Run for Grub

Sweat Scholarships Ripe for the Picking

2010-10-05T23:07:00.001-07:00

Since I crossed the finish line of the first annual Run for Grub about two months ago:

my running regimen has been downgraded from militant to pleasant,
I've reminded myself that music is more than just a collection of beats driving my feet, and
that toenail I was so worried about losing? Totally lost.

What HASN'T been lost is the four Grub Street scholarships I ran this race to fund in the first place (make some noise for the generosity of all our sponsors, please!)

If you're looking to join a family of writers in Boston.

If the writing project nearest and dearest to you could use a gentle kick in the pants.

If your writerly spirit is willing but your bank account is weak, the Run for Grub Scholarship may be for you:

WHAT: Run for Grub is a set of four scholarships covering the cost of a 10- or 6-week Grub Street workshop of your choice.

ELIGIBILITY: You must either be taking your first multi-week workshop at Grub Street OR taking your first multi-week workshop in a genre that is new to you (i.e. you are a fiction writer taking screenwriting for the first time, or a poet taking a memoir class, etc).

APPLICATION: Send runforgrub@grubstreet.org a one-page, single-spaced letter in 12-point font. The letter should detail how you'd benefit from taking a Grub Street class and include your bio and your familiarity with writing workshops (at Grub or other schools).

DEADLINE: Applications must be received by October 15th, 2010 at 5pm EST.

A letter, people! Just a letter! You could have this whole application wrapped up faster than it takes to fill out one of those silly Facebook questionnaires. And really. If I can run 26.2 miles, you can certainly write one stinking page.

We'll even let you keep all your toenails.

For complete scholarship information, visit the Run for Grub Scholarships page on the Grub Street Web site.

My Hollywood Ending

2010-07-31T20:11:00.000-07:00

The race kicked off at 7:07 p.m. and ended—for me, anyway—with choking sobs eight laps and almost six hours later. I want to tell you the story, I do. But at a party once, Michelle Seaton, a wise Grub Street instructor, told me that the biggest mistake essayists can make is trying to write about seismic life events while they're still feeling aftershocks. That's sound advice, but as a blogger, I don't really have the luxury of time to process the event,and yet I've put off writing about the big race this entire, sore-muscled day. Because besides the blisters, the aching legs, and the surreal realization that when I stepped over the finish line very early this morning I transformed from marathon trainee to marathon finisher, I'm not sure what else to tell you, exactly. Not sure what to share. And then when I feel like I've gotten anywhere close to the heart of what it is I do want to say, I'm not sure anyone would believe me.

Should I tell you about the hell of lap one, when I found myself in a crush of runners pushing me faster than I'd practiced? About the stitch that came on like a vice at mile two? About reminding myself this was my race, my pace, and falling into my rhythm—mine— before the lap was through?

Should I tell you about the swarms of microscopic harpies that dive bombed me—dive-bombed all the runners, really—during lap two and filled me with dread about a nuisance I could have avoided if I'd thought to included some Deep Woods Off in my bag of marathon tricks?

Should I mention how the text messages wishing me well started at the start of lap three with a chuckle-inducing reference to The Karate Kid? Should I mention the car of people who screamed my name at the very start of the race? The army of people who were there to cheer me on at every lap? The way my husband called me champ and handed me water bottles, tops pre-loosened? The way my heart swelled at the sight of signs with my name on them, my dog's name on them, Grub's name on them? The way the roar of support as I finished the first half of the race gave me such a boost that the first lap of the second half of my race was the absolute easiest of them all?

Do I mention how downing about 24 ounces of water per lap forced a port-o-potty break after lap 5 even though I knew full well that stopping would make it much harder to get going again? Do I tell you how uncomfortable it was trying to run after pulling sweaty, wet spandex up into a position that just didn't match the grooves the spandex had made through the first five laps of the race? How the only other time I stopped during the race was the 30 seconds I took to frantically try and right said sweaty, wet spandex?

Should I tell you about how the fastest runners didn't give me a second thought, but the medium-speed runners who passed me looked back and yelled: Good job or Just a little more or Looking strong? Do I tell you about making friends with David, a runner in the ultra marathon category, who was in a run-walk pattern that meant we kept passing and being passed by each other? Do I tell you how I lost David after the start of lap 5? That I can't decide if it was his knee brace or my pee break that broke our little 13.1-mile dance?

Do I mention the torture of muscles aching at lap 6 and the hum of pain in my feet and knees that settled in halfway through lap 7? The way I took a breath and forced my thoughts to stay the hell in my head— just my head, dammit—literally convincing myself that my legs, though down there, didn't need my attention right now and the only body part I cared about just then were the parts from the neck up? Do I try and explain that turning myself into bobble-head me worked beautifully when I don't really understand the first thing about how I made 90 percent of me disappear? Do I explain how bauble- head-me kept my head on the things I wanted to think about—how far I've come in a year—while the text messages pouring in made sure I was buoyed by the bigger picture: this run was a fundraiser for Grub Street.

Do I tell you about how I realized that some people were lapping me, others I was lapping, and still others—long lost David among them—kept passing me and letting me pass them? Should I mention how this reminded me that this race was like writing a novel that way: it doesn't matter how many people get to the finish line before or after you, your pace is your pace is your pace?

Do I tell you about the way I entered the last lap with a certainty that no matter what my knee was doing down there, I was going to finish this thing? Do I tell you how weepy I got about everyone who supported me out there? The way I realized that for all the joking I've done about how running a marathon is easier than writing a book because there are clear schedules for marathon training, that I realized that I've gone and come to the end of the Run for Grub road with a revamped outline of the second half of my revision that looks a hell of a lot like a training schedule—do this, then this, then this.

Do I tell you about the personal journey of that last lap? The way my mind cast back to one year ago when I was forty pounds heavier and barely able to run three miles? Do I tell you how I choked up at mile 25 because holy mother of sweat monkeys, I was two-thirds of the way through the last lap and really, actually, for reals, yo, about to finish my first marathon?

Do I tell you about the way I totally lost it and burst into tears on coming to the marker that told me I had finished 26 miles? The one that meant I had a measly .22 miles to go? One last corner to round? Do I mention the way the runners around me slowed and turned to make sure that sobbing-puddle-'o'-Cathy wasn't in dire distress, the way I waved them on by telling them I was almost done, the way they let me be, the way I pulled it together and ran that last little spit of road for everything running had won for me this year—my health, my renewed confidence in my book, my commitment to Grub Street?

I could tell you all those things, but as Michelle would warn, it will come out sounding pretty much exactly like the first draft of a diary entry that this little rant has turned out to be. But for a blog entry made just about 24 hours after finishing my first marathon, that's OK with me. I should hope that's OK with you.

What I think I'll leave you with is the perfect Hollywood ending every fiction workshop I've had at Grub Street would encourage me to avoid. But in this case, this story is mine. And I think I've more than earned the right to share my Hollywood ending.

You know.

The one where I cross the finish line and see my husband walking toward me, arms stretched out. The one where I fall into his hug and really cry—for everything I've mentioned above and the swarm of emotions that are still too raw for me to translate with a keyboard—while he asks me again and again to talk to him, let him know that the tears are about joy and not pain. The one where for several seconds, all I can do is nod and cry in the cool, cool night.

On July 30, Catherine Elcik ran her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Donations can still be made at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Day Of...

2010-07-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

I've been wonderfully swamped with well-wishers today--flowers and phone calls and texts, oh my!--so the lollygagging I'd planned to do over the day-of-the-marathon entry didn't really happen. But I'm feeling strong and spooked and excited in about equal measure, which means feeling great has the majority and I'm all about majority rules. In the last forty-five minutes left before I leave for the race, I need to double check that I've packed everything (no barefoot running for me, thanks), down enough water to make the pH in my stomach hospitable for most freshwater fish, and watch the finale of The Karate Kid one more time.

Yeah, I know a karate tournament and a marathon aren't exactly kissing cousins, but the way I figure it, the metaphor holds up on three counts:

if the little demon in my head so much as hisses the words tired or quit or sore, I'll sweep his devilish little leg;
the crane kick's all the metaphor I need for digging deep and pushing through when (if!) I feel beat; and
I'm hoping Mr. Miyagi's voice will make an appearance in my brain somewhere around lap 7:

Miyagi have hope for you!

And with that, I'm off to go take my mark...

My State of Mind The Day Before the Race?

2010-07-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Excitofied!

Rocky Balboa's Got Nuthin' on Ralph

2010-07-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

Everything I read about what I'm supposed to be doing in this last week of training says I should be taking it easy by watching uplifting movies like Rocky and Chariots of Fire and Prefontaine. Which would be well and good except that I heard Steve Prefontaine died in a taken-too-soon car crash. And even though his death was completely unrelated to running, dead marathoners are not really the vibe I'm looking for two days before my race.

The vibe I do want? A little more magical realistic. A little more breathlessly rooting that the fantastically ridiculous longshot will pull through. A little more outting me as the complete sap I am when it comes to competition movies (this dates back to the time in my latchkey phase when my sister and I wore out the videotape we'd used to steal The Karate Kid from Cinemax).

So when I read that Saint Ralph was about a fifties-era freshman who fixates on the idea that winning the Boston Marathon was just the miracle he needed to rouse his mother from her coma, I was all over that shit.

You remember that stereotype of the frat boy who gets drunk at a party, starts hanging off his friends, and screams "I love you, man?" Yeah. So that was totally me from the moment the gun goes off at the marathon and Ralph gets busy run, run, running. Because the thing was, you see, that the people at home were listening on their transistor radios.

I mean, like, all of them.

And yes, I know that no sports movie is complete without the required quick cuts to all the motley fans listening in cars, in classrooms, and in any weird place the director decides will fly, really. But in this particular movie, those supporters were Grub Street.

Grub Street's been called a lot of things by all the people who have done Q&As and essays for the Grub Tales section of this blog, but so far no one's mentioned how the community at Grub buoys its writers with all the energy of a fan-support montage in a competition movie. The only difference is that where love for Ralph was total Hollywood fabrication, Grub love is real.

The amount of well-wishing I've received this week has been totally humbling. And I'm downright gobsmacked at the number of people who are planning to show up in Wakefield on Friday night to support me. Though given my weepy reaction to Saint Ralph, I need to renew my warning about the likelihood of tears: I may well turn into a blubbering shell of myself after crossing the finish line.

You know.

Assuming I've got any water left in me at all after sweating for five to six hours.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

Grub Tales: Lisa Borders

2010-07-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Lisa Borders’ first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her second novel, The Fifty-First State, is represented by Svetlana Katz at Janklow & Nesbit. Lisa has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. This fall she will be a fellow at the Millay Colony. More information on Lisa and her work is available at www.lisaborders.com.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
Lisa Borders: When I say that Grub Street is my home, I don’t mean it as a metaphor. My Oxford American Dictionary gives one of the meanings for “home” as “a place where something flourishes.” I can’t think of a better way to describe my relationship to Grub Street, and I can’t think of any other place that fits, for me, that particular definition of “home.”

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory? 
Lisa Borders: The one that stands out in my mind is from a Novel in Progress class I taught a few years ago. On one of the last nights we were meeting, four people read revisions of scenes we’d already workshopped. From one student to the next, the revised versions were quantum leaps better than the previous versions. It truly felt magical when the fourth student began reading, and his scene was as amazingly transformed as the others. “I have chills!” someone called out when that last student had finished reading. “My work here is done – you’re all amazing!” I said. The entire class was so jazzed we ended up talking for an hour past the time the class ended. It’s such a gift for a teacher to see incredible progress like that within the time frame of a ten-week course. In keeping with the magic of that class, I happen to know that several of those writers are still meeting as a group.

RUN FOR GRUB: Grub Street almost closed in 2001, but--thank goodness--it reinvented itself as a nonprofit instead. What would you have lost if Grub had withered away eight years ago?
Lisa Borders: Before I made the decision to chuck more sensible professions and become a fiction writer, I’d always felt like I didn’t quite fit anywhere. I went to my graduate creative writing program hoping I’d find that home of other writers, that place where people got me – “a place where something flourishes” – but didn’t find it there, either. I’d almost given up on ever finding that elusive home when I stumbled upon Grub Street. This amazing institution has nurtured me both as a writer and as a teacher of writing. Many of my closest friends are people I met through Grub. Almost everything good that has happened to me in the past eight years is linked, directly or indirectly, to Grub Street. The thought of a life without Grub sounds postapocalyptic to me – bleak and lonely.

RUN FOR GRUB: Can you believe we’ve known each other almost nine years?
Lisa Borders: Actually, I feel like I’ve known you longer! You’re in that category in my mind with the friends who go way, way back.

RUN FOR GRUB: I was in one of your first classes, which means you were the first face of Grub for me. This isn’t so much a question, but a thank you for seeing a spark of something in me, nurturing it without extinguishing it, and being loyal for all these many years.
Lisa Borders: I’ve remained loyal because I can’t wait for your amazing novel, Misfit Kings, to be a runaway bestseller – after which I plan to walk around boasting that you were once my student! All kidding aside, it’s been amazing to see both your writing and our friendship develop over the past decade. The appreciation for the support and loyalty goes both ways.

RUN FOR GRUB: RUNaway bestseller! Ha! Kidding aside, right back at ya. And to any novelists in Grubdom, know this: working on a novel on your own is like running on a treadmill; working on your book while enrolled in one of Lisa’s novel-in-progress classes is like running on a pristine beach with your favorite tunes and just the right amount of seabreeze to refresh you.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

Celebrity Death Match: Simon verses Elvis

2010-07-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

Glancing at my marathon playlist (See The Playlist I Literally Sweated Over), most people can't help but notice that tracks from Paul Simon and Elvis Presley dominate—songs from Elvis, Paul Simon, and Simon & Garfunkel account for 17 of the 98 songs on the playlist, and that total creeps to 20 if you include the three tracks from Harper Simon as Paul Simon tracks which I do. I'm all for letting kids of superstars make their own way in this world, but Harper's voice sounds like such a Paul Simon clone I had to check the liner notes to make sure it wasn't Paul Simon singing.

That means that a little more than 20 percent of the music that will carry me along on race day belongs to one of these two men. Who, then, is the King of the playlist? Who is my Mr. Marathon? Paul Simon gets the advantage in number of tracks, but Elvis is the King of Rock. This was a question that would need further investigation. This was a question that would need a death match!

Round # 1—Volume
Elvis' nine songs pale next to the 11 songs I'm attributing to Paul. Unfair because Paul Simon didn't write any of Harper Simon's songs you say? Elvis didn't write any of the music that made him rich, either (not even the few early hits that were credited to him).

Point goes to Paul Simon.

Round # 2—Longevity of My Obsession
I've been a Paul Simon freak since 1992, and though I liked Elvis fine when he came on the radio, I didn't start obsessing until 2001.

Point goes to Paul Simon.

Round # 3—Muse-like Qualities of the Music
I'll fight anyone who tells me that there's a more poetic songwriter than Paul Simon alive today (and I question the existence of your musical soul if you can listen to the live version of "The Cool, Cool River" without getting goosebumps at the end when he repeats the line: "sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears"), but it was an Elvis song that planted the seeds of the novel I'm revising. Sorry, Paul.

Point goes to Elvis.

Round # 4—Gateway
Whose music is a bigger gateway: Paul Simon introducing the world to African tribal music and the rhythms of South African drumming or Elvis blowing through what until that point had been largely segregated musical styles and introducing the world to rock 'n roll so definitively that even though historians will quibble about what was truly the first rock record, few will mount a real contest to Elvis's King of Rock title? Man. Those VH1 pundits make spinning definitive statements from subjective sociology look sooo easy. I don't want to take the clear point-awarded-to-both cop out, but I will defer to the Boss on this. Bruce Springsteen never got escorted from Paul Simon's door, but he did hop the fence at Graceland and get intercepted as he made a break for Elvis's front door.

Because the Boss is, well, the boss, point goes to Elvis.

Round # 5—First-name fame
Paul Simon tried so hard to get the world to call him Al, and while most people know who Paul Simon is (though a depressingly large percentage of my students do NOT know this name), if my husband said he listened to Paul yesterday, I'd tell him it's always good to listen to his boss. If my husband told me he was listening to Elvis, however, I'd ask him who he was and what has he done with the man I married (not such a fan, that one).

Point goes to Elvis.

Round # 6—Sex Appeal
OK, I guess technically Elvis is the shoe in here. The problem is I was born in 1975 which means I basically only know Elvis in retrospective photos. Yes, teenage Elvis exuded sex on stage, and sure Elvis could wear him some black leather pants, but I've also seen him in photos from the seventies where he was sporting a floppy terrycloth fisherman's cap, about 50 extra pounds, and a goofy George-W-esque expression on his face. And Paul Simon? Um.

A grudging point to Elvis, I guess. Because he was sexy at least once in his life.

Round #7—Songwriting
No surprise here. Paul Simon wrote the vast majority of the music he recorded and Elvis, though a master of the arrangement, did not. Given that I'm a writer running to help writers, it should come as no shock that Paul Simon will get the nod here.

3 points to Paul Simon. Just because.

Results
So there you have it:

Paul Simon: 5 points
Elvis Presley: 4 points.

I think it's fair to say that we've proven in a totally non-biased evaluation that Paul Simon has earned the title of Mr. Marathon.

Grub Tales: Ron MacLean

2010-07-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ron MacLean is author of the story collection Why the Long Face? (2008) and the novel Blue Winnetka Skies (2004). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Fiction International, Night Train, Other Voices and other quarterlies. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and has been a proud part of team Grub since 2004.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
RON MacLEAN: A writing home; a place to teach at a high level with students who are serious about the craft and colleagues (and students) who challenge and inspire me; a community of friends; an organization I care deeply about giving back to.

RUN FOR GRUB: Can you define your Grub community?
RON MacLEAN: I’ve always looked at Grub Street as – and tried to help make it – a home for writers in the Boston area. So I define my Grub community in light of that. Whoever defines themselves as a writer in the Boston area. Whoever comes to visit is a guest in that home. It’s one of the things I love about Grub as a destination: if you’re there, whether as a student, an instructor, a party-goer, a guest at the Muse, whatever – you’re part of the community. It’s a big, open free-floating network, in the best sense of that word.

RUN FOR GRUB: Grub Street almost closed in 2001, but--thank goodness--it reinvented itself as a nonprofit instead. What would you have lost if Grub had withered away eight years ago?
RON MacLEAN: Half my friends. Most of my moral support. My favorite place to teach. My clubhouse. And one of the few institutions that helps me believe anything is possible.

RUN FOR GRUB: Have you ever complained at a bookstore because the manager wasn’t stocking enough books by Grub Street writers on the shelves?
RON MacLEAN: YES! How did you know?

RUN FOR GRUB: So a little bird tells me you hate running but stand behind marathon crazy. Any shot you’ll consider running with me if I do this again next year?
RON MacLEAN: No, no, and absolutely no. If, however, you want to do a century bike ride, we can talk.

RUN FOR GRUB: I'm sensing some, um, resistance on your part around the whole running thing, though I have to say the idea of a century bike ride has me cocking my head like an intrigued puppy. Especially given that I haven't had so much as a nibble in response to my request for company should I decide to repeat the marathon next year. Alas, Peddle for Prose doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Run for Grub does...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

Race Details for Run for Grub Groupies

2010-07-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

This week, Run for Grub officially hit its fundraising goal and raised enough money to cover the cost of workshops for four writers who want to try a Grub Street class for the first time (or four current Grub Street students who want to try a class in a genre that's new to them). In a digital-age version of pinch me, I keep calling up www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub just so I can blink at the full thermometer up top.

Yup, I think. We're still at 100 percent!

But as much as I lost my mind when I reached the goal (a certain Grub Street board member whose donation happened to put me over the edge can attest that our Facebook chat devolved to digital squealing on my part at the exact moment I knew it was true), I'm currently gobsmacked by the number of people who are planning to cheer me on come race day. Even after I remind them that my target finishing time is somewhere between 5 and 6 hours, they grin. Some of them are gonna be there to see me off; others will show up at the end of their night to see me finish. And a few swear that if I can run for that length of time watching me run is the least they can do.

I'm honored that so many people want to share in the last leg of this crazy pavement pounding journey of mine, but I have to warn you that I'm pretty much guaranteed to be in tears when (when!) I finish (though it's too early to say whether those tears will be of joy, of pain, or some combination therein). So as long as you can resist the temptation to bellow "there's no crying in marathon running!" at me after I cross the finish line, I'm happy to have you on the sidelines cheering me on.

Here are the details:

Race: 24 Hour Around the Lake

Start time: 7 p.m., Friday, July 30

Duration: Last year's female marathon winner did the race in 3:05:27. Clearly she's not nearly as pokey a little puppy as I am. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me given that I slow and slow and slow with every mile. My best guess is that I'll take between 5.5 and 6 hours to finish. Because that's the goal, here. Finishing.

Location: The race course goes around (and around and around and around and around and around and around and around) Lake Quannapowitt* in Wakefield, MA. This is good news for spectators because it means that you can stay right where you are and let me pass (and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass) you by. The race** starts and finishes at:

Lake Lord Wakefield Hotel
595 North Avenue
Wakefield, MA 01880

How's the spectator thing gonna work exactly: Honestly, I don't know. I know. Someone I babysat for when I was younger is planning on making posters, a runner friend is threatening to run beside me during the last lap (despite my honest expectation that an old lady with a walker will be able to keep pace with me during my last lap), and my husband's planning on turning my race into a drinking game.

Yup, you heard me right.

The Lord Wakefield Hotel has a lounge attached. And given that the race starts and stops at the Lord Wakefield and that cheerleading duties (namely positive chatter and the hand off of a fresh water bottle) will only last at most a minute every roughly 35-40 minutes, Mike is threatening to drink between laps effectively turning my marathon into a drinking game that I endorse as long as he a) doesn't miss me passing by in a given lap and b) understands that I'm the only one of us who has a fair claim on needing to be held up at the end of the night.

If you're thinking about going, comment on the blog or send me an email so I can keep watch. I'll make sure Mike wears something that helps him stick out. Perhaps I'll give him a Grub T-shirt or something....

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

* Is it just be or does this photo make the lake look awfully big to be run around 8 times, she said in a fit of pre-race uneasiness...

** I'm not digging the whole calling-it-a-race thing. I think it sets up unrealistic expectations. Basically I'm going out for a (very, very) long jog, and some other uber-fit yahoos are gonna be racing by me.

The Playlist I (literally) Sweated Over

2010-07-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

For the last twelve weeks, the Run for Grub blog has focused on all things marathon. I've groused about the slog, documented every skinned knee, and asked (and asked and asked) for donations. But though I may have led you to believe this blog was an all-access behind-the-scenes-pass to my marathon training, I've been sitting on one humdinger of a lie of omission. In addition to being one part personal physical challenge and one part fundraiser for Grub Street, my marathon has also been a freakishly effective vehicle for some serious musical obsessiveness.

It started when I noticed that certain songs—say "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves, for one—had the power to make me grin even while I was running. Grinning while running? But running's supposed to be the epitome of Puritan angst and suffering, isn't it? Or is serious suffering simply incompatible with giggling at the panting wolf thing Duran Duran's got going on during "Hungry Like the Wolf"?

And so begin my quest to create a playlist of every song that had the power to make me forget I was running. In a blind musical mania, I gathered up more than 9 hours of music and proceeded to systematically winnow that list to 5.5 hours (my guess for how long this marathon thing's gonna take me). I was ruthless. During my training runs, if I reached to fast forward through a song twice, it was gone. A bit harsh? Maybe. But as I said, I was obsessed. For the vast majority of my runs to date, I chose songs to audition, ran with my ears wide open, and then made my cuts when I got home. When I wasn't sure about a song, I dumped it into a test playlist until there was enough music to support a run, and then I gave it a do-or-die audition.

And in that way I reduced my list to 100 titles I absolutely loved, or so I thought. During my 20-mile run on Friday, I turned on two songs I thought were totally safe, so the finally list clocks in at 98 songs. I know I cut some great songs, and I know that there are at least a few songs on here that will get the universal what-was-she-thinking response, but I don't care. The way I see it, the equation is simple:

MY MARATHON = MY PLAYLIST!!!!

But in case you like what you see and want to snap up any of these songs, where possible, I've linked song titles to the Amazon mp3 store where you can download them. And watch out next week when I'll have some musical- themed posts up while Run for Grub is taking a much needed pre-marathon vacation.

So without further ado, my marathon playlist, alphabetically by artist (and if you do decide to buy something, let me know in the comment field so I know I gathered all those links for the greater good):

ABBA
Waterloo

ARCTIC MONKEYS
Dancing Shoes

THE BEATLES
The Ballad Of John And Yoko—No mp3 available except for a tribute version, so I'm embedding the real deal from YouTube:

BEYONCE
Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

RYAN BINGHAM
The Weary Kind

JEFF BRIDGES
Somebody Else
Fallin' & Flyin'

JOHNNY CASH
All Over Again
I Walk The Line
Ring of Fire

NICK DRAKE
Time Has Told Me

DURAN DURAN
Hungry Like The Wolf

THE EELS
Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)
Losing Streak
P.S. You Rock My World

EMINEM
Lose Yourself

FASTBALL
Fire Escape

FOO FIGHTERS
Gimme Stitches
Learn To Fly

THE FRATELLIS
Chelsea Dagger

FRIGHTENED RABBIT
Head Rolls Off
Old Old Fashioned

GREEN DAY
She's A Rebel—This song is one of, like two, that's only available on the album—thank you, Green Day—so I'm embedding the real deal from YouTube:

BILL HALEY AND HIS COMETS
(We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock

IRON & WINE
The Devil Never Sleeps

WANDA JACKSON
Hard Headed Woman

WAYLON JENNINGS
Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way

JET
Are You Gonna Be My Girl
Look What You've Done

JIMMY EAT WORLD
A Praise Chorus
The Middle

BILLY JOEL
It's Still Rock And Roll To Me
Summer, Highland Falls
You May Be Right

JUNE RICH
Sweetthang—Saddest news ever—this band has called it quits. So here's a video of them doing this song live:

KATRINA & THE WAVES
Walking On Sunshine

KEANE
Bend And Break

THE KENNEDYS
Life Is Large

THE KILLERS
I Can't Stay

THE KNACK
My Sharona

LADY GAGA
Bad Romance

LADY SOVEREIGN
Love Me Or Hate Me

BORIS McCUTCHEON
Acequia
Standin' So Still

THE MEAT PUPPETS
Shine

GEORGE MICHAEL
Faith

MIKA
Love Today

ALASTAIR MOOCK
Let It Go
Unwanted Guest

ALEXI MURDOCH
All My Days

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
Welcome To The Black Parade

OUTKAST
Hey Ya!

PEARL JAM
Just Breathe - Apparently Eddie doesn't care to play the Amazon game for the Backspacer album, so whatever. Here's a YouTube version:

IGGY POP
Lust For Life

ELVIS PRESLEY
Burning Love
For The Heart
Got A Lot O' Livin' To Do!
I Gotta Know
A Little Less Conversation
Mystery Train
Shake, Rattle and Roll
Suspicious Minds-LIVE VERSION
Washed My Hands in Muddy Water

PUNCH BROTHERS
Rye Whiskey

QUEEN
Seven Seas Of Rhye

R.E.M.
I'm Gonna DJ
Living Well Is The Best Revenge

THE RAMONES
Beat On The Brat
Blitzkrieg Bop
I Wanna Be Sedated

JOSH RITTER
Snow Is Gone

BOB SEGER--Because Bob Seger is apparently a bigger luddite than I am, not a single one of his songs is available on Amazon for mp3 download, so I'm linking to the tribute bands I could find:
C'est La Vie
In Your Time
Old Time Rock & Roll

HARPER SIMON
Cactus Flower Rag
Tennessee
Wishes And Stars

PAUL SIMON
American Tune
Gone At Last
Hurricane Eye
Late In The Evening
Me And Julio Down By The School Yard
The Obvious Child

SIMON & GARFUNKEL
Keep The Customer Satisfied
Baby Driver

THE STROKES
Someday
Last Nite
Reptilia

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
No One Knows My Plan
Destination Moon
The End Of The Tour
Don't Let's Start

THREE DOG NIGHT
Joy To The World

TRAVIS
Flowers In The Windows

VIOLENT FEMMES
Blister in the Sun

ANDREW W. K.
Ready To Die

THE WHITE STRIPES
My Doorbell

DAR WILLIAMS
Mercy Of The Fallen

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

Grub Tales: Lynne Griffin

2010-07-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster, July 2010) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), and the nonfiction parenting title, Negotiation Generation (Penguin, 2007). Lynne teaches family studies at the graduate level and writing at Grub Street Writers in Boston. She appears regularly on Boston’s Fox Morning News talking about family life issues, and she writes for the blog, Family Life Stories.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
LYNNE GRIFFIN: After my mother passed away in 2000, I found love letters written to her by my father. Reading them, I went so far as to imagine excerpts of my father’s beautiful writing shining within a novel I might someday write. In those musings, Sea Escape was born. Still I told myself, you've never written fiction. You don’t know the first thing about taking on such an ambitious project, weaving his words into your story. No matter how much I dismissed it, the idea nagged me. For years it wouldn't leave me alone. Characters were named. Plot lines fleshed out. Twenty or so pages written--pages that would eventually become the last chapter of the novel.

The minute I began writing Sea Escape, I knew two things. The first was that I was in love with writing fiction. The second was that I had a lot to learn. So I joined a writers’ group, and at every meeting heard something about Grub Street. Amy MacKinnon, author of Tethered encouraged me to take classes, go to readings, join social events. She said it was where we would find our people, that it was the place to meet talented writers at all stages of the journey. I’d heard about independent writing centers, but had no experience taking classes at one. I took the plunge by signing up for a weekend workshop on aspects of the novel taught by Stace Budzko. To this day, I still use techniques Stace shared in that session.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
LYNNE GRIFFIN: Learning about craft and navigating the marketplace—living a literary life—is a solitary pursuit, and always a challenging feat. Grub Street is a physical space where I can go to connect with writers aiming for the same goals, contending with the same obstacles to success. Whether it’s commiserating over the struggle to write the perfect sentence or mulling over the ins and outs of the publishing industry, Grub Street is a like-minded community of people I can connect with in person, at classes, and increasingly online. Grub Street has become for me a state of mind. An honest, thoughtful, inspiring, and encouraging place.

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
LYNNE GRIFFIN: Oh, there are so many! I could share sights and sounds and insights from my first Muse and the Marketplace conference or my first manuscript mart, when an editor asked for a full [manuscript]. Or the first craft class I taught. But the most magical moment for me came when I was a student in a class on revision. I’d just finished a first draft of my novel Life Without Summer, and I knew I needed direction in taking on a full scale edit. Hallie Ephron, author of Never Tell a Lie, and a wonderful nonfiction guide to writing, offered a session on revision. At the end of the class, she asked students to share work for critique. Reluctantly—nervously—I agreed to read. When I finished, Hallie said, “Thank you. That quite captured me.” With that one line, she provided enough encouragement to see me through my grueling revision. She made me believe that I had something worth sharing, however small that may be. One line from her had the power to spur me on. I told myself that no matter how much reworking, reimagining, or re-visioning I needed to do, I’d gotten at least that one bit right. Thank you, Hallie. And thanks to Grub Street for hosting guest authors who positively and enthusiastically encourage emerging writers.

Editor's Note: Catch Lynne reading from Sea Escape at Cornerstone Books in Salem on Thursday, July 15 at 7 p.m. or at Newtonville Books on Sunday, July 25 at 2 p.m.

Corners I Didn't Know I Was Cutting

2010-07-10T18:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I ran twenty miles. So easy to type and yet so grueling to slog through. Despite the fact that I've not been afflicted with pretty much any of the ailments distance runners seem to complain about (get me some wood and I'll knock it, will ya?) a few dragons reared their heads last night:

friction burns where the seams of my sweat-wet bra rubbed me raw;
gashes in my ankles from the reflector cuffs that were meant to keep me safe;
moments of shooting weakness through my knees—no pain, just a flowing feebleness demanding that I concentrate on the brain messages being sent to keep those legs a pumping; and
a full-blown panic caused by technical malfeasance on the part of my otherwise revered pedometer program for my iPod Nano.

Numbers 1-3 speak for themselves, I think, but let's take a moment to explore number 4. I use a computer attachment for my iPod that's like a pedometer on steroids—I program in a distance I want to run, and in return a computerized woman's voice announces every mile I complete until she congratulates me on reaching my goal. It's been great. There's nothing like the thrill of hearing her bright voice call out "halfway point!" and knowing I'm free to turn back at any time. Because I had to calibrate the machine over a known distance when I bought it, I thought I could trust it, though I must admit that I'd noticed recently on my long runs that the 7-mile marker was shifting a bit, but no matter. I extended my run beyond the halfway point to compensate, and then didn't really worry about it.

But last night the Nano flipped it's rock 'n roll lid.

I knew that I'd built in a little wiggle room into my 4-mile loop because I like to leave some time to stop and walk at the end of the run. But on the first lap, it seemed like the computer had reached four miles far earlier than I thought it had any right to reach it. By lap two when the computer thought I'd gone more than 9 miles when I knew I'd only gone 8, I was out-and-out worried, and when I finished the fourth lap and my pedometer thought I only had .75 miles left to go instead of the roughly four miles I knew I had left, I was pretty demoralized.

Inside after my run, I traced my route on Gmaps pedometer to find that my four-mile loop was in fact 4.1799 miles. That means that in my five laps around this loop, I went 20.8995 miles—not the 24.62 miles my iPod thought I'd gone. When my blood ran cold it had nothing to do with the air-conditioned air hitting my sweat-soaked body and everything to do with a very simple question: how many of my training runs has my pedometer program completely muffed up?

Last night my nearly 21 miles took me about four and a half hours. But when I click back through old stats, I see that last week's "18" mile route only took me three and a half hours. So if I'm to believe I went 18 miles last week, I've also got to believe that it took me an extra hour to go two extra miles last night.

My husband points out that some of the time lag can be accounted for in hills—my normal long-run route has only one hill in it while the loop I did last night had 20 (the four hills I went up five times ). Oh, come now. I've never said I was anything but slow-slow-slow, but there's no way a few molehills added an extra hour to my time unless I just so happen to be the love child of a giant sloth and a garden slug. I am not. Clearly my computer has been letting me down, and I gotta say learning that now is freaking me the hell out.

Yes, I ran almost 21 miles last night. And yes I jogged for four and a half straight hours, but learning that I may have cut corners I had no idea I was cutting makes me worry that I haven't been conditioning myself quite as thoroughly as I thought I'd been.

At the end of my run last night, I had trouble walking in a straight line. I had to shower sitting in my tub because standing made me feel nauseous. And I was so wiped out that my husband found me face down on our bed with my glasses still on and my body no where near under the covers. What if I was zonked because I haven't been adequately prepared for this distance? How is it I could work this hard for this long and still feel like a cheater?

But, but, but!

I'm reminded by the small, wise voice within that the real headline here is that I ran almost 21 miles and lived to tell about it. My inner runner has taught my inner writer so much over the last few months, but maybe now it's time for the writer to return to the favor. Realizing that the long runs I've done maybe haven't been up to snuff, well my inner writer has been there and done that. Because my inner writer has workshopped stories she thought were close to done only to have trusted readers tell her with a beautiful and firm kindness: No, sweetie. Not so much.

My inner writer knows how to dig deep. My inner writer knows how to find a way to go those extra miles she thought she'd already covered. And my inner writer knows—oh, how she knows—that that the difference between quitters and finishers is quite simply about refusing to take herself out of the race.

So maybe I didn't run as many miles as I thought I did in the last few months of training. Maybe that's true. But last night I know I ran 20. 8995 miles with nothing more serious to complain about the than a couple of scrapes, some friction burns, and quads that scream uncle every time I try to go down the stairs.

But, but, but!

Last night I ran 20.8995 miles.
Tomorrow I'll run 5.
And on July 30, I'll run 26.2.

I just will.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

The Last Long Run

2010-07-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

At 7 p.m. I'll head out for my last long training run, the 20-miler.* The program I'm following recommends treating the 20-mile race like a dress rehearsal—eat what you'll eat, start when you'll start, etc. But when I found out how hot is was supposed to be this week, I told my husband I'd probably just do my 6 a.m. thing.

"Yeah, but what if it's that hot the day of your race?" my husband asked.

I stared at him. "Are you seriously suggesting I choose to run in this oppressive ridiculousness when I don't actually have to?"

"I'm just saying it might be good practice," he said. "Plus this'll give you a chance to get used to running as the sun's going down."

"But—"

"And if you pick a loop around the house, I can bring water down and cheer you on."

I sighed. As much as I hated to admit it, the man was talking sense, so I said goodbye to my dreams of one last run from Winthrop into Nahant and decided the 20-miler will be done in five laps around my 4-miles-and-change loop.

So here I sit, obsessively checking the temperature—weather.com says it's 86 now and with 82 projected for 7 p.m.—and praying for a quick thunderboomer to ride in like a knight in shining silver lining and chase away ten degrees or so. I'm not holding my breath.

But I may be procrastinating.

All right, all right. In a few minutes I'll wrap up here and start to get dressed. I'll prep my iPod and HOLY MOTHER OF THOR, I JUST REMEMBERED BY IPOD'S NOT ACTUALLY CHARGED!!! Excuse me one teensy moment, would you?

Please imagine 60 seconds of annoying Muzak.

That's better. Tunes are charging as we speak. But holy crap was THAT a near miss!

And though my nerves at the thought of twenty miles tonight make me want to stay right here chatting with you all a while longer, I should probably go make sure everything I need is gathered and ready to go.

And hey, I know the vast majority of the world is already deep into the whole Friday-night-thing, but if you do happen to see this, take a second to wish me cool breezes and second winds.

And with that, I'm off. Or at least off to get ready to be off.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

* The training program I follow suggests training up to 20 miles before tapering off in the last couple of weeks before the marathon to rest. There are programs that argue that your training runs should include at least one run that's the full-length of the marathon, but most of those programs are also designed to improve speed. The program I chose is designed for the marathon rookie. Plus, I like the idea of running my first marathon for Grub, and if I ran 26.2 miles before race day, it would be my second marathon.

My Top Three Running Anthems

2010-07-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

In the book "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life," Steve Almond (he's reading tonight to introduce songwriter Danya Kurtz at the Oberon on Arrow Street in Cambridge at eight—go, go, go!) writes about how "drooling fanatics" fall for different musical myths: the owner of an Air Supply album is pretty much guaranteed to harbor a different world view then, say, a Nine Inch Nails fanatic, for example.

But because most running playlists are built around a target tempo, it's almost impossible to get a clear sense of musical bias based on the tunes a runner throws together to encourage her feet to keep running around mile twenty. Case in point: no one would ever confuse me for the kind of girl who actually knows how to shake it like a Polaroid picture, and yet I get a goofy grin on my face every time my iPod shuffles around to "Hey Ya." And though I've been known to shake my hands like an idiot when André Benjamin demands I shake my aforementioned "it," no one's gonna confuse me with an Outkast fanboy.

But if you ask a runner for her top three running anthems, you can get a glimpse of that person's inner core, or as Steve would call it, her personal myth. And though I tend to be a handwringer in practice, most of my anthems are about quitting the handwringing already and embracing life. And frankly, it's refreshing to see the childlike optimism in me making a play for it, even if it's just bubbling up through a playlist.

And so without further ado, my top three running anthems:

"Life is Large" by The Kennedy's—A buzzkill once told me this song is the worst kind of saccharin, but I decided that the way this song makes me fly was all I needed to know about it merits. And I'm not ashamed to admit that every time Maura Kennedy sings the lyric—"How do you want to be remembered? A raging fire or a dying ember?"—some little girl voice in my head screams: "Raging Fire! Raging Fire!"

"Gone At Last" by Paul Simon—A Southern-Gospel romp by a Jewish singer-songwriter from New York? Why the hell not?! Although my heart may explode as a direct result of my legs trying to keep up with the rollicking tempo of the piano in this tune, there's nothing quite like a gospel choir insisting that my steak of bad luck is gone, gone, gone at last to put a little pep in my step at the end of a long run.

"Losing Streak" by The Eels—If you're dubious about how a song called "Losing Streak" could possibly qualify as an anthem, you haven't heard the horns that chase the tail end of this chorus. "I said my losing streak is done," indeed.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Unleashing the High Five

2010-07-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

After eight miles this morning, my feet held up just fine (see "My Foot Goes Gangstah") until my sneakers burst into flame due to ridiculously high a.m. temperatures.

Running in the heat hasn't exactly been the highlight of this whole marathon training process, but it does have its advantages:

I'm prepared should the temperature near blistering on race day;
I sweat so much that my entire t-shirt turned a darker shade of grey instead of leaving a lighter streak in the exact shape of my sports bra; and
I finally got the high-five I've been trying to inspire someone to give me since my long runs clicked up into the double digits.

Today was an eight-mile medium length run, and I decided to circle by Deer Island. Normal people drive out there and walk the few miles around the tip of the penisula, but I've found that if I jog there, loop the thing, and jog back, it's about eight miles. As I neared the end of the Deer Island segment of my run, a jolly man stood near a bench arms akimbo, shaking his head.

"You're doing better than me," he yelled, laughing. "I had to stop, and I was just walking."

I smiled at him, waved, and kept running.

The man yelled after me: "You're doing good, kid! Keep it up!!"

I waved again, my legs in their crazy left-right-left-right trance, when it hit me—for months I've bemoaned the fact that the secret running society amounts to a wave of a couple of fingers as joggers pass by one another.

Totally lame.

It's my firm belief that runners should great each other with way more ruckus than that. I'm thinking grand hellos and secret handshakes, but I'd settle for a high five. In fact, I've spent the last several weeks raising my hand in clear high five position, a move that has only succeeeded in bringing me bigger waves. Not a single, satisfying slap.

After a few weeks of this, it occurred to me that to make my in-medias-run-high-five a reality, I was gonna have to get into some faces, wave my hand, and make them feel silly for ignoring me. Which meant I pretty much had to give up my quest because let's face facts: I'm not really a channelling-Robin-Williams kind of girl.

But here was this happy Santa personality not a hundred feet from me. If there ever was a now-or-never moment, this was it. Maybe it was the false bravado of Eminem in my ear buds—You better lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it, you better never let it go— go!—but I turned around and jogged back.

"Hey," I yelled. "Could I get a high five?"

The guy laughed and got his hand ready. As I neared, my hand went up, both of our arms sailed through the air, and then—here it comes!—the smack to end all smacks! Believe me when I tell you that there has never been a more satisfying high five than that sweaty thunderclap I shared with a stranger this morning.

The lesson?

Sometimes you just gotta ask for what you want. And because I'm SUCH a quick study, I've already thrown my head back and yelled my request to Mother Nature:

"How about a cold front before my 20-mile run on Friday?"

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

My Foot Goes Gangstah

2010-07-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

I don't want to alarm anyone, but I have reason to believe my feet may have joined the family. My toes aren't packing or anything (though there is a very suspicious callous on my big toe), but what with the dull but pulsing ache in the top of my foot that reared its ugly head this weekend, I can't help but feel my feet are trying to send me a message I can't ignore.

Plus there's the gravelly gangster voice my feet use when they talk to me—you know—in my head:

What fresh hell is this, Toots? Huh? You make us foot those extra pounds all these years and when you finally lose them you think it's slam-the-sidewalk time?

You feel that twinge in your tarsal bones, babe? Do ya? Yeah, I thought so. Keep running, Toots. Yeah.

You just keep it up.

After running 18 miles on Friday, my feet were a bit tired, by Saturday they hurt, and following Sunday's five-mile run in the hellaciously hilly country my mother-in-law calls home, I was in pain. I iced. Four times, I iced. I took ibuprofen. I surfed my husband's iPhone for information on stress fractures. Fortunately, this was definitely not a stress fracture. Not nearly painful enough. What it was, in fact, was an embarrassment: I'm lacing my running shoes too tightly.

Well wrap me in a toga and call me Bam-Bam!

So before my walk this morning, I tied my shoes while arching my foot to allow for extra space, trudged up and down those same hills, and poof!—the bark of the don living in my foot was almost completely stilled. Good news, clearly.* But I do have one persistent worry:

If I spend an extra minute or two tying my laces just so before my eight-mile run tomorrow morning, does that make me the Tanya Harding of marathon training?

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

* Kidding aside, I want to go on record about how lucky I feel to have avoided injury. I know training for marathons isn't a smooth ride for everyone, and I'm grateful. Even when I poke fun, I'm grateful.

Grub Tales: Crystal King

2010-07-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Crystal King is a 15+ year public relations and marketing veteran who currently drives social media for CA, Inc., a $4.3B high-tech firm. She teaches graduate-level media communications at Boston University as well as social media classes for artists and writers at Mass College of Art and at Grub Street, respectively. Additionally, Crystal is a freelance writer and Pushcart-nominated poet who is currently working on her first novel. She holds an M.A. in Critical & Creative Thinking from UMass Boston where she centered her thesis on developing creative tools to help fiction writers in progress. Find her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/crystallyn.

RUN FOR GRUB: I know you're working on a novel about Rome in the first century, so tell me what's harder: being a gladiator or training for your first marathon?
CRYSTAL KING: Ha! This is such a great question. I think the training is equally arduous, but in the end, I would have to go with gladiator. Instead of dodging potholes they're trying to avoid the jaws of death—lions and bears most likely being the scariest of the jaws. Additionally, people threw money and flowers at them. Marathoners usually have to hit up everyone they know for money before the performance, but I'd like to believe that there are flowers handed to them afterward!

RUN FOR GRUB: You're kind of the Grub guru on social media sites, and I've tried to use Twitter and Facebook and Blogger to publicize the Run for Grub. My question is this: could I have made a BIGGER pest of myself?
CRYSTAL KING: Oh, you haven't been the slightest bit pesty! I enjoy helping people figure out what they need to do to help promote themselves. It is true though, that some people "get it" faster than others. The good thing is that you are the former vs. the latter! In my high tech PR job I spend a lot of time answering the same questions for the same people who just can't manage to wrap their heads around what social media is and how to use it.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
CRYSTAL KING: This is a funny story actually. Four years ago I was at a "Getting Things Done" seminar on organizing my life, schedule, etc., and while I was there I ended up meeting a woman named Michelle Toth, who it turns out was on the board of Grub Street. I had heard of Grub but hadn't really pursued getting involved, thinking that it was just taking classes and not knowing the whole picture. I talked with Michelle for awhile and we agreed to touch base after the seminar was over. We put each other on our "get things done" list and did we do that? Nope. By then, however, I was intrigued enough to sign up for a day at the Muse & the Marketplace. During one of the lunches Michelle spoke briefly and when I went to approach her afterward, she remembered me immediately and we both talked about how we never managed to call each other. She introduced me to Christopher Castellani and after that I became very hooked—not just on what Grub offers but by how special the people and the community are to me as a writer.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
CRYSTAL KING: I like to think of my life as B.G.S. (Before Grub Street) and A.G.S. That may sound silly, but it's honestly true. It is 100% true when I say that Grub has changed my life. My outlook on my sense of self and as a writer is drastically different than before Grub Street waltzed in and declared itself part of my world. Before I was just someone who wanted to write—desperately wanted to write. Now I feel like a writer, my friends are writers, and I meet writers (NYT best-selling writers!! I'm still in awe of that) all the time. I worked in a vacuum B.G.S. Now I feel energized and excited about where my writing is going.

RUN FOR GRUB: Can you define your Grub community?
CRYSTAL KING: It's both small and large. I've taken several classes at Grub and they are all top-notch. I've taught classes on creativity and social media at Grub which is such a delight for me. And two years ago I pulled together three other Grub women I knew and we started meeting every two weeks and hashing over our novels. I also know a lot of writers both published and unpublished that I have met over the years at all the readings, the Muse conference, bi-annual parties, lock-downs, and other gatherings. It's a rich vibrant community that just plain makes me happy.

RUN FOR GRUB: What does Grub Street's magic feel like to you?
CRYSTAL KING: For being a writer I find that it's hard to put into words how I feel about the "magic" that is Grub Street. But it IS magical. I tell everyone I know about it. I feel proud to be a part of the larger tapestry that is Grub Street. I am so fortunate to live in Boston where a community like this exists. It's truly unique.

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
CRYSTAL KING: There are so many! Between all the writers I've met, the conferences, and classes it's hard to say. I think though, the way that I felt after I taught my first social media class at Grub—that would be hard to beat. I felt like I made a real difference for my students—who are my fellow writers. They loved the class so much that they had my career half planned out on how I could help other authors afterward. I tear up thinking about it even now.

RUN FOR GRUB: Grub Street almost closed in 2001, but—thank goodness—it reinvented itself as a nonprofit instead. What would you have lost if Grub had withered away eight years ago?
CRYSTAL KING: I'd still be working in a vacuum! I can't imagine going back to my life B.G.S.!!

RUN FOR GRUB: What was the best advice you ever received at a Grub Street event?
CRYSTAL KING: Again, there have been so many useful takeaways I've had from events. Chuck Palahniuk's keynote at this year's Muse & the Marketplace will always stick with me. It made me cry. It made me realize that the writer is, first and foremost, a storyteller. Anita Shreve also said something during her Muse session that will stick with me: "When something is stuck in real life you bang on it, you kick it—that's what you need to do with your writing."

RUN FOR GRUB: And now for the hard hitting journalism: I hear you have a new Grubbie to introduce to the world named Nero—can Run for Grub be the venue to introduce his stunning cuteness to the world? CRYSTAL KING: Yes! My new furry muse, a Ragdoll kitten, will be joining us in a couple of weeks. I'm hoping he'll sit on my desk and keep me company when the words just refuse to flow!

Miles Run, Money Raised,& Running Cuisine

2010-07-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

Crappy Thing They Don't Tell You About Running #10: No matter how clear you are that the chocolate-flavored Power Bar gel that you're about to suck out of a bottle-shaped packet will not taste like chocolate, when you see that dark brown color bubbling up, your tongue's thinking hotfudgehotfudgehotfudge--an unrealistic expectation that will cause face convulsions when the flavor hitting your assaulted taste buds is pretty much the anti-chocolate. Rest assured, once the initial revulsion passes, you'll realize this allegedly chocolate-flavored gel tastes exactly like the aftertaste black licorice leaves behind. And while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's most certainly not a chocolate thing.

Training update: 18 miles today fueled by distinctly licorice-flavored gel, water from two Dunkin Donuts pit stops, and a small handful of very salty almonds. Eating almonds while running is be an odd choice, I'll admit it. But when I can successfully avoid inhaling almond bits as I struggle to chew and swallow while panting, the salt and protein do wonders to stave off the lightheadedness I suffered a few weeks back. Though I do end up feeling as if I owe an apology to everyone who's had to witness my open-mouthed chomping during their morning constitutionals.

Fundraising update: With four weeks before my marathon, the Run for Grub has raised a little more than 90 percent of the cost of four scholarships for first-time Grubbies. That means we have just $204.50 to go. If you've been planning on donating, do it now. I'd love to run my final training run (20 miles on July 9) knowing that the fundraising portion of this journey was done and all that was left was the little matter of me and 26.2 miles.

On Being Human

2010-07-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was June 30. I intended to make much of the one-month-to-go milestone (my marathon's in Wakefield on July 30), but then I also intended to do my 5-mile short run at the end of a long work day. Instead, an urgent work project followed me home and swallowed up the end of my day.

And yet way, way too late I put on my running clothes and pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail fully intending to get my training in, dammit, before snapping safely back to my senses: Clearly, I needed to sleep more than I needed to not miss a second run. And just when I was starting to berate myself for missing a second run of my training season, a friend and fellow writer and runner sent me an email asking how the training was going:

"If there's one piece of advice that you won't hear too often, it's this: MILK IT! Eat that pint of ice cream, get a massage, let the dishes fill the sink, and yes, by all means, tell that cause-of-the-day-canvasser: 'I'm running a marathon for Grub, now fuck off.'"

But while I'm not ready to tell members of the unsuspecting public to fuck off, I'm positively a-tingle with the idea of unleashing an f-bomb (or thirty) on the harpy in my head that will not let this lousy missed run die already.

So harpy of mine, I tried to reason with you. Because really there's nothing earth shattering with a missed run here and there as long as I'm getting up on Friday mornings for my long run (I have and I will--18 miles tomorrow and why I'm not in bed right now is a riddle for another time). And though I'd say this seemed like a perfectly logical argument, my harpy just screeched all the louder (as harpies will), and I'm left with no other options. So here I am, pushing back my metaphorical sleeves, taking a deep breath, and telling my inner harpy exactly where she can shove that relentlessly shrill shriek of hers.

Now maybe I can finally get some sleep...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tale: Michelle Hoover

2010-06-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street. She has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. She was born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families. Her first novel—The Quickening—will be published on Tuesday, June 29.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
MICHELLE HOOVER: About seven years ago I was teaching part time at Boston University and was lucky enough to befriend Daphne Kalotay there. She invited me to a few events, and since I was new in town, these became my primary social outlet. Every time I went to a party or reading, I saw some familiar faces and couldn't believe my luck at finding such a ready-made social circle of oddballs and booklovers just like myself.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
MICHELLE HOOVER: It gave me a vital social network, but also the best teaching experiences I've ever had. I think I basically stalked Chris Castellani until one day he looked at me and said, 'we should try to use you.' Of course I've learned more from teaching Grubbies than I have at any other institution, more about fiction writing in general, about why people write it and its everlasting appeal, and about my own work as well. Now I'm also doing consulting projects for Grub and had a chance to lead a panel about the organization (and those like it) at AWP. The teaching, consulting, and networking opportunities Grub has offered me (as well as plain old friendship) are incredible and I'll always be grateful for them. Grub is even going so far to host a party after my Brookline Booksmith event July 6. Where else can an early writer get that kind of support? And there's not a personality in their office or among their teachers who I can't help but love.

RUN FOR GRUB: What was the best advice you ever received at a Grub Street event?
MICHELLE HOOVER: The most recent came from Chuck Palahniuk's address at Grub's Muse and Marketplace conference. He said he used writing as an excuse to go out. I'd never thought of writing that way. He would force himself to go to parties, readings, whatever, and he would write there, often stealing a line of dialogue or an interesting gesture. Of course, I don't think I'm the type to sit isolated in a corner and wax poetic during a big shindig, but he has the right idea. You have to be in the world to write about it, and if you're paying attention, if you always have your writer's cap on, you'll find plenty of true stuff to put on the page.

RUN FOR GRUB: As a novelist who runs, tell me: Is there some secret to keeping my brain on my book when I run or do I always have to wait for inspiration to bubble up whenever it damn well pleases?
MICHELLE HOOVER: I'm too much of a control freak to wait for much of anything. When I'm flat out in the middle of a book, I often decide on a certain problem or scene I want to work out and then keep it in mind as I run. Sometimes I get nothing, but I've surprised myself. Writers often underestimate the power of simply thinking. They believe they aren't working unless something shows up on the page. Of course, even while running, my head will veer toward the pain in my knee or people I have to call or why that chubby dude isn't wearing a shirt, but then snap, there's an answer to my scene. It's not always a good answer, but it keeps me going.

Editor's Note: Catch Michelle Hoover reading from her novel at the book launch at the Middlesex Lounge at 6:30 tonight, or visit her events page for other scheduled listings. The Quickening, her debut, is available on Tuesday, June 29th. If you loved "Plainsong," "The Quickening" will make your heart sing. Poets & Writers agrees—the current issue featured Hoover as a writer to watch, and there was much rejoicing in Grubdom...

What a Difference a Year Makes

2010-06-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Today's headlines remind me that yesterday was the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, and I'm finding it absolutely inconceivable that I nearly let such a momentous anniversary pass me by. It's not that I was a big Michael Jackson fan--I hadn't bought any of his albums since I was a kid saving her allowance to buy Thriller on cassette. But Michael Jackson happened to die on the day I ran my first road race, the JP Morgan corporate challenge in Boston Common.

When I showed up to get my number on June 25, 2009, all the iPhone people were buzzing about how Jackson was in critical condition; a few minutes later news hit he was dead; and by the time I rounded the corner of the last turn of my first 3.5 mile race, the big spiralling-strings-and-horns opening of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" was blaring from the radio DJ covering the race. All told, it took me almost 49 minutes to cover 3.5 miles.

Exactly one year later, I ran 17 miles in 193 minutes (3hours and 13 minutes). That's almost three minutes faster per mile over a distance that's 13.5 miles longer. That's a hell of a leap in one year. Next month I'll run a marathon. And next year? I'm thinking about doing all this again. Thinking about it. Will you think about joining me? And before you tell you that you're not a runner and couldn't possibly, consider that last year at this time I was you. Or my version of you. When someone joked that the next stop was a marathon, I told them I wasn't that kind of runner, that I couldn't possibly. And then I decided that maybe I'd try to be.

I'm not gonna lie to you. Training for a marathon has been no walk in the park, and I do realize that it's helped me immensely that I work a job with a non-traditional schedule and the fact that the sturdy stock that contributed to my personal gene cocktail seems to be paying off (my knees are fine, my back's golden, and the closest thing to injury I've experienced has been some slightly sore ankles and shins today after running 17 miles yesterday). In other words, I've been lucky.

I know there are quite a few very good reasons not to run a marathon. Maybe you've got small kids at home or you work a billion hours a week and can barely find time to write as it is. Or maybe you've got a medical challenge sidelining you. I understand that marathon's aren't for everybody. But if you're biggest reason for not running is because you couldn't possibly, I have one question:

What would it mean to you if you did?

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Unleashing Your Inner Churchill

2010-06-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

For many good if absolutely avoidable reasons, my long run last Friday (see Your Turncoat Flesh) left me feeling like—and really this is the only word that will do here—dog shit:

I almost passed out,
I was so nauseous I could neither stretch nor drink,
when I peeled it off my sports bra was so soaked I could literally ring it out, and
I had to nap my way back to some semblance of my pre-run self.

I know all of this was my own damn fault for starting a 3-hour run at 10:17 on a hot day—a wake up call if ever there was one—so here I sit at 5:44, munching on a carb-infused breakfast in advance of today's 17-mile run. I'm gonna miss the 6 a.m. start time I was aiming for, but I'll still be back home before the time I set out last week. And while this whole fueling-at-dawn-to-beat-the-heat thing feels very responsible of me, the truth is for the first time in this crazy beautiful marathon journey of mine, I'm afraid.

They say (my husband, mostly, but I think a lot of famous head-shrinker-presidential-types said something like it, too) that the only way to slay fear is to run toward it. In my case, quite literally.

So I'll run. I absolutely will.

But though I know that true fearlessness is about staring down fear by channelling Churchill ("Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never..."), my inner idealist wishes that living fearlessly meant actually feeling no fear. And yet a more practical part of myself knows that if life without fear isn't a naive pipe dream, it's certainly an ideal reached only after years of unleashing your inner Churchill on fear after fear after fear.

In the few months I've been training for the Run for Grub (sponsor me at www.firstgiving.com), the runner in me has taught the writer in me so much about how putting one foot in front of the other translates to stringing words together on a page. The runner has also taught the writer about dodging the inner critic who says you can't, you shouldn't, and who are you to even try? And my inner runner has even taught my inner writer a thing or two about accountability.

But now it's time for the writer to school the runner. Because the writer knows a thing or two about hurdling past fear. Just this week, my inner writer got more stuck than she's ever been, so stuck she stared into the abyss and flirted with the idea of tossing the manuscript in. And so this morning, as I feed my breakfast to an unappreciative and knotted stomach, the writer steps up to talk the runner from the quitters' ledge and guide her to the starting line.

Forget the 17 miles looming ahead of you, she says. What matters are those first, slow steps.

And if there's one thing my inner writer knows intimately it's starting again when by all appearances quitting seems like the best (and maybe even the only) option.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Jane Roper

2010-06-24T05:50:00.000-07:00

Jane Roper is the author of Baby Squared, a narrative blog on Babble.com about her adventures and misadventures in parenting twins. She also writes fiction, nonfiction, and a whole lotta advertising and marketing copy. Her debut novel, Eden Lake, will be published in 2011 by Last Light Studio. Her memoir, Baby Squared, about the highs, lows and in-betweens of her first three years as a mother of twins will be published by St. Martin's Press in 2012.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
JANE ROPER: The first time I became aware of Grub must have been in around 1998, when I saw a photocopied, handwritten flyer up on a bulletin board at a coffee shop in Somerville. At that point, though I was secretly yearning to try my hand at writing fiction, I was too chicken even to think about taking a writing workshop.

Over the next couple of years, I started to dip my toe into the writing waters. I got my hands on copies of Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and Brenda Euland’s “If you Want to Write,” and started schooling myself in some of the fundamentals. That is, I just started writing – free writing in notebooks – almost every day. I also read short fiction hungrily and made a few embarrassing early attempts at it.

Meanwhile, Grub’s presence had grown — they now had plastic newspaper box things around town with their schedules in them. In early 2000, I grabbed a schedule and registered for my first workshop. It was Fiction 1, with Chris Castellani – and it was the first Grub class he’d ever taught. I’ve always felt a special bond with Chris over that. I'm not sure he feels the same way, but he always nods politely when I say it.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
JANE ROPER: So much. I credit Grub with giving me the confidence and inspiration I needed to go from a timidly aspiring writer to a passionately aspiring one to a sort-of-kind-of-professional one.

I’ve taken Grub classes, taught them, been part of the team that helped transition Grub from a for-profit into a non-profit (I came up with the name "The Muse and The Marketplace" – one of my proudest Grub achievements), and have made wonderful friendships–close and otherwise–through Grub. It is, quite simply, the heart of my writing community. Love it to death.

RUN FOR GRUB: You’ve been in workshops at Grub Street and Iowa. Discuss.
JANE ROPER: I got a lot out of my workshops at Iowa. The other students were talented and supportive, and I learned a great deal about craft. But the level of energy, passion and support from my Iowa profs didn't even come close to what I got from Chris Castellani or Steve Almond, the two Grub instructors I studied with.

Iowa also had a generally competitive vibe, which I didn’t like. Financial aid for the second year was determined on the basis of your writing during the first year, which is absolutely antithetical to experimenting, exploring and taking risks in your writing. And isn’t a workshop the ideal place to do that?

I love that the Grub community doesn’t go in for competitive, elitist b.s. The publishing world is vicious enough. There’s no need for writers to be anything but supportive of one another. When I came back to Boston after Iowa and started teaching Grub workshops, I really felt like I was coming back to my writing home.

RUN FOR GRUB: What’s tougher—writing or raising twins?
JANE ROPER: I'd have to say the latter. As difficult and soul-wrenching as writing can be, it almost never requires wiping butts, withstanding double tantrums or having to referee knock-down-drag-out fights over who gets to use the red marker first. At least, not in my experience. But every writer has his or her own methods.

Crap No One Tells You About Running: #9:

2010-06-23T05:19:00.000-07:00

Despite how certain you were that the decision to sport sweat bands on the middle school playground turned that gangly kid into an unsalvageable geekazoid, somewhere around the eleventh time your eyeballs burn from the cocktail of sweat and SPF that beelines for the crack between your eyeballs and your contacts, you'll begin to fantasize about where you might get your own version of the international flag of geekdom.

And though some guilty part of you will know that your uncharitable thoughts about the aforementioned geekazoid make you a hypocrite for even thinking about where you might buy a sweat band, the part of you screaming sweet Jeebus, stop the BURNING will start to look for loopholes in the whole sweat-band-equals- geekazoid equation.

Unfortunately, you'll find none.

But through the kind of intense rationalization that only acute pain can inspire, you'll decide that if you embroider the head band with the Grub Street logo and the URL for the Run for Grub, that you're not letting your geek flag fly so much as rocking some seriously inspired marketing. Right?

Right??!!

Who knew running was gonna turn me into both a geekazoid and a hypocrite?

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Your Turncoat Flesh

2010-06-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

My 16-mile run yesterday was going along fine...right up until it wasn't.

Despite an extra day of rest (see "The Truant's Tale"); despite feeling good enough halfway through the run to joke about the process on Facebook and Twitter; and despite a water break somewhere between miles 9 and 10 that made me feel like I was starting afresh, at 14.75 miles, my body betrayed me. My head felt like it was detached from my neck, and the air around me dimmed in that way it had the one time I ever passed out. So I did something I've never done on a training run yet: I stopped and sat in the shade.

With my head lolled near my knees, I thought about my options. My husband was at work, so there was no calling him to the rescue (and truth be told, I wanted to finish the run more than I wanted rescuing). I scanned the street--I suppose the a man slamming the door of his F150 and the retirees kibitzing on a porch were folks I could have asked to fill my water bottle. But then the world clicked back into focus, so I stood back up and struck a deal with myself: walk until my iPod/pedometer told me I'd covered 15 miles and then jog for the final mile.

As I left the people in the neighborhood behind me, a couple of taxis screamed along the road, and I worried that this was a sign that I should have stopped and asked the old men for water, that I should have flagged down a taxi, that I should have given up. When the nice woman's voice on my pedometer announced: 400 meters to go, my playlist served up Andrew W K's "Ready to Die." The inspirational first verse goes as follows:

This is your time to pay!
This is your judgment day!
We made a sacrifice!
And now we get to take your life!!

If I had been feeling slightly better, I'd have laughed at the irony of those lyrics, though I suppose if I was feeling slightly better, the lyrics wouldn't have been so ironic. Either way you look at it there was nothing at all ironic about the dive my general well being took when I got home.

When your body turns on you--even temporarily--a part of your consciousness abandons your turncoat flesh to watch the show. You watch a person who looks a lot like you struggle to keep her head up against the dizziness. You see her arms hanging at her side, so leaden, you wonder if this is the wall runners talk about hitting. You hear her muscles screaming to be stretched, but watch as her nausea and her inability to balance refuses to let it happen. You marvel at how even though her body is in need of water and food more direly than she's ever needed them before, the act of chewing and the sensation of the water slime-ing around her tongue trips her gag reflex. And when you do snap back to your body, you're fascinated at its inability to care for itself in the moment--sure you are--but mostly you're scared.

You find that you can stomach water if you're lying down, so you hit the bed and drink and drink and drink. And when you feel yourself drifting off to sleep, you reach for your phone and set an alarm. You have a minute to wonder if sleep is bad in this situation, like nodding off after you've bumped your head hard, but you can't fight it.

And then, an hour later, when you jump up to silence that alarm, the nausea and dizziness have disappeared as if they'd never been anything more than a bad dream. In fact, the only lingering ill effects from the heat exhaustion and the unscheduled nap are a primal hunger, slight soreness in the legs you weren't able to stretch, and a lingering fear that forces you to take a ragged breath. Forget the proverbial dodged bullet--part of you knows you've just skipped across a firing line without so much as a scratch.*

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

* I recognize now that getting the runs in early in the morning is no joke in this heat. I have three more long runs before the marathon on July 30. I'll be better, I swear. I swear.

The Truant's Tale

2010-06-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

The training book I'm following said there was a good chance it would happen, and it finally did. Yesterday. On a day I was supposed to run five miles, I just didn't. Not the end of the world, certainly--I've read the only runs you really can't skip are the long once--but I still have my regrets.

Like the regret I feel for marring my 10-week streak of perfect runner's attendance. Or the regret I feel disguised as dread that a member of the Grub Street police state (which exists only in my guilty imaginings) has written me up some sort of existential ticket. Or the regret I have about spending the whole day thinking I'll run later, later, and later still, instead of embracing the rebel I never quite got around to being in high school, declaring yesterday a total loss, and savoring the devilishly delicious taste of bad behavior throughout the day. Instead, I only gave up on the run well past midnight when it was patently obvious that heading out for five miles at that hour would be stubbornly ludicrous.

Now if I could only apply this valuable lesson about the merits of letting go early to the bloated behemoth of a novel outline skulking in the corner of my study where it laughs and laughs and laughs....

Grub Tales: Grace Talusan

2010-06-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

Grace Talusan’s writing has been published in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Best American Medical Writing 2009, Solstice, The Drum, and other publications. She contributes book reviews to The Rumpus. Sometimes she blogs and she twitters even less. She teaches writing at Grub Street and Tufts University. Someday, she will publish a book or two. PHOTO BY ALONSO NICHOLS.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
GRACE TALUSAN: About five years ago, my friend Ricco Siasoco connected me to Chris Castellani, Artistic Director of Grub Street. Chris was looking for more teachers. I almost declined because I thought I wouldn’t have time for another teaching gig, but Chris was sincere about wanting to support underrepresented writers, especially those in Grub Street’s neighborhood. I’d just returned from the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) summer writing workshop, and I was hoping to work with writers of color. While this isn’t Grub Street’s main mission, I know that Grub cares deeply about the community in which it operates. Both The Young Adult Writing Project, especially the summer fellowship they give to teens to study writing, and The Memoir Project, convinced me that Grub was an organization I wanted to participate in.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
GRACE TALUSAN: When I was in graduate school, my teacher Wilton Barnhardt was emphatic that writers should have writer friends. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I thought having writer friends was limiting, but in hindsight, I realize that my discomfort had more to do with the jealousy I’d sometimes feel when my writer friends published or won awards or otherwise succeeded in areas where I wasn’t. Once I started teaching at Grub, I started making more writer friends. Pretty quickly, I realized how helpful it was to have people around me who believed that writing and reading are worthwhile, meaningful, and productive ways to spend time. My writer friends make so many happy things in my life possible.

RUN FOR GRUB: What is the best thing about Grub Street?
GRACE TALUSAN: Grub Street is more than just a place for classes—it’s a community, a network. There’s a place at Grub Street for bestselling authors and literary agents and recent MFA graduates and students taking their first writing class ever. While most of my students range in ages between twenty and fifty, I’ve taught high school students and several students over seventy. I love finding out what people do outside of writing—one student was a zookeeper, another a trapeze artist, several were stay at home mothers and fathers, some were between jobs, while others were accomplished leaders in their fields. Recently, on the first day of class, a student confessed, “I’m kind of famous on the internet,” a line which still makes me laugh when I think of it. Grub Street is a community of writers who are generous and supportive to other writers, while at the same time, committed to improving their work.

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
GRACE TALUSAN: About a year and a half ago, I participated in a Grub Street group reading at Newtonville Books. The room was full of my favorite Grub Street friends as well as people I’d never met before. Chris Castellani introduced me. I remember he kept using the word “beloved” to describe me. He said that whenever he mentioned my name, people’s faces would light up. Hearing this made me want to weep with joy. Once I stood behind the podium and faced the packed room, I couldn’t even look at Chris, much less thank him properly, because I was afraid I’d cry and wouldn’t be able to read from a memoir about my mastectomy. What a gift to hear those words. Whenever I’m feeling bereft or despairing, I remember what he said: You are beloved.

Lady Marathon: A Fractured Fairytale

2010-06-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Lady Marathon entered an epic fairytale of her own making when she decided to train for a marathon to raise money for the deserving, rookie scribes of Grubdom. An unlikely heroine, Lady Marathon set off on her merry way armed with little more than the optimism of her girlish heart and a belief that miles could be bested by an obsessive focus on her magical playlist.

And while these tools served her well for the first nine weeks of her four-month Odyssey, when yesterday's training schedule called for a run that stacked sixteen long and arduous miles end to end, the weariness in Lady Marathon's legs was so intense, her running slowed to a speed on pace with that of a shuffling troll. But it wasn't just her legs that turned troll—oh no. Somewhere around mile 14 that troll made its scrabbling way to her brain where it started to whisper ferociously:

Once upon a time my fairy tale ass, it began...

And just like that, the false romance of the fairytale runner's world melted away, and Lady Marathon felt, with every aching muscle in her taxed and tired body, like a wayward heroine in one of the scarier tales from the Brothers Grimm.

Or, in words less tainted by her complete love affair with John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things (readitreaditreadit), the 16 miles she ran yesterday flattened her. And to put it still another way: holy mother of ouch!

We've reached the point in our fairytale of a run where the bucolic gives way to the beastly: Next week her long run may hold steady at 16 miles, but her short and medium runs will all inch up with the tenacious force of the branch army that took down Macbeth.

And so Lady Marathon sends out a plea to all the members of Grubdom (and all the people who love those who cherish Grubdom): If you've been meaning to pledge to the Run for Grub, now would be a most excellent time to do so. With only $437.50 to go until we reach our goal, Lady Marathon knows that crossing the fundraising finish line early won't actually make the pounding miles hurt any less, but she's pretty sure it will make for one hell of a happily ever after—plus her little girl heart hopes it'll inspire a humdinger of a second wind, too.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run (and quite frankly, her second wind) at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

And Now the Nightmares Begin....

2010-06-09T09:32:00.001-07:00

Last night in dreamland, I missed my marathon—showed up just as all the runners were crossing the finish line. The panic I felt was palpable—if I hurried up and got started now, I could still say I ran it, right?

Not right.

The roads that had once been closed were reopened. People were packing up, heading home. One old man looked at me with better-luck-next-time pity in his eyes as I stood on the start/finish line blinking down at the crumpled Dixie cups littering the pavement.

I'm no stranger to the Cinderella-shows-up-after the-festivities-are-done brand of nightmare, so I expect this particular nightmare (and variations thereof) will visit me a few more times before I cross my waking finish line at the end of July. But I can't figure out why the nightmare would gear up the middle of what has arguably been the best week of training I've had yet:

I ran 14 miles on Friday and finished strong (a big relief because the 13.1 long run the week before left me feeling sick for most of the rest of the day);
I logged 4 miles in 37 minutes and change on Sunday which included my first ever sub-9 minute mile;
I ran 7 miles in less than 70 minutes yesterday;
And when the troll who lives in my brain said, "Fourteen miles, ha! Let's see you run another 12 right now!" I shut her up by telling her that I'd be happy to follow fourteen miles up with another twelve on the day of the race, eight weeks from now. Because building up slowly is kind of what training's all about.

Maybe the dream was just my troll's way of fighting her way off the endangered species list. But I'm hoping to graduate her from endangered to extinct before she can claw her way any deeper into my brain. In fact, this morning my legs saw the troll's night terrors and raised her four miles in 39: 21—not even a foul-mouthed troll can say a bad word against three consecutive runs clocked in at an average speed of sub-ten-minutes per mile.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Stace Budzko

2010-06-06T05:47:00.000-07:00

Stace Budzko is published or forthcoming in Hint Fiction: Norton Anthology of Stories, Press 53, PANK, Hobart, Elimae, The Los Angeles Review, Night Train, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, Brevity & Echo, Quick Fiction, The Southeast Review, Carve Magazine and elsewhere. The screen adaptation of his story, “How to Set a House on Fire” was recently awarded Best in Show/Best Overall/Best Drama at Spotlight Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and Westport Film Festival respectively. At present, he is a writing instructor at Emmanuel College as well as writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Gorgeous and Loved at Grub Street

And when they ask you what you mean, exactly, when you say you are gorgeous and loved at Grub Street, tell them about the nights you are in a classroom overlooking Central Burying Ground up high on the 4th floor, surrounded only in the best intention of story, in words, and for that moment whatever awaits at home (as in you) is made all the more the real, there.

— Stace Budzko

Only in America

2010-06-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ran 14 miles. Yeah, I know. Yay, me. But this blog entry isn't about patting myself on my back. If I wanted to pat myself on the back, I'd tell you about how, during the first leg of yesterday's run, I passed an old veteran nodding off in the sun only to notice that he hadn't moved so much as a single inch when I passed him again more than two hours later. Certain he was dead, I doubled back to wake him up. As you might imagine, he was grumpy—you'd be too if a sweaty know-it-all woke you from a deep sleep—but when I told him I was checking on him, he gave me a weak smile, told me he was OK, and thanked me. I suppose it helped win him over that I chose NOT to tell him I'd thought he was dead.

But this blog isn't about me running 14 miles or saving dead veterans who were neither dead nor in need of my misguided heroics. This blog's about the insanity of the food industry in America.

Somewhere between miles 7 and 8 yesterday, I ducked into a Dunkin' Donuts to buy a bottle of water. It had to have been clear I was in the middle of the run:

I was rockin' my tune band;
I was a sweaty mess;
I literally jogged all the way to the door;
I went directly for the drink cooler; and
I'd even dropped two singles on the counter and made to turn without my change.

Despite all those clues, the most earnest Dunkin' Donuts employee in America—let's call him EDDE—became very agitated when I told him that yes, that was it, and tried to be off.

EDDE: But you know you get a free donut, right?
Me: I don't want it, thanks. I'm running.

EDDE: It's free.
Me (quick smile): I mean I'm running, like, right now.

EDDE (with exagerrated annunciation and patience): But, it's free.
Me (hitching a thumb at the guy behind me): Then give him whatever he wants.

The guy behind me in line tittered, and I moved to leave as EDDE called to me about my change, but I was already gone, gone, gone.

I spent a good half mile all worked up about how this country can ever possibly hope to be anything but an obese nation when the biggest donut chain has taken to giving out free lard wheels with a perfectly healthy water. But then I realized this was national donut appreciation day or some such.

Even so, EDDE's not the ripest tomato on the vine. Only in America would someone try and push a donut into a runner's hand during a pit stop. But, it's free, by jiggling ass.

Why The Next Few Fridays Can Bite Me

2010-06-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Thank god it's what now? Are you kidding? This is the week my long Friday run inches up to 14 miles, then it's 16 for a couple of weeks, then 18, then a very dizzying 20. Do you really think I'm in any mood to thank anyone it's Friday?

You know what? I'm staging a coup. Until I cross the finish line of my marathon on the evening of July 30 (though, really, the smart money's on me finishing somewhere after midnight on the morning of July 31), the acronym formerly known as an abbreviation for "thank god it's Friday" will stand for "tyrannically grueling impossible Fridays."

And with that, I'm off to run 14 miles. TGIF, indeed!

Happy National Running Day!

2010-06-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

Today I celebrated National Running Day by running 4 miles in 38 minutes and 32 seconds. That's not only a personal best--it comes on the heels of breaking the hour wall for six miles last night. Go me and all that jazz.

What I don't want to do is mar this beautiful moment by thinking ahead to the 14-mile run I gotta slog through on Friday.

Whoops.

Kidding aside, maybe today's the day you go from thinking about running to actually running. I know running's not for everyone, but it might be for you. Have you ever looked at a jogger and wished you could do that? Or looked at a calories-burned chart and turned green when you noticed that runners can go out for half the time you walk and burn twice the calories (or near abouts)? Or looked back on those golden days when you used to run with nostalgia and wondered what exactly the road back would look like

If you've got the itch, you know it. So why not celebrate National Running Day by starting?. Run for two minutes of your walk today or jog from the door to your car when it's time to go home tonight. Or just cruise over to the National Running Day website for some great beginner tips.

And now that you're online anyway why not celebrate National Running Day by cruising over to my sponsorship page and pledgeing right this very minute?

I'm shameless. I know.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Jami Brandli

2010-05-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

Jami Brandli’s work has been produced across the country, including New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington DC where she was a Visiting Artist at the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive (2006, 2007). She was also a contributing writer for both stage and screen for the Elliot Norton Award-Winning production of “PS: Page Me Later,” a Visiting Playwright for the 2009 ATHE New Play Development Workshop, and a finalist for Disney ABC's 2008 TV Writing Fellowship. Her short plays are published in Smith & Kraus’ Best Ten-Minute Plays Anthologies (2007 and 2008). Her play, "The Sinker," won the 2009 Jury Prize for HotCity Theatre's GreenHouse New Play Series, and has received its world premiere in St. Louis in May, 2010. Her latest play, “Technicolor Life,” was recently accepted into the 2010 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab and is currently a semifinalist for The Ashland New Plays Festival. It was also a semifinalist for 2010 The O’Neill Playwrights Conference and a finalist for the 2010 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. She now lives in Pasadena with her husband, Brian Polak, where she’s at work on scripts for both stage and screen and a novel. For her day job, she teaches dramatic writing at Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, MA.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
JAMI BRANDLI: I first learned about Grub Street in the spring of 1998. I saw a flyer in the Borders downtown, and although I can’t remember the exact words in the flyer, I do remember thinking: This place sounds perfect for me. I took my first fiction class with Julie Rold, and she was really fantastic at making the basics clear. At that point (twelve years ago!), I needed to understand the basics so I could find my voice.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
JAMI BRANDLI: Without a doubt, Grub Street has helped shape me into the writer and teacher that I am today. As a student, Grub challenged me to take risks with my writing. As a teacher, Grub (specifically Chris Castellani) took a risk by hiring me to teach. In 2004, I had this crazy idea for a class where the students would write ten short shorts in ten weeks. At first Chris was like, Really? And then he was like, I get it. After about a week of brainstorming class titles, Ten Stories in Ten Weeks was born.

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
JAMI BRANDLI: I have a few:

1. The fiction class I took in the fall of 2000. I met Jane Roper and reconnected with Ellen Litman (we first met in a crazy fiction class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education), and Steven Almond was my teacher. I didn’t know it then, but Jane and Ellen would turn out to be two of my greatest friends in both life and writing. Ten years later, we’re still in a writers group along with two other grubbies, Morgan Frank and Jessica Murphy. These ladies are extraordinary. As for Steve, he's still one of the greatest teachers I've ever had. He literally rocked my writing world with one sentence: Jami, you must love your characters. I’m lucky to say that we’ve been friends ever since (despite the fact that he and Eve Bridburg have taken much of my money at poker games).

2. Every Ten Stories in Ten Weeks class I taught. All those students were truly amazing. Like champs, they were open to everything I threw at them, and then they asked for more.

3. I now teach playwriting and screenwriting at Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program where one of my former Grub Street screenwriting students, Terry Johnson, recently received his MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen. It was amazing to teach him once again. But what was even more amazing was when he thanked me at graduation for helping him become the writer he is today. Now THAT was a magical moment. And without Grub, that would have never happened.

RUN FOR GRUB: Grub Street almost closed in 2001, but--thank goodness--it reinvented itself as a nonprofit instead. What would you have lost if Grub had withered away eight years ago?
JAMI BRANDLI: I actually don’t want to think about that. A good chunk of my writing and teaching life would have never happened, and I would have never met many of my amazing friends. Grub Street has influenced so much of who I am now that it would have been like a parent dying if Grub had died in 2001.

RUN FOR GRUB: How does the magic of LA compare to the magic of Grub Street?
JAMI BRANDLI: It doesn’t compare because there isn’t anything remotely like Grub Street in LA! It’s depressing. However, I do get to come back to Boston twice a year while I teach at Lesley for the Winter and Fall residencies, so I do my best to get in my Grub time. I miss you, Grub!!!

The Sorest Muscle

2010-05-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

This marathon business is harder than I thought it was gonna be, and I never figured it was gonna be easy.

Yesterday I ran 13.1 weary miles. At about the 12-mile mark I started in in the body scan. My heart and lungs were fine—in fact, if it wasn't for the way I go all sniffly when I run, I could probably breathe through my nose if I had to—but from my stomach down, my muscles were flirting with mutiny.

Was it my quads and hamstrings? No. Not really. It was muscles on the side of my legs I don't have a name for. And my lower back, but not in a oh-my-aching-back kind of way--in more of a my-muscles-are-tired-and-cranky kind of way. And my knees were moany, but not in pain. Moaning. Yeah, that's what my legs were doing. And let's not forget how my ring toes got so sore I was sure those nails had been ripped off somewhere around mile 10. The image of a bloodied pair of nail-less toes haunted me until I got distracted with the way the air around the Garelick Farms plant on the Revere/Lynn line smelled like manure. Then my thoughts became so consumed with the possibility that actual cows lived on the Lynnway that the hum of the cars going by too fast and way too close to me started to sound like a postmodern moooooo.

The run itself finished without a hitch. Well. Running through air thick with the stench of manure is no picnic, but you get what I mean: I finished. But the run left me bone weary. Instead of my evening walk, my dog got a visit to the fenced in children's playground where he could run like a happy idiot while I sat laughing at the way his tongue lolls as he tears around, wood chips flying. As we walked home it occurred to me that maybe this is what ninety will feel like—muscle soreness and a desire for a slow, slow pace.

This morning I'm sore, but not terribly (though my ring toe on my right foot is aching in a way that's seriously making me take bets that, if I'm gonna lose a nail, this is the one that's going ). But I have to say that by far, my sorest muscle is my brain, and that soreness is feeling a lot like worry about how zonked I'm gonna be over the next six weeks as my long Friday runs inch up and up and up until they hit the big 20 mark and then taper off until the 26.2 mile finale on July 30. And worry too, about week ten when my short runs click up to 5 miles, and my medium ratchet up to eight. Wasn't my long run eight miles not so many weeks ago?

Training for a marathon—with all its challenge and worry and uncertainty—is a lot like writing a novel. But just as I've learned to stop allowing myself to worry about the capital-R revision of my book and focus on the scene I'm working on right now, I need to stop thinking about the spectre of the marathon and start thinking about the run before me. The next mile. Hell, the next footfall. Just as I'm making my way through my novel scene by scene with only the occasional check-in with the bigger picture, I'm making my way through my marathon training one stride at a time.

And yes, it's true that training is harder than I imagined it would be when I started, but it's also true that the swelling sense of strength I feel at the end of a long run— fatigue be damned— is sweeter than I ever thought it would be. Now if I could just convince the writer in me of the euphoria I'll feel when I finish the first half of the revision...

Running in the Afternoon Sun on the Hottest Day of the Year

2010-05-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

Bad idea. Colossally so.

My legs feel leaden, my skin's dripping like I've just stepped from of a shower, and my brain's trying to prevent itself from wondering what the hell kind of inferno a 7 p.m. race on July 30 will feel like.

Perhaps if all of Grumdom wishes hard enough we can will July 30 into an unseasonably cool day.

Ready? Repeat after me:

We DO believe in cold fronts...
We DO believe in cold fronts...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

A Numberly Interlude

2010-05-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

418.2 — Total number of miles I'll have run from the start of my training on April 10 to the finish line at the end of the marathon.

116 — Total number of miles I've already run as of Sunday's short run.

302.2—The number of miles I have left to run between today and the race on July 30.

17 — The number of times today I'll find myself wishing I hadn't quantified the number of miles I have yet to run.

3 — Number of new (and oddly shaped) callouses that have appeared on my feet since I started training.

159 — Current number of songs on my runner's playlist.

18 — Number of Elvis Presley songs on that playlist.

100 — Percent chance that a handful of those Elvis songs will be cut.

2 — Number of times I've fallen.

7 — Number of times I've run along Revere Beach and wished it was me sitting on the sea wall eating fried dough.

0 — Number of times I've actually stopped to eat fried dough during a run.

1 — Number of times I've been lunged at by a dog and been so startled my heart lurched and I screamed like a little girl.

6 — Approximate number of inches said dog's leash stopped him short of reaching me.

1/2 — Number of miles it took me to run off the panic brought on by near-miss mauling.

1392 — The number of dollars raised by the Grub lovers in the first 6.5 weeks of training.

758 — Number of dollars to go to reach our goal of funding four scholarships.

68 — Number of days left until the marathon.

11.15 — Approximate number of dollars we need to raise daily to make the goal before the marathon (so doable!).

92 — Number of minutes ago I should have been in bed.

4 — Number of crazy Run for Grub related schemes I've hatched, including the original idea for the run itself, my quest to get someone —anyone— to give me a high five as I run by, my questionable devotion to spandex running pants, and my promise to send a personalized poem (probably a haiku or limerick) to anybody who makes a donation on the Run for Grub donation page at First Giving between now and June 1.

Did you catch that? I'll send a personalized poem to anyone who donates money to the Run for Grub between now and June 1. I mean really. What other blogger in your life writes you personalized poetry? Though in the interest of not getting hounded by the Better Business Bureau, it must be disclosed that I'm not really a poet. But then if you've been following this blog's previous forays into haiku and limericks, you've already been made aware of that. Painfully aware.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Jenna Blum

2010-05-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS (out May 27, 2010, wherever books are sold!). Jenna has taught at Grub Street Writers since its inception in 1997 and writes the Writers' Advice Column for the Grub Street Free Press. Follow Jenna on her book & storm tour for THE STORMCHASERS on her website, www.jennablum.com, or on Facebook.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
JENNA BLUM: I’ve known about Grub since the olden days, its inception in 1997. I was graduating from B.U.’s creative writing workshop and Eve Bridburg, who’d graduated the year before me, kindly took a chance on me as a fiction workshop teacher and, for a short and terrifying time, administrative assistant. This meant I sat on the second floor of Eve’s house in Somerville, where the Grub offices were located then, and looked confusedly at paperwork, then went out on the back porch to smoke. Ah, all the things that are gone with the wind. Luckily for writers everywhere, Grub is not one of them. I’m so proud to have watched this community grow from the days when Eve and I drove around handing out pamphlets for Grub’s two writing classes (fiction and poetry) to the fantastic, dynamic, thousandfold writer-life-support community it is now.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
JENNA BLUM: I would no longer live in Boston if it weren’t for Grub. I have lived in other cities (New York City, London, Minneapolis) and they had their charms, but they don’t have Grub. Nowhere have I encountered a writing community so strong and supportive, with such warm, funny, talented, caring writers who know each other’s characters as well as they know each other. Almost all of my dearest friends are from my Grub classes. All of my students are phenomenal. And I’m happy to say that my novelists’ books are starting to come out on the shelves (Randy Susan Meyers’ THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS, Iris Gomez’s TRY TO REMEMBER). So watch out, world. Grub Street Writers are taking over.

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
JENNA BLUM: Once, in one of my novel workshops, one of the participants began to cry (and it wasn’t the writer being workshopped!). She held up the portion of the novel we were discussing—it happened to be the book’s ending—and said, “This is what good writing is supposed to do. I’m just so—so—moved!”

I also love the moments at the Muse & the Marketplace when I’m standing in the Manuscript Mart and looking at all the writers, agents, and editors. You can just see them all as kids, the smartest in all of their respective third grade classes.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did your time at Grub Street prepare you for the rigors of storm chasing?
JENNA BLUM: I know this isn’t exactly answering the question you asked, but I’m going to pull a Sarah Palin and talk about what I want to talk about instead. It’s sorta related: without Grub, I wouldn’t have been able to write my second novel, THE STORMCHASERS, which features, surprise, stormchasing. I had terrible writer’s block between my first and second novels, in part because I had rather stupidly given up smoking. I didn’t want to give up smoking. I loved smoking. It was like Styron’s experience quitting drinking, which he describes in his memoir about depression, DARKNESS VISIBLE: his body decided for him that he was no longer able to drink. Because I was getting migraines from smoking, I gave it up—and then, because I had been writing and smoking for over 20 years, I also gave up writing fiction. I just didn’t know how to do it anymore.

Grub Street, and Ron MacLean in particular, led me back to the fold. I write the Writers’ Advice column for the Grub Street Free Press, and Ron gentled me through my first days back at the writing desk by soliciting these nonfiction pieces. Then he cleverly suggested I write about stormchasing for the Freep. Because I found I was able to write nonfiction about things I loved—stormchasing and writing—I was able to segue back into fiction. If it weren’t for Grub and Ron letting me write about chasing for the Freep, instead of finishing THE STORMCHASERS (out May 27!) I would still be sitting staring sadly at the big ol’ empty red ashtray.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did your time at Grub Street give you the strength to run toward a tornado instead of the hell away from it?
JENNA BLUM: I had to. I had to finish the danged Freep articles, didn’t I?

RUN FOR GRUB: Any advice for me should a tornado hit while I’m running my marathon around the lake?
JENNA BLUM: Run like hell in the opposite direction.

Editor's Note: Jenna Blum's book launch for The Stormchasers is at the Coolidge Corner Theatre this Thursday (May 27) at 6p.m. Tickets are $5 and must be purchased in advance through the Brookline Booksmith.

A Hypochondriac's Adventures in Hydration

2010-05-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

I've read that distance runners are supposed to keep tabs on their water needs by weighing themselves before and after their long runs. The idea is that once they see how many pounds they've lost, they're supposed to pound water until they get back to their pre-run weights. I'm oversimplifying, but bear with me.

So after running 11 miles in about 2 hours this afternoon, I discovered that I'd lost 5.5 pounds. Clearly my body needed me to mainline water, and right away.

I guzzled two pints and then jumped back on the scale hoping to see a two-pound gain that matched the 32 ounces I'd swallowed in a heroically quick fashion. Instead I was down another .7 pounds.

So what the scale was telling me was that 32 ounces of water had netted into a roughly 11.2 ounce loss. Interesting. It occurs to me that if I could find a way to make scales work like this with chocolate, I'd be so rich I could set up a trust fund for Grub Street and bag this whole marathon thing. But back to the scale.

Because two pints of water didn't do the trick, I downed a third. This time the 16 ounces I drank showed up as 4.6 pounds gained. Encouraged, I tried to drink a fourth pint, but my stomach gave a mutinous flip about halfway through, so I sloshed over to the scale to see the bad news: defying the laws of physics, I was down and additional .1 pounds. I tried to force myself to keep drinking, but by the time I finished my fourth pint, I seriously needed to sit down or risk puking up the half gallon of water I'd poured down my gullet over the last ten minutes.

Sitting at my computer to see whether I could fight off my stomach's urge to eject all that water, I got to thinking. Hadn't I heard somewhere that too much water can kill you just as easily as too little? A quick Google search on the totally objective phrase "can too much water kill you?" confirmed the worst of my fears right there in the headline:

*TOO MUCH WATER CAN KILL YOU *
WATER INTOXICATION
The facts you need to save your life

Here was a whole page devoted to hyponatremia. The scoop? Basically when you drink way too much water you wash the salt right out of your system, your brain swells up, and you die. But that's a loose translation. And I'm a hypochondriac.

So never mind about my dubious research methods or my total failure to try and confirm that this Web site was anything approaching a trustworthy source. One quick look at the symptoms at the top of the list—Nausea! Vomiting!—and I was convinced that I may well have drunk myself to a watery death.

But then I let out the most ladylike little burp, and the nausea passed. Phew! My brain was probably not gonna swell up on me any time soon, but I decided to be liberal with the salt in my post-run meal just in case.

Now, it's pretty clear I was in no danger of actually developing hyponatremia, but I did lose 5.5 pounds of water weight while I ran today (and yes, I'm willfully ignoring the possibility that my scale may be a wee bit wonky). Which means I'm just not drinking enough while I'm running. But I knew this. The training book I'm following recommends that runners drink 6-8 ounces of water for every 20 minutes they're out. But that seems absurd to me. What do they expect me to do? Swap out my Red Sox cap for a beer hat I can use to sip water? A few weeks ago, I bought a belt for a bottle that holds maybe 24 ounces, and I consider that purchase a coup.

My compromise so far has been to drink as much as I can before and after a run and make my way through one bottle of water during the longest distances I do in a week. Is it dangerously naive of me to hope that's enough? And that's not a rhetorical question, either. I'm honestly asking for advice...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

A Running Problem I'm Glad I DON'T Have

2010-05-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've been a little whiny lately, what with my cycle of entries on crappy things people don't warn runners about. So today I start counting my runner's blessings. Top of the heap? I've never had the misfortune of being pummeled to a pulp while running. Apparently Mother Nature has a serious bone to pick with Iowan runners...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Sue Williams

2010-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Sue Williams is a British writer who moved to the Boston area six years ago. As well as being an Assistant Book and Magazine Editor for Narrative Magazine, she's a writing instructor at Grub Street. Sue's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Night Train, Salamander, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Yalobusha Review, and numerous other books and magazines. She also publishes erotica under a pen name. Recent awards include first place in the Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and an Honourable Mention in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open (Dec '09). Sue also co-runs the Boston arts salon, Art2Art, and has written a collaborative chapbook with her writing group, entitled Authors Anonymous. You can find Sue online at: http://www.suewilliams.co.uk.

Moving from England to America was nerve-wracking. We arrived in our new apartment, which we'd never seen before, with little more than clothes and books; it would take months for our furniture to arrive. I'd brought my computer, however, and, determined to develop my writing skills and meet like minds, one of the first things I did was to track down a writing class. During the ten-week Grub course I signed up for, I wrote a story that would soon become my first fiction publication, and would later give rise to the idea for a novel, which is now in its final draft.

Six years on, I still enjoy taking Grub classes and am also an instructor. In fact, I recently delivered a one-night seminar entitled, "Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica," which was one of the most inspiring three hours I've spent as a teacher. At the start, many of the writers expressed their frustration with the prejudices surrounding a genre that is often misunderstood. This seminar provided a place where their work was finally being valued and taken seriously.

During the workshop, a deeply talented writer wrote about a personal experience, which he then read aloud to the group. Afterwards, he flushed, pressing his hands to his face, and explained that it felt amazing to have shared such a powerful memory -- one, in fact, that he'd never revealed before. We told him it was an honor for us, and I've no doubt his beautiful piece will soon be published. This kind of experience is typical of the Grub community; I myself had a similar moment when sharing a story I wrote in Steve Almond's class. Grub not only teaches the craft of writing, it also provides a warm environment where growth and courage are rewarded.

In short, because of Grub Street I've: become a better writer, published my stories, delivered exciting seminars, made some of the best friends I've known, joined wonderful writing groups, met potential agents, been honored to share in the talents of others, and presented what is often daring work with large, receptive audiences. I'm also sure that Art2Art, the Boston arts salon I co-run with friends, was partly inspired by the wonders I've seen at Grub.

Just as being a fiction writer is more than telling stories, so Grub is more than a writing center. How lucky we are to be part of it.

Editor's note—The next Art2Art will be at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 22 at the Piano Factory building in the South End. Visit the Art2Art blog for further details!

Crap They Don't Tell You About Running: #8

2010-05-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

To be fair, the joggers around me tried to warn be about the way running roused their hungry horrors. The way training transformed their tummies into bottomless pits. The way they came to the conclusion that the only real solution was to make sure the food they fed their beasts was healthy fare. And though I heard them, I didn't consider what awaking my very own hungry hippo would mean for me. Or more accurately, what it would feel like.

On Friday my long run inched up to ten miles; when I got back to my kitchen just after 11 a.m., my stomach was hollering so loudly it would have freaked out Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors.

Because I had afternoon appointments I made myself a feast intended to last me through dinner. Except then it didn't. As I was driving home just after 4 p.m., my arms started shaking, and I my eyes went into primitive hunter-gatherer mode: I was actively searching the highway for a healthy option.

What I found was a bagel at Dunkin Donuts. Some popcorn a little later at home. A little later than that, a cookie. By the time the husband got home hellbent on whisking me out to dinner, I'd already consumed all my calories for the day. And then some. And yet, I was still hungry.

I should stop here to say my relationship with food is—how can I say this?—complicated. If I ever decide to write a memoir about my decades-long battle with food, I'll call it Stuffed: One Woman's Unrequited Love Affair With Food.* But detailing my many issues with food is beyond the scope of the Run for Grub blog, except as it applies to the training. And so here it is. After being locked in an epic war of wills with food for most of my adult life, in the last year I've finally learned that breaking the cycle of mindless comfort eating is as simple as asking myself one question before I eat: Am I really hungry?** Of course, the vast majority of times I've asked myself this very question over the last year, the answer has been, "no." But when I'm burning almost 1400 calories by running 10 miles before eleven o'clock in the morning, I shouldn't be shocked if when I ask yourself if I'm hungry, the answer's a resounding "yes!"

No guilt. No shame. Just a healthy hunger that means my body's working in just the way it's supposed to work.

So starting next week, I'll plan for a fourth meal on my long-run Fridays. But I'd still liked to have been warned BEFORE I started training that the hunger said training inspired would challenge me to flex every good food habit I've worked so hard to develop.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

*Although apparently there's a food memoir about living in a restaurant family called Stuffed. So Gorged, then. Whatever.

**I do recognize that this is a horrendous oversimplification of a decades-long struggle, but this is a training blog, not a memoir.

Let's hear it for Chuckie P!

2010-05-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

If you weren't able to get to Grub Street's Muse & the Marketplace writing conference this year (and really what else were you going to do the weekend of May 1 & 2—stay home and boil water?), I'm bringing the key note to you. Or rather, a link to the keynote.

Clear an hour.

Watch.

Enjoy.

Without further ado, Chuckie P: http://vimeo.com/11691438

The Tortured Limerick

2010-05-13T20:50:00.001-07:00

For my very next running and lit trick,
I'm having a go at the limerick.
If tomorrow's ten miles,
rob me of my smiles,
this poem may bring them back right quick.

Running Haiku: A Poetic War Cry

2010-05-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's realization that marathon training may not inspire the last twenty pounds I'm trying to lose to beat a fearful retreat inspired me to declare war...through what I hope is sufficiently bellicose haiku.*

HAIKU, THE FIRST

Stubborn belly fat,
you clinging (but shrunken) rolls,
oh, how you mock me!

HAIKU, THE SECOND

(Un)dearest fat cells:
You're no longer welcome here!
Flee my gut at once!

HAIKU, THE THIRD

Fat, you've been sentenced:
Death by interval training!
Hill's? Sprints? You're soooo dead.

HAIKU, THE FOURTH

Three miles today, fat.
Up and down the same damn hill
Didn't I warn you?

HAIKU, THE FIFTH

The fat laughs last, though.
Legs are rubbery puddles.
Hill work is no joke.

*It's worth noting that these "poems" are best enjoyed in the spirit of the worst of the beat poetry from So I Married an Axe Murderer:

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Crap No One Tells You About Running: #7

2010-05-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Are you sitting down? I hope you're sitting down. Because I just found out the crappiest of crappy things nobody told me about running: Training for a marathon may actually be a lousy way to lose weight.

Quick question. Can you actually hear my belly fat cackling or is it just me?

Now, I'm no nutritionist (and quite frankly while reading the offending article I got vertigo and my ears started to ring), but here's the problem as I understand it: all those long runs I was hoping would help whittle my middle straight down to my goal weight may actually just turn my body into an efficient machine. Or to put it another way: if I want to lose those last twenty pounds, my body needs to burn through calories like a Hummer tears through gas, but heavy training may make a Prius out of me.

So what have we learned this week? Training may cost me my toe nails, but the spare tire I can keep? This just keeps getting better and better.*

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

* Complaining aside, I have to say that even if I run the hundreds of miles in store for me and stay at the exact same weight I am today, the training actually DOES keep getting better and better. This weekend the fundraising efforts of the friends of Run for Grub reached a total that will lock in two of the four scholarships we're aiming to fund. Suddenly lost toe nails and a little retained belly flab seem like such small prices to pay.

Grub Tale: Michael Schiavone

2010-05-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Schiavone has been published in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Carve, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. His debut novel, Call Me When You Land, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in September 2011. For more information about Michael, please visit: www.michaelschiavone.com

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
MICHAEL SCHIAVONE: I learned about Grub Street while surfing the net in 1999, a much more limited Net than we have now. I was living in San Francisco and was about to move to Boston and was trying to locate a workshop of some sort. Having ignored all creative pursuits in San Francisco due to my time-consuming corporate job and proclivity for getting smashed, I sought to start off in Boston on the right foot. I signed up for a short story class with Tom McNeely and it changed my writing life. He was the perfect instructor for me at this time: unapologetically critical, honest, and insightful. Plus, I met people in there that I continue to work with today, ten years later. It's been a treat watching Grub's growth since its salad days. Living in Boston is worth it for Grub alone.

RUN FOR GRUB: So Grub helped you break the ignoring-your-writing habit?
MICHAEL SCHIAVONE: OH, YES! Grub helped me break the ignoring habit. And it taught me the true meaning of revision.

RUN FOR GRUB: And what about the getting smashed habit?
MICHAEL SCHIAVONE: OH, NO! We partied after every Grub class! Work was brutal the next day. But I was young and thought you had to be drunk to be a writer.

Running Rules I've Broken So Far

2010-05-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

With four weeks of road behind me, I say goodbye to the relative ease of the first month of marathon training and hello to double-digit mileage goals for my long runs. Today may be Mother's Day for the rest of the world, but it's the official start of the fifth week of training for me.

One glance at the pain in store over the coming months and it's clear that if training were wading in the ocean, the crotch of my bathing suit would be pretty much soaked right now. Which means it's silly for me to stand here with my arms hugging myself for warmth. It's time to dive in. Completely.

I'm talking about giving up the bad habits I've developed in this first month of training. Yup. In the interest of finishing this marathon without killing myself (I'm not particularly keen on maiming myself, either), I'm coming clean about all the cardinal running rules I've broken during the first month:

Broken Rule #1: My record of stretching is spotty at best. Mayhap I will. Mayhap I won't. If I'm gonna stretch at all, I have to do it outside because once I'm inside I get distracted with essentials like food, water, and updating my Facebook status. But even outside, I give the stretching short shrift for three very compelling reasons:

I wear tight running pants,
I live on a main road, and
as I reach for my toes, there's a point when it occurs to me that I'm saluting traffic with my ass, a realization that turns me a hundred shades of red that have nothing to do with forgetting to put on my sunscreen. Again.

Broken Rule #2: I forget sunscreen. I hate the smell so much that I wear light, long-sleeve shirts so I can get away with coating only my face and hands. Then I forget to coat my face and hands. Fortunately I do run with a baseball cap, but I know that's not enough. I've also noticed that I'm rocking a tan line where my ankle socks end. Clearly, I continue to deprive my legs of sunscreen at my peril.

Broken Rule #3: I sneak my runs into my day instead of creating a dedicated running time. This is a brand of stupidity I know first hand. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck out on my seven-mile run longer than I intended to be and got home with a grand total of 21 minutes to stretch, hydrate, eat, shower, and get out the door. I showered just enough to wash away the sweaty slime and grabbed a handful of nuts, a piece of fruit, and a bottle of water as I raced to my car. Halfway through my appointment, I had such a bad headache, I asked for water. When I came home I made myself a balanced dinner that I promptly threw up. Clearly, making room for a run is about scheduling time for the run and the self care that comes after. I am learning these lessons: I'm happy to report I ran my eight-mile run this week without upchucking a single thing!

Broken Rule #4: I see sleepiness as more of a suggestion than a mandate. Which means I'll often push through my drooping eyes in the interest of starting an episode of "Lost" at 11 p.m., chatting with an old friend on Facebook, or (now this is awkward) blogging for you all. If I have any prayer of getting into the habit of running before the sun really starts roasting on summer mornings, I've got to get to sleep earlier. Period.

Broken Rule #5: I find carrying water annoying. Like really annoying. Like so annoying I only started carrying it on the eight mile run. And then I didn't really drink much. Yes, I understand this is beyond stupid. But it's really hard to drink while you're running. What's that? If I can send twenty-three ridiculous tweets while I'm running, I can certainly manage to drink a little water? Yes. Yes, indeed.

Broken Rule #6: I've been sneaking a glass of wine here, a sweet or three there. Not a big deal, I know. But it's probably better if I only eat the things that best fuel my marathon-running machinery. Particularly now that I'm rocking a double-digit run every week.

So I'm going to dub this second four weeks of training the Month of More:

more stretching,
more sunscreen,
more sleeping,
more breathing space in my schedule,
more sleep,
more in-run hydration,
more diet perfection.

And speaking of more, could I be in any more danger of becoming one of those insufferable buffoons who can only talk about the ONE thing she's obsessed about? Or does my second obsession with Elvis round me out any?

Oh yeah.

I'm gonna be a BLAST at parties this summer...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Tweeting and Running Are Not the Best Combo

2010-05-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

You don't need to think too hard to come to the conclusion that tweeting while running isn't the smartest plan in the world, and yet that's exactly what I did today. I could have easily stepped out in front of a car, dropped into an unseen ditch, or smacked into a pedestrian (nearly did that), but instead it just slowed me down and never let my head really get into the run.

Would I do it again? On a special occasion, maybe. So enjoy this tweeted run (it might be the last), on this the last run of my first month of training:

THE TWEETED EIGHT (as tweeted by runforgrub--and yes, I did this life via my phone):

PRE-ROAD: Today is the last single-digit long run of my training for a while. I'm celebrating by tweeting while I run. I call it: The Tweeted Eight!

PRE-ROAD: Disclaimers: 1) I'm testing out some Elvis today, so if it sounds like an all Elvis run, that's why.

PRE-ROAD: Yes I do realize that by tweeting WHILE running I may in fact be asking for road rash. But I like to live dangerously...

11:10: Technical difficulties averted. "Witchcraft" playing. Me running....er jogging starting NOW! about 2 hours ago via txt

11:14: "The >lack --ARADEk is awesomeness....but tweeting slowing me down...
Note: that should read "The Black Parade."

11:19: Hat too big or noggin too small? Can't decide. Running only for a bit.....

11:26: Resisting siren of Revere Beach at low tide. Knees need punishment of concrete sidewalk...

11:30: "Cause baby I got something to say! k Loving June Rich but almost knocked into somebody to tell you that....
Note: 'k' should be closed quotation marks.

11:38: Forgot what a dirty little song "Shake, Rattle. & Roll" was.

11:39: QUEEN!! 7SEAAS OF OH JUST RUN ALREEADY....
Note: All caps not intentional after QUEEN!!

11:42: Water bottle on my back punching me like toddler behind me on a plane.l

11:43: Kelly's Roast Beef smells like sin.

11:49: Fat man holding an umbrella over his Yorkie as it frollicks on the sea wall. Awwwww.

11:52: Halfway point with TMBG!

12:02: Feel guilty fpr setting a goal of catching up to a woman with a walker.

12:03: Doesn't help that I have M Stipe singing"baby I am calling u on that."

12:14: 2 miles 2 go!

12:16: DidnLt know men could get bunions.
Note: Capital L should be an apostrophe.

12:17: DON'T STOP ME NOW!!!

12:19: Freddie is making a supersonic woman outta me.

12:21: Wake up! Smell the catfood in my bank account!

12:23: Leaving the beach is always the bummer part of a run.

12:26: Hey! Oh! Let's go!

12:32: Guitar riff in "Atomic" from Tainspotting Soundtrack makes me feel like danger mouse!

12:36: Doner!Eight miles in 85:19. Tweeting was fun but 11 h09 per mile= fail.
Note: Doner should read done and 11ho9 should read 11:09.

12:38: Cooling down and feeling jazzed but wishing I'd remembered sunscreen.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #6

2010-05-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

When you tell another runner that you're training for a marathon, a disturbingly high percentage of the time the first question from that runner will be:

"Have your toenails started to fall off yet?"

Excuse me, what?

And really, I don't know what's worse here: the implication that my toenails may in fact start sloughing off or the smile that spreads across these runners' faces as they ask.

No, seriously: what??!!

So any and all advice you have about getting me through this race with all ten of my toenails intact would be greatly appreciated in the comment section below. Because I know this for an actual fact: I want to lose a toenail even less than any of you want to read about me losing said toenail.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Musical Hallucinations

2010-05-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

Jogging up the ridiculously pitched road that leads up to the water tower in Winthrop today, my legs started to slow, and my mind started to wander. A few of the rhetorical questions that occurred to me as I inched up:

Can I actually call what I'm doing jogging if my arms are moving more definitively then my shuffling feet?

Did I really think challenging myself to tackle what passes as Winthrop's Everest was a smart move on a day I'm doing five miles in the baking sun?

Do you need to be eyeball deep in lactic acid before you can actually start to hear "I can't go on forever on this steep incline" where Elvis sings "we can't go on together with suspicious minds"?

How have I never noticed how much the lyrics to "Suspicious Minds" sound like a rock 'n roll argument against running uphill on purpose?

And as I crested the hill at a slug slow pace and "Suspicious Minds" gave way to a Boris McCutcheon song called "Standing So Still":

Is my iPod laughing at me?

No, seriously. Is it??

Grub Tales: Eve Bridburg

2010-05-03T23:04:00.000-07:00

Eve Bridburg worked in nonprofits in San Francisco, farmed in Oregon and managed an international Bookstore in the Czech Republic before moving to Boston to attend Boston University’s Creative Writing program on a teaching fellowship. She founded Grub Street in the spring of 1997 in order to create a supportive yet rigorous place to study writing beyond the halls of academia. In order to expand Grub’s reach and mission, she directed the transformation of Grub Street into a nonprofit arts organization in 2001. Once Grub Street had its new legs, Eve joined The Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency where she has developed, edited, and sold a wide variety of books including memoirs, literary and commercial fiction, and expert-driven nonfiction titles and continues to work with select clients. Now back at Grub Street as Executive Director, Eve is excited to oversee Grub Street’s next phase of growth with an eye toward advocating for all writers and exploring new opportunities for writers and readers in the digital age.

I started Grub Street back in the spring of 1997 by tacking flyers on trees up and down Beacon Street in Brookline. Fresh out of the boot camp atmosphere of Boston University's MA in creative writing program, I set out to do two things: create workshops that didn't involve tears or humiliation and avoid real work at any cost.

My first workshop had five participants, one of them a friend who graciously agreed to sit in and pretend that she was interested in writing. She became my mole, helping me determine what was and wasn't working over wine on my porch after class. I learned a lot that first term. I learned that Grub Street would be the kind of place that welcomed writers of all genres and ambitions, that classes would be about craft and not identity, and that we would not tolerate posturing or snobbery. I also learned to get tuition money up front and that Brookline residents don't much like tacks in their trees.

Working as I did back then from a small room in my then boyfriend's (now long suffering husband's) small apartment, I never imagined that ten years down the road, Grub Street would be a thriving literary arts center with digs overlooking the Boston Common. Nor could I have imagined that we would host a national literary conference and book prize every year with some of the country's most beloved and popular authors. I never would have thought that Mayor Menino would host a Grub Street event or that we'd partner with the City of Boston to collect memoirs from seniors in neighborhoods all over Boston. That we'd have a volunteer-run program working with teens free of charge of that we'd offer fellowships to writers striving to revise their novels and books of poetry. It fills me with great pride and excitement to see how far this baby has come.

A few years after that first class, a student approached me and told me that Grub Street had changed her life. I smiled politely, resisting the urge to slip my shrink's business card into her coat pocket. She explained that she felt alive again and was suddenly spending her evenings writing until the wee hours. It was the people that she had met, both the teachers and the other students, who were responsible for her awakening. I've heard many versions of this story from countless others over the years. These stories are what have kept me engaged and dedicated and fully convinced of the necessity of an organization like ours.

What Grub does is quite simple. We bring people who love stories and words together. That we've managed to do this well for fourteen years is directly attributable to the people who have shown up for the party. Through generosity of spirit, hard work, imagination, and talent we've not only produced fine work, but have built a lasting community.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #5

2010-05-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the back of your hands can sweat. A lot. Like, enough to drip. Who knew running the soupy air of an impending storm was like pressing the sweat-so-much-you-might-as-well-be-running-in-the-rain button of this little body that could? And one more question: is it normal to stare at my sweat-slicked hands with pride? Just saying...

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #4

2010-04-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

In your stocking feet, you might be the love child of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, but the second your sneakers hit the pavement, the intricacies of counting out anything beyond the simple one-two rhythm of your breath are beyond you.

As I set out for today's long run (just seven miles, but double-digit treks start in two weeks), I decided to calculate the mileage up and back down the hill that starts at my front door—the idea was that if I could run an exactly equal distance beyond the halfway point of my route, my iPod would tell me that my seven-mile run was finished at the bottom of the hill, and I could stop running. In other words, I was doing my best to make sure I could walk—not run—up the quarter-mile hill that feels more like a mountain after I've covered enough miles.

If you ignore for a moment the way cutting out the one real hill on my route outs me as the raging wimp I am, you'll see that my theory was sound. Or would have been if I hadn't gone and run the full quarter mile beyond the halfway point. Worse, I didn't even realize my mistake until my iPod started to count down the homestretch way too early.

I was so quick to blame the iPod for miscalculating my mileage that it didn't even occur to me that the fault may actually have rested squarely with my own calculations until, exactly half a mile from home, the realization washed over me like a second wind: when adding distance to a round trip run, you sorta need to remember to add just half the total extra distance you want to go. Because when you add all of it, you end up turning around and retracing those steps. Which is precisely how I found myself a half a mile from home instead of the happy little quarter mile I'd been hoping to be.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running #4: Jogging robs your brain of the oxygen it needs to solve complex math problems. Like counting. And addition.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Breathing Space: S-l-o-w Running Songs

2010-04-28T20:26:00.000-07:00

Normally, I power up my runs by listening to songs from my bounce-n-go playlist, but now that my training runs are starting to grow longer, I'm seriously starting to question the wisdom of my decision to go all bubblegum beat all the time. In fact, for every additional mile added to my long, Friday run, I become more certain that any playlist worth its bites should offer the runner pockets of peace, a quick break, a bit of breathing space.

And while an audiophile friend of mine once told me that including sleepy music on a running playlist made about as much sense as popping quaaludes before going to the gym, I say any song with a clear beat can be turned into a potentially powerful running ally. Particularly if you love the song. Particularly if it gives you a lift.

Here are the top ten breathing space songs on my list with a disclaimer: my playlist may be too hard wired to my tics to be much use to you on your run, but hopefully you'll like the music and think about a tune or two that moves you in every way a runner can move. And if you've never considered using breathing spaces in your playlist, maybe you'll start today. Note: Click on the purple to go hear the songs.

1. All My Days by Alexi Murdoch—Alexi Murdoch is the heir apparent to Nick Drake (if you don't know either of these names, stop reading and listen to 'All My Days' before you go any further. Now that you're back, scroll down this post to listen to "Time Has Told Me." There, now don't you feel like your day is so much better than those combined nine minutes and twenty-four seconds have any right to make it?) Call me a sucker who falls for handsome men holding guitars, but I can't help it. Breathy and wounded tenors make me feel—and here's the technical term for it—all floaty. And in the middle of a long run when you'll take a lift anyway it comes, floaty works.

2. The Beauty of the Rain by Dar Williams—When you get right down to it, the message of this song is pretty much, stop being a jerk, you jerk. But Dar (can I call her Dar?) says it with a melody that hallows the message and a chorus about falling rain that's so lovely I end up feeling like the jerk for trying to boil the song down at all. Another floater of a song.

3. Just Breathe by Pearl Jam—Grief can make you forgot to be thankful you ever loved hard enough to make losing hurt so much. The lilt of the guitar and the opening verse of "Just Breathe" remind me to be grateful that I've known so many fierce attachments in this life:

"Yes, I understand that every life must end, aw-huh.
As we sit alone, I know someday we must go, aw huh.
Oh I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I love
Some folks just have one, yeah, others they've got none, oh, oh
Stay with me.
Let's just breathe."

4. Mercy of the Fallen by Dar Williams—This song came to me at a time in my life when I had the anti-Midas touch—everything my fingers tapped turned to shit; every choice I made was a mistake. The lyrics invoke us to follow our north stars, promise the mercy of the fallen, and swear we—all of us—have guiding stars inside us. In this cynical age, a buoying song like this isn't for everyone, but it definitely played like it was written for me, and it buoys me still.

5. P. S. You Rock My World by the Eels—My husband put this song on a mix CD he made for me when we were dating. The song wound up on our must-play list at our wedding, but by the time it came up in the rotation, we happened to be ministering to wedding guests at different tables. We didn't stop and go dance—that would have been rude!—but we caught each other's eyes and smiled. Or I should say I smiled because Mike's more of a smirker. But I knew what he meant. How can you I run anything but strong with the kind of man in my corner who reminds me how "a happy man takes a walk"?

6. Strangers in a Car by Marc Cohn—I can't quite put my finger on what it is about this song that draws me in, but there's a longing in the rising piano and the story of a girl taking the kind of risks I was never brave enough to take myself. And yet for all the song's longing, the way it swells in me feels like a reminder to be bold. That and a reminder of how lucky I am to have never been shot in the head. Unlike the singer of this song.

7. Summer Highland Falls by Billy Joel—I'll admit these aren't the most uplifting lyrics in the world. But the piano sure wants to be hopeful. And though I could create an involved explanation about why I find a song that ends with the narrator standing on the ledge of his life uplifting, the real reason I love listening to this song while I run is because the piano's so beautiful, that the only lyric I ever seem to catch is the word "euphoria." So in my warped brain, then, this melancholy little song's about runner's high. Did I give the disclaimers about all interpretations being the product of my overactive imagination? No? Then consider yourself so disclaimed.

8. Time Has Told Me by Nick Drake—Being part of a couple that has a "song" always seemed a little giggling school girl for me, but when the perfect song found Mike and me—not a good song, not a great song, but the absolutely perfect song for us—we didn't fight it. When "Time Has Told Me" clicks on during a run, it can actually feel like Mike is taking over for my feet for a spell. You don't axe a song like that from your playlist—I don't care how slow it is.

9. Unwanted Guest by Alastair Moock—This song's an anthem for everyone who's battled depression—sometimes again and again—and come out the other end, safely. The bounce of the guitar carries me in a way that makes me remember driving on country back roads as a teen, all the windows down, the cassette deck blaring "I Am a Rock." Except that "Unwanted Guest" is more musical, more lyrical, and more hopeful than "I Am a Rock" ever was. The contest wasn't even close.

10. The Weary Kind by Ryan Bingham—Because even though we've all known plenty of those weary kind days, somehow a crackling alt-country voice singing about it can make them feel that much less weary. Even going uphill.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

But I Have Promises to Keep

2010-04-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

With just 96 days to go until I run my marathon, you'd think injury would be the most worrisome thing on my mind (particularly given that three weeks into training, I've already fallen twice). Despite this, my biggest worry isn't physical, but fiscal: will I raise the $2150 we need to fund all four scholarships?

In the first 16 days of training, Run for Grub has raised $867, but while I'm gratefully showering karma points on everyone who's donated, my mind keeps wandering to the $1,283 left to be raised. To the 96 days left to raise it. To the mental math that tells me those figures translate to roughly:

$91.64 per week,
$0.56 per hour, or
less than a penny a minute.

Less than a penny a minute, people! Somehow the amount seems less daunting now, which is my cue to remind you that donations can be made with a credit card payment at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Want a suggestion about how to sponsor? Take a look at some of the options I've cooked up below:

YOUR BASIC FLAT FEE. Showing your love with a flat fee remains the easiest way to pledge, but read on for a few of the more fun ways to get involved (or scroll to the end for the basic per mile sponsorship amounts).

CONSOLATION CONTRIBUTION. This sponsorship level was detailed in a blog post about my second fall--ten bucks every time I go down like the proverbial ton of bricks. Two falls so far, and 96 chances to go kersplat again. Do you dare bet on a klutz?

DOUBLE DOWN. Even after reading my FAQ page, you remain skeptical about my ability to finish the race. I get that. So take the bet. Give me half of what you're planning to donate now and put DOUBLE DOWN in the comment field. On August 1--the day after I successfully finish the marathon, thank you very much--you'll make good on your bet by wiring the rest of the money or risk the wrath of the metaphorical goons I'll send to collect.

VIRAL CHALLENGE. Make a donation and pledge to go viral by getting ten people in your life to match your amount. When those same people ask you why on earth they'd give money to help some crazy lady they don't know run a marathon, tell them it's not about me, it's about how much Grub has meant to you. Then shoot them your best puppy-dog-would-like-table-scrap eyes. Said eyes are especially effective on mothers and animal lovers.

COOLEST ALTERNATIVE MOTHER'S DAY GIFT EVER. You've been there, done that wtih breakfast in bed, the flowers, the lunch out at an impossibly crowded restaurant. This year, ask your brood to show how much they appreciate you by making a donation in your name to the school that's meant so much to you. You can also tell them that we at Run for Grub firmly believe that your brood should tell you about said donation with an impossibly cute handmade card delivered along with breakfast in bed. Complete with a tulip in a bud vase. Because you deserve it, mom.

PAYMENT PER POSTS. Did a blog post I've written connect with you in some way? Make you laugh? Make you think? Make you dig out your Ramones album to listen to Beat on the Brat for the first time in more years than you'd like to admit? Grub Street's all about making us the best writers we can be, so make your contribution about the writing, too. I'll take my cue from iTunes: $0.99 for the everyday posts; $1.29 for the ones you really liked.

NOVEL IDEA. This one's for the people who know the lady behind the run and have expressed concern that training for a marathon and blogging about the process would eat into the time I have to revise my novel. This one's simple--a dollar a day for each day I write at least a page on my novel. The numbers will work out like this: $96 for 96 training days for (at least and hopefully more than) 96 pages. It should be noted that this is not a cumulative sponsorship-- for example, if five people choose this sponsorship category, I'm not on the hook for ten pages a day. That would be madness. For me anyway. More power to those of you who do manage that kind of productivity.

YOUR BASIC PER MILE SPONSORSHIP. As a first-time marathon runner, I'm of the firm belief that my miles are worth about a million dollars a piece, but there's a recession on, so I'm willing to negotiate. Here are some sponsorship levels:

A penny per mile = $0.26
10 cents per mile = $2.62
A quarter per mile = $6.55
50 cents per mile = $13.10
75 cents per mile = $19.65
A dollar a mile = $26.2
Two dollars a mile = $52.4
Four dollars a mile = $104.8
$10 per mile = $260
$48.97 per mile = $1283
$1,000,000 per mile = $26,200,000

I know that the sponsorship level list gets kind of hope-springs-eternal toward the end, but you never know when a lonely heiress looking for a good cause is gonna happen along...

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tales: Steve Almond

2010-04-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Steve Almond is the author the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life came out on April 13.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
STEVE ALMOND: I must have been one of the first instructors hired by Eve. This was, gosh, 1998? I don't even remember how I learned about Grub, but the first class I taught was so full of amazing writers that I was sold. (That class included Ellen Litman, Jane Roper, and Jami Brandli—how's that for a bunch of hotshots!!).

RUN FOR GRUB: What's your most magical Grub Street memory?
STEVE ALMOND: I'm sure it was that first class. I was so astonished by the talent. I was like: "Now why am I teaching this class again?"

RUN FOR GRUB: What was the best advice you ever received at a Grub Street event?
STEVE ALMOND: I believe it was Chris Castellani who told me to "Hold on loosely, but don't let go." Words to live by.

RUN FOR GRUB: Have you ever complained at a bookstore because the manager wasn’t stocking enough books by Grub Street writers?
STEVE ALMOND: Constantly.

RUN FOR GRUB: What are the best three running songs of all time?
STEVE ALMOND: I don't run, so I can't tell you. And even if I could tell you, that would just be what gets me psyched up to run. Everyone has their own aerobic anthems.

RUN FOR GRUB: I'm reading your treatise on what you call your drooling fanaticism and I have a questions: Do my musings on the music I’m using to train qualify me as a drooling fanatic? If so, is there some kind of membership card I can tuck into my wallet between my license and Mastercard?
STEVE ALMOND: I'm not sure that's something you'd want to flaunt. Besides, Drooling Fanaticism is really a matter of how music makes you feel at a particular moment, not a lifestyle decision. But you appear to need validation, so I will provide it. I hereby pronounce you, Catherine Elcik, a Drooling Fanatic, Private First Class. Now hit the dance floor and give me ten!

RUN FOR GRUB (mumbled): Yes, sir...

Editor's note—If music has ever kicked your joy up a notch, salved your sadness, or made you feel like you had no choice but to listen to this one amazing track again and again and AGAIN, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life is a must for your library. Click here to make it yours!

Writing Lessons from My Inner Runner

2010-04-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

This morning I ran three miles at an average pace of 9 minutes and 45 seconds per. This despite telling myself, not so many months ago, that I should probably make peace with the idea that running a 10-minute mile might just be a personal pipe dream. And yet while I was distracted with the excitement of starting my official marathon training, I went and got fast. Fast for me anyway. Because though I know that in a lot of running circles a 10-minute mile places me firmly in the snail category, it's downright hare-ish when you compare it to the runner I was at this time last year.

I should say that nothing about this morning's run screamed personal best. Running downhill, I entertained the same fantasies I always do about having been transformed into Cathicus, Greek Goddess of Fledgling Runners. Going uphill I either get totally freaked out by the complete and utter appropriateness of the lyrics of the song currently playing—this really ain't no place to fall behind, Mr. Ryan Bingham, is it?—or taunt my inner hypochondriac with the idea that the burning in my quads isn't lactic acid at all but a sign that my muscles have entered into an alarming frayed-rope-like state. And yet even weighed down with all that mental chatter, I still paced faster today than I ever have.

Mayhaps I should get out of my own way more often.

Like so many bloggers, I'm a bit of a ruminator. Will I? Won't I? Should I? Shouldn't I? I'm exactly the kind of person who keeps perusing displays of thingamahoozits for months after I've already bought that very thingamahoozit. So it should come as no shock to anyone that when people ask me how my novel's going, I tell them, "slowly." It's a lie. It would be more truthful to tell them: "The pace of my revision makes glacial progress seem like an Olympic luge by comparison—thanks for asking!"

What if the writer in me took a cue from the runner?

The runner in me keeps track of her progress, but she's not beholden to false goals. The runner in me will run 10-minute miles if and when she's good and ready. Are you taking notes, oh, writer in me? Because how many birthdays have to go by before writer-me stops promising herself that this will be the last year she has to put finish the book on my list of goals.

The runner in me knows that if I look beyond today's mileage on my training schedule, I risk suffering existential vertigo by reminding myself how quickly my long runs trip over into double digits (I'm up to ten miles as of May 14). Instead, the runner in me focuses on the mileage for today's run. Once I'm on the street, it's all about putting one foot in front of the other. Tunes help. What if the writer in me stopped casting ahead to the murky second half of the book and turned her focus on the scene she was revising today? Wouldn't those scenes add up quickly? Wouldn't she find herself revising her way past the black hole she was worried about in pretty much the exact same way the runner in her left the ten-minute mile in the dust today? Why yes. And yes to you, too, Mr. Bingham. I will pick up my crazy heart and give it one more try.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Grub Tale: Becky Tuch

2010-04-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

Becky Tuch’s first novel, Cindy, Wendy and DANGER: A Novel of Mystery and Excitement!!! was completed in the fourth grade. Since then, she has been writing fiction and practicing using fewer exclamation points. Her stories have won awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and received Honorable Mentions from the Pushcart Prize and Writers' Journal. Other stories, poetry and reviews have been published in Folio, Eclipse, Blueline, Artsmedia, The Women's Review of Books and elsewhere. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website that reviews literary magazines.

RUN FOR GRUB: How did you learn about Grub Street?
BECKY TUCH: I learned about Grub from a poet I dated when I first moved to Boston. He was looking for teaching jobs and so took me to a Grub Street party so he could network. I remembered there was this giant sink in the hallway and I thought, "this place is cool!" He ended up teaching at a university, but oddly enough, now it's five years later and I'm the one who teaches at Grub Street—novel and short story workshops to adults and teenagers.

Also, I'd like to add that at the time, I was taking fiction workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Ed. I'd taken about two years worth of classes, and then I got to a point where I knew I wanted to take my writing to a more serious level, but I did not want to pay MFA prices. Grub Street was heard of at that time, but not everyone had caught on to how amazing it was just yet. One night, in class, I told everyone that I wasn't going to come back for the next term.

"Why not?" they asked. This group and I had been in a short story workshop together for over a year by then.

"I'm going to take a class at Grub Street," I said.

There was an audible hush.

Evidently, I had made a statement.

Telling your peers in an adult ed class that you're going to start taking classes at Grub was, I learned, like telling a bunch of body-builders that you're done with working out in the basement with your grandpa's old barbells. You are actually going to join a gym, maybe even get a personal trainer.

"My writing," I was saying. "Is important."

I took my first Grub class the following term and have been taking classes there ever since.The really great thing is that since that time, almost all the people I knew in those Adult Ed classes have reunited with me in Grub workshops or seminars or conferences. We just wink at each other's biceps.

RUN FOR GRUB: What has Grub Street meant to you?
BECKY TUCH: So, yesterday, at around noon, I got a phone call from one of my favorite Grub Street instructors. "I just wanted to call and check in with you about your novel. You mentioned you were having trouble with the ending?"

She is an instructor in this master novel class I'm taking, so it's not like she just read about my ranting on Facebook and decided to call and check in. We'd actually scheduled this time to chat. But still. No one is forcing her to do these phone conferences. She just decided that it would make the class better if she called us.

Who does that? Where in the world—apart from academia—do people make those kinds of phone calls?

She and I talked for an hour, about art and literature and our mothers and, of course, our novels. Interestingly, the most helpful thing about the call was not that she told me how to end the book, or how to tweak my characters, but that she made the call at all. She had it on her list of things to do, probably right up there with buying food, cleaning her apartment, going to the bank, organizing her tax forms. Right in the midst of all this mundane life work that we all have to struggle to finish on a daily basis, she had the item—"Call Becky re: novel," or something like that. And that's what Grub Street has given me over the past five or so years. It's given me the incredible sense that writing a novel or short stories or poetry, and teaching writing, discussing writing, reading books—all these activities can and should have the same primacy in a person's life as, say, going to the dentist. Writing is real. It matters.

RUN FOR GRUB: Can you define your Grub community?
BECKY TUCH: My Grub community ranges from the people that I hang with on Saturday night (I've made some of the best friends of my life at Grub Street), and my students who I teach on weekdays, as well as the teens I work with one Saturday a month. The community are the people I bump into at cafes in Somerville and with whom I stop to chat about agents and first drafts and revising. There are also the wonderful people with whom I have a communal blog, Beyond the Margins, all people I met through a Grub novel class.

Also, I am not only a teacher but continue to be a student at Grub, so my community includes the people in my workshops who inspire me (like you, Cathy!) and my teachers. One of my other favorite Grub instructors has me over every Christmas and Easter and how can I put words to that? To the generosity and warmth and kindness that permeates the classes and pours out into all of our daily lives?

Well, before I get all sentimental, this would be a good place to mention that I'm also the captain of the Grub Street softball team. This means that my Sundays during the summer are pretty much spent shouting at novelists and memoirists and filmmakers to stay on the freaking base! Run it in! SLIDE!!! Those are happy days indeed.

RUN FOR GRUB: What does Grub Street's magic feel like to you?
BECKY TUCH: It feels like the kind of laughter that brings tears to your eyes. And maybe that's because so many of the workshops I'm in, they just end up being so funny. The stuff people reveal about themselves, and the way we all press in close to one another and jump off a cliff into the big nothingness of This Thing Called Writing, together, in a class, learning from each other, it seems to me the whole thing makes people positively giddy. So the magic feels to me like joy.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #3

2010-04-21T22:06:00.001-07:00

So I tripped and fell again yesterday—if you look closely, you can see evidence of my scraped up hands in the sweaty and seriously unflattering photo at right (yes, I sometimes rest my sunglasses atop my baseball cap; no, my hands aren't actually bigger than my head).

This time it was Lady Sovereign's Love Me or Hate Me playing in my ear when I fell, and mere seconds before my tumble, I was wondering if the fact that today's play list included Eminem and Lady Sovereign back-to-back meant I had somehow been catapulted from nerdy to hip.

A trip, a dive, a roll and the answer was a very clear "no."

But while hipper seems desperately out of the reach of graceless, old me, faster is a word I can get behind. I ran my 3 mile run in 29:44, a time that included precious seconds wasted on

tripping,
rolling on to the sidewalk,
getting back up,
brushing off the dust,
taking a moment to thank the gods of running (Marathon?) that I'd managed to avoid the pile of dog shit close to where I rolled into the grass, and obsessively checking my body to make sure I had in fact avoided the dog shit—I had.

Given that daydreaming while distracted by music may just turn me into the first runner in history to develop callouses on her palms as a direct result of marathon training, you'd think I might consider the relative health merits of running in silence, but no way. I'd sooner be the wacko in Winthrop who runs in a crash helmet than give up my tunes.

But I would like to pose a sponsorship challenge—I hereby found the consolation contribution. If you want to be a consolation contributor, just visit my sponsorship page and donate $10 for every fall I take. We're starting at $20, but I feel I should warn you that there's no upper bound.

And so without further ado, today's crappy thing people don't tell you about running is this: Careless and clumsy runners will get to know road rash intimately. And often, apparently.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #2

2010-04-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Take a look outside today. The mercury's inching into the mid sixties, the sun's shining, the lilacs are ready to bust, and the sun's dancing along the water in that way that makes your inner 3-year-old believe that the ocean just might be where all the other stars nap when the sun starts shining.

Idyllic. Bucolic. Pastoral. Just a few of the words that leap to mind when spring has finally come to New England for good. A perfect day to loop my run along the beach, I thought. Unfortunately, the gnat-like winged demons that delight in dive-bombing anyone who gets within two feet of the seawall had similar thoughts.

For walkers, beach bugs are an annoyance that results in waving the pests every few minutes, but the situation's a little more dire for runners. Because as we bounce along, panting heavily with our mouths gaping open to catch our breath, the bugs see our uvulas as a swinging target double-dog-daring them to go for it, and go for it hard.

The second crappy thing people don't tell you about running is that chokijng down a bug is pretty much inevitatble. As is being laughed at when you stop dead in the throes of some seriously unladylike gagging and spitting.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Crap People Don't Tell You About Running: #1

2010-04-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

When you think about the hurdles a person might have to clear while training for a marathon, sore muscles; shin splints; and dehydration sprint immediately to mind. Perhaps the issue of how a pokey little puppy like myself will actually find the time to put in those long runs (going public helps).

There are so many known running demons that it's easy for many of the death-by-paper-cut snafus to fly under the radar. So today I begin the first in an occasional series I'm gonna call "Crap People Never Mention About Running." So without further ado, the first crappy thing nobody mentions is this: Running will definitely double your laundry chore—it might even triple it.

There was a time before we moved into our condo when my husband and I went to the laundromat together and amused ourselves by watching the kind of soap opera that can only be delivered through the fights people have over the spin cycle, but those laundry dates are the closest I've ever come to washing my husband's dirty socks for him. So it came as quite the shock when I started to find myself besieged by the ever growing pile of sweat-drenched leggings, balled-up blister-prevention socks, and soggy underthings. As excited as I was to have my inner runner move in with my husband and me, it turns out she's a sweaty pig of a roommate who shows no sign of either cleaning up after herself or moving out any time soon.

Bad, runner! Bad!

Because the other runners in your life will have all kinds of tips for avoiding overuse injury and staying hydrated during long runs, I'm gonna go ahead and give you the best tip I have for tackling the Sisyphean laundry task that's just one of the many hidden perks of marathon training: commit to a color family in your running clothes.

Variety may, indeed, be the spice of life, but if you wear the lights and brights in your workout wardrobe in equal measure, you're gonna end up doing twice the laundry. Decide now if your running clothes will lean toward the lights (white and pastels) or the brights (black and bright colors). That way when it comes time to wash the stinking masses, you can throw the whole lot into the washing machine without a thought. Added bonus for women who choose brights? You never have to worry about your orange-and-pink-striped running bra shining through your light shirt like so much Vegas neon.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

On Birthdays and Baubles

2010-04-18T11:42:00.001-07:00

Today's my birthday. Tomorrow's my wedding anniversary. And though I've managed to get my miles in around the celebratory shenanigans that have been happening since Friday, my diet over the last two days has been more John Candy on a bender than Cathy Elcik on a training regimen. I'm OK with this.

Before the heads of the running purists among you go on and explode, know that I paid for everyone of the culinary baubles of the last two days with a rubbery-legged 3-mile training run this morning. And I'm OK with this, too.

Though there's definitely a birthday cake in my future to celebrate National Butter Cream Frosting Appreciation Day (this is what one of the Run for Grub sponsors calls a birthday), my meals for the foreseeable future will be made up of a whole lot of fruit, whole grains, and lean protein.

And though this is the only birthday I'll celebrate during training, I'm sure this weekend's tasty hijinks won't be the last bauble over the next fifteen weeks (Grub Street's upcoming Muse and the Marketplace conference is always good for at least a couple glasses of wine, for example).

Let me be clear, here: I've made no promises to run the perfect marathon—I just want to cross that finish line with my fundraising goals met or exceeded. Let's make that our working definition of the perfect marathon from here on out, shall we?

And while we're redefining perfect scenarios, if you've been waiting for the perfect moment to flip your coins into the Run for Grub well, what better time than on the 35th birthday of the runner herself? Is this shameless? Maybe. But nothing seems quite as shameless as the sudden urge I'm having for turtle cheesecake and shoestring fries and, and, and too many other pound-packing pleasures to take the time to name here.

Sigh.

I hereby dedicate the thirty-three miles I'm scheduled to run in weeks two and three to whittling all traces of the last two days from my middle. Buoy my mood by making that pledge you've been meaning to make for my birthday today?

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Leaving the Whimpering Behind

2010-04-14T10:40:00.001-07:00

No, not MY whimpering (but thanks a lot)—the dog's.

I have a greyhound name Bo (mostly we call him Bo-Bo) whose doggie personal ad would list his hobbies as taking long walks on the beach, streaking his nose across laptop screens, and meat.

He enjoys the occasional short sprint, but Bo's no distance runner, though lately he seems to think he'd like to be. In addition to marathon training, I'm also the primary dog walker in my family. I love walking, so this is totally fine with me. And up until recently, this was totally fine with Bo, too. But the time spent doing training runs needs to come from somewhere, so on the four days a week I run, Bo's walk gets cut to 15-30 minutes. I think of it as a warm up. He thinks of it as getting screwed.

On these short walk days, Bo's started tailing me as I strip off my coat and fiddle with my arm band for my ipod. When I go for by keys and head for the door without him, he stands in the middle of the hallway doing something that sounds like a cross between hyperventilating and whimpering. Whimperventilating? I don't know what you call it. Pitiful maybe. And his eyes. I know if I look into them, they'll hit with a ray of hurt and betrayal that'll sap me of my will to do anything but sit beside him on one of his three doggie beds (yup, he's totally spoiled) and scratch his hiney. Which isn't as creepy in practice as it sounds in print.

So as I head out for my run, I tell him I'll be right back, slip through the door, and race down the stairs. Not because I'm in any rush to start running, but because I can hear the whimpering through the door. And it breaks my heart. Which I find entirely unfair to me because I tried to include him in my running. I really did.

When I started the couch to 5K program last spring, I thought, how perfect. I'll train Bo along side me and transform my furry shadow into my four-legged, long-distance-running sidekick. How fun! How sweet! How short sighted of me!

The couch to 5K program does exactly what it says it will. In nine weeks, it eases a couch potato like me into a person capable of running a 5K race. From what I can tell, the program works because it tricks you into running bit by bit until all of a sudden, you can run a mile, and then two, and then three.

But Bo pooped out right out of the gate. The first day program starts with a "brisk five-minute warmup walk." He was right with me for that. The walk was supposed to progess to 60 seconds of jogging alternated with 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes. The first 60 seconds of jogging, Bo kind of glanced up at me with his mouth open in an expression that said, well, this is new. By the second 60 seconds he was lagging so far behind a chucklehead passing us yelled "I thought those were supposed to be racing dogs!" And by the third 60 seconds, Bo's head was down and his feet dug in so completely, that forward progress would have involved dragging him by force. Bo's career as a distance runner was over before it began.

So it's understandable that when I go for a run I have to leave him to whimper at the door. Would I like a marathon dog to run beside me? Maybe. But then on my three-mile loop today I watched an old woman grunting as she cleaned up after her dog and realized that running sans Bo has it's perks. Because though I pride myself as a clean pet owner, I'm not sure how many miles I'd really want to run while carrying a bag of dog shinola in my hand.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Two down; Sixty-two to go!

2010-04-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

I ran four miles at a slowish pace today—ten minutes and 11 seconds per—but given that I managed to stay upright for every step this time, I'm counting today's run as a win. Though a definite loser emerged from the playlist.

To keep my mind occupied as I do these training runs, I'm quite literally running through all of the 135 songs I've put on my marathon playlist since the beginning of the year. A semi-final round, of sorts.

Today, Billy Joel's "It's Still Rock 'N Roll to Me" got green lighted, but "The Longest Time" gets the boot. I may be a big believer in creating a mix that includes the break of a few slow songs that buoy me, but doo wop a capella was doing nothing for the speed of my feet today. Sorry, snap-happy Billy. You are today's weakest beat.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

My Grub Tale

2010-04-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

Stories about the magic of Grub Street will appear in the blog and be archived in the "Grub Tales" tab above. If you want to share your Grub Tale, email your interest to runforgrub@gmail.com.

GRUB TALE: CATHERINE ELCIK

In the year 2000, I was a community reporter covering a planning board meeting packed with a bunch of suits going on and on about some zoning faux pas so dull, that my brain liquefied and started to drip, drip, drip from my ear and puddle on the floor. When I realized that the daydream that transformed snow melting off my boots into a brain soupy with boredom was the first fiction I'd written in years, I had one question for myself: How in the name of every writer I consider holy had I ever convinced myself that a career writing for a community newspaper could scratch the itch I felt to write novels?

I decided right then that an MFA at Emerson College would be the perfect bridge from journalism to fiction, so I whipped up an extended metaphor disguised as a short story and sent off my application, convinced this was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Unfortunately, the Emerson admission committee didn't agree, and a few weeks later, I found myself standing just inside the door to my apartment blinking at my rejection letter. It wasn't that I disagreed with the verdict—I was painfully aware of just how badly I sucked. But I still got trapped in a cycle of thoughts that went something like this:

I need Emerson to learn to write, but I need to learn to write to get into Emerson, but I need Emerson to learn to write , but I need to learn to write to get into Emerson...etc.

After repeating that extraordinarily unhelpful mantra for three days, I called the writing and publishing department at Emerson and asked the young-sounding receptionist if she thought that the continuing education classes there would actually help me learn what I needed to know to improve my application for the next round. At the time my salary was so paltry that I often had to put my groceries on a credit card, so I needed assurances that a class with a $1200-plus price tag was gonna be worth the price.

The receptionist sang the praises of the Emerson continuing education program for a few moments before she dropped her voice to a whisper and asked the question that would jump-start my life as a fiction writer:"Have you heard of Grub Street?"

When you take a second to reflect on this turn in the conversation, it's pretty miraculous. Even though I gave every indication that I was ready to empty my wallet to enroll in a continuing education class, an Emerson employee still pointed me toward Grub Street. Probably risked her job to do it, too. That's the Grub Street magic, right there.

That first Grub Street class gave me access to a community of like-minded word lovers who welcomed me as a writer as long as I showed up willing to brave honest criticism delivered respectfully. Better still, it was a community I could tap for encouragement, commiseration, and friendship. And truly, some of my closest friendships got their start at Grub Street—whether it was bonding over drinks with a writer whose work shook me in the way only the best writing can or the kindred spirit I noticed because when talk turned to "The Time Traveler's Wife," she pressed her hand over her heart in just the way I did.

For the most part, the non-writing world only recognizes writers once they've earned an Amazon sales rank. But Grub Street recognizes writers in the fast-talking breathless ways we speak when talk turns to writing and in our Herculean ability to nurture a willingness to stick to the page in the face of long, long odds.

For me, Grub Street's magic is about more than just an employee of a different school steering me toward the offerings at Grub. It's about guidance and friendships and all those ways leading to ways I can trace back to that first Grub Street class I signed up for almost nine years ago.

I'm more grateful to Grub Street than I have words to describe, so I'm doing this Run for Grub to pay it forward, as they say.

And should the training process help me blast through those last 20 pounds standing between me and my goal weight, well then we'll just add that to the long list of reasons I'm grateful to Grub.

Beat on the Brat

2010-04-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

Run one of 63 today. Just three miles. Should have been easy. Should have been. But just before the halfway point, my rebel toe went and stubbed a corner of sidewalk that had been pushed into a cockeyed angle by an angry tree root elbowing for space.

For a millisecond my legs tried to convince my teetering center of gravity to err on the side of staying upright. But even as I let myself entertain the hope that I was gonna get off with inelegance—stuttering a few steps before rediscovering the rhythm of my stride—my self preservation kicked in as I realized it would be easier on my body to let myself fall (nothing causes as much injury as trying to prevent injury, I've heard). So I put my hands in front of me and did just that. Even remembered to roll into the fall to spread the shock.

From what I could gather, my spill was pretty spectacular—a Lexus slammed its brake in the road beside me as I went down, only speeding up again when I popped up, dusted off my scraped hands, and kept running. Once I turned the corner, I slowed my pace to take a quick inventory: Limbs still attached? Ankles feeling healthy? Embarrassment making my face burn even hotter than than my sweat-reddened face was already burning? Check. Check. And absolutely check.

Chagrin aside, I take full responsibility for the fall. No, seriously. I was asking for it. Moments before I went down—and how!—I was smirking at the utter foolishness of the song my playlist had just offered up for my running enjoyment: "Beat on the Brat." by The Ramones.

I felt a quick twinge of guilt—was bopping along to lyrics that demanded I beat on a brat with a baseball bat as bad as giggling at a tasteless joke? I don't know, but the song's too catchy for me to care.

So I started rationalizing.

What if the brat was my name for my inner critic? Yeah, that was it. Because beating on my brat of a critic is perfectly acceptable. And in the second just before I fell, I laughed, imaging writers everywhere doing the newest dance craze—The Baseball Bat. All you have to do is swing your arms like you've got a major league beef with that brat who's too dim to figure out he's overstayed his welcome. Which was right about the moment my brat decided to trip me.

Here's hoping the rest of my runs go off in a perfectly upright manner.

Catherine Elcik is running her first marathon to raise money for a scholarship fund for Grub Street, Inc, and independent writing center in Boston, MA. Sponsor the run at www.firstgiving.com/runforgrub.

Introducing the Run for Grub

2010-04-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

I'm turning my first marathon into a fundraiser for Grub Street, Inc, an independent writing school in Boston, MA.

Why?

Because every good thing in my writing life can be traced back to finding my way into a a Grub Street classroom in 2001, and I want to help pass on the welcome Grub gave me to the next generation of Grub Street writers.

My "Run for Grub" will fund a scholarship for writers who are new to Grub Street—whether that means they're taking their first-ever Grub Street class or testing out a class in a genre that's new to them.

Follow Run For Grub!

Training blog—you're looking at it, so bookmark this page!
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The run

And no, I don't have a twitter account set up for the event. Why ever not? Largely because I haven't yet been properly disabused of Twitter's complete and utter uselessness. If someone wants to try to convince my luddite alter ego about the benefits of doing fleet feet tweets, shoot me an email. But good luck luck to you. My inner luddite has all the charm of a grumpy old man.

Official Launch April 11, 2010

2010-02-28T22:15:00.000-08:00

Watch this space!