Author: Sara Puotinen

oct 27/RUN

6.25 miles
flats and back
45 degrees

I’ll take this weather every day. Sunny and cold enough to not overheat but not cold enough to feel cold. Wore shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, and a sweatshirt. Took the sweatshirt off at mile 3. Ran much faster and for longer without stopping than I have recently. Was greeted by Mr. Holiday near the beginning of the run — good morning! Heard some voices down below — rowers? hikers? My right kneecap shifted a few times as I ran. At first, I was worried and thought, usually that only happens when I walk, but then I remembered that in the fall my kneecap can move around some. Is it the colder weather?

I ran the first 5k without stopping, then walked a little before starting again. I turned on the metronome at 175 and listened to it as I ran up the hill. Then I switched to a Billie Eilish playlist. I was hoping that listening to the metronome would get me inside of the beat and open me up to noticing and feeling more, but I couldn’t quite get there. I could hear that I was in time with the steady click, but I couldn’t feel that moment when we were fully in sync, when the striking of my feet was the beat happening.

10 Things

  1. more leaves off the trees, more open air above the gorge to view — bright and looking almost hazy. Was that the air or just an effect of how bare and un-green the other side was?
  2. the bright, silvery reflection of the sun off a bike’s mirror — the bike was not moving, but was parked by a bench and 2 people
  3. fluttering leaves in front of me, showing me that the wind was at my back
  4. the leaves hovered in the air, one of them long enough for me to touch it
  5. a roller skier in all black
  6. another roller skier in a bright yellow long-sleeved shirt
  7. signs and port-a-potties left over from yesterday’s race
  8. the seep in the flats was seeping enough to have left a big wet spot on the road
  9. vision error: got too close to the edge of the trail and hit my face on a branch, then ran right over another pile of branches and almost tripped
  10. so many leaves on the path, covering holes and cracks and bumps — rolled my ankle on a bump that I couldn’t see

Before the run, I listened to a recording of a draft of a section of the poem I’m working on and had some good ideas for revisions. Very excited about how my Haunts poem is coming together!

oct 26/RUN

4.75 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Scott and I were supposed to run the Halloween Half this morning, but we both decided it was too much — for Scott it was his feet, for me my gastro-stuff. I was not interested in stopping at every port-a-potty along the route. Instead, I decided to go out for a much shorter run to the falls and back. Mostly I felt good, but halfway in, a growing need to go the bathroom. Boo. I hope I can figure out/fix this problem soon. Other than that, I enjoyed the run. Not too cold, clear, hardly any wind. A beautiful morning!

10 Things

  1. the tree 2 doors down from me, which was red a few years ago, is a bright yellow this year
  2. stretches of the sidewalk covered in leaves
  3. the falls were roaring and misting
  4. the tinny recording of bells coming from the light-rail train across Hiawatha
  5. the view! open air, bluffs on the other side
  6. rowers below — heard the coxswain’s voice
  7. only a few leaves fluttering to the ground
  8. empty benches
  9. the sound of plastic wheels — no chance to look, what was it? A crappy stroller? roller skates?
  10. the smell of pine needles

oct 24/RUN

3.1 miles
duluth lake front
55 degrees

Took a quick drip to Duluth with Scott and FWA. Lots of walking and talking and being by the lake. Great weather! Peak color. Wore shorts and a sweatshirt on our morning run. Ran north (I think?) by the lake, past Leif Erickson park. Lots of short, steep hills. Just before the turn around, I realized that we had had the wind at our backs. Uh-oh. The wind was in our face for the second half. which didn’t really matter because we were running mostly downhill. I said to Scott, can you imagine if the wind had been in our faces as we ran uphill?

The water was almost smooth with no waves. I could hear the rocks gently shivering when the water washed over them. Speaking of shivering, while we were shopping in a kitchen store, FWA and I both overheard an older woman exclaim, wow, it’s shivery in here. It was a little chilly, but shivery?

10 Things

  1. a tiny bird so small I thought it was a dragonfly — a hummingbird?
  2. cooing pigeons near the wall
  3. sparkling water — circles of light on the lake’s surface
  4. no clouds
  5. no big boats
  6. entire trees with orange leaves, a few bushes with slashes of red
  7. a machine across the way making a noise that reminded me of the sound the black monster in Lost made when it was hovering or hunting
  8. so many inviting benches on top of the hill, high above the water
  9. the constant buzz of the hospital helicopter, landing on the roof, then taking off again
  10. a little boy and his older sister on the path — come on, Whitley, it’s time to start our grand adventure!

oct 22/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
65 degrees

A quick run after getting my flu and COVID shot and before taking FWA to an eye exam. Another beautiful, warm morning. Everything yellow and crunchy. The Winchell trail was crowded with hikers admiring the leaves and the view. Heard kids on the playground. Smelled the sour sewer. Felt the soft sand. The theme of the morning: leaves. Brittle leaves covering the trail, making it harder to see roots or rocks. Fluttering leaves falling from the trees. Absent leaves giving me a better view of the other side. And that sound! Before starting my run, yellow locust leaves near the curb sizzled after a car drove by. A few blocks later, a cluster of leaves — or was it a plastic bag? — crackled and crunched in the slight wind.

Near Folwell, after climbing the short, steep hill, I stopped to record a few lines for the next section of my poem. The section is called Nobody and it’s about bells and mom-ghosts and dead cone cells.

In the gray morning
the few cone cells that
remain are starved for
light, everything lacks
form — no edges, no
bodies, just blurs

Here’s a beautiful poem I encountered this morning. I’m adding it to my collection of dirt/dust poems.

Housekeeping/ Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

It’s 14 lines. Is it a sonnet? Is there a volta? Is it the dust, lit like stars?

oct 20/RUN

10.2 miles
downtown loop*
61 degrees / humidity: 70%

*river road trail, north — past the trestle, down franklin hill, in the flats, up the I-94 hill, past the Guthrie and Stone Arch, under Hennepin, over Plymouth, through Boom Island, up to the 3rd avenue Bridge, winding down to river road, heading south.

Warm this morning. Sun, sweat. Wore shorts and short-sleeved shirt. Ran with Scott; we’re running the Halloween Half next Saturday. My legs and lungs were fine, my gut not so much. Unfinished business at mile 6, then again at mile 9. Hopefully I can figure out a way to fix it soon. I remember that Scott talked a lot more than I did, but about what? Music — he subbed for a community jazz band and he’s hoping they ask him to join. I talked about shadows and afternoon moons and my admiration for fit runners and good form — so graceful and pleasing to watch!

We greeted Mr. Holiday — good morning! — and encountered a few roller skiers. We also encountered Vikings Fans between Stone Arch and Hennepin. Enjoying the nice weather before the game, I guess. I heard train bells and some biker calling out to the other bikers he was with: we’re going to whip down this hill. I sang to Scott, whip it good! The steps up from St. Anthony Main to the 3rd Avenue bridge were tough, but the view of downtown was amazing. I mentioned Spirit Island to Scott, which is the sacred Dakota Island that was quarried by white settler colonists, then removed by the Army Corps of Engineers, and we wondered where it had been exactly (south of the Locks and Dam).

Looking up where Spirit Island was in relation to Stone Arch and the 3rd avenue bridge, I found a brief article that mentioned how the island had bald eagles and spruce trees, In my poem, I say the trees are oaks — did I remember it wrong, or were there spruce and oaks? To be safe, I’ll change it in the poem:

Among eagled spruce,
rock by sacred rock
hauled off in horse-drawn
carts, few records of
where. Not gone, scattered,
displaced, their origin
as island erased.

11 Things

  1. the shadows of the railing on the Plymouth bridge — straight, sharp
  2. the bright, sparkling water at the edge of Boom Island
  3. the railing shadows at another spot on the bridge — the shadows they cast on the sidewalk made me think the sidewalk was broken
  4. the pattern of the shadows of a chain-link fence — sharp but soft, geometric
  5. 2 shirtless runners passing us, running past and fluidly, their feet bouncing up down up down, spending more time in the air than on the ground
  6. rowers, 1: the voice of a coxswain giving instructions
  7. rowers, 2: an 8-person shell on the river
  8. slashes of deep red leaves from the bushes beside the path
  9. the quick suggestion of an afternoon moon: a flash of white in the bright blue sky. Was it the moon or a cloud? I checked with Scott: the moon!
  10. a sour smell rising from below: sewer gas
  11. falling leaves! reds and yellows, fluttering in the wind — sharp, brittle, hitting my cap hard

Earlier this week, RJP and I took an overnight trip to Red Wing and stayed at the old/haunted hotel, the St. James. It was wonderful — the hotel more than the town. As part of it, we hiked up the bluff — He Mni Can-Barn Bluff. A great view of Red Wing and the river, and a good workout! 90 minutes of ascending and descending. We saw a Vikings cruise, 5 stories tall, docked at the river. RJP looked it up: an 18-day cruise from St. Paul to New Orleans, $12,000 per person. Wow. The next day, at a bakery getting doughnuts and coffee, we overheard a woman ask for a Trump cookie. Yes, they were selling cookies that spelled out Trump with icing. They also had Harris cookies. RJP said that there were more Harris cookies left. We were both disturbed by the idea that someone would want to buy a Trump cookie and that a bakery would be selling them.

oct 16/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees

Wonderful weather for running! Not too cold, but cold enough to not overheat. The color of the day: yellow. I’m sure there were orange and red leaves, but all I remember were the bright yellow ones. Another color I remember: glitter — on the water, among the fluttering leaves. Seeing the low water in the creek on Monday, I wondered if the falls would even be falling. They were, but no gushing or roaring.

10 Things

  1. laughing kids at Dowling Elementary
  2. the oak savanna is still mostly green
  3. a sidewalk covered in dry, yellowed pine needles
  4. a person taking a selfie with their dog by my favorite overlook at the falls
  5. the man who empties the parking kiosks — I’ve seen him several times before and wondered why he comes in a regular (unmarked) car and how many coins he collects
  6. the creek was higher than in past falls when bare rock was exposed
  7. instead of a rope blocking the steps down to the falls, which is easy to climb over, Minneapolis Parks has added a green metal gate
  8. the shadow of some leaves falling to the ground, looking like the shadows of birds
  9. those same falling leaves looking like brown snow
  10. the swinging shadow of my ponytail

pines and Basho

I ran over yellow pine needles covering the sidewalk at the start of my run and thought about Basho. So I looked up “basho pine” and found this line:

Learn about the pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.
Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.

from Basho on Poetry

A poem I was working on yesterday (and submitted to a journal for consideration), starts this way:

It begins here: from
the ground up, feet first,
following.

The following I am referring to is not simple repetition, even as it literally is about following trails already made by past feet, but seeking what past feet sought: connection, contact, familiarity with the ground/land and how it has been shaped.

ghosts and zombies

My plan for this month was to focus on Zombies, but between a kid crisis, the marathon, and a poem that insisted on being reworked, I haven’t given much attention to them. Maybe two other reasons: I don’t really like zombies, and I’m still thinking about ghosts.

from Circle / Dana Knott 

human obits in the process
of being written
ghostly obits in the process
of being read

Here’s what I wrote on August 1, 2024 that got me thinking about zombies:

On Ghosts V. Zombies/ Suzanne Buffam

Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake. 

For the past few years, I’ve devoted a lot of attention to ghosts and haunts, but I’ve rarely thought about zombies. This poem is making me want to think about them now. So many directions to go with it — the relationship between the body and the soul or the body and the spirit or the body and the mind; how, because I can’t see people’s faces or make eye contact, they look soulless to me — I’m a ghost among zombies; Alice Oswald and the Homeric mind — our thoughts traveling outside of our bodies; Emily Dickinson and the soul that wanders; the fish in us escaping (Anne Sexton) or the bees released, returned to the hive/heaven (Eliot Weinberger). 

I clicked on the ED link and read my entry from march 19, 2024. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, including a reference to Homer, but not the poet, the cartoon character, Homer Simpson. It’s the clip where his brain escapes his body to avoid listening to Ned Flanders talking about the differences between apple juice and cider (if it’s clear and yella, you got juice there fella, if it’s tangy and brown, you’re in cider town). Wow.

taking it slow

Reading the “about this poem” for poets.org’s poem of the day, Dead Reckoning, I encountered this line:

This poem began as a long sequence but arrived at this stripped-down form after fifteen years of off-and-on revision.

Hyejung Kook

15 years of off-and-on revision! I’m only on year 3 of my Haunts revisions. I’m glad to know that other poets sit with some of their poems for a long time.

After finding this, I read an old entry from October 16, 2021, and found this:

“I am slow and need to think about things a long time, need to hold onto the trace on paper. Thinking is adventure. Does adventure need to be speedy? Perhaps revising is a way of refusing closure?…” 

Rosemarie Waldrop

This slow time reminds me of Lorine Niedecker and what she writes in a letter to her poet-mentor, Cid Corman, while working on her poem, “Lake Superior”:

Cid, no, I won’t be writing for awhile, and I need time, like an eon of limestone or gneiss, time like I used to have, with no thought of publishing. I’m very slow anyhow . . . . I’m going into a kind of retreat so far as time (going to be geological time from now on!) is concerned . . . .

Lorine Niedecker

oct 14/RUN

9 miles
lake nokomis and back
37 degrees / humidity: 83%

Cooler weather! I wore my winter running tights under my shorts this morning! Fall! Even though it was cool, I was dripping with sweat. All the walkers I passed were bundled up in winter coats and stocking caps. Winter is coming.

I felt strong as I ran, able to keep going. Scott and I signed up for the Halloween Half on the 26th. We might even try to wear costumes. FWA suggested Bob and Linda Belcher. Yes!

My favorite fall tree this morning was next to the double bridge. It was bright yellow with a hint of orange. My second favorite fall tree was a RED one near the Longfellow House. Cherry red. About half of the trees are still green.

The lake was still with sharp reflections. A few people were at the beach, but no one was in the water. Any boats on it? Running past the boat landing, I saw one boat being dropped off.

Pickleball! Even in 30 degree weather, people were out there. I could hear the thwacking of balls being hit as I ran by the courts.

A mom dropping her kid off for preschool at Lake Nokomis Rec Center. I thought about taking FWA to classes here when he was 4.

The creek was very low. There was still enough water for the ducks.

Crossing the pedestrian/bike bridge near Lake Hiawatha, I heard a noise that was in time with my feet. I thought it was a truck or some type of machine, but later, heading back from the lake I ran over it again and realized the noise was coming from me. The bridge was squeaking every time my foot struck the ground!

added, 15 oct 2024: I forgot about the pine needles! A block from my house, yellow pine needles covered the sidewalk. I can’t remember now how it felt to run over them, I just remember that I loved it and somewhere, deep within, I imagined the sound of wind moving through the needles still on the tree.

oct 12/RUN

5.7 miles
ford loop
52 degrees

Peak fall this morning. Orange! Yellow! Red! Made even more vibrant by the gray sky. Wow! I felt strong and relaxed and dreamy. No sharp lines, everything soft and fuzzy and dissolving into the gray. It was dark enough for street lamps and headlights. Heard the rowers and the clicking and clacking of a roller skier in a bright yellow shirt, a squirrel cracking a nut. Smelled the sewer. Felt a few raindrops at the very end. Crossing the ford bridge, the tree line was oranges, yellows, reds on the st. paul side, but still a lot of green on the minneapolis side.

At the End, There Is Always a House / Sara Eliza Johnson

These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to
haunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,
thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror I
return to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, to
find anything there but my face. Mirror is another word for
hunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would be
tired of hearing from me, the kind of woman — this repulsive
word — who’ll never have a garden or greenhouse, only a
fridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, all
rotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening like
frostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with such
perfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. The
thing is there’s no way out of this house. Memory circles
like flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. I
left a note in the memory: You deserve so much more than
desire.

Wow, this poem!

oct 10/RUN

5.1 miles
bottom of franklin hill
55 degrees

My first run after the marathon! I wasn’t sure how much I would do, but I felt good, so I ran to the bottom of franklin hill and back, and I did it without stopping to walk. I haven’t done that for several months. Almost perfect weather, calm and cool. Wore my bright orange sweatshirt and managed to take it off while running down the franklin hill. No roller skiers or rowers or Dave, the Daily Walker. But shadows and blue water and fluttering leaves.

As I ran, I chanted: I am flying/I am free/and I am where/ I want to be. I felt some soreness/tightness in my left hip, a slight pang in my right foot, but nothing in my knees.

I tried to think about my haunts poem and girls, ghosts, and gorges. I’m trying to put together a draft to submit for a journal that’s due on the 15th. Like in the past, I’m struggling — too many ideas and threads. I keep getting stuck and lost and in a rut of repetition. I started chanting, girl girl girl ghost ghost ghost gorge gorge gorge.

10 Things

  1. red leaves on bushes — or are they young trees? — at the edge of trail, a red that burned dark and deep and seemed to yell out, I am RED!
  2. yellow leaves, like lemon sugar
  3. orange leaves, with a hint of pink
  4. the occasional dead leaf fluttering down
  5. the sound, somewhere above, of a nut being cracked open
  6. most of the leaves are still green
  7. a stinky, sewer smell above the ravine, a faint sourness
  8. a man on a bench — I think it was Daddy Long Legs — calling out, hello!
  9. a quick glimpse of something sitting under the franklin bridge — was it a person, sleeping? No. On the way back up the hill, I could see it better: stacked limestone blocks
  10. 2 black garbage bags, full, beside the trash can near the lake street bridge — did they come from the gorge?

26 Marathon Things: r-z

river. Crossing the Franklin bridge near 2 other runners, I heard one of them look at the river — a blue ribbon sparkling in the sun — and say something like, this marathon is hard, but we get to see this! And I thought, yes! this is the beautiful river I get to run beside almost every day!

strong. During the last 10 miles of the race, I regrouped. It was still difficult, but I ran more than I thought I could. And every time I ran, I felt strong. Several of the spectators called to me, you’re looking so strong! you’ve got this. Once when I stopped for a walk break, a kind runner passed me, gently touched my back, and said, I’ve been watching you and you look so strong. You can do this! Keep going!

t-rex. At least twice, I saw someone dressed in a t-rex costume by the side of the road. The first time, Scott pointed them out to me, but the second time I saw them on my own. What’s the deal with t-rexes? (I asked Scott and he said the t-rex has been a thing for several years).

unreadable. It didn’t bother me, because I’m used to it, but with my bad vision I couldn’t read any of the fun or encouraging or strange signs that people were holding up. When Scott laughed at one, I asked what it said. Run bitch!

vikings. In past years, I’ve enjoyed watching football, but recently I’ve lost my love for it, especially for the Vikings who always seem to disappoint. Even so, this year they are undefeated, and hearing spectators calling out the score as we ran, 10 – 0, 20 – 0, or listening to the game while they cheered, was fun and distracting and felt very Minnesotan. Scott’s dad, a big vikings fan, would have loved the season so far if he were still alive. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed hearing the score; it reminded me of his dad.

walz. At mile 20, you run by gov. walz’s house. I thought I heard someone cheering there and imagined how cool it would be if it were gov walz. I don’t think he was there when I passed by but later Scott told me that he had been outside cheering on runners.

eXhilarated. At the beginning of the race, during the first 2 miles, Scott was so excited. He talked about running this race again and how pumped up he was. I was happy to be there, but couldn’t match his enthusiasm. I was not exhilarated, I was waiting for the moment when it got very hard.

you can do hard things. So much support from spectators. Most of it straightforward encouragement, you’ve got this, you can do hard things, you’re amazing. Some of it slanted: you’re crazy! or look at you out here running and look at me enjoying my bagel! The one sign I could actually read just said, Why?

zephyr*. While the wind wasn’t gentle, it was blowing from the west. In the first mile, it almost blew my hat off. Then it was at our backs. Then I forgot about it until we reached the east side of Lake Nokomis where it was really blowing. A woman’s signs, stacked on a table, blew off and into the road. I briefly thought about stopping to help her then remembered I was racing and should probably keep going.

*I was struggling to come up with a z. Thankfully Scott thought up zephyr, which means west wind

oct 8/postMARATHON

Here’s some stuff that (maybe) only future Sara will appreciate: 48 hours ago, I was in mile 4 or 5 of the marathon, near Bde Maka Ska. This morning, I’m sore, but it’s not that bad. Right after finishing, my calves ached and I limped — waddled? no glimping for me! As I walked, they loosened up, hurt less, but getting up after sitting for a few minutes made them hurt again. Yesterday, I woke up with a stiff left knee and sore obliques. Occasionally my right foot hurt. In the midst of telling Scott about my foot while we took Delia on a brief walk, my right kneecap slipped out of the groove and I had to push it back in. As usual, there was no warning. My sentence interrupted with a shift then a gasp. I’m used to it by now, so are the tendons surrounding my knee. None of us remembered the slip for long. All in all, I’m in fairly good shape! I can’t wait until I feel good enough to get back out by the gorge.

26 Things, i-q

impossible dream. Running between the lake street bridge and the railroad trestle, I heard some singing — to dream the impossible dream/to fight the unbeatable foe — a male voice, lots of vibrato. I thought it might be someone actually singing and not a recording. Wow, I was impressed. But when Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” came on next I decided it was only a recording. When I reached the source of the music I realized it was the house that puts up bleachers every year for watching and cheering. What a party!

jingle bells, the farts version. Somewhere along minnehaha parkway a speaker was playing a version of jingle bells where each note was a fart. I told Scott that we should remember to tell RJP (I did); the two of them love listening to fart playlists on spotify and apple music.

kids. My favorite kid was on Summit. He was holding a microphone that was hooked up to a speaker, calling out, We have to share! It’s my turn to use it now! then, Who doesn’t like mac and cheese?

lakes. Lake of the isles, Bde Maka Ska, Lake Harriet, Lake Nokomis. As we finished each lake, I called out to Scott, another lake done! I wasn’t able to do that with Lake Nokomis because we split up right before we got to it. Lake Nokomis was the hardest lake to run around — windy and long. I remember walking by the little beach and thinking about open swim.

music. There were rock bands and concert bands and drummers and sousaphones and some brass instrument that sounded like a bellowing elk. And music from “official” speakers and make-shift speakers and smartphone speakers. “Eye of the Tiger,” “We are the Champions,” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” “The Impossible Dream.” A group of runners behind us, changing the words of a Gwen Stefani song to This race is bananas B A N A N A S! In past years, I might have listened to a playlist through my headphones. Not today.

neighborhoods. One of the reasons I wanted to run the twin cities marathon is because the course passes through all of my old neighborhoods. Downtown, not too far from the apartment we lived in when we moved back here in 2007. Lake of the Isles and Bde Make Ska: where we lived the first time we moved here from California in 1998, when we fell in love with Minneapolis. I roller-bladed, biked, and walked around these lakes a lot in my early 20s. Around Lake Nokomis where I swim all summer. On Minnehaha Parkway, only 2 blocks from our first house. The falls, the river road, 4 blocks from my current house. Most of the rest of it, until mile 21 at the start of Summit, followed my regular running route for the last 10 years. Some of it looked familiar, some of it made strange by the effort of running for so long.

other-worldly. Out there on the course for 5 1/2 hours, I was somewhere else. Familiar places became unfamiliar, time stopped passing or passed so strangely with no steady beat. I was no longer Sara, but aching calves, blistered feet, sore forearms, feet moving forward. I didn’t think about poetry or the meaning of life or what to do to help FWA grieve for the loss of his beloved community.

poop. I’ve struggled with constipation for a few years now, and in the last month, it got worse, making my long runs harder. Before the race, I was worried — in a state of preoccupooption as RJP and I have named it. The morning of the race, I couldn’t finish my business before we left. I used the port-a-potty twice before the race and twice during the first 10 miles*. It didn’t help much, but it was enough to prevent any incident that would later be recounted as my “poop story.” Pooping is an obsession for a lot of runners. Ask them about their poop story. At one point during the race, I remember hearing a racer talking to someone else: I read that you need to get up several hours before the race to eat something so you make sure you are able to poop in time. Yes, she said poop, and more than once, and not quietly. You need to poop. I had a bagel so I could poop. I managed to poop. I don’t have a problem with her saying poop; pooping is a wonderful thing and the word poop should be said more, and without shame, maybe sometimes with reverence.

*according to Scott, I stopped FOUR times during the first `10 miles. Yikes.

quest. Post-race, I’m disappointed that I didn’t push myself more, but I need to remember that that was never what I was aiming for. I wanted to be able to start the race, and once I started, to finish, then to recover quickly so I can enjoy fall running.