One Blank at a Time Features: Two Events at a Time, Two Medical Tents at a Time

Don't expect to get something back from a race that you weren't prepared to give away freely. 

-Sonja Wieck

I heard Sonja's words (quote above) in an interview on the Endurance Planet podcast. She struck a deep chord, and I just loved what her words meant to me-- "...give away freely." Besides the sun, what else in the universe gives away freely?

For me, the temptation has too often been to expect or demand a simple payback. It's as if race day were some cosmic vending machine that I could just input X-quarters of training at Y-intensity and T-time and expect a commensurate Z-payback called "fun" or "win" or "six-pack".  What a cold and commodified un-relationship between mind, body, and experience. What arrogance and ignorance of the serendipity of the race gods who are more prone to doll out surprise packages as gifts and memorable stories more than textbook race executions. 

Previous race day surprise "gifts", be they diarrhea, wardrobe malfunctions, staples puncturing feet, or pothole crashes, but also from non-surprises like chronic self-over-pressuring, have taught me that it's essential to schedule two races at a time. Despite this blog's namesake, not all good things should be done one _____ at a time. When it comes to races, two are always better. This way, I never put too much pressure on the event at hand. For me, there is such a line that can be crossed that is too much zen, too much in-the-momentness, which can be paralyzingly scary. So, it helps to be able to look out past the ominous shadow that race day can cast. By always having two events on my calendar, I guarantee that the first event, if nothing else, will always have value as a learning opportunity for the second event. Also, the ever-present second event guarantees that I've committed to a long term lifestyle journey and not just a one-and-done fizzle.

TWO RACE REPORTS: The Flying Pig Marathon & American Triple T Triathlon. 

The Flying Pig
In the days prior to May 5th's Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, I was feeling extraordinarily grateful and accomplished despite having not even raced yet. Unlike previous races, for this event I had zero expectations. I was open to surprises.  That feeling of peace was new territory for me. For one, my training was drastically different than it's ever been. Basically, I just ran a lot of slow mileage with friends. We call it "smileage."  But this time, I was now excited to relish the adventure through the experience of others-- though a new community of runners and friends that I had just gotten to know and help coach through the studio. I had skin in the game! Watching them inspired me. Rooting for them, helped take my focus off of me. I liked it.

As it turns out, it was a wonderful day for most of them... and, oh yeah, I set a new PR by 33 minutes! I ran it in 3:05:10, just missing my Boston Qualifying time by 10 seconds. It wasn't even on my radar as a possibility. The fun part was running with friends in Harvey Lewis's pace group, which included Franklin Baker, Tim Westrich, and Laurah Turner, and for intermittent spells, the Tarahumara Indians from the bestselling book Born to Run by Christopher McDouggall. (This is one of the greatest books ever written. Shut up and read it!)

Harvey's all smiles as usual (in red), You can see Franklin's eyeball behind the dude in grey.  My mohawk is behind the balloon stick. And Laurah's woopin ass in the dude-pack. It turns out Tim had to drop back and later found out he had been running on a broken foot.

What's most ridiculous is that I ended up having to take both my shoes off once the laces untied themselves and became too floppy to run with. I shouldn't have messed with them at the start line, but I kept feeling like I had cat litter stuck between my toes, (which of course I had). One came undone as soon as we hit Riverside Dr. (~20 mi). A couple miles later, the other followed suit. WTF-- another gift from the race gods! At mile 23 or so, I was afraid I'd cramp up if I stopped to tie them, so, I just kicked them into the woods on the side of the road. This certainly put my mind at ease and made me run faster than I would have in my floppy shoes. Ironically, I ended up passing Miguel, one of the Tarahumara in final stretch, he was wearing running shoes (which they're famous for not wearing) while I was barefoot! It was hilarious.

Arnulfo, the star of Born To Run was also in and out of our pace group. Are those shoes he's wearing? Franklin just about plowed him over at an aid station like a linebacker.

As soon as I crossed the finish line, I dove for a wheelchair. I knew I was dehydrated because I was dizzy, had tunnel vision, and was cramping. The volunteers rushed me to the medical tent where I ended up spending the next hour, taking in three liters of fluids by IV and bottle. It was an awesome day.

I keep replaying my race in my head, looking for 10 seconds to make up. Was I not supposed to high five Elvis and slap people's butts? Of course I was! But I don't have time to dwell in that, because Event #2, The Triple T, was luckily just around the corner and it is a mother-bleeper of a hard race.

Triple T
It's a four triathlon stage race over one weekend in Portsmouth, Ohio. It is harder than Ironman, by my estimation. But, it's better in that it's grungier, less corporate, more scenic, and you can have teammates that make meals for you. Here's what makes it special:

TTT KA- Time to totally kick ass

Guac - for power

As it played out, race #1, Friday evening's super sprint, went flawlessly fast and according to plan at 23:46, which makes it very boring to write about, other than the guacamole. But lucky for you, race #2 had some gifts from the gods-- I rolled my ankle on the second dolphin dive of the swim while trying to do my best Baywatch water entrance.

One of the Triple T teams was named David Hasselhoff's Chest Hair. As you can see, they were a formidable opponent for me and Franklin's team, Sponsored by Manliness

I eeked out a swim with no kick, hobbled through T1, and decided to hammer the bike, knowing I'd probably be forced to walk the 6 mi trail run. This was only partially the case-- I did manage to run most of it. So I finished with a respectable time, somewhere around 2:25.

Saturday afternoon's Race #3 is usually the hardest of all the races. It's an inverted olympic distance race with monster hills (bike then swim then run), but it follows a tough morning of what is often approached with undisciplined redlining efforts, where one "burns all of their matches", as Russ would say. Since I had hurt myself so badly in race #2, I wasn't all that depleted, plus I squeezed in a nap, plus I tossed back a 12 banana smoothie after the morning's race, plus I was drugged up on Franklin's military-grade ibuprofen. I was ready and excited.

Race #3 begins in time-trial start procedure. Franklin and I were one of the last two to be released on our bikes, which meant we'd have the confidence boost of passing lots of other riders. We were casually budgeting our effort, proud of our matching patriotic outfits, taking 3-4 minute pulls in front of the other (draft legal). The out-and-back course was quite suitable to our tactic. On the way back in though, we were climbing the mother-slut-daddy of all hills, when suddenly, the gods unleashed Armageddon in the form of heavy sheets of rain. For 15 minutes or so, it dumped on us like a monsoon. This kinda injured the fatty pads under my eyes, but I endured it like a manly woman. It also served to bridle our effort since it was not even possible to use the breaks on any of the descents or turns, probably a good long term race strategy that we can't take credit for.

By the time we got back to the lake, the rain had passed. The idea was for me to hit the swim hard rather than try to keep a somewhat slower pace with Franklin. Then Franklin would barrel down and catch me on the run. Fortunately, the ibuprofen was working like a charm and my run felt like a pure run with no limp or injury. By the time Franklin caught me, I was able to hang on with him for the last several miles at  ~6:45 pace. Another respectable time 2:42, setting ourselves up for a great cumulative race.

Race #4 on Sunday was the final punctuation mark on the weekend. At ~20 mi, I crashed hard, hitting an unmarked pothole on a steep descent. Several athletes stopped to offer help, and fetch an ambulance, which was just down the road. When I realized none of my bones were broken, I told the tattooed brute hovering over me, "Don't worry-- nothing's broken, don't slow your race because of me." At that, he just guffawed, "C'mon man, this is Triple T-- this is what it's about." I tear up thinking about it.

Road rash on my shin. It felt like falling on razor blades of fire and acid and salt.

As the paramedics were finishing dressing my wounds, nothing could have prepared me for the violence of the crash that happened next. A woman hit the same pothole as me, but tumbled like a rag doll, smashing her face square on the pavement. It was absolutely horrific. Her helmet did nothing to soften the blow. Franklin, with all his ER experience was Jonny on the spot, of course, alerting the paramedics and joining their impromptu medical team to get this girl the hell to a hospital. Scores of riders stopped to offer assistance, to immobilize her head in case of spine or brain damage. It was madness and bloody and somber. Suddenly, I felt intimately connected to this complete stranger, who was now fighting for her life for following the exact same pathway as me. Why am I just scraped up a bit but her teeth are implanted in the roof of her mouth?

We found out from her teammates that the woman was named Teresa, from St. Louis. After the ambulance pulled her away, the crowd of riders silently went on their way.  It wasn't very race like. Franklin and Russ worked on fixing my bike, as I stood and watched 5-6 other riders hit the same pothole. Although they didn't crash, the sound of each bump put me on pins and needles and I started shivering uncontrollably. I knew my race was over. My first DNF. It's painful to have that finishers medal and T-shirt be out of reach. I usually just assume it's a given from the cosmic vending machine. Not so, Luke Skywalker.

We cruised back to the medical tent, praying for the woman, debriefing at the mayhem. I felt bad for Franklin that I ruined his race. But he was only worried about telling my wife the news. (I'm sorry I put you in these scary situations, babuh.) Besides being alive, the silver lining is that not finishing Triple T means less recovery needed, which means I may be able to attempt another Boston qualifier real soon. It also means I can ramp up my miles in preparation for Burning River 100.

We certainly have to ask ourselves what the point of all this training is. And the answer is that it's not training...not like it used to be. I'm not training in order to race. I'm not training for exercise. I'm finally learning to do what I'm doing in order to do what I'm doing. It's freedom. It's therapy. It's aliveness. It looks like guac with friends in the woods. It looks like big foot discussions with fellow collapsitarians in the rolling hills of Kentucky. It looks like photo-bombing people's marathons. If the stars align next month, it looks like a through-the-Friday-night run with friends to Yellow Springs, OH for breakfast and patchouli candles. It looks like smokin' hot dates with my wife on a trail run in Ault Park. It looks like cheering for friends and family who are courageous enough to try something new and impress the heck out of you at their first tri in a bikini speedo and a fixed gear bike. (Unreal Mike!)

My bro-in-law running his first tri, past the water slide that my sis-in-law's firm designed.

Specific Training Summary
Upon my friend Sandro's advice, I drank the Maffetone Kool-aid this year, whose credo sounds something like, "train slow to go fast." Dr. Phil Maffetone helped convince me that there is tremendous opportunity when one steps back from the precipice of the Cliffs of Insanity and balls-to-the-wall-intensity. Still, as much as I tried to train within the bandwidth of heart rate efforts that he proposes, I inevitably practiced much slower than was supposed to be my lower bound. So, by erring on the side of going slower but doing more miles, I ended up running and conversing with a lot of really cool people and actually have been performing quite well. The key is that this method is what's helped me finally stave off overuse injuries.

On the flip side, it really helps to know the Maffetone rules, so I know how to break them. Thus, I've incorporated some anti-Maffetone runs as well on Fridays with my training partners Franklin and Matt. We usually do 15-20 miles with some solid zone 3 or zone 4 pace or hills to interrupt our great conversations. I'm really looking forward to more powerline runs in Mt. Airy Forest. This is the closest thing we have in Cincinnati to mountains. Also, I continue to do at least one Spinning session on Mondays with Susie, which is usually a high intensity interval set. Sometimes I fake turning the resistance knob, but mostly it's just good practice at obeying my wife and jamming out to some great music. There's much less danger of road rash in her class.

The second difference to my training this year is I've incorporated functional strength session led by Sus on Wednesdays and Pilates on Mondays with either Alicia or Nicole. This is all about balancing my body, stablizing my hips, building a power-center. In years past, I've neglected these fundamentals in favor of mere "Baywatch workouts"-- pecs and abs, baby!

Third, and perhaps most importantly, for the last seven months, I've focused on helping others realize their athletic potential by assisting with my wife's annual Flying Pig training team. Coaching didn't allow me much time to myself for athletic penny pinching or recovery bean counting. Instead, it was spent showering attention and energy on others, many new runners and their needs and wants. It's what the sun would call "giving away freely." Not that it felt onerous or anything. But things change when your alarm goes off at 5am on a Tuesday and other people are actually counting on you to do your run through Ault Park. The situation really helped me rise to occasion.

Earth Day Garden Investments

Painters love painting but writers love to have written. 

So, where does that leave gardeners? It's full tilt spring this week and, baby, I'm rearing to bust out of this winter hole I've been cooped up in. Nobody loves the idea of and having gardened more than me. And yet, it takes a deliberate act of gardening. Is it harvest time yet? I'm not sure I'm cut out for this.

In my typical devotion to the ideas of doing stuff more than the actual doings of the stuff, I have finally trained my little green thumblings this winter to perform a few small acts of doing-- not just the paralysis of analysis that I normally succumb to.

In preparation for spring, I've poured my heart and soul into fathering about two dinky dinner-sized portions of crops inside my window garden.This week, I introduced them into their new habitat.

Day 1 - the idea is planted. Kale, spinach, radishes, lettuce, and other stuff I can't remember.

Gardening must be an endurance sport, and I must have been born a sprinter.

My new year's goal was to turn my entire postage stamp-size back yard into a salad as far as the eye can see and then eat one big salad per day. Salad is what my friend Patrick calls "poor man's EPO". I think my buddy Tim Van Orden would agree, who's won 9 U.S. trail titles fueled primarily by salad and liquid salad (smoothies) and his calves aren't wimpy.

Where does a vegan get his protein? He must eat his own hairy drumstick-looking legs. Yummy.

I'm taking my next gardening strategy from the playbook of professional garden-neglector Mark Shepherd. He's coined the "S.T.U.N." design technique. S.T.U.N. stands for shear, total, and utter neglect. Mark talks convincingly about how we silly moderners tend to waste our efforts trying to kill the stuff that wants to live and trying to make live the stuff that wants to die. This is part of the reason why it takes an average of 10 calories of fossil fuels to yield 1 calorie of food on your plate. Things that are unsustainable, like conventional farming, are quite good at automatically stumbling into the awareness that they are no longer sustained. 

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.

-Jack Handy

Meanwhile, Mark's having amazing success doing industrial-scale farming in a way that's far more harmonious with my/his desire to be lazy. These kinds of reduced input systems also happen to be a prerequisite of any economic activity vying for relevance on a planet suffering the ramifications predicted by peak oil. Things that require lots of inputs are failing as we speak and will continue to fail at an accelerating pace.

Basically, what I plan on doing is filling my mouth completely with seeds for nine minutes so the seeds can take in all the information they need about me. Then, I'll walk around barefoot or maybe even butt-friggin naked in the yard planting under the moonlight wherever my drool lands. I couldn't get more lazy.

The weakest plants will have to compete against the plethora of weeds and stuff that have already claimed their home there. Many of these so-called weeds happen to be dandelions, which make excellent salads in themselves. If my designed salad ingredients die, they have only cost me nine minutes of sudoku time. But if they live, I just may be reaping an endorsement deal from the Hidden Valley or Newman's Own's triathlon team.

So, concluding thought-- if you want a gardening technique to have a very high efficiency, then you either need to hope and pray and rain dance for really large outputs (harvests) or else limit investments to nearly-zero inputs. Remember--

Efficiency = Output / Input.

Mathematically, the investment is a no-brainer. As the denominator approaches zero...that is, as my investment approaches an act of drooling on the ground, then my gardening efficiency approaches infinity!!!! And infinity is what I demand on all of my investments.

Face the Fucker

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end
- Ursula K Le Guin

I don't know what I did wrong, but I sure do feel bad about it. The angst is probably just coded into the DNA of us Catholics. A business-as-usual approach would have me blogging about the recipe I just reverse-hacked for the world’s greatest $20 nut butter, the current nutrition science regarding fat metabolization and the ramifications it’s had on my ultra-training. That would be a true and marvelous story. Meanwhile, in Vatican City, the College of Cardinals would elect a couple more Bishops of Rome-- Benedict XVII and Benedict XVIII and industrial civilization would march on its merry way toward moral and political bankruptcy. However, that would be yet another tasty distraction from what my gut says I really need to do, and that is to FACE THE FUCKER. I think it could be therapeutic. 

DISCLAIMER

If you go out of your way to avoid cultural taboos, I'm just warning you that you're reading the wrong blog. I'll be talking heavily about religion in this one, so this might be your cue to check out NOW. Yes, I feel like I need to address this whole Pope quitting thing alongside my overdue X-seminarian decompression.

This is THE FUCKER I've been wrestling with for quite some time. It's festered, half-written, for over a decade now. I am encouraged by the words of Emily Dickinson, who would say, How can I know what I think, unless I see what I say? Like her, I am compelled to write something down, because there is a lot of gunk that I haven't fully processed.

On December 31, 1999, I found out I wasn't cut out to be a Catholic priest. I knew this of course, deep down, but the answer seemed to make more sense coming from higher up the chain of command-- the General Director himself, a 78 year old Mexican priest who zipped around by helicopter. He was my hero, and I broke up with my girlfriend and swore off all future girlfriends, in large part, because of him. But that's another story. 

I was a second year Novice at a seminary in Connecticut, washing dishes after night prayers, practicing poverty, chastity, and obedience, and coping with a life that was straight up KICKING MY ASS. I was fresh out of high school. My friends on the outside were traveling, doing beer bongs, sleeping with girls, and playing collegiate soccer, but I had zero contact with the outside world. I kept as busy as possible, careful not to let my mind sit for too long in the awareness of where it was and that the dress code was a black cassock and my hair had a part line like the Red Sea. 

The austerity was pretty badass too. I lived in a new cubicle every month (practicing detachment), where some nights I could see my breath it was so cold. Every morning involved cold showers at 5AM, doing 200 push ups, meditating for 3-4 hours, reading, re-reading, and memorizing entire books of the Bible. My goal was to push a pin through any random word on a page of the Gospel of John and tell you, without looking, each of the words the pin had pierced on subsequent pages.

I worked voraciously in the kitchen and pantry, learning how to cook for 200 men, to palletize donations, and to manage a crew in silence. It easily beat any leadership training my peers were paying tuition dollars for. This is how I justified it to others. But internally, the vanities of beer bongs and a career-track life reeked of phoniness.

We studied languages-- Spanish primarily, so we could read the volumes of letters from our Mexican founder, a “living saint”, but also some Latin and Greek too. On Sundays, we broke silence during recreation, usually soccer, but I rolled my ankle and got mildly-addicted to Percocet. I stopped sleeping, gained 20 pounds on a diet of Hostess pastries and pork roast, and started fainting. I began brewing a lot of inner rage, probably like a wild stallion feeling penned-in, or maybe like a 20 year old dude would feel in a cloister. 

 

It wasn’t the beer, co-eds, or soccer that I longed for most. The soccer, like the Gregorian chant, was something soothing that kept the circumstances somewhat bearable. Actually, what I missed most was investigation, curiosity, discussion, disagreement, dissonance, WILDNESS and FREEDOM. This is quite the opposite of rank-and-file discipline, order, and devotion to transmitting an immutable "Deposit of Faith" from point A to point B as a loyal middle-man.

I wrote letters to the founder, outlining my mental and physical troubles, asking for a sabbatical of any kind-- some time to spiritually regroup and focus on others. I hunched I’d be sent to the missions in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. That's what I hoped for. 

But months later, I got a letter back, denying my request, saying, it would be best if [I] left the seminary and enrolled in a university. Overnight, I was gone, without even saying goodbye to my brother seminarians.

What's strange is that I so thoroughly trusted another man’s reading comprehension, assessment of my inner life, and then judgement as my absolute authority. But that is indeed the way of every religious order, from the Franciscans to the Benedictines—obedience to your superiors. Even nonsensical commands from superiors are opportunities to outgrow the ego and grow in personal perfection as if commands coming from God Himself. That is the Catholic teaching, modeled by Jesus with his submission to his parents. It is also the danger of deference to others. It can be a slippery slope, either towards moral complacence or toward guruism, always looking outside of ourselves for our answers. But when I left the seminary, I still loved and believed the whole of it, even though my hero, the founder, would ultimately prove to be a hypocritical sexual pederast Mafioso. 

My first day home, I called another hero-- my favorite gradeschool teacher, Mr. K, and asked him how he became the man I aspired to be. He told me he was majoring in physics and tutoring the Xavier men's basketball team when he realized he liked teaching, science, and sports. So, within the week, I was a full-time college student, majoring in physics and education, and trying to walk-on with the soccer team whom I also tutored. 

Only slowly and intermittently did I find peace with my new path. I tripped my way through a clumsy transitional period, I call my 20s, intent on preserving my old sense of meaning. I tried to marinade the natural content of the physical sciences with all of my supernatural and metaphysical juices, careful to give preeminance to the spiritual overlay.

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin,

Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 

-Luke 12:27

Through my 20s, the rancor within me felt like I was constantly chewing a mouthful of sand while breathing through a nostril lined with shit. I spent sleepless nights in the physics lab, tracking subatomic particles and running virtual simulations of chaotic systems, while my inner nature felt truly chaotic and atomistic. I eventually did become a teacher, but I felt a growing isolation and disconnection from the very natural world I wanted to experience, learn about, preserve, and share with others.

There was absolutely no separating my image of God from some of the passive aggression of my closest relatives, from the zealots of religious fundamentalism, from the environmental strip-miners, or from the infinite growth paradigm of the debt collection agencies that I could neither do battle against nor keep pace with. A depression weighed on me that I feared would end my most important relationships, if not my life. I gripped tightly to the life vest of my spiritual heritage, even as its bouyancy frayed from under me. I began to feel like I was actually drowning in an ocean of life vests themselves, smothered by the poisons of the high priests of the technocratic world.

Then March 2010 happened. I met a Russian woman named Anastasia, who showed me some extraordinary things. My wife and I planted a tiny seed together and are now co-creating a space of love that will last forever. It's fucking exhausting, but the harvest is bountiful and nourishing and it saved my life.

To this day, I continue to work through some version of survivor's guilt about abandoning my brothers and students. I have weekly nightmares that I'm stuck in a situation where I have to choose between being with the woman I love, co-creating the world I dream is possible, or else imprisoned in a typecasted role shackled by "shoulds." I wrestle with God...or rather, with my image of God. I'm pissed that there's cancer. I'm pissed that there's a war on cancer. And I'm pissed that there's a war on the war on cancer. So, I'm DEEPLY suspicious of my conception of God or an old book's conception of God, or a pedophile priest's conception of God, or any other person's conception of God. And that's why I decline Bible group invitations. (I don't hate you.)

So, when the Pope DNF's, I don’t blame him for being a quitter any more than I blame myself for what some have called “abandoning the vocation.” In fact, I’m damn proud of myself and the Pope for our revocations. To "revoke" something, literally means to "re-call"...as in, election results can be re-called when they're botched, quarterbacks can re-call an audible when the game's momentum demands new tactics, and girlfriends can be re-called and dated again with newer and hotter romance.

The process has been painfully slow for me, but sometimes relentless evolution trumps revolution. I hope Ratzinger takes up permaculture and yoga in a revolutionary new way, in his spare time, but he too can do whatever the hell he wants. I hear he likes piano, so I would imagine we'd all be better off with him doing what he loves.


For the sake of our humanity, I sure hope we are never defined by the worst thing we've ever done. We are merely human, ever in search of giving and receiving love and coping with suffering. Even if Michael Jackson committed horrible atrocities, I love his music and his message, and we probably don't understand his inner workings. Even if my hero, Fr. Maciel, siphoned millions in donations to pay off mistresses and his molestation victims, it's always an opportunity to look in a mature way beyond simply blaming one person. No man is an island. We are the sum total of our relationships. Each person is also an organelle of a larger system that feeds us with both poisons and nutrients, with a net output we can only hope to harvest as kindness.

I’m not sure what religious or spiritual label I’m attached to at the moment—the religion of gardening holds promise, so I'll continue to journey in that direction. The best spiritual practice I’ve found so far involves hanging out with my loved ones, riding my bike, and running through the woods. Sometimes I’m fueled up hills by anger at the state of cancer-prevention or geopolitics, but mostly I’m slowly learning how to live in the spirit of the gift. 

We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The underlying connection between beauty and function suggests a parallel harmony between survival and the expression of our gifts. The old divide between making a living and being an artist will crumble, is already crumbling. So many of us, more and more of us, are refusing that divide. No object will be too insignificant to merit our care, our reverence, and our effort to make it right. We will seek—are already seeking—to embed all things in wholeness. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true state of gratitude: of reverence for what we have received and of desire to give equally, or better, from our endowment. We wish to leave the world more beautiful than we entered it. 

-Charles Eisenstein