Seaside

The baseball fields are perforated with openings we like to call "gopher holes"  although I'm positive I've never actually seen a real gopher and am even more certain they are not native to Bend, Oregon.  But that doesn't stop us for calling them that.  The Bend baseball fields are notoriously poor and each time a player stumbles in the outfield or a grounder unexpectedly caroms off it's path at a new angle in the infield, we all shake our heads and collectively utter under our breath, "damn gopher holes".  

The officiating at the games isn't much better.  At some games the lone umpire, clad in cut-offs and an untucked Midas brakes T-shirt, will stand behind the pitcher bent over slightly at the waist and squinting at the plate for want of a chest protector and and face mask which would allow him the more traditional perspective to call balls and strikes.  The local kid does his best to be fair but in honesty we in the lawn chairs behind the backstop have a better view.

The distances between tournament games can be inconvenient too, sometimes 30 miles from where we are lodging, and the weather can be darn right cold there in May at Bend's 3,000 foot level, but still we come each year -- and look forward to it.

Because it really isn't about the playing fields or how well the event is organized or the weather.  It isn't even really about baseball. 

And so it was with this background that we loaded up the car full of luggage and the dog and headed in the opposite direction from Bend, to watch Brandon play in his first basketball tournament away from home.  Our destination, the "famous" Seaside basketball tournament.

Now I'm not saying that we don't go to these things to watch the games.  We most certainly do.  But we can do that at home.  Tournaments are more of a celebration.   A time to mark this brief time in our lives with something a little more special.

Most obviously it about making the kids important.  Brandon is involved in things other than sports. For instance he studies playing the trumpet and performs in several concerts each year including being in a marching band during parades in our small town. But 7th grade basketball is a very intimate sport, the kids play just five at a time and the fans sit just inches away from the action.  A great deal has occurred to put all of this together and now he is the star of the show.  

But this is also a time for our family to be together;  the coziness of the car (the dog goes with and lays between the boys with her black nose an inch from the console between Lynda and I), and we share two beds in a single room.  One bathroom and a tight schedule forces a great deal of cooperation and respect.  We talk about our meals and where we want to eat. "Camp 18" and "Doogers" are high on the list.  We decide what we'll do doing our brief down time and settle on keeping it simple by walking down Broadway to the beach, window shopping and letting the boys play at the arcade.  It's what everybody does when they go to Seaside and only have an hour or two.  We are not alone during our jaunt, we run into the families of the other boys on the team everywhere we go.

This is certainly a group event and that's what makes it so much fun.  More than a week before someone had organized a cell phone list so that we could call any of the other nine families. Lunch was planned together at the Bigfoot's Pub & Grub, as soon as everyone got to town.  The party room, decorated like a log cabin, was deafening with conversation as we squeezed everyone in.  Between games we collected money for pizza and had a party in the breakfast room of hotel we all stayed at--much to the chagrin of the lone front desk clerk.  We exchanged intel with each other on such things as coffee shop locations, game time scenarios ("if we win both games, we play tomorrow at 2 pm but....") and how to find the high school.  But mostly we just spent as much time together as a weekend will allow.  Good people and good kids.  Hard to beat.  

And some place in there on Saturday morning I was able to get in a 5 mile run along the Seaside  boardwalk and the Necanicum River.  (see picture above)  It was a great run, the best I have had in a long time.  I felt fast as I was dodging folks walking along the boardwalk, which by the way is not made of boards.  

The weekend ended too soon and we had to all head back much before I would have liked.  But the Bend baseball tournament is only 3 months away and we are sure to go.  It should be a good time.  Gopher holes or not.

Super Oats

I keep a log of my eating in the same journal that I use for recording my running.  It's part of keeping myself accountable, if I eat it it has to be be written down, and it's a way of tracking my intake and use of calories while I try to drop back down to my desired weight.  

I've just looked back at the journal and under the of heading for breakfast, which I designate each day with the simple letter "B", I have written the words Super Oats 42 times this year.  And I gotta tell you, I look forward to my morning bowl of oats!

Maybe it just has something to do wanting to do the right thing, which I think is a part of the personality of a runner, but mostly I just really think they taste awesome.  Win-win as the saying goes.  

Plus making them is a bit of a ritual.  First I get the steel cut oats going.  These take awhile to cook so I put them on first.  I have tried having steel cut exclusively but don't like it as well as making a 50/50 mixture with old fashioned rolled oats.  I use the insta-hot to get things boiling right away and make it very soupy so that I can add the rolled oats a few minutes later.  With everything in the Revereware pot, I turn off the heat, toss in a generous handful of raisins, give the boiling mass one last stir and then cover it with a lid and let it fester while I prepare the rest of the fixins.

Next I get blueberries out of the freezer.  Until last week I was using berries that grown in my garden last summer, but now I've resorted to the frozen types from the supermarket or Costco.  I put the berries into my special school bus yellow colored cereal bowl and then rinse them with warm water.  This not only washes away little pieces of stem and who knows what else, but thaws out the berries a little.  I drain the water and let the berries sit in the bottom of the bowl.  

Next I retrieve my other ingredients and wait a few minutes for the oats to be done.  Once I'm satisfied, or just can't wait any longer, I scoop them out onto the blueberries, which completes the thawing process, and also helps hold down the dreaded "purple milk syndrome" if they were left to float around on their own.  And yes, purple not blue.  Remember George Carlin?

I squeeze out about a tablespoon of honey, two tablespoons each of ground flax seed and wheat germ (my newest addition).   Then I use a spoon to give the contents a bit of a mound shape, working the oat mixture away from the edges and up toward the center to make way for the soy milk which I now carefully pour around the edges until it is about an inch from the top of the oats.  And viola!  Super oats.  

Not only good for you but also tasty and fun to make!   

The Last Mile

My mom's high school graduation picture and later with me during Thanksgiving, 2007

My little brother, my dad and my mom all left my life much before they should have.  I think about them a lot, especially when I'm out running.  That's when I'm living my life at it's fullest, placing myself out there with not much more than I was born with and pushing myself farther down the road.  It's during the last three miles of these quests, when I am past the point of warming up and have left the uncertainty of my early expectations, when I have entered a more exalted state, shed my outer complex layers, that I think about all of them the most.  Three miles from home I dedicate to my little brother and two miles out is for my dad .  But the last mile of my run is always for my mom.  

They took a lot of pictures of my mom back in 1958.  It was the year that she both graduated from high school and then married my dad.  Both life events when lots of pictures are taken.   It would be hard to imagine a more beautiful young woman than those shown in the images taken 51 years ago.  She was a classic beauty; tall, slender and with coiffured brunette hair and a fairness that could not be exceeded. Much later, her nieces that took part in her wedding ceremony as flower girls told me that they saw her with the same awe as held for any glamourous Hollywood starlet of the time.  In the years that followed she would emulate a kind of Jackie Kennedy persona and did so in a way that would have made the the first lady envious. She was just beautiful from the inside out. 

But 1958 was also the year that my mom started smoking cigarettes.  

One of my earliest memories is of my mother smoking, I think because even to a pre-schooler it must have impressed me as so unnatural.  In my childishness I would ask her to "be a dragon"  and she would oblige by exhaling smoke through her nostrils.  I can remember sitting at home in our living room every evening and stare at the the way the smoke from the cigarettes in the ashtrays would lazily rise through the lampshades and exit out the other end under more speed than it had entered, looking much like a minature volcano, apparently propelled by the heat of the light bulb.  It was fascinating.  

As a teenager, perhaps with more of a tilt toward defiance, I would pull my shirt up over my mouth and nose to filter out the smoke as it banked down in the house.  Of course I was told this was disrespectful and while lived in their home to stop it.  After, when I moved out into my first apartment, I actually bought an new ashtray and put it away for use when my parents came to visit.  And when they came over, they did use it.  It seems so odd now.  It seems like such a different time.  Times change but they didn't change soon enough to save my mom.  

I had always pestered my mom about quitting but it wasn't until I was nearly thirty years old, and she was about 50, that I had implored her to stop.  She thanked me for being concerned and that was about it.   She would remind me that is was a generational thing to start smoking back in the 50's and that at the time they didn't know any better.  I thought to myself what a cop out and what a bunch of crap.   

At about this same time, her own father died of smoking caused emphysema and on his death bed my mom promised him that she would quit. She didn't.

By the time she turned 60,  both she and my dad were tethered to twin oxygen tubing that ran for the length of their house.  They each had oxygen concentrators that chuffed and hissed out the precious wisps which had now become so relevant to their lives and the sound of which was so comforting and reassuring to them.  Traveling more than short distances became increasingly both logistically and psychologically frightening and so their last visit to our house,  four hours away, was seven years ago.  Hobbled by their dependence to the oxygen machines, the only time we saw them was at their own house or somewhere not very far away.  My boys grew from toddlers to teenagers with nothing more than phone calls and greeting cards from their grandparents.   

My dad had stopped smoking ten years prior and although he would not get any better, he seemed to get no worse.  But my mom could never get over the addiction.  For me thinking about the  combination of pure oxygen and the lit cigarette I knew she still held throughout the day was something I cautioned her on and prayed that nothing would happen.  Somehow it never did. 

But as predicted and dreaded about for so long, my mom quickly began to fail and all too soon her miserable life ended,  just days before her 50th wedding anniversary.  

And the awful thing is, I really didn't do anything to stop it.  

Nobody does.  Smoking addiction in our society just is not dealt with.  We prefer to diminish it's consequences by calling it a "habit" as if it's akin to cracking our knuckles or sucking  our thumbs.  We turn the other cheek, look the other way or we say that the smoker has rights.  We do anything but really help.  But after watching this woman, my mom,  die so young and suffer so long and have such an awful quality of life for such a long time, I really question the logic of this acceptance.  

And why do we, regular people, accept it?  (I know why politicians wont act without a public uprising.)  In part it may be that we know how smoking has a long relationship with our country that has wedded it to us by our history.  Most of the influential leaders of our early nation used nicotine addiction to fund their agenda's, gain their influence through it's hefty global profits and give themselves the time to pursue other their opportunities such as politics.  Without our country being a major supplier of nicotine during our formative years I doubt that it could have become the political power that it is today and maybe would not have even  attained independence.  Tobacco made us great and we are still beholding.  It's part of our romantic past and then, like now, tobacco is available everywhere. 

How could anything so deadly, so destructive and so awful also be so readily obtainable?  The horrific impacts that this drug has on our families and loved ones seems to be tempered by the fact that a person can go to any supermarket, anywhere, and load up on boxes of the stuff.  It's use is so accepted still that we can fill our carts full of food for our families and then at the end of the checkout line have a carton of cigarettes thrown on top as we head out the door.  No big deal, and the message again is that it must be "okay".

And what really pisses me off more than anything else is that we let the addicted person tell us that it is their "right" to do to themselves.  That this is their life and they can choose to live as they please.  

You know, my son Matthew gave me a book to read last month written by Josh Hamilton, a baseball star with the Texas Rangers.  To get to the point, this player became addicted to cocaine and then freebase crack.   Near death and after severing himself from everything that makes us human, he was  just barely able to grab a tree branch after having jumped off the cliff .  His description of what it is like to be addicted to a such a all consuming drug is stunning.   But he tells us what we already know: that people who are addicted are NOT CAPABLE OF MAKING CHOICES FOR THEIR OWN HEALTH AND WELL-BEING.   In fact they aren't able to make decisions of any type. Everything in their world revolves around feeding the addiction.   They will lie, cheat and do things contrary to their own moral code and to the people they love and care about just to get their next dose.  NOTHING is more important.  The addiction takes over and to those of us watching it from the outside, it even has it's own voice.  Our loved one is no longer logical or talking sense.  These people are literally out of their minds and yet when they tell us to go mind our own business, as my mother told me many times, I listened to the addiction and did what it said and walked away leaving my mother trapped inside.  She couldn't ask for help, but she shouldn't have needed to.  

Now my last mile is always for my mom.

Today

Today I woke and at once thought about running.  Today would be my longest run in 9 months.  Today I would do (not try to do) 10 miles at Forest Park.   Today I thought about what I should eat for a pre-running breakfast and settled for toast and a banana.  Today I paired up my Ultimate Direction water bottle with it's belt for the first time in a long time.  Today I sorted through the sports bag I bring to work to find a clothes combination for the weather of 48F and dry.  Today while lacing up my Vomeros someone asked my advice on where to buy shoes and how I liked mine.  Today when coworkers saw me in my running clothes I answered several of their questions about "where?" and "how far?" and "are you going alone?"  Today I drove on the freeways, skirted downtown Portland on side streets and and then climbed suburban Thurman street to park just down from the trailhead lot.  Today I contemplated the security of my wallet, phone and keys and decided to hide my wallet inside the car and take my keys and phone with me in the small zippered pouch in the hydration belt.  Today I decided to listen to Fdip because the last time I ran high up into these woods I felt lonely and this time wanted to hear a friendly voice.  Today I started started running, slalomed thru the opening in the gate that bars the forest road and started up the rocky roadbed. Today while my body was still warming up I wondered how I would feel near the end of the run and wondered whether I would feel strong or would be struggling or hurting later.  Today I got passed on the road by two separate faster runners and was startled each time because I did not hear them coming with my iPod in my ears.  Today I felt pretty good out there and was able to plug right along with a consistent pace.  Today I was surprised to find a group of five women walking together up near mile 4.5 because I rarely see walkers up this far.  Today I impulsively pulled my phone out to take a picture of my turn around point, milepost 5, in observance of my longest run in a long while.  Today while running I sent the picture I had just taken to my wife's email so she would see I was fine.  Today I had to momentarily stop when an unleashed dog approached me and the owner had to call it back.  Today I kept noting how close my Nano counted the miles compared to the MP markers along the road (it finished at 9.92 miles). Today my left heel started to feel a bit sore after mile 8 and I slowed my pace just bit on this downhill section to keep from aggravating my plantar fasciitis.    Today I finished my run in 1  hour and 29 minutes and felt great afterwards.  Today I opened my car, pulled off my sweat soaked poly shirt and pulled on a dry cotton T-shirt and a dark gray sweatshirt that had belonged to my dad.  Today I blew my nose one last time into my running diaper and then used it to wipe the mud off the back my legs.  Today I drove home and listened to some jazz and then to NPR, two of my favorite post-run sounds.  Today I came home to a hyper dog who had clearly noticed that I gotten home from work later than normal.  Today I weighed myself soon after getting home, and before I eat or drink  anything, because it always shows a nice low number.  Today I took a long shower and did some shower stretching.  Today I uploaded my run to Nike+ and then wrote it down in my workout log book.  Today I went to "caloriesperhour.com"  and compared it's estimate (1300) to my Nano's (1486).  Today I wrote on this blog.  Today was another celebration of my life.  Today I was a runner.