COLUMN A LIFE LESSON FROM THE GARRY BJORKLUND

from DULUTH.com May/June 2019

MINNESOTA ROCK MUSICIAN RICH MATTSON REFLECTS ON CAREER, LATEST ALBUM ‘TOTEM’

HALF-MARATHON: MAYBE JUST, I DON’T KNOW, TRY?

and then we got a percentile ranking — how we compared to kids our age around the country.

I nailed it. Every. Single. Time. I was the greasy-haired freckle-face to beat. And I nailed it in a pair of dirty white Keds that probably didn’t even have shoelaces and with a kneelength plaid skirt whapping at my thighs as I cruised across the finish line.

And then I went off to college and found out that I was just OK at running — bigger pond, er, track and all. It no longer mattered that I could sprint around the church parking lot 2.5 times faster than any other Catholic preteen with an address in northwestern Rochester.

Another year I woke up at 5 a.m. on race day and decided I wasn’t in the mood to run.

I wish I could pinpoint what changed and why. How I went from “meh” to that growl one makes when monitoring muscle tone in the mirror. I’m sure it would make a very meaningful montage, but the truth is, I just wanted to see what happened if I trained.

So I followed a training schedule. I made a pretty great playlist. I put a specific amount of carbohydrates into my body on a designated day.

BY CHRISTA LAWLER

Ihave a long history of having zero interest in doing things I am not good at: saxophone, golf, wearing a white T-shirt. I just don’t do them. Mimes wiping hands clean. If my introduction to said-new-thing doesn’t end with a wide-eyed, “why she’s a natural,” forget it.

A long, long time ago, I was good at running. A bonafide natural. Enough years have passed that I can throw out “fastest in the school, probably,” and it’s not an important enough stat for a single alum of St. Pius X in Rochester, Minn., to give a rip about whether it’s true.

Do the words Presidential Fitness Test still hold any currency? The gist: everyone in the school did a bunch of sports stuff, including irrelevant things like shuttle run and flexed arm hang (just for girls; boys used their big muscles to do actual chin-ups),

As a college freshman, I could run rapidly and wouldn’t finish in last place. My teammates, though? What a bunch of winners. They were a Purple Pack of Tommies, lean and speedy. They concerned themselves with things like conference titles and national meets. I’m guessing they never filled a St. Thomas travel mug with Dr. Pepper and Southern Comfort and laid around eating Slim Jims while they watched Satan Marlena on “Days of Our Lives.”

They were in training. They were trying. What a bunch of squares. Me, it was natural talent or nothing. Watch Marlena’s eyes glow demonic.

And so it went for years: a runner with no commitment to better running. My resume: In that time, I came in sixth-to-last place in the Twin Cities Marathon — a race to the finish line against an almost 80-year-old man and a bro in a very high-tech knee brace. “Train, shrain,” I’d thought in the months leading up to the race between Minneapolis and St. Paul. “I’m the four-time conqueror of the Presidential Fitness Test.”

One year, I stopped and waited in a lengthy line to use a portable potty along the Garry Bjorklund HalfMarathon route. How very Gen-X to shrug off the 40 minute addition to my finish time.

I had a stomach ache on the day of Grandma’s Marathon. The bus dropped us off near the starting line of the half-marathon, and I weighed my discomfort. It was unfamiliar. Probably a rare stomach disorder. Then, boom.

It was nerves. I was nervous.

“What if I committed to months of training for this thing and I finish with a porta-potty time?” I wondered, triggering more waves of discomfort.

I pulled my hat low over my eyes and cringed. “Oh. This is what it feels like to care,” I realized, unmasking this irregular sequence of twinges.

I finished less than a minute faster that my goal that year, just the kind of thing that makes a runner pelt her foil finish line cape with a hot, satisfied tears. For all the waves of starting line nausea, caring seemed worth it. This was my movie moment. I was “Rudy.”

Never fear, friends. I’ve since returned to mediocrity. I’ve started the race with a limp and last year I had an entire existential crises — why do we even do this — that lasted the length of downtown Duluth. But the point is that one time I cared enough to try, and it worked.

Christa Lawler is a features reporter for the Duluth News Tribune. Grandma’s Marathon will be run down the North Shore, ending in Duluth’s Canal Park, on June 22, 2019.