(As printed in the Long Beach Grunion Gazette)
As a child growing up in landlocked Ethiopia, new marathon world-record holder, Haile Gebrselassie (who recently covered the 26.2 miles in 2 hours, 4 minutes) used to run ten kilometers to and from school every day. This apparently has led to his distinctive running posture, with his left arm crooked as if still holding his schoolbooks!
Conversely, I have done much of my marathon training and running in the last fifteen years along the Long Beach waterfront, and without schoolbooks. As I run at the water’s edge, without fail, the ebb and flow of both tide and time ensures that the beach looks a little different each time.
In the peak of relentless summer, the beach looks her most manicured. Before the major holiday weekends, the city sends out trucks that comb the sand flat, evening out any dips and bumps the wind may have caused, and clearing away debris that has washed up on the shore. In the early mornings, the beach can be cool, hazy, and quiet, populated only by the occasional homeless person, or a chanting monk from the Long Beach monastery across Ocean Boulevard. On long summer evenings, she can be noisy and talkative, the boardwalk filled with runners, walkers, skaters, cyclists, and couples walking arm in arm.
We are now approaching my favorite time of year for running: crisp, cool mornings, dew-softened lawns and misty vistas. Beautiful! In the coming winter months, the beach will show her character, especially after a passing storm. She’ll look disheveled and windswept, even messy. Tree trunks, seaweed, and miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam from passing ships will scatter the high water mark. The air fills with salt from the whipped-up sea. As haggard as the beach can look at these times, she feels vibrant, animated, and alive. Sometimes the wind can be blowing so hard that I wonder if she isn’t trying to give me the experience of taking flight!
No matter how the beach is, no matter what her mood, I am simply happy that she is there to welcome my feet along her shoreline, to play chicken with the rising and falling of her sea, to listen to the lap of the waves as I run at the water’s edge. As the rhythm of my run becomes meditation, she cleanses my spirit.
Sometimes, I can thrive in her company when I can stand no one else’s—not even my own. No matter what my mood, she greets me just as I am. There is nothing that I need to do or be. I feel seen and accepted in a way that inspires me to see myself and others in a more compassionate way. Spending time in the generous, accepting presence of the beach is always healing for me. I come home with a more loving view of myself, and I am more willing to extend that loving perspective to others.
It is, perhaps, this innately loving and compassionate presence that draws us all to the ocean, to stand at her feet and reflect upon the ocean inside of us as we seek to navigate its occasionally-stormy waters or find ourselves stuck in a directionless calm.
I know that I, for one, am grateful for the wonderful mystery lady in my life that is our Long Beach shoreline. I anticipate that this will be an affair that lasts a lifetime.
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