I remember training for the race several days a week that fall, the sun just up, the crisp Northern Ontario mornings biting into lungs and legs as a handful of classmates and I plodded through Jack pine forests and through frozen wetlands. Some mornings in the shower after those runs our legs bled where blades of grass like razors had left their mark.
I finished in the middle of the pack for that race, both on my team, and for the event.
The next race I competed in with this past June. Time lapse: twenty seven years, give or take a year.
It was the Mount Doug Gut Buster. A hot June day, the race was on my home turf, a hill I’ve run over at least five hundred times since moving to Victoria a few years ago. At eleven kilometers, with three accents and descents of the bulbous dome, it was a grind, and the heat left me sapped. I came in sixty ninth of one hundred and twenty runners.
Middle of the pack again.
I can’t say that the Mount Doug race was fun while I was running it. It was hard. I remember that while dragging myself along the back stretch, through dark trees towards the finish, someone said to me “pick it up!” She told me saying that was easier than passing me, which she eventually did. I simply couldn’t run any faster. I passed out that afternoon while my two sons bounced on me.
Over the weekend I ran in my fourth race ever, my third of the season. (I ran the Royal Victoria 8K in October as a last minute “something-to-do-on-a-Sunday” sort of thing.)
This past weekend was the Gunner Shaw Classic Cross Country Race at Thetis Lake. The location is another favorite place of mine to run, with winding trails that zig zag up oak dotted hills and down through dark, lichen strewn woods. The Gunner Shaw has a reputation as being a bit of a tough race with a rather unnecessary, but interesting, splash through a thigh deep swamp at its mid point. This plunge, aside from reeking of fetid algae, provides the added bonus of turning the legs into blocks of cement.
The final dash to the finish is through the foreshore of the Thetis Lake beach, which starts out at nearly crotch depth, and ends calf deep. Some sprint to the finish. Several people took a dive.
I finished in the middle of the pack – 205th of 460 - running the 9km race in 45 minutes. Josh reminded me that the Gunner Shaw attracts a pretty tough field: there were several Olympic athletes in the race. It was won in just over 30 minutes.
I was grumpy all afternoon, failing, I think, to properly dehydrate and replenish the system afterwards. Instead I jumped right back into single parenting.
My grouchy state was also because I didn’t feel I ran as well as I might have. I felt drained of energy before I even got started!
While running I kept pulling myself back to the here and the now, repeating over and over: “Where am I? Right here. What time is it? Right now. What am I? This moment.” But inevitably, as the weariness crept in, my mind drifted.
I forgot that I was running in a favorite place. I forgot that when I get tired while running I try to pull energy in from the rocks, the trees, and the water. I take what I can get. Instead I just tried to concentrate on being nice to people. I'm really not much of a competator: when I hear someone coming up behind me (often) I make sure they have room to pass and tell them they're doing great as they go by. Its about the phun.
On Sunday the boyz and I ventured out to Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site. Only a few minutes from town, we’d never been. Silas is obsessed with Lighthouses’ these days, though I don’t know that he’s ever seen anything larger than a navigation buoy. Fisgard was the first lighthouse built on Canada’s west coast, and was operational for 100 years unitl the mid 1950s. Its on the same site is Fort Rodd Hill Naitonal Historic Site, which served as part of the defensive system for the Esquimalt Naval Base through World War Two. It’s a pretty cool place for two little boys and their dad to spend an afternoon.
We visited the Lighthouse, which was lovely and immaculate and well presented by Parks Canada, and the boys dutifully posed for a picture, and I think Silas’ was pretty impressed. But all Rio wanted to do was go to the beach, which is hard for me to argue with, so we did.
There I cracked open a thermos of tea (I did wish that it was hot chocolate and Irish Cream for a moment) while Silas collected shells and Rio raced back and forth along the shore.His running was so completely free. He would stand on a log along the tide line and as the small waves washed over the gravel, he would launch himself along the beach, jumping and laughing as he always does when we are at the sea shore. Its one of the things I love most about this dear, beautiful child, and there are many, many things I love.
When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he was doing? “Racing waves,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“What for?”
“Its for my exercises,” he said.
“Is it fun?”
He simply nodded.
“Do you ever win?” I asked.
“I always win,” he said, his pants wet to his knees, his boots sloshing with salt water.
And off he ran again.
I can’t wait until he and I run together through the woods. And we won’t be racing the clock, or each other, but simply racing for life, racing the trees that blur past, racing the waves, racing the spinning earth. At East Sooke Park we’ve run along the sandy foreshore for hours, jumping logs and dodging boulders and getting our feet soaked and laughing like fools. It’s the purest expression of running I know. Its freedom incarnate. Its joy. Its bliss.
We take a break from running for a snack. Rio finds a rock that he brings to my attention. I asked the boyz to find something beautiful that we can bring to Jenn, whom I love deeply and profoundly, and who will arrive in Victoria in a few short days. We always try to find something beautiful for her when she isn’t here. Beach glass, heart shaped stones, something lost overboard far out to sea. Today it’s a lovely russet coloured rock with green stripes. We take a picture of us with it to send to her.
What I found that was beautiful on that beach that day was a reminder of why I run. I’ve only recently enjoyed (the aftermath of) racing. For much of the last few years running has simply been the way I dissolve myself into the splendor of nature; to feel with my body the reality that I am nothing more than nature moving through itself. To let my heart and head have some time to do their work without my constant intrusions; to let my body do what comes most naturally – be completely free.
