Only in America

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.