Oh, The Stories They'll Have

Both of my sons are playing on traveling basketball teams this winter, and even though their seasons are barely underway, I've visited a lot of gyms in western Massachusetts over the last couple of weeks.  This week my younger son is playing in a CYO tournament hosted by Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Springfield.  The gym is certainly one of the, shall we say, coziest gyms I've ever been in.  Spectators are restricted to folding chairs that line one wall of the gym, and anyone with a shoe size greater than about 5 will have to watch their toes.  Of course, people can always sit on the stage during the game.  The teams' benches are old church pews, and James Naismith would have been right at home.  But while the gym is small, the competition has been spirited. 

I never played much basketball when I was younger; it just wasn't my game.  And I certainly never played organized basketball.  I learned to appreciate the game more when in college, when I went to a basketball school, and I've grown to appreciate it even more now that my kids are playing.  When I walked into that gym last night, I felt for a moment that maybe I'd missed out on something by not playing basketball when I was their age.  But I think that regret may have been fueled in part by the mistaken belief that these places didn't exist anymore, that basketball had been cleaned up and homogenized and corporate-tized into something antiseptic and generic.  I was able to overcome my own regret with the thought of the stories my kids will tell their kids in 30 years about the crazy places they played basketball when they were kids. 

Yes, I guess I'm appreciating basketball stories as much as I'm appreciating basketball these days. 

Hall of Fame

My son had the opportunity to play basketball on the court at the Hall of Fame in Springfield on Sunday.  His Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton CYO team from Northampton beat a spirited Agawam squad.  It was funny watching the players on the bench who spent more time looking up at the big screens and the pictures of all of the inductees.  Just before that game, they played a game in East Longmeadow in a tiny gym with linoleum floors that doubles as a cafeteria.   You've got to be versatile to succeed in Division 1 grade 3 and 4 CYO basketball. 

Shout Out

I knew that the Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club liked the last blog entry I did about their 2010 race series, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they'd posted it as an essay on their site.  Always nice to see what I write published in various places (yes, they did have permission.)

How I Spent My Spring and Summer

When they run, kids don’t worry about personal records or electrolytes or their mile pace and they don’t wear $100 running shoes or satellite-synched wristwatches that would make Dick Tracy jealous.  They just run.  I used to be like that, before injuries, a driver’s license, adolescence, and a lot of beer and late nights made running less attractive.  So I stopped running, for about 20 years.  Five years ago, fearing that I would not be able to keep up with my active children, I set out to see if I could recapture some of what it felt like to run as a kid.  One day, in the middle of a bike ride, I stopped by the Smith College track and ran a lap.  I barely finished.  Fast forward to this past week:  I completed the Monson Memorial Half Marathon, the last race of the Sugar Loaf Mountain Athletic Club’s 2010 race series. I ran 10 out of the 12 races in the series. 

But I don’t want to write about my own running achievements, because let’s face it, to anyone who doesn’t run, and to a great many people who do run, listening to someone else’s running stories can be a bore.   I’d rather talk about my dreams.  I regularly dream about running now, something I don’t recall ever happening before. In my dreams, I run without effort.  I don’t need a watch or fancy computer to tell me what I can feel instinctively: that thanks to effective training and a flawless technique, I am running as fast as I possibly can.  This is where I can see the payoff for consistently getting out of bed in the morning at while the rest of my house is asleep—and probably the rest of the neighborhood, as well.  I feel the wind in my face, but that’s pretty much all I feel.  I don’t feel too hot or too cold, I don’t feel worried about traffic or whether I’m late for work, and I don’t feel any impact from my feet hitting the ground.  I’m gliding, and it’s perfect. 

And then, as they say, I woke up. 

I haven’t come close to replicating that feeling during my waking hours, but it’s not for lack of trying.  My last entry in this blog highlighted a race I ran in April, the Ron Hebert Road Race, where every finisher gets a pair of socks.  That race marked the first race in a new racing series put on by the Sugar Loaf Mountain Athletic Club, or SMAC.  Before this race series, I’d never participated in such a thing before, and while I had a vague notion that these things existed, I had no real idea of how they worked.  But one thing jumped out at me as I read through the rules: participants who finished six of the 12 races in the series would get a prize.  That was my motivation.  I have run enough races to confirm that fact that I am too slow to win any of the “traditional” running prizes; you know, the ones you get for running faster than most, if not all, of the other people in the race. But I was pretty sure I could run six races in 8 months. 

I paid my series entry fee—a reasonable $10—and began to look forward to the email updates that the series organizer, John Reino, would regularly send out after each race.  I ran my sixth race in the series in September to qualify for a prize, and then I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the standings that my name was much closer to the top of the list than the bottom.  I also realized that I had a chance at making 10 races in the series, so I signed up for the Monson Half. 

For running these races, I got socks, t-shirts, technical shirts, pint glasses, and even potatoes.  I got a couple of black toenails and some nasty chafing issues.  More importantly, I got to experience the hospitality of the race volunteers (I still can’t get over the pastries at the Lake Wyola Run) and the excitement of race day on both a big (2000+ runners at the Bridge of Flowers Classic) and small scale (a couple of races drew only 100 or so runners.)  I also got to experience a feeling of accomplishment and I got to share it with my family, who met me at the finish line on Sunday.  My younger son even held a sign up as I passed: My Dad=My Hero. 

It’s kind of a bittersweet feeling to know that the series is over.  There’s a race I’m thinking about running on Sunday, but part of me says it’s not worth it because I won’t get any points for doing it.  Another part of me says, haven’t you run enough already this year?  But still another part of me says that maybe, just maybe there’s another PR out there for me. 

Thank you, Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club, for putting on this race series and for allowing me to experience joy in running again.  I was a middle-of-the-pack runner who didn’t stick around much after the race was over, but I enjoyed every minute of it. 

Good Day for a Run

 I ran in the 42nd Annual Ron Hebert Road Race, an 8-mile race through Florence and Williamsburg.  I almost chickened out and didn't do it, because I was intimidated by the hills, like the one heading into Williamsburg on Route 9 by the driving range, and the hill on North Farms Road.  But I didn't.  And while I wasn't first, I did finish in the top 50.  That's right, you're talking to the 49th finisher.  Of course, the official results may not show that, because the part of the number that gets torn off after you cross the finish line, which had my name on it, was pinned on my sweaty shirt, so the pertinent information was washed away.  I was too tired to stick around to see what kind of a back up system they had in place. 

It was a beautiful day for a run, and the breeze helped immensely.  And I must say, I really liked how I was greeted at the finish line: the race director shook my hand, congratulated me, and gave me a pair of gym socks. 

Here's a picture of my sweaty shirt, my number, and my prized socks.

Here's a picture of me actually running.  Check out those buff, white legs.  I asked the photographer to wait until I was in front of the blossoms. I think it was the right choice. 

Driving to a Standstill

I grew up in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country.  And I grew up in a pretty crowded area of New Jersey, where many times it seemed like cars outnumbered people, and where traffic jams weren't called traffic jams, they were just called the daily commute.  So I know traffic.  And I can tell you that yesterday's mob of cars throughout Northampton and Easthampton--and other towns--was some pretty impressive traffic. 


It turns out that the state's decision to close a lane of traffic on I-91 south to pour some concrete on the Friday of a holiday weekend wasn't the best one.  I will give credit where credit was due and say there was plenty of notice about it--I heard announcements on the radio and there was a front-page article about it in the Daily Hampshire Gazette--but that doesn't really provide much solace when you're stuck in traffic. 

Let's face it: being stuck in traffic sucks, and I've found the rarity of such an occurrence has been a major benefit of  living in the valley.  But because I'm not used to it, when it does happen, it makes it seem that much worse.  And I didn't have it that bad: while the traffic was slow from Easthampton to Northampton, I was heading north when most of the trouble was headed the opposite way.  There are a lot of people much more upset about it than I was, and that always makes me feel better. 

Here's my nominee for the least surprising quote in the Gazette's story about the traffic (emphasis added): "The root cause of the traffic, according to Maureen Glenn of the State Police in Northampton, was the closure of a southbound lane so workers could pour concrete near the East Street Bridge in Easthampton. Glenn said the site had been cleared by 5:30 p.m., far later than the Massachusetts Department of Transportation intended to have the lane closed."

The Real Madness of March

 I'm the guy in the red shirt. 

After yesterday's Holyoke St. Patrick's Day Road Race, I was talking to a guy who's run the race every year for the last 25 years. He said that without a doubt, yesterday's race was the warmest he could remember.

Warm temperatures + hilly course + 5000 people = bad results in the race for me.
I trained for six weeks because I wanted to do better than I did last year. I was ready. And then I got to the starting area and found a sea of people, many of whom were talking about how "perfect" the weather was for a race. Let's just say that I differed with them on that point, especially when I could feel the heat coming off the pavement as I waited for the race to start. But I should have known that this race wasn't the best place to try and set a personal best when I saw the rather zoftig woman with carefully applied makeup talking on her cell phone right before the race was going to start, in the front row where the elite runners line up. 
I had to pass people with dogs in the race, people who were walking the whole race in the middle of the road, and people with strollers. 


Yes, I'm bitter about this.  I need to remember for next year that this is a party race, a place for people to have fun.  It's a race where the spectators line the course and do a great job of cheering everyone on, and more than a few of them will give you a beer, if you want one. 

When I made that last turn and headed toward the finish line, all I saw in front of me was a sea of people--spectators lining the streets and runners running with me.  I finished in 2009th place, and that was an above-average performance.  It was a great day in Holyoke, and I'm sure that I'll be back again next year.  Just look for the guy in the red shirt with the expression of bitterness on his face.