The Pain in Gain

For my job yesterday, I was talking on the phone to a physical therapist in Pittsburgh who, four times now, has completed the 34-mile Rachel Carson Trail Challenge, and once placed ninth out of 600 finishers. “Unlike in a footrace,” its Web site tells readers, "the ‘challenge’ is not to win, but to endure—to finish the hike in one day.”

There’s a clickable video on the event’s home page with the still image of participants engaged in various states of movement—running, walking, testing their footfalls—as they try to negotiate a downhill gulley in the middle of a forest. Above this scene appear the sentences, “This time [the event always is held on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice], the Challenge starts at North Park at sunrise, 5:50 am. The deadline for finishing is sunset, 8:54 pm, or 15 hours 4 minutes, whichever comes first.”

Below the video image, under the heading “Course Description,” are advisories that the trail is “primitive,” that it features “no special grading or surfacing materials,” that it isn’t always clearly marked, and that it includes “poison ivy, nettles, bugs, loose gravel, wet stream crossings and steep hills.” Participants are advised to “expect the unexpected and think the unthinkable.”

The PT with whom I spoke—a 45-year-old father of three who’s a university professor, researcher and clinician—conceded with an appreciative whistle that the course is indeed “brutal,” but added that he finds himself “chuckling” when the marathoners start fading at around mile 28. This guy also has completed the Mt Washington Auto Road Bicycle Climb in New Hampshire, described on its site as “the toughest hill climb in the world, at 7.6 miles in length, with an average grade of 12%, extended sections of 18% and the last 50 yards an amazing 22%.” (It’s probably worth noting, too, that Mt Washington is more than a mile high and, per Wikipedia, is “famous for dangerously erratic weather”—which has included a wind gust of 231 mph that was a world record for 76 years.

The previous day I’d been speaking on the phone with a different PT—a woman ’d interviewed for a story about 10 years ago. We’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, and I often kid her about her athletic mania. Kim and her husband compete in all manner of long-distance mountain biking and cross-country skiing events, and she’s placed first in her age group (she’s in her mid-40s now) in a multi-race cycling series in Wisconsin. We’ve only ever met in person once, but I’ve issued a standing invitation for Brian and her to cycle to DC from their house in Iowa for a visit—or to hop a freight train and leap from it at 100 mph at a local rail yard, or perhaps parachute onto our yard from a military cargo plane.

When we spoke the other day she regaled me with the story of how once, in the midst of a leisurely hike up a steep mountainside while on vacation in Colorado, Brian pointed to a guy hiking at a rapid clip in the far distance and suggested they try to pass him. Kim, of course, was up for that. A hiking competition ensued. Kim and Brian won. Kim, oxygen-deprived and as exhausted as she’d ever been in her life, celebrated by spiritedly vomiting off the mountaintop.

This story came after she’d noted that, in addition to being a PT, she now works two days a week for Brian’s construction company—roofing, tiling, pouring cement, hauling plywood, laying drywall. All in order to ensure, you see, that she gets enough exercise.

I conceived the story for which I interviewed Kim and the Pittsburgh guy. Its working title is “Extreme PTs and PTAs [Physical Therapist Assistants].” My idea is to highlight two things: 1) the ways in which these individuals’ background in physical therapy helps them train for demanding athletic pursuits and avoid or at least limit injury, and 2) what these PTs and PTAs have learned in competition that informs and enhances the patient care they provide. It’s slated to be published early next year in PT in Motion, the magazine my employer, the American Physical Therapy Association, distributes to its 80,000-plus membership.

Given that physical therapy is all about motion science, it’s not surprising that within the profession’s ranks there are many individuals who practically make it their second job to move around quite a lot. By the time I complete my interviewing process for the story I’ll have spoken with triathletes, Ironman competitors, and an array of other men and women who may see the pavement or trail about as much as they see their own families. But it isn’t just PTs and PTAs who do this, of course. Rather counterintuitively, as our nation gets more and more obese there’s also been an explosion in recent decades of interest and participation in endurance competitions, with mere 26.2-mile marathons being the least of it. (I myself lack the endurance at the moment to seek out supporting statistics, but I know they’re there. My God, every other burg hosts a marathon these days, and it sometimes seems there are so many Ironmen and Ironwomen walking among us that it’s a surprise Robert Downey Jr still sells movie tickets each time he dons the suit.)

Maybe it’s another 1% versus 99% thing, with the health-wealthy on top of the heap while the rest of us simply hope we can afford the health care we’ll need to battle sloth-and-gluttony-fueled type II diabetes. But that’s not quite right, because then there are people like me: those who get a reasonable amount of exercise and try to watch our weight, but to whom “thinking the unthinkable” is trying to picture ourselves tripping over exposed roots on some damn Pennsylvania trail for 15 hellish hours, or vertically cycling up a mountain into gale-force winds.

It’s my friend Kim’s philosophy that life is all about seeking out, facing down and overcoming challenges. I suspect a lot of extreme athletes feel the same way. In an e-mail this week she wrote that one of her favorite quotes is, “There’s no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone.” She added that she believes “growth only comes from a person’s ability and willingness to experience discomfort.”

I’ve been thinking about all this quite a bit over the past few days. My route to and from work takes me past the staging area for the Marine Corps Marathon, which will be held this Sunday. I entered that race only once, several years ago. Though I thought I’d trained sufficiently, and had successfully completed half-marathons in the past, I had a miserable experience that day. I developed a foot injury about halfway through the course that forced me to walk the last several miles, and I posted what I considered to be a shameful time. I had experienced discomfort, all right, not to mention embarrassment. But, growth? I grew all the way to never entering the event again.

For years afterward I continued to enter shorter races, however—10Ks, 8Ks, 5Ks. But I always dreaded them, and I never enjoyed or got any kind of adrenaline rush out of participating. The only part I liked was regaining my breath afterward and feeling I’d “earned” the T-shirt for which I’d paid $20 and most of my lung capacity. Again, the discomfort seemed less to me like a growth opportunity than like what Lynn called it: idiocy. I used to tell people that, for me, running in a race was like hitting oneself on the head with a hammer: It feels so good when you stop. For years, Lynn essentially had been reminding me that if this was a vaudeville joke, the punch line would be, “So, don’t do that.” A few years ago I stopped running in races entirely.

I do still run, of course, but at my own plodding pace, which I purposely don’t time. The only time I’m interested in is one hour. That’s how long I generally run. Sometimes a little longer, every once in a while 90 minutes or even two hours. There are various routes I like—in DC, my neighborhood, sometimes Arlington on the Virginia side of the river—and as I lope along I watch the world wake up, in that post-dawn period when people are out walking their dogs or heading to work or the gym, when traffic is light, when stray deer sometimes linger at the edge of the woods. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I enjoy those runs. It’s still work to keep at it for an hour, however slowly, and it certainly feels much better afterward, when I’m sipping coffee somewhere and reading the newspaper.

I mull this equation of discomfort with growth, which hardly is original to Kim. It echoes through a thousand books on entrepreneurism and maximizing one's potential, and it’s filled countless arenas where motivational speakers preach the gospel of shaking up your life and laying bare the power, will and fortitude you never knew you had. The thing is, though, that I’ve never really seen comfort as an enemy. If I did, I’d no doubt be more ambitious professionally, more knowledgeable about any number of things and less intimidated by 21^st century life. Perhaps I’d be a supervisor or a manager. Computer savvy. Fluent in French. I’d undoubtedly run faster—and force myself to compete.

For better or worse, however, I seem unable to push myself any farther than earning a decent living, staying sharp in the one language I know, and remaining an obesity outlier among our, um, growing population.

Last Saturday, Lynn, our friend Julie and I went to Arena Stage to see the musical production One Night with Janis Joplin. I referenced the play’s subject in an e-mail to Kim this week, writing, “It occurs to me that you are to athletic competition as Janis was to boozing and pouring out raw emotion. It’s just that you and your Bobby McGee leave it all out on the trail rather than on the stage or at the bottom of a bottle of Southern Comfort. (Interestingly, though, both hard-driving lifestyles seem to involve copious amounts of puking.)”

Maybe that’s what it boils down to for me. A little bit of discomfort—as I huff and puff my way down city streets or face occasional obstacles in my relatively low-pressure job—is one thing. Vomit-level discomfort, however, is quite something else. I’ve visited the Rock ‘n’Roll Hall of Fame, but I never will be enshrined in it. I jog, but I don’t race

 Am I growing? Not much, I suppose. But even jogging is not standing still.

Daughter of the Old Dominion

I’d like to share a letter I sent to a dear friend a few weeks ago. First, a little background.

The recipient, “Mildred,” was known to me for much of the past 35 years as “Mrs Pope.” She was the mother of my college classmate John Pope. When I first met her in 1977 or ’78 at John’s family home in Falls Church, Virginia, she’d already been widowed for several years. She had the kind of formal gentility and Southern grace that perfectly suited her loyalty to the Old Dominion, Virginia’s sepia-toned nickname. She was a collection of charming contradictions: forthright and self-effacing, elegant yet clumsy, both old-school and incredibly open. Our relationship had been friendly but hardly close until one sunny afternoon sometime in the mid-1990s.

John and his brother Jim, whose name you’ll see referenced in the letter, held an annual summer cookout at Jim’s house in Arlington. Just prior to that year’s event, John had had a health scare involving a severe headache and his sudden inability to remember the route to a familiar hospital. Just before Lynn and I were about to leave—we were standing in the leafy backyard while a by-then-recovered John stirred the chili indoors—Mrs Pope took my hand and, tearing up, asked me to pray for her Johnny.

Which I subsequently did over the course of the next many months, in my questionably effectual agnostic way. John nevertheless died of brain cancer in 1997. He was only 38. It was in the years after his death that Mrs Pope encouraged Lynn and me to call her Mildred, as we got together on occasion to reminisce about John and  discuss and admire the wonderful paintings and drawings he’d left behind. Eventually we moved on to develop a strong rapport and a friendship in its own right. For whatever reason, the three of us clicked, and the obvious pleasure Mildred took in our company helped lessen some of the guilt I felt over the fact that her dead son and I had never been the tight friends she seemed to imagine we’d been. I mean, I’d always liked John, but he and I had been essentially admiring acquaintances who’d shared an alma mater. I got to know him better posthumously through Mildred, and to some extent through Jim, than I’d ever known him in life.

But if my kinship with John never was quite real, Lynn’s and my friendship with Mildred deepened and grew. We visited each other’s homes and kept in touch over the years. When her health dictated that she sell her house and move into a senior-living apartment near her daughter’s home in Georgia, I continued to write her occasional letters and to sometimes phone her.

Nearly two years ago she called me up and, after characteristically thanking me effusively for a recent letter, then making some small talk, she got to the crux of the matter. She’d been diagnosed with leukemia and was going to be placed under hospice care. She was 94 at the time, and she told me she’d already been out shopping for caskets and was shocked by the prices. We laughed a lot during that call: about her practicality, the racket that is the death industry, the crazily brief time we all get on his Earth, who knows what else. I remember getting off the phone that day and, after wiping a grin off my face, thinking, "Mildred is terminally ill."

As it turned out, reports of her imminent death proved inaccurate. Mildred would outlive that six-months-and-out prognosis connoted by hospice care by more than a year. This made her family and friends very happy, of course, but made her much less so. Not because her quality of life was so greatly diminished until the very end, but because she felt she’d somehow overstayed her welcome and perhaps become a bit of a fraud—like the way Barbra Streisand keeps un-retiring until most people just wish she’d just be done with it already.

But then, finally, Jim called me at work one day late last month to tell me the end truly was near. So, I wrote Mildred one last letter, just before we left for a vacation in New England.

This past Wednesday, October 17, Jim called me at around 5 pm to report that his mother had passed away earlier that day. Her interment will come later this month. I’ll be a pallbearer, at her request. And a proud one, of course.

I’ll end this post with the letter and let it serve as my loving sendoff. But FYI, lest you might wonder as you read, I’ll first make these final notes:

I specifically mentioned Iceland because Mildred herself had toured that beautiful and strange country with her daughter in fairly recent years, after Lynn and I had raved about it and shared our pictures. I hope the reference conjured fond memories of a trip she told us she’d loved.

Clive and Karen Scorer are lovely people with whom we had a wonderful reunion on Cape Cod. I mostly was kidding about Clive’s “British eccentricity” for comic effect. (Americans hardly have room to talk, our national “eccentricities” being passions for deadly firearms and divisive religion.)

I did indeed succeed in adding Vermont and New Hampshire to my running-states list—not that you’d know it from the appalling lack of national media and social networking coverage. And the weather did cooperate, though I might have preferred a bit of seasonal chill in the air.

I always tried to limit my letters to Mildred to a single typed page, so as not to bore her to death (though she might have welcomed that as her self-reproach at her earthy lingering grew). In principle at least, I’m all for brevity. So I’ll close here and let the correspondence finish this out.

September 28, 2012

Dear Mildred,

Jim called me yesterday and told me he’d been with you on your birthday, and that he’d read to you the card Lynn and I had sent you. While I was happy to know you’d received that small token of our love, I was saddened by Jim’s use of the words “read to” and asked him if that meant you no longer can read things yourself. He confirmed that your abilities to read and write have largely been taken from you at this point. I remarked that this must be very difficult for you, given your love of reading and your skill at correspondence. But please know the Lynn and I always will cherish the letters we have received from you.

I’m writing this on a Friday. Both Lynn and have taken the day off and have been busy making preparations for our upcoming vacation trip to New England. We’re leaving Sunday for Lynn’s mother’s house in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and during the course of the week we’ll spend nights in Falmouth, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), Brattleboro, Vermont, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before returning to my mother-in-law’s house and driving home from there. The main reason we’re traveling north at this particular time is to meet up with a British couple who are roughly our age, Clive and Karen Scorer, who we met during our tour of Iceland in 1999. We’ve kept in touch over the years, but we last saw them in the flesh in 2000, when they came to Washington on vacation and we had occasion to make them dinner (well, Lynn made them dinner—but I did the dishes) and play tour guide on trips to the White House and the top of the Washington monument. They will be flying to Boston this weekend to begin an organized bus tour of Massachusetts and New Hampshire that will focus on history, culture and, of course, that star of fall tourism in New England, the colorful foliage (which we hope for their sakes will oblige with a proper rainbow). Their lone unscheduled day is Wednesday on Cape Cod, so the four of us will spend the day together. We plan to drive them across the Cape to arty Provincetown, and also to indulge Clive’s request to visit a local kaleidoscope store, as he collects same.

Speaking of Clive’s hobby, which strikes me as being a very British sort of eccentricity, I’ve suggested in the past that my friend really lays on the British thing a bit thick, given that he’s already named “Clive” and lives in a town named “Biggleswade” He has not, frankly, rebutted the charge. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he and his wife were to have us scouring retail districts for tea cozies, monocles and suchlike before the day is through.

Although from everything we’ve read both Brattleboro and Portsmouth are lovely towns, the main reasons we’re visiting them is to satisfy my own eccentric pursuit and because they were among the few places we could secure lodgings at fairly reasonable prices during Leaf Season in New England. The eccentric pursuit to which I’m referring is my determination ultimately to run in all 50 states. My own idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes a run is one uninterrupted hour. (I’m writing the word “run,” but at my speed think “jog.”) I’ve been stuck on 30 states for several years now, and Vermont and New Hampshire are the only remaining East Coast states that somehow have eluded me to date. So, Lynn has graciously agreed to abet my efforts by routing our trip accordingly. I just hope for decent weather, or at least rains that are short of monsoonal. Because I’m pretty much determined to make like the Post Service and let no conditions keep me from my appointed rounds—um, runs.

This will be the first real vacation (more than a long weekend) that we’ve taken in a very long time. We’re greatly looking forward to it. But first, I must get back to the aforementioned preparations! So, our very best to you. And, of course, as always, our love.

Eric