Eugene in May is sunny until nearly nine, so my Sunday run was an evening bridge-to-bridge hour followed by half an hour on the bike to nowhere. After an hour and a half of constant motion, things were going just fine - which I find very encouraging. My knee gets a little tight these days, but it doesn’t hurt, and the stretching and icing seems to be keeping it under control. But then my run yesterday was 40 breathless minutes. And I wish I understood this.

I’m sure my bad runs correspond to something – sleep, hydration, nutrition, weather – but I sure can’t figure out what. And I wish I could, because I really don’t want marathon day to be a bad run day.

This week has had its share of marathon angst. Part came when I revisited the Beginner’s Guide to Running book that has been gathering bedside dust since February when I bought it, read about nutrition, and put it aside. Turns out there’s all kinds of good advice in there about things like core strength, which I don’t have. And now with three weeks to go it’s not such useful information. But I’m annoyed that I didn’t know to do these things sooner – the stretching and the weights and the exercises – and I guess if you’re a runner it’s obvious, but I didn’t know and my TnT coach didn’t mention it. And I think about how much stronger I could be and how much more ready I would feel, and ugh.

Also I read about the Anchorage course. It’s hilly. It’s hilly, and there aren’t many spectators, and miles of it in the middle are through quiet woods. Now back in January before I’d ever run anywhere this sounded beautiful and peaceful and scenic, but what I’ve learned about myself since then is that scenery does not motivate me. Though I’m excited to see Alaska, marathon-wise I think I’d do quite a bit better at one of the Rock n’ Roll marathons where every mile brings a new band. The other day I ran past a few guys jamming in the park and just that thirty seconds of music picked up my pace and my mood. So after putting it off all this time, I’m now planning to get an mp3 player for race day. It feels lame, but if it helps me finish, it can’t be such a bad idea.

So there’s me with eighteen days to go. Eck.

I just mopped the floor, three times. I’m not a mopper. But when I dragged myself out of bed this morning at 11 there was a quarter inch of mud in the kitchen, producing tentacalling mud trails through the living room to the front door and the bathroom and my bedroom, which last night was a coat room. We had a pretty rocking party.

This latest fundraising effort was born last month when Julie, Talley, Melissa, Adrienne and I were having margaritas. The idea of a keg party came up. A keg party in our backyard to capitalize on the newly nice weather. Something with a theme. We discussed the potential of pirates, luaus, and barbeques, until Talley came up with the brilliantly transparent Sex Sells.

It seemed impossibly easy. As Ty put it, “Guys show up for tits and ass.” And when Eugene’s six months of rain finally end, girls are happy to oblige.

Talley and John got the keg of Terrapin. Julie promoted endlessly and recruited Kevin to DJ. Melissa and I hit the dollar store for Blow Pops and Ring Pops and candy necklaces and all manner of other vaguely sinister edibles. We shrouded the washer/dryer in purple velvet.
The main obstacles were Memorial Day Weekend traveling, and a rival party thrown by some architecture students. Surprisingly the rain worked in our favor on the first count, as camping plans were cancelled. The archies were another matter. We called to see if they would throw their partygoers our way later in the evening. They mocked our beer charge and explained that the architects would be staying at the architecture party, not wasting time at the landscape architecture party. Granted, this probably had less to do with actual assholeness than with one of the hosts lusting unsuccessfully after Melissa a few months ago, but whatever. For the record: You Guys Suck.

Happily, our friends turned out in style, and brought their friends with them. Girls in boas and guys in leather filled our dance floor. Lemon drops were downed. Malibu was sipped. Julie sold raffle tickets out of her bra - the only thing she was wearing besides a trench coat and heels. Newlyweds Sarah and Hans sported three flavors of animal print between them. John tangoed. A cowboy hat made rounds.

Amidst the general debauchery, there was crazy support and cheering for the running and for the cause. I heard more about the marathon Sarah ran in Kenya. I met Molly, who did an event with Team in Training in San Francisco - her dad passed away from leukemia. I talked with Drew about the cross-country bike ride he is planning for this summer. He wants to get corporate sponsors and raise $25,000 for cancer research. These are the people I have been crossing paths with via my asinine decision back in January.

Kevin spun until four in the morning. For the last half hour it was just him, me, Melissa, and a couple of our good friends, and he kept going anyway. The six of us danced around to the blaring music in the big empty room. We pulled out Talley’s birthday carrot cake, Julie fell asleep on the sofa, and we called it a night. I went to bed as the sky got light. Wahoo.

Last night the Kitchen Synchopators played at Sam Bond’s, and I danced to their ragtime jug band fantasticness until two in the morning. It was the kind of show and the kind of crowd where you strike up constant conversations with the guys in straw hats and the girls in crinoline skirts, and one of them named Billy told Julie and I to catch Hot Buttered Rum closing the Eugene Folk Festival today. So at four in the afternoon the clouds parted just long enough for us to hop around in one of those tie-dyed tattooed patchouli-smelling Eugene crowds for an hour of pretty sweet bluegrass. The only downside to all this merriment being that my right knee aches something fierce, and so for the first time I am ignoring The Schedule, which told me to do an extra long workout today, and instead I am making a PowerPoint for my thesis presentation and hoping for the best.

So what was there waiting in the rack when I went to the machine room yesterday?

Backpacker magazine's gear of the year issue.

There was a full color spread on headlamps.


I pull up, lights turn green. Shit.

My horoscope this week ended with this warning: You should watch for unexpected changes caused by the healthy improvements you've made in your life. I'm not saying the changes will necessarily be bad, just that you should be alert for results you didn't foresee.

Changes I started noticing, once advised to do so, include: (1) better posture (2) doing more laundry (3) regular upwellings of annoyance when I return home at one a.m. and realize I have to do leg lifts and (4) higher levels of general fidgetiness. But most alarming of all is (5) unwanted awareness of current fashion trends and lives of the stars. This last arising, of course, from the selection of reading material available in the campus workout room.

Since my long runs were curtailed I abandoned the acquisition of an mp3 player. I may yet revisit this, but for the moment I’m happily unheadphoned. I’m fine for my now-short runs. But I just can’t cope with the startling monotony of the elliptical machine. In the absence of music – and because the print of my own books is too small to read while bobbing up and down in place – I read whatever the fitness room magazine rack has to offer. And what it usually has to offer is a crushingly vapid selection of photo-heavy mags with embarrassingly vain single-word titles. People. Glamour. US. Shape. Self.

I find myself being reluctantly up-to-date on who is dating whom in Hollywood, and what freakish names they have given their children and pets. I have been briefed on the unfortunate stylishness this season of the shirtdress, the round-toed shoe, the gaucho pant, and the color white. These sorts of things were of no interest to me whatsoever when I lived in New York City, and they certainly do me no good in Eugene. Couldn’t someone do a big glossy spread about headlamps?

But there it is. The pictures are numerous and the text is large and now I know that pulling the frosting off my cupcake will save me eighty calories. As if anyone subscribing to this magazine would be caught dead with a cupcake, and as if I’d ever waste something as tasty as frosting.

So the marathon is five weeks from yesterday. And yesterday my teammates ran about twenty miles, and I did not. I sat in the sun selling miscellaneous goods, and then I biked and climbed in place for forty-five minutes.

This was making me a bit worried, this gross deviation from the standard marathon training program. You know, the one that involves a lot of running. But Dave consulted his friend Viet and they put together a new training program for me – one that will get my body ready without wrecking my knee. I carry The Schedule with me at all times. The Schedule begins with Dave’s cheery explanation, “You’re pretty much going to be working more and harder, but you’re going to be running less.”

The Schedule has a workout for me for every single day until the marathon. Actually each day has three to four workouts. Two of these per day are endless sets of leg lifts, which it turns out I have been doing wrong up to this point and which are, in fact, far more uncomfortable and exhausting than my wrong ones. The third workout, and fourth on some days, is running and/or biking and/or the elliptical. Each workout is followed by extended specific stretching, which I like, and then by icing, which by Dave’s decree is the only thing I am allowed to do while reading.

So there it is. Five more weeks. I am trying not to cheat and I am trying not to hate the elliptical machine and I am trying to be thankful that at least I am a graduate student, so I won’t get fired for spending nearly three hours a day obsessing over my leg muscles. And today I ran for half an hour, past the purple blooming Empress trees and the foul-smelling photinia and the baseball-sized Saturn of Eugene’s model solar system, and it all felt pretty good.

This marathon involves several things I am bad at. The first and most obvious is running. The second is fundraising.

Team in Training works this way: event participants agree to raise a certain amount of money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and TnT handles the race logistics and matches the participants with each other and with a coach. Once my knee went bad, I pretty much abandoned the team and the coach – I had my own special limpy-appropriate schedule, and anyway I don’t see any reason why runners feel obligated to put in their miles bright and early on Saturday mornings. But I stuck with the organization because they really do great work, and I like the kind of model they follow where everyone contributes something they can – coaching, running, cash, morale – and in the end this adds up to big meaningful things that just wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise. I am not the rah rah teamwork type. I am the let me just do this myself type, or the why don’t you just do that already type, and I generally don’t go in for the nonhierarchical consensus based project style. But in this rare case I am a fan. Rah, rah.

So my end of this, in addition to a crazy amount of running-related activity that I will describe in a subsequent post, is raising nearly $4500. This is difficult for two main reasons: (1) me, and (2) everyone I know.

(1) There are many things I like doing, and there are many things I don’t like doing but can suck up and do anyway. Asking for things from people I don’t know is neither. We are encouraged by TnT to approach businesses with requests for donations or services or percentages of their earnings, and forget it. Schmoozing and working connections is not my thing. The good work of the world could not be accomplished without it, but that is why nonprofits have development directors. And I would sooner run a marathona month than be one. Which means in my fundraising, I initially approached people I know. Which leads to

(2) I know a lot of people. Amazing, inspiring, fabulous people. To get an idea of them, pick at least one item from this list:

artist

musician

writer

grad student

four years of college loans

and one item from this list:

just bought a house

about to buy a house

just got married

about to get married

just had a kid

about to have a kid

just started a business

about to start a business

and then you will get a sense of who I know. And knowing this, you would be *astounded* by how generous they have been for this bizarre undertaking of mine. And that generosity – along with some equally overwhelming generosity from my parents and my friend’s parents and a few people I don’t even know – got us about 40% of the way there.

And so the next 60% looms, and I just don’t need looming right now, what with the graduating and the new internship and the general chaos and the running all the time. So I am chipping away at it. There was the first garage sale, which for all its agony at least brought in $150. And then there was a trip to the store that buys clothes, $15, and the store that buys books, $60. And soon there will be a big party, which much more will be written about.

But today there was a second garage sale, this time in my friend Warren’s driveway and not in the parking lot of a big box store, and it brought a much more cheerful and supportive $200. I’m still sunburned and exhausted like last time, but far less bitter. This time people gave me five dollar bills for three dollar items and refused change. And one couple saw my sign and came to ask me about lymphoma, because their friend had been diagnosed two days before, and she didn’t know what it was or where to go. And I told them about the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s website. And they bought a calligraphy set.

But no one has yet bought the Star Trek engineer costume. Let’s overlook the fact that I can identify the particular ranking of Star Trek officer to which this uniform would belong, and just say that I guess I’ll have to have another sale.

I just spent three days in Phoenix for the wedding of my friend Matt’s sister. We stayed at a “resort hotel.” I have stayed at nice hotels but never at a resort hotel, and it was a little insane. But I have to say that in the midst of an expansive golf course and about ten swimming pools and various arrangements of cacti, the highlight for me was the workout room. And no, I am not turning into some sort of gym freak, and I still like the outdoors better than the indoors. But damn, it was nice. If I had access to this kind of workout room (and access to some sort of time machine) I would happily work out two hours a day.

The first attraction was the shiny sleek smooth equipment. As I’ve said I like the big robot machines, but all these machines felt friendly and sturdy and… svelte. The weights rose and fell with appropriately muscular steadiness and control, and all in near silence. Small simple diagrams highlighted target muscle groups. Though I’m barred from leg machines there were five upper body machines to keep me busy.

What with the Phoenix heat and my nagging knee, ellipticals and treadmill sessions replaced my runs. Though I am exceptionally good at amusing myself – a legacy of only-childhood that allows me to keep entertained in an empty room for hours at a time – ellipticals and treadmills challenge even my high threshold for boredom. But these ellipticals and treadmills had large display screens that not only provided detailed information about speed, incline, resistance, heart rate, calories burned, and other workout minutiae, but also doubled as televisions. Televisions with Full Resort Cable. So I ran towards Nicole Kidman for an hour.

In addition to being sexy and entertaining, the workout room was full of small amenities. The machines each had a crisp clean white workout towel rolled and waiting. A table in the back had extra sets of headphones, and a tower of wet washcloths, and a cooler full of ice water. Ice water with sliced limes. Suddenly I have less awe for the toned physique of stars like Madonna. I mean, we’d all be a lot more kickass if it came with iced lime water.

Today I am all limpy again. This time, though, I’m not panicking about it and throwing my arms up in the air. The first time athletic injury happens it is big and mysterious and scary. But after that it seems ordinary and manageable, and you forget how it used to be big and mysterious and scary. And I think this is why the first time it happened to me, the majority of my nonathletic friends (and I) assumed my running was finished while the majority of my athletic friends thought I should calm down and deal. Which, essentially, was true. Happily this time I am calm and dealing.

So getting back to limpy: I had a daily routine this week of half an hour on the elliptical and lots of stretching and leg lifts and fifteen minutes of running, followed by icing. Talley and I have been going to the gym together for the ellipticals, and the first time we went we had fifteen minutes to kill before machines were available and we ended up in the secret weight room.

The secret weight room is not really secret so much as secondary, small and tucked away behind the climbing wall. Most people choose the big flashy weight room with giant windows and even bigger mirrors, where there is grunting and posing and staring. In the secret weight room no one cares if you spend a few minutes adjusting the seat and reading instructions on the sides of the elaborate machines, and more often than not the weights are already set to fifty pounds instead of two hundred.

I love the secret weight room because I love weight machines. I love their big bulky robot forms, like people imagined the future a hundred years ago. I love their precision, the way two tons of pulleys and iron mechanically conspires for the sole purpose of toning one single muscle group in your forearm. I love doing three reps of ten, when the third set takes all my concentration and willpower and I have to count practically out loud after six.

So I started going to the secret weight room every day after the ellipticals, and alas, this was unwise. Specifically, my enthusiasm for the machine where you sit with your legs at ninety degrees to a big metal plate and push back to near-standing was unwise. Because apparently this machine puts stress on knees, and my knees would prefer a break from stress right now. So today, limpy. Lesson learned.

It wasn’t long or glorious, but I ran yesterday. Not even two miles. Sort of a trial run. I ran down to the river and the park was full of people and I ran into Lindsay on her bike, and my breathing was all heavy and sloppy like when I first started all this, and after ten minutes my body felt tired and uncoordinated like when I first started all this, but I didn’t really want to stop. It was sunny and warm and I wanted to do the 3.5 mile bridge-to-bridge loop but I didn’t, cause Dave said One Or Two Miles Only. So I got to the riverbank where the kids feed the ducks, not even as far as Skinner Butte, and I turned around.

And I came back home and stretched and iced, and a little later I took some ibuprofen which I’m not sure I was supposed to do. But it doesn’t hurt today. So I guess I’m ready for trial number two.

How I’m going to get from not even two miles to twenty six point two miles in less than seven weeks is a thing I’m choosing not to think about.

letters from foreign countries in the mail this morning: two.
small beet plants in the new raised bed out back: six.
temperature outside: eighty.
minutes since i handed in the final draft of my thesis: five.

wahoo!