Celebration and heartache

by Woody

This essay originally appeared on July 7, 2013

*

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE! 

*   *   *

Streaking Forward While Looking Back

Later this afternoon I will celebrate a happy anniversary.

Too, I will mark a polar one.

Freud would surely argue the two are related. And while this did not occur to me for quite some time, it now seems obvious if not undeniable.

First, the celebratory anniversary. Or, as the United States Running Streak Association – yes, there is such a thing – terms it, “streakiversary.” Today my consecutive-day streak of running a minimum of three miles (with an average of 8.6 miles daily over the span) will reach 10 years – or 3,653 days in a row thanks to three leap years.

If this strikes you as silly or insane or stupid, you are probably right on all counts. However, there are no less than 152 runners who are certifiably (according to the USRSA) crazier than me – including eight Americans with streaks surpassing 40 years!

I did not set out to become a “streaker.” As a person caught red-handed in a love affair or addiction – and a running streak is no doubt a little of both – might guiltily explain: “It just happened.”

It happened in response to a life-changing event. Early on I believed the tragic catalyst was my being rear-ended at a stoplight by a drunk driver speeding 65 mph. The result was a ruptured disk in my neck requiring surgery to fuse two vertebrae.

The result also was permanent nerve damage and chronic pain that stole my recreational passions of tennis and basketball. So when my gifted neurosurgeon Dr. Moustapha Abou-Samra, a fellow marathoner, finally gave me the go-ahead to resume distance running I grabbed hold as if it were a life preserver in a choppy ocean. Each run gave me a daily dose of empowerment over my physical losses from the car crash.

Like a U.S. postal worker, I have not been detoured by rain nor sleet nor snow. I have run through injury and illness and at insane hours to accommodate family plans, work, time zones. Hopping off a plane in London, I kept The Streak alive by running three miles in the airport terminal at 11 p.m., causing one Englishman to holler: “Hey, bloke! You must be a Yank cause you’re bloody crazy.”

Perhaps, although psychoanalysis might reveal something different at play. Indeed, while I did not realize it for two years, it now seems beyond coincidence that my streak began on July 7, 2003. That was the due date of my wife’s and my third child.

A baby lost to miscarriage. Was the streak’s birth a subconscious response to death?

The pregnancy was a surprise, a wonderful one, and because my wife was 44, of high-risk. After she made it safely into the second trimester we finally exhaled, allowing ourselves to get fully excited.

Then the heartbreak of no heartbeat.

It is likely a self-protective mechanism to try to rationalize a miscarriage as “being for the best because something was terribly wrong.” Doctors, family and friends offer similar solace. And maybe the mind buys into this, but the heart does not.

We had chosen not to know the gender, perhaps another grasp at self-protection. Again, the heart has its own mind. A few years later my wife had a powerful dream in which she watched a child on a playground swing. The girl, the same age our child would have then been, was happy. Rather than being overwhelmed with renewed grief, my wife felt comforted.

I had no similar night vision.

However, I have had many a daydream on runs while looking at kids – girls and boys – who are about the same age as my streak and thinking: That’s how old our child would now be.

Last week, I had a sleep dream. Surely it was influenced by my wife’s from six years past, as well as by the approach of my 10-year streakiversary – and hence the 2003 summer birthday that never was. In the dream I am running on the San Buenaventura beach bike path, one of my very favorite routes, alongside a child of about age 10.

SHE is smiling and happy.

I will think of her as I extend my streak today, my eyes likely salty as the sea.

*  *  *

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”