The Long Road Upwinding Ahead

Today is a new day.  It is Day One - the first day of a sixteen-week marathon-training plan.  It is always a little intimidating embarking on a journey like this, especially as I discover with amazement that I keep sliding into older and older age groups.  But it was a beautiful day and my plan on Day One called for six miles of "hills," so I chose Big Bearpen Mountain and Sunset Rocks.  Running up mountains is an appropriate way to begin, because training for a marathon is a gradual process, moving forward and upward step by step, climbing to the summit of fitness, the acme of preparation, until I can stand on the starting line and say, "I have done all that I could do, and it is enough."  So I climbed slowly and easily, feeling the strength in my legs, the cool morning breeze, watching the long road upwinding ahead through the green rhododendron, until finally I stood at the very summit and stopped and gave thanks (and stretched my tight hamstring), gazing out at Satulah Mountain and Whiteside.

It was an auspicious day.  Before I even got onto the lower slopes of Bearpen, I ran through Highlands Manor and talked to the owner of that big white Irish wolfhound, Czar (shouldn't it be an Irish name, though?).  His little helmeted son rode his training-wheeled bike beside me, legs furiously turning, asking me if this was my "first loop."  And then he asked, "Are you running, or jogging?"  Admittedly, it might have been hard to tell the difference at that point.  But this is a new day, the beginning of a plan, and I am a firm believer in planning your run and running your plan.  So I am no longer just running, and certainly not merely jogging - I am in training!  And that is a very satisfying feeling:  to focus once again on that distant goal, to become a little leaner, a little more disciplined, a little less likely to eat that brownie at the Roadrunners Club picnic.

I always feel as if I am on the edge of the miraculous when I embark on this adventure, because, truly, for an ordinary person like myself to run his 18th marathon at the age of 63 is the height of incautious behavior.  Only a miracle will get me to the finish line.  But perhaps that is why we try it again and again:  because we want to be part of the miracle, to dig deep and dip into those deep wells of the miraculous.

And another miracle happened today.  I had stopped to talk to Vicki Heller at the beginning of my run, and she asked me if there had been any bear sightings recently.  Vicki achieved notoriety in the pages of our newsletter recently for famously encountering a bear on Big Bearpen Mountain and shouting to it to "Go Home!"  I told her that no bears had been seen in the past couple of weeks except on Fred Motz's deck, but that if I saw one I would command it to go home.  As I circled the loop at the top and started down, I was thinking to myself, “I am going to be running Big Bearpen a lot this summer and it is only a matter of time before I do encounter another bear,” and - I swear this is true! - at that very moment I came around a curve and there was a large black bear standing in the road less than 50 feet in front of me.  He turned and looked at me, and began unhurriedly to walk away down the middle of the road.  He did not look like any of the three bears photographed recently onFred's deck, or a cartoonish Yogi carrying a swiped picnic basket.  Instead, he was decidedly lean and lanky, sauntering away from the trash can he had just opened for breakfast.  I stopped in the road and watched from a safe distance,  and then I clapped my hands, hollered “Hey,” and then laughed and shouted, “Go home, Bear!”  He looked over his shoulder at me with a kind of  insolent smirk, then slouched down a driveway and out of sight.  What a miraculous sight!

The journey begins . . .