October 21, 2012

The race day started like a nightmare and it started, literally, with a nightmare, in which I saw my husband dropping his phone, telling me that Liya was crying over the other end of the phone. She had been kidnapped. I picked up the phone, but it had been disconnected. I woke up. 5:45 already? Why didn’t my alarm go off? Oh, it’s Sunday. I had the alarm set for 5:30 every day except Sunday. Shoot, I need to hurry because the race would start at 7 and it had moved from Long Beach to Santa Monica. The drive could take at least 40 minutes.  I touched my son’s forehead to see if his fever had gone. He was soundly sleeping. Now I remembered why I wasn’t able to wake up earlier. I had woken up at 3am, downloaded some music and created a playlist for the race, and then fed my son some Tylenol before going back to sleep around 4am.

At 6:05am when I got out of the house, it was dark and drizzling. Oh, that’s just great! I hate driving in the dark and driving in the rain.  To make things worse, while changing from 605 to 405, I missed 405 North and ended up on the surface street. GPS was recalculating and showed I would be there at 7:05. Oh, no. I can’t be late for the race!  I needed to get back on the freeway. GPS said, take Lakewood blvd at the  roundabout. Oh, I hate roundabouts. They always look like a maze. I was going at 50miles/hour then I saw a red light.  Stepping hard on the brake suddenly, I felt the car slipping and screeching before it fully stopped.  I remembered the last time I was driving in the rain on the freeway, I almost had an accident. I told myself, I need to be careful. The race can wait. 

I got back on the freeway. Things were looking up. GPS was finally saying I would be there 6:58.  The rain was still drizzling and my car wiper wasn’t at its prime working condition, which made the rain appear heavier than it actually was. The whole thing and my desperation to get there before 7am reminded me the scene from Psycho.  This morning’s experience felt like a prelude to some kind of climax, or a death. I told myself again to be careful.  Then I asked myself, why am I doing this? It felt as if everything was working against my going to the race.  

I had been wondering about what got into me that I was reading books like a starving man eating.  Then I read two books about reading and got an answer. The two books are Anna Quindlen’s How Reading Changed My Life and Sarah Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time.  Both books are excellent and resonate so much with me, esp. Nelson’s book.  I felt so identified with her when I was reading. She likes Nora Ephron and claims to be an Ephron-wannabe.  She reads several books simultaneously and calls it “double-booking”. She is married to an Asian-American and has a mixed son. In her book, she says, when things go right, I read. When they go wrong, I read more… etc, etc. 

In Quindlen’s book, I found my ultimate identification: 

“And a book provides what it always has: a haven. I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for the fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed…. And as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one’s own.”

Haven’t both reading and running provided an escape for me from my crazy reality? If reading is a mental escape, then my recent dabbling in running is a physical one, to be with myself. The absolute solitude gives me a sense of being, being alive and being independent, and an opportunity to think, to reflect, to put everything in perspective. The interesting thing is I go to books to seek escape and to be alone, but is overjoyed to find that I am not alone and there are other readers just like me.

I had used this song from Sandy Lam(林忆莲） when I was running in 2003. It always gave me the rhythm I needed for a sprint. I finally downloaded it the night before the race. It was good as ever, good as I remembered. I never really understood the lyrics of this song, and I wonder if it can be translated as “Grey Escape” or “Grey’s Escape” (if we mimic “Grey's anatomy”, hehe).

But here you go, a great song for running. It’s the only Chinese song I have in my running playlist. In addition, there are several pictures I took during the race. As you can see, everything was indeed grey. Coincidentally, it reminds me the reading of “Fifty Shades of Grey”. I wonder which shade my escape has taken on.