World Turtle Day - Respect Your Inner Tortoise

The purpose of World Turtle Day, May 23, sponsored yearly since 2000 by American Tortoise Rescue, is to bring attention to, and increase knowledge of and respect for, turtles and tortoises, and encourage human action to help them survive and thrive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle_Day

Turtles. 

The symbol of slow. 

Born with all that weight to carry around.  Yet such determination to get where they need to go.

Not everyone appreciates that.  But I do.  I love that turtle-urgency to be on the other side of the road, no matter how many lanes there are to cross.  No matter if it takes all day.

 
I have always been a slow runner.  A sucky runner, actually. 

Before Jane Fonda wore leg warmers, before Jamie Lee Curtis became Perfect, jogging was in vogue.

A 3 mile jog every day up Tropical Trail from the marina was my staple exercise.  Even into pregnancy, in those days of just-sit-still advice.  Living on a sailboat was becoming more and more cumbersome.  But the morning jog was, by far, the hardest 40 minutes of every day.

That summer, in Boothbay Harbor, when my new doctor got his first look at my ponderous pregnancy, the first words out of his mouth were not “what do you eat” but, "What do you do for exercise?"

Huh? A doctor who wasn’t determined to make me quit running? A doctor who believed in exercise? Now here was a doctor I could like.

I answered up immediately. "I run three miles a day."

(I had even learned that no one called it jogging anymore, it was running.)

"That's not running", he scoffed.

Oh.

I was crushed.  But when he turned around, the nurse whispered, "Don't mind him. He's just mad because his sister's a better runner than he is."

It turns out that my new doctor was a marathoner.  And his nurse was right.  His sister was better.  The best in the world actually, winning Olympic gold the next summer.

So believe me when I say, I have been dissed by the best of them.


Lesson number one for the slow.  Keep any personal elation close to the vest. 

A dogged shuffle is the stuff of scoff to real runners.  I learned to confide my times guardedly, and only to trusted friends.

Once, at a Melbourne Art Fest 5k, out of 23 runners in my age group, I managed to take a third place. 

TriLady, always truthful, blurted out, "That's because nobody good was there!"  She needn't have worried.  I was in no danger of imagining myself fast. 

Of dozens and dozens of race medals since, there are only 3 in my keeper shoebox:  The medal from my first-ever marathon finish.  An Ironman finisher medal.  And that little bronze bobble on a flamingo-pink ribbon from the Melbourne Art Fest the year nobody good was there.

2011.  Still jogging along.   Sometimes walking if that's what it takes.  

No more pavement.  Soft trails are scarce near Cement-a-lot Beach.   It’s a 20 minute drive (or forty minute bike) in order to get to the park to run.  Just another part of the picture, like remembering your waterbottle, or tying on your shoes.  
  
Sometimes in the midst of struggling - Keep running! Don’t walk! - it’s good to remember the hardest 40 minutes.  To recall the hours, the steps, the years.  Don't forget the occasional pain.  And the occasional elation.

Take it all to the struggle with you.  Distill it all down into one single moment.  This moment, this step you're taking right now. 



This Sunday.  Wickham Park Marathon, 50, 100, and 200 Mile Fun Run.

I’ll be lucky to run a dozen of those miles, though I’ll be trying for fifteen.  While also trying to stay invisible among the many, truly amazing people who run it.

“It’s OK, you’ve got all day,” Popeye reminds me.

I know.  And I’d aim for a nice quiet walking finish of 26, or even a midnight 50, if I didn’t need my knees again next week.

But I’m going to need them.

Next week.

And the week after that.

Because this is the shell I live in. 

And I have so far left to go.