The Breakup

I hate this post. I’ve tried to write it no fewer than four times. Here’s number five—hopefully the last.

I fired my coach.

There. I said it. Now you know.

Not that I’ve been keeping it a secret, but it feels like a secret. It feels like I did something wrong. Even though I know it wasn’t wrong, it was right . . . and absolutely necessary.

Damn, though, it was hard. It still is.

I’ve never broken up with anyone before. Not a coach, not a boyfriend, no one. So while I’ve watched others do it numerous times, I have never had to experience the process myself: the anger, the sorrow, the paralyzing indecision.

There were just so many factors.

There was the fact that I knew J, my coach, was going through a number of life upheavals, between quitting his job and then moving across the country to a place where he knew virtually no one. I’ve made that move myself. I know how jarring and lonely it can be. Then, there was the fact that I felt frustrated—furious, really—at my own inability to perform: something that, coach or no coach, I knew was still up to me at the end of the day. And finally, there was the fact that J has brought me farther than I ever, in my wildest dreams, imagined I’d come.

Four years ago, I was a 3:21 marathoner. I did no speedwork, took virtually no rest days, had never eaten a Gu, and thought that running around a track sounded “boring and torturous.” Then I met J, who, after meeting me twice and IMing me a handful more times, said to me one day, “I could help you shave six minutes off your half marathon time.” Um, yeah right, I thought at the time, 6 minutes off of 1:30? I doubt it. But I was intrigued, and eventually I decided why not? I could try this coaching thing, and if I hated it, I could just quit.

Fast forward to 2016, the best racing year of my life. I PRed every single distance I raced, from the 5k all the way through the marathon. I broke the tape at my first race ever. And that six-minute promise he made? Well, I’ve dropped that and some, running under 1:20 in May.

That kind of progress is impossible to ignore, and even harder to walk away from. We had a track record together, a proven track record, and there is no chance—I repeat, no chance—that I could have dropped even a fraction of that time on my own.

And yet, coming into 2017, things were just not working. An absence I had felt vaguely throughout the last year became even more pronounced when he moved hundreds of miles away, and no matter how hard I tried to upend the pattern, we just seemed to be going in circles. Running was feeling worse and worse, and I was starting to wonder if this was the end of the road for me. Maybe 2016 was it. Maybe this big dream I had decided on, of chasing an even faster marathon time, was foolish. Maybe I didn’t really want it.

But I did. Deep inside, where we keep the truth protected from everyone and everything, even from ourselves, I did want it. I just didn’t know how to go after it.

I was stuck, and something had to change.

So I wrote, and I thought, and I wrote some more. Hesitantly, I reached out to runners I respected, and talked with coaches who were (and were not) willing to take me on. Eventually, I found someone—a new “J” in fact—who seemed like a good fit. He was local, coached only a handful of athletes, and had very definite, very different ideas about how to train. It wasn’t until we were sitting across each other and I was listening to him describe those ideas that I realized what I really wanted was a complete change. If I was going to make a change, I wanted to go all the way and change not just the coach, but the whole philosophy, too.

So finally, I did it: I had the hard conversation with J1 in person, when he was in town, and the next week I started paying J2. I have no idea if J2 was the “right” coach to choose or not—time will bear that out. But what I do know is that within a week or two, I already felt better. And, no surprise, I’m already running better again, too.

To speak in metaphors, when I look over my shoulder, the path behind me looks unimaginably long . . . it seems impossible that I could have covered such a distance. When I look ahead, I can’t see where this road goes, whether it climbs uphill or swoops down, whether it twists or turns or just keeps going on for endless, endless miles. I can’t see the finish line, but I’m not looking for that yet. Right now, I’m focused on a spot, a few yards ahead, where I can still see the seams in the pavement. I have a plan to get there, and I am going to focus on executing that plan. This is how I will proceed: a few yards at a time, little by little, step by step. Baby steps. But they’re still steps. And they’re moving me forward—exactly where I want to go.

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Review: Lazarus is Dead

Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most unique books I have read in a long, long time.

Beard examines the story of Lazarus through a novel, inherently a work of fiction, yet he weaves historical asides throughout the book that paint an even more compelling, almost "convincing" picture of this man who was said to be Jesus' only friend. Lazarus is presented to us as both a character in a story and a man who was once alive on this earth, someone who is intimately knowable through Beard's imagination but also inherently unknowable because so few records of his life are available to us.

As someone who was raised Presbyterian and attended Catholic grade school, I always saw Lazarus as "just one more" of Jesus' miracles. He was just another chapter in the life of Jesus, no more or less important than the other chapters we learned about. And yet Beard raises (and answers, in his own creative way) questions that never occurred to me: why did Jesus choose to raise Lazarus, of all people, from the dead? Why was Lazarus dead in the first place? And what happened to Lazarus after he was brought back? How could any of us live our lives again, after coming back to life?

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Review: The Troop

The Troop by Nick Cutter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Terrifying. Grotesque. It's been a long time since I read a horror novel, but The Troop reminded me why I have such a love-hate relationship with this genre. I love that a good horror novel can create such a strong emotional reaction, but at the same time I have to wonder why I'm putting myself through this torture voluntarily. I was sincerely afraid I'd have nightmares from reading this book!

Let me start with a trigger warning: if you have vermiphobia, do not read this book. However, if you don't know what vermiphobia is, then you're probably safe (or as safe as anyone who voluntarily reads horror novels can feel), so go ahead and turn the page.

Imagine a horror-infused Lord of the Flies with a little bit of modern science thrown in, and you'll have this book's essence in a nutshell.

The setup: a scoutmaster and his five Eagle Scouts have been dropped off on a small island in Canada for a 3-day wilderness excursion

The plot twist: a very ill man arrives on the island . . . and his infection spreads

The horror: (don’t worry, this is revealed extremely early on in the book, so not a spoiler) genetically modified tapeworms

What I love most about this book is the way the boys’ characters are all so distinct and their interactions play out so realistically, despite the impossibilities of the story itself. In fact, the most horrific part of the book might not actually be the tapeworms, as grotesque and scary as they were; the most horrific part of the book was the horrific things humans are able to each other in the name of science and survival.

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Review: The Girl on the Fridge

The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What incredibly short stories! Oftentimes a few paragraphs long, or a few pages at most, these stories were extremely quick, which was a nice way to experience reading: I could sit down, zip through a few, and set the book aside with zero stress.

However, perhaps due to their brevity or maybe something else, I was often left feeling frustrated. Where was the story? These seemed to be more snapshots, introductions to interesting situations or ideas, but rarely anything that felt like a full and complete story. This is a problem I find myself facing with many short story collections, where the "stories" feel more like character sketches or introductions to full stories that then fail to materialize. So in many ways, this collection was just one more that left me unfulfilled.

Yet I cannot say I did not enjoy it at all. The ideas and characters and situations Keret presents are fresh and unique. The stories cohere in a vague way that I might only identify by rereading the book in its entirety, but they always felt like they belonged in this collection, no matter how banal or bizarre. So the next time I have novel fatigue, I just might pick up another collection by Keret. Because sometimes, freshness and brevity is worth a little frustration.

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On Failing

Here is what failing feels like: it feels like two lead vices clamping around your legs as you fight to keep them in motion. It feels like dread, in that moment right before you look down at your watch. It feels like sliding backward down a hill that has no end. It tastes like metal. Looks like darkness. Sounds like silence, where there should be the deep, tremendous roar of will.

I’m running. And I’m failing. And I don’t have any answers.

Before I sound too self-pitying, I should point out that by many people’s estimations, I’m not failing. In fact, if you look at the “official record” of what I’ve done so far in 2017, you might say I’m succeeding. I’ve run a handful of races and placed reasonably well; I’ve even won a few. But is winning the same as succeeding?

Depends on your definition of success.

If I show up to a race and the only women there are at my fitness level, with my experience, then yes: I want to win. But there are plenty of women out there who are fitter, tougher, more talented, and harder-working than I am. If they show up, I will not win.

And frankly, I don’t care.

What I care about is, when the race is neck-and-neck and it comes down to who can dig deeper in those last miles, or moments, or seconds, that I don’t let up. I don’t care if my name is rendered in lights or entirely forgotten. I don’t need an extra medal, or a trophy, or a podium, as nice as all of those things are. What I need is to know that, when it comes down to it, I care more and can push myself harder than the woman next to me. If, in the end, she is actually faster and wins the race, so be it. Good for her. But as long as I ran right to the brink of self-destruction and gave it everything I had, all the way through the last centimeter of the race, I’ll be happy.

Happy . . . but perhaps still not succeeding.

The beauty of running is that I don’t have to care about winning for the sake of winning. Running is not like basketball, or soccer, or tennis, where there is one winner and one loser, and if I don’t win, I failed. In running, I can lose to tens or hundreds or thousands of women and still succeed. But in order to do that, I have to beat myself. I have to beat my own fastest time.

That is how I measure success.

So right now, I am failing. I am failing at races, I am failing at workouts, and I am frustrated as hell. However, I’ve heard some smart people insist that failure is not the end of the journey. So tomorrow, I’ll lace up my shoes, strap on my watch, and try, try again.