 Almost every year since it started, I participate in the Run for Food, a fund-raiser started by two members of the Sioux Falls Area Running Club to raise money for The Banquet, a feeding ministry in downtown Sioux Falls. Over the past 12 years or so, they’ve raised more than $61,000. It started simply enough: With Rob Sevold and Jeff Schmitt, childhood friends and longtime runners, deciding to swing by the Banquet on their normal Thanksgiving run and drop off a donation. Then they began inviting their friends, and then they made fliers and told more people, and before you know it, hundreds of men and women and their families began gathering Thanksgiving morning to run with them. One of my favorite parts of it is that it’s no frills – no clock, no shirt, no entry fee, no actual racing. Nothing. Just a reason to get out and run that morning with a bunch of other people. It’s one of my favorite parts of the holiday. Turnout depends heavily on the weather, as you can imagine, and that varies in South Dakota in November. This year, it was beautiful, and there was a huge crowd when Kelly and Patrick and I pulled up to the Banquet. I had planned to meet up with my friends Nanci and Jeri to run. Earlier in the week, Jeri had sent me a message saying she was hoping to practice even pacing and wanted to run fairly solid 8:30s for the run, to get over the mental hump that a 10K can present. I can understand that – it’s a short enough distance where you feel like you should be able to hustle, but long enough where if you start too fast it’s going to feel terrible. She was looking for someone who was steady and asked if she could just sort of follow along. Of course I said yes, then told her she could count on Nanci for that – Nanci is training for Boston and by all accounts is a better runner than me. My plan was to just go run. For the past year I’ve been trying to focus on consistency and not worrying about how fast I go – which shows if you look at my plodding log. But the question from Jeri was a challenge – I haven’t tried to run any particular pace in a long time. Could I? I feel so far from the runner I used to be, a little embarrassed that 8:30s for 6 miles wasn’t a sure thing. But I know it’s always easier to do that kind of thing with a friend, and with the belief that I was helping someone else out. We set out, and I realized about a quarter mile in that Jeri was in front of us. We had lost each other a bit at the start, as the crowd set out and the 3-mile runners split from the 6-mile runners. Patrick went his way, Kelly fell back a bit, and Nanci and I looked around. Up ahead I saw Jeri, and she looked solid and steady. We slowly gained on her. I had warned her that I tend to start slowly – lessons learned over many years. We caught up to her around Fawick Park and ran next to her for a while, until she said, “I can’t talk at this pace, I’m sorry.” We laughed – been there – and held steady. I don’t run with a Garmin. I run with a Timex Ironman watch, my fifth or sixth iteration over the years, and if there are mile markers, I take the splits, if not, I just run by feel, by perceived effort, and for runs on my own, for time. I throw my phone into a pocket and run Strava in the background, just looking at it when I’m done. For me, it’s taken the pressure away in a good way – when you’re getting back in shape, it can be demoralizing to see what your pace is, we all know that. And sometimes what feels hard one day feels easy the next. My runs are generally classified as an easy run or one where I’m running a little harder, whatever that is. Over the past few months, I’ve watched the average paces tick back down, down, down, until I’m in the 8s more often than I have been for the past two years. It’s a good feeling. And there are still plenty of slower runs, which tells me I’m doing something right by allowing it to vary and taking easy days easy. (And really, for the most part, they’re all easy days, more on that changing in another post.) We hit the turnaround, and Nanci and I talked about holiday shopping, running, and the exorbitant occasional costs of home ownership. We said hi to nearly every runner on the out-and-back, always surprised by how many people I know out there, or who know me. Around mile 4, some women I know came past us, and we talked briefly about winter mittens. These are the kinds of 30-second entire conversations you can have on a run. We came through toward the end, missed our turn back up the ramp and instead climbed the stairs near 8th Street. Jeri hustled up the stairs and ended up finishing just ahead of us, at a fabulous clip and looking strong. We came through, clicked off our watches and caught back up with Kelly and Patrick, Rob and Jeff. Jeri seemed happy. Nanci thanked me for the run. Patrick got a chocolate milk to bring home for my kids. Kelly said she had people to run with the entire way. I felt like I ran an even effort out there, talked the whole way with Nanci. And when I looked at my phone after, I was surprised: 8:27, 8:35, 8:33, 8:26, 8:24 – with a random 12:00 first mile because I turned my phone on and then walked around for a while – and an 8:08 final quarter for the 6.3-mile run. I couldn’t have run that evenly if I had tried. I know that. Two days later, I ran just over 10 miles through southeastern Sioux Falls, again just looking for an easy run. It was the same thing, a bit slower – 9:31, 9:33, 9:27, all the way through. Later on Thanksgiving, we had a bit of time between events and Patrick and I went and rode the single-track along the bike path that I wrote about last week. We weaved between the trees, stopped for coffee and then came back, getting in just over 12 miles on our bikes at a casual and lazy pace, doing nothing but enjoying being outside and checking out the work that FAST has done, and continues to do. I’ll be running those trails soon, I think, for something different when I’m over there. I don’t know why both of those runs made me so happy – maybe because they felt really good. Maybe because there’s something to be said overall for not fluctuating wildly in something – I need a little consistency just about everywhere in life, and I’m finally finding it. It’s good to find it on the run, too, right now. Settling in, holding steady, building back up, one mile at a time. I heard from Rob on Friday that the run had raised more than $40,000. It was an impressive number. Then, a day later, he texted me again. It was even better: More than $61,000. Did you read that? This community raised more than $61,000 in one day for The Banquet. That’s from you and me and businesses and corporate matches and people stuffing cash and checks into buckets at the start. All because two guys wanted to go for a run and give back on a day when everyone is thinking about what they’re grateful for. Family, a warm house, a meal together with the people you love. Steady miles. Generous giving. Thanks, Sioux Falls.  Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.
1 Comment
 BENSANE at Leaders Park! If you think hard enough about it, everything is built incrementally. Each piece doesn’t have to be the same size: Sometimes it’s a gathering of tiny movements, a big bang, a world unfolding. A feeling, a conversation, an aftermath. You can punctuate the timeline from the first spark, from somewhere in the middle, from 10 minutes ago. It all depends on what moments you’re measuring. For dirt trail-building in Sioux Falls, time began more than a decade ago, and it advanced another 1,000 feet this summer. You’ve seen it if you’ve run along the bike path near Yankton Trail – about a mile of dirt track peeking through the trees, entire families of cyclists veering off for a stretch of urban mountain biking. Or if you’ve gone to Leaders Park to get in a few miles of trail running or dog-walking. It’s all part of the growing off-road recreation movement in Sioux Falls, one supported by volunteers and used by anyone interested in getting off the paved road, if just for a little while. On a recent Friday, I sat down with Michael Christensen and Clay Austin, two of the founding members of Falls Area Single Track (FAST), to talk about what they do and why they’re doing it. The first thing you should know about these two guys is how gentle they are – soft spoken, wide open and down to earth enough to answer even the most mundane questions. Their mission is simple, best summed up later in a text from Michael: “If we don’t have something that other communities have, I try to make the something.” These are the people who are going to city council and parks board meetings, who had a vision, along with Chris Pierson, and then slowly and methodically knocked down barriers and red tape, addressed the concerns of neighborhoods and then hauled in machinery and hauled out stumps to build, slowly build, opportunities for recreation in the middle of the city. Once they build the trails, they take care to maintain them, too – it doesn’t fall to the city. But the trails are open to anyone who wants to use them. I first came across them as a runner, wondering what that ribbon was alongside the bike path. Then this summer, I dragged out my college mountain bike and took it to Leaders Park, where I remembered how you have to just get over whatever is holding you back when you try to mountain bike. It doesn’t matter if you ride the brake the entire time like I do, or if you slide all the way around a corner and lay there staring up at the sky, or if you have to stop for a moment, just wait with me, for a minute, while you try to slow your breathing down and remember that everything usually works out and everyone has to start – or restart – somewhere. Clay and Michael don’t care. They want you out there. On foot. On your old bike. With your kids. That may be what makes them happiest. “Just go for it,” Clay says. “You don’t need a $7,000 bike to make it work. You don’t need clipless pedals. You don’t need all that fancy stuff.” Michael says they get a huge turnout every year for their Take a Kid Mountain Biking event. “That shows that any bike will work,” he says. It’s true. Both my kids have been out there, bouncing along on their heavy kid bikes. They don’t know they could be lighter, or wearing fancy shoes or doing anything. They just know that they’re riding their bikes in the woods. When you let go and do it as an adult, you know the same thing. A decade in, Michael and Clay and the rest of the FAST board realize they’ve got something – and the city does, too. That’s why they’ve joined forces with the International Mountain Biking Association, become a nonprofit, and have set their sights on developing a few miles of single-track along Tuthill Park. The city said yes. They consulted with a trail-builder out of the Black Hills who can help craft a plan for the trails, follow the contours of the land, watch how water flows, avoid erosion and make it a park that’s fun to ride and reasonable to maintain. It’s one of the lessons that came out of their work on Leaders. “The path of least resistance is not the right path,” Michael says. “People go wherever the trees aren’t, but if you want something you don’t have to maintain all the time, you have to look at terrain and make sure it isn’t too steep and water isn’t always flowing down the trail.” “At Tuthill, everything will be 5 percent grade or less,” Clay says. “At Leaders, we have some really steep stuff.” “Those are the mistakes,” Michael laughs. “Yeah, you’re going to give someone a rough day,” Clay says. They were learning. That’s part of what the mountain biking association and the professional trail-building can help with. Then they can help do the manual labor – with help from volunteers – of pulling out stumps and clearing brush. To do that, they’re trying to raise money. An event this past weekend touring the opportunities in town with stops at all the bike shops raised a few thousand dollars. They need about $20,000 to make this project happen. The more money they raise, the faster it can go. But speed isn’t the goal – though everyone would prefer to be running or riding the trail rather than clearing it. They know it can be a process, and incremental is OK with them. It took three years to convince the city and the neighborhood that Leaders Park was a good spot. Now? People have stopped them to thank them for a new place to walk after dinner. For providing entry points to the park. For bringing in different uses for the park, different people to experience it. A few weeks ago, I was out running at Good Earth State Park and heard someone call my name. It was Michael. He and his family were out there hiking for the first time. “That place is great,” he told me later. He’s finding out what the rest of us on our feet have known for a while now. “We need to get better at recruiting,” Clay laughs at the end of our meeting. Maybe. It’s hard to get folks excited about helping carve a terrace into the side of a hill. It just sounds tiring. But we’ll be there. Because we run the trails. Or take our kids out on their bikes. Take ourselves out. Because the off-road movement is as big, if not bigger, in the running community. It’s all recreation. It’s all of us. And it’s all in our city. How to donate: Visit Falls Area Single Track at http://www.fallsareasingletrack.org. Donate here: http://www.fallsareasingletrack.org/donate  Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged
The first cold day of the fall, I always underdress. The second one? Wickedly overdressed. It happens every year. I’ve been running long enough, been running outside long enough, that I should be able to look at the temperature and immediately know what to put on. It never works that way. On a recent Friday, I headed out in what I thought was a reasonably warm collection of gear for a chilly but not really cold morning. Then, as it always happens here, I turned into the wind and was reminded that it can be biting, even when you’re fine otherwise. That, of course, meant that the next time I went out, I completely overdressed in straight paranoia. Too heavy of a coat, gloves that were too warm, a headband I didn’t need, tights when capris would have worked. The only good thing I did was put tape over the toes of my shoes to keep the wind out. It takes a few runs to get the hang of it again. More than a decade ago, I told myself I was going to run outside all year, and, if I did, I would treat myself to a few new items. The thing with running clothes is it’s usually the smell of them that makes you retire them, not that they wore out. So you know whatever you buy is generally an investment. I bought a jacket that year on a clearance rack, and I still have it. Same with some of my favorite gloves and even a pair of tights. Recently, 605 Running Co. hosted a winter running class, showcasing gear and offering tips and tricks for how to survive the season. We all have our absolute go-to items for winter running. These are a few of mine. Handwarmers. I was introduced to these by Rob Sevold at a Lincoln morning run a decade ago. I have circulation issues, and my hands turn to ice long before the rest of me. I have an entire box of mittens, of gloves, of gloves with windproof flaps that turn them into mittens, liners and giant fleece mittens. I have every combination. Some of them work better than others, but what I absolutely have to have are chemical handwarmers. Wool socks. Again with my circulation issues. Sure, wool socks are more expensive than a six pack of cotton socks. But they last forever. I just pulled out a pair of grey ones that I bought that first year, and they just started to have a hole in the bottom. (Also, all my socks get holes at the same time – why is that?) Balaclava. A hat is good. A buff is good, too. A balaclava is both. I see folks in the really tight ones with the nose holes, and they’re cool, but I’m a nerd and my glasses fog up when I wear those. So I stick with a fairly loose fleece one. I’ve had it for years and love it. I wear a hat underneath it on really bitter day, and I like that I can kind of move it around if it’s windy or not – pull the face mask down so I can breathe, pull it up into the wind, take the hood on and off for the same reasons. Note: Braid your hair. A balaclava and a long ponytail is a recipe for a giant knot when you’re done. If you’re cold enough, it’s a frozen knot. Full tights with capri tights underneath. I rarely go for a run where I think, wow, my calves are really cold. But your thighs? Good grief, they can freeze. Two pairs of tights are a half pair too many, though, so I wear capri tights under longer ones, or under looser running pants in the dead of winter. I’m warm without feeling stuffed into my clothes. Windproof jacket. I don’t want to talk about how many running jackets I have. Soft shell jackets. Windbreakers. Reflective coats. Coats big enough to cram a fleece under in the dark of February. It’s a lot. I have a LOT of winter running coats. Also, somehow they are almost all either blue or purple. My favorites are a little big on me, have a pocket big enough for a phone somewhere and are longer in the back. Trail shoes. Its’ snowy. It’s slippery. Strapping any kind of weird spike thing on your shoes just makes your feet go numb. OK, maybe that’s just me. Every winter I regret that when I bought snowshoes I didn’t buy the kind you can run in. It would allow me to push my trail love deeper into the season. For now, trail shoes get me through the snowy season. Beyond all that? A desire to go. Friends to go with. The occasional daytime run, so you don’t feel like you’re in the dark all the time. A weekend long run followed by a fleece blanket, giant sweatshirt and cup of tea, the sun bright and a library book.  Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged.
 My Sunday morning was spent sitting in my kitchen, feet on the barstool next to me, coffee on the counter, and finally finishing “The Dark Dark,” a book of short stories by Samantha Hunt. Short stories haven’t always been my thing, but I find myself gravitating toward them more and more lately, recognizing them for the art form they are and not feeling wanting every time I read one. Instead I can take the story itself, the collection as a whole, as enough. I don’t know how I found this book – it wasn’t the usual way, which is dumb luck looking through the stacks at the library and grabbing something with a cover I like or a title I like or a blurb from another author I adore. My oldest sister, Pam, told me when I was a kid to read the first page of a book to decide if I wanted to check it out – it’s advice that still stands. But for this one, I read an excerpt in a review, and suddenly I had to have it. “I am not simple. My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs, and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs.” Swoon. I found the book, requested it at the library, took it out and kept it long enough to warrant a discussion with a branch manager this past weekend where I promised I was bringing it back just as soon as I write down some of the lines from it. The quote came 179 pages in. By then, I was already in love with this author. That paragraph, though, ends with: “I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds … I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives.” Don’t we all. The entire book is like that, the words themselves spare and beautiful. The stories so visual I can hardly stand it. In one, a woman imagines she’s turning into a deer at night, and the writing is so good I believe her, all the way through: “I wait, and just when I think too much time has passed, that maybe it won’t happen tonight, it happens, so quickly I can’t scream.” She goes on to explain how it happens and you feel it. You feel her face harden, the wobble in her legs as she tries to stand on the mattress, staring down at her sleeping husband, wondering how she can tell him what she becomes at night. When all your disbelief is suspended, you know the story works. In another one, a brother and sister watch as their mother’s horse falls through ice and into a drainage pond behind a shopping center. “She screams as much as a horse can scream.” As I sat there, trying to finish the book before I went for a run, I had to keep pausing to reread lines. Some of them were just so musical, “The night keeps swinging, Trey to her, Trey to her.” I love the strobing, love the imagery. The whole book is like that, the last story echoing the first, but the characters find themselves reading about themselves. None of this is my style. And yet. Finally, I finished, with the gasp and laugh that happens to me whenever I end a book that I love. Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed I just sit there, met with a “Did you read something sad” comment. I set the book down, changed clothes, tried to decide if I should do a straight road run or drive to the trails to avoid the bit of wind that had risen as the day began. While I had been reading, I’d also been listening to Internet radio and I kept hearing this song by Spoon. I recognize I may be the last person to hear of this band, and I have no idea what kind of cool factor or wildly uncool factor they have. Like books, I pick what I like just because I like it. I decided to download the album and take it with me to Good Earth, spend an hour in the woods with music I didn’t really know on trails I know by heart. As I ran out there, mostly alone save a dog walker or two, mostly out of the wind, and the trails half dry dirt, half covered in leaves, I was thinking about language. The album was poppier than I expected, incongruous against the state park setting. But it didn’t matter. The music is fine – my vocabulary to talk about music is limited to my emotions about it, not the skill or technique behind it. But maybe it was just the day – having started in words, I stayed there. It’s just poetry, really, lyrics. I let the album play as I ran the top of the park, and the song I love, “Do I Have to Talk You into It,” began as I made my way down the single track to the south loop. “Do I have to talk you into it,” I sang out loud. “Do we have to make sense of it.” The words come spitting out in the song, on the trail. “When I’ve known you such a long time, and we never had to act polite.” Then it just switches, more plaintive, backed in somehow, less forceful: “I wanna whisper down the tube, all the words you would never use, do I have to talk you into it.” It’s a constant question for me: What would you say if you weren’t afraid. What words would you use? I’ve made myself use some of them, heard others use their own version. Then you extrapolate it to your entire life. Whisper down the tube all the things you would never do. What would they be? They’d be everything. I did the loop at the bottom twice, not ready to climb the hill again. I stopped and took a photo, ran back to the top and did all the lollipops up there. I debated going back to my car, decided to run a little out and back first. It’s a loop with a bench under a tree, and every time I do it, I see the cover of “These Happy Golden Years,” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, an illustration of Laura and Almanzo, she’s holding her dress out, they love each other. I bought my daughter the entire set of books for her 7th birthday last week, and she full-on fell over with laughing joy when she opened them, having just finished “Little House in the Big Woods” by herself the week before. I looped around the tree, thinking how happy I am that she loves to read. That’s when I realized that’s what I would write about today – books music and words and language and running. How each one is a kind of meditation. You do them all alone, you share them with everyone you know. The review I had read of “The Dark Dark” describes it as stories of women in metamorphosis. It is, I guess. There’s a crossroads of some sort in most of them – woman to woman, lover to lover, reality to fantasy. And just like any writing that really resonates, what you respond to is the honesty, the vulnerability of the author, the razor-thin margin between who they are and how they write. “I don’t want to love you because I’m scared,” the woman tells her husband in one story. “So you imagine bad things about me,” he replies. “Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?” The story ends with them standing in the kitchen. “We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think of as the night.” No difference between us and the trail. Between us and the woods. Between us and the miles and the accumulation of them. Between us and where we want to be. Whisper down the tube, all the words you would never use. You don’t have to talk me into it.  Author’s note: This book will be the February choice for the Zandbroz Community Book Club, which I’ve run for more than a decade, if you’d like to join us. We meet the third Thursday of every month at 6:30. You can find us on Facebook.
Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear each Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at [email protected]. Story ideas are encouraged. |
|
RSS Feed