RUNNING HUNGRY

"A second 10K for world hunger?" asked Tim Hewitt after we'd run the 6.2 mile CROP Walk route.



"In these old sneakers?" I moaned, feet burning from the May Day blacktop already bubbling in the early summer at the edge of tidewater Virginia.

__________

Tim was my new running buddy during our late senior year at Randolph-Macon College. A former cross-country star at his Fort Bragg high school, he had watched with interest as I used distance running to make the transition from football to pre-med after my sister's brain tumor and my father's first fatal heart attack.

"Ready to kick it up a notch?" he inquired one lazy spring Sunday after our all-nighters, his at our fraternity's pajama party, mine bent over physics and organic chemistry. 

"No but let's go anyway" I answered. "I need to clear my head before tomorrow's exam."

Tim proceeded to coax five miles out of my coffee-soaked lungs for my first really long run. And to my surprise, the mathematical solutions to end-of-chapter problems were much clearer during that night's session at the science building.

___________

"One step at a time" he coached as we passed the sign-out table.

"Double...or nothing...for Biafra" I gasped, wincing into a plodding jog that would get me through my first marathon.

TWENTY-ONE WINDMILLS

"Out 4 a 5 miler, c u later?" I text to an interesting woman I'd been seeing since the feast of Saint Nicholas.

"Have a good run, the electric blanket's on" she replies.

_______________

It had been a good run since sparks had started flying three weeks earlier. She was wound tight by two absentee courtiers and I was in dire need of unwinding a year after a traumatic marital separation.

"A lonely Saturday without my daughter", she posted on Facebook on a morning that I was feeling the same.

"How about a country drive to a potter's open-house?" I messaged.

"I'm in the shower."

"Be right there!"

_______________

Stretching hamstrings on my mailbox post, I spot the STOP sign in front of her house two blocks away, an inspiration to run fast to get home quickly. 

Setting out down the blacktop, I cut through a meadow where we had walked with her Brittany spaniel on a frosty Sunday morning.

Jogging back into town along Church Street, I try to avoid looking at the little yellow house that her ex-husband still lives in.

Heading out McElheny Lane, I pass the Confederate Cemetery where we had walked on the first white Christmas anyone could remember.

The sun is setting as I lean into the uphill back into town along Route 60. I stop at the western hump above Lewisburg for the 360 degree view of the Greenbrier Valley and surrounding mountains. Standing in front of the Sunset Terrace Motel, where I had slept away those first two lonely weeks after moving out, I spot fiery glints of sunlight on the distant hilltops to the north.

"It's a 21 windmill run" I quickly post onto Facebook before taking off toward town with visions of long slow nights dancing in my head.

"With many more to come" she responds before I even hit the shower.

BLACK WATER

"Old black water, keep on rollin'" sings my new old girlfriend reciting the Doobie Brothers song from our college days as she dips her fingers into the steely Greenbrier River on our May Day run.

_______________

It was her first West Virginia visit and our first public appearance since reconnecting after my heart-wrenching separation from a seventeen year marriage. As 18-year-old freshmen at Randolph-Macon College, she and I had been drawn together like opposing poles of two magnets. Somehow, in the rush of her new friends and field hockey and my football and fraternity, that attraction only sparked an occasional brush at parties. Now our careers and marriages had taken parallel paths but four hours apart. 

The temptation of meeting somewhere in the middle landed us with a dream of a new life in Charlottesville. The only problems I could initially see were two teenagers whose high school lives I'd be leaving by starting over elsewhere. The elder would soon be off to college, but my eighth grade daughter still needed her father nearby.

_______________

The river is still frigid with snow melt from the higher elevations to the north. We turn back south on the Greenbrier River Trail, following the current that is running dark just before the spring algae bloom turns it moss green.

"This is where I almost lost Ella one April" I gasp, pointing out the bluff where her bike had gone head-over-heels to miss her stalled 10-year-old brother. "She was caught by the greening branches on top of that little tree." 

"It's great you were there for her" she soothes, falling into her therapist's voice.

"I still am" I huff. 

On the night she leaves, my middle brother comes to me in a dream:

"Dave, you can never go back." 

I awake the next morning knowing I'm not yet ready for a new life, in West Virginia or elsewhere.

BEAR FOOTIN'

"We missed the downhill trail, now what?" asked Zia when we finally realized our 6-mile ridge run at Sherwood Lake had already gone at least 8-miles.

________________

The run had been confounding from the start when I misinterpreted his call for a short run before the summer solstice picnic with our spouses. Envisioning a shady four miler on the cool hardwood forest trail around the lake, I had neglected to pack food or water. He offered to share so I assented to his diversion up a steep switchback connector to the upper ridge trail. There we ambled through brambles and scrambled over boulders in the midday heat of the highest sun of the year, briefly stopping for occasional sips from his water bottle, nibbles on his trail mix stash, or gorges on low bush blueberries. It turned out we weren't the only ones who had discovered the ripe berries.

Trudging along the rocky trail, we were startled by a blur of dark movement just ahead. Two smaller smudges scrambled through the underbrush to our right. In that life-or-death instant, we both called upon all we had ever learned about bears. We froze until all movement stopped. We crept slowly backward as a big black snout poked up into the air. We moved slowly to stand side-by-side. We spread our arms to enlarge our appearance. We were ready to roar but, instead of charging, the big sow ran toward her startled cubs. They watched her gallop past and then waddled up a semi-fallen log. The thrashing down the ridge soon faded so we tiptoeing past the dark puffballs, their frightened whines just audible over a little breeze. Acting on our collective knowledge of bear encounters had allowed this one to end as a most amazing one.

I was hoping for a similar result for my second go round at department chairmanship at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. Previously done in by the three bears of a controlling supervisor, contrary faculty, and absentee staff, I could now see ways to get past them unscathed.

The ridge trail started sloping down as we recounted the bear and my administrative encounters. After awhile our legs got heavier again as the path switched back to uphill. Stopping to finish off the water, we soon realized that our good turn on the hilltop had been followed, like so much of life, by a wrong one on the way down. 

_________________

"It's all the way around for a fifteen miler or backtrack for twelve" I groaned. "Either way, it's going to be a dry run."

Sure enough, we'd missed the downhill junction a couple miles back. At first the trail down was cool and easy, winding through stands of mountain laurel along a bubbling stream. Then our feet got waterlogged from criss-crossing the creek. Soon our legs became heavy with fatigue and dehydration, and there were still three miles to go. 

It was tempting to walk, but somehow I was able to shift complete focus to each footfall, stringing steps together by silently chanting Ta-ra-humar-a. If they can run a hundred miles in the dry Mexican hills, I can do a half marathon in the West Virginia rainforest. And so I did.