Running with a Police Escort

by Jill Grunenwald

  Field trips to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo felt like an extra special adventure to a young me, reaching almost to the level of an exotic safari, as not only did I get to eat a Lunchables, carefully alternating the unnaturally round slices of processed cheese with the unnaturally round slices of processed meat like a stack of poker chips on a cracker, but my classmates and I also got to eat at little picnic tables located right next to the animal exhibits. Seeing those magnificent beasts up close and in person, especially the lions opening their wide mouths to yawn in the noonday sun, shaking out their large manes, was a totally different experience than eating lunch at home with my pet cat, Max.

  As I was about to enter middle school, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo opened a new indoor tropical exhibit, aptly called the RainForest. My family planned our first visit for right after opening day.

  The RainForest was, and still is, two levels with winding staircases built into faux tree trunks. Making my way up that very first time, I felt like I was in the coolest treehouse ever. It was like something out of Swiss Family Robinson. At the center of the building is a large glass-enclosed habitat for the orangutans, who climb high above us into the RainForest’s impressive geodesic dome.

  Experiencing the RainForest for the first time was nothing short of magical, and the magnetism of the entire menagerie imprinted itself on a young me; even as a thirtysomething woman, I still find the ability to go toe-to-toe with the beasts of the wild to be pretty awesome. I love to watch graceful giraffes stretch their gaits across the green grass of their open paddock, necks held high; or lazy lions luxuriate in the warmth, like a domesticated cat who has found a patch of sunlight in the house; or polar bears dive beneath the crystal clear blue waters of their personal pool.

  Even now, far removed from the tiny desks of my kindergarten classroom, living a proper grown-up life where fun field trips are no longer an option, I still love spending an easy summer afternoon at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo standing among the grand majesty of nature’s creatures.

  In the summer of 2012, as I was beginning my running journey, I was looking for races in the Cleveland area and saw a listing for the Running with a Mission 5K which would be held at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. As soon as I read the location, I zeroed-in on it as the perfect opportunity for my official racing debut. I mean, hello, I was going to get to run around all those awesome animals. How cool was that?

  I totally admit now that choosing a race based entirely on the fact that it was the site of hazy, halcyon days of classroom field trips and whimsical bouts of nostalgia sounds sweet and sentimental. Sappy, even. Because as it turns out, nostalgia isn’t the smartest way to go about choosing your first race, because while taking a stroll down remembrance road, the mature memory will filter out some of the more prominent geological features of the landscape. Rose-colored glasses will shade the narrative, focusing on the peaks and high points of the journey, ignoring or outright forgetting the valleys.

  In this case, my memory completely abandoned all recollection of the not just one, but two hills that make up the zoo’s loop around the park. Because, that’s how a loop works, right?

  The course for this race is undeniably scenic. Beginning at the entrance near Monkey Island, the zoo’s footpath takes visitors past the African Savannah, which includes zebras and giraffes, and up a short incline to the Northern Trek, a small summit where visitors can see the tigers, bears, and … well, the lions are actually down by their African companions, but close enough.

  From the Northern Trek, visitors make their own trek past the wolves and down to Waterfowl Lake, which sits at the heart of the park. Anchored on one side of the lake is a Victorian-themed ice cream parlor in a small, Victorian building called Wade Hall. This building was the original barn for the deer that came with the property when Jeptha Wade gave it to the city, making it one of the oldest zoo buildings in North America.

  At this point, visitors are left with a choice of how they would like to get up to the top of the big hill which takes them to the Primate, Cat, and Aquatics building. Option one is the small hill tucked back behind the lake in a grove of trees or Option Two, is a large—and long—multilevel deck walk that goes right up to the back of the exhibit.

  After circling the building, the path goes down a very large—and long—hill, winding through the Australian Adventure corridor and the African Elephant Crossing before bringing visitors back to the Welcome Plaza near the front entrance. This particular path can be walked, but due to the topographical nature of the park, the zoo utilizes a tram system for visitors who want to save their legs a bit of work.

  With the offer of a tram, very few walk up all the hills and even fewer take advantage of an opportunity to run up them.

  Being a runner means I am constantly learning. After multiple 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons, I’m still learning things about this sport. New situations arise, new challenges present themselves, and I have to figure out how best to deal and (hopefully) come out successful on the other side of the finish line.

  Every race proves a new opportunity to educate myself about what it means to be a runner and what it means to run. Races in particular provide a steady stream of chances to gain new information and, unsurprisingly, my racing debut came with a very steep learning curve.

  The very first hard-learned lesson came swift and quick, leaving me unbalanced, overwhelmed, and unprepared all before I’d even had coffee the morning of the race.

  Jill’s first running-related lesson: always read course maps very, very carefully.

  What I didn’t take into account when I signed up for the Running with a Mission 5K is that while that big footpath loop around the park seems long in distance, it’s actually not. Like, not at all. My master’s degree is from the University of Kentucky, and after living in the Bluegrass State for a couple of years, I moved back to Northeast Ohio in the spring of 2009. Since returning to Cleveland, I’d visited the zoo a handful of times and it’s one of those situations when, because I would spend all day walking, my comprehension of the size and scope of the zoo was going to be a bit skewed, making it feel much bigger than it actually is. In reality, that loop is only about one and a half miles around. The RainForest, which felt monstrous when I was little, is not nearly as large as I remember. That staircase carved out of a tree that seemed to rise to the heavens, feels small when I return as an adult. It’s more like a novelty staircase on a playground than a set of stairs meant to be utilized by adults as well.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, running the Running with a Mission 5K wasn’t my first foray into the area of misplaced nostalgia. Like most kids, my sister and I each had a favorite movie when we were growing up and we would beg our parents to rent that VHS from the video store constantly. As in Every. Single. Weekend. (Yes, I am old enough to remember the VHS and Betamax format war, the precursor of the already outdated DVD and Blu-ray format war.) In the 1980s, little me would kneel in front of the VCR, blonde pigtails high on my head, excited to watch the Strawberry Shortcake movie my mom had rented for me.

  On many a family-pizza Friday night, my sister and I wanted to go to the video store downtown Hudson to rent our favorite movies. My particular favorite was the David Bowie–led masterpiece Labyrinth. I can say that it is without a doubt one of the best children’s films to come out of the 1980s, which is saying something as that particular decade was full of really dark, really twisted films aimed at children, and I was obsessed with each and every one. Upon reflection, that probably speaks to my current personality more than any other possible pop culture influence I had growing up.

  Right, okay, so there’s a movie. In this case, Labyrinth, and every Friday night I was begging my parents to go to the video store in town to rent it because I am just obsessed and had to see it again and again (and again). And because VHS tapes were only rarely ever “priced to own” at the time, the only option was to rent it from the video store. As I child, I never got to own my own Bowie masterpiece

  But kids grow
up and film tastes adapt and evolve. The small collection of VHS tapes that went off to college with me soon started to be exchanged for DVDs. As technology also adapted and changed, video stores fell to the wayside and eventually the ability to stream the latest blockbuster from below the pile of blankets and cats on my bed was a reality. I can’t even remember the last DVD I bought.

  (No, wait. I lied. It was the Star Wars trilogy to replace the VHS tapes I bought shortly after the films were remastered and rereleased into theaters back in the early 2000s. And by Star Wars trilogy I, of course, mean the original—Episodes IV, V, and VI. Because Fuck Jar Jar Binks.)

  Anyway.

  A VHS copy of Labyrinth was my very first ever Amazon.com purchase, made in late 1999. A few years later I replaced it with a DVD edition, placing it on the shelf at the beginning of the alphabetized-by-title Ls, where it soon sat collecting dust because pushing a single button on my Apple TV to see the latest Netflix offerings was way easier.

  But fast-forward to January 10, 2016. After spending an entire day crying and listening to Space Oddity on a Spotify loop, I decide the only way to properly honor the late, great David Bowie was to go home and dig out that DVD. I’m grieving the death of a man I never met, surely engaging in some Muppet Magic will cure what ails me.

  Only … something isn’t quite right. As an adult, re-watching this film, the one I was absolutely enamored with as a child, something feels off. As though across the time and space of two decades, some of the magic has dissipated and been lost in translation. For one thing, while Jennifer Connelly would eventually go on to win an Academy Award for her work in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, this particular film is maybe not the best example of her acting chops. Then again, her entire supporting cast is made up of a baby, a rock star, and puppets, so I can’t really say she had an easy job with this one.

  Really though, it’s just so fucking weird. Way weirder than I remembered.

  No wonder my parents hated having to rent it every week and watch it so often.

  So as I’m constantly relearning, perception can be entirely age-related.

  Now back to running: because of the layout of the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, in order for a 5K to take place and meet that distance, all runners needed to run that loop twice. As such, all runners would be forced to run those hills twice. So it wasn’t just two hills I had to contend with, it was now four.

  Only, I didn’t realize that when I signed up. I didn’t realize that through any of my weeks and months of runs leading up to the race. In fact, I didn’t realize that until the morning of the race, when I was getting ready and checking over all the race details one more time.

  And that is when I noticed the small little notation in the bottom corner of the course map uploaded on the website that said runners would have to run the course twice.

  Well then.

  Now, some race day surprises are fun. Like winning a gift card to a local restaurant at a post-race raffle. Or anxiously watching the weather in the days preceding the race only to wake up that particular Saturday or Sunday to absolutely perfect running weather.

  Other race day surprises, not so fun. Like finding out I had to tackle a set of hills twice. A set of hills I was woefully unprepared for.

  Remember, I hadn’t followed any sort of formal training plan for this race. I used Couch to 5K to start running and then, after registering for the race, I just kept running, lacing up and pounding the pavement a couple of times a week.

  But that’s all it was: running. There was no structure, no set or planned mileage. There certainly wasn’t anything more involved than just stepping outside my front door and running around the block a couple of times or doing a couple of laps at nearby Edgewater Park.

  Hills were not, and still are not, my forte, but back in 2012, a month before my first race, they weren’t even on my radar. Any “hill work” I did was purely accidental: if I decided to run somewhere that just happened to have hills, it was one thing. But actually planning a workout running up and down hills, yeah, no. I didn’t even know that was something people actually did.

  With all of those runs in May and June, I had been working towards finishing the 5K with a time of 45 minutes, which would require running those 3.1 miles in just under 15 minutes each. Not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely faster than the 16-minute miles I was running in the weeks leading up to race day.

  Aside from the hills, a little thing called weather can throw a wrench in the works.

  That’s right, the bane of many a runner’s existence: humidity. It was the middle of June after all, and summer was in full swing. I had started running indoors on the treadmill in February. My outdoors runs started in cool and breezy spring, when it’s the Goldilocks of weather, neither too hot nor too cold. Of course running in the summer would be different. Heat and humidity can affect the body in numerous ways and while the body can and will adapt and change to its environment as needed, sometimes that environment is just too powerful and will overcome.

  Letting this new information regarding weather and pace sink in, I realized a little too late that I was still very much a novice when it came to running. I signed up for the race thinking it was all just a matter of, y’know, running and while to some extent it is, there are so many other things I still needed to learn.

  Running, it turns out, is a continual learning process as I was reminded, yet again, when I looked at the course map more closely. First lesson learned.

  My next experience came from learning what to do on race day.

  Going to a new race always makes me a little nervous, even now. Where do I go for packet pick-up? What’s the parking and traffic situation going to be like? How much time do I need to give myself? How many other runners are going to be there? I tend to overcompensate in all of those areas, leaving the apartment much earlier than I need to in order to make sure I have plenty of time to get to where I need to go. Usually this is okay because, if nothing else, it gives me plenty of time to hit the restroom before lining up at the start line. Other times, though, it turns into a situation where I am hanging out in my car for a while, because it’s the dead of winter, and there is snow on the ground, and the race is being held at a location without an indoor waiting facility.

  But for my first race I had absolutely no idea what to expect. In all fairness, how could I? It’s not like I had done this sort of thing before.

  I went to bed early the night before, hoping to get a good night’s sleep, but nerves made it hard to sleep. In the morning, I was still far too nervous to really eat, but I knew I needed to get something into my body if I wanted to keep it fueled and fit for the run ahead, so I managed to eat a frozen whole grain waffle with peanut butter and a banana. After getting dressed in black yoga pants and a pink tank top, I got in my car and drove the few miles over to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

  The zoo’s parking lot is massive, and whenever I go to the zoo as a visitor, I always end up needing to park what feels like miles and miles away. That morning, however, I was able to snag a spot in the front of the lot, right in front of the zoo’s main entrance.

  After parking, I got out of my car and followed the crowd towards the small, white tent that had been erected outside the entrance. A woman stood behind a table that was covered with bibs, official-looking large black numbers predominant against the stark white background.

  She asked my name and, after checking it against a master list, turned towards some cardboard boxes and from one of them retrieved a white plastic drawstring bag. Inside was a small collection of coupons to local businesses who were sponsors for the race and also a bright blue race shirt. I fingered the soft sleek fabric and knew this was one of the fancy tech shirts that often come at bigger races, but rarely at small races like a local 5K. I put the shirt back in the bag and turned back to the volunteer. She handed me a bib, a set of small safety pins, and a little plastic square-shaped disc that had two holes in the top corners.

  Blankly, I stared
at the disc, completely flummoxed.

  Because I am a librarian, research is kind of my thing, so I spent the weeks leading up to the race looking up information on what to expect with my first race. Things like what to eat (and what not to eat), what to wear (and what not to wear), where to line up, etcetera. The bib was easy and the most obvious part: it gets pinned somewhere on the front so I can be quickly and easily identified by my number, and it’s important to pin it in all four corners to keep it stationary. But this disc was new and hadn’t come up in any of my research.

  After a few seconds of silent uneducated guesswork, I finally looked up at the volunteer. She met my eyes.

  “It’s your timing chip,” she patiently explained. “It goes on your shoe. The holes are for your laces.”

  Oh. Right. My timing chip. That magical device that will alert those that need to know when I cross the start line and then the finish line. This is the first time I would ever learn my speed and ability from a verified source and not just some free app on my phone which may or may not be accurate.

  The other data point I’d be learning that day was how I stacked up against other runners.

  Not that it was a huge deal or anything: for me, running is a solo sport. Since that moment I took that first step at a speed faster than walking I had found my happy place. The cliché about running being cheaper than therapy turned out to be true.

  But I was still curious to know how I’d fare against other runners.

  Since this was not just my first race but my first time running with other runners, I didn’t know what my performance would be like in the grand scheme of things. I knew I was slower than most runners and it was unlikely that I’d manage to squeak out ahead of the other Female Runners age thirty to thirty-five to place in my age group, but I didn’t think my pace was anything to be concerned about.