finding a new fast

true Even as I uttered the theory last August, I knew it must be wrong. "I think everyone has a maximum speed," I said, "and mine is seven minutes and two seconds." It was October 1997. I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina and running five or six miles at lunch several days a week with my investment banking friends. I was 24. In that first mile of the Race for the Cure 5K I clocked 7:02, and I remember how much it hurt, how I gasped through the next mile and then slowed to nearly eight minutes for the third mile, finishing a few hundred yards behind my running companions. They're just fast, I thought. Built for speed. I'm a jumper, that's what I am. And the humidity! Born in Portland, Oregon, I was used to cool Octobers. I'd never even run a mile at a time until college. My high jump coach never pushed me to do the warmups with the rest of the track team even though I was a hurdler, too, and I did have to sprint down the runway for the long jump. My first track practice at the little Division III school was shameful, I had to walk halfway into the not-quite-three-mile run. In college I had learned to pace myself so I'd have something left to sprint up the hills at the end of the trail by Wood's Creek. And my pace never earned me any invites to the cross country team. So when Adria, a new associate in the loan syndications group, convinced me to start training with her to run a 10K, I struggled to keep up with her long legs and made those my excuse. She always finished a little bit ahead of me, and she'd wait for me so we could walk up College Street together to warm down. Last August, I had no need to explain my upper-eight-minute-mile pace. I'd had a baby only six weeks and three days before the start of the Hood-to-Coast Relay, and I'd broken my tailbone somewhere in the blood and hot pressure of birthing my third boy. At first I had claimed the easiest leg; lots of downhill and only about 15 miles total; but my training had gone well enough I begged for some "terrain." I got more than I'd bargained for in the punishing leg seven; its first segment's steep short hills had made me want to cry. Carrying an extra 20 or 25 pounds leftover from my pregnancy was a distinct disadvantage. Sleeping with my newborn son on a grassy parking lot in Birkenfeld, Oregon wasn't conducive to peak athletic achievement, either; and it was then that I posited my theory. I claimed that my "real" running pace was somewhere a little below eight-minute miles, and that I would just never be faster than that. For shame. Even if my only experience in visualization and the power of positive thinking had been that third birth, an almost drug-free vaginal birth after two previous cesarean sections, well, I knew better. When I finally realized the truth it wasn't about positive thinking at all. It was July, deep into July, and I was stuck in the blur, as if in the line of vision of someone on a hot wild merry-go-round, standing still and yet manic, barely seen, not quite real. I was here but yet not present; I was present but not effective. I did not know if the whirling in the corners of my life was a coming-together or a blowing-apart but I knew that I end many days feeling lost, behind, vastly insufficient for the task at hand. Things were falling apart in a smash of good efforts gone wrong; every day a glass or a lovely pottery bowl or a jar full of local walnuts broke, it seemed, every day something was ruined or stepped on or purposefully shattered.  I had too many creatures to care for, six chickens and three little boys and two lovely but broken adults, my husband dipping in and out of alcoholism, a basement resident who was committed to many laudable values but at the same time damaged, emotional, easily brought to anger. In my house this summer there was anger to spare, loud and shrill from my six-year-old, gruff and barking from my husband on his bad days, shocking and habitually leaping from downstairs, and my own anger, my shame, what I lacked in frequency I made up for with sheer power. I knew what was missing. I was not meeting my needs, I was in over my head and I did not know where to turn. I needed peace, I needed yoga and knitting and quiet, I needed many weekends away with a lake lapping and a calm friend who would bring me iced black tea and maple hazelnut cookies. I needed someone to listen to me and let me get all the way to the end of every sentence. I needed so much. But I did not get it. All I could do was run. I ran in all the wild spare spaces in my day, I wrenched time shamelessly from my family and I would go, I ran angry and I ran fast. I was so fast. Really, amazingly, numbingly fast, I was faster than I had ever been, ever, even when I was 24. It was the biking, to be sure, carting two or three children and dozens of pounds of groceries on my mamabikeorama up and down hills and all over town; it was the diet, full of sourdough and organic whole grains and fresh-from-the-farm veggies and fruits, it was the post-partum body, supercharged. It was my playlist, full of Persephone's Bees and Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants and Cherry Poppin' Daddies, pulsing and sometimes happy and always skittering rhythmically. But most of all it was the need, I needed something and this was all I had. I had been talking a big game, I delivered my estimated 10K time, 7:50 miles. "My training has been going well," I wrote in a pre-race email, half-humbly, smiling as I typed. It was going better than that, many miles were nearing my record time and these were just training runs. There was the day I ran up the mountain and down, down to the farmer's market, and my fifth and sixth mile were the fastest, and then I ran almost two more. The day of the race came, hotter than we'd thought. I was running the ninth leg and my first segment was long, more than seven miles through Gresham and east Portland on the Springwater Trail. An hour before I was dizzy and a little nauseous. I drank more water. I ate a bagel. I looked up to the sky in a yogic salutation and I breathed in the country air. And I told myself, "you're fast. You're so very fast. All you have is fast," and when it was my turn to take the baton I opened my hips up and I ran. I could not believe my power. I ran down city streets and around gravelly corners, past traffic lights and volunteers, past policemen and my cheering team. I opened my stride ever more and let my breath come lightly, deeply, I told myself over and over again, "you're fast." And when six miles came, and seven, and when it did not appear to be ending and I did not know how far I had to go, I did not flag but ran, picked up my feet so lightly and how good it felt to be alive and alone. I would run 16 more miles in the next 24 hours, through midnight dusty roads and hot swampy farmland, through mountains and shores and up and down hills. I would run fast and I would run happy. Our team of 12 mamas would shave a whole hour off our time from the previous year. And in the end, my hips aching and my body exhausted, I would plug my iPod into my laptop and watch the chart of my runs unfold, and I would see that I had a new fast. I had run 6:50 miles in my first leg, a nearly-eight-mile leg, I had run faster than I thought possible. I had found a new fast, and in this discovery was a whole world of revelations. There was no maximum speed, there was no corporeal limit, it was all in my powerful, broken mind. Through anger, through the edge of my sanity, I ran, and it was something good.

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I ran in all the wild spare spaces in my day, I wrenched time from my family and I ran.

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