Each performance has a theme. Christmas, for example, is some variation on The Nutracker. This morning's theme was Superheroes. Movements from various Superhero-ish symphonies were performed, everything from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture to John Williams' themes from Star Wars and the March from Superman. You have to be there to know the majesty of such moments. To hear a full symphony orchestra tear into the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme is to know that old Neil Young axiom "Live Music is Better, Bumper Stickers Should Be Issued." I sit in our second-row seats and feel the pulse of the music hit my body. The complexity of each movement dazzles me, and so often I find my creativity stirred, causing me to reach for a notebook and pen so I can write down the thoughts about story ideas and plot points that suddenly ricochet around my brain pain. It is a children's symphony -- and yet it is not. On so many occasions over the years, the performances have moved me to tears. I sit there like a pile of mush, knowing quite well that I am sitting close enough for the orchestra to see this grown man crying. And I don't care. The music is beautiful, transcendent, powerful. 

Another highlight of this morning's show was not only the playing of Michael Daugherty's Metropolis Symphony, but the presence of the composer himself. Daugherty sat on stage, nodding to the music, and even closing his eyes and smiling at one passage. As a creative person, I marveled at such an opportunity. Writers don't often get the chance to see their work performed in front of an audience, and certainly not with the flair and spectacle of a live symphony. I found myself listening to the music, but watching Daugherty. I'll never have the opportunity he was enjoying, but I wasn't jealous. There's a wonderful moment in the writing process, when you read your final final polished draft before sending it to the publisher and know in your gut that you've done it right. That's what I was watching up there. 

During the final piece, Giachinno's credits piece from The Incredibles, the giant video screen behind the orchestra flashed drawings of superheroes that members of the audience had submitted prior to the show. They were childish and primitive, which is a redundant sentence. I saw Batman, Waterman, Spiderman, and a bunch of surely parent-influenced newcomers like Doctor Man. Most of the artists colored outside the jagged lines, which added to the charm. I had a flashback to childhood, and drawing stuff like that. I remember my Batman lunchbox and my GI Joe's. 

There's a reason for superheroes. As youngsters, they are the powerful, impervious images of ourselves we one day hope to become. They have muscles and wit and guile and sometimes invisibility. Women love them. As we get older, superheroes get replaced by just plain heroes. For me, it was Steve Prefontaine. To Pre, running was power and pride and gut, which spoke to me at a time in my life when I had none of that.

These heroes are also the versions of ourselves we someday hope to become, but a little more realistic, and thus more attainable. I had other heroes, people like Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Springsteen. In their crafting of words and lyrics, I found inspiration to step outside my own middling way with words and give them a pulse and beat that caused them to rise up off the page. 

And then, inevitably, it happens. You find your own voice. I stepped on the backs of Hemingway and Thompson and even Pre to spin the words and build the attitude that became me. I no longer measured myself against them, because my path diverged at that point. My words and my running became deeply personal portayals of who I am, warts and all. Not super. Not always heroic. But better, day by day, mile by mile, word by word. I will never write like Ernest Hemingway. Never ramble like Thompson. Never run like Pre. That doesn't mean I can't kick a little ass in my own inimitable way. At some point we all need to jettison our heroes and become the person we're meant to be. 

I left the symphony supercharged. On the way home, Callie and I stopped at running store to buy new flats for Liam. The store was crowded, but I was happy to wait. Put me in a gear store and I'm as content as the proverbial barnyard pig. Within a few minutes, something started to bother me. It wasn't just the books and magazines they had for sale, which were connected by the common theme that running should be as mindless as possible. And it wasn't their store mascot, a snail. And it wasn't even the clerk who kept trying to push a brand of shoe that I considered substandard, but which I'm sure they overbought and needed to dump. 

It was just the whole mood. Which was this: Running is mundane. Running is assembly line. Running can be boiled down to a business plan. 

Now, you need to know this about me: running saved my life. Without running I would be dead somewhere. Just as Bruce Springsteen speaks of "the magic, the ministry, and the mystery of rock and roll," so I feel about running. It kept me sane when I was trying to find my way in life. It gave me a sense of self when all the world didn't seem to get me. It gave me peace on days when the world was chaos. It gave me glory as I crossed the finish line first. It gave me contentment, gave me connection, gave me catharsis. 

It made me feel, on those days when the sun hit me just right, like a superhero.

And now, running was just an act of commerce. To make matters worse, they sold Pre videos right next to books espousing mediocrity, status quo, and just good enough. 

I bought Liam a spectacular pair of ASICS and drove home in a snit. Calene kept looking at me as if I'd lost my mind. I'd gone from crying about superheroes and symphony composers to sniper-in-the-belfry within the span of 30 minutes. She is a wonderful woman who knows me well. These were her words: You need to go for a run. 

The recent rain in Southern California has been bruising. My trails are underwater and muddy. But I needed the solitude of the wilderness, so I set out during a lull in the storms. I sloshed through mud and water for four miles before breaking brush onto the local golf course. It's a little known fact that golf courses are the best place to run on a rainy day, because they're built for optimal drainage. So while the golfers themselves stayed home, I had the most perfect little cross-country course in Orange County all to myself. 

There's always that moment on an angry run day. It comes about four miles in. As I trotted down the 13th fairway, past three deer standing in the rough and eyeing me as if unsure whether I was friend or hunter, the moment hit. Here it was: I was the problem. The folks at the running store were just doing their jobs. They were selling shoes, and shirts and shorts and books and magazines and watches and socks and pretty much everything else to a group of people who were mostly non-runners. They were bored and irritable and tired of silly questions, just like any employee at any store. But they were handing out the keys to the kingdom. All those shoes and shirts and other stuff were the uniforms of superheroes. If I'd said it out loud in the store, people would have thought I was nuts. But when those same folks cross the finish line of their first marathon or half-marathon or 10k or any race that demands their very best, I guarantee you they will feel like a superhero. 

That's what running does to lives. It's not just exercise. It's not just achievement. It's a daily discipline that has nothing to do with speed, weight, social status, sexuality, political affiliation, where you live, or whether anyone anywhere loves you. It's about being the slow and painful process of being the best you can be. That's why the first step out the door is always so hard. That's when we choose between settling for average and being a superhero version of ourselves.

Some days, average wins. 

But man, when you go Superhero...

Onward. The Olympics start in a week. I'm pretending not to notice. It's not that I've chosen not to cover it in person (as with the Tour, you see a lot more on television than in person, and the mountain venues mean a multitude of logistical nightmares). It's that once they Olympics begin, they will steal my heart. I am already dreading that end-of-Olympic letdown when the torch is snuffed. I think of little else during the Olympics, and watch nothing else on television. I love getting immersed in those obscure sports like skeleton and luge, and the way we all become instant overnight experts on the players and nations involved. I even watch the figure skating, breaking my own hard and fast rule that a sport is not a sport when there are judges present. Competition should never be subjective. It will be wonderful while it lasts, and I'm sure we'll all have some very pronounced opinions on the inevitable glories and calamities soon to ensue. I will be rooting for my old hiking buddy Lindsey Vonn, as I will for my favorite train wreck, Bode Miller. In all, it will be wonderful. The Olympics always are. Then it will end, and my days and nights will lack the emotional highs and lows of watching athletes push to be their very best. I will no longer have anthem ceremonies to make me tear up. My nightly TV schedule will once again be that steady diet of CSI, 30 Rock, Survivor, Chuck, and Biggest Loser which allows my mind to quiet at the end of a busy day. 

So bring it on, Olympics. It will be glorious while it lasts. 

On a random note: I've formed a new running team. The San Juan Capistrano Track Club is a little something I threw together this winter. Right now it's just an avenue for younger athletes to improve between seasons, but I'm thinking of adding an age-group component if I can find a way to keep the obsessive-compulsives at bay. Just trying to keep it fun while making everyone fast.

Finally, this weekend marks the first ever California Indoor Track and Field Championships. Two of my guys are competing. It's too early to focus on speed and top-level racing, what with the outdoor championships starting four long months from today. But let's just say that winning is never a bad thing. Here's hoping that they kick some butt. 

Keep pushing... always

       These are all the things I noticed during the first two miles of our run. The pace was light and the physical act of running was incidental. My ears and eyes and ankles were the focus. I guess this is what it means to dissociate. Or, as I like to think of it, looking at the scenery.

         After those first two miles we raced some mountain bikers up a switchback, then I broke them into groups for a fartlek run - two minutes on, two minutes cruise, three minutes on, two minutes cruise, four minutes on, etc. Normally I'm an observer, but I've been trying to get myself back in shape lately. I've cut out a lot of the garbage from my diet, made a point of training in some fashion every day (running, mostly, but also a couple weight/plyo sessions at the House of Pain. I'm also giving serious thought to getting back on the bike), and have prepared for an upcoming few months of intensive writing by raising my level of fitness. So I thought it would be fun to jump into the fartlek session. "Fartlek" being Swedish for "speed play" it all sounded like a whole lot of fun. And it was. But it took everything I had to keep up with my runners. I was cognizant of each footfall, my arm angle, the pattern of my breathing. I kept track of each runner in front and to my side. I'd like to say there was someone behind me, but that would be a lie. I knew the pine-scented loop we'd be running, but had forgotten how impossibly far it was to the turnaround point. What had seemed like a short trot on an easy (dissociative) day, was actually more than a thousand meters. The grade, which once seemed so flat, was actually slightly uphill on the outbound portion and wonderfully downhill after we rounded the cinderblock public restroom and pushed back to the start, where we would do it all again. This, as Flotrack tells me, is associative running. I paid attention. I was in the moment -- so in the moment that time slowed down, expanding itself into the minutiae of running. The two minute rest periods, on the other hand, flew past in what felt like five seconds.  

     Racing feels like this, too, only with a higher level of focus and clarity. I know that some people like to dissociate during racing, to take their mind off the pain. But I'm so ADD (or ADHD, or whatever I am that makes me so easily distracted), that a moment's dissociation takes me to some other emotional place. Suddenly, the race seems unimportant. So I don't go there, because bad things happen when I do. At the Raid Gauloises in Ecuador a few years back I dissociated on the fourth day, while walking across an Andean plain. Within minutes, I was thinking of all the better ways I could be using my personal time. Out of nowhere I decided to quit the race. 

            This is dangerous territory. The Navy SEALs point out that once someone has made the decision to quit their basic training, there's no turning back. The mind has faltered long before the physical act of ringing the bell has taken place. What saved me in Ecuador was sharing this impulsive decision with a teammate. She reminded me that I was in no way fatigued or injured, merely bored by the scenery. In this way, I carried on. 

            OK. So we have associative and dissociative. But I would posit that there is another mental state comprising a little of both. It's the hyper-focus before the run, which carries over into the workout, so that it passes in such a blur that it's as if it never happened. Case in point: any day that my writing is going well. It's my habit to get the kids off to school, write for a couple hours to get the synapses firing, then go for a run to let all those new ideas percolate. Afterward, I'll head back into the office and write for three or four more hours. weaving all those endorphin-laced, highly oxygenated thoughts into the story or the book. My best writing -- or, let me say, my most fulfilling writing -- follows this process. I've got the basic idea, I add a little run, then I plunge back into the written word. No phone calls, no emails, no distractions. It's an introvert's dream. 

            Sometimes, however, I plunge too far into the psyche. These are my bunker days. I am so consumed by writing that I am transported to another time and place. I do not exist, other than as a vessel for whatever thought needs to flow onto the page. Only reluctantly, and perhaps out of obligation, will I break out for a run. 

            These are scary times. I am physically running, but my brain is still writing. These are the runs where I stand at a stoplight and run a hand across the drape of my running shorts, just to make sure I remembered to get properly dressed. These are the runs where I look back and forth two or three times before crossing the street, because in my mental condition I might actually forget why I'm looking both ways, and sprint out in front of a car. A run like this can last an hour. All the while I am associating in a monster way with writing, while apparently dissociating on my run. 

            Here's the weird part: the spell is broken if I run to the top of a hill. No lie. The whole way up will be a grind that will not register in the slightest, but once I stand atop Chiquita Ridge or the hill I like to call Falcon, or that spot on the Live Oak Trail where I have a 360 view of my world, I snap from my reverie. Very often I will pause to appreciate what I'm seeing. Sometimes I offer a short prayer of thanks for the tremendous beauty, or for my sudden lightness of being. Summits purify me. They let me see. It's no wonder that on the morning of my wedding I went for a run, and somehow found myself standing atop a hill. It just happens. 

            I don't know the clinical term for this hyper-focus, and then the loosening of one's cares and focus that occurs when all the world is laid before me in some glaring display of perspective and beauty. I don't want to know. 

            The mind-body continuum is one of the most overlooked aspects of running and life. To run is to think, whether we think we're thinking or not. 

So much fun, in fact, that I actually started to take ownership of what I've been writing. The web is a curious place and the words I write from my little office in Southern California go all over the world, to all sorts of people. I wondered if someone might be of a mind to take an essay or two, then rewrite it with their name on it. Paranoid as that sounds, anything seems possible in this day and age. So I'd write a draft, post it for a day, then pull it back down and slip it into a Word document. The idea is that one of these days some of those essays might get some fine-tuning and become publishable. 

What struck me, however, is a curiosity about the web. My stats page shows me that readership is as strong as ever, but there's been little to no feedback on these pieces. The most comments I get on a daily basis, by the way, tend to be more controversial. If I say something snarky or praise the wrong person, more folks tend to weigh in. I think the nature of the web is that most of us don't post a comment unless we get really fired up. It's just the nature of the beast. In the world of the web, it's all about having an opinion. 

I digress. 

The lack of comments made me think that these essays, by and large, were either execrable or just plain mild. I am not sure which one I found more discouraging. And so while I knew that people were poking around on the site every day, I also had the feeling most of you were disappointed not to be getting a daily dose of Lance or the Tour or my feelings on the more boneheaded mediocrity in the running, riding and writing world. (Here's one for you: a prominent running magazine has a cover proclaiming something to the effect of: "Run Less, Train Slower, Race Faster." Could things be any more Lowest Common Denominator? Why bother running at all?). 

I never planned to stop posting, it just happened. The holidays ended, an intensive research period for a new project is upon me, and I sort of got in the habit of waving to my website every morning as I surfed past. Now, thanks to a great weekend of reading and outdoor fun in Mammoth, and that slap-in-the-mouth Susie B. so often delivers, I am back. I'm planning to start my day with a web warm-up at least three times a week. What I'd like to hear is some feedback on those essays. If you were reading, and maybe they struck a chord, I'd like to hear. See, I want to write more of them. They're fun. I think there's room in this world for running essays that don't have a breathy voice or start each sentence with a scientific training stat. Maybe I'm wrong. Let me know. 

And thanks for reading. 

Keep Pushing... Always

The core of the book is the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, and their legendary distance running prowess. The author goes there to do a story, is smitten by their lifestyle, falls in with an outlaw ultra-runner who's planning an epic race pitting the Tarahumara against the modern world's best ultra racers, and then undertakes to be in the race himself. On the surface, a simple story, but the author writes it well, weaving in bits of running lore and research along the way. The characters were intriguing and the writing was good (there were spots where the writer's magazine journalism background showed itself, with snarky asides and cute sentences better suited to the trendy, go-go pages of Men's Health). The book moved along quite well. One of my habits when I'm traveling is to leave a finished book wherever I am when I turn the last page. This lightens my load and leaves a book for the next guy to come along. Only when something really catches my fancy do I hang on to it. This is one I kept. 

By the way, I should add that I felt somewhat validated to read that elite ultra-runners consider the Stunt Runner to be just that -- a man consumed by running-oriented stunts that cheapen the sport. I've never had my finger on the pulse of the ultra world, so that to find my sentiments mirrored actually felt quite nice. 

Here's what I didn't like about the book -- and this may be the same stuff that many of you did like, but bear with me. This takes us back to the snarky digs. I found it contemptible that someone new to running could so openly attack legends like Bill Bowerman and George Sheehan. He makes Bowerman sound like an addled moron, and Sheehan sound delusional. He makes Joe Vigil out to be a visionary (an observation with which I wholeheartedly agree), but also makes a point to say that Arthur Lydiard was a far better coach than Bowerman. This, while assailing Bowerman for not becoming a runner until he was in his 50's.

Look, that's just dumb, particularly from a newcomer to running. 

You've got to earn your bones in a sport before taking potshots at guys who dedicated their lives to it. And for what? To prove the uber-trendy theory that barefoot running is the best way to go? This not only takes us back to the sound-bite writing of Men's Health and other pithy, self-absorbed lad books, it shows a complete ignorance of running or simple stride mechanics. Watch an elite runner power down up a hill, or round the final corner toward home, and you will understand how beautiful and precise a stride can be. And I've yet to see one not wearing shoes. Running barefoot to optimize your stride and strengthen your feet is nothing new to top runners, but it's just one technique among many that includes stride drills, core strengthening, and lactate threshold sessions that will scorch your lungs but perfect your running economy.

So there's that. 

And of course there's the disparagement of short, fast running events, insinuating that triathlon and ultra-running are somehow more pure because they're longer. As someone who's done ultras, long triathlons, marathons, and events as short as 800 meters, I can tell you there's no suffering like the kind of punishment you put your body through in a fast two-mile track race. 

What we need, actually, is a book that doesn't trumpet the longer-is-better school of self-actualization (though, you will admit that a guy who wrote "Surviving the Toughest Race on Earth" doesn't have much of a leg to stand on there. Let's just say I got that out of my system), but appreciates the beauty of endurance racing in all its guises without being threatened by the others. 

Keep Pushing... Always

...followed by the collapse.

My wife calls it the New Orleans syndrome, because it first occurred on a long-ago drive around the country. This is the dark side of Keep Pushing... Always. On that trip I was so intent on seeing everything and going everywhere, burning the candle at both ends, that when we got to New Orleans my body just shut down. My memories of Bourbon Street were limited to the inside of the Cardinal Richelieu Hotel.

So it was Sunday. You push and you push and you push, and then the body says it's done. I shut down for the day with flu-like symptoms. The mere thought of anything organizational or a to-do list made me nauseous. 

I felt a little better Monday. Tuesday I ran. And once I've gone for a run, then the New Orleans Syndrome is done. Today I woke up, put on a sweatshirt with a track and field logo (I refuse to  wear cross-country during track, and vice versa), and began plotting how I am going to train my legions when we get back to it in three weeks. There is always something to be done better, and some way to go faster. 

It's on. 

Looking forward to my next New Orleans in June. 

Keep Pushing... Always

My office is a wooden deck chair in an outdoor room. The floor is stone, which gives way to grass two feet from my own feet, and then the ocean is just beyond that thin strip of green. Being here reminds me of working on SURVIVOR, where any moment of creative staleness was quickly fixed by a sprint into the turquoise ocean. So it is now. The cove is sheltered and the waves are six inches high -- a soundtrack more than an obstacle. 

Onward. Read about the new Radio Shack team in this morning's New York Times. Seems a lot like a rehashed Postal Service/Discovery/Astana, what with Levi, Popo and all those old familiar faces. What that team needs is a good time trial rider....

That's all I've got. 

Keep Pushing... Always

I've been trying to get Lance Armstrong on the phone for six weeks. My career depends on our conversation. My real career. You need to get that one-on-one interview, my editor insists all through August, as I rise before the sun to pour words from my head onto the printed page. The deadline is forty days from the end of the 2005 Tour de France. I followed Lance and the Tour for the final time, watching him win his epic seventh title. Now I am close to finishing the book about that road trip, with its daily doses of history, wine, and lung-searing competition.  It is a book I was born to write. I want readers to know how I am inspired by this great endurance contest. How it makes me want to push my own limits, especially at a time in my life when I know for certain that my competitive days are in the past.

I don't just want to slam the book, as the publishing world calls anything written so quickly. No. I want it to be great. So I shut out the world and bleed into my computer each day, feeling the drain of emotion and energy as I pour every fiber of my creative being into this story. I am bruised like a boxer at the end of each session. Yet every morning I open my eyes before the alarm clock, seeing only darkness and hearing only my wife's soft breathing.

You need to get that one-on-one with Lance. That's my first thought. I hear my editor's insistent demand. I see the crisp font of his email. I feel the deadline sitting on my chest.

And now Lance calls. Now, of all times.

I've taken on another challenge in August.

This is a habit of mine. I don't like to admit I have limits. And I am loathe to squander an opportunity to fulfill a dream, even if it means stretching my already diminished faculties far past the breaking point. So when my oldest son transfers to a new high school in August, I strike up a conversation with the athletic director. It is a relatively new school, and their athletic facilities are still being built. But I grew up running competitively, and have lately felt the urge to help young runners.

I'd be very interested in giving your cross-country coach some assistance, I tell the A.D.

He's younger than me by fifteen years, but I feel like a child. I want to coach so badly that I make him the all-powerful authority figure.

We don't have a coach, he tells me. Do you want the job?

I say yes. I don't even have to think twice.

I am writing the book, grappling with story structure, sleeping troubled, and speed-dialing Lance Armstrong's office each and every day. And now I am coaching a high school cross-country team. Six days a week. Three hours a day. I am ordering uniforms, leading group runs, trying to find new runners (there are four on the first day of practice. All of them start walking before we have run a single mile), and basically building a program on the fly.

I am head over heels for this new hobby of mine. That's what it is -- a hobby. I will do it for a season, maybe two. What I don't tell anyone is that I am too good for the job. I'm an international journalist, always a phone call away from hopping on a plane. I'm a New York Times bestselling author. I have traveled around the world at twice the speed of sound, and traipsed through Africa without a guide. My articles about distance running have appeared in magazines like Esquire, GQ, and Sports Illustrated. I will bless these young people with my wisdom and then move on when Devin graduates. People will remember me with reverence for years to come. The athletes will tell their children about the special man who once coached them.

What I will not do is act like the stereotypical high school coach. I will not yell Listen Up, People or adorn myself in spirit wear. And I will never, ever drive a school van or ride a school bus.

But here I am, driving a Ford Econoline up the 405. Fourteen boys and girls are packed inside. In the back of my mind I am praying that they all found a seat belt. We are on our way to a race. They are giddy with nerves. I love it. I really do. I love the fact that we are going to race -- the first cross-country race I have ever coached. I am giddy, too.

I am also cranky that Lance hasn't called. The book goes to print in just one day. The whole purpose of Chasing Lance is the conceit that journalists battle each day for the one-on-one, chasing Lance. A couple of my buddies got that interview. Not me. The title will be ironic instead of triumphant.

I don't like ironic.

And then he calls. I drive with my knees, holding the phone to my ear with one hand, waving the other in a dramatic demand for silence. When that doesn't work I turn and mouth Lance Armstrong. The chatter and hysterics snaps into hushed reverence. They watch me drive with one hand, take notes with another, and conduct a telephone interview with the world's greatest endurance athlete at 75 miles per hour, cell phone squeezed between ear and shoulder.

We talk thirty minutes. I pull up to the course and mime for my team to warm up. I hang up the phone before they are finished, hurriedly jot notes on all we talked about, then phone my publisher with the news.

Five years pass. Devin graduates. Connor's a year off. Liam's right behind him.

I am still the coach. I say Listen Up, People. I wear spirit wear. I drive the van (more cautiously, and with both hands on the wheel). Coaching is the ideal alter-ego for a writer -- spend six hours each morning writing, then spending late-afternoon in the hills. I used to spend late-afternoons gardening. Coaching is better.

My runners are family. I write books that allow me the luxury of staying home. I coach my own sons, growing closer to them in a way that I never would have, had I not accepted that invitation. And I know that the simple act of service that comes with sharing knowledge and helping someone else realize their dreams is infinitely more fulfilling than anything else I've ever done in my life. 

To watch my runners train every day, pushing each other and bonding as a team feels like daily salvation. As I train them to be optimistic and diligent and perseverant, I realize how much I need to be like that, too. The inspiration I once found in a long away bike race, I find in them. The passion that I still burn into every page that I write, I also pour into every day of coaching. 

I am not too good for this job. That was just my fear of commitment and failure talking. I am blessed to have this job, and to know these runners. Every day, and for years to come, I will tell everyone I meet about these special young people who let me be their coach. 

Keep Pushing... Always

On that warm summer evening I showed up a full fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I stepped inside, thinking that maybe my group would be at the bar. The room was noisy and small. It felt like everyone was turning to look at the new arrival. But my party wasn't there. I was in no mood to nurse a drink -- in fact, I was jittery because it was a money meeting, and perhaps more prone to knocking one back when moderation was clearly the watchword. So I headed back out into the streets. The restaurant was down by NYU and there was a manic energy to the air. Lots of people out walking or just hanging out. I walked around the block once to bleed off my nerves. Then a second time. And then, still having a couple minutes before the witching hour, I made a third lap. 

This time around I stopped before a record store -- a real record store, with vinyl for sale, concert posters on the walls, and some kid with straight bangs and torn jeans working the counter. There was a t-shirt for sale in the window. At first I took it for that iconic "Hope" image of Obama. But instead of Obama, the face on the shirt was Jeff Bridges' Dude from The Big Liebowski. And instead of "Hope" the message read "Abide." 

Because everyone knows that The Dude abides. 

An image filled my head of otherworldly calm, and the zen koans of The Dude. Suddenly I wasn't so nervous. The seeds of nirvana had been sown. 

I was thinking of that this morning. I'm as nervous as... I'm trying to think of a good comparison, something folksy about a cat with ten tails, though that doesn't make sense. Let's just say that I randomly bounce on my toes from the bundled energy, and my stomach has that tingle of anticipation. Saturday is race day, the payoff for six months of hard work, planning, and commitment. I wish it were now. I wish I didn't have to wait. Let's just line them up and fire the gun. 

It's good to be nervous in November. That means the postseason is ongoing, and that planning for next year is still a month away because this year is still very much alive. As a racer, I used to get nervous all the time. Those were real nerves compared with these -- panic, dread, anticipation, nausea, and on -- but I still feel charged like the Light Brigade  right now (still searching for that comparison, by the way. That, obviously, was off the mark). The training is now money in the bank. This is no time for worry or fear, because that would the opposite of hope, which is the opposite of faith -- and I have oh so much faith. "Our light and momentary troubles," it says in Corinthians, "are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." Which is a nice way of saying not to be nervous, but in a cosmic sense. Or, as I mentioned to Callie this morning, a billion people in China could care less about what happens at Mt. SAC on Saturday morning.

Which brings me back to hope. Part of nervousness is merely the hope that something important to me or to you, something that we care about enough to fret the outcome, will turn out for the best. And not just a little bit for the best. But in a superlative fashion that touches the outer fringes of a dream coming true.

The other part of nerves is dread that this superlative will not be realized. That, in fact, some disappointing and opposite outcome will occur; something that bruises the heart, if only just for an hour or a minute. 

It's too often said that the journey matters more than the destination. And that's true. But the great electric nerves that keep you up nights and make you as jittery as ten Red Bulls and a kettle of coffee (better?) is the crazy dream that the journey and the destination are equally wondrous -- that there is, in fact, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I love those nerves. I hate those nerves.

To abide is to set those nerves aside. 

To abide is to accept that the outcome is beyond my control. 

To abide is to be in the moment and enjoy this ride. 

I need to abide. 

Keep Pushing... Always

There is a map of Maryland amid the rubble, a small tome devoted to the "Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln," a tour book from the Confederate White House. There is a small mountain of transcriptions and press clippings, a cricket ball from a long ago trip to Australia, an inscription that my wife framed for me on our first Christmas together, and a thin volume of Benjamin Franklin's quotations. There is a boarding pass from my trip to New York last week, right next to the ticket stub from Springsteen's Garden show. An old phone which I keep meaning to power up so I can download all the numbers into my new phone. There is an unbound manuscript for The Crusoes, which I keep writing and rewriting, because I know that someday I will get the hang of fiction. There is a National Geographic "Eyewitness to the Civil War" photo book that my Mom and Dad gave me last Christmas, a small coaster from La Flamme Cafe' (6, avenue de wagram, Paris), which was a loud lacquered place that somehow I liked enough to steal the coaster.

There is a bill from World Vision that I need to pay so that my adopted Malawi child can go to school, an uncashed check for thirty-six cents from my insurance company, user's guides to my camera and my phone, neither of which I will ever read, and should rightfully just toss in the trash can. But that somehow feels derelict, so they take up space just in case of some phone or camera emergency makes them instantly valuable -- although I am more likely to experience phone or camera emergencies when I am far from my desk.

Which brings me to the last item. 

To my left, just within arms' reach, is the devil's playground. It is a standard clipboard with a sheaf of individual documents that the casual observer wouldn't bother to read. Some are handwritten, some are downloaded, and one is a sheet of paper with staples in the upper right corner that I plucked off a bulletin board Sunday morning. All are dog-eared from me thumbing through the pages, as I read and reread them in search of the Magic Kingdom. The documents are addictive to say the least; peanut buttter M&M's, In-n-Out French Fries, and Stone IPA twirled into some great mental time suck. I try to refrain, but inevitably I lose myself, reaching over to pick up that clipboard. Next thing I know I have lost fifteen minutes or a half an hour, my mind wandering through the possibilities and predictions on the pages before me.

I am talking, of course, about stats. I study stats like Hugh Hefner studies porn. I memorize names. I know what my runners are doing, and what other runners are doing. I know which teams have cut back on their mileage as they taper, and wonder if they started too soon. I know which teams train through races. I know who's fast, I know who's slow. I know which opposing runners had a bad day or a sick day or had an off the charts day that they may or may not be able to duplicate ever again. I wonder what would happen if each of my runners took twenty seconds off their three-mile time. Or thirty. Or, amazing case scenario, they somehow knocked off a minute.

To be a writer is to know uncertainty, discomfort and a daily search for hope. Life is like that, no matter what you do. In stats, I find certainty and comfort and hope. So I reach for that clipboard. Much of my life is nebulous. Much of my life lacks a sense of presence -- I mean, look at my desk. I sit here for months and not notice the rubble, because my mind is on Mars, solving some story problem. But with stats I am centered, in that way music at the start of church brings me into the building and gives me focus.

To look at a stat sheet is to remember a race, a temperature, a cloud of dust, an emotion. It is a puzzle. In many ways it's like writing a story, which is really just a series of decisions. That's all creativity really is -- what do I want to write about? What's the first word? The first sentence? The first paragraph? The order of chapters -- flashback, straightforward, essays? The secret to being a great writer, I am told, is to always write the truth. And I can tell you from firsthand experience that a day of hard writing is a draining of the truth, wringing every last bit of raw fact from the brain onto the page, so that by the end I am a limp puddle. It's therapy, only with a narrative.

In stats I find purest form of truth. The stopwatch is a bitch, but there's no hiding from that honesty. I can write my best and know that the end result is subjective. But I can look at stats from a race last week or thirty years ago and know absolute truth. Stats don't lie. Stats let us all know where we stand. Stats don't play favorites. In that truth, I find calm. 

I also find the ingredients for success -- and who wouldn't reach out for a thing within arms reach offering that promise? The trick is parsing those ingredients in the most beneficial means possible.  

Writing, of course, is a narrative in words. Stats are a narrative in numbers. To flow from times to words and back again doesn't feel like I'm really sabotaging my writing time. So I give in to the clipboard, even though I've promised myself I won't allow distraction until the work day is done, and I leave my desk to sit in my big chair in front of the TV, ignoring whatever program fills the room so that I may divine the future on those scraps of paper. I look at the runners who finished first and wonder how they got there. I think the same for top teams. Then I wonder how I can get my guys there, too.  

This is what I do when I read those five books, too. And whatever else I read. Who's good? What are they doing? How can I do it better? And, if by chance I feel just a little sharper or smarter than whatever I am reading, I allow myself a moment of self-congratulation. Because without a shard of triumph -- not conceit, but personal validation -- life would feel futile. 

At some point I shut down my brain and return to the present. I struggle to remain mindful, as a yoga teacher once urged me. But that's hard. So sooner or later I am picking up one of those books, or maybe even that clipboard again, to do a Calgon -- and slip away. 

Keep Pushing... Always