded by my two loyal canines. It was OK, even good, to turn off. But by Saturday, when I didn't feel any better and faced a list of things I wanted to get done, I was frustrated. There's the tension: When I do feel ambitious after a relatively relaxed phase, it feels like starting from a disadvantage. And when I let myself drop all ambition and action, I sometimes worry that I'll never get revved up again.

My years in the Ohio River valley, sinus infection capital of the US, taught me to respect and fear what my body's fighting off. So I'm taking it in spurts today. Nap-work-nap-errands. And hoping tomorrow is a snot-free day — for you as well.

Performance evaluations for moms?

2010-12-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

At the the risk of re-igniting the war, I want to reflect a bit on the tension between stay-at-home moms and career moms and how we know which way is better. I don't.

The topic has come up a few times in the last few days, giving me pause. First was Nora Ephron's brilliant new book, I Remember Nothing. It's a powerful look at aging, made enjoyable because Ephron isn't afraid to laugh, especially at herself. In one essay she explores the family legend that her mother told about kicking Lillian Ross out of her house one evening when the storied writer made a crack about how little Mrs. Ephron must see her four girls. At the time, the elder Ephron was a successful scriptwriter who also prided herself on taking care of her kids and the house, not hiring out help. So much pride, in fact, that it was worth snubbing a celebrity.

Then Elizabeth Edwards was released from the hospital to die, putting her back in the news. I haven't known what to make of Elizabeth or her husband, but a friend last night told me that she lost respect for Elizabeth after the Edwards' had two more babies. "I get that she wanted more kids, after losing her son," my friend told me, "but did she, really? She immediately went out on the campaign trail, then the book tours..."

In his fairly balanced piece on Edwards, Jonathan Alter addresses the same kind of sentiment he heard when Edwards, after announcing that her cancer had spread, continued to campaign with her husband rather than stay home with the kids. How dare anyone, Alter basically says, tell a cancer survivor how to spend their days.

I wonder if the same isn't true for being a mom. Does time spent with your kids fairly measure how well you've nurtured them? Is there a possibility that small bits of high-quality time could equal, or trump, the day in, day out grind?

I feel lucky to have worked in a field -- journalism, communications -- where it was possible to work part-time while raising our kids. Sometimes I think my career might boast of more achievements if I'd been working full time all those years, but mostly I feel like I got to, pardon the cliche, have it all. My bosses (bless you, Jeff Hanna) were flexible, so I could be there when the kids were sick, when their teachers needed to talk to me, when they wanted to bring a new friend home to play. But I also remember many endless days stuck in a house with young kids when the only bright spots were snacks and naps. My presence wasn't always nurturing, my example not always sterling.

In the same way, was Mrs. Ephron a better mom because she was usually the one to tuck the kids in at night? Was Elizabeth Edwards a worse one because she wasn't?

In her new book, Nora Ephron also writes about her mother's alcoholism, which seemed to come on suddenly in her 50s and got ugly enough that her daughter "gave up on her." I relate all too well to that story, except that I also saw the roots of my mother's frustrations and psychoses develop through my childhood. So there was my mother — bright, intelligent, curious — at home, raising five children and miserable. Would she -- and we -- have been better off with her engaged in the workplace instead of home folding our laundry in front of soap operas?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. I am trying to practice being more present in the moment because — as Elizabeth Edwards posted on her Facebook wall the night before she died, "all of our days are numbered, we know that." And I've been embarrassed to hear how often I tell my dogs I love them, to recognize how often I pause during the day to hug them. I'm quite sure I didn't shower my children with such outright affection.

And that, as Nora Ephron likes to say, makes me feel bad.

Mystic Snowfalls

2010-12-05T11:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Wayne and I walked out of the Winston-Salem Y, where we'd been talking with friends for an hour or so after a half marathon, into light snow falling. It seemed magical — early December, North Carolina, a Christmas-themed road race, and the perfect timing as we headed to the comfort of a warm car to drive home.

All afternoon the snow fell, a good several inches covering everything. It was all perfectly cozy to recover from the race with a hot shower, warm lunch, and a book in bed with the dogs, the snow falling outside like a picture-book scene.

That perfect timing took me back to many Decembers ago when we were living in Mystic, Connecticut, and the kids were little, maybe five and three. I worked a few nights as a copy editor at the New London Day. I'd go in at five p.m. and come home anytime from midnight to one a.m., whenever we got the paper sent to press. That year I worked on Christmas Eve. We wrapped the paper up early enough that I was home by about 11:30. I drove home in a new snowfall, storybook flakes falling silently but surely. I came home to a sound-asleep household (we didn't have dogs yet) but I was more wired than usual after work. I knew the kids would be up early, but I had energy to burn. So I decided to go for a run.

I dressed quickly in warm running clothes. Tights, mittens, jacket. And, honest truth, the first hat I could put my hands on was a Santa hat that the kids must have been playing with. I pulled it on and slipped out the door. The little seaport town was dressed in its Christmas finest, lights and wreaths and roping and red ribbon. The snow kept falling, big fluffy flakes. As I crossed through town and over the drawbridge, flying effortlessly, churchgoers were heading into a Christmas Eve midnight mass. Their exuberant cheers and greetings surprised me until I remembered my Santa hat.

I can count on two hands the number of times I've run at night. That run was all magic. I came home finally cold and tired enough to sleep, but warmed by my early Christmas gift.

What's on your bliss list?

2010-11-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

It probably started with the endorphins. I had a good 12-mile run first thing this morning with Bill. He was doing a good deed, so we lost the rest of our Blueliner pals. A young Nicaraguan, Melvin, who is staying with Bill for three weeks, wanted to come out and run with us — only he didn't know the course, he doesn't speak English, and he doesn't run. So a few of our early miles were run back and forth, helping Melvin find the greenway course so he could walk while we ran. Then we ran well.

From there I dashed straight over to a two-hour yoga workshop, "Happy Holidays???." Heather created the class to help people deal with the next month or so of busyness and conflicting emotions. She filled our time with restorative poses and thoughts of release. Quoting from a book (of course I didn't retain the title, too rejuvenated), Heather shared insights from Lou, a 101-year-old woman who townspeople had identified as the happiest person in their town.

We were lying on our backs in a classic yoga "open" position — our necks supported by a blanket roll, our chest lifted by a bolster, our legs bent open wide, knees pointing out and feet touching — when she read to us from Lou's "bliss list." Lou chooses to do things that make her happy, she says, and those things include, among others: riding in the front seat of the car, the color magenta, meeting new people, eating good food.

Then Heather asked us to think of our own bliss lists. My body and mind were nicely spent. Lying relaxed and wide open, I nearly cried. Happy tears. It occurred to me that my bliss list is a long one and I am often living it. Even without realizing it.

Again, the endorphins from my run probably fed into my euphoria. But I hope, as we wade into the holiday season and beyond into winter and so many other dark unknowns, that I remember to turn my focus to the small, simple things right at hand that bring me joy.

I offer my bliss list, at least the start of it, in the hopes that it inspires your own:

Good, strong coffee
The soft velvet on both of my dogs' heads
Long runs crunching through leaves
Yoga class
Bob's humor
Grape-nuts with blueberries
Naps with Juno curled into my side
Several-hour stretches of creative work with words and thoughts
Clean bathrooms
Laughing with friends
Worn-in flannel pajama pants
New music mixing with old loves on Pandora
Scrabble
Cold pale ale at Fishbones

Still the Mom

2010-11-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

Working from home with two dogs is reminding me a lot of raising toddlers. They fight over their toys, don't respect that I'm on the phone, and they're fascinated with the guys out front who are working on the water lines. Fascinated.

The big difference: Whenever I need to, or want to, I can walk out the door and leave these two. Not that I want to do so very often -- would you?

Bring on the sandbags!

2010-11-15T04:01:00.000-08:00

I'll take my inspiration anywhere I can find it — in the bottom of my coffee cup, in a friend's passing comment.

My mind keeps drifting back to the movie, Mao's Last Dancer, I saw last week. It may be simply that it's the first "real" movie I've seen in a long time (watching a DVD on my laptop in bed with Bob somehow doesn't count). But I think it's more that I found inspiration in the transformation of the main character, Li. We watch him evolve from the skinny, big-eyed little boy you see in the picture to a ballet dancer winning international acclaim.

The movie's backdrops are entirely exotic to me - his peasant home in the Chinese countryside, an arts academy in communist Beijing, and the bustle of Houston, Texas. So what drew me to Li's story? There's a scene in his school-boy days where all the boys are doing backward bows -- where you lie on your back, arms above your head, and you push up to the sky. "We" do this is in Heather's Mother Sequence yoga class. I say "we" because I discovered on my first day with Heather that this pose that I used to do in my 20s, for fun, is beyond me now. It requires arm and shoulder strength and stronger, more flexible hip flexors. In the movie, the brusque teacher walks by and mindlessly lifts Li's bow higher. From that moment on, I was pulling for the little guy — my 50-year-old hamstrung self felt for his skinny 10-year-old self.

The lightbulb clicks on for Li when a mentor gives him veiled advice that inspires him to work hard at his ballet as a way to gain his freedom. I loved the following scenes — the skinny boy becoming a strong teenager, training extra in his free time by jumping up stone steps with bags of sand tied around his legs.

Ballet dancers sport beautiful physiques, obviously. The physical confidence that Li presents as a young man and accomplished dancer was entrancing. Even as he navigated a foreign culture and language, he walked and danced and performed with total self-knowledge. Watching him master his art, with ingredients close enough to yoga and running that I could relate, got me.

I'm a balance queen -- I keep my comfort needle close to the middle most of the time. This week, thinking of Li makes me want to nudge the effort up a few notches out of the comfort zone into "hard." I think about running faster and farther, training for a half-marathon, accomplishing more with work, making the most of my time.

In fact, I'm heading out for a run now. Right after I tie on the sandbags.

Ah, the wonderful possibilities

2010-10-29T04:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a little quiet on the blog front -- more job transitioning in the works. That story is still unfolding. In the midst of all of that, I'm finding great escape in online Scrabble.

For a year or so I've been engaged in battle with two old friends, one a former high school classmate now living in Chicago, the other a former coworker from 20 years ago in Rhode Island. They both look like very nice people, but they are sharks, these two women. They often whip me by as many as 50 points a game. I'm coming along, though, learning strategy as well as obscure words from these masters. Knowing how skilled they are makes me even prouder the few times I manage to beat them.

The beauty of the online game is that we play at our own pace -- sometimes trading a few turns in an hour, sometimes over several days. I suspect they turn to it as I do, as a way to take a break during the work day, to unwind at night, start up in the morning.

I've been re-reading Caroline Knapp's essays (The Merry Recluse). Knapp wrestled with and defeated some big addictions (alcohol, anorexia), but she never could beat cigarettes -- or online Solitaire. When she writes about how little the game of Solitaire requires of her, I feel instantly better about my Scrabble games. I may be sitting and not moving a muscle, but how my mind has to stretch! Mentally scrambling the letters (you can't rearrange the tiles on the electronic "rack") and visualizing possibilities that include as many colored squares as possible is a workout for my brain cells, I'm sure of it.

Possibilities. That's what I like best about the game. Each move presents options. I have to work with the letters I'm given and the moves my partner and I have made, but there are always possibilities, some better than others. And we get smarter at seeing the good options the more we play. See how much I'm learning?

Here's to many blue and red squares ahead for you, and may a Q and a U land in your rack at the same time.

Losing my wanderlust

2010-09-24T03:42:00.000-07:00

Our daughter called last night, breathlessly excited about an idea for winter break: She found a program where we could all spend a week in Kenya teaching kids to play sports.

My first response to her unexpected idea? "Oh honey, isn't it getting dangerous in Kenya?"

When did I become this person whose first thought about travel is about safety, maybe next thought is about how draining the flights would be?

Earlier in the night I saw my runner friend Pat. His pharmaceutical work takes him all over the globe, from China and Japan to India. But just as soon as we runners start to say, "oooh, how cool," about his latest jaunt, Pat is quick to dispel any notions of glamour. "I have to bring peanut butter, the food is awful," he'll tell us, describing the animal body parts (start with eyes) his hosts will offer at meals.

Pat was just back from India. "Filthy," he told me. He and his colleagues and their bags had to be searched each time they entered their hotel because of terrorist threats. Yikes -- as my friend Ann heads off to India today for a month's adventure, helping kids and practicing yoga.

Maybe it's listening to NPR and knowing how much instability you can find around the world. The college cancelled our friend Claire's semester as professor and chaperone in Mexico because of the unrest in that country, even though her program would be half a day away from the troubled area.

I blame North Carolina a bit. Except for August, when the air is too hot and heavy to do much of anything, it's just nice here, pleasant, not much of the dreariness we'd feel in Ohio and New England that would make you dream of escapes. And our bank account is feeling lean -- I don't see a spare few thousand it would take to fly to Africa.

But I'm afraid it's more about getting set in my ways. Brigitte is off to Albuquerque this week, and that DID make me envious. I've been to Albuquerque, twice, so I could see revisiting my favorite coffee shop, my favorite run. Do I just want comfort in the familiar these days?

I'll be thinking about this, hoping I'm not growing averse to adventure. But on spending a week this winter in Kenya, jury's still out.

The Ol' Be Here Now

2010-09-16T04:28:00.000-07:00

Ann, a friend and yoga teacher, shared a small reading at the end of class the other night that has stuck with me this week. It was from Judith Lasater, and I won't get this exactly right, but the essence was, "Because I so rarely go there, the most exotic place in the world is where I am right now."

First I giggled to myself -- this was coming from Ann, who is headed to India of all places in a few weeks. But laying on the floor of a yoga studio on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro, across from the Sonic drive-thru, the sounds of traffic and trains seeping in, the slight stir of air from fans, I did sense the exotic. My day had been stuffed full of dashed expectations, miscommunications, getting over a headache bug, fixating on the next few months ahead -- all the stuff that twists my head into knots. After a good class of moving and working, I lay on my mat and took those words in. To be finally still, to feel relaxed enough to be present to the breeze and sounds, was rare and exotic indeed.

It's a lesson worth learning over and over, the value of being in the present. Tying that awareness to place resonates even more. This morning I walked -- instead of running or cycling -- the half mile home from Heather's early morning yoga class. Paying attention to Spring Garden Street, which I travel daily yet rarely "see," revealed an odd and somehow endearing jumble of urban, forlorn, and funky: auto shops, a hookah bar, coffee shop, bakery, cable TV office, pool hall, car wash, dry cleaner, vacant spaces.

The sound of city buses thundering by and cyclists passing in the bike lane, with messenger bags strapped over their backs, takes me back to my few exotic trips -- Japan with Josh, and the urban rush; Mexico with Karen. Yet this is my home, where I am now, around the corner from our bungalow and deep yard and dogs and neighbors. Bob and I keep marveling about how perfect Greensboro is for this time in our lives. There's enough urban to keep it interesting and entertaining, but it's small-town enough to be free of traffic or parking hassles, interconnected enough to feel like a community.

This is where I am, right now. The dogs barking at squirrels have interrupted my trying to write this post three or four times -- this, too, is where I am right now. It's an exercise to practice not rushing ahead in my mind to what's coming, where I should be, how to make it all work. We often travel long distances seeking insight, relaxation, an unwinding of the knots in our head. How freeing (even for our bank account) to realize we can savor those same gifts in the here and now. As we say in yoga class, namaste.

Getting Older = Getting More Accessories

2010-09-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Ken called it years ago. He was an older colleague at my first job out of college in Newport, RI. We rode bikes a few times, even after I left the job and moved to Boston, where I met Dee. Back then, Dee and I rode for miles, for days, in running shorts and cotton singlets, no fancy lycra. I wore running shoes, Dee wore leather sandals. Our gear consisted of water bottles and an odometer to count the miles. One of my earliest points of bonding with Dee was when we both admitted that we didn't wear bike helmets because we wanted the sun to bleach our hair. It sounds ridiculous now, but back then it was one of our few vanities.

Ken, twenty years older, was of the same no-frills school, but he had graduated to padded leather cycling gloves to take some of the jarring of the handlebars off his wrists. He told us it would happen, that we would start accumulating gear to offset our aging. And he was right, of course. Year by year, although I don't remember the order, I moved on to padded cycling shorts, toe clips and eventually cleated pedals and shoes, a helmet, gloves, double water bottles, and an aerodynamic bag under my seat with a spare tube. I've yet, I'm proud to say, worn one of those loud neon cycling jerseys, but even they are beginning to make sense as I worry about how careless drivers can be.

It's the same with running. Leaving the house on a Saturday morning to meet friends for a long run used to mean just grabbing a dry shirt for coffee and bagels afterward. Now I pack a bag: a change of shirt and shorts (it's the North Carolina humidity), my hand-held water bottle, dew rag for the summer, and my Galloway timer.

The ultimate accessory of aging is probably the two little blue Alleve pills I pop before a long ride or extra-long run. Medicating myself never would have occurred to me in my twenties or thirties, before my legs started complaining.

In my mind, I'm still of the no-frills club. I appreciate gear when it helps me get in the miles, but I don't enjoy having gear, purchasing it, discussing it. It reminds me of one of my favorite passages in Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, one of the first books that made me double over in tears laughing. Bryson talks about the gear-heads, the guys he'd encounter on the Appalachian Trail who loved to discuss the relative merits of different pieces of equipment, while it meant nothing to the writer.

I was thinking about all this the other day when I got in a long run, by myself. I was equipped to run for an hour and a half with my little water bottle and my timer. Bob, running the first few miles with me, asked if carrying the water bottle bothered me. It's actually really comforting, I told him, not to worry about finding water. I dehydrate easily, and it can ruin a long run. I'd normally feel silly wearing a beeping timer, too, but Galloway's run-walk-run method has been a lifesaver, it's made me enjoy running again.

So there you go. Getting older does indeed mean getting more gear, and it's OK. Just let me keep going.

Thoughts while running

2010-08-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

I saw a squirrel yesterday morning with his jaws clenching a green crabapple that was bigger than his belly. Hope he was bringing it home to share with the whole family.

Then I passed a big official sign posted on the concession stand wall at the arboretum ballfield: "Sex offenders prohibited." Really? Will that do the trick? So a creep is in line to buy a Coke, sees the sign, and turns to go back to his car? All I know is, the sign would have prompted difficult conversations when my kids were just learning to read. They'd piece the words together then ask me what it meant, and I'd have to explain something like, "bad people who try to touch your body, when they don't have the right to, aren't supposed to be here." My kids, cautious as they always have been, would probably never have stood in line for a grape slushie again. So maybe that's a good thing.

People who can't say hi, good morning, or wave their hand as we pass each other on an early morning run definitely take themselves too seriously. And cyclists who want to fly by runners on a bike path need to call out, each of them if there's more than one. We can't always hear you coming from behind, and often after one bike passes, we adjust our path, only to be nearly sideswiped by bikes following the first one.

It's a wild world out on the roads in the early morning-- foraging squirrels, sexual predators, speeding bikes. Guess that's why some people run the indoor track at the Y.

Coping with mild strain of empty-nest blues

2010-08-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

The moments catch me when I least expect them: in the grocery store aisle, reaching for mac n' cheese or a jug of green tea. Walking by the dishwasher, clean dishes waiting to be unloaded. It's a peculiar form of grieving, this empty-nest syndrome. It's not like I didn't know Tommy was moving out to start college. And he chose the university right down the street from us -- most days he'll never be more than two miles away.

Still, there's an absence that takes me by surprise. He's been an independent kid all through high school. Bob says it was like living with a community college student. He'd come home from school, cook some sort of pasta meal, head out with his skateboard pals or go to work, come home for homework, make another meal after we had headed to bed, do his laundry. So he didn't require much in the way of traditional mom stuff. He was appreciative when I came home from a thorough grocery shopping. He tried to fill us in on his whereabouts, often by phone, so I didn't really need to nag him.

We've tried to make the most of it. This past weekend we turned his room and little bathroom into a clean, spare guest suite, the downstairs den into a place to watch movies. The house feels good that way, like we can comfortably stretch out and keep things as clean and clutter-free as two responsible adults can. Good or bad, I've never been the kind of selfless parent whose life revolved around her kids, so my work and play stand ready--I can throw myself even more into them.

But it's been three days and I already miss the weekend mornings when he'd stumble awake around 10 or so, flop down on the floor by my feet and let the dogs lick his face. I miss knowing whether he's gotten a good sleep, eaten a good meal, had a good day. I hadn't realized how much I was surveying those things, keeping track in the back of my mind.

Friends suspect I'm playing favorites, caring more about Tommy's leaving than his older sister's. But Kate was so excited about starting college that I couldn't help but feel the same way. She went over her checklists of what to bring, shopped for them and organized, counted the days. Separation and independence were new for her, and good things, while Tommy has pretty much been there. And when I returned from Pittsburgh with an empty car, Kate's brother was still here, the gap not quite so obvious.

I'll be fine soon I'm sure. Loss is also growth. I just need to stay away from the pasta aisle for a little while. Those skinny blue and yellow boxes of Kraft mac n cheese call up all of Tommy's childhood, from the towheaded toddler carrying his stuffed animals to the young athlete to the gangly, moody teen. He's a young man now, serving me at his coffee shop job, arranging his apartment decor. One day soon I'm inviting him back home. I'll cook real pasta, not the kind with orange sauce. The dogs will gladly lick his face, preferably after he eats. And then we'll send him on his way.

Ten pounds of blubber, you are history

2010-07-21T03:28:00.000-07:00

Kids say the darndest things, don't they? My sweet son dealt the final blow last night. I was sitting in my usual slumped posture in an armchair and Tommy was bringing me back my phone. He dropped it softly on my belly, a nice soft pouch that keeps growing bigger and softer.

"Huh!" he said. "That landed right on your belly."

So I can't pretend any more. It's time to reverse what age and hormones have been conspiring to build up.

Here's what I want:
-- the tops of my thighs to stop rubbing against each other
-- the skinny twenty-something guy down the street, who runs before dawn with his equally sleek border collie, to see me as a fellow runner, not an old lady jogger
-- my belly not to push into my desk when I sit at work.

When I climbed into bed, waiting for me in a copy of Runner's World was "How to Lose 10 Pounds." These are my people, so I listened. One problem is intensity: One or two of my runs each week need to step up the pace. Second, of course, is diet, scaling back my expectations of how much I think I need to eat in the course of a day.

Done. I wheezed my way through three 800s this morning at "race pace," which I translate to be the point at which I almost feel like I'll throw up. Then push-ups and crunches. And a promise to write down what I'm eating these next few weeks, a simple exercise that can be very revealing.

Watch out, paunch, I'm after you.

Galloway to the rescue

2010-07-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

I was not inspired to run this morning. Blame it on the North Carolina heat and humidity, blame it on no running partner, blame it on my body being beat down from 25 years of running.

Then, checking Facebook -- part of my morning ritual along with making coffee and walking the dogs -- I saw Jeff Galloway's newest post about running 26.2 miles with his wife and seven others, doing 30-30: thirty seconds run, thirty seconds walk. This is where Jeff's come to after years of teaching his Galloway run-walk-run method, an alternative for everyone from beginners to injured longtimers. Recently he's tried cutting the intervals from five or four minutes down to thirty seconds, because he found that people who still fought injuries even at one minute intervals could run pain free at 30-30.

Sounds crazy, I know. I remember reading that he had run the Big Sur Marathon this way and thought, man, you must get motion sickness from all that start-stop stuff. But something about his Facebook post today made 26 miles sound like, well, a walk in the park. And they finished at Starbucks, even better.

So I set off for my four-mile trudge. After a half mile of the same old mental refrains ("this hurts," "I'm slow," "why not turn here and just make it two miles") I decided to give it a go.

I haven't read enough about Galloway's methods but I know there's a few issues to overcome -- one of them being ego, the notion that you're giving up or wimping out each time you start to walk. I bypassed that issue today after the first half mile. I was making my way through the arboretum at sunrise with plenty to distract me, and it was early enough that not many people saw me.

By two miles I was hooked. Running felt fresh, fun, and -- best part -- fast. I even found the counting to thirty, in multiples of ten, a kind of meditative mantra. I don't know how that would work running with a pal (I'm numbers challenged enough that I'm quite sure I couldn't count AND follow a conversation). And I'm anxious to try this on a longer run and see what the difference in overall time is.

For now, thanks Jeff!

Hope it's not "wtf" in Chinese

2010-07-11T05:36:00.000-07:00

I'm far too polite to talk about people while they can hear me -- far better to do so behind their backs, right?

In this case, I'll go ahead and share because I don't think these people can "hear" me. Here's my question: What's up with all my new Asian best friends? The most frequent blog commenters of late speak (at least write) a different language, with characters I can't read.

At first I deleted the comments, figuring it was some kind of spam. Then I started feeling bad -- what if someone was expressing real thoughts and I was censoring him or her just because I couldn't read them?

This morning I'm wondering if the latest Asian-language commenter might not be living in Greater New York City, where he or she became equally fluent in the regional tongue of sarcasm. On my last post, which was written in small bits and pieces about equally small musings, this commenter wrote first in Asian characters, then, "thank you for this useful information."

OK, so I'm not exactly offering how-tos for changing the world, but geez....

Off to my yoga church soon on a gorgeous summer morning. To the whole world, I say a global namaste.

Bugs, bikes, belongings, books

2010-07-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

Bite-sized thoughts, in no particular order:

• The Universe, cleverly looking to test BOTH of the self-improvement vows that I recently made public in this space, sent mosquitoes. There I was, enjoying a fun backyard Fourth of July cookout on a pretty evening, and I got divebombed repeatedly despite bug spray. Itchy welts have popped out up and down my legs. So I am trying my best not to judge or be critical of the pests and to enjoy the here and now, even if it includes scratching at myself, sometimes in nearly private body parts.

• Bicycle commuting, my whole three miles of it each way, brings me up close and personal with the best and worst of human instinct. The best: the drivers who realize I'm one small, unprotected soul on a carbon-aluminum frame, so they slow down to let me move into the turn lane. The worst: the drivers who see my unprotected self as one more obstacle that is costing them 10 or more seconds in getting to wherever they're in such a rush to get to. Crikey, as my British friend Dee would say.

• Conundrum: My oldest sister has given away all of her very tasteful worldly possessions, except what she can pack in her Rav4 to drive to begin a new life in Boulder, Colorado. At the same time as my family is enjoying many of her nice things, colorfully upgrading our home and the kids' new apartments, I'm also envious of her stripped-down freedom. Material things are nice, but so is shedding them.

• Ever since posting on Facebook that I was having a hard time reading the Pulitzer winning Olive Kitteridge and a writer friend wrote back questioning me, I've had great impromptu literary discussions. It's fascinating -- my friends seem evenly split down the middle: those of us who found it difficult and dark and can't for the life of us imagine what those Pulitzer judges were thinking, and those who found the book brilliantly written and true to life.

Self-help, Part 2: Embracing normal days

2010-07-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned that I love public radio? This morning, on my way to swim at the Y, I caught the latest Story Corps installment, the reflective interviews of "normal people" that play for bare minutes but often bring me to tears. This morning's was a woman in Atlanta who just died at 53, talking about how she loved normal, ordinary days, because "nothing great happens, but also nothing terrible happens."

The adrenaline junkie in me sat up and took note. I want to make peace with ordinary days. My life is full of them, but I've lived most of my days waiting for next week, next month, next year when all the good stuff happens. Routine bores me. I'm always chasing after the exciting days when there's a big breakthrough at work, a long bike ride with friends, some great development for the kids.

But this woman's voice caught me up short. Here I am, living day after day with nothing terrible happening to me, in fact many good things surrounding me. Great family, good work, nice house, beautiful town, exercise, interesting friends, loving dogs...my list is long. What if I went cold turkey, stopped seeking my next injection of excitement, and just enjoy what is?

It's another mental exercise. Meanwhile, I just swam for the second day in a week for the first time. Swimming is good for organizing my thoughts as I churn through the water. Watch out for more frequent blog posts, chlorine-induced.

Finding strength in gentle

2010-06-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

I caught a snippet of a public radio program this past Sunday having to do with an older woman, her faith, and her aspirations. One of her three goals resonated deeply: She wanted to be more gentle. Not wimpy -- bravery was another goal -- but a softening of her sharp edges.

I get that. I've been disappointed to catch myself sounding more and more opinionated; "harsh" as my 18-year-old would say. By the time we hit 40, we've acquired enough experiences to stand pretty firm in what we believe, in what we think is right and wrong, good and bad, smart and dumb. But I'd like to think I've saved some space in my mind, a little zen clearing in the woods, for considering other viewpoints, differing choices.

I was raised by a judgmental mother. Breaking that cycle is a challenge. Like my mom, I think I can read people and their motives pretty well. Mom dealt with her deep-seated insecurity by pinpointing everyone else's faults and issues, never her own. I'm not afraid to scrutinize myself. But ask me about someone else and I'm frighteningly quick at getting to the negative and cynical stuff.

It's a fine balance -- learning to draw on the wisdom we accumulate with age and experience without turning into an obnoxious know-it-all. I'm going to start by practicing keeping my mouth shut longer, encouraging others more, and judging less. It's my goal for this new decade: Seeking gentle.

The books of summer

2010-06-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

I felt a bit restless this evening, one of these long June evenings where it won't get dark until after I'm ready to hit the sack. So I asked Bob if he'd drive down to the library with me.

I can't remember my last trip to the library, but it's been on my mind since visiting our friends Lisa and Richie last week. To make room for me to sit on a bench in her kitchen, Lisa pulled aside a stack of 10 or so library books. I looked longingly at the piles as she walked away. I remember stacks like that—it took me right back to summer days growing up in Atlanta, when my mom would take me to the library and we'd each get lost in our favorite areas. My pile of checked-out books would be heavy on biographies of historical figures with a few novels thrown in the mix.

In this regard, I raised our kids right. They both loved trips to the library even before they could read. Once they turned that key, unlocked that magic door to become readers, they'd be off, collecting stacks of their own favorite genre: Babysitters Club or some other series for Kate, sports biographies for Tommy. In the little Ohio town where the kids grew up, the library was a 10-minute walk from home, a favorite outing. They earned prizes from many summer reading programs, but they didn't really need the incentives of plastic yo-yos or pencil toppers to get them to read books by the dozens all summer.

We still laugh about the much beloved summer babysitter, then a high-schooler, who didn't know where the library was. She had never been there. My kids stared at her as if she had told us she didn't know what baseball was. Or had never tasted ice cream. Unimaginable.

I feel a little bad that I've been more apt these days to turn to a bookstore, or Amazon, and buy a book I hear about rather than wait to borrow it. How did that happen? Tonight I've got two novels waiting for me, one that needs to be returned within two weeks. It's summer, and I'm glad I've dug up my library card.

It's getting hot in here

2010-06-10T02:09:00.000-07:00

Enough with the hot flashes! I feel like a cliche. I turned 50, and almost to the day my own personal global warming started. They were innocent enough to begin with, kind of cute -- "oh, I must be having a hot flash?" Always the little sister trying to catch up to my three cool big sisters, I felt some small pride in finally joining the club.

Then the power surges started messing with my sleep. And as my kids learned at a very young age, it's not wise to mess with my sleep.

I just got in from walking the dogs and -- burst -- a hot flash, sweat beads dripping down my shirt front and back. I've never been one to sweat much, even running; I figure I don't drink enough water. So this is weird. I'll be talking with someone and my face will suddenly glisten. It's not you, I want to say.

I figured one benefit would be that these little power bursts mean my metabolism has to speed up to stoke these fires, but after a few months I can tell that it doesn't seem to work that way.

Ah well. Another rite of passage. As with so many of them, I'm wishing this one along, hoping to check it off the list quickly. Somehow, I don't think I'll look back wistfully and wish I has savored these times.

Good enough, or the zen of chlorine

2010-06-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

Something clicked in the pool this morning. It still feels new -- I've made it to the pool once a week for the last month. Unlike running, swimming means so many things to think about: breathing, kicking, tucking my head, reaching my arms, counting laps.

Halfway through my laps, it occurred to me that reaching my arm to stroke felt a lot like side-angle pose in yoga, where you stretch one arm overhead while leaning on one bent knee, twisting to the side. I liked thinking about how my various activities can contribute to and strengthen each other -- running, yoga, swimming, half-time bike commuting.

I finished the swim feeling happy. The downtown Y does that for me. A great mix of people -- triathletes and first-timers, retirees and twentysomethings, black and white -- frequents the place. Almost to a person they are friendly, the kind of people who hold the door for you and ask how you're doing -- and mean it.

I left the building this morning in my t-shirt and pajama shorts, wet hair, feeling good. Beside me as I headed out was a man dressed in a nice suit and tie, styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, clearly feeling just as good. He told me he swam, that he plods along; I told him I do, too. He asked me why I swim, so I told him I'm trying to mix it up, mostly I run.

"Ah," he said. "I was going to guess that. You have runner's legs."

For a change, I decided to bask in his compliment. After 25 years of running, my legs might indeed look that way. I know that I look middle-aged, with fat collecting in places where I wish it wouldn't. I know I'm running slower, biking slower, still can't touch my toes in yoga. But today I chose to give all that up and think instead about all the fun ways my body gets to move, to play. That's the attitude that will give me 25 more years of play, seems to me.

Our Virtual Best Selves

2010-05-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

The essay I entered in the Quail Ridge contest....

Never mind the usual obsessions about how we look—how old, how fat, how wrinkled—to people we haven’t seen in thirty years. What scares me more about a high school reunion is that former classmates might greet me warmly—and I wouldn’t have a clue who they are.

Memory issues have dogged me for years. Too many moves, two kids, too little psychic storage space. In my defense: My family relocated before my junior year of high school. I only had two years with these classmates before moving on to college. As a newcomer, I floated among cliques, never getting too close.

Fast forward three decades. Planning for our thirtieth reunion coincided with many of us discovering Facebook. Someone found me online; soon dozens of us had Friended each other. I lived too far away to attend the actual reunion. Afterwards I pored over the posted photos, thinking they’d spark a few memory cells. They didn’t, but no matter. I’ve embraced this virtual community of people I barely knew but who quickly became dear to me.

There’s Leslie, a cheerleader who knew a few of my friends. Five hundred miles apart, we play a running game of Facebook Scrabble. She beats me then posts kind comments on the news in my life. There’s Shawn, a cross-country runner I knew only by name. He cheers my running news and offers advice. Craig is into cool music; we’ve shared memories of favorite nightspots that we never went to together. The girl who moved to town when I did, who shared my name and played two sports with me (only she was much better)? Her notes and photos are a treat.

This past fall, we worried about Karen. She was going through an ugly divorce, taking care of seven teenagers, and sounding despondent. We reached out with our posts. One friend tracked down her brother; another found her sister. Karen seems better. I think she finds relief just in sharing her woes with us online.

Were we this kind in high school, or have the years mellowed us? Is it the safety of distance that lets us be so supportive? I do like hiding behind the one photo I have of myself that I like—it’s soft-lit to hide my wrinkles and it cuts off above my belly.

We share a history—even if I’m murky on the details—so it’s not like talking with strangers. We know little about each other’s intervening years, but it barely matters. We deal in the here and now—the new job, the dying parent, the fun vacation, the exasperating kids. It’s like we’re sitting around at the end of the party when we’ve kicked off our shoes, loosened our ties, and really started talking. We feel like old friends.

Winning, losing, and the space in between

2010-05-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

"Writing contest." The words called to me from a bookstore newsletter. It was right around Boston Marathon time, my birthday, so I was still dealing with the fact that my friends were running Boston and I hadn't qualified. Writing, I thought, that's the ticket. My hamstrings may be tired and not cooperating, but I can flex my writing muscles.

The requirements were that it be one page, fiction or non, about a high school reunion. I wrote the piece in two days. I sent it off, sure that I had won. I don't know why. Partly, I thought, not many people will know about it, like when you go to a road race in a small town, look around and say, yep, I've pretty much got the middle-aged women's category sewn up here. And partly I thought that not many people can write tightly and quickly, two things I've never minded.

For three weeks I have been waiting for tonight, a reading by author Elizabeth Berg at Quail Ridge and the announcement of the winner. I've been like a little kid waiting for a party. Driving to Raleigh, I was still sure I had won and conscious that I should give my hair a quick brush, put on a bit of lip gloss because I'd probably be asked to come up front and accept my prize.

Then I walked into the bookstore. Other women were gathering, emerging from book aisles and the women's room with tense expressions on their faces that I totally recognized. I was surrounded by women who were also sure that they had won the contest! These women had also given their hair a quick touch-up, refreshed their lipstick, and sat down with that tight anticipation tinged with nervous concern.

It had never occurred to me that I might not win, that so many people might have entered. I spent the next fifteen minutes until the program began grappling with it all. Much like the Outer Banks Marathon qualifying attempt, I realized that things might not go as I had imagined. How would that feel? What did it mean? I worked on carrying the right expression on my face, a smile that would say none of this mattered. It brought me back to two intense afternoons waiting for Kate, my daughter, to emerge from seventh-grade basketball try-outs. My stomach in knots for her, I had to craft a facial expression that registered some balance between "I'm so sorry, honey" and "it's OK, it's a dumb team anyway" yet convey enough optimism to show that I believed she would make it. It was excruciating. (Thankfully, she made the team.)

When the program finally began, I saw that there were three prizes. They called up a young woman as third-place winner. Then me. And then another woman was named the winner and asked to read her piece to all of us; she took a while to gain her composure before she could read. She won a bottle of wine, a book and a gift certificate. I won a book and a gift certificate. It felt like coming home from a race with an age-group award--runner-up, not bad.

My sister Sandy thinks I'm competitive. I'm really not. Not like Pam, who has to beat any woman she sees ahead of her in a race. Or Patrice, who starts a race fast and then goes faster. That's not me. But maybe goal-oriented? I seem to need measures of my achievement, a sense of accomplishment or sense of progress.

This contest was a good kick start. I'm inspired to work on my own writing, to build those muscles.

As Berg's reading began, I covertly wrote to Bob on my Blackberry. "I came in second of three winners; I'm Ok with that."

True to form, he wrote back, "I'm not." I love him.

I (Heart) Pharmaceuticals

2010-05-07T03:07:00.000-07:00

We were facing yet another setback at work last week on a monster project, a job that involves mountains of tedious detail online in a custom program for referencing medical information.

No problem, I told my coworkers, I'll start this batch and maybe I can finish two by the end of the day. My colleagues sat and studied me for a second or two.

"How long will you be on this Prednisone?" one finally asked, "and can you get some for us?"

It's true, I flew through last week on fast forward, and I owe it all to the little white pills my doctor gave me to fight poison ivy--an annual skirmish. This time around I jumped on it. I saw my doctor as soon as the bumps cropped up. I got the prescription filled right away, hoping to contain the itching and the creepy rash.

The next morning I went out for a run, my head full of the usual stuff that needed to be cleared out. I only had time to squeeze in a three-miler. But I knew before I hit the first half mile that things were drastically different. My hamstrings and glutes weren't moaning their usual song, my right achilles wasn't asking me to slow down. All these pain messages that have become part of running for the last year, making me question my strength, health, speed, making me think I've just been running too long, gotten too old -- gone! Instead of turning back, I kept talking myself into going another block or two.

The next day I flew even higher. I ran that morning, then walked the dogs after work, felt how beautiful the evening was and decided to run again! And go to the gym! And finish a newsletter!

My nurse practitioner buddy warned me that I'd be ravenous. But I seem to react the other way to the medicine -- I lose my appetite, another highly unfamiliar sensation. She and I did an eight-mile run last week, two miles longer than our usual runs. I talked nonstop pretty much the whole time, up and down hills, along the lakeside trails. Go easy on coffee today, she told me, exhausted at the end of the run while I still felt fresh.

I'm down to one pill for two more days. I only wake up once a night itching, so the poison ivy has turned the corner. Last week's manic energy has wound down a bit, but running still feels wonderfully pain-free. I've gained a good four inches toward my toes in my forward bend in yoga.

I'm sad to think all this muscle calm might leave as quickly as it came. Friends have joked that I'll be turning to the black market, the street corners to get my fix. Nah, not a junkie. Yet. But it's been fascinating to witness the power of chemicals. And I suppose, if the hamstrings got bad again, I could always tackle that overgrown bed of weeds in the backyard. Wink, wink.

It's my birthday, and I'll get soft if I want to

2010-04-18T03:34:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, April 19, I turn 50. Weird as it sounds, I still feel a tingle about it all, just like I did as a kid.

Does everyone feel this way about their birthdays? I love the date: April 19. I love seeing the combination of 4 and 19 together. Even though I've been sneezing my way through this time of year since I was a baby, it has always seemed magical -- more so, maybe, than Christmas and Santa. My sister, Linda, who would have been 10, woke me up on my fourth birthday with four new puzzles, cementing my pride in finally reaching that fine age. Another year, maybe the next, I woke up to a gorgeous spring morning and was bursting with excitement because my mother arranged a spot for me and my friends on the Officer Don show. (How great is Google? Given my age-impaired memory, I typed in "Atlanta 1960s TV show" and there he was, Officer Don.)

My family started the magic; my friends have continued it. There was the night at Fenway Park when my boyfriend Bob fit in seamlessly with my pals from college. And the 30th surprise party that was supposedly for Sarah. I'm easily "gotten" -- it took me whole minutes to figure out why Dee from Boston and Joan from college would ALSO be in the same restaurant for Sarah's party.

Then, of course, was turning 40 in 2000. We drove to Boston from Ohio and threw a celebration in an athletic building at Harvard, where Bob used to work. I loved watching our New England friends mix with my Ohio running pals, who came out to run the Boston Marathon with me the next day, one day before my birthday. I lived in the Boston area for high school and in my 20s, and watching the marathon on Patriot's Day -- a Monday holiday in Massachusetts, honoring the start of the revolution on, yes, MY BIRTHDAY -- was always part of the magic. To be back there as a qualified entrant, with dear friends who helped me get there, was all over the top.

Which brings us to 2010, ten years later. The marathon falls smack on my 50th tomorrow and I had planned to be there. Pam, Patrice, Dena, and Dee are there, probably getting a little anxious right about now.

In all honesty, how do I feel about not qualifying, about not celebrating the new decade by running 26 miles in Beantown? Just fine. Call it mellowing with age or embracing my inner balance, but I have no itch to be running a marathon. My four-, five- and six-mile runs feel good; yoga feels even better. Other things call to me -- bike trips, writing projects, time with Bob and the dogs. It sounds like a "Life is good" t-shirt, I know. My only fear is that I'm disappointing friends who expect me to push more, to have more of an edge.

A few years ago, Stacy and Ali treated me to one of my all-time favorite runs. We met at 6:15 on a Tuesday or Thursday morning, per usual. It was my birthday, which they barely acknowledged. Except Stacy, the queen of varying our routes (which I love) offered that we could include the Guilford College trails, for my sake. We were coming out of the campus, running a bit too fast, when they crossed Friendly Avenue, which we never did. Stacy flashed me a smile as we crossed the parking lot to Starbucks. They did it! My friends did what I'd always joked about: they cut the run short, bought me a cup of coffee, and we walked the last mile home.

When they discussed it on the phone the night before, Ali -- who's a disciplined athlete, strong runner -- worried that I'd be disappointed not to get as good a workout in. But Stacy knew better.

Call it wimpiness, going soft, no edge -- I choose to call it balance. And you have to go along with it -- I'm the birthday girl. See you in Starbucks.

Nice trip, but could we have a layover?

2010-04-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

You won't hear me say this very often, but life is moving a little too quickly right now.

I've written about the myth of competency, a condition that afflicts Baby Boomers in particular. It's the notion that with one more electronic gadget, one more advanced degree, one more home renovation, we'll have our acts together, our lives in order. But we won't, we can't; we aren't actually totally in charge.

I suffer more from the myth of tomorrow. Next week, next month, next year -- what's around the corner always holds such allure. It seems so much shinier than the dull mundane of today.

When our kids were little, I couldn't wait until they cleared the next hurdle: walking, talking, toilet training, school. I tend to daydream about the destination and rush through the journey. It's not terribly zen, I know.

Just now, though, I have a sense of things steaming along on an express route when I wouldn't mind riding the local. It's mostly due to having both kids, at almost 20 and 18, sign leases on apartments for the fall. Sure, Bob and I are paying the rent. But they're setting up households, budgeting for their needs, making plans that don't involve their father or me. And after all the racing along beside these two for all these years, cheering them as they grew up, it all of a sudden feels, well, weird.

Adding to the strangeness: Our spring weather has been phenomenal these last two weeks. The air is soft and bugfree, the trees are blooming and colorful, the sky is a clear bright blue. I see it through the blur of itchy, crying eyes, thanks to the tree pollen, but still I want to cherish these days, sunrise to sunset. Instead, I've started my new job inside a windowless building with bad overhead lighting. I like the work, appreciate the people, but I walk out into the sunlight at 5 pm and try to drink it all in with great gulps. Driving home at lunchtime to let the dogs out, I roll the windows down, turn my music up, and feel like a high-schooler busting free.

Bear with me these next few months. I'm turning 50, watching my youngest graduate from high school, and helping my oldest move into an apartment for her first summer away from home. It's all good stuff, it's just happening so quickly. Just when I was starting to appreciate the ride.

Aging game: You win some, you lose some

2010-03-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

I had been needing some reasons to feel good about my physical state. The net result of my training for the Outer Banks marathon this past fall was to feel like I have instantly aged ten years. My achilles ached, my hamstrings cried, my piriformis (much nicer word than "muscle across the butt") throbbed. Worse yet, partly because of all that, my times slowed by at least a minute a mile. And my overactive imagination muscles kicked in -- maybe I've slowed down because my arteries are clogged? My coworker told me that was possible because I drink french press coffee, which raises your cholesterol. Maybe I'm pre-diabetic -- my diet's not so good, my blood sugar drops so easily, blood pressure was high at the running doctor's visit...

If aging means watching your fitness levels head downhill, I had hit a black diamond slope, and all before actually turning 50.

Thankfully, a doctor's exam and fitness assessment from my trainer friend Thad reported otherwise. My cholesterol levels are very good. I may be hypoglycemic but definitely not diabetic. And my flexibility and strength measurements aren't bad for a woman of, you know, my certain age.

Maybe it's all placebo, or maybe the inserts from the running doc are kicking in, or my jump from one to three yoga classes is taking hold, but I started to feel rather hale and hearty. (I'm still quite sobered by Paula Chu's experiences with breast cancer, mind you, making me realize the trivial nature of my concerns.)

Robin, my physician assistant friend, told me that my cholesterol numbers were phenomenal and I should go eat steak. But suddenly I was enjoying feeding myself well. I could keep up with a few more core exercises in yoga class. Best of all, my runs the last few days have been pretty near pain-free -- it's been nine months since I've felt that way.

Sprinkle in a few folks telling me, "You can't possibly be turning fifty!" and you get an idea of how I've been feeling this last week.

So where did all this good energy go? I was leaving an appointment with a client this afternoon and threw a piece of gum in my mouth. Next thing I knew, I was chewing on hard bits -- a bit off the back of one of my lower front teeth chipped off. Listen here, the Universe was telling me, you're no spring chicken and don't you go thinking you are.

Good thing my cholesterol's OK -- scrambled eggs make for nice soft food for us older folks.

Re-orienting on a rainy Monday

2010-03-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

A tornado blew through the Triad last night, but our little household stayed safe. We -- two adults, two canines -- slept fairly well to the sound of pouring rain.

This morning, though, feels sobering. Dark sky, Monday morning, sprinkling rain. And I've been blown away by a blog I discovered last night. Paula Chu, the sister of my friend Ellen, is dealing with a mastectomy and chemo, and her writing is unabashedly honest, insightful, and funny. A counselor by profession, she isn't afraid to examine her thoughts and moods, which I find fascinating because she does so without an ounce of self-pity, just reflection.

Still, I feel picked up, tossed on my head, and re-righted. Life is hard enough, do people really deserve to have surgeries and chemotherapy thrown in there? As a writer, am I nearly that honest about the far-smaller issues thrown at me? Not to mention nearly as articulate?

I'm also trying to tie up loose ends on my consulting jobs as I face the first day of the new job on Thursday. I suppose it's the nature of marketing and fundraising work, but nothing feels neatly completed. Still so many phone calls I could and should make, so many angles to try...but I need to close some of these open files.

The upshot of a rainy, gloomy, foreboding Monday morning? My little Juno squeezed in beside me, her chin resting on my leg, warming me as she dreams her little-dog dreams of being big and fierce. Amos, the new guy, is curled up by the front door, ready to spring to action if we need his protection.

Juan is supposed to come this morning to paint two rooms. Which means a great opportunity to follow my sister Sandy's feng shui advice -- collect all the things I haven't used or touched in these rooms and give or toss them away. The space that opens up should be clarifying.

Cleaning up, re-righting, re-orienting myself -- that's what people should do after tornadoes.

May your Monday be a promising start to the new week.

Learning to embrace constancy

2010-03-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

Change is the only constant in this world, we all know that, right?

Some of us — well, me, more than anyone else I know — are change junkies. Just when things get settled in one part of my life, chances are good I'll find a way to shake up something else. For a while there it was houses -- we lived in three houses in nine years in the same little Ohio town. My husband used to shrug his shoulders and tell people that some wives have affairs, his wife just falls in love with new (but old) houses.

Part of my 12-step program would probably involve taking it one day at time: running the same course as the day before, driving the same route to do errands, eating the same thing for breakfast and lunch... oh dear. I would be a drop-out of that rehab program, a chronic relapser.

Less than two months ago I was settling into my full-time-plus consulting work. I was finding my rhythm for working from home -- early mornings until mid-afternoon, when I'd call it a day and walk the dog. I was determined to learn how to juggle multiple clients and demands and stop feeling schizo as I jumped from one world to another, from book marketing to nonprofit fundraising to book production. Working in my pjs with a bottomless coffee pot were great perks.

Just then, the phone rang. A pal and former colleague who had moved on to Vitality Communications called to say her company was looking for a marketing person. I had been intrigued with Vitality since she started talking with them: they partner with medical associations and pharmaceuticals to produce patient information publications. Just right for a latent hypochondriac!

Having watched my husband's job searches through a number of moves in college athletics, and my resulting searches following our family's moves, I've learned that you can discern plenty about a potential new employer by how they handle the hiring process. How quickly do people contact you? Do they give you an idea of the timetable, and do they keep to it? Do the interview formats offer a chance to really learn about each other, or are they stiff and over-scripted meetings that might as well have been e-mailed Q and As? Vitality scored high in all areas, and I'm glad that they seemed to think the same of me.

The new job starts next week. The same month that I begin my new decade. And believe it or not, slowly but surely I'm embracing stability. After moves to three states, Greensboro feels like our forever home. Our 1920s bungalow is our downsized forever house -- we can even host grandchildren in the basement rooms if they should come along (a funny thought at the moment). I'd rather not go through another job interview, well, ever would be fine. After losing two beloved dogs last year, we have two pups who could be with us for many good years. I'm OK, even good with all this semi-permanence. Just don't tell me I have to eat the same oatmeal every morning-- no matter how good it is for me. I could at least shake it up: walnuts one morning, almonds the next.

Sidetracked by a sweet fellow

2010-03-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

My next-door neighbors just laughed at me for my manic whirlwind of activities these last few days: Bought a new (used) car in Durham, hired a painter for our dining room and bathroom, went to the doctor's for a physical...oh, and Amos.

The feverish pace has to do with my accepting a new job, which sends me back to the 9-to-5 real world starting next Thursday. So, a long list of all the things needing to be done while I still have a flexible schedule. But then, along came Amos! Sharon, the executive director of Animal Rescue and Foster Program of NC, has been keeping an eye out for us. After losing Chandler, our elder statesman dog, in late December, we told Sharon we wanted an adult male, mellow, golden retriever/shepherdy. Last Wednesday night, who should be dropped at ARFP's door but Mr. Amos: a three-year-old male, a gorgeous golden-red coated mix of retriever and shepherd.

So never mind that I have four clients who still have plenty of work to complete this next week, I should get to the dentist, mail the tax forms, and renew my driver's license. Amos came yesterday to begin a trial stay, and suddenly I'm mapping my days around him. I feel a bit like I did with my newborns: sleep-deprived (he tossed and turned last night in his crate); proud; watchful. Why does he keep running from front door to back door, is he hoping someone is coming to take him back home? Should he be drinking that much water? Look how well he comes when we call his name! Aw, Juno looks like a happy sister.

Tonight was one of those picture-perfect spring evenings. The air was gorgeous and light, the temperature soft, the bugs not out yet. I rushed home in the new (old) car to let the dogs out, then concocted a healthy spring dinner: salmon on the grill, pasta and corn and tomato salad. Bob and I ate out on the deck with the dogs laying at our feet.

I still have plenty to do, but once again my dogs have taught me to slow down a minute, sniff the air, breathe it all in deeply. The checklist will still be there in the morning.

I'm getting very, very sleepy

2010-03-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

The basket of bite-size candy bars sitting on the conference table gave me hope this afternoon as I walked into a 4:30 board meeting. Hope that if I started to nod off, I could revive myself with a quick hit of chocolate. Funny thing is, all six of us grown-ups reacted the same way, snagging a shiny little treat every now and then to keep alert and on task.

Earlier in the day I had caught myself whining to a client about how busy I was. "That's good, though," she told me, and she's right — I should feel lucky to have good, satisfying AND paying work. It's just that, well, I'm tired.

A fellow board member chimed in at the end of our meeting today that everyone he's run into this last day or so is slammed. He thinks it's the economic upturn hitting our pared-down workforce. My oldest sister says it's in the stars, something about the position of Mars making it feel like we've all hit the accelerator (hope it's not the sticking kind).

Do you feel it too?

Actually, to tell the truth, I just think it's how we talk these days. When's the last time you told someone, "nah, I don't have much going on, life is pretty laidback these days"?

Then it dawned on me — my day started unusually early this morning, 4:30, to get myself downtown to try a new running group at 5 a.m. It was worth the early wake-up; those runners are nice, welcoming people. Now, though, at 7:30 p.m., I'm worthless.

Best clue that it's time to shut down the computer and crawl into bed: When you don't remember doing a job that you did 1.5 months ago and almost start to do it again. Night night!

That's my girl

2010-03-02T04:40:00.000-08:00

I've been telling everyone who knows her, and a few people who don't, about my little dog Juno's feat on Sunday. With Stacy and her dog Hook, we ran down Friendly Avenue a mile, looped the two-mile trail at Guilford College with both dogs running free, then a mile back to Hamilton Lakes for the four-mile trail loop.

So Ms. Juno ran seven miles or so on her four little legs. Well, Hook and Juno probably ran more like eight or nine miles between protecting us from squirrels, chasing each other, and circling back to find their "moms."

I'm quite proud of my newest running partner.

I addressed an assembly of elementary school kids yesterday morning, telling them about the GO FAR program I'm helping with, and how the kids can learn to run 3.1 miles and have fun doing it. When they run that final 5k race, I told them, they'll be doing something that a lot of adults in their life can't do. We had a great video to show the kids. But it might have been more effective to bring in Juno for show and tell.

Juno, by the way, has already met fame. She is the star of several epic adventures, thanks to my artist friend Lisa.

Happy, happy trails.

Instant gratification in the digital world

2010-02-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

I went for a run this morning, expecting the day to be just as gorgeous and springlike as it was this past weekend. Instead the gray skies started spitting as soon as I left the house. It's OK. The rain brought out great end-of-winter earth smells, and the solitude -- with the weekend's fair-weather runners inside -- felt soothing.

One of the best things about running is that it takes me far, far away from things electronic. That's why I refuse to run with music, to carry a cell phone for emergencies, or to wear a fancy computer pacer watch (well, that and I can't afford one, never mind know how to work one). Back at my desk, it's all electronics, all the time -- laptop, Blackberry, backup drive, printer....

My fellow compulsive e-mail checkers out there will understand that sometimes it's best to just step. away. from. the. desk. Especially when the e-mail you're waiting for just won't come, no matter how hard you stare at the screen.

Things have gotten worse in the last year or so, about the time that "writing" fully morphed into "content." Now anyone who makes a living on the power of words, especially words shaped and honed for marketing purposes, can send a message out into the world -- via e-mail, Web sites, Facebook, Twitter, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, blogging -- and collect instant feedback on how you did. My poor Firefox gets a workout dancing from reports on how many people clicked through from e-blast newsletters to how many people checked my clients' Web sites to how many people joined clients' Facebook pages.

These data-rich reports stir up the latent competitor in me. I want each new e-blast to top the last one's stats. I'm brushing up on math skills -- is 19 percent of 1,319 a better response rate than 11 percent of 2,745?

It seems quaint to think of the days when we'd send off a new issue of a magazine -- a print magazine, in the U.S. mail -- and then eagerly wait for the return mail -- print letters, with stamps on the envelopes -- to hear what readers thought. How did we fill the time in between?

Maybe we took walks in the spring drizzle and composed, in our heads, nice long letters that we'd write out by hand to family members, one at a time. Sounds like something you'd see on the History Channel, doesn't it?

Gotta go, just got a new e-mail.

Loving to work

2010-02-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

My husband has often fantasized about running a diner. Or a bar. It's in his blood -- his dad ran a bar in Newark, N.J., when Bob was little. Like his dad, Bob is outgoing, enjoys shooting the breeze, and is good at repetitive tasks like lining up glasses or folding towels.

The fantasy includes a sense of doing work that seems much more straightforward, I'm sure, than his typical day, teaching sport management to 20-year-olds.

Over the years I've been quick to comment that such a scheme scares me to death because I know those businesses require you to live the work around the clock, seven days a week. Keeping the books, ordering the supplies, worrying about the customers.

These days, I have to laugh. I've ended up doing work that I find truly compelling. But as a self-employed consultant, I live the work seven days a week, sun up to sundown. I've never put in so many hours, days and nights and weekends. Along with the writing, editing, and strategizing, I'm keeping the books, ordering the supplies, and worrying about my customers.

Yet the challenges are satisfying. And the work is portable -- give me my laptop, reading glasses, and Internet connection and I'm pretty good to go. Especially when my assistant, Juno (pictured above) squeezes in beside me, rests her chin on my laptop, and falls asleep.

I feel a little bad for Bob. Chances are good my head is elsewhere even when we're together. I may be sitting in my armchair and looking like I'm relaxing. But in my head, I'm actually churning around some strategy or pitch, trying to get it right. I remember driving to Asheville with Bob this winter for a quick getaway. I spent half of the three-hour drive coming up with a new tagline for a technology nonprofit. I enjoyed it; it was a puzzle to solve, a brainteaser.

So here I am, running my own bar and grill. What can I get you?

The power of alignment

2010-02-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

It took a record-setting head cold, a lull in deadlines, and some disturbing political commentary to bring me back to the blog world. I've missed this exercise in sharing thoughts that are at once personal and universal.

If you tired of the running chronicles as I tried to qualify for Boston, rejoice! That quest is behind me. So is the lingering hip pain, soon, I hope. The famed Dr. Bert confirmed yesterday that I'm fighting classic issues with my right piriformis, the muscle deep in the butt that runs sideways to the hip. The astute doc saw my right foot turning slightly out as I run, causing the stress. My therapy includes practicing running pigeon-toed, retraining my foot to not be so right-leaning. Ha! No wonder I've felt out of alignment as a UMass-trained left-leaner.

In the absence of marathon training, I've filled my last few months with plenty of fretting and whining about the job market and the economy and how they affect my future. By early January it looked like I would be trading in my various hectic consulting gigs for a full-time J.O.B. Worrying about one client and one set of deadlines sounded good. But the best part, after commuting to Winston for nine months: I'd be working from home. Slowly and mysteriously, though, the opportunity fizzled over weeks of silence from the other end after a two-day trip to meet each other.

After a little bit of wound-licking and a few good recent breaks, I'm proud to say that I am indeed working from home on nonprofit projects that feel challenging and worthwhile. I may be juggling, but I promise to stop whining.

And in the last two days, friends have pointed me to two troubling musings. One comes from Paul Krugman, about dangerous inertia in the US Senate, and one is a recap of a recent talk by Tom Friedman, on the lousiness of our collective will to consume less energy, fix health care, even raise responsible kids who don't require cops in the schools.

There's work to be done, voices to be raised. I'm picking my head up from my navel (yup, the belly's still there, doesn't seem to be shrinking) and getting to work.

Depends What You Call a Good Time

2009-11-09T03:17:00.000-08:00

We were at the marathon expo Saturday afternoon to pick up our numbers. Vendors displayed fun Outer Banks clothes and gear. But I thought, I'm not buying anything. If I don't qualify, I'm going to hate the Outer Banks Marathon.

Not true. In short, I didn't qualify, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

My dear friend Dee stayed with me the whole way, from the national anthem to the finish. We ran a wonderful first half, along the sound, through neighborhoods where early morning spectators thanked us for being there (that's a first) and then inland through pine forest on a soft trail. At 10 miles we were 4 minutes ahead of pace and I felt strong, and proud to have that cushion. We've got this, I thought, and I feel better than I have in a long time on a run.

At mile 13 we left the woods and trails for the open highway and bright sun. Temperatures were starting to climb -- they maxed out close to 70. Very warm for running. I was drinking at the water stops every two miles, more than I've ever taken in at a race, and yet I couldn't stay hydrated. At mile 16 I sunk into a scary place -- I can't slow down my breathing, my stomach is roiling from so much to drink, I can't do this. I pulled myself out of that hole a few times, which I'm proud of. (Dee, fit as a fiddle, was holding a conversation with me the whole morning, pointing out sights and such, and I merely nodded back at her, trying to ignore my inner dialogue. At some point, 19 miles or so, I coached myself -- look at this, you've still got the 4:05 in the bag, enjoy it.

But I was whipped. At one of those odd miles, 19 or 21, it took an eighth of the mile or so before we got to the water table that was SUPPOSED TO BE at the mile marker, and I was near tears. That's how fixated you can get, how little tolerance you can have left.

At mile 22 you start climbing up the bridge over to Manteo. Mile 23 is the peak, then it's 3.2 miles to the finish. We came down off the bridge and I knew I was crawling. It's a long stretch, those last few miles. We were turning a corner towards the little town and mile 25 when I checked my watch. We had 8 minutes to cover 1.5 miles -- I can't do that even on a good day. So I started walking. Dee was perplexed -- Lisa, maybe we can do this! But it all became instantly clear: Who cares?! I wasn't going to make the 4:05 time, but I felt really good about the race. I had no interest in trudging in that last bit, still struggling to breathe.

Dee, who is quite an athlete, was perplexed at first, not knowing if I was heartbroken and if she should push me. She contemplated going ahead and getting her qualifying time, 4:15, then realized she was only going to run Boston if I did, because she's done it a dozen times or more and it makes teaching her college classes a little rough the next day.

Strange as it may sound, walking in that last mile and change was my victory lap. I was celebrating so many things: My legs and hips for cooperating better than they had in weeks. The months of training--the 5 am, dark mornings heading out for hours of running. The gorgeous course and day -- gorgeous if you're not running. And spending the morning with a friend of 25 years and so many adventures. I just wanted to walk and savor it all.

So it's done. I'll have to cook up some fun, new plan for celebrating my 50th. Coach Bob has been goofing with me, telling me the locks on the doors would be changed when I got home because I didn't come through. He asked me this morning how I felt. Good, I said, I don't feel like I ran a marathon. Well, he said, looking away, mumbling about how walking in the last mile means I didn't EXACTLY run a marathon.

I had a fun weekend with four women: Dee; Robin, a new and dear friend who came along and ran the half and drove us poor marathoners; and Lauren, a member of Dee's women's running club, who flew down to bag North Carolina on her quest to run a marathon in all 50 states. For the most part, runners are good people. We laughed with strangers about our strange post-marathon gait back to the hotel. We made countless stops on our four-hour drive to the beach, knowing how important our pre-race hydration and diet were, and how often you have to pee because of it. We celebrated on the drive back with chips and soda.

Fun. I didn't get a good time, but I had a very good time.

Think Brett Favre Has to Do This?

2009-11-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

I'm all alone tonight and savoring it. Another hot bath, hot as I could stand it. All that time in the bathroom, though, forced me to scrub a bit and vacuum up one layer of dog hair afterwards, perhaps ruining the mood.

Then a ceremonial dinner: grilled cheese and Gatorade with Van Morrison, who is serenading me along with Bruce on Pandora.

It's nice, all this relaxing and attention to myself, my hydration, etc., but I kind of feel like I'm going off to war or something. I suppose I am—off to do battle with myself for four hours on Sunday morning.

Dinner will be topped off with the scrumptious cake my daughter had delivered from her former workplace, through her brother, with "Good Luck Mom" in gorgeous script across the top. I'm so proud.

And Me? Can I Do It?

2009-11-04T09:58:00.000-08:00

Just checking in, with 3.5 days to go until race morning. I ran eight miles on Monday morning and three miles this morning with Stacy, and I'm not exactly feeling fresh. My hip flexors, both sides, feel increasingly like I'm running with the parking brake on. I'm just hoping that no runs between now and Sunday morning, popping some Alleve here and there, and stretching a bit will make things a bit better.

That, and thinking of all of you, including:

• My Blueliner fan club. You set fine examples, you keep running fun.

• Mason, my coworker's seven-year-old who has been fighting brain cancer cheerfully since it was diagnosed on Labor Day. Talk about strong.

• Kate, my college sophomore, who thinks it's cool I'm attempting this; Tommy, my high school senior, who thought I was flying to Boston this weekend for the marathon. (Just a slight difference between girls and boys.) I love those two kiddos.

• Robin, my "colleague" these last few months, who's kindly serving as personal driver and medical advisor while running the half marathon in-between.

• Sandy, Ellen, Ali, Erin -- you faithful blog readers who say such kind things.

• Chandler, my elderly dog, who will just be waiting anxiously for me to come home and doesn't care about marathon time one hoot.

• Bob. Coach Bob. Well, enough said, right?

• Dee, for being game to travel to NC for yet another adventure. Sally, for understanding and giving us both your blessings.

Joan Does It Again

2009-11-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't hear, Joan Benoit Samuelson ran a 2:49:09 in the NYC Marathon this past Sunday. It's an event record for women over 50, by more than four minutes, and it's just one second off the American marathon record that she set last April during the Olympic Trials for women 50 and up.

Joan's been a hero of mine since 1979, when she won her first Boston Marathon in her characteristic fashion: low-key, no frills manner but decisive, take-no-prisoner wins.

These days I find her race times astonishing, making us all choke on our excuses of "my body's too old for this."

I was thrilled to meet Samuelson last spring when she came to town for the NC Marathon. As she headed out for a 10-mile training run (at a leisurely seven-minute pace), she acknowledged that it takes her a little while to warm up these days and work out the stiffness. So, she's human. Just fast.

Ode to Coach Bob

2009-10-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

I was twenty-five and living in Boston. I had broken up with my college boyfriend and was trying to date casually. It didn't work. Instead, I developed a huge crush on the tall, dark-haired guy who worked in the office suite down the hall.

I sent people to investigate and learned he was Bob, a grad student at Harvard who had coached lacrosse and soccer at Princeton. My crush daydreams grew to include fall afternoons hanging out at soccer games.

Somehow it all worked, and I did spend a few afternoons at games that first fall that we were dating. I also ran my second marathon that fall, half thinking it would impress him. But it turns out I never had to play games like that with Bob, I could just be myself.

By the time we met, Bob wasn't coaching anymore. He became a college administrator, then professor. Well, he did coach many of our kids' teams: t-ball, Little League, rec basketball, rec lacrosse--even Kate's high school lacrosse team, where the girls loved calling him "Bob."

Still, over our 24 years together, I have benefitted from his coaching. Like all good teachers and coaches I've known (Dee, Joan, Thad, for starters), he has the ability to break tasks down into do-able steps. And he imparts confidence: Let me show you the skills because I know you can do this.

When my pals and I qualified for Boston at Cleveland in ’99, Bob sat waiting for us at mile 23. He proudly ran in with us, totally getting what the whole deal meant to me, a clueless jv athlete at best.

A friend who's started online dating again asked me one of those interview-like questions she had to answer for the service: What makes a relationship work? There's the usual things -- communication, negotiation, respect. But probably one of the things I love most about Bob is he makes me laugh--always has, still does. And he never allows me to take myself seriously. That's more important than you know for anyone who tends to get boggled up in her mind, strategizing and analyzing things to death.

Coach Bob has been rooting for me and my qualifying quest these last few months. He's experiencing some of the same disconcerting effects of age when he runs -- slowing down, aching more -- so he understands that this time around is more of a push.

He's the first person I'll want to call after I cross the finish line in Manteo next week, no matter what happens. It kills me that he'll be on an airplane, flying home from a conference, and I won't be able to either celebrate or commiserate with him.

Here's to you, Bob, for all the sweaty laundry you've had to wash, all the whining you've endured, the hours lost to naps and other long-run recuperation. You've always believed in me--like the best coaches do.

Straying from moderation

2009-10-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Today was one of those nicely balanced days. I thrive on balance--and sunshine. And I got plenty of both today. In the space of twelve hours, from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm, here's what I've accomplished:

Professional: Four hours of editing on two clients' book projects. Coffee with a designer, a neighborhood friend who may work with me on one of the books. An hour's meeting with one of the authors.

Domestic: Four rooms vacuumed, half the kitchen floor mopped (because of our elderly dog's continence issues). Quick run to grocery for basics. Front yard and neighbor's front yard mowed (because I borrowed their mower). Leaves swept off the back deck. Checks deposited at bank.

Active: No run (love that tapering), but a happy walk in the woods with my little dog. She hunted and leaped and sprinted for an hour, I walked and admired the leaves and sunshine.

So, nothing to excess, the basics taken care of, all a nice flow.

Living a balanced life has its satisfactions, of course. But I've just realized it's one of the things that has made this marathon training such a challenge (sorry for prattling on about this over coffee, Michael, it's all just becoming clearer). When I try to do one thing well, when I push one activity beyond moderation, I am stepping out of my all-important comfort zone. Aiming to run a marathon at a faster than comfortable pace is exactly that -- a scary tipping of the balance.

Us everything-in-moderation folks typically lack the competitive gene that distinguishes every good athlete I've ever known. You know the ones, people who will pass someone in front of them in a road race just because they're there. People who can't imagine not playing hard until the last second, leaving it all on the field. I've never really left it all on the field because I'm too aware of my comfort level. I'll run or ride a bike for hours, happily, but that's usually because I'm yacking with pals or admiring the scenery, not studying my watch or odometer and aiming for a personal best. Such moderation has probably helped keep me injury free over the last 25 years, but it also limits the trophies and medals on my shelf.

Now that I've labeled it, I understand much better my angst over the last few months. My mind has been wrestling with itself and with my body. I've set a goal that would be exciting to meet, I'd feel quite proud qualifying for Boston. But my worn-out hamstrings and my comfort-zone loving heart may not be up to it.

Life, meanwhile, has definitely lost some of its balance: the house is dirtier, my contribution to meals much shakier, my time with Bob more taken up with details of aches, pain and fatigue. These imbalances are temporary, of course. Pushing myself physically, to above-average running, would be longer lasting.

We'll see. A mere 10 days. And speaking of moderation, I think it's time for a heart-healthy glass of red wine, to toast the day.

I'm not tapering, I'm peaking

2009-10-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

At least, that's what I learned today. Over bagels and coffee after my 12-miler today, I whined to Thad. (Poor guy, he started a running blog and now all he gets from us Saturday morning Blueliners is our fitness questions.)

Anyway--back to me. I felt exhausted today, barely able to bring in the 12 miles. I'd rather not think about what my pace was. So I asked Thad about tapering, wondering of course if it's safe for me to start cutting back my miles when I feel so, well, not strong. Is the fatigue from all the training, or from weakness?

Thad sent me to a couple great articles by running coach Joe English. Mind you, when English talks about training load, I know he's working with much more serious athletes. But the thinking is the same: to be in peak shape for an event, after months of training, you do need to cut back on volume these last few weeks, but not on intensity. So, shorten the runs, but keep 'em (get them?) fast.

I grabbed a sheet of paper and started scribbling down my recent mileage. Lo and behold, last week really was a jump up, to 41 miles. Plus ten of those miles were two five-milers where I pushed the pace (thanks for the inspiration, Dennis). That's a jump in weekly mileage of five to seven miles or so, plus some intensity. Thus, fatigue.

So now, with two weeks to go before Outer Banks, my job is to do all I can to stay strong and healthy. Vitamins, protein, drink water. Massage (thanks, Chevy). Yoga. Sleep. And keep the runs short and fast.

By the way, I'm not getting older, I'm getting better. :)

Twenty miles done, plenty of questions

2009-10-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers, nice friends, have been asking about the 20-miler yesterday. I'm still processing it.

I loved the course: a few miles through my neighborhood, then Market Street to downtown. At five miles, Robin met me, and we did five out through the estates of Irving Park and north on Elm, then five back. The last five were the meandering bike path from Bessemer back to Elam, the way I commuted to work on my bike two summers ago.

After so many long runs on my own, I loved Robin's company, it was perfect timing. But by the time I met her, I was three minutes off the goal pace of nine-minute miles, so I bagged the whole pace/clock thing and just ran, or ran-walked -- we did a modified Galloway in which we'd stop to walk roughly every ten minutes, sometimes earlier or later because of an uphill or downhill.

So here's the hitch -- it was exactly 10-minute miles. Should I fret? At one point towards the end yesterday, I felt my chest tighten as I pondered it all. I really don't think I can do 9-minute miles, I thought, for 26 miles. I really think this is over my head. Should I even bother traveling to the Outer Banks? Then I tried to reason that people (Dee and her running club mate) are traveling just for the race, I have to at least go and finish.

My husband, he of the New Jersey sarcasm and coach pragmatism, told me yesterday afternoon with unusual confidence that he knows I can do it. "You just have to suck it up for one day," he says.

I guess that's how to approach it. Train my mental muscles, hope my physical muscles cooperate, and "leave it all on the road." THREE MORE WEEKS!

This Is Why I Run, Installment 3

2009-10-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

This is why I run: To feel good about getting myself out for a 10-mile run on a cold, drizzly weeknight after sitting in a conference all day. I could have drawn from so many excuses -- tired, haven't been home, better to go to the grocery store, what if it really starts raining, I only run in the mornings, on an on. Instead I got out the door, and I actually enjoyed the temperature, the twilight, the physical movement after a long day of sitting. Afterward, the groceries still weren't bought and the house still wasn't clean, but those things didn't seem like such big deals. I love that.

Chicago on my mind

2009-10-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about two Blueliner running pals who are running the Chicago marathon tomorrow.

Dena stuck to the Furman training method like glue these last three months, lots of hard work. She's a very disciplined and strong runner and should have a great race.

Neal, who introduced me to the Galloway method, is looking to have fun and run strong. As a relatively new runner, he loves the whole scene around a big race like this.

May they have tailwinds, mild temps, and p.r.s!

Second to last long training run -- EVER!

2009-10-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

See, I just don't think I've really got this athlete thing down. For a few reasons:

1. I set out to do 17 miles this morning. I started at the dark, ungodly hour of 5:40, because I had a 9 a.m. board meeting. It was in the high sixties and incredibly humid, and by 14 miles or so I had talked myself into just doing 16 -- you know, so I'd have time to get to the board meeting. Never mind that I was exhausted. At 14.5 miles, I talked myself into still another shortcut, ending up with 15.5 miles. And the thing is, I only feel a little bad about it. A real athlete would be horrified.

2. That exhaustion part. Back home on my front porch, I could barely bring each leg up on a chair arm to untie my shoes. My back end -- hamstrings, hips, butt -- locked up. That's how it feels running these days, like the muscles I should use to accelerate are locked, or like I'm trying to run with the parking brake on. A real athlete would probably go work out with some weight machines at a gym to push beyond that, get stronger. Me? I just whine.

3. I got hungry and spacey by the end of the run today. I had been counting on bringing along some jelly beans (my alternative to those Goo packs), but it looks like my teenager must have found them and thought they were a treat for him. It doesn't help that my carbo-load dinner last night was tuna tacos and 1.5 Natty Greene's drafts down at Fishbones. A real athlete would have eaten a sensible pasta dinner, washed down with several glasses of water. I thought about it.

Like I told Steve, the race director for the recent 3oK Salem Lake race: "Great race. I never want to do it again." I am reaffirming for myself why I gave up marathons for six years -- they're too hard for me. I'm still feeling like my chances of hitting the Boston qualifying time at the Outer Banks are decent. If I qualify, I'll train a bit for Boston, but only enough to enjoy being there, not for any kind of time.

I want to get back to running for fun. Silly, I know.

Hills are my friends

2009-10-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Bridget in my yoga class is one of those Really Good Runners who has been at it a long time and is still going strong. When I first met her four years ago, she was training for a half iron man. She is still just as lean and sculpted. AND she can touch her toes in yoga class. Amazing. I touch my shins.

Bridget made me feel good two weekends ago when she said my quads probably felt so beat up after Salem Lake because of trying to get traction on a wet, muddy day -- not because I'm weak or anything.

This past weekend, when I whined to her about how I was still slow, she told me to go run hills. If you want to run faster, she said, it's the thing to do.

So, in the dark at 6:15 this morning, there I was running up Northridge and trotting back down, three times, then one last hill on my way home. Not too awful, a nice break from the same old miles.

We'll see. I've got one month until Outer Banks. I'll try anything. Except track workouts.

Random Thoughts, A Few Fine Whines

2009-10-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

In no particular order:

I am tired of running in the pre-dawn dark, even by 6:45 a.m. I wish the clocks would FALL BACK already. I dread tripping on an errant acorn or the lip of a sidewalk and ending this training.

It would be easier if, after a long run, the weather turned cool and rainy, like last week. Then there's no guilt in a mid-day nap. Today it is sparkling, nice mild temperatures, and all I've wanted to do is sleep. I justified a quick nap by lying on my stomach with a bag of frozen blueberries on my right achilles.

Speaking of the achilles, a cheap $9.99 Dr. Scholl's insert seems to be helping a bit -- giving arch support and heel cushion. My right hip even feels better. But now my left hip hurts...

When people kindly ask how my training is going and they are runners, I'm embarrassed to have to tell them my pace. I've dropped from an 8-minute runner to a 9-minute-miler in just a few years. I swear I try to mumble under my breath and turn my head as I speak.

That's it, for now. I usually feel better after a little whine and cheese.

Surviving Salem Lake

2009-09-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

This morning's 18.6-mile trail race at Salem Lake was a great dry run for the Outer Banks marathon. Well, not very dry -- it's been drizzly and cool since last night. Which means mud and drizzle on the trail. But I'll take that over hot and humid any day.

After weeks, months really, of worrying about my pace, it was good to run a race and see how I was doing. Except being clueless about my pace kind of hurt me. I had to work my way through a slow, crowded first mile, so I thought I should push -- the specter of a Boston qualifying time is camped out on my shoulder, of course. Thankfully, Les and Jim from my Saturday morning Blueliners group ran by at the three-mile mark to let me know that I'd run a 7:50 pace, mile 2 to 3. Way too fast.

So I cranked back a bit and ran a fun next three miles with a gentleman who liked my pace. He inquired about the age of Sam, another Blueliner who passed by, so I asked him his. Ready? 69. Blew me away. Great guy. Started running at 41, and at 49 ran his marathon pr, 3:17. I was inspired.

The first half I averaged 8:30s, the second half in 9:10s. Lesson learned: aim for 8:45s and I'll probably feel better. And Outer Banks won't have all the twists and turns of this trail run.

I had a fun moment this afternoon in my post-race stupor, one of those times when you realize how foreign this running stuff is to most folks. I had to re-visit our cell phone situation, the continuing transition after Verizon bought Alltel. I had a not-great Verizon experience last week so I picked a new store, stumbled in with my phone and Bob's, and got Sierra, a nice salesman. We clicked. He's been beaten up for days by unhappy former Alltelers, including a family of three just before me. He helped me out, finding a cheap way to get me back to my Blackberry, and he loved that I didn't bark at him. I was too tired, and I could tell he was being honest with me.

Over the course of an hour-long visit, I couldn't control a few yawns. I was trying to decide mentally between a latte or nap when I was done with the phone stuff.

"So Lisa, tell me what you do. You just don't strike me as someone who sits around watching TV," Sierra says.

I laughed. And felt good. He didn't see me as an exhausted old lady, he saw me as an athlete!

"Well, this morning I ran 18 and a half miles around a lake," I told him. He pushed back his chair and shook his head. "I knew it," he said, and called out to his colleague, "Hey! Do you know what this nice lady did this morning?"

I felt downright formidable.

This Is Why I Run: Installment 2

2009-09-21T15:54:00.000-07:00

It was fun this weekend when a friend who hasn't seen me in a year or so exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, you've shrunk!"

Mind you, I'm hardly wasting away. But I do feel better than at a low moment in July. It was the end of a great bike trip with Dee and Virginia across New York State. We were toweling off in a high school locker room and I caught sight of my bare naked body in a full-length mirror. Compared to my two lean friends, I looked like the "before" picture and they were the "after" examples of what exercise can do for you.

Pudgy wasn't how I had "seen" myself all week -- I had felt strong, athletic, with 500 hilly miles under my legs over 7 days. But the reality of the mirror reflected differently. It showed the cumulative effects of middle-age metabolism, which loves to pile the fat on in the middle of our bodies, and months and months of sedentary work.

Nothing like increasingly longer runs in late-summer humidity in North Carolina, however, to burn off some of that mid-section. It took the bike trip, followed immediately by marathon training, to jump start my metabolism. I hope the engine keeps running.

Precious minutes

2009-09-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I have pondered time -- minutes and seconds -- more in the last few months than ever in my life, thanks to this Boston qualifying business. For most of our days, minutes fly by like nothing -- there's so many of them that we can't possibly notice each and every one.

Early in the training, I was trying to figure out my typical pace and the difference that 10 or 15 seconds per mile would make. Not huge, in the course of a mile. Over the course of 26 miles, very big.

Lately, since deciding that the Galloway run-walk plan is my marathon salvation, I've been savoring my one-minute walk breaks on long runs, every nine minutes. Those 60-second breaks feel like precious chocolate-chip cookies that I don't want to gobble down too quickly. I count in my head to 20, times three, wishing that my counting could slow the seconds down. I set my sights on a tree that looks like it's a minute up the road and test how close I come in my minute's worth of walking.

Yesterday I set out to do 18 miles, but mapmyrun tells me I was short, just a little over 17. Which means my time was disappointingly slow. Alarmingly slow -- I'm embarrassed to tell you. But I'm going to focus on the positives: I did it myself! I've never run that far by myself in 25 years of running. And I didn't feel dead when I finished -- probably because of my pathetic pace.

Back to positives: On a traumatic day in which I gave up my precious Blackberry because Verizon was going to charge ridiculous fees, I gained a favorite new "hand-held": a cute 10-ounce water bottle that fits in the cup of my hand with a little strap. I'd been parched on my last few runs, so yesterday I took great comfort in knowing I could drink whenever I needed to.

Looks my homework this week is simple: speed.

Because you got to have FRIENDS

2009-09-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

I got a nice surprise this morning. I was almost halfway through my solo eight-miler when who should emerge in the pre-dawn dark but my pal Stacy, who lives just up the road. She ran the next three or so with me before circling back home.

I had been running fine, but it's so much nicer with a friend along. By sharing all the stupid things that have happened to us and our friends in recent days, we don't have to be so aware of the miles. Thanks Stacy, it was a p.r. for the Hamilton Lakes loop for me.

On my last mile home, I started thinking of how many wonderful people I've been lucky enough to run with regularly, over many years and in many locales. It started with Dee, 24 years ago, with our lunchtime runs around the Charles River in Boston. Dee "made" me run my first marathon back then. And she's flying in from Rhode Island to run Outer Banks with me -- how cool is that?

Then, let's see. Cindy during the year I lived in Providence, we trained for a half-marathon together. Ellen in Mystic, Sunday mornings along River Road. Pam, Patrice and Beverly nearly every day in Wooster, Ohio, and three or four marathons together. Very strong women. Then Greensboro, with Stacy, Betty, Sherry, Ali, Dena, Donna and the Blueliners.

This fall, thanks to my work schedule and training needs, I've run more on my own than I've ever had to in the past. It's OK; I see how people swear by their time spent solo, sorting things out as they go. But I'd much rather gab and laugh and hear about others' lives as I trot along. I think of all those running partners, how different we all are. And how it doesn't much matter out on the road.

Here's to you, pals. May you never get together and start swapping stories about what you've had to put up with from me, in the dark and in the broad daylight....

The brilliance of run-walk-run

2009-09-13T04:44:00.000-07:00

I hope I'm not counting my eggs before they hatch, but yesterday's run felt like a big breakthrough. Hello, Galloway method!

Maybe you've heard of it. Galloway is the run/walk concept where, from the very start of a long run or race, you take regular walking intervals. I remember being vaguely aware of this when Jeff Galloway introduced it. Mentally I turned my nose up at the idea -- must be for those beginning runners or the perpetually slow who can't REALLY run a marathon.

Years later I met Neal, who joined our Saturday morning group. He brought all the zeal of a newcomer to exercise and running. He had just dropped some 50 pounds or so and loved running, kept wanting to do more and longer. Aches and pains, though, made him turn to Gallowaying. He's run four marathons since, each progressively faster, now hovering around four hours. He finishes in fine shape, ready to go celebrate while most of us have to limp off and lick our wounds.

Looking for any answers I can find to snag a Boston qualifying time, I've been asking Neal if I could try it with him. I finally got to yesterday, his last long training run before the Chicago marathon.

I LOVED it. Seventeen miles felt more like 10. Neal sets his Garmin to warn him, with four beeps, every 8 minutes. He walks for a minute (speed walks, I couldn't keep up with him), then four beeps warn him as the minute wraps up. It feels strange at first, when you're fresh, to stop and walk. He had warned me about this, that mentally the hardest thing about Gallowaying in a race is walking in those first miles while people run by you. But by now he knows that he'll be the one passing people in the last six or seven miles.

And that's the idea. That break from the monotony of the running pace uses slightly different muscles, preventing some of the fatigue in your legs. Just as important is the mental break, I think. It was all clear to me at about 15 miles yesterday. Normally by then I'd be hurting a bit and starting to doubt my toughness, scared that I couldn't really finish. Yesterday I realized I was running without fear or mental stress, because I knew that in eight minutes or less I'd get a little break. Brilliant!

The last remaining issue will be speed. Neal and I averaged somewhere between 9:15 and 9:30 minute miles, he says. We had much to discuss -- it was catching up and a business meeting wrapped into a run -- so we didn't focus on the clock a bit. I feel fairly sure I could pick up the pace, now that I know you really do feel fresher even after a few hours. That was my concern: that I'd feel just as tired at 16 miles, plus that much slower because of walking breaks.

Then there's injury prevention. Advocates say the Galloway method significantly cuts down on wear and tear. I left my house yesterday morning worried about my right achilles, which keeps getting worse. This could be the long run, I thought, that finally puts me on the sidelines -- we lost Marshall last week to a foot stress fracture. But, aside from the usual starting out pain, not a problem!

I plan to test Galloway next weekend with an 18-miler on my own. I need to find one of those computers-on-your-wrist and get a digitally savvy person to program it to beep like Neal's does. It was nice to not have to fuss with or check a watch at all, just listen for the beeps.

Eight weeks to go until Outer Banks -- happy trails.

What Would Joseph Say

2009-09-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

I've joked for a half year or so about how my Sunday morning yoga class is my church. But to some degree, it's true. Those 1.5 hours of yoga each week have certainly been my salvation as I build running mileage again. Yoga tends to undo a lot of that damage. Running tightens the hamstrings and hips, yoga pulls at them to stretch and open up again.

I've had quite a few good instructors over the years, and they each have their strengths. Joseph, my current teacher, focuses particularly on alignment. We move slowly through the class with his reminders to rotate our legs, arms, core. I find myself in poses, my hamstrings stretched excruciatingly while I run through the check list -- pinkie toes pulling back, kneecaps facing up, thigh rotating in, arms rotating out... The multitasking becomes a discipline, sometimes taking the focus off the screaming hamstrings because there's so many other things to align.

Now Joseph's voice is lasting with me longer through the week. It starts as I hop on my bike for the half-mile ride home from the studio. As soon as I start to slide into my standard slump -- shoulders forward, core collapsed -- I think how my teacher would come behind me with reminders for all of us. "Remember to grow your spine tall, collarbone wide, let your shoulder blades travel down your back," he tells us. I've never thought much, truly, about having a collarbone, but letting it grow wide is exactly what I need to open up my chest, pull my rounding shoulders back, my abs up.

On runs, it's become a good distraction to check in with the alignment of various body parts as a way to ignore the usual aches and pains. I grow my spine tall and think about my lungs filling newly opened space in my chest cavity. I drop my shoulder blades down my back and think about engaging my core. And then I try to just breathe. Joseph would be quite proud, I'm sure.

Maybe at heart I'm a slug

2009-09-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

I ran 13 miles this morning out at Salem Lake on a pretty, late summer day in the company of friends. That's all nice, but right at this moment what I like best about long Saturday morning runs is the mid-day nap that follows, if at all possible.

I got home from the lake after scooching around in my seat for the half-hour drive home. Driving stresses my right achilles and the exact spot on my right hamstring-hip-butt that yells at me after an hour or so of running. I limped my way through a couple errands, took a shower, downed a glass of milk and a few ginger snaps, and crawled into bed at 11:30 am -- just as my 17-year-old was waking up.

I choose to look at these naps as part of the training protocol. We know that rest is important. I recently quizzed two long-time marathoners, Marianne and Maureen, about what keeps them healthy and fast. They agreed that rest in its various forms -- days off and sleep -- is important and can get shortchanged when you're getting up early most mornings to run. And women's hormonal changes can make long nights of sleep harder to come by as we ag...er, as we move gracefully into the next age group.

Anyhow, I feel like a new woman. I'm rested and ready to think about how many long runs to go before the marathon: five or six, looks like. That's a half dozen good naps in my future.

This Is Why I Run: A little inspiration

2009-09-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of NPR's "This I Believe," I launch the series, "This Is Why I Run."

Installment 1: Watching the sun rise up over Hamilton Lake, halfway around my eight-mile loop this morning. Steam was rising off the water, and it was just me and the ducks taking it in.

Thank you, fall

2009-09-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

I can breathe again! September swooped in with wonderfully cool air overnight, and I had a great run this morning, my downtown five-miler.

For ridiculous reasons -- a cheap Target watch, my pit stop behind the bushes at UNCG, and the couple minutes it takes my achilles to stop arguing with me -- I don't know my time. But I felt good, the way running should feel. I think my kind friends have been right: it's been the humidity, stupid, that's made running feel so trudge-like this last month.

So welcome, autumn. Remind me never to train for a fall marathon again, when you have to start in the summer. Actually, remind me never to train for a marathon again.

Pass/Fail

2009-08-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

My new coworkers Dave and Sharrod have clued me in to the hip expression, "fail!" As in, you snap a photo of your friend doing something stupid and all the caption needs to say is FAIL.

For the next eight weeks, I'm living with the angst that I may have to slap "fail" across one of those commercial photo proofs of me crossing the finish line at the Outer Banks marathon. If the clock above the finish line says anything more than 4:05, I'll have missed my Boston qualifying time. And because I've been telling anyone and everyone about my goal, I'll have lots of chances to practice explaining how nope, it didn't work out, no 50th birthday party in Boston next April for me.

I realize it's all relative. Plenty of folks would be ecstatic to cross a finish line and know that they had run 26.2 miles, no matter the pace. But that's not what I've set out to do. Yet, while I knew how torturous marathon training can be, I didn't really grasp how much I've slowed down these last few years, how rusty and cranky my body feels about the mileage and speed.

Marathons are monsters that cannot be tamed. I know that. You can train well for months, sleep and eat well, do everything right, then wake up that morning and be sick, turn your ankle, face thunderstorms. I love that unpredictability, actually -- it means anything is possible. You could have a great day and set a personal record. To some degree. If I can't run sub-nine minute miles for 10 miles, I probably can't run them for 26 miles.

This has been a big year for learning that life doesn't always follow the script I envision. Last winter I left a good job that had grown stale. I was brimming with naive confidence that I could hand pick a new job, in a new field, not truly factoring in the dismal state of the economy. I've had some disappointing experiences since then -- people who turned 180 degrees, folks who disappeared -- but also some wonderful gifts of meeting genuine, bright people working hard on efforts that matter. Figuring out how to pick my head up off my desk when work prospects looked bleak has taught me a few new lessons about persistence and humility.

And once again, running offers great, tangible metaphors. Do a few early rejections mean I should abandon plans to launch a business? Only if a few early, slow runs mean I shouldn't aim for a good marathon time. In both cases, I've stepped out of my comfort zone. I could rest on my laurels (I'm embarrassed to admit how often I hear myself telling people that I have indeed qualified for Boston once before, 10 years ago). But I prefer the notion that in running, as in writing, I'm only as capable as my last run or my last article. What I accomplished two years ago, or ten years ago, informs who I am and what I know, but it's about how you put those strengths and abilities to work in the present.

Here's what I intend to do: I'm going to keep running, even if some of it feels more like trudging. I'm going to remember what I love about running -- its simplicity, the people, the outdoors, the honest fatigue -- and only check my watch when I have to. I'm going to remember that every time I've pushed myself, I've come out the other side knowing myself better, whether I've reached my goal or come just short of it.

Maybe that's my real goal, anyway, to know myself better. To say I don't want to turn 50 as a has-been means I don't want to be someone who doesn't try, who shuts the door on opportunities because they look a little out of reach. That, in my book, would be a FAIL.

So, why marathons?

2009-08-24T16:46:00.001-07:00

It's been about a month or so that I can say I've been officially training for my next marathon, which is Nov. 8. The funniest moment so far came at the lowest point, a few weeks ago. Dena and I were circling Salem Lake on a steam bath of a Saturday morning. The humidity was wiping out every runner we saw. Pretty as that trail is, the air tends to just hang over the lake. About halfway on our second loop, 10 miles or so into a 13-mile run, I was concentrating on running fast enough to keep Dena on her training pace, and she had pretty much stopped chatting. We couldn't drink enough to stay hydrated; we could wring the sweat out of our shirts and shorts. Suddenly Dena says, "It's times like this I don't want to be a runner! I don't care about a four-hour marathon!"

The thought still cracks me up. How silly this must look to the casual observer -- runners in so much discomfort and agony, and it's a voluntary act of recreation. You know, for fun.

All the negatives about marathon training made me swear off of it for the last six years. Ask Will -- he and I co-founded the No More Marathon faction of our Saturday morning running group. Been there, done that, tired of the throbbing hamstrings.

Go ahead and run one, I always tell runners who start dreaming about it. It's empowering and satisfying and you can apply it to the rest of your life. If I can run a marathon, you tell yourself, then I can get through this deadline, deal with this difficult person — anything that requires endurance and will power.

But don't think there's a lot of skill involved. Really, long-distance running is as much a mental exercise as anything. If you've got the time to commit to training and the desire to finish, you can do it.

The lack of desire was what did me in about six years ago. My first couple marathons brought that sheer satisfaction from finishing 26.2 miles. Then Pam and Patrice trained with me to run Cleveland and qualify for Boston. It was tough training through an Ohio winter with a qualifying time hanging over my head, but those two, and my long-time friend Dee, just seemed to pull me along in their wake, they're such strong athletes. Running Boston the next year was all a celebration, two days before I turned 40.

A few years later, those pals decided to run Nashville. I went so I wouldn't feel like a has-been. By mile 17, though, I would have paid anyone to drive me in. I had no love of the challenge, no good reason I could think to keep plugging along. All I wanted to do was to sit down, stop.

So here I am, at 49, trying to do the Boston qualifying thing again and sometimes wondering why, as Dena voiced at Salem Lake. I guess I still don't want to be a has-been. Boston, next April, falls exactly on my 50th birthday -- talk about celebration. But what I quickly discovered, a month or so ago, is how much I've slowed down in the last few years. I can't take a four-hour marathon for granted, where 10 years ago it would have been a walk in the park. So I'm fretting and scheming and yes, the hamstrings throb. And sometimes I even admit, not as publicly as Dena, that I don't really want to be doing this.

Then I go home, have a good shower and a cup of coffee and come to my senses. Or not.

Return to the Blogosphere

2009-08-23T05:42:00.000-07:00

Going to see the movie, Julie and Julia, about the young blogger who chronicled her year of cooking her way through Julia Child's cookbook, made me wrestle with the concept of blogs. On one hand, these public journals epitomize self-absorption, and millions of these things litter the Internet. On the other hand, the form encourages practice, the daily exercise of writing, and it offers the potential for a writer and readers to interact like we've never seen before.

Obviously, the pros won out. We writers love metaphor and symbolism -- and not writing in a vacuum. It's all here in blogging. The practice of entering a post mirrors the other discipline I'm attempting -- training for a November marathon to qualify for the Boston Marathon. And I love to gather a community. I take great comfort in learning I'm not the only runner struggling with getting slower after years of taking my ability for granted. And I love meeting others, women especially, who look at their imminent empty nest (my kids are 18 and 17) as a sign that they can attempt to do something new now, to put all that energy that went into raising kids into another constructive undertaking.

So here we are. I've got about nine weeks until the Outer Banks marathon on Nov. 8. I've just sent my oldest back to Pittsburgh for her sophomore year at college, and her little brother starts his senior year of high school on Tuesday. My husband, a college professor, starts his classes tomorrow. Order returns to our world; it's a fine time to start this practice again.