It's a question I'm asked with great regularity, especially by people I haven't seen for a while. It's a way to break the ice - an easy conversation starter. Yet there's a smarty little part of me that wants to answer, "Are you still brushing your teeth?" Now, that's not very nice, but what I'd really like to say is, "Yes, I am still running, because after 40 years, it's as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth, and honestly, I hope to keep on running until the day I can no longer hoist a toothbrush to my mouth".
I didn't run in high school or college or during the years when my children were very young. But when I turned 35, I read an article about how the "first hundred miles are the hardest," and I began to run. I did it in the dark, in time to be home to get four kids off to school, and because in the early seventies, women who ran were enough of an oddity that it was best done in the dark. Only four or five years earlier, Kathryn Switzer registered with initials only, wore a hooded sweatshirt, and hid in the bushes because women were not allowed in the Boston Marathon. In 1980 when I ran in Boston, there was a qualifying time for women over 40 only because I wrote to the race director and asked what he had against older women. Will Clooney wrote back and said that if I could run a 3:30 marathon, I'd be welcome in Boston. I did it with 30 seconds to spare.
My one mile-every-day jaunts in the dark ended after I entered my first race at age 40, a 10k. I had a little success, and for the first time in my life, realized that maybe I was competitive, and maybe that was okay. Because I came to running late, my competition has always been with myself, to see how well I can do. It's one of the many things I love about the sport. More often than not, runners offer encouragement when they pass each other. As recently as last September I was helped to run a faster than expected 10-mile time because of a stranger who helped me out by setting a speedy pace and sticking with me.
Running isn't a sport that suits everyone, but for me it provides an uncomplicated way to stay in shape, enjoy fresh air every day, maintain a decent weight, and be in touch with a whole community of people who feel the same way. Races get the adrenaline going, and are often a chance to visit new places and meet new friends.
As the years go by, I am ever more grateful for the benefits of running and for the fact that I can still do it. I now have the pleasure of running with grandchildren. It doesn't get any better than that. I look forward to sharing some running experiences and a few tips for getting started and staying committed to my favorite sport in future columns.
I've had a lifelong affinity for frugality and the quirky habits that go along with squeezing every possible bit of value out of what I own. I cut toothpaste tubes in half and scoop out the remains, save chicken bones to make soup, and have to monitor by ever-growing plastic container collection carefully.
My love affair with compost is related to my penchant for making things do double duty. I get a kick out of depositing food scraps in a corner of my yard and watching them--with the help of worms, weather and a little water, turn into a nutritious, aerating addition to my garden. That which had no value, in time, becomes something of value.
Some of my clothes are very old--including a red nylon windbreaker that has been part of my wardrobe for fifty-seven years, given to me by my parents when I was 13. It is this jacket that I have used the most, and loved the most. A yellowed shoelace replaces the original drawstring for the hood. Seams gap open here and there causing little wisps of fraying red fabric to dangle from a sleeve and a shoulder. On the pocket flap, I prize the small holes where ski tow tickets were once stapled.
Soon nylon wind breakers were eclipsed by down, Gore-tex, polypropylene, and polar fleece. Where a heavy sweater under a windbreaker was once sufficient, now, it seems, you need a "system" consisting of several layers of just the right kind of wicking, waffled, wind-resistant fabric. But I have sweated up Pikes Peak and down the Grand Canyon on my two feet and ridden from Iowa to Maine on two skinny wheels. Like an old friend, my jacket, my Grand Old Rag, stuck with me.
I averaged a C in art every year I was in school until I didn't have to take art any more. I possess some limited skills with a pen, such as making very small dots and drawing lines. But the tea bags are different. What I do with tea bags, marking pens, glitter and paint is not art, but it is something--maybe dogged perseverance or procrastination from more onerous tasks. I don't know. What I know is that I can spend hours designing and creating artsy little squares and rectangles that look surprisingly pleasant mounted on a note card and surrounded by a simple gold or black inked frame...
I began to experiment with different kinds of bags. At first the square ones, unencumbered by strings and staples seemed best, but I soon discovered that any bag would work. Some bags arrive on my doorstep, delivered by friends, after a week or so in a plastic bag, vaguely smelly and beginning to mold. The stains on these aged bags in-spire abstract designs...Rejuvenating tea bags has become my passion--one that satisfied my re-use gene and feeds a lurking entrepreneurial bent as well. These days there are no bags, only tons of tea leaves flying out my back door into the compost pile.
Using up and reusing defines me, I guess. It satisfies something deep inside me to see how long an item can remain useful and to figure out new ways to use things that would otherwise meet their end in the trash heap.
It's easy to exchange money for new clothes or printed cards. But I think I'll go on using and reusing, hanging on to my old clothes and saving tea bags to make note cards and book marks. And maybe, in some small way, the world will be a better place.
Odwalla. Hill Billy. Cherokee Purple. Brandywine.
I'd never tried to grow an heirloom variety. Too difficult, I'd read. And so I stuck to Big Boy, Early Girl, Celebrity, and when harvest time came, I never could remember what was what and I didn't much care.
Until last summer. By August the small plot of land that had once been my back yard was under siege by a series of tomato explosions. On and on they went, rising up and covering my new windy path through the garden, obstructing my accustomed route to the tool area and compost pile, crawling overland toward my tiny patio. I wanted to yell help, but instead I kept my harvesting basket close by and dutifully picked for weeks and weeks.
I begged friends, neighbors, even casual passersby, to take home a few tomatoes. I made salsa and spaghetti sauce, and ate tomato sandwiches every day for lunch for what seemed like a lifetime. I fried, baked, broiled, and ate 'em right off the vine.
I'd been trying to decide what I'd add to my back garden this year, when I got a call from Tim, my favorite dumpster diver. "Hey, you need any tomato plants? "I've got more than I can use."
"Sure," I said, and before I knew it, Tim was in my back yard unloading flat after flat of not only heirloom tomato plants but banana peppers, and several kinds of basil, all scavenged from a dumpster. The plants looked a little bedraggled, but they were certainly far from dead. "Why in the world would someone throw away flats and flats of perfectly good plants?" I asked.
"Who knows," he said, resigned after long years at his avocation to the mystery of why people throw away--rather than give away or recycle--perfectly good, useable items.
So began the summer of the tomato. Those plants loved my place. Where mediocre tomatoes had grown before, huge luscious monsters emerged. Probably I watered them more. Probably my new organic soil was just what they needed. Who knows?
Next year, I'll be older and wiser, and I'll be more careful about the number of cast-off tomato plants I allow into my yard.