During the past several months, the city playground in Madison Park near my house has been undergoing a pretty significant renovation, and it opened up on Saturday. Rain or shine (and it was a bit of both), summer arrived in Madison Park, along with hordes of kids and their families. The playground changed a bunch. Trees were cut down, playground equipment was taken away, new sod was put down, paths where no paths had been, then new play structures came back. During the winter, a chainlink fence guarded the site, and people picketed, complaining about the trees, and the change, because change for many people is bad. As a communications guy, I tend to look at the world as an ongoing set of communications challenges, and I would’ve told the park planners that the problem they were having was a direct result of not being clear enough about their end point – what was the world going to look like on June 7 when the park opened again. In the absence of this vision, it was easy to lionize the past, and wail about the present, and mourn the future. But when the park opened, the persistence of the people who had planned was made clear, and for all the kids and families scrambling over the equipment, the change was good. I’m pretty sure the kids all along were looking to the potential new, not with fear but with anticipation, a lesson for us all.
Then on Sunday, I went for a run with my bro, the latest training run leading up to the Mountain to Sound relay. I’ll be running the half marathon leg, and the team I’m on has a name (“Faster than last year”) which sort of means work harder in training. We’d both gotten the latest issue of Runner’s World, which said that the way to run faster over a race was to train so that the last few miles were at race pace, give or take. So off we went, 12 miles, starting slow with the intent of finishing fast. Many of my runs these days cover some seriously beautiful areas. My runs from the house take me along Lake Washington, where I can see the lake and the sailboats and both bridges and Bellevue in the distance, and on clear days the mountains that surround us. On longer runs, I’m on the Burke Gilman trail, past the University of Washington and out toward Sand Point and back. The path is filled with runners and walkers and cyclists and skateboarders and inline skaters, everyone just out and about. It’s good distraction. At the turnaround, we picked up the pace, going uphill and into the wind, which is always the way it seems to go. Six miles to go, and I thought we were going a bit fast, and then at the mile mark we found out we were – our goal was to finish the last two miles at a 7:30 pace, and we hit 7:38 at mile 7. It’s never good to go too fast too early, and I started thinking about all the reasons to slow down. I was tired, my legs hurt, we were still running uphill. I run with a heart rate monitor, which is sort of a mixed blessing. I knew that I was now running at something close to my race heart rate pace – and I’ve not been able to sustain that pace for more than a few miles. But I thought of all the miles I’ve logged in the last year. A year ago, I was going to run the 10k portion of the relay, and the idea of running even 10 miles seemed like a bad idea. Now I was 7 miles into a run, faster than I’d run the 10k a year ago. Pat suggested thinking my heart slower…being more efficient on the run. Another mile passed, then another, all at the same pace and it was time to speed up again. I remembered what I’ve known before…that with persistence and a clear goal, anything is possible. At mile 10 we clocked a 7:07 mile and then eased up to the finish. The sun came out, and it was summer still.
Who knows what pace I’ll run for the race. But the lessons for the weekend – embrace change, be persistent – are ones that will last.