Remembering Who We Are

As A waited in the corral for our team to start running the Tahoe trail relay, someone in the crowd shouted to another runner, “Remember who you are!”

That is my favorite piece of unintentionally insulting coaching advice (“play within yourself” being a close number two).  It would be one thing if I could remember I am Joan Benoit.  Instead, hearing that only succeeds in reminding me that I am a middle-aged recreational athlete with a chocolate habit.

Turns out, not far into the first leg of our relay, A was quickly reminded that he is a sea-level street runner with limited trail experience.  He was also reminded that running up elevation, at elevation, is hard to train for when you live on the coast.  After keeping pace with the elite trail runners for over half a hilly mile, A was felled by lack of oxygen and a steep trek the wrong way up a ski slope.  And that’s how my excellent-runner husband – he who ran nine road miles in under seven-minute pace, he of the never-quit mentality, the FIDO yin to my FYIT* yang – ended up walking.

In fairness, not a single person actually ran up that hill, including the experienced trail runners.  As someone who later did that hill three separate times, the trail turned into a slow-moving human escalator of deflated athletic aspiration.  The brutal inclines reduced all the competitors into zombies, shell-shocked by the difficulty of the task they didn’t realize they were getting into.  My friend M said seeing the numb trudge of racers slowly crawling up the mountain was like watching “Night of the Living Dead”.

What we didn’t know about this type of trail running is that the speed comes from barnstorming the downhill.  And, having not practiced the technique of racing down sandy inclines or steep drop offs made of loose gravel and rolling boulders, that is not something we were about to do.  So our pace suffered.  And suffered.  And suffered.

But the good news was that we were not alone.

*FYIT: Fuck You, I’m Tired