Running, Possibilities, a Birthday, and a Beach
Running and You (and me)
A contemporarily underappreciated gift of our evolution is our ability to sweat, a part of life that most of us gripe about and work to prevent rather than celebrate. Personally, I believe sweating to be one of the most unique and fundamental parts of what it means to be human, on par with thumbs and the creation of Takis. Next time moistness manifests, imagine being a pre-historic human. Compared to the other beasts of the land, you’re a slow nubile weakling comically incapable to compete with other predators. Our wimpy bipedal legs could never hope to chase down even the most rotund ruminants. Before the monolith came down to teach us to use tools, we were yet another failed experiment ready to be wiped from the geological timesheet. That is, until sweat literally started to ooze from our skin, providing us the chance we needed to excel. When they weren’t busy laughing at us, the other animals breathed heavily to cool themselves down after a scamper (Boring). Our skin juices gave us automatic evaporative cooling (Based).
Take a turn, and go back to your roots.
Armed with only our sweat, our sweaty family, and our innate drive, we’d be okay with getting smoked at the beginning of our hunt. Rather than lose our hopes, we’d let out an oogah-oogah and continue chasing. Deep into the jungle, plain, or tundra, our prey began to feel confident that their evolutionary advantaged speed had saved their hide once more. Yet, the smell of 8th grade boys would become stronger and the oogah-oogahs grew louder. They would rest on their laurels once more, jetting off further, evading us once again. At this point, the beast would let out asthmatic heaves trying everything it could to recover from repeated sprints through difficult terrain. Unable to move due to exhaustion, the animal would watch the sun start to set, and what was confidence traded place for fear. The stench is coming in from all directions and the last thing our prey sees in its paralyzed debility is a group of musty paleolithic goons come out of the bushes, let out one last oogh, and show what’d become humanity’s first step on their quest to dominate the world.
Imagine this neanderthal, swamped in sweat hurling himself through the forest with reckless abandonment, no ruminant animal would be safe.
One day, before I die, I will chase down a deer-like animal. A restless route through the forest, man versus animal, and millennia of genetic evolution coursing through me to experience one of the most deeply encoded features of being human. While Thoreau sat around a pond all day to reject the distractions of modernity (coward) my dream is using nothing but my sweaty willpower to experience the divine simplistic beauty of humanity in a way that Thoreau and his familial Door Dash could never. The one thing standing between me, and my moist nirvana of ultimate exertion is the fact I’ve been a terrible runner my entire life.
My first attempt at running a mile came in the 5th grade where I finished in 15 minutes (brisk walking pace) and vomited on the finish line. Throughout my teens, I mentally relegated myself as a bad runner. I never thought about bettering myself because I believed these things were impermeable. We are who we are, and I was a bad runner. I was plenty active in this time, though if I couldn’t be a good runner, I was going to be a strong guy. So throughout high school and community college, I only focused on lifting heaving things for a few reps.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
This was until I transferred to UCSD, where during my first semester I was more active than I had ever been in my life up to that point. I walked everywhere I went, eventually started biking everywhere on campus, briefly was on the Men’s Rugby team, played as many intra-mural and intra-fraternal sports as possible, and lived a short walk away from a great gym. Within weeks of being at UCSD, I dropped 40 pounds. It wasn’t even the number that changed, as I had previously been around 185lbs during high school wrestling, but the type of body I was changing into. I was still strong enough, but I got faster with better endurance. During a soccer game, I realized I could run hard for most of it without feeling exhausted. I still didn’t view myself as a runner, I still don’t, but I no longer viewed myself as incapable of cardio. It wasn’t just my body changing, but my mindset around my capabilities as well.
This isn’t even my final twink state
Post graduation plus a brief relationship plus COVID lockdowns all at once meant I regained the weight. Though I fell out of shape, I was empowered by my previous weight loss to know I could do it again. That is exactly what happened. After a breakup, a move, and a new romance with a 1985 Cannondale Road bike from Craigslist, I found myself in even better shape than I had ever been in during college. The first weight loss opened my eyes to what was possible, the second was a full awakening. Together they shattered the wall of inertia that prevents the present from becoming an enlightened future beyond the path of apathy. We are not stuck with who we’ve been, rather, we are what we choose to do. It’s obvious to say, but harder to live out.
Despite all these profound revelations, it wasn’t even until this year that I started running. Before joining the Peace Corps, my cardio (and love) was my bicycle. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my steed with me, leaving me many months without my favorite exercise and hobby. After six months in Timor, I was finally able to get a bicycle and transport it up to Ermera, my mountain village. I was filled with joy to be back on two wheels, until I realized that the country’s presently woeful infrastructure applied to me and my bicycle as well. The dirt roads are unfortunately too intense for an enjoyable ride and the only paved road is a 4m wide tract winding up the mountain with large trucks flying around the bends each way. I enjoy the thrill of silly senseless risk as much as anyone, but I’ll save death for another time.
I would do anything to get this leg back.
The forces of necessity and boredom united to compel me to engage in the most primal and basic human exertions outside of mating, running. Foolishly the only athletic shoes I brought were a pair of cleats that I expected to get plenty of wear with playing soccer in a soccer loving nation. My expectations did not expect all the local soccer to be played on gravel and rock, making the cleats useless. The running I did early on was done in my sandals, hobbling along trying my hardest not to faceplant on the road. Eventually I got myself a proper pair of running shoes, which lead to an inevitable Instagram story picture of a run, finally leading to a text from volunteer Isabelle, “Saw your Instagram story, looks like you’re ready to start half marathon training with us”. The date would be three months from then on Isabelle’s birthday. From throwing up after my first ever mile, all the way to running 13.1 all at once, and eventually that deer like animal. Nothing like a deadline to get the ball rolling on destiny.
Isabelle’s Birthday and Maubara
The half marathon never happened. For the first few weeks after the challenge, I was consistently training, running 3-5 miles every other day. Then I started to develop breathing issues stemming from seasonal crop burning, perennial trash burning, and my lung muscles beginning to wither away due to a lack of protein. This combined with the present drought making water extremely scarce and showers more so, meant training was halted. Of course, I’m not the lone struggler against these challenges. Sure, they derail my training, but they’re a common reality for communities across the island. Rather than allow the challenges to bog us down with complaints, they serve as motivation to bring the better future we all want. On the positive side, the atrophying lungs gave me medical permission to crank up my protein consumption and lift heavy things to get the mountain man bod to match the lifestyle.
Fortunately for me, I wasn’t the only one lacking in training to bail on the race portion of the weekend. Instead, it would just be a lovely weekend in the sleepy fishing village of Maubara. And what a lovely weekend it would be.
To plan to get there: Walk down mountain to larger valley town of Gleno, catch bus heading north all the way down the mountain to the coast, ???, get to Maubara. Once on the coast, the bus turns east towards the capital. So, I would get off where it turned and somehow end up far west in Maubara. Maybe I could flag down a bus heading that way (unlikely considering they only leave Dili when they’re beyond packed), or miraculously a friend would see and pick me up, or worst case scenario I’d carry all my stuff on foot the 36km.
After trudging down to Gleno, I hop on a bus and begin the purgatorial circling recruiting others to get others onto our bus so maybe we could leave promptly. It typically takes about an hour to get the requisite number of bodies onboard to prevent the jostling that seatbelts would normally take care of. After two hours of calling out “DILI DILI DILI”, I needed a break so I asked the driver if I could hop off for lunch before we went. Like clockwork, as I was settling up for my lunch, the driver came back around to pick me up to continue the circuit, though this time with a few more recruits. After the sweltering three hours, we finally began our always beautiful descent to the ocean. Before we’d see the sea, the curvaceous winds of the road would seduce two other passenger’s lunches to come up and be plastered along the bus windows. We’d tally another hour onto the journey for cleaning and resting before continuing our roll on down.
With the ocean in sight, I got off the bus, though now the scarcity of sun added itself to the list of challenges to overcome alongside the impending uncertainty of logistics. The bridge I would cross later was here. After a few photos of the serene vacancy of coastal desert, I began walking west, uncertain of how many steps I’d take before I’d get to Maubara. The answer was about five. Almost at once after I started walking, a car pulled over, and the driver introduced himself in perfect English and asked where I was going. I replied saying I was going to Maubara, he said he was as well. For legal purposes, Jacinto and I became close friends before I got in his car. And if we weren’t that close to start, we’d become so by the end of our drive.
What an incredible blessing it was not only to get a comfortable ride to my destination, but to have an hour of conversation with one of the most interesting people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. Jacinto was born during Portuguese colonization. He worked hard in school before Indonesia invaded his nascent country. After the devastation that the occupation brought, he fled to the mountains for a few years living as a guerilla fighter before eventually fleeing to Australia. How could he possibly flee the island to another island four hundred miles away without anything? Well one night he went down to the airport in Dili. Near the airport, on the ground, he found a pair of small crosses that he pinned to his shirt, maybe they’d help him. As he approached the plane headed to Australia, he was stopped by Indonesian soldiers who asked him what he thought he was doing. Before he could answer, the soldiers saw the crosses pinned to the shirt and asked if he was with the Catholic Dioceses, who had immunity during the occupation. He said he was, and they let him get in the plane, where he got to Australia and immediately declared as a refugee. “Stupid soldiers” he would laugh.
In Australia Jacinto would go onto get an education and use it to advocate for his country’s liberation. He worked for every single international agency, doing a countless number of jobs. Eventually he couldn’t be away from home any longer and returned to Timor, back to the front lines. Though rather than fight in the mountains, he documented and reported the crimes of the state and the suffering of the people. He had many more stories to share, ranging from gut wrenchingly painful to gut bustingly hilarious. What an unexpected joy to meet Jacinto.
We’d eventually get to Maubara and part ways. The weekend had officially started, though I had already made many weekends worth of memories solely in the journey there. Though in Maubara, I still wasn’t at Isabelle’s house yet, nor had I any idea of where it was. Rather than ask, I figured it would be more fun to start in the town center and ask around until I got there. Through a series of “leten” (up) “kraik” (down) and “sorin” [side (which side is left to the listener’s imagination)] I got to her neighborhood where I found a group of kids. I asked them where Isabelle lives, and rather than answer, they cheered and started running together past me. I took the clue and joined them as the marauding half naked crew guided me to my destination.
At Isabelle’s, we enjoyed a nice meal together before heading out to set up camp on a nearby beach for the night. I didn’t know we were going to sleep on the beach until a few days before coming. I had little thought-out plan for how I’d get there, and even less about how I’d be sleeping. Personally, I like it better that way, figuring it out as I go along. I figured in the worst-case scenario; I’d sleep on the beach with a blanket of sand ready to wash off with the morning tide. I’ve never been a stranger to sleeping anywhere, though usually it’d involve a silly amount of beer. We can put another check in the win column for simply going with the flow because Ruby happened to have an extra tent she didn’t need.
Waking up at sunrise brings a certain kind of exclusive joy that is equally open to all who choose to partake. Most of my sunrise viewings have traditionally paired with going to sleep rather than waking up. While there is plenty of fun to be had with the previous, each approach has their own part of the heart to tickle. This sunrise, it was the granola side being tickled, an often-nourished side that continued to feast. Around an hour before the ball of flames crested the nearby silhouetted mountain, I crawled out of the tent with sand partnering with my sweat to form an adhesion of abrasion that would soon be relieved by the most polar of a plunge taken in the tropics. The whole of the Wetar Strait [Tasi Feto (The Woman Sea)] was alive and jostling my floating body to and fro like a leaf caught in the wind refusing to land. I lived in San Diego for 4 years, one of those years was within stumbling distance from the beach, and not once did I ever allow myself the pleasure of a pre-sunrise dip. Now that I live deep in the mountains, I can more fully appreciate the luxuries of proximity to the water. There various similar surreal joys that exist so accessibly for our taking, but only if we want to.
The dusty purple eventually traded itself for a softer blue then into a harsh blue and yellow radiating from the sky with the only respite coming from the sea who turned from gentil delight to salvatory necessity with the creeping arc of the sun. After hours of skipping stones and swimming in place while challenging the current, we built up a hell of an appetite. Still sopping from the ocean, some of us wandered off to forage food for the others at the weekly bazaar that so happened to take place during our search. One person got the baked bread, another found the fried bread, I loaded up on the avocado and eggs so we could have a beautiful California breakfast from the warmth of another coast. A wonderful feature of Timor-Leste’s roadside cup noodle stands is the availability of preboiled eggs at the same price of a regular raw egg, often chaotically placed side by side. The stands are often an eggs throw from each other meaning I am never a solid toss away from an affordable, convenient, and sustainable source of protein whenever I’m fiending.
The rest of the final day involved an equanimous meander to a café my buddy Kyle is volunteering for, another stroll to a restaurant in an old fort, and my own solo ventures. The fort is a fascinating story because it was a former Dutch fort during the colonial age. That was until the gouda eaters traded the small area of Maubara for the entire island of nearby Flores. While it doesn’t absolve the tulip pickers from the blunder of trading Manhattan for Pulau Rhun (Context ruins the joke, sorry), in NFL trade terms its akin to The Dutch Seahawks trading away Russel Wilson to the Portuguese Broncos for way more than he’s worth. So that’s why upon entering the restaurant in the courtyard of the fort, you’ll be greeted with “Bom dia” instead of “Selamat Pagi” (The Dutch East Indies never really took on the Dutch language).
The fort is a beautiful oasis of shade and trees giving bucolic rest from the dusty red earth pulsating from the noon heat of the dry season. Cannons, fortress walls, and chicken fried noodles, what else could one want in their antiquated colonial fortress.
After eating and leaving enthusiastic google reviews for the two establishments our buddy Kyle volunteers with, most went to digest on the shores, but me? I saw a rock that required my immediate mounting. Jutting up through the water only mere meters from the beach, was a rock maybe two or three kilometers from our fortress. What the hell was it doing out there, seducing me with its jagged edges contrasting so perplexedly against the smooth water and sand. It was a lone boulder without a counterpart in sight along my entire journey along the coast. The locals, sitting roadside would ask me, “Colega, ba neebe?” (Friend where are you going?) and while trying to tamper the excitement in my voice, I’d reply “Ba fatuk” (I’m going to the rock). As the rock grew, so did my yearning. After the sweaty march, I crested the roadside barricades, no amount of resistance would be able to stop me in my pilgrimage to this rock I had just seen maybe an hour ago. Sliding down the cement, feet touching sand, and eyes closer than ever to the anomaly. We stared each other down, pupil to pebble, trading geological epigenetic information so vast that it would cause Indiana Jones to cower. Then, through this transmission of understanding, my urge to mount the rock faded. Sure, one could say it was the fast tide, scary waves, and sharp edges that spurred my own cowardice, but no, I did not swim across the short distance of water to climb the boulder out of a mutual respect from each of us once being stardust and not so different after all.
Having just finished my rock excursion, I came back to the beach where my friends were to see half laid up in hammocks and the other half laid up next to some friendly beach goats. The goats didn’t say much and neither did my friends. There isn’t much to say sprawled out on the sand, enjoying the communal solace. With the sky beginning another transition of colors, it was time for another transition of place. This hour it was to shower before dinner at Isabelle’s family’s house. Knowing that I’d only get dirty again and preferred not to spend a scarce sunset squatted down in a shack dumping pails of water over myself like a muskrat with a Sisyphean challenge, I opted to forgo the shower. As a result of that, Isabelle opted to send me to explore an abandoned resort perched atop a hill with decent views of the village. And I’m off again, camera in hand, finding my way.
I’m amazed I never saw the abandoned resort when I first came to Maubara, it’s white walls stand are a stark contrast from the red earth and shrubs. The directions could’ve been as simple as a point and a “go for it”. Fortunately, her instructions were clearer, yet I had the sunset to beat so I took a polite shortcut through a kind family’s house. They knew where I was going before I could see them. Using a nearby tree, I jump over the barricades and land in another time. How long has this building sat here? It looks like it could be wonderful if it weren’t for the decay, as wonderful as a white resort towering over a village can appear though. Viewed from above, as well as from sea level, this entire are of Timor-Leste reminds me so dearly of part of the desert near the Salton Sea, where I grew up, from the land to the shrubs, to the ever presence of salt in the air. The views are nice, as promised, but they are impermanent. The sun sets without a fuss, and I scamper back down the hill with only my photos and imagination.
We had the fortune to be in town for movie night, hosted by Kyle and Isabelle. Brother Bear was the marquee film of the night, a film fittingly about the brothers one is born with as well as the family one picks up along the way. This is followed by a dinner of red weenies at Kyle’s family’s house and a pursuit of the beach to set up camp. While the previous nights here, and on other beaches, with this crew have been on the wild end, tonight was different. Rather than running wild and letting loose, we laid under the clear sky, caught the falling stars, and talked about the kinds of things people usually talk about laying together under the stars. This went on until one by one, each of us drifted away to the sound of the waves and each other’s voices resembling the sand we lay on. Slower and lower, until out.
Morning comes, as it always does. We swim, we joke, and we pack. First it was Grayson and Ruby waiting roadside until 3am for their bus. Next it was me, following the road looking for my first of three rides back up the mountain. I say my goodbyes, leave my favorite shorts on an abandoned boat, and start stepping along the road with eyes looking back for any hope of a bus heading the same way as me. I find a shop with hot water a few kilometers away so I can make tea. A bus headed my way comes and passes while I am steeping the leaves. I think about the sacrifice I made for my tea for a full minute until another bus comes, picks me up, and carries me off. The ascent was far less eventful than the descent, though I appreciate the balance.
