#3: When the Cloud Comes
I ran a marathon in Sacramento this week, and I learned my strategy for dealing with pain forty-five minutes too late.
Well, it was an eventful two weeks, wasn’t it? Thanksgiving, trees, traveling with your toddler, running a marathon, more trees, finding out your LDL is down fifty points. A mixed bag, really. Before we start, some updates on book promotions. You really pre-order Must Love Trees: An Unconventional Guide, because look at all the hotness that is happening:
Looks like everyone is doing something cool. I don’t know about you, but that’s always my metric for deciding what to do.
This week, I started a new promotion: you can win my “dummy book” (the real book with blank pages that your publisher sends you to pose with)—of which I am filling up the pages with various tree-related observations, secrets, terrible drawings, and straight-up wisdom—if you pre-order the book and send your proof-of-purchase to MustLoveTreesBook@gmail.com with the subject “Tobin is a Dummy”. You can participate no matter when you’ve bought the book. Here’s the slightly creepy video I made for it.
Also, you’ll see below under Trees Future header my guide to Christmas Trees. I adapted it from the book, just for more of a taste of what you’ll be getting.
Trees Present: I Went to Hell, and All I Got Was This Lousy Strategy for Dealing With Marathon Agony
There are different strategies about what to do in the last four or five miles in a marathon in order to distract yourself from overwhelming pain. Some people repeat mantras. Others think about everything you did to get here. Or all the people cheering you on from afar. The point is, it’s almost always awful, and there’s no one weird trick.
On Sunday, at the California International Marathon in Sacramento, I finally discovered my own strategy. And I discovered it forty-five minutes too late.
Let the following serve as a marathon autopsy.
A note on writing about running:
The only people who want to read about running are runners. But, it turns out, there are a lot of runners, so this works out. Haruki Murakami has a book about running called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I didn’t like. But I’m a runner, so I read it. Will he write a book about trees next? I certainly hope not.
In one part in his running book, Murakami talks about how much he likes to listen to cool music when he runs. Most people do this, I think. But for my own part, I absolutely cannot listen to music when I run. It makes my pace and energy level completely beholden to the emotional highs and lows of each song. I’ll get all pumped up at the guitar riff at the beginning of “Sgt. Pepper”, imagining myself all cool and and sexy and fast, then I’ll deflate when “She’s Leaving Home” arrives shortly thereafter, making me fearful for my daughter’s eventual emancipation from me. I don’t run to develop rapid fire emotional states in myself. I run to iron them out. It’s why I prefer to listen to Ezra Klein talk about how nice it is to read books when I run.
I was as prepared as I could be for this marathon, which I was aiming to complete in under three hours. This is because having a two in front of your marathon time feels really cool. I had also completed the entirety of “The Irishman” in the hotel room the night before, which was an incredible choice to lull me into a deep slumber at 9pm.
I woke up naturally at 3:56am for the 7am race (dreamy) and had my planned breakfast of coffee, a banana, a hard-boiled egg, and a plain bagel with jam.
The rainy bus line was in front of the capitol building in Sacramento, which has one of the most beautiful public arboretums that I’ve ever seen. I tried to drown out my impulses to join in other’s long-line grumblings by looking at the tree tags, which were large and visible from twenty feet: curvy old deodar cedars, Chir pines, Redwoods (so much happier in Sacramento than Los Angeles), and even a burnt-out Giant Sequoia, fire-roasted so that it resembled one of the ancients in the Sierras, even though it was probably no more than fifty years old. Power line accident? Man, those guys can’t catch a break.
The porta-potties are one of the most dispiriting parts of every marathon start line. There’s upwards of 150, and each one has a line of twenty people in front of it, all with the same plan: instead of taking 45 seconds to pee and getting out, they’re jamming their butts onto the wet, cold seats, desperately trying to poop for an extra 30 seconds and failing so that the average occupancy time almost doubles. I also tried to do this and failed, but I have also never succeeded in past attempts before a marathon so it was no big whoop.
I would need to maintain an average of a 6:51/minute per mile pace if I wanted to achieve a sub-three hour time.
The race started really great, and stayed really great until exactly 21.5 miles. It’s not remarkable that I got this far. I ran for hundreds of hours in my training, which was self-inflicted and mostly fun and largely inconvenient for my wife and child, in order to do it. But mile 22 is always a wild card, because it’s farther than any of your training runs, and beyond it anything can happen because it’s unexplored territory for you, at least this time around. You’ll be in pain, sure, but the question is, what kind of pain?
For me, this time around, it was the bad kind of pain. Two things happened in rapid succession for me at mile 22—my legs started to feel heavy, and then I allowed “the cloud” to come over me, which means that I panicked. I still had thirty minutes of running, and I just couldn’t stand to imagine that much pain. It reminds me of the sermon that that crazy-ass priest preaches in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” when he says that the worst part of hell is not the pain or the stink or the darkness, but the knowledge that it will never end. Legs feeling heavy is a regular part of the process at mile 22. Panic is not. And that’s what sunk me: equating thirty minutes with an eternity.
When the cloud came, it was like opening Pandora’s box just a hair, which we all know is not how it works. A few years ago, I wrote a passage in a since-abandoned novel that tried to capture the awfulness of a similar moment when I was in seventh grade cross-country, at the moment it became hateful to me as a young man:
“He had a momentary day-terror of someone pouring cut pieces of dried grass down the back of his shirt and a fantasy of mindless, maniacal scraping and tearing at the parts of his back he couldn’t reach…every movement was painful—in his lungs, in his legs, and in his mind, which kept going back to the pain that the Jews in concentration camps must have felt when they were forced into labor…ahead of him, the runners started pulling away, like the last handholds on the dock before being taken away by the riptide.
He felt his face quake like Jell-o with every slowing stride, and it reminded him of fourth grade, when every male student was forced to wear a ragged old bathing suit to swim class. They were marched out of the locker room, tiny white thighs shaking from the cold of the showers that were the tunnels to the chlorine mists of the Natatorium, like a chemical vision of Dante.”
Catastrophic thinking like this dictates the rhythms of your body. I should know: I have had a talent for manifesting somatic pain or physical symptoms in my body for years as part of my OCD, like twitching or headaches or blinding agony in my hands. At mile 22, I probably still had my body, but I had lost my mind.
My pace slowed to about 7:30.
Then, at mile 23, I committed the ultimate sin: I decided to make peace with not achieving my time. In the space of a mile, I had gone through the entire five phases of grief for myself. My mourning period was over. No use in digging up the body now.
Runners with long histories don’t do this. I had trained to be to a pretty physically fast runner in just a few years, but I was not tough like others. They began to pick me off at mile 24, maybe two hundred or more—runners who were able to resist the white-hot allure of despair.
I crossed the finish line with a time of 3:01:55, enough for a Boston qualifier but almost two minutes behind my goal. I was so happy to be done that I didn’t mind coming up short while I got my medal and water. But then I had to pass through a sea of amazing, elated athletes, most of whom had achieved their goals. My wife and toddler were still in Los Angeles. I requested to my wife that they stay there for logistical (read: sleep) purposes. Now I wished I hadn’t.
I scarfed down a free burrito and began to walk the six blocks back to my hotel. My legs were sore, of course, but this wasn’t like my first marathon or even my second—walking actually felt fine. That made it worse. Maybe if I were limping now, like in my first marathon, I would have felt more war-torn and noble.
I exited the greeting area, and, startled, realized that I was staring at the same old, curved deodar cedar that I had been standing in front of five hours earlier in the rain and the dark. Behind it I could now see the riches of the arboretum in front of the capitol building. I decided to cut through it.
It featured large, beautiful trees that I consistently got wrong when I tried to ID them: A Chinese Sweetgum (with three pointed leaves), a Chir Pine (I took it for a Stone Pine at first), and a beautiful example of a Nordmann Fir, with incredibly short, compact needles that almost felt like the branches on a tree Lego. Much different than any Nordmanns I’d seen grown as Christmas trees.
I have said many times, and I say in the book, that spending time around trees will not cure your woes any more than music or any other kind of art can. In fact, I find that I treat trees like an art with no artist behind them. My engagement with them—having fun socially with them, looking for metaphors within them, gazing at them for hours on end hoping to gain some kind of elevation through attention—is indistinguishable from that of a music-lover or a cinephile except that I don’t shoulder the burden of reckoning with their creator in any kind of authorial intent-sense. They’re simpler than art but better, for me.
When I wandered out of the arboretum fifteen minutes later, I was lost, and had to ask directions to J street (thank you, Laurielle). But the cloud had lifted.
I had to cross the course to get back to my hotel. I decided to stay by the sideline for a bit and shout awkward words of encouragement, “Go RUNNERS!” “You got this!” “Yeah!” It is such hard work to make meaning from suffering, but I just can’t imagine any other way to do it.
I always look at trees when I run. I can tell you what tree grows on every street on every route I’ve ever run. It’s just where my head goes when I’m free from fear.
Forty-five minutes earlier, I achieved the same agony as the people I watched now. I wished I could tell them what I now knew was the way forward. See the pain. See the panic. Then look up.
Some people have music. Some people have mantras.
I have trees, and I was in Sacramento, where anything grows.
Trees Past: Stump Voodoo
Drink in the voodoo meshugas of these screencaps from a conversation with my amazing gardener, Nick, and pity us both:
So, yeah, it’s been good, I guess!
Trees Future: The Jews Love Trees Guide to Christmas Trees
Click on the above to see the complex decision you have before you. Shout-out as always to Trey Conrad for the excellent illustrations and brow-work!
An Out-of-Context Sentence from Must Love Trees: An Unconventional Guide
Page 182:
“Birch, please! Birch, please! Ha ha. No, I’m just kidding—I actually respect you guys. ‘Guys’, wait, no, you’re not guys! You’re tree . . . chicks! What? Anywho, wanna cruise in this, uh…car?”
Pre-order from:
Thing I am thinking about:
This super cool enormous seed art by Ming Fay at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
