Ghosts--Seriously (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second of 3 posts on unexplained phenomena--ghosts, if you will--I've personally experienced on my runs.

This incident occurred only a couple hundred yards from the first story I blogged about.  It involves a Revolutionary War era cemetery, called the Brown's Mill Cemetery, close by my home.

The cemetery is surrounded by a wrought iron fence, pictured here, whose pickets are quite close together--perhaps 3-4". The fence sits close to the ground as well, and is almost chest-high. The combination of picket spacing, no room to wiggle under, and the height of the fence meant that nothing larger than a squirrel could pass from one side of the fence to the other without a major (and time-consuming) effort.

I was out for a run early one summer morning before work, pre-dawn. My route was a 4-miler, an out-n-back, and I was only about half a mile from ending up back at the house. I was running up a slight incline, on the left side of the road facing traffic, of course (although there was no traffic on this rural road at that time).

Across the road from me on the right side sat the cemetery. I was about even with the lower corner of the cemetery (in the top photo, the stone post in the lower right is at that corner), which runs some 200' uphill directly beside the road. There were some street lights in the campground across the road to the left that provided diffuse light to the road and fence where I was (i.e., no need for a flashlight there).

Suddenly I saw a movement ahead of me and across the road: it was a low, animal-like shape, right along the wrought iron fence. I immediately think "Dog" and glance down at my footing and simultaneously move more to the left, onto the gravel shoulder, to give myself the maximum berth around the animal. The shape of the object was a bit more than knee-high, and its size and outline were very collie-like, in that the back was flat and straight but with that abrupt, right-angle downturn back at the tail.

In the 1-2 seconds between seeing the shape, glancing down and moving left, and then looking again across the road to see whether this "dog" was any sort of threat to me, the form had disappeared. Vanished. And there was absolutely nowhere for it to have gone--the fence was impenetrable for a critter of that size, too low to squeeze under, and too high to jump.

Besides, by the light of the streetlights I could see across the fence into the cemetery, which was fairly open, and there was no "dog" inside. The critter could not have simply scooted along the fence to a corner and exited that way, for it was too near the middle of the 200' run of fence to reach a corner in the time it took for me to look down and back up.

It was simply gone, with no explainable way of disappearing.

Beyond the normal rush of adrenaline that any runner would get from suddenly encountering a dog whose intentions are unknown, the experience was not menacing in any way. It just was. Any me and my rational thinking cannot figure it out.

More Emily Dickinson and UltraRunning

Several weeks ago I did 3 posts on Emily Dickinson (here, here and here) and I just looked over some of her letters again.


Found another thought fragment that proves (at least to me!) that she had the soul of an UltraRunner. In a letter to a friend, she writes:

You ask my companions, Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know but do not tell.

Give me some hills and a sundown and a trail and I'm in heaven.  The dog is optional since I have no experience with running with a dog, but I imagine it's fun.

Photo credit to http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=282

Tales From The Perimeter: Babbling and the $37,000 Thermometer

Perimeter meaning the 6 mile patrol road inside the fence of the military installation on which I work, where some half a dozen of us comprise a pool of running “talent” and strive to show up for a noontime run a couple times a week if we can escape our desks. We share a lot and these guys are one of the core pillars of my sanity.


In our excursions around the perimeter, we unmercifully bust on CH for talking a lot (the word babbling comes to mind). Also we bust on JH's car sometimes, referring to his Lexus as the $37,000 thermometer, since a favorite question for JH while we're changing for the run in the locker room is "What's the temperature?"

I use a page called REFDESK as my home page--great resource just to be able to find stuff, like having a library at one's fingertips. Anyway, one recent REFDESK news headline was "Driver recalls 6 miles of highway terror in Lexus."

Of course it was about the accelerator problem, but I couldn't resist the straight line opening and emailed the article to the running group with the comment:

Sounds like JH must have given CH a ride again.....

This group of guys means the world to me.  At a time when my life was quite in disarray, they helped me to keep my sanity.  In a future post I'll elaborate a bit about that.  For now, suffice it to say that we shed blood, sweat, tears, stories, and most of all, laughter.

Not All of DC Shut Down During the Blizzard

These photos came from a member of our noontime running group, KK, who was just on Reserve duty in DC as a Navy Commander during the recent snows.

I've been to this place probably half dozen times and it always is a moving and sobering moment, one that every American should experience.

Icarus and UltraRunning

Icarus reminds us that UltraRunners can crash and burn, sometimes spectacularly.  But while he was flying, man, what a ride! 

Maybe running 100 miles at the Umstead 100 Mile Endurance Run will bring me up short.  But I prefer to think that it'll be quite a ride.

Hit the link here if you need a quick Icarus refresher (photo below from that site).  Basically he flew too close to the sun, his wax wings melted, and poor Icarus plunged to his death.  


 

 
Bear with me.  I'm trying to connect Greek mythology, stages of philosophical thinking in one's life, and UltraRunning. 

I know that many of you, when you see poetry, can't hit that DELETE key fast enough. I know, I was once the same, but perhaps as you age you look for meaning and interpretation wherever you can. I can trace what's probably the typical trajectory of philosophical thought--when I was in my late teens and twenties, that was when I was burning with thoughts on the meaning of life, of hopes and fears and dreams.

Then that urgency goes latent for some decades--it doesn't vanish entirely but goes undercover--while you are busy with love and family and career. Then later in your life, perhaps triggered by grandchildren, you again begin thinking those big thoughts on the meaning of life, of hopes and fears and dreams. It's in that striving for understanding that you reach out to embrace the thinking and expressions of others, hence the return to (or the initial exploration of) poetry.


So, with that intro, I ran across Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert, a poem about falling out of love. He uses the analogy of Icarus. You can focus on the love part of the poem.  Or, as I did, you can focus on the Icarus part of the poem.


So for me, Gilbert's key point is that Icarus flew. Icarus FLEW. Read the whole thing, and pay particular attention to the first sentence and especially the last sentence, which truly resonates with me when I fall short or fail:

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts

This makes all our UltraRunning concerns seem pretty insignificant....

In 2007, I was an Army lieutenant leading a group on a house-clearing mission in Baquba, Iraq, when I called in an artillery strike on a house. The strike destroyed the house and killed everyone inside. I thought we had struck enemy fighters, but I was wrong. A father, mother and their children had been huddled inside.

In fact, it's been nearly three years, and I still cannot remove from my mind the image of that family gathered together in the final moments of their lives. I can't shake it. It simply lingers.

....

I know something about this. The deaths that I caused also killed any regard I had for my own life. I felt that I did not deserve something that I had taken from them. I fell into a downward spiral, doubting if I even deserved to be alive. The value, or regard, I once had for my own life dissipated.

....

In recent months I've been trying to honor the lives I took by writing and speaking in public about my experience, to show that those deaths are not tucked neatly away in a foreign land. They may seem distant, but they are not. Soldiers bring the ghosts home with them, and it's everyone else's job to hear about them, no matter how painful it may be.

We must not forget that LT Meehan was acting in our names, and we have blood on our hands as well. It is good that he reminds us of that fact.  We may feel like bystanders, that we were not involved, but whether we advocated the war, or acquiesced in it, we share in the responsibility and the obligation help heal those wounds. 

And moreover, on behalf of all the Mister Tristans who will one day grow up to be of soldiering age, the promise to ourselves to never again take lightly the decision for war.

Umstead Update--5 Weeks to Go

Training proceeds as planned.  This weekend just concluded I had planned a 10-miler, and executed a 12 miler.

This was a run that I just love to to--it's finite, it's economical, it's practical:  last Friday, one of my vehicles was in the shop for annual inspection.  They called to say it was ready, and since I'm a regular customer for years, and I could not get there before their 5 pm close, they just locked it up with the key and receipt inside, and I would just slip a check thru the key drop slot when I came by on Saturday (they are not open weekends).

So I got up for a 6:00 am departure for the 10 mile run to the garage.  The sun soon arose, gloriously.  Traffic was light, and the roads were dry, wide, and safe (with reference to our major snow blanket from previous mid-Atlantic storms).  I elected to throw in another small loop to add a couple miles since it was such a fine day for a run at daybreak.

The big test will come on in a week--the weekend of the 27th when I have a 30 miler on tap.  Then it's all a downhill taper until race day on 27 March.

An Odd Perspective on "Why?" We Aspire to Run Long

I'm still wrestling with trying to articulate why I am motivated to run 100 miles.  The following is quoted from a 1997 UltraList email from Christian Griffith (punctuation and capitalization are his!):

Imagine that, an odd perspective from me...

but, 'ever noticed that when you show up to a hotel where other racers are, and you may not know the runners you see, but you feel a sort of unsaid connection. Kinda like, "man, I know you must have been going through those same long training runs as me, talking to yourself, convincing yourself to continue, fighting the urge quit, to walk, to rationalize how/why you've gone far enough for today and can try to improve tomorrow." - "I'm sure you have the same collection of empty wrappers, plastic bottles, stinky clothes and smeared vaseline all throughout your car just like me." - "I'm sure you've held on to that pine tree just like me, with you shorts at your ankles, trying not to pee on yourself, as you stink up the woods, watching out for oncoming hikers and cursing the decision to eat Mexican the night before a 20-miler..."

We run these races because we feel like we share a big secret that others don't know or understand. A sort of secret to unlocking areas of our mind, body and spirit that usually go untapped - at least in the normal hum-drum, ritualistic lifestyle of most of us working stiffs.

and as you pass a runner in that hotel hallway, it's a nod, or a "hi" ...or whatever... and you walk away wondering, "hmmm... I wonder how fast that person will be tomorrow?" ...or, "damn, that girl is lean and bad-ass looking, why don't I look like that?" ...or, "Wow, I hope I can be running these races when I am that dude's age."

We run because we strive for our own, sliding-scale, versions of perfection.

and lastly, when you cross that finish, you notch that mental belt that adds yet one more kick-ass experience in this journey of life and for a second you are the coolest person in the whole world ...to you.