High Tide

This past weekend was a 16-mile trot about the San Francisco Bay Trail. We started at the Oracle parking lot in Redwood City at 6:30am, and wound our way up to San Mateo, through Seal Point Park, returning back from whence we came nearly three and a half hours later.

A few things struck me on this run. One, I go running for three-plus hours these days. Two, you can think a lot of thoughts during a three-plus hour run. Three, while thinking those thoughts, the scenery seems to mysteriously change around you so that when you look up every so often, you never seem to be completely oriented on the trail. You start swiveling your head to and fro, searching for a recognizable bush or telephone pole (which all look vaguely familiar, because they all look vaguely the same), and reassure yourself that since you don't recognize anything in particular from the view that is ten feet behind or in front of you, you must have been running for at least another mile since resurfacing from your deep thoughts. (Usually however, you've only run a mere 200 yards.)

It goes on like that for three hours: you drift out to your sea of thoughts, paddling about in your memories of the week, recalling your frustrations with silly people, and reeling in the moments when you embarrassed yourself during the day. Then you look back to shore and realize you've no idea how far you've drifted.

And running along the Bay Trail is the most literal experience of this sea-of-thoughts metaphor.

When I started out at 6:30, the sky was overcast, there was a slight breeze in the air, and the trail was unpopulated - save for the occasional dreary-eyed morning cyclist. The view was peaceful - the terrain relatively flat, with a winding pavement along the marsh edge. The marsh is composed of wet, slick, textured muck. It looks as if someone took a gigantic melon-scooper and removed some muck for a giant muck-fruit salad. Beyond that pleasant view is the bay, and you can see the water at low tide, lapping at the edges of the marsh, as if exiled from a place it once inhabited. If it weren't for the tall green grass and the moist texture of the marsh, you would think we were in drought season. A few muck-loving birds, statuesque, sprinkle the landscape with their profiles.

While running through this scene, sculling through the chore list in my head, I looked up every so often to watch the gradual shift in the bay. Slowly, but surely, the shoreline shifted. In places where I expected to see marshy mud pies and lanky grass, I only saw sandy beach and pooling bay tide. How suddenly the view had changed, and I felt that I had somehow missed it. How did that happen? In fact, during the last two miles of the run, I was convinced that global warming had tightened its stranglehold and elevated the water levels to new heights within a matter of forty minutes, the mucky terrain no longer visible further inland.

Watching the scenery, I drifted even further out to la-la-land. Then, the really random thoughts started flowing in...
At low tide, the bay looks pretty beat up and sorrowful, and as you run, feeling your muscles tighten up and wondering how you will ever make it back to the start, you begin to empathize with that mucky terrain, because in the beginning stages of your training seasons, you feel exactly like muck after an hour of relentless forward motion. And then high tide comes in, quietly and unassuming. The water covers everything, and you no longer see the marshy roots or the desolate, dank misery that was the beginning of the running...and you start to feel somewhat comfortable and energized. Not by much, because your feet haven't stopped moving, but a little bit.
The reason you become so energized is that you didn't realize there could be a high tide. The starting stages are no longer visible, and from that point, there's a new scene: everything looks effortless, expansive, and fluid. It looks pretty nice, actually, and it's somewhat peaceful. You become that high tide, creeping up on the shore, conquering it little by little. and that's quite an energizing thought.
And even if you hit low tide again, you can see the marks of high tide, the heights you reached on that expansive shore, and you know it's possible to get there again....

I finished the run with this thought in mind, and sat down to stretch out my now fluid-like legs, and I thought to myself, "I just paralleled my running experience to a Nicholas Sparks novel. Three plus hours of running will make you crazy."