Ever on & on

I had been running 2.5 miles already as I started the familiar loop around a small lake. I cruised along, clad in a reflective vest and using a headlamp to illuminate the feet of path in front of me and to be sure drivers and bikers could see me.

There didn’t seem to be as many runners as normal. It was dark and a bit later than my usual time. Though it had let up by now, the rain had been rather heavy earlier. I passed a pair of women heading in the opposite direction, and then was alone again.

I continued. Unexpectedly a figure emerged from the shadows of the path ahead, clad head to toe in black, face mostly hidden by a dark cap. I tensed. It took only a few seconds, honestly probably fractions of a second, to process that this was just another pedestrian—light bounced off the tiny reflective logo, hands in pockets and head tucked down against the cool air and the drizzle of the night, traveling a straight line, no sudden or unexpected movements.

Though my feet kept moving, there was a brief debate in my head. This was one of the “better” parts of the path. The trail I was on is literally next to the road. Some of the parallel streets are heavily trafficked, others often quiet, but if something were amiss, would any drivers even notice? The trees and bushes along the way aren’t densely packed, but they are sizable, large enough to obscure a figure in the dark.

I decided to keep going. This was fear not caution, and I wasn’t cutting my run short for that. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the scenario. Kelly Herron fought off an attacker in another Seattle park two years ago. Three women runners have been grabbed and groped, not far from where I was running, in recent months. Nationally there have been many others, women harassed, assaulted, disappeared, murdered just going out for a run.

When something prompts me to run through the scenarios and the precedents, the fear doesn’t last very long before it turns to anger. When something happens to a woman runner (and other women as well), there’s a chorus of scolding and advice, not just for the victim but for all women engaging in similar activities.

She shouldn’t run alone.

She shouldn’t run at that time of day/night.

She should carry pepper spray.

She shouldn’t run there.

She should take a self-defense class.

She shouldn’t be distracted by music.

She should be alert at all times.

She… she… she…

Broadly I’m the sort of person who considers risks and what I can do to mitigate them. But I run for the joy of it. I don’t want to carry a reminder of my insignificance. I know that these are relatively rare events, but I also know that, should anything ever happen, I will, in many eyes, bear some responsibility for it.

Then I see men post about lacing up and heading out for a late night run. By appearances, they don’t give it a second thought. They may even laud the tranquility of the hour. I wonder whether anyone’s warned them about the dangers of their activities.

Or is it just the women who are supposed to guard themselves in the spaces we dare to take up in the world?

On its surface, the mantra “write everyday” makes sense. Make writing a habit. It doesn’t matter what you write about, just write. It builds the writing “muscles”. 

But I’ve never been any good at it. It takes just a quick glance at the archives here to see I’ve never been a model blogger. Consistent, predictable post frequency has never been my strong suit. Over the last few years in particular, I’ve been sporadic at best.

It’s not so much about finding the time. The time is there if I wanted it. It’s about finding the focus and the followthrough.

Some days I want to write, but there are too many ideas competing. I might start with one, but then it fizzles. It didn’t have as much fuel as I thought. Or I try to bring together a couple of things that seem connected in my head, but I just can’t seem to thread them together eloquently.

Other times I find that I need more preparation, more time. I need to read up on a topic to give it the treatment I desire. I worry about being wrong or expressing myself clumsily.

The folder of forgotten drafts speaks volumes about these scenarios.

Then there are the days like this, when I’ve set aside a time to write and nothing clicks. The prompts don’t spark ideas that I want to actually pursue. I try to think of something else to write on, to recall one of the topics from the collection when I’ve had competing ideas, just to find my mind blank. I might even look back to electronic notes I’ve jotted down of things I once considered exploring, but I find no interest in delving into them today, or maybe ever.

So I stare at a blank screen a while. Maybe I wander to Feedly or Twitter, perhaps hoping some inspiration will hit there but knowing that’s unlikely to happen. My head—or maybe it’s my heart—just isn’t in it that day.

The difference today is that I made some unspoken commitment to myself to write more, to reconnect with this act that has, in the past, brought me joy and clarity.

I’ve written 350 words about the Step 1 challenge of writing. That’s not even all the words I’ve written today. A hundred others were typed and deleted before these. There’s a hesitation even to post these.

Perhaps the only reason that I’ll hit that Publish button today is that indistinct pledge I made and some sense that putting this into the ether will make me a little more accountable to it tomorrow. It’s certainly not perfection. I’m not sure that it’s even progress. But it’s something, and maybe that’s all I need to keep the momentum going forward. Or maybe it stalls out tomorrow, but that’s not the work for today.

Since Saturdays oft entail an early start and a lot of running (almost six hours on trails yesterday), I’ve decided that Saturday will be my “rest day” from Januwordy. For Sunday, I’ll pick from the four prompts of the weekend (or something else if I’m not feeling them). This post brings together two: “deceive” and “course”.

Around the time I started driving regularly, MapQuest became a thing. It was a fantastic tool. Plug in the start and end points, choose the route, and print out the turn-by-turn directions. No more squinting at maps with small markings and using measuring tools to figure out distances. A few years later, I had a GPS gizmo in my vehicle, so I didn’t even have to print anything. Within a few more years, my phone had a GPS transceiver and Google Maps on board. Over time, more options and information were added to Google Maps, and it became a useful tool for driving, and in some locales, public transit, walking, and biking.

We’ve come to rely on these devices and applications. They’re wonderful tools not just for getting from point A to point B by the fast route. Through integration with other apps like RunGo, MapMyRun, and GarminConnect, we can plot our own course, meandering through places, playing with distances and elevations, choosing routes to take us by points of interest.

These technological solutions work great—when they have good data. Good data abound in municipalities and places that are easily accessible by car. If you begin to venture into more “remote” areas, natural areas and forest accessible only by foot or bike, the data quality at the heart of Google Maps—and thus the utility of the tools relying on it—begins to break down.

Here is Google Maps view of the trail system in a Washington state park.

Admittedly it carries more detail than I might have expected. But let’s take a look at another representation of the same area (from AllTrails).

The first thing you might notice is that Google’s version is missing several trails. You might also notice that Google’s version lacks a bit of detail in the trails it does have, essentially showing a smoothed curve version of the trails.

There are two problems here.

The simplified map means that you will come to intersections that don’t exist or look different in Google’s map. Trails are confusing enough as is, and unknown forks become more challenging to navigate. It looks like the mapped course goes straight, but is it the one to the left that heads down hill or the one to the right that heads up the mountain and sort of parallel?

Even if you’re paying attention or have an app/device to tell you you’re off course, you’re still spending time retracing your steps and adding distance beyond what you planned.

The other problem is related to planning. Hiking and biking trails tend to wind a bit and have switchbacks to take you up and down hills (the 10-15% grade on switchbacks is probably preferable to tumbling down a 40% grade for the most part). Google Maps lacks a lot of that detail, which translates to shorter expected distance than actual distance—sometimes by more than 10%. From a physical fitness and planning perspective, that might not mean much when you’re talking about three or four miles, especially if they’re flat. But 10 or 20 when you’re heading up and down a mountain? That kind of accuracy probably isn’t dangerous if you prepare for the unexpected (as one should on trails), but it can be painful.

The truth is, even good maps suffer these issues but to a far lesser degree. And of course no map is immune to trail changes—washouts, closures, detours, reroutes—that haven’t been reported yet.

This turned a bit more technical than I’d planned, and if you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. Somewhere in my head (which is currently muddled by running 28 miles with 5500 ft vertical gain over two sessions in ~26 hours), this connects to life more broadly.

Throughout life, we often look for guidance, something or someone to show us the way to where we need or want to be. Advice can be incredibly valuable but also unwittingly deceptive. Sometimes advisor doesn’t have (and never had) the full picture, either of the individual or the environment. Sometimes the landscape has changed. New paths have emerged, while others have become more difficult to traverse. We can fall into a false sense of, perhaps not security, but knowing. We come prepared to face challenges, even planning for the unexpected. Yet somehow we still fail to account for errors between the expected and the actual and are surprised by how long (or how far) the planned course takes us. We also might not appreciate the physical, mental, or emotional toll that it’s going to take.

Even the best laid course, perfectly executed, won’t match precisely with the plan or the vision. Some of its error in the tools we use to plan. Some of its error in the tools we use to measure our effort. Ultimately we have to decide how to manage our expectations and what metrics truly matter.

The further we went, the more anxious I became. We had been hiking up for this mountain face a while, the pace slowing as the incline became steeper. We began to occasionally find trickles of water creating icy rocks, here in the shadow of the peak almost a mile and a half above sea level.

When we’d made the decision to start up the slope, our goal had been to reach the pass so we could get a view of the other side. But as we got nearer the top, the slower our progress. Fellow trail users who’d been here before would proclaim, “This is the worst of it. Not far now!” Yet another section would come, even steeper or more technical or coated in water, liquid or ice. And still the peak loomed above us.

Eventually we decided that, as the saying goes, “Discretion is the better part of valor.” We were already exhausted. Though we could see the top, we couldn’t see the end. And we still had to retrace our steps before darkness fell. So we turned back without reaching the pass. We had “failed”.

It wasn’t all for naught though. We had managed to ascend far enough to be rewarded with an amazing panoramic view of the lake and mountains below.

We set our sights on pinnacles. There are promises—spoken and unspoken—of renumeration, perhaps power and influence, awe. But if we’re honest with ourselves, how much of the draw is in the challenge itself? In being able to say, “I did this,” and knowing that some small number of people (relatively speaking) have been here?

In youth (and even later, maybe even our lifetime), we tend to focus on completion. It is, of course, a critical component of being… done and accomplishing something in this world.

At some point though, we will fall short of the target we set ourselves. We willingly take on, what is at least for ourselves, an audacious goal and find that we just don’t have what we need to see it through to its finish.

At least not today.

But the attempt is not fruitless. At least it doesn’t have to be. We learn something when we fail. We take away a better understanding of what we need to finish so that, maybe, we can come back and try it again. We discover what our limits are at this point and in this part of our lives. We grow strength, knowledge, and skills from the effort itself, which will serve us in what we do tomorrow or next month or even in years to come—if we choose to build on the gains of today.

If you like the photos in this week’s posts and/or are interested in topics like running, trails in the Pacific Northwest, or a couple deciding to take on an ultramarathon, check out the other blog I contribute to: Boundary Conditions.

There is a massive, lucrative market in selling secrets.

Not the espionage sort, or at least I can’t speak to the scale of that market. No, I mean the secrets to… take your pick: professional success, a better body, finding your soulmate, running faster (or further), making friends, being the life of the party, retiring at 40, working on your passion, having it all. (I refrained from adding “air” quotes because I quickly realized they’d be littered across the list.)

There is an incredible demand for the secrets of life, of personal betterment. The evidence is on shelves of bookstores, scattered across Self-Help, Fitness, Business, and other categories. In pages of the magazines by the supermarket register and touted on their covers. In article titles that flit by on Twitter. In questions that are asked at nearly every career forum/panel.

We long, even at times are desperate for, those secrets (or by other names: cheat codes, formulas, lifehacks). At some point, though, if we are lucky have been paying attention, we realize there are no infallible codes to finding or achieving what we seek. We come to understand that those success stories that sell are a product of particular set of circumstances—personality, privilege, opportunity, skills, environment, context, and even a bit of luck.

There is no one-size-fits-all, or even one-size-fits-most, solution. That’s not to say that we can’t learn something from others’ stories. In some cases, it might be a lesson, an idea, or an inspiration that we bring to bear on our own scenario. In other cases, it could be the opposite: We see what the “secret way” cost someone (financially or otherwise) or see that there’s no way it would work for us and decide that we are going to find another way.

There are almost surefire ways to fail. It’s incredibly rare that someone who never runs can just go out and run a marathon. People don’t make friends by never engaging with anyone. Finding our to “success” (however we might define that) can take many forms. But when we see others “failing” or struggling, it doesn’t mean they’re not trying; many encounter systemic barriers or don’t have certain types of privilege. Just as there are often overlooked contributors to success, so too the obstacles can be invisible, especially to those of us looking in from the outside. What if we strived to understand those secrets too?

Each of us is a product of many elements. Life is full of trial and error. We may glean some strategies to try from others, but ultimately we won’t find our way through using a formula that someone is all too eager to sell us.