What a Difference a Year Makes

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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.