Hugh Trenchard

If Georgia were not a place, but a representation of inner conflict, then for me at this moment I could kneel before it and humbly ask it to relent, or I could run frantically roughshod all over it with a steamroller of desire bent on flattening it or pressing it under, but watching it, like a sponge only to rise up again in every place I had just been.

There is a thing in Albany, Georgia, a thing called a marathon. It happens in a little over a week, on March 7. There is a number prepared for me, perhaps with my name on it, I don’t know; but the entry having been sent some months ago, by now, I am sure of this much at least: there is a number reserved for me, and it will be laid out on a table among a few thousand others. If it is not retrieved by me, it will be gathered up with those few others whose owners did not show, and cast out or used again next year.

There are kilometres in my legs, many hundreds of them. There are a few races in my legs and injuries that have come and gone; illnesses borne and shucked off, and new shoes and insoles and socks and all the old clothing that have soaked many pounds of water and sweat, and cycled through their countless go-rounds in the tumblers of driers and washing machines.

There is even a little fire in the belly, a smaller one perhaps than the one required to stoke the furnace that drives the engine of sacrifice for the cause of running 26 miles in some distant place on the Eastern seaboard that is both a place on earth as real as the keyboard on which I type, and a monument to the voice that lingers and says “why are you doing this, you are not even ready for it, and the cost is substantial, and the travel is long, and perhaps the ways are deep and the weather sharp”; but these last two things only if the voice that lingers was swept into a melancholy mood that found itself reciting an Eliotesque landscape to convey the perception of a very long journey, a journey made long only by the conflict it bore along the way.

But still there are shoes and socks and shirts and a number that waits for me, and a thousand kilometres and a few races in these legs. But there is not yet a flight on which they will travel, though, and for that, if they will make the journey through Georgia, the monument of my current conflict, to the city of Albany, then perhaps there will be something more for me to write about when I return.

Perhaps that will make all the difference.

An aged man is a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless soul clap its hands and sing
And louder sing for every tatter
In its mortal dress

- WB Yeats

As my racing summaries have been pretty scarce of late, I thought I might cast out a brief mid-winter update to stir things up just a little.

The First Half half-marathon on Sunday February 15, was my third running race of 2009, following on the Cobble Hill 10k and the Saanich 8km in January.

After managing to put in consistent mileage in November and December, during which I logged over 1000km for those two months combined, the consistency began to break down soon after the Saanich 8km in early January. The day following I began to encounter niggling plantar facsiitis and achilles problems. Although I have largely managed to keep these problems under control, it has come at the cost of consistency. Coupled with that was a bout of the flu leading up to the First Half.

So far I have only been especially happy with the 8km race, where things were looking rather up after racing sub 27 minutes off steady mileage and no real structured training. The other two races have been reasonable, but not to the standard my first race indicated was possible.

Nonetheless, not having raced the First Half in several years, it was great fun to be there, and I bumped into a few people and saw names reminding me of the few seasons in Vancouver when I ran many races there.

I seem to recall the last time I ran the First Half, perhaps 10 years ago or more (I was living in Victoria by then), when I was through in 1:14 something, with a best time on the course being a 1:12 something in 1994, when I was actually third overall. Being the Provincial half-marathon championships that year, I won my only Championship medal in a purely running event. These last few years, 1:12 barely gets you top 10.

And being reminded of that finishing time brings me to recall that same year – that glorious year which now seems nearly a lifetime ago – when I ran my PB 10km time of 32.40, which I ran twice that year; my PB 1/2 marathon of 1:10 (North Shore 1/2) and when I ran 2:31 in the Vancouver Marathon, winning the top BC, all-paid trip to run the Honolulu marathon. Colin Dignum was/is also from BC but his 2:22 that year earned him the top Canadian spot, and for that he went to run the international star-studded Fukuoka marathon. In all honesty, I’d rather have gone to the tropical warmth of Honolulu and not Fukuoka, even if I could have run as fast as Colin did that year.

That was my first big trip overseas. I arrived to a golden full moon and my own massive two bed room overlooking the pitch blue Hawaiian ocean and over three days got chaperoned around with some of the top marathon runners in the world at the time. The Honolulu marathon itself was a sidelight and I remember little of it aside from the 5:30 am start and fleeting images in the darkness and the rising sun.

In 1994 I also set the course record (55.24) on the road run up Mt. Seymour, and the last time I checked a couple of years ago, it still hadn’t been broken. Perhaps it has been since.

Having just identified 1994 in Vancouver as my single best running year and lauded a few proud achievements, this is surely a sign that, after having reached the age of 40 in October, I acknowledge my best running achievements are behind me. 1:15.33 being my time at this year’s First Half, a time that once I would have thought to be nearly disastrous, now I will accept and say, yes, that was ok. And even if there is a grain of disappointment etched in that marginally positive statement, disappointment rolls like water off a forty year-old back.

Don’t get me wrong: look around at the fittest forty year-olds you know and ask yourself if they don’t look much the same as many of the fittest thirty year-olds you know. Nor do I feel anywhere near being past my athletic prime. I can, just as easily as anyone, delude myself and know with great sincerity that I still can replicate performances of previous years. Just give me the proper base period free from injury, and Bob will be my uncle.

And that is not a delusion, it is simply a fact, I say without a hint of cynicism. All the same, it is surely also true that, if I truly thought 1994 could be replicated in 2009 or any year subsequently, I probably would not feel the need to write it out here and now: I loved the First Half this year, not because I ran it very fast, but because it has, in 2009, given me the chance to write about 1994, that glorious year.