My inspiration for the day — what’s yours?

Coming this weekend: the last part of “Eat, Pray, Run” and profile #18 on another Boston Marathon qualifier here in Colorado.

Thanks for your patience, all. Stay tuned.

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In the meantime I wanted to share with you some pictures from our crazy, fun, fall road trip to Santa Fe.

Here’s all of all us — me, “Tarzan and Jane,” my friend and her children — exploring the Anasazi ruins at Bandelier National Monument.

That’s it for today but more coming tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Bueno bye.

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Do you believe in karma?

Before I moved to Santa Fe in the early 1990s I scuffed at such notions.

I don’t anymore.

That’s what 11 years in Santa Fe can do to a person.

People who live in touristy locales will tell you, there’s a huge difference between visiting a place and calling it home.

For me that difference in Santa Fe forced me to dig deep on every level.

When I wasn’t running in reflective meditation in Santa Fe, captivated by its raw, unfiltered beauty, the harsh reality of surviving there brought me to my knees — literally and metaphorically.

As most people learn, times of distress often move us closest to God and spirit. That’s what happened to me.

Now, as a result, each time I go back to Santa Fe (it’s been eight years since I left) my soul returns the womb.

There are only a handful of places where I’ve experienced this divine sense of my coming home.

I felt this way when I traveled to my parents’ homeland in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

I also felt it when I moved to northern California after college and would visit this one particular beach town near where I lived.

The third place was Santa Fe, but unlike the other two places, it didn’t occur right way.  It took time, I believe, because of all the karma I  fulfilled there.

I will never forget my first trip to New Mexico. On the plane ride home I sat next to a woman who had lived in Albuquerque for several years. She had moved there from Seattle and was now moving back. I told her I was getting ready to move to Santa Fe with my fiance in a few months. She warned me not to do it.

“It’s beautiful here, but you can’t eat
the sky.  There are no jobs here. The pay is lousy and the crime and alcoholism and drug use is really bad,” she said. “I’d
think twice if I were you.”

She and her husband moved to New Mexico because they had vacationed there many times. They fell in love with its mild climate and bottomless sunshine. They couldn’t stand soggy Seattle anymore, she explained, and they arrived with dreams of blissful, arid living.

They sold their Seattle house, took their savings with them and moved to New Mexico without any jobs.

They got to Albuquerque, bought a house, but never found great employment. They burned through their savings, then had to work a couple of jobs each and were always under-employed. Their house got robbed multiple times and there were drug problems down the street from them.

It took them a couple of years for them to save up again so they could leave.

Her story rattled me to my core.

I liked living in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, which is where I was before Santa Fe. I had family there and a great job with a Fortune 500 company. It was my fiance’s idea to leave, not mine. I’d never lived anywhere as small as Santa Fe. Blue skies and sweeping views aside, its size and remoteness felt claustrophobic to me.

My first year there sucked. I took  a job that paid me about a third less than what I was making in California. (Except for a tech editing job I got later in Los Alamos, that was standard there.) The cost of living was still relatively expensive.

My fiance and I bickered constantly over the details of our wedding, which was planned to take place in my home town in the Midwest.

Think “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” That’s what my parents wanted to give us.

Now imagine the opposite of Ian, the sweet, amicable fiance in that movie — an “anti-Ian” whose purpose was to loudly thumb his nose at everyone when he didn’t get his way.

That was my ex.

I remember my father called me one day out of the blue, a few months after I moved to Santa Fe, and he offered to help me and a way out. I did not have to go through with the wedding, he said.

I was too proud (and young and stupid) to call it off.

That’s the only way I explain why I still went through with it, despite the warnings I saw — youth and stupidity, and karma, and the fact that my maturity hadn’t reached its consciousness yet.

When I got to Santa Fe I was 25 years old, with dreams of becoming a journalist and writer, still longing for the high energy of Silicon Valley or the Big Apple but now living in the “Little Chile.”

I also badly wanted children in the future. My ex did not.

So what do you do under such circumstances when you feel stripped of your worldly means, your true hopes and aspirations, and your essence?

You learn to pray — a lot.

You seek to find God but then God seeks you. When you feel lost, you pray with all your might for God to rescue you.

That’s why I believe I went to New Mexico — it was my path to God, and because I followed it to Him, I believe He gave me the gift of my voice as a writer there.

I’ve heard it said there are no foxhole atheists but you also won’t find many in Santa Fe, New Mexico, either.

With its spectacular, cinematic-quality landscapes, where the intense sunshine casts layers of shadows over the mesas, New Mexico is a great place to ponder divine intervention. It what you do when you are floundering like a distressed fish on the high dessert’s sands. (It’s not a wonder. I am an astrological water sign, after all.)

Over time the closer I got to God, the more I grew apart from my ex (we were married for five years). Eventually I found the courage to leave my bad marriage. It happened shortly after I ran my second marathon. I credit my training and success, in part, for finally giving me the strength to do it.

Throughout my years in Santa Fe I ran along more dusty roads than I could count, where I witnessed the hands of God at play in azure skies and double rainbows, and in golden chamisas and shrubby pinons dotting the hills everywhere I went.

I ran on desolate pueblos with a running partner who was Native American and saw how she straddled her two worlds with incredible grace and no malice toward me, yet another outsider to her invasion-weary culture.

I ran along the windy, hillside roads onto the cottonwood-covered mesa tops of Los Alamos with my running/scientist friends there. Afterward we would peer down from the top into breathtaking views of Frijoles Canyon and Bandelier.

I also prayed and prayed, and bumped into the many different spiritual paths of others seeking their way home, too, in Santa Fe.

I ran and ran, and I prayed and prayed.

I ran and prayed until finally God, in His infinite mercy, showed me my way and karma finally pointed to the exit sign out.

My soul work and time there, after 11 years, was finally completed.

My next post: Eat, Pray, Run, Part III: Running and Love.

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Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!

Mileage Saturday: 12; Mileage Sunday: 8; Mileage since Boston: 734.35.

Part I: Comidas

You can’t eat the the big, blue, delicious skies of New Mexico, but if you could, they would taste like roast chiles on a crisp fall day.

No, you can’t eat the incredible beauty in Santa Fe, but that doesn’t mean its endless vistas or rugged landscapes can’t intoxicate you — or deceive you.

Indians, Conquistadors, modern artists and tourists — they have all fallen prey to its wily charms.

Elizabeth Gilbert in her best-seller, “Eat, Pray, Love,” traveled and searched the world — Italy, India and Bali — to heal her broken heart through food, prayer and love, bolstered by the royalties of a cushy book advance.

What Gilbert didn’t realize was, she could have experienced her transformations, all in one place, Santa Fe.

First, she would have eaten herself through a culinary trail of chile, “Christmas” — that’s local lingo for ordering your food with both red and green chile.

Second, she would have burned through her book advance in a year or so after sinking the majority of her funds into a ramshackle but picturesque adobe on Santa Fe’s historic east side. (It’s one of the oldest and most expensive areas of town.)

Third, she would have explored the region’s inherit spirituality and discovered Shamans, Indian medicine men, crystal healers, Buddhists, Catholic monks, Sikhs, and Wiccans, but settled on becoming a New Age zealot after falling hopelessly in love with a handsome (but flaky) famous Santa Fe sculptor at a week-long, silent meditation and yoga retreat at a sweat lodge in the Jemez Mountains.

Her whirlwind romance with the sculptor would fall apart quickly after they actually started speaking to each other (not just gazing at each other longingly and sweating over a fire pit.) 

Gilbert would then date and fall in love with the half dozen, non-gay, artistic men her age living in Santa Fe and have her heart broken each time.

She would then trade “love” for the comfort of living with several stray cats and dogs at the aforementioned ramshackle adobe.

Finally Gilbert would wake up one day to realize her money and savings were almost gone. She would begin to scrounge for work in Santa Fe’s tourism-based economy and learn first-hand the old joke about making a living in the City Difficult: “How do you make $1,000,000 in Santa Fe?”

The answer: “Start with $5,000,000 and stay a few years.”

She would find out her advance degrees (not in hard sciences so no job options at Los Alamos National Laboratory) were useless in getting her viable employment that paid her more than $10 an hour and settle for a job as a waitress at an upscale, touristy restaurant.

Gilbert would then spend the last of her funds at yet ANOTHER week-long, silent yoga and mediation retreat in Abiquiu (a.k.a., Georgia O’Keefe country), make peace with herself and God, and settle into New Mexico so poor she could never, ever afford leave it.

Yes, I am being facetious about the City Difficult because spending 11 hard-working years there will do that to you.

The picture I painted is not of one person I knew while I was there but it IS bits and parts of MANY people I met there and their stories — artists, writers, creative, spontaneous souls of many backgrounds who came there entranced by Santa Fe’s beauty and left duped or spurned by its economic hardships and hostilities.

My made-up story is a poor man’s version of  “Eat, Pray, Love” and a common one in New Mexico.

Even a beautiful place can have an ugly underbelly. In Santa Fe that happens to be — it’s hard as hell to make a decent living there, and if you happen to be a “trust-a-farian” (trust-fund baby) when you get there, chances are good you won’t be by the time you leave.

There are few well-paying jobs and it’s expensive to live there. The median family income in Santa Fe, according to one report I found: $52K; average home cost in SF: $306K; average per capita income of New Mexico: $29K.

OK, so you’re not going to get rich living in the Land of Entrapment but here’s some very good news.

Santa Fe, and New Mexico, is an AMAZING place to run AND eat, and fortunately, you can eat really well there at just about any price point, from fast food at Baja Tacos to La Casa Sena, to The Compound.

Chile is gastronomical king — found in everything — from breakfast burritos, to carne adovado, to green chile stew, to posole.

So are tortillas and blue corn as in blue-corn pinon pancakes at the Tesuque Village Market’s restaurant. Or eating breakfast burritos bigger than your face at Tecolote or The Pantry restaurants — I used to love doing that after a long run.

Do NOT, however, make the mistake of calling the cuisine “Mexican” though — the locals will correct you quickly, it’s New Mexican and it’s Spanish influence they say, not Mexican.

I moved to Santa Fe in 1992 after becoming engaged to my first husband. The economics of the place (rightfully) scared the living crap out of me but my first year exploring the cuisine was unrivaled.

I ran a lot as part of the Hash House Harriers back then and the runs almost always ended at a new restaurant I’d never been to before then. Almost each time, the food was really, really good.

When I went back this visit with my friend, her children and my own, I likewise was not disappointed. In fact I ate too much yummy food.

The hardest part of being in Santa Fe again was being there with children. Santa Fe is not what I’d call a kid-friendly town. Of the four places where we ate — only one had a children’s menu. The weirdest part — you don’t SEE many other children eating with their families at the restaurants or out and about many other places for that matter. With our pack of five kids we stood out everywhere we went.

Where I do believe Santa Fe IS more welcoming of children — the outdoors and in nature. That’s what I will explore next in “Eat, Pray, Run” — Part II: Spirit. It’s hard not to look at its beauty and find God somewhere in Santa Fe, and if you don’t find Him, He usually finds you if you stay there long enough.

My favorite part of going back this trip, besides getting my chile fix, was exploring Bandelier National Monument again with my children, and revisiting my old running routes.

Until then, bueno bye for now.

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Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!

Mileage today: 7; Mileage since Boston: 717.3.

Tarzan and Jane, and I are back from four-day, three-night misadventure into the Land of Entrapment — oops, I mean, “Land of Enchantment.” We all came back, body parts intact and no jumping over a cliff’s edge (as far I know) Thelma and Louise-style, although we did our best to sufficiently scare the natives of those under four feet tall or still teething.

I’m exhausted from our six-hour-plus drive and then hosting a Columbines meetings tonight so this is just a quick note.

Tomorrow I plan to catch up on blogging and life as WiFi reception was iffy during our vacation. This photo, above, captures how beautiful running was while I was there. I ended up doing a 7-mile loop on the east and north side, in the historic district of Santa Fe — a shorter version of what my friend and old running buddy Suzanne G. called “Danica’s Run.” It is in essence the same route I took Hal Higdon on when he contacted the Santa Fe Striders years ago while visiting and asked for a local runner to show him the area.

My run in Santa Fe was at 7,000 feet altitude, and included plenty of dirt roads, rolling hills, passing by real adobe homes (not the newer “f-adobes” — fake adobes), shrubs and chamisas, barrio dogs, junk cars on blocks and equally weathered family compounds that have been around forever.

It was quintessential Santa Fe and I loved every moment of it.

I searched on the internet tonight for Eliza Gilkyson’s “Lights of Santa Fe” on YouTube to play for you but it’s not available. Here, however, is a clip from one of her other songs and my favorite lyrics from the “Lights of Santa Fe.”

“Santa Fe — City of Faith — I did my time in an honorable way,
Oh there is a candle lit for each dream that dies in the lights of Santa Fe.”

Whenever I hear Gilkyson’s voice (she used to live in Taos so I got to see her play in New Mexico when I lived there, too), she reminds of my own “honorable time” spent in the lights and shadows of Santa Fe.

Bueno bye  for now– more to come tomorrow.

Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!

The guy giving you a cup of water at mile 8.

The cop monitoring traffic at mile 10.

The kid high-fiving you at the final aid station.

The lady handing you a finisher’s medal at 13.1 or 26.2 miles.

Runners aren’t the only “endurance athletes” at races — so are the volunteers.

They give of themselves and their time, some times in adverse weather conditions, for hours.

Do you thank volunteers when you race? If not, you should start.

Have you ever been a race volunteer yourself? Again, if you haven’t, I encourage you to step up. You won’t regret it.

Back when I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was the president of the Santa Fe Striders, and I also served as race director for The Santa Fe Run Around, a local 5K/10K race, for a couple of years.

I got to fire the starting gun and use a bullhorn. (This was back in the days before timing chips and Garmins.)

The Run-Around lived up to its name in every sense when I managed it. It wasn’t a huge race (about 500 runners), but staging it was a colossal, manual team effort, from processing paper registrations and checks, to filing for race-day insurance, to printing race tags and designing T-shirts, to stuffing goodie bags.

Being a race director (and club president) required navigating politics and personalities, securing financial sponsors and getting the whole community behind the event.

It took months of planning. I loved doing it.

 

Volunteering at race gives you great perspective from the other side of the finish line.

A few months ago my friend Pam and I were talking about a small race where she volunteered. She told me about how one woman spontaneously hugged her after she crossed the finish line — this racer was so happy with her accomplishment.

“It made me happy the rest of the day,” Pam told me. “You remember what it’s like again, to be a new runner and racer and that feeling.”

I love those kinds of moments. They remind us that running isn’t just about goal-setting but a lifestyle.

Last weekend was the final mile for Kids Running America, a program in which my children have participated, and also the Denver Rock N Roll Marathon.

Kids Running America is a nonprofit in the Denver area with the focus of fighting childhood obesity. The goal is for the children to run the equivalent distance of a marathon, 26.2 miles, in approximately two months. Each week they log their mileage and they run their finale mile at a celebration.

The final mile was in downtown Denver this weekend, in the rain and cold. It was about 40 degrees, and the kids did awesome, despite the drizzle and chill.

Kids Running America in Denver, 2011.

Throughout the KRA fall 2011 season I’ve volunteered as a parent mentor. Some weeks I paced the faster kids; other times I was the sweeper in the group, helping the younger or slower-moving children finish the workouts.

By the end program all the children, regardless of age or size, showed improved endurance.

For the past few seasons I’ve also drawn up the training plans (as a volunteer/coach) for the Distance Divas — a marathon/half marathon subgroup of the Colorado Columbines.

Tarzan and I met up with Columbines who set up a cheering section for our runners at the Denver Rock N Roll Marathon and Half Marathon (also this weekend). We were at mile 9, our cowbells and enthusiasm on hand.

That’s me and Tarzan at the far right.

Tarzan and I didn’t stay long, just enough to cheer for a handful of our group and the other racers (I knew better than to test the patience of  my 5-year-old too much), but we enjoyed every moment of it.

There’s a camaraderie you get from looking at races from the “other side,” through the looking glass. It makes you appreciate the whole experience again — seeing the hard work and determination on people’s faces and what it means to them, to have the courage to be out there in the first place.

Whether we are young or old runners, newbies or veterans, fast or slow, running our first event or our 500th race or first  Boston Marathon, we runners, and racers, can’t do it without the dedication of those people out there helping us.

Volunteers working the 115th Boston Marathon, April 2011.

Thank you, race volunteers — you rock.

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Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!

Mileage today: 7; Mileage since Boston: 669.35

Did you know that?

I knew he was Marine once upon a time, but I didn’t realize he’d been that fit back then until I read it in Runner’s World. Carey was featured in “I’m a Runner.”

Carey, the host of TV Americana classic “The Price is Right,” recently lost more than 80 pounds!!

He changed his diet and started running several months ago.

When he started his weight-loss transformation he weighed about 260 pounds and had diabetes. Now he’s no longer diabetic.

What was his motivation?

“It sucks being fat,” he said in several interviews.

Here’s a “before” picture of him:

Here’s a picture of him these days. He went from fat to fit, quickly:

Talk about spinning the “Big Wheel” for luck …

“Drew Carey, come on down. Your the next contestant on  …  The Pace is Right!”

Holy Toledo … I mean … Cleveland!!

(FYI, Carey’s a Cleveland native.)

I had to write a Boston or Botox midlife triumph about him for two other reasons: 1) Drew Carey is a talented comedian and I used to like “The Drew Carey Show”; and 2) my mom is a HUGE fan of “The Price is Right.” 

She watches it EVERY, SINGLE DAY.

The few times my children or I catch the show we think of her.

We flipped to the show the other day and Tarzan shouted to me: “Hey, that’s Baba’s ‘Price is Right!’ ”

Carey is a quirky guy and an outspoken Libertarian. It surprised me RW editors had the chuzpah to feature him. Most of RW’s material is so meh. This choice wasn’t.

(I also liked the expose RW did on Frank Shorter recently, but that’s a serious topic for altogether different post in the future.)

Later this month Carey will run his first marathon, Marine Corps in Washington, D.C. I wish him luck in mastering his own 26.2 mile “Showcase Showdown.”

Semper fidelis, all …

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Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!