Mountains Made Low

You know, I’m really glad I went to the track today to test my in-shapeness before I signed up to run a 5k in public. Running in the real world is much different than working out on the elliptical machine. Much.

I can do 4.5+ miles in 48 minutes on the elliptical, no problem. (I would say “no sweat,” but that’s really not the case—I sweat when I do it. A lot.)

But I went and tried to do the 12½ laps on the track that constitute 5000 meters (3.125 miles) today. And I couldn’t do it. And I felt bad about that for a while. But then I realized that even though I’m not in shape for running a 5k in the real world, I’m still in the best shape i can remember being in. Before I decided I’d reached my limit today, I did 6 laps (1½ miles) in 16:43. Not a stellar time (just over 11 minutes per mile), but I don’t remember running six laps at once in my life—ever.

So small victory in the midst of the unhappy news. And I’m still pretty happy about that.

Or something similar.

I went to the gym this late afternoon and found that, about the time I got there, the power had gone out. I debated for a while what I should do: wait it out? walk on the indoor track? throw in the towel? Then I noticed that there was a guy happily doing his thing on one of the elliptical machines that I use (there are six machines, three each of two types, and one kind is, I think, better than the other; fortunately for me, most people who exercise there seem to have the opposite opinion). I thought maybe he was just trundling along not worried about the fact that there was no power. And I thought that if he could do it, I could, too.

So I went over. The little screen on his machine was glowing its happy blue glow in his face, registering what he was doing, the preprogrammed workout he was following. That’s weird, I thought, and then realized, looking at these three machines, that they don’t plug in! Their power requirements are met by the hamster running on the wheel! If you’re on the machine and moving fast enough, these machines have power! Joy and happiness all around.

So I hopped on, did my workout (up to 28 minutes today, btw, 2.54 miles, 5.44 mph average, and about 320 calories shed), and by the time I left the power had still not come back on. But it didn’t matter. Much.

But it wasn’t just the gym, or the hostpital complex, experiencing the power outage. It was all of Linville. And as I drove home, I learned that it was all of Newland, too, including the two traffic lights in Newland (see, Avery County isn’t that backwards: the county seat has two traffic lights). But there were a number of people who don’t understand that a traffic light without power becomes a four-way stop. “I’m on the bigger road so I have the right of way” or “I’m on the cross street so I’ll wait for ever.” Oh well. I made it through.

But I was unable to get my daily Coke Zero ration in either Linville or Newland. It had to wait until I was back to Elk Park. But that worked out, too. The guy at the place where I stopped told me that the power was out all over the place—apparently a transformer on or near a transmission line had blown. So I wondered if I’d have power when I got home.

I stopped in Elk Park for some food, at that rate, not knowing if I’d be able to cook at home.

Turned out it was fine. I’m home and blogging, so the power’s on here, but if I had assumed it would be, it wouldn’t have been. You know?

I said yesterday that I was feeling better about a lot of things in my life. After a good night’s sleep, and an “argument” with my cat this morning—I would have liked my good night’s sleep to continue a while longer, she thought that, at 7:15, it had gone on long enough (she was probably right)—I still am, but as much as I said last night that I wasn’t going to interrogate it, those of you who know me also know that it’s not that easy to get my brain to disengage, particularly when it has found interesting subject matter to latch on to and chase after.

So here are some more thoughts (and, frankly, a lot of them).

Looking back over the past school year, I really do believe that exercise-induced endorphins play a major role in my contentment or discontent. When I’m exercising daily, my life just seems better all around. It could very well be that I am addicted to these amazing chemicals that our bodies produce when we work them. I might even be tempted to digress here about the rise of general discontent in society as we have “progressed” from agrarian to industrial to knowledge economy, but that’s only a hunch, only based on anecdotal evidence, and I’m not convinced that the “good ol’ days” were always good, or, indeed, any better than today and our ever-darkening future forecast. But I know for me, something I wish I’d have learned years ago: I feel better when I’m exercising regularly.

That said, though, there’s probably more to it than that. Another thing I realized in the past couple of days is that like I said about the elliptical machine at the gym, life is a continuous uphill slog. Unlike walking the hills in San Francisco, you really can’t look forward to a peak followed by a downgrade. Don’t get me wrong, here, I know that walking down hill is good exercise, too; it works different muscles than does walking uphill or walking with no grade. But it seems to me that life really vacillates between different degrees of up slopes, just like the elliptical machine. And just like using that crazy machine, when we’ve been climbing a steep up for a while (months or years, in terms of life), a less steep uphill incline can seem like a downhill passage, and then we get pissed off—disheartened, at least—when the next big, steep up sneaks up an clobbers us.

But what might this have to do with life?

I’m still working it out. But here are some things that have crossed my mind.

I spent the first five years of my life being a little kid. But have you ever stopped to consider how much work there is involved in being a little kid. In the first five years of our lives (give or take), we’re expected to: learn how to roll over, then sit up, then stand up; learn how to crawl, then walk, then run; learn an entire language from nothing (at least one); learn how to interact, productively, with other people (our parents, our siblings, and others outside the family unit); learn how to handle our personal waste appropriately; learn to dress ourselves, tie our shoes, work buttons, snaps, and zippers. There’s a lot to learn in just five years. And most of us rise, quite ably, to those challenges (though I’ll admit I had a slight problem with the shoe-tying thing: I didn’t learn till I was six, and I was taught by my younger sister, then four).

At the age of five, though, I entered the next phase of my life: school. And this phase lasted for the next 24 years: Kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, high school, college, grad school (MA), and grad school (PhD). I’m not sure that I necessarily learned as much in those 24 years as I did in the first five, but by the time I finished my PhD, there I was 29½ years old, and thinking that maybe I’d get a bit of downhill in my life. After all, I had attained what I had been working for all along—I had arrived. I could get on with the business of being a professor, and I had a job (I’d already started it by then, actually, because I finished the PhD a semester “late”); I was ready to get on with the easier part.

I thought I could pretty much set my own agenda, read what I wanted to read, write what I wanted to write (and after 24 years as a student and 3½ years working on a dissertation, that was very appealing).

But I found, despite the summer after I turned 30 being primarily devoted to reading 30+ books that I wanted to read, that this whole career thing was yet another long walk uphill. No more had I finished my diss than the question of tenure began to loom large. And though the projections for an answer to that question were very positive, I began to feel under-appreciated. I began to grow restless. I began to feel a strong sense of discontent. And I started looking around to see what else might be out there.

Of course, about the time I got really serious about making a career move, I experienced another rather large life change, too—I got divorced. That was one thing, quite honestly, having been through my parents’ divorce as a kid (which is a much longer story in its entirety) and my sister’s divorce as an adult, that I had sworn would never happen in my life. But it did. And perhaps that process drove some of the discontent I was feeling with my job. Who knows? But the bottom line is: three weeks after the divorce was final, I made a move: changed jobs, changed houses, changed states (didn’t change time zones, though, so it could have been more drastic, I suppose).

You see, when I came here, I thought I’d found what I was looking for: a place where I could be me, do my work (teaching, research, administration) in my way—I seem to be a little bit unorthodox in that regard, and it seemed like there might be more freedom to be unorthodox here. It was an exciting place to visit, and in the beginning, to be. I really thought I had found “my people” and to a certain extent, though I was moving from the state I mostly grew up in to a place more different to me than anywhere I had ever lived before, “my home.”

This immediate sense of belonging was important to me. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt like I belonged anywhere. I don’t have a “childhood home”; I’ve lived a pretty nomadic existence, really. I’m now about one month shy of 33 years old, and I’ve lived 22 places in my life. There is no “house I grew up in.” In fact, my parents now live in a 2-bedroom apartment, having sold the house they had owned for 10 years (a record in my lifetime, and, I think in their life—yes, I think of my parents as a unit, even though I’ve mentioned their divorce—I told you it was a much longer story) 2 years ago. And as an adult, I’ve continued the pattern.

This place I’m in now, though, had an immediate sense of home about it, both in terms of the job and in terms of the house I bought. And in terms of the house, I that immediate sense wasn’t wrong. This was “home” and “my house” from the day I moved in. Yes, there are changes and improvements I want to make, but it’s mine. It’s home. For sure. (For now.)

About the job, I haven’t been so sure. I love teaching—I have loved teaching everywhere I have done it. And I will continue to love it, I’m sure, where ever I do it in the future. But that immediate sense of home surrounding this place sort of vanished, and did so pretty quickly, once I got here. There are a lot of reasons for that, I know, but the primary reason is that I came into an institution in a bit of a crisis, in transition, and in a bit of a crisis of transition. This happens. I’m aware of it, and—to a certain extent—I’ve been trained to deal with it (those 24 years in school weren’t for nothing!).

But there have been times when that disquieting feeling of being under-appreciated has returned, the feeling that my own personal efforts toward alleviating the crisis and smoothing the transition weren’t being recognized—however small, minor, and . . . well . . . personal they might be. There have been days like that. Actually, there have been weeks and months like that. December was one. February was another.

Yet, even when I’m not feeling too great about how others are responding to me and my efforts, my natural tendency is to do more. To punch that button on the elliptical machine that increases the resistance, that increases the perception of uphill. If I’m not getting the results I want climbing friendly, rolling hills, in other words, I’ll find a bigger hill, set my resolve, and get to the top of the bastard. Yes, I’ll get tired, I’ll get winded; my heart will pound, my muscles will burn; I won’t be able to think about much else beyond climbing the damned hill. But I’ll do it.

That’s just me.

As I do it, though, I’ll curse how out of shape I am: the pounding of my heart, the burning in my muscles, the laboring of my breath in my lungs—how ill-equipped I am for the task and how climbing the hill seems to be all I’m getting done. And I’ll bitch and moan about other people who have decided not to climb the hill: those who claim to have climbed other, similar hills in the past, and who think, therefore, that they have the right to sit this one out; those who seem to want to be pulled up the hill in a little red wagon like children; and those who think they’ve found a way to forgo the hill entirely and call out cheerfully, “Meet you at the top!”

But still I climb, and I know I’ve got company along the way in this climbing. I see those who battle their way up the hill alongside me. At times, they’re good company, sharing the problems in the ascent, and sharing the bitching. At other times, the tiredness and aches overcome us and we blame each other for the hardships of the hill we’re climbing, turning on each other specifically because we’re in this together.

I know, too, that in terms of my job, the crest of this particular hill is really only a reduction in its slope. When we get to the top, we’ll still be walking uphill. Cresting this particular rise is only permission for us to punch the button on the machine that reduces the resistance, that says, “Okay, we’re not going up hill as much anymore.”

But what I’ve realized, quite recently, and what’s probably contributed significantly to my overall feeling of contentment in the past few days or so, is that that’s okay. That’s life. And, as the saying goes, “a change is as good as a rest.”

It may not seem like a happy thought, on its surface, but for me, it is: Everything in life—work, fitness, relationships, belonging and home—is uphill, all the way. I can’t coast. After all, I coasted for three months on fitness, and while things didn’t particularly get worse, they certainly didn’t get any better, either.

I realize now, that I’ve got to keep working, not despite the uphill nature of the battle, but because of it. And I realize now that the crest of each hill is really only the base of the next one. Some will be more steep, some less. But, in all of these things, I (we?) have to continually be ready for the next challenge, ready to take it (whatever it happens to be) to the next level.

The other thing I’ve realized, though, is that focusing on the current particular hill to the exclusion of all else leads to discontent, as well. There’s more to life than the current challenge or the current set of challenges.

As I nearly run (5½ miles per hour is more than walking but not quite running) my miles into nowhere on the elliptical machine, I listen to audiobooks on my iPod (I know it’s dorky, music—the louder, nastier, and more metallic the better—would be a more traditional choice). The stories distract me, some, from the pangs in my muscles, the drumbeat of my heart rate, and the harshness of my breathing. Without the stories, my workouts would be much more focused on the machine, on the exercise, and on how hard it is. And that focus alone would make it harder yet.

As I walked, a week ago, up that first unbelieveable, ungodly hill on Hyde Street in San Francisco, the same thing was true. If I focused only on getting up the hill (and on being jealous of the dude who was actually running up the bloody thing), it would have been even worse. But I didn’t. Instead, I looked around, at the houses, at the view of the downtown skyscape off to the east at each cross street (the building that’s a really really tall tetrahedron in downtown SF is actually terribly beautiful in its weirdness—the one that you see in pretty much every episode of Charmed, if you’ve never been to SF). In my looking around, scanning all the angles, I accidentally looked directly back over my shoulder in one case, about half or two-thirds of the way up that monster of a hill. And I saw the Bay (of course, I didn’t think to take a picture—duh!), but I saw the Bay as a beautiful blue-green shimmer spreading out below me.

Seeing the Bay from that vantage point didn’t make the hill any less steep, but it did, for a moment, take my mind off the climb. It reminded me that in climbing any hill—real or metaphorical—the goal is the top, the summit, the crest, but that we cannot be so focused on that goal that we concentrate wholly and entirely on the hill itself. If we think about only how hard the climb is, how much we’re working to reach our goal, how no one who’s not on the hill understands how hard the hill is, we’ll get grumpy, we’ll bitch and moan, and we’ll grow ever more discontent.

After all, the summit is the goal, and we want to get there, but when the going’s hard, don’t we want to be reminded that the goal is not the only important thing in life? That that one goal is valuable, but that there are other worthwhile things to see and experience around us all the time? And, honestly, that the challenges we’re in the midst of provide us perspectives that would never have been ours if we weren’t facing those challenges? That some part of what we’re striving for is always already right there, waiting?

So, yeah, I’m climbing the hill. Several hills at once, really. Teaching my students. Running my programs. Working on Core Curriculum reform and assessment. Exercising. Making this place, this job, this life feel like mine, like home. Good, steep hills all. But I’m also looking around; seeing who’s climbing with me on each of these hills; looking for the funny-looking but beautiful building, the unique architecture, and the Bay.

Maybe I’m striving for several goals, and that can be difficult. But I think I’ve been too focused on those things for too long. I need to look around more. Take more notice of what’s already here.

And blame the endorphins if you want to, but that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

And, in terms of my attitude at least, it seems to be working.

The second day of my return to working out was not as traumatic as the first. Yesterday, as I climbed on to the elliptical machine, I experienced a series of familiar sensations.

First, there was the burn in my muscles the made me think, “what the hell was I thinking getting back into this; I’m probably going to die on this thing; why can’t I just embrace the fact that it’s my God-given lot in life to be a fat man and move on?” This sensation occurs about five minutes in to the workout.

Then, there was the loosening of those knots and the muscles changing from feeling like they were on fire to feeling like they were working. Not unpleasant, just a workout—what I go to the gym for. And it started to feel good.

Finally, as I approached the target time I had set for myself, I was winded and really feeling the work my muscles had been doing. But I also felt like I could have gone on past my target. That’s the feeling I like, and one I’d gotten used to: feeling like I’d gotten to my goal and not been wiped out by it. That I wasn’t done (in), and could have kept going if I wanted to.

I didn’t keep going, though. I didn’t want to risk doing too much too soon. So I stopped at my time goal. 24 minutes (I’m trying to work back up to 42—where I was before—and we’ll see what happens from there). But in those 24 minutes, I did 2.18 miles. That’s almost 5½ miles per hour, sustained for 24 minutes. I’m happy with that.

Maybe given that pace, if it’s sustainable for even longer periods as I up the time, I’ll make my goal for now 44 minutes (as long as they don’t start enforcing the 30 minutes on a machine rule, which I’ve never had a problem with before). 44 minutes would be 4 miles.

So I’m feeling better about it. And now there are a funny thing from the gym.

I swear I must live in the most homophobic area in the world. Or something. During my hiatus, the YMCA, which is still under construction, opened its locker rooms. So the past two days, I’ve been using the locker room which is nice (I don’t have to change in the men’s restroom before I leave work). Well and good. In the men’s locker room, however, (and I assume the women’s as well, but who knows) there are, in addition to the standard accouterments of a locker room (full restroom facilities, showers, and, well, lockers), curtained changing cubicles. That’s right. You can go in, draw a curtain and not have to be in your underwear around other men. You’ve gotta be shitting me. What’s more, as I was changing back into street clothes yesterday, sitting on one of the traditional locker room benches in my boxer briefs, a guy came in, and went in to a cubicle. I can’t say any more than “a guy” because that’s exactly how much attention I paid to him: someone else came into the men’s locker room, so I assume it was a guy. But he felt the need to change in a cubicle. Me? while he was in the cubicle, I stood up, dropped my underwear, grabbed my towel and hit the shower. You know, the way you think of a locker room—particularly a men’s locker room—working. Not that I want to look or be looked at; but the locker room is traditionally a place without modesty, and after about the 9th grade, also a place without shame.

What is this world coming to? I mean, seriously.

About lung capacity, being in shape, and all those other delusions I suffered from after a very pleasant afternoon meander around San Francisco.

Or maybe the thing about sea level and lung capacity really was the case. Whatever it was, yeah, I was deluded about somethings.

You see, I went back to the gym today after a longer hiatus than I had really planned. I thought everything would be all right. After all, I’d managed not to gain weight during my hiatus. I’d even dropped five pounds. But today I went back to the gym, climbed on to the good old elliptical machine, and let ’er rip.

For about half of what had been my standard work out before Christmas disrupted my routine. And then I was done. D-U-N. Done. So now I’ll begin the ever-enthralling process of getting back to where I was before, at least in terms of cardio capacity. Before Christmas, I was doing 3½ miles in 40 minutes with a steadily increasing, then steadily decreasing, pseudo-hill. (Remember, though, that on the elliptical machine it really is uphill both ways—the difference is between more and less uphill…. You can’t do downhill.)

Today, I started out optimistic. I didn’t think I was Superman or anything; hell, I didn’t even think I’d be able to do what I was doing before (it has been three months after all—and yikes!). I did think I’d be able to do 25-30 minutes. 2-2½ miles. That was my guess.

I was wrong.

I went 20 minutes, not quite 1¾ miles. Not bad. Still on my 12ish minutes per mile pace. But I can’t keep going at that rate for nearly as long as I used to be able to. But I’ll get back to that place.

As long as I keep getting back to the gym.