The Trail - or Poetry in Motion

I was out on a trail this morning and I thought to myself I really wanted to write a poem about running, to try and capture all the ups and downs, literally and emotionally, of a good trail run.

Written By Erin Lucero

First, there’s the warmup.

Greeting my cold legs, still heavy from sleep.

Waking up my ankles and feet.

Moving over the easy gravel, knowing there’s more to come

As I Find today’s rhythm, always unique.

Here comes the hill.

Now it’s really time to play.

Winding up the switchbacks,

The heart kicks into double time.

Pumping blood, pumping life,

Pumping movement.

Deep breaths of cold thin air,

The lungs and thighs burn in synchronicity.

The dance of oxygen and blood as lifeforce flows

To my calves, my toes, my heart, my mind.

Scanning the horizon but watching the rocks ahead,

Feeling the burn, feeling the strength.

Pain and pleasure twist together in the most ancient of cycles,

As the trail gets steeper.

Climbing, Step after step, Breath after breath.

Asking for just a little more, Digging just a little deeper.

Then my dear friend Doubt comes for her visit.

“Are we there yet?” She asks. “Maybe we should take a break?

Why not take the easy road?

Why do you keep pushing yourself?”

The cold air chaps my skin as sweat stings my eyes.

Taking a sip of water, Imposter syndrome makes its routine appearance

The inevitable faster runner comes to pass me by, bounding along in endless grace.

But Doubt, we are old friends now.

The friend you’ve known forever and have learned to ignore.

So I keep going. Trusting my legs, trusting my heart.

And as it always is, just when we’re about ready to give up, the hill lessens.

Instantly my body responds.

A rush of oxygen, my legs feel lighter.

My heart stabilizes, the world feels good again.

Endorphins flooding the system.

The sun that was blazing hot a moment ago is now a friendly warmth.

Deep breath, and then Wow look at that view.

As the trail crests to the summit, the world opens up.

Blue sky folding into layers of mountain peaks.

Snow still whispering in the crooks of the boulders,

The birds are calling to each other from the sagebrush.

Then the wind starts blowing, waking me up from my reverie.

And now I find a new cadence, as the dance changes.

My feet find a new turning, as they fall into the rhythm of the rocks,

Of the sand and the mud, of the boulders and the pebbles.

My feet move across the earth, as my toes reach out and grasp the stone through my shoes.

Connecting in the most intimate way.

Kissing the earth, Breathing in the sky, drawing life from the Sun.

As the trail begins to turn downhill, my body comes alive.

Feet moving faster than the mind can think.

Until it finally stops trying.

With each revolution, with each step, coming closer and closer

To the Flow.

And then the trail opens up, smooth as silk.

And I find the Flow.

The Dance, The Dream.

The Poetry of Motion.

Are my feet still touching the ground? Or am I the ground?

One with the movement, everything works together in perfect harmony.

Flying, Free, This is the magic. This is the reason I know not to listen to Doubt. This is it!

This is…..

And suddenly a rock shifts under my foot

And oh crap, I AM flying!

But my body still knows better than my mind does.

And it puts me back on my path.

My ankles are stronger than I give them credit for as they set me back on my feet.

And I continue on, a little shaken, but still strong.

Running a little slower, but still running.

Still moving. Still dancing.

The dance is ever-changing.

It has its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows.

Just as the world turns, we turn, step by step, mile by mile.

We find the flow, we lose it again.

We find our strength, and doubt comes along to try and snatch it away.

We falter, but then our body brings us back home, back to the trail.

For if we keep moving, if we keep dancing,

We will always find the poetry of motion.

Tackling a Marathon

I wrote this post a year and a half ago, but never posted it... because it didn't seem right at the time to post about the world pre-covid.... But now I just want to post it, for posterity, and for all the things that marathon taught me to help get me through the year ahead.  And now, looking back, to see how it changed the course of my life..... 

So a month ago I ran a marathon.  And today I'm in self-quarantine with a pandemic on our hands.  My how things can change in a month..... 26.2 miles, all in one go.  It seems like a lot, until then you start training for it, and then it seems like A LOT.
I've been trying to think about what to say about this that people might find interesting, or maybe find something that they could relate to in their own lives.  And so what I settled on is Strength.
Strength in myself, and what I learned about myself during my training, and then on Race Day.

Training:
So my training plan (The Hanson Plan) was pretty serious.  6 days a week. working up to 50 - 60 mile weeks.  And that takes a lot of commitment.  It also takes a lot of support, from my husband, who I was constantly abandoning to go on runs.
But here's what I learned. If you really want something you will find a way.  I changed my work schedule so I could get in runs before dark.  I learned to run on the Dreadmill at work.  I ran in the dark.  I ran in the rain.  I ran slow when my training plan told me to, and ran fast when it told me to.  I got bored of running, I got bored of the whole process, but that was about halfway through so it was too late to back out.  I learned to do something even when I didn't want to.  And that was Strength Lesson#1
I also finally developed a truly healthy relationship with food.  Yes 40 years on in life, I saw food for the fuel it was.  And I saw my body as the beautiful strong machine that it was.  And I wanted to take care of it.  Some days I was a bottomless pit of hunger; some days I was craving mineral water. My body told me what it wanted, and I listened and honored it and tried to give it the best nourishment I could. I very specifically told myself and everyone else I was trying to maintain, not lose, weight during my training.  I ended up losing a little bit at the end, and that's okay too, but the intent was to love and honor my body and to take care of it the best I could

The Run:
For me, the marathon was the shortest moment in the huge run up of training and then pre-race anxiety.  18 weeks of training.  1 week of nerves.  4 hours of butterflies in the stomach, and then the starting line whistle blows and it's just me and my feet.
My race was in Pueblo, Colorado and it ran along a bike path from the Pueblo Reservoir into town, then an up and back in the not-so nice part of town and finally finishing at the Historic River Walk.  There were only 77 marathoners, and I'm a back of the pack runner to start with so for most of the race, it was pretty quiet.
Each mile was its own journey.  Some miles were just smooth, feeling pretty good miles.
Some miles were super exciting when my amazing cheer squad was at the sidelines (thank you Ed, Brit, Lauren, Jesse, Kelly, David and Amber for being there for me)
Some miles I questioned myself, my choice of clothing, if my pace was sustainable, or if I was drinking enough, but strangely I never questioned why I was doing this in the first place.
Then I got to the out and back part.  It was a not-so nice neighborhood, and miles 14-20 were a gradual uphill going into 20 mph winds.  My cheer squad couldn't get to this area, and they had a bathroom issue on the race, with no bathrooms available from miles 14-26.  This was my dark time.  This was the time I started walking, and started feeling tired, and a little hopeless. Just before the turn around I went through this super creepy tunnel that was dark and sketchy and I was like what the heck am I even doing here!?!?!
But I reached that turn around, gave myself a pity party, and then pulled myself back together and remembered all the people that were out there supporting me.  All my friends who had told me they'd be thinking of me.  My husband who was tracking my iphone and kept sending me encouraging messages, and I was like girl you got this!  You may be tired and may have slowed down, but you WILL FINISH.  And so I started running again.  And knocked out one mile after another.  Passed each aid station on the way back and thought, one mile closer to done.  And then I got to the last aid station, with one mile left to go, and a guy who I'd just come up on said to me,  well at this point we have to finish.  And so we did....  So. we. did....

I cried as I hugged my friends who were waiting for me, had been waiting for me for hours.  Who handed me oreos and chips and water and congratulated me.  I had run a marathon, and I would never be quite the same person again.  Not for that day alone, but for the entire journey that led me there.

And now......posting this 1 year and 6 months later......

with more than 600,000 dead from Covid in the US and so so many more world wide, 

with my mother gone from cancer,

with the world in the grips of climate change, 

we have gone through those dark times and we have hit the wall, but we have kept going.

Colorado's Governor said last April that Covid was going to be a marathon, and not a sprint.

Maybe now we are at mile 24, when we say to ourselves.....well at this point we have to finish. 

And I am now starting to learn about the new person that I am becoming, and how my priorities are going to be forever changed.... and that is OK.

Thank you all for coming on this journey with me, and I can't wait until we can share Oreos at the finish line.  

https://www.madmooseevents.com/pueblo-marathon

Madagascar!

It's been two months since coming back from Madagascar, and I've been contemplating how to put a trip like that into a bite sized blog post that wasn't just filled with a list of animals we saw  or a rambling essay on how different a 3rd world country is from America. 

Traveling opens my eyes to so much more than just the tourist attractions, it's the people, the culture, the different kinds of plants, there's just so much... I'll try and highlight a few moments, that maybe can begin to paint even the palest picture of that incredible country.

The People
I've observed in my travels that people are the same the world over.  Our cultural differences separate us sometimes, and we often have different beliefs or norms, but we are all still part of the Tribe Human.  Madagascar is a beautiful blend of a 18 different tribes, with some very different lifestyles and practices (from annual exhumations at the family tomb to a completely nomadic lifestyle with no family homes or passing of generational wealth).  Across the country the tribes also look quite different, as African, Asian and European peoples have all settled there over thousands of years. 

As we drove from the capital of Antanarivo to the rain forests in the north, and then to the highlands to the south and finally to the spiny forest and deserts in the west, we saw a sampling of some of the different tribes, from small wood houses to 3-story brick homes built by hand from local materials, to zebu grazing areas lined with fences made of cactus. 

And everywhere we went, whenever we saw young women or little girls they always waved and would smile back at me when I smiled at them. And it was a real smile.   A real connection of woman to woman, and incredibly powerful.  Have you ever looked out a window and sometimes caught the eye of the person in the car next to you and you feel like you just invaded on their private lives?  But then sometimes you look at them and they look back and and there's a brief connection that's made? Like for a moment you just connected, and thought, yes that's a person too, with a story and a family and life all their own.  It was like that.  And it happened everywhere we went. 

It also broke my heart too see these beautiful and proud people where survival was a struggle.  As we drove along the roads we saw piles of rock with a half dozen people sitting by the road with small pick axes breaking down the rock into gravel.  We saw young kids, 7 years old, filling the pot holes with a homemade shovel asking the truck drivers for some payment for their work.  We saw that the people who lived in the areas that got a lot of rain were well fed, and the people in the south where they didn't have as much were struggling to scrape out an existence.  The people had what they grew, or made with the resources around them.  Subsistence living finally took on a real definition for me. It made me realize just how much we take our transportation infrastructure for granted, both in terms of utilities and the movement of goods and commodities.

The rice fields in the Highlands

The handmade brick homes

A local market, with clothing, goods and livestock.  The villagers would walk many miles each week for Market Day

A cactus fence!

The Animals and The Parks
I wish I could say that Madagascar is full of rain forests and lemurs are jumping from every tree, but alas that is not the case.  The main staple of the Malagasy diet is rice, and their rice growing practices are all manual labor and not efficient, so much of the country has been cleared for rice patties.  Almost all of the lemurs are endangered and their habitat is largely restricted to protected National Parks or private reserves. More than 80% of the forests are gone, but we heard that there is a movement to plant more forests and to set aside more land. But as we even know in the US, if you have the needs of people up against the needs of the wild, only a government who wants to care about both can help solve both......

But the lemurs and the chameleons were just so amazing.  We had the best moments, standing in the forest, usually on a really steep hill trying not to fall down in between a slippery mud bit or a branch poking at your back, just watching lemurs do their thing.  We saw chamelons sleeping on a leaf at night, and the largest lemur, the indri, calling their haunting call; we watched a baby lemur bouncing around non-stop on his patient parents, and lemurs coming down to the ground for their daily mineral supplements from the iron rich soils.  All just doing their thing and not particularly caring about us tourists one way or another.   One of the best moments was when our small group of 4 plus a guide were in one of the less popular national parks, and an entire troupe of Verraux's Sifaka was just hanging out right above us.  A mom and baby, jumped around just feet from us. It was just us, in the forest, with a half dozen lemurs, dancing from tree to tree.

Ring Tailed, or as we called them King Julien lemurs coming down to the river for a drink while we ate lunch

Verraux Sifaka or the Dancing Lemur

Parson's Chameleon, sleeping on a branch at night.

My favorite, the adorable Bamboo Lemur.  They were just so darn cute! and sadly don't survive in captivity, so habitat protection is especially important for them.

The Company
I went on this trip with my Mom.  And we had some trepidation going in to the trip, could we get along for 2 whole weeks at such close quarters? We might have had a couple mom/daughter moments, but looking back I can't be happier that we made this decision to take this trip together.  My mom turned 70 this year, and there were some hikes that were very strenuous for her, but together we made it through, even when we had to take her load off and carry her pack for a bit.  She has traveled all over the world, and some of it has been pretty rugged.  Having her there to talk and process through what we saw and experienced was so valuable for me.  And having such a seasoned traveler to commiserate with when things got uncomfortable, like when there was no hot water, or we had to sleep with the door wide open to get a breeze or a mosquito was buzzing around your head all night, Someone who understood and who could help keep you going and still find the joy in it all. 

So this just scratched the surface of this incredible 2 week journey, but thank you for reading, and I hope it gave a small glimpse of this unique country. 

If anyone is really interested in visiting Madagascar, I would highly recommend Pioneer Expeditions as a tour company, and Hari as a tour guide.  We saw many groups in our travels and were so pleased with our choice.

Mom, Hari and me at Ranomafana National Park