Rocking, Rolling, Running, & Curing

This weekend I plan to run my first ever half-marathon. I've been training for the past ten weeks with a running group here in Davis. Grad school started this week, as did my new job, and somehow this race has crept up on me. I will be running on the same day as the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes, which is no small coincidence. In these last few days before the event, I can't help thinking what a tremendous symbol this has all become.

Running has always been my catharsis, my time to zone out and turn off my brain, to challenge my body while nobody else is looking. There's no way to be "good" at running; the most successful runners I've met are the ones with a keen understanding of how to push themselves, and when it is appropriate to. I'm still working on that second part.

When I run in a group, I sense gears shifting in my body, and suddenly there is something to prove. The person just in front of me becomes the person I most desperately want to beat, and once I beat them, there is always someone else. I run with a little fanny pack with my blood sugar monitor, insulin pump, and three or four packs of GU. The part of the run I relish the most happens after we're all done, after the other runners have stopped to chat or refill their water bottles, when I sit down and whip out my glucose monitor to test my sugar. I take great pride -- probably (definitely) more pride than I truly deserve -- in watching the recognition register on someone else's face that, holy shit, she beat me, AND she's diabetic?

Hell yeah.

I might be feeling differently on Sunday afternoon, after 13.1 miles in this late summer heat. But no matter what, I can't wait for that feeling of satisfaction that I will have done something I've never done before, and done it on a day when my team and I are committed to finding a cure.

Running Through Yellow

This might be an unpopular opinion but I love Daylight Savings.

I went running today after work and the sunlight was that shade of yellow that seems like it should be reserved for childhood photographs. The best color in the world to run through. It makes you fast, shimmery, like a little fox darting through intersections, neighborhoods, sunsets. Tonight I made it up through Diamond Heights, further than I had anticipated, but I swear I could feel the endorphins shoot straight from my legs up to my ears.

And then, somehow, I found myself atop one of the steepest hills in San Francisco--one I'd only driven up before. When I first moved here, I was wary of running on city streets, much less scaling these hills, but now--now the hills are all fear and desire mixed in concrete and dizzying height. Now I love running and biking those hills. I love them in the way that when I run up them, I am forced to slow down, to concentrate on the minute movements of each muscle. Speed is secondary to simply moving, doing. And the slaps that my feet make on the way down--bad for the knees, yes, but every third or fourth step I indulge just to hear the concrete respond. To let the earth know that I'm here, not just standing on it, but running down it. And few things are more exhilarating.

All that said, I'll probably hate Daylight Savings when I get up in six hours.

Thanks for the Legs, Dad

The day started at 6:30 am.

In a fun, adult role-reversal, I had my parents over last night so I could finagle my father into a 10k run in Golden Gate Park today. The three of us slept in my V-shaped attic room and crashed down the stairs early to make chicken-apple sausages before the race. I wasn't expecting it to be such a clear day--it hardly feels like winter.

We got to 8th and Lincoln by 8:10. The race started adjacent to the recently renovated Academy of Sciences. Dad and I jogged straight to the starting line just as the announcer was winding down. We were told to line up according to our approximate mile splits.

"We can do 8:30," Dad said.

He's a seasoned runner, and my favorite running partner. We did the Bay to Breakers this year (my longest race, and my first B2B), plus a number of 10ks and a few Turkey Trots back in my hometown. This is the man who woke up with me four days a week to jog around the village green when I was an insecure eighth-grader, the same one who followed our racing shells after regattas to make sure my rowing team and I made it in okay off the Sacramento River. He's got a ponytail and usually runs in board shorts.

"Let's start at 9," I suggested. "We can always up it as we go."

The start was anticlimactic, as every race start is, requiring us to jog in place for a few minutes until the elite runners (I've always hated that word) left a clear spot for us to follow. The sunlight was clear, yellow; autumn light. We circled the 7th and Lincoln baseball field, the one where I've taken Kaplan Aspect soccer clubs, and looped out MLK drive all the way to the Panhandle.

Here's the reason I like to run with my father: because we are built the same, mostly legs and arms with long-twitch muscles that don't make us particularly fast, but do make us goddamn stubborn. Many times when we run together, there's no time or distance goal, but rather a personal challenge, usually involving an unknown fellow runner.

"See the guy with the obnoxious red-white-and-blue shirt? Yeah, the one about 100 yards ahead? We're gonna pass him. Now."

My dad is strong and powerful, and he had to take a brief hiatus from running this summer because of some particularly unruly vertebrae in his back. I signed us both up for the 10k a few weeks ago, somehow forgetting the 8 weeks this summer he spent off the track. And yet, today he was just as strong and determined--if not more so--than ever.

The real reason I am writing about running tonight is because it mirrors what I am thankful for. Quiet mornings with my family. Being outside. Functioning limbs. That sensation after exercise when one feels absolutely able-bodied. Whatever chemistry it is that brings friends together inside and outside, at all times of the year.

Dad and I both completed the 10k in good time, after cruising up above the Conservatory of Flowers and around Stow Lake. Mom was waiting for us at the finish line with our border collie Taj, and there was music, water, and goodies waiting for us between the de Young and the Academy of Science.

We weren't the fastest runners, nor were we the slowest. But we were the most goddamned stubborn. And thank goodness for that.