songs of experience

As I mentioned earlier, a couple of my seejanerunners and I decided to try something new this summer. We trained in 100-degree weather, doing middle-distance sprint work on a melting track with high hopes of running near 10:00 in the 4 X 800m relay at the National Masters championships. We hit a few bumps in the road (rocky mountain spotted fever, sinus infections, a family crisis or two) but we made it to the starting line yesterday with all four runners ready to rip.

The whole masters atmosphere was more like a festival than a track meet … with its fair share of “freaks on parade” (said our #3 runner, when a 70+ year old woman jogged/jiggled by in a stars-and-stripes bikini racing suit). I went to the track early to witness John Hinton win yet another national title and stayed around to hand out awards as a guest presenter. The meet was in Charlotte, NC my old high-school stomping ground, so there were a lot of familiar faces … older, yes, and changed, certainly … like me - like all of us. But, it’s funny, I didn’t feel old on the inside when I stepped out on to the mondo and took my position as achor-leg. It had been 25 years since I ran a relay with a baton but yesterday I was magically 18 again, waiting for the stick (hopping up and down, staying loose, doing strides in my new,”fly” spikes, whistling across the track, screaming, “Go, Terri!” or “Stay strong, Mimi” as they rocketed by on their first lap, keeping my peripheral eye on the race clock to register each runner’s splits). I had the vitality of youth that running - that racing - eternally provides. No wonder all those “freaks” - myself among them - keep coming back for more, year after year, as they age up and up and up. There was even a 92 year-old triple jumper. Imagine …

So, this morning when I was reading/reflecting on the week-end, and I came acoss a list of ways to “simplify your spirituality” (from Carolyn Myss’s Anatomy of the Spirit), I had to pause over this:

“Change is constant. Every life goes through phases of difficult change as well as peace. Learn to go with the flow of change rather than try to stop the change from occuring.”

We four may be 40-something moms with crows feet around our eyes from too many days running in the sun; we may have loose skin on our bellies from birthing babies (11 children between us!); we may have finished way slower than our goal time (officially we ran 10:26), but DAMN was it fun!!

Sign me up for next year’s parade.