WAIT

December 11, 2019December 11, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

Immediately after my shower. I had run to school (15.3 miles) in August 2011. My husband trailed me & carried my briefcase and lunch. Don’t I look happy? I was.

I loved running. Loved it! I was never very fast, never did better than eight-something miles, never ran a marathon. But I ran the Hood to Coast several times, a bundle of 3ks, the Bridge Crossing, and a slow but official half-marathon in Portland nine years ago (2:17). Ten kilometers was my favorite distance and I aimed for 9-minute miles. I had measured runs of three and four and five and six miles on the beach and highway from my home. I ran at least every other day for years. I used to run the six miles on the beach to my mother’s house in Cannon Beach two or three times a week in summer.

And then I couldn’t do it anymore. I could barely walk for a year. I tried other exercise but biking is unsafe around here and involves a mechanical device, and the pool has too much chlorine. All I have is walking, and I am usually on the sand for over an hour a day without a problem. But I miss running.

That might change. I have decided I might try running again this next year, but to do that I need to weigh less. Wait for weight. When I quit teaching, I was about five pounds over my running weight. I meant to lose eight to fifteen pounds—is this starting to sound familiar?—but instead I have gained fifteen. Now you see it, don’t you?

Weight isn’t a huge issue for me. Well, that’s a lie. I grew up in the twentieth and live in the twenty-first century. I am female. Yeah, weight has been a huge deal all my life. In my teens the doctor was worried when I weighed 121 pounds. My mother tried to put me on a diet. Eventually I lost 7 pounds only because I had my tonsils out when I was fifteen, Ballard Hospital was remodeling, and I was in from Sunday until Friday. They brought me one meal on Tuesday, which I was still too sore to eat and neither the nurses nor I noticed that I was being starved. So I weighed 114 pounds by that Friday and throughout high school. By my senior year of college I weighed 118. Or maybe by then I weighed 121 again. I do not remember.

In my thirties, a friend called me plump when I weighed 130 after my second child. I dieted back to 114, but that did not last.

I began running, a few blocks in April and six miles by August. I am not built like a runner and had absolutely no history as an athlete. But running turned out to be wonderful. I felt strong and capable. I found runner’s high at three and a half miles in a rainstorm and laughed. Thus in my forties, I usually weighed 132 to 142 because of running muscle, lightest by the end of cross country season. (I tried dieting while running but that was pointless.)

During my fifties when I was caring for my mother and running time grew sparse, my weight pushed up. Then grief over my mother’s death took off 40 pounds. People complimented me on my weight loss, which I found ironic.

Like most people, weigh has gone on and then off and then on again with no deliberate effort on my part. I am always impressed by people who maintain a consistent weight throughout their lives. I am not fully in tune with my body. I know it does not want to weigh 114 pounds any more than it liked running more than eight 9-minute miles in a row. Lower weight and longer distance runs were each a struggle. I could do those distance runs, but it was against my body’s better judgement. In 2011 when I ran over 15 miles in bad shoes my body was not happy. My feet up and resigned their commission. I stopped running.

How’s it been without running? Like how a dog with no nose smells. Awful.

So, a new and more reasonable plan. Take a year to go back to my most typical running weight of between 132 and 142, mostly by eating only between 8am and 6pm. Three meals, no snacks, less sugar, more veggies. (Well, we all know that: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables.”) And walking. For the duration, only walking. At sixty-seven years old, I can not afford to put too much weight on knees and feet. But I think, perhaps, if I can drop those recently gained pounds, I might manage three miles again. Slower miles perhaps and only on sand.

I’ll let you know.

LIVING AT SEA LEVEL

December 17, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

There is a major front moving in. Gary has come up the stairs twice to tell me about it. Perhaps two inches of rain. He will need to buy the whipping cream today—how much did I need? Three quarts. The tide sweeps up nearly to the hedge and he suggests we might get a walk up Shingle Mill rather than on the beach. And that reminds me of a very old essay . . .

Hoo-hoo-a-hoo Hoo-uh-oo! We heard the owl at the far end of our run on Shingle Mill that morning. It was the first day of Daylight Savings Time and this meant we were running in the dark again. It also meant we got to hear the owl. And my two-day headache finally left me.

We live at sea level and the Pacific Ocean is right outside my window. On a Thursday night we watched the news about the 8.9 earthquake in Japan (since upgraded to a 9.0), checked the estimated time of landfall in Hawaii and our coast. The news had pictures of a ten-foot wave sweeping across agricultural fields, smashing into building, carrying cars like so much driftwood. Ten feet might not sound like much, but that wave had the weight of the entire Pacific behind it. Nuclear reactors were off-line. The early estimates claimed 25-35 dead, but we already guessed this would increase ten-fold by morning, and again ten-fold, and perhaps again. But it was also clear that the wave would not hit here until after 7am and since we are always up between five and six, we went to bed.

We would have slept through the night and begun packing up in the morning, but a well-intentioned neighbor called to alert us at 2am and so we were up three hours early. School was cancelled, and this had been on the news hours before the call came. By then waves hit Wake Island and Midway. Hawaii was hit, but the estimated wave was less than four feet for our stretch of coast. More bad news about the Japanese nuclear power plants. The tide would be mostly out so that the estimated four foot wave, if it came, would look like a sneaker, nothing threatening. A local geologist was interviewed by a Portland television reporter, and it was all he could do to keep from laughing at all the fuss. “People can evacuate if it makes them feel better,” he said. Horning is a smart guy and I trust him, but better safe than sorry, and we’d already planned to leave.

The warning siren began blaring right at the time we were putting the dogs and cat in the cars. That was good news—no way anyone could miss hearing the Arch Cape alarm unless they were deaf. An hour before the time a wave was expected, we had packed up and evacuated ourselves and our pets to St Peters’ parking lot.

Through all this Gary and I were calm. An hour past anticipated landfall for the first wave, we went back home and unpacked.

During all this several things went well locally: We had many hours to prepare. We packed and left. The warning system worked. Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) reopened the Dennis Edwards Tunnel to allow visitors to return to Portland without detouring construction.

What didn’t go well: ODOT posted nothing, absolutely nothing on their website about the tsunami warning. I found out the tunnel was open from Facebook and later the news. The news stations reported the most dangerous scenarios over and over, and often showing images from Japan with a “live” label on screen while interviewing—voices only—locals about the threat to the Oregon coast. People turning on the news understandably feared the images went with the interviews. Many people were unnecessarily frightened. Friends from Seattle emailed to ask if we had an emergency kit in our car. Others thought the entire situation was blown out of proportion.

It wasn’t.

In January of 1700—Tuesday evening, January 6th, to be precise—the Cascadia subduction zone dropped, causing an earthquake magnitude of approximately 9.0 off the NW coast of the US and Canada. Scientists can be precise about this event because while none of the people living then on the Oregon coast actually wrote it down, the Japanese recorded details of the 5 meter tsunami that struck their coast. That’s about 16 feet. People died.

That earthquake and tsunami was just the most recent in a series that have struck our coast. Until recently the general advice was to get to 50′ above sea level and we probably had a couple hundred years before another big quake would strike. But then the Seaside School District asked State of Oregon geologists to have a look at cores and advise us about where to move Cannon Beach Elementary, which is sited along Ecola Creek, just off the beach. The school can evacuate to 50′ in less than 5 minutes—they practice. The discoveries of the state geologists put the wave height at up to 100′ and frequency closer to 300 years than 500. We are overdue just now for a big one and that is why my school district, with four of our five schools barely above sea level, is scrambling to relocate and build a new campus higher up in the coast range. These buildings would also serve as staging for relief efforts and emergency housing when the next big one comes.

When that quake comes, if I am home, at least parts of my house are likely to collapse. I do not count on getting my car out of the garage, nor that local roads will be free of fallen structures and trees. I will grab the dog’s leash, stuff the cat into her carrier, change into runners, and I will run. I will not carry even the most practical of emergency kits. I will not take extra drinking water or food or my favorite pieces of jewelry, the family photos or blankets or any of the sentimental or practical items we carted over to the church the other day. There won’t be time. I will have only a few minutes to run to higher ground—best case scenario suggests 20 minutes total, and I will have spent part of that time fighting the cat to get her into the carrier. In a worst case scenario I might have only 5 minutes to climb 100’ above sea level and I will not make it.

If I’m at school during the quake, I will likely have a couple of dozen students in my room, and over a mile to run just to get to the base of a hill. There is a backpack in my room that I am supposed to carry, but I am old and small and the reality is that I do not want to carry 20 pounds of emergency items for over a mile. I might do it, though. I am a stickler.

Wherever I am when it hits, there’s a fair chance my husband will be someplace else. We have tried to figure out where to meet. Neither of us is hesitant to walk from wherever we might be, but getting from one place on the coast to another will be torturous. I figure I can run the highway from Seaside to my home in less than three hours. It’s about 14 miles and I ran a half marathon last fall in awful weather in a little more than two and a quarter hours. But after a quake, that highway will be mostly gone because it’s at sea level in low places, tumbled with rock in high places, and already sliding downhill any place above sea level. Bridges will have collapsed. Mud and downed trees, the drowned wreckage of human constructions will make barriers. Owls will always find their home, or a new tree. But if I head for my tsunami-swept home nothing along the way will look familiar, and I will likely need a day or two to get there from Seaside, if I’m lucky enough to find Arch Cape at all.

If I were a girl of sixteen, Friday would have been a holiday off from school. But I am closing in on 60 and even a false alarm gets me thinking too hard. The adrenaline left me exhausted and achy and reconsidering. The next day I had a headache, and it wasn’t until this morning, three days after Japan’s quake, when Gary and I decided we were going out for a run despite the rain, that my headache is finally gone. It returns as I consider the future. Grim reality.

There is the stretch of flat road we often run, the road we ran this morning. We run laps east, west, east, and when I am headed toward the ocean its voice sometimes comes up strong like an animal roaring over my head. I always think of a tsunami when the ocean is in full throat; I consider where I would turn to find high ground, and that I do not have time to escape that massive rush of water.

LIKE A RUNNER

June 5, 2018June 6, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

After my 15-16 miles—happy, but hurt.

In August 2011, I ran from my house to school.

It would be the last good run of my life. And it was not good.

I had been training all summer for my second official half marathon that October. I ran long one day a week, working up to 12.5 miles, and 3-6 miles other days, including hills. I was conditioned, but I underestimated the distance to school. I believed I was running about 13.5 miles that day and figured I could take my time and manage that stretch. I’d covered that distance before. The run turned out to be more than 2 miles further than I’d expected. Even so, I might have been okay except that my new runners were sitting in a box at home—saved for the Portland Half Marathon, still six weeks away. I ran the first 5 miles on sand but as soon as I turned off the beach, I realized my shoes were dead flat. By mile eleven on pavement, I was hurting. By mile fourteen I was struggling.

LESSON ONE: Know what you are doing.

I began running after my eldest son ran with the cross country team because the boys and girls teams were so cheerful and supportive of one another. I’ve read plenty of books about running, written by runners, and I was a runner for nearly twenty years, covering a modest 3-6 miles at least every other day.

At the age of 41 in 1994, I began training over a distance less than a third of a mile. I started April 1st. It was a joke on myself that accepted the likelihood I would not be running for long. My plan was never to hurt myself. I am not a believer in no-pain/no-gain. That’s a crock. Pain is an indication of damage. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I wanted to get in shape. I ran every other day and added a couple of hundred feet each day. This schedule of running every other day allowed my muscles time to heal. By August I was able to run strong for six miles. When the cross country team began practicing, I ran with them and could keep up with all but a handful Varsity boys. I was not fast, but steady and capable of distance.

When I set goals for myself, I intend to promise only what I am certain I can complete. When I make a list of task, I pace myself, allowing for flexibility but also for serious deadlines.

LESSON TWO: Make reasonable, doable, consistent plans.

Despite my good planning, I made other mistakes at the beginning. I did not buy any sort of running gear for myself and chaffed my legs between my thighs on cuffed shorts. I didn’t have a running bra. My running shoes were hand-me-down sport shoes that were a full size too small. No muscle pains from my early training, but blisters and sore feet.

LESSON THREE: Buy or borrow the right equipment.

Once I began working with the cross country team, I picked up race strategies. When I was covering distance, I maintained a steady pace. There was a sweet spot between one and four miles where running felt almost effortless. Right at the beginning and after the first four or five miles, my effort increased. Another had to do with “running strong” right through the finish line. In other words, resist the temptation to slow when approaching the end, even if I am doing well enough that I believe I could.

When I near the end of a process—the end of the school year, for example—I push myself to sustain my pace. In other work, this is one of my greatest challenges. Sustain attention, quality, and detail right through the end.

LESSON FOUR: Run through the finish line.

I was not yet 59 years old when I had my last “good” run. I’d become fond of a vision of myself hobbling along at age 72. I gave myself time, went back to running slowly and over short distances. I was careful, but my feet were ruined. I got orthotics and wore larger shoes all day until I could walk without pain. By 2013, at age 61, I accepted that I would not be running again. It about broke my heart.

I considered biking and swimming, belly dance and yoga and gave up. Walking stuck.

There is a memoir about running by the novelist Haruki Murakami, where he describes trying to run at a pace in his middle years that he never trained for in his youth. The entire time I read that section I shook my head. As we age, some goals become unrealistic. I’m not happy about it, no one is. I have a neighbor who is in his mid-70s and still runs the beach. It’s true I can walk faster than he can run, but I admire his spirit and his willingness to continue doing what he loves, even if he has to slow down.

Most of the activities I have enjoyed in my life are still fully available to me. I quilt and weave and go to films. On my morning walk I can see to beachcomb. I read a book every few days, though I need better light to see the page. I lost the habit of 8 hours of sleep at night when I was an overworked high school English teacher. I nap instead. I am careful about what shoes I wear and how hard I pinch because my hands and feet are inclined to ache. I no longer run.

Could I do more? Hubris needles me to answer yes, but common sense wins. I will do what does not hurt me, and that is more than I would have expected for a woman my age.

LESSON FIVE: Accept your limitations.

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