nature’s first green

To follow a training plan is to work magic on your own body. I can see the evidence of the magic in my posts on Strava during my last marathon training cycle. Describing a 15-mile run on August 18: “An awful slog. In the tenth mile I knew I didn’t have another park loop in me.” Describing another run two weeks later: “17-miler DONE! 😩” And then, the week after that: “18 miles! And I feel fine?” I remember that 18-mile run, marveling in the fifteenth or sixteenth mile that I felt great, in what I call the Steve Rogers Zone (“I can do this all day”)—not at all as I had been feeling running similar distances in previous weeks.

This spring, as I’ve been working through my training plan for the Brooklyn Half Marathon, I’ve been feeling despondent. My regular runs often feel too slow, and my tempo runs too hard. Maybe the magic won’t happen this time. Maybe I’m finally too old, it’s all over.

From time to time I perceive glimmers of magic. Maybe the sky is gloomy and I’m kind of bored, but I feel good anyway. Or it’s the very end of a very long run that took me out to the ocean and back, and I find I have the energy to sustain an ambitious half-marathon pace for three miles. But it’s never all magic all the time, and I’ve got to get out there again and again all the same.

I wish that I could enjoy the early weeks of a training plan as I enjoy the early weeks of spring. There’s a bit of desperation to my enjoyment of it, actually. My favorite flowers come and go so fast. Though I am 💯 Team Chaucer and staunchly against T.S. Eliot’s nonsense about the cruelty of April, I do find every year that spring is an occasion for me to write yet another poem (or two or more) about death. I suppose that Frost best captures the bittersweetness of the time.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I think a lot about theories of change these days, even as I see and feel change everywhere. How spring unfurls slowly and then all at once. How my willingness to slog through twelve or more miles on a gloomy Sunday in March is what makes a great race possible—never guaranteed, but possible—in May. I haven’t yet read Erica Chenoweth on civil resistance (I’ve lately been reading Julie Anne Long’s Pennyroyal Green series, Marci Shore on the Euromaidan, and Bernadette Mayer), but their findings on its effectiveness make intuitive sense to me. The work and the fruits of the work are the same. How could it be otherwise?