Resurrectionists

It wasn’t until April that the persistent knee issues finally convinced me to go to the doctor. A specialist quickly confirmed that the ACL was torn, and an MRI showed minimal meniscus damage. I was in surgery within 2 weeks.

Recovery from an ACL tear is difficult, but it’s important to do what your doctor tells you. This is even true when fighting insurance the whole way. My physical therapy regimen started the day after the surgery, with basic range-of-motion exercises. Through the first few weeks I was in and out of the PT office regularly, and as the summer wore on I got tired of stopped at PT before or after work.

But it was helping. My knee was getting better, and I was now able to jog (not run) upwards of a mile without pain. Biking was easy -- that was most of the therapy, actually, since surrounding muscle strength is important for recovery -- so I became a regular on the trail to and from work, the short way (soccer to home) of course.

In August, I lost my job, but I was quickly re-employed. Alas, said re-employment happened to be at a location far, far from my house.

Let’s be fair, though: it wasn’t any farther from my house than my first job, just in the opposite direction. And since my knee wasn’t really up to doing long stretches on the bike, I drove. A lot.

The commute ate at me, tore at my soul, made me a worse person. I believe the following sums it up:

Me * Traffic = lim_{N -> inf} CURSING AND WISHING ILL WILL ON OTHERS^N

Or, if you’re not so mathematically inclined, I was more like the Hulk and less like Xena, Warrior Princess. Or maybe I was like Xena and less like, say, Gabrielle. The slightest thing would set me off -- not so good with a 6-month old child and a just-over-3 year old.

As a remedy, I looked for ways to leave the office earlier, my commute justifying limited office time. I could work from home for a few hours a day and not suffer any work product effects. That kind of flexibility isn’t available at any old workplace, but I had landed at a company that valued mental health.

That is, until people started noticing I kicked out at 3:00. Then it became a company that valued face time. I shifted my schedule the other way, staying needlessly until 6:30 and letting my wife pick up the kids. That worked OK for a while, but eventually I started mixing things up, making it tough to tell whether I would be in the office until early afternoon or late evening, to the point that my supervisor insisted that I make a schedule and stick to it.

Was I just talking about a work schedule there? I must apologize. Sometimes this mind wanders and there’s nothing to be done about it but ride the crazy gravity wave it leaves behind, hoping to land far from the Isle of Inconsequentialities and be tossed at the foot of the door to the Runner’s Rumpus Room.

Anyway, the work schedule can be slipped into this narrative. I’m sure of it.

How about this: On days where I stayed late, I often arrived a little early and took time off during the day, time to duck out for a run.

The new job was in Greenbelt, Maryland, and once the weather cleared up and my knee felt up to it in the spring of 2013, I was back in the saddle, running and riding and enjoying life.

It started on the roads and trails, where I was totally unfamiliar with the terrain.

First up: The business complex that my office was in had a path around it. It claimed to be 1.5 miles, so I figured 3 laps would make for a decent run.

Alas, it’s lucky if it’s 1.5 km, and the running conditions go from good (paved sections in good repair) to mediocre (paved sections with mossy growth or interrupting crossroads) to poor (formerly-paved sections that are washed out or simply underwater). Instead of 3 laps -- which is hard enough to convince my not-a-lap-runner mind to do -- it was more like 5 laps to get a decent workout, by which point I would rather be stuck in traffic.

So I branched out into town, where the local lake promised an alternative “lap”. Now that I’m familiar with that trail -- and some of the nearby roads -- I understand where I went wrong, but on my first foray into this circumnavigation, I was almost immediately and intensely lost. With a knee hardly up to 8-milers, I ended up doing one while getting turned around in the most assuredly non-orthogonal streets off the southeast tip of the lake, having prematurely exited the lake path. By the time I got back after that first trip to Greenbelt Lake, I was covered in sweat and cursing the poor design of the neighborhoods. (I still get lost back there; they truly are a maze of confusion.)

But I would not be deterred! Next up was the trek to the hill side of town, the north section of Greenbelt proper. I crossed the road and took what, to my untrained eye, looked like a sort of industrial road up. On that first voyage, I encountered something feared by any runner: a dog protecting a No Trespassing area that I was obliged to either cross through (by jumping a small gate) or dodge with a 1-mile detour.

I chose the former, hurdling the gate and sprinting all-out to get back to the normal roads. That little jaunt ended up taking me by the local elementary school, where I waved cordially to the crossing guards as though nothing had happened. Again, the run went long, and my knee began to suffer the consequences.

A week later, I discovered what would become a regular destination: a series of trails in the woods abutting a Department of Agriculture plot of land. These trails wound into the forest, dipping across streams and coursing up rises, sometimes running straight into chain link fences. A couple years after my first trips in these woods, I discovered that there were places beyond the fences, places where a runner could actually go on DoA land quite unwittingly and end up in severe confusion about which way is “out”. But that was later.

These trails provided a regular release, and a return to the running of old. Soft after rain, sometimes slick with mud, they apparently beckoned only me, and I would drop into the woods and enjoy ducking and weaving around trees and branches, enduring scraping bushes that sprouted willy-nilly across the path, taking wrong turns and right turns and thoroughly exploring those woods. In spite of these travels (and trevails), I regularly spanned only a few of the trails, often finding myself on new paths that dumped me in altogether unexpected places.

I went on a lot of long runs that spring and summer, and by the time fall rolled around my knee was constantly sore, the scar tissue a little tingly to the touch. But I felt strong and capable.

Every year, twice a year (April and October), Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt holds a 2-mile race. It was that October that introduced me to the race, my first experience slamming through such a short distance. Just getting to the race was an ordeal, as a person without a badge had to establish a contact inside NASA and get a visitor badge at the front gate. Fortunately, my company worked heavily with Goddard people, so it was just a matter of finding someone lucky enough to pop by the security booth and stand there while I signed the paperwork.

When I arrived at the race start, I had no idea what to expect -- as, indeed, most of the attendees also didn’t, since the course was temporarily re-routed for construction. I lined up a couple rows back from the line at the starting gun and took off, immediately stopped by the crush of slow joggers in front of me. Unlike every other race I’d been in, the sorting here was entirely haphazard, with what looked like pedestrians pushing their way forward so they could perhaps cross the start line (which was also the finish) just a couple seconds before everyone else. As a result, the race was an instantaneous traffic jam -- one that I swiftly sprinted around on the verge on the outside. Having established my lace in the top dozen or so runners, I inched my way up to 9th with a relatively slow 12:25. I went on to post a best time of 11:22 in that race in the spring of 2015, a reasonable showing but one that my 26-year old self would have beaten handily. We’ll get there.

That fall I also learned the riding route to the office, and it was far uglier than the previous one. The frustrating part of that ride was in Washington, D.C., where drivers and pedestrians turn into gawking idiots in the presence of monuments. It’s a dangerous town, but not like, say, Sao Paolo is a dangerous town; it’s a dangerous town because cars can wreck a bike with a split-second mistake and pedestrians can cause an accident through careless inattention. Even though the distance to work hadn’t changed, my new bike time was 20 minutes longer than the old one.

That winter, I ran everywhere in Greenbelt. As spring approached, I made it a goal to get fast at distance. It wasn’t that I wanted to compete, I just wanted to be able to point to metrics showing improvement. It’s all in the numbers. I started with 10 miles, turning up the jets until that was a 1:10 effort. Then I added the other 3 and change miles to get up to a half marathon, timing these runs until they came down to 1:35. I was once again in top form. If only I had someone to race.

The summer passed. It simply was. I have no firm recollections of it, and there are no race results from it until October, probably because I was still working on the work and just holding onto whatever fitness I had with standard daily 6k trips and “long” weekend 10k outings.

Regardless of the reason for the gap, it was ended by the other event put on by Goddard, the 10k around Greenbelt Lake. This event was so cheap that they didn’t bother charging: if you showed up, you could drop $5, join the club, and get a number, or you could just join the race for free. The 10k mysteriously used to fall the week after the 2-mile, so if you did one it was hard to get excited for the other. In 2013, I saw the 2-mile as a waste of time -- it was simply too short -- but the 10k was appropriate, and a good way to compete. I joined with no idea how I would do, thinking 42 minutes was a good goal.

The race is almost 5 laps around the lake, which makes for convenient race strategies. In particular, I moved up until I was in 5th position, ran along with the 4th-place guy for a while, then overtook him on Lap 2, figuring I could leapfrog my way up. The runner in 3rd place was quick, and I gave him a bit of a dangle, treating the situation like a bike race: when a racer knows you’re right behind them, they try harder, meaning the faster person will win if the engagement is long; if a racer doesn’t know you’re behind them, you’ll both hold a more relaxed pace and a later move can net a short-term faster racer the win even if they would fail over a longer timespan. Strategically, then, I wanted to push him only in the last 2k or so.

We hit the final lap at a solid pace, and he kicked it up a small amount in anticipation of the race finish. I kicked it up a little more and closed the gap, cutting it from about 20 meters to maybe 10 before he moved up to my speed. I hung on, pushed hard, laid down the rubber, and so on. But he was simply a faster runner, and he knew what I was doing. As we hit the 200 meter mark, he accelerated again, and I couldn’t keep up. He came away 5 seconds ahead, but I still posted a 39:47, a solid time for a 34-year old with a reconstructed ACL.

That guy was named Jake, and he semi-coached a group of Goddard runners. We talked after the race, and he gave me his email, suggesting I should join his ragtag bunch of underdogs. We shot a few emails back and forth, talked on the phone once, and a month after the Goddard 10k, I met the crew at the lake and started training for realsies, a first in my running career.

Team members included a half dozen regulars -- along with Jake (already mentioned in that paragraph right up there, immediately prior to this one, because I was introducing his role and...oh, you found it. Good then.) -- as well as a half dozen more irregulars. It wasn’t a huge group, and people came and went as they pleased, sometimes showing up for a month before disappearing back into the general Maryland racing scene.

But there was some cohesiveness. For the next year or so I was a Goddard runner, and I did some things for that group that I didn’t do for anyone else. We will come to that, my friends.

Next up: Competitive development.

Mash out. Spin on.