Songs of Experience

I don’t think Betsy will mind my sharing this. After writing about my training partners, I pulled out some old journals and came across a letter I had saved from Betsy that she gave me a few days before the 1996 Olympic Trials. I want to post it here, today, so that other seekers-of-joy (through running) might feel the love.

“Joan, you have used your running as a mode of expression, an artwork, since the day I met you. I have seen the struggles, the elations, but most of all the JOY. It is in this process, the process of expression, that the Olympic trials final fits. Not as an ending, not as the pinnacle, but simply as an act of 25 laps of joyous effort!

From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I had produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At 73, I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, of plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am 80, I shall have made more progress; at 90, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am one hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.

– written at age seventy-five by me, once Hokvsai, today Owakio Rojn,
old man mad about drawing

Joan, this quote describes you at age 75, with your family, your coaching, your running and your writing. And it describes you today, going into this race. The best is yet to come! We’ll be there at the track yelling and cheering like crazy from the sidelines. RUN WITH JOY!
Love, your friend Betsy”

Dear readers,
The comments function on Songs of Experience was broken for the last week or two, so if you did write in with a brilliant comment (or even a so-so one), please re-send. It should be working now.
thanks.

I am hoping to teach a running class at nearby Duke University. Here is my outline (below).
Would this make you want to take the class? I welcome any feedback. Be honest!

Running Qi
… for women only

In Chinese philosophy, qi (pronounced “chi”) means “vital energy or spirit; life force”; I believe that running is one of the purest ways for women, especially, to tap into this life energy. In western civilization, women are fractured into so many relational personas (sister, daughter, wife, mother, worker, neighbor, friend, etc.) that we can lose our essential, singular self. In Running Qi, I will guide 20 women through a challenging 13-week training course that begins with a 2-mile jog and ends with a half-marathon trail race.

Along the way, each runner will be expected to keep a journal, complete reading assignments, and contribute to “circle time” discussions before the work-outs. We will use Clarissa Pinkola Estes’, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, “general wolf rules for life” as our outline:

Eat – nutrition for female athletes (feeding your mind, body, and soul)

Rest - hard/easy training philosophy (“too good is no good”)

Rove in Between - trail running (getting “lost” and finding your path in life)

Render Loyalty - running sisterhood (what makes a good training partner?)

Love the Children - learning to mother yourself; seeking wise women/mentors

Cavil in Moonlight – finding your voice and using it

Tune your Ears - running injuries and prevention (listening to your body)

Attend to the Bones - the history of women’s running

Make Love – falling in love with running (passion versus obsession)

Howl Often – racing!

Texts: Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD; Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindberg; Nine Stories by JD Salinger, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach; and various hand-outs by authors such as Annie Dillard, William Saroyan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christian Northrup, Eavan Boland, Jane Addams, and The Kitchen Sink.

I chose the title “Songs of Experience” for my blog because of a life-long fascination with William Blake’s poetry. Most people are familiar with “Tyger! Tyger!” and “Ah, Sunflower!”, but this poem below (from the Songs of Innocence portion of Songs of Innocence and Experience) fits my mood tonight:

Ecchoing Green
The Sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The sky-lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush.
Sing louder around
To the bells’ cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green.

Old John[Joan], with white hair.
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.

They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
“Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls & boys,
In our youth time were seen
On the Ecchoing Green.”

Till the little ones, weary.
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers.
Like birds in their nest.
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen
On the darkening Green.

I watched my 12 year-old run in her first team cross-country race yesterday. Her lovely blond ponytail, held up with a Mustang marroon hair scrunchy, bobbed earnestly as she fought hard to hang on to the back of the varsity pack … while I, Old Joan, sat under the oak among the old folk.

I’d like to take a moment to expound on JJ’s last question and my answer (below):

JJ- Q. what advice can you offer runners wanting to get the best out of themselves?

My advice is to find one friend or one training partner or one coach with whom you can be perfectly honest about your hopes and dreams (and your means of reaching them). Tell him/her everything that is on your mind and in your heart and then get out there and run until you are blind.

Throughout my running life I have had the amazing good fortune of finding just the right training partner to fit each particular phase of my life. It’s almost as if there were a guiding hand leading me to these people – my comrades, my fellow travelers, my running soul-mates.

I had Marla Daniel (when I was a freshman at UNC) who, in the middle of her long run, would swing by my dorm room on Sunday afternoons – forcing me to run a brisk 5-miler (what I still call “Marla-pace” to this day!) and NOT sleep the afternoon away. From her I learned the importance of “don’t miss.”

As an upperclassmen, the ever-enthusiastic and determined young-un, Holly Murray, taught me how to handle my nerves. “Don’t ruin it by getting nervous” she wisely advised before the NCAA cross-country championships. She was a 3-time All-American in cross and is, today, joyfully coaching at a high school in Philly.

Right after college, I trained with (Hail!)Fredonia’s Bernard “The Dude” Prabucki, probably the toughest, most focused cat ever to cross my path. We would go to the track in the evenings and after my solo-warmup, he would time my intervals; then I’d cool down with him on his warm-up before timing his intervals. He once talked me through how to make a hill flat with my mind. It really works if you concentrate hard enough (you know, like those people who can bend spoons with their mind?). Bernie ran 13:45 for 5k in 1988 on fewer than 70 miles per week … but his hard days would CRUSH a normal man. From Bernie I learned to match my physical intensity with my mental.

Next, I met Austin P. Guiles in a bible study. We have trained together on and off for 20 years … never once running out of things to talk about. He can run fast or long on trail or track or just stand and chat in a parking lot; I always enjoy his company. Once on a run we saw two abandoned bags of fresh groceries lying on the side of a busy road, so I challenged Austin P. to use the groceries as a storyteller’s “prompt.” What a story he told! He wove this tale over hill and dale and back again, lasting the entire run. From Austin, Godfather of my first-born, I learned of the fellowship of runners.

Through Jo White, British amazon (2:02 800m; 4:06 1,500m), I found a coach – Harry Wilson – but I also discovered my ambition. Jo wanted to be FAST. She had a thrilling/dangerous? live-on-the-edge approach to running that made my college career seem like a neighborhood game of kick-the-can. Jo made me see if you want to run with the big dogs, get off the porch.

After the intensity of Jo and Harry, I needed a break. I started coaching myself; I ran alone, read a lot, joined the Catholic church, got a job, went to plays, dated a missionary, read some more … and waited for the next training partner to come along.

Then came Betsy! Betsy Kempter was the “one friend, one training partner, with whom I could be perfectly honest about my hopes and dreams (and my means of reaching them). I told her everything that was on my mind and in my heart and then WE got out there and ran until we were blind.” She was a 2:37 marathoner and I was a 3k-5k track runner, but we met in the middle with equal passion and work ethic to wring every ounce of talent we could out of each other. We sweated, grunted, spit and howled. I can still hear Betsy’s voice out over the top of a crowd of runners in a road race, “GOJOAN!” as if it were one word. I would respond, like an animal in the woods hearing her kind, “GOBETSEEEEEEEEEEy!”

We trained and traveled and raced alongside one another for nearly 7 years. She and her husband, Bryan, taught me to bring my own freshly-ground coffee, with one-cup filters, to races. They had yummy “door food” at all times in their truck with goose-down pillows in the back for napping. Betsy and Bryan were in the audience on the backstretch of my 10k at the 1996 Olympic trials. I had instructed them to cheer, “There’s always Summer Breeze!!” (a dinky road race in Charlotte that we loved to run) if they saw I was in trouble. Luckily, my friend, my partner, only had to howl, “GOJOAN! GOJOAN!”

Those were pure, happy days of running … two she-wolves in the wild. I miss her.

Here is an e-mail interview I gave to JJ:

http://www.jaysonjo.com

I must admit, in all vanity, I prefer the “Joan then” photo to the “Joan now” photo.

ugh.

Sometimes I lose whole chunks of time. I don’t know if this happens to other people (aside from those who have substance abuse related black-outs), but I can go to write in my journal … or this blog … and see that weeks or even months have passed since my last entry. I try to fill in the gaps by checking our family wall calendar (I’m tempted to write “cross check” like the flight attendants do, but I don’t really know what that means) … and I end up staring and staring at the word “Thursday” or the number “17.” I look at the blank space inside the box and strain to remember, “what happened that day?” Of course I ran, but how far? With whom? There were no doctor’s appointments written down, or meetings listed, or “notes to self” scribbled in the tiny square (my life that day)… so, what then?! I hate losing time like this. I hate living my life on automatic pilot (hey, isn’t it the live pilots who ask for the “cross-check”?). When this happens too often, I turn to my books for inspiration and reminders that I must “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Thoreau).

Today, Annie Dillard helped me remember:

“I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend? Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both. Too little noticing, though – I would risk much to avoid this – and I would miss the whole show. I would wake on my deathbed and say, “What was that?�

from, An American Childhood

Remember the kid-question, “If you could be any animal, what would it be?” Well, I could never come up with an animal because when I was little I wanted to be a tree. Of course, that sounds silly now but I used to think trees were sentient beings, that their feelings could be hurt, that they cried if cut.

I still love trees. I can’t name all the types or identify the leaves or even tell you the difference between an American and a Japanese maple (one has red leaves, I think). I love them in all seasons – but especially in winter when they’re naked and vulnerable. Austere and beautiful in their stripped-down solitude.

So, when I read about a woman who turned her head away from the trees in William Carlos Williams’ poem, The Last Words of My English Grandmother I knew for a moment, for the time it took to read the last line, exactly what dying must feel like.

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed—

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat—
They’re starving me—
I’m all right I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please—

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher—
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear—
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

On the first day of seejanerun I always ask an ice-breaking question, then we go around the circle one at a time to answer it. One year I asked, “What is your favorite body part” (because most people are quick to point out their LEAST favorite … “my nose is too big” or “I hate my thighs” or “I always wear boots to hid my hideous cankles” (calves that go straight down to the feet). I’d rather hear what people love about themselves.

Another season I asked them to name one thing they are proud of outside of being mom [the answers varied from publishing a chapter in a medical textbook to climbing a beanstalk at a children's museum].

This fall I asked my seejanerunners to offer a bit of advice they would give a new mother/parent. Here is what we came up with:

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