I returned to my front steps this morning, shirtless, wrung
out, dripping – the hallmarks of a mid-summer Virginia run. The dark and cold
mornings that defined this past January seemed a distant memory. But I still
remember them.
I remember the tail end of what I would consider the first
real training week. That Saturday morning called for 18 miles, a.k.a. serious
mileage. I had plans to meet up with Rohan to do “a new route I’ve wanted to
try.” “I just want to get some hills in,” I said, thinking ahead to the rolling
elevation profile of my impending March half marathon.
I had no idea.
I awoke to a room dark as pitch. Rain tapped the windows,
eventually changing over to the unmistakable hiss of ice crackling – popping
and snapping like fire – against the glass. What the forecasters call a wintry
mix, and DC-ites call a bread, toilet paper, and water emergency. I let out a
heavy sigh and pulled the blankets up.
When Rohan and I eventually let out, the sleet had tapered
to a fine mist. Steel-colored clouds stretched across the sky and the air
carried the unmistakable scent of snow.
The now infamous-run, which we refer to only as “Bluemont”
for the town this ribbon of torturous inclines and declines carves through, led
us each to new places, both literal and figurative. The elevation profile looks
like an EKG of someone who suffered a massive heart attack or, as I prefer to
call it, “shark’s teeth.”
It was the kind of run that – having come through clean on
the other side – has changed you. You are a different person when you return to
the car from the one who set out – hardened somehow.
It has been six months since that run. Over the past half
year, Rohan and I have texted each other that one word – “Bluemont” – and it
was enough to bring pause to whatever the recipient was doing. Those
breath-stealing climbs and quad-pounding descents still linger in our lungs and
legs. The word was not (and is not) one taken lightly.
I bring it up here because this week the schedule calls for
18 miles. In other words, serious mileage. I stand at the beginning of yet
another training program – as I have for the past 10 years – seeking to once
again redefine what I once thought of as “the limit.” That training plateau where
you believe, “I have reached the edge and can go no farther.” Where you live at
the margins for weeks on end, hanging on. I thought I had reached it last
November and then again this past March, as I had back in 2009 and 2004. But
each time I have begun, I have ended in new territory – changed, hardened,
stronger.
One text went out on Monday: “Bluemont.”
And so, we begin again.
