Spontaneous feats of strength and endurance
On the magic of living without expectation
The first and only time I ran a half marathon was in my senior year of high school. It was during the last cross country meet of the season against our crosstown rivals, which I was attending, but barred from participating in. I didn’t intentionally set out to do it, but looking back, I don’t know that I could have if I had.
Two weeks prior, I was doing a training run with the team along our regular route. It was a hot and sunny fall day, so we left our shirts trackside before departing. Beginning at the high school’s football field, we crossed campus and scurried over El Camino Real — the busy four-lane thoroughfare marking the boundary between the town of Palo Alto and Stanford’s Campus. We then wound our way past the sun-drenched athletic practice fields, grand administrative buildings with terra cotta tiled roofs and sandstone facades, through the middle of the vast and brutalist student quad, and up a steep, tree-lined hill before arriving at the recursively named Lake Lagunita — which was really more of a dried-out hay field that only occasionally had some water in it. Depending on the mileage target for the day, we would do anywhere between one and four laps around the half-mile dirt trail tracing its circumference. This day, we were planning on just one easy lap before heading back the way we came, but it was not to be.
We crested the hill leading up to the lake, taking in a vast and familiar view of golden grass waving in the wind, surrounded by dark oak trees along the edge, set against a blue sky streaked with a smattering of white clouds, framed by the green hills beyond. Typical California stuff. In the midst of all this however, an unexpected figure punctuated the middle of the scene. In what would have been the deepest part of the lake sat an abandoned golf cart. There was no thought or discussion to be had. We ditched the route and stomped through the knee-high grass to investigate this new development.
We arrived at the cart and I immediately clocked that the keys were in the ignition. Imagine yourself as a 16- or 17-year-old. Have you seen enough, or are you getting behind the wheel? I learned then that I was in the latter category. Which led to the discovery that the vehicle was very much operational, with plenty of gas in the tank. A friend joined me riding shotgun and we sped off through the lake bed towards the lowest point of the trail where we could potentially rejoin the paved road. A handful of our other, better-adjusted or less-adventurous (depending on how you look at it) teammates watched us for a minute before jogging back to the trail to resume their run.
After a bumpy traverse through the gopher-mound-ridden lake bed, we made it to the relatively smooth dirt track and somehow managed to scale the steep hill leading up to the wider, double-track portion of the trail. Most of our fellow runners were going counterclockwise around the lake as I drove clockwise, leaving plenty of space to pass. By this time, the girls’ training run had also arrived and, in my recollection, were extremely impressed by our antics. Or aghast. (Not sure if I could tell the difference between those reactions at that age.) In any case, a couple of our friends running towards us stopped mid run and burst out laughing upon recognizing the situation. I braked hard, skidding to a stop and my copilot invited them into the rear-facing seats on the back as we resumed our joyride towards the road giggling all the way.
After a harrowing descent down the rather steep and bumpy trail out of the lake, we made it back onto pavement, in the loading area behind a nearby residential hall. Unfortunately, a few facilities workers happened to be on a smoke break and we were immediately confronted to explain ourselves. Apparently, it was obvious that two shirtless teenage boys weren’t meant to be operating a Stanford-owned golf cart. We opted instead to abandon ship, leaving the keys in the cart, running off into the crowded quad as he quixotically demanded we stop.
Having evaded capture, we figured that we had also evaded consequences. After all, we did the university a solid by recovering a missing vehicle and restoring it to the roadway. Having reunited with the rest of the team at the track, we were already reminiscing, recounting, and joking to that effect. The other shoe wouldn’t drop until tomorrow’s practice.
Apparently, someone on the team who had witnessed our joyride had decided that this behavior was untoward and that the perpetrators ought to be held to account. Which is how my friend and I found ourselves talking to the coach before practice.
Coach Joe — or simply “Joe,” as he was more commonly known — was new to coaching cross country and track, having graduated from college only a few years ago and moved back to Palo Alto even more recently. Not too long before that, he was a student and star athlete at our high school. All of which is to say, he shared a familiarity and camaraderie with his athletes that made him feel like “one of the guys” and also undermined his stature as an authority figure.
I don’t remember too much about the specifics of the conversation Joe pulled us into, but I do remember feeling like he was less upset about the transgression itself than with the fact that he now had to do something about it. We had left him with “no choice,” but to suspend us from the last meet of the year. As someone who had only started running with the team last spring as a forcing mechanism to spend less time with some deadbeats I’d fallen in with, this was of little consequence to my running ambitions. My co-conspirator was somewhat more competitive and may have done okay though, so I felt for him. (The girls were entirely spared.) Regardless, Joe clarified that we would still be allowed to attend the meet to support our teammates and warm up with the crew as usual.
On the day of the meet, I was in a bit of a funk. We got off the school bus and proceeded to the rubber track surrounding their football field to stretch and warm up. Jogging along with my teammates, I felt my mood begin to lift in equal proportion to the amount of sweat beading down my skin. By the time the warm up run had finished, I felt I was only getting started. So I left my shirt in the stretching area before setting back out onto the three and a half mile race course, running in the opposite direction of the racers, in the dead grass bordering the asphalt walking paths. The heats passed me by in successive packs. The fast girls, followed by the medium girls, followed by the slow girls. Then a lull. Then the fast guys… By the time the slowest guys were heading towards me, the sun was starting to set and I realized that I had run the course three times over, which was already longer than I had ever run before. At the end of this third lap, I wound my way back to the track, but I still wasn’t done.
After a lifetime plagued by shin splints, which returned with a vengeance when I started running track earlier that year, I found the solution while reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It makes the case that everything we know about running footwear is wrong-headed, marketing-driven BS designed to sell shoes that promote comfort (and injury) over fitness and health. And that minimalist shoes — or no shoes at all — was the way to go if you want to avoid injury. By the end of the track season, pretty much everyone on the team had read it and, based on the proliferation of Vibram FiveFinger toe shoes and similarly minimal footwear, around half of us bought the premise completely, including me. Regardless of whatever controversies surrounding the book’s claims may arisen following its bestseller status, I remain confident to this day that switching to minimalist shoes helped heal my shin splints. But as anyone who’s tried running long distances in toe shoes can tell you, they are as uncomfortable to run in as they are for a spectator to behold.
With the first 10 miles down, my legs were still feeling fresh and the endorphins coursing through my body were pushing me further, if not faster. But my poor toes were screaming for relief from the pokey neoprene seams surrounding them on all sides. So off came the shoes and off I went, this time barefoot, going around the track. With all the heats finished and the cooldowns completed, I was the last man running. A few laps in, some of my friends took notice and, matching my slowed, but steady cadence, asked what I was doing. I told them I was going on mile 12 and thinking about doing a full 13 miles if time allowed and they seemed excited by the prospect.
Unlike with a race, there was no line to cross and no crowds to cheer. But a few friends joined me as I approached the end of my twelfth and final lap and a few others clapped for me and slapped my back as I rejoined the group in their stretching area. It wasn’t much, but it meant more to me than any of the roughly 10th-from-last place finishes I’d racked up during the rest of the season.
An immense runner’s high kept me from feeling the blisters in various states of development and rupture on my toes and soles as I lay on my back, staring into the pink streaks of cloud across the purple, early evening sky. I reflected on how prior to last March, I had never run more than a single continuous mile. Yet here I was, 8 months later, having completed a half-marathon on a lark. And really, I only stopped because the bus was leaving soon.
We are conditioned to believe that we are only capable of the things we’ve already accomplished or have painstakingly planned to accomplish. If you had asked me if I thought I was capable of running a half marathon earlier that week, or even an hour before I started, I would have confidently denied it and told you I had no intention of finding out. The goal was never there to begin with, yet the physical ability was within me all along. Perhaps it was the spontaneity of the feat that rendered it achievable.
I chuckled along, a delightful read
Keep running